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Explores the development of the charity retailing sector in the past decade. Examines the role of charity shops in their local communities. Provides some suggestions as to the likely future of the sector.

This paper aims to explore how a global fashion retailer uses a social media platform to build an appeal via a process of online employer branding.

The study involved a narrative and thematic analysis of posts of a global fashion retailer on LinkedIn. The authors sampled organisational posts and the responses they received over a six-month period.

The organisation uses carefully curated success stories of “ideal” existing employees to build an appeal based on the values of growth and belonging. While varied, the responses of platform users tend to be limited to brief contributions, questioning the success of the organisation’s attempts at creating an appeal.

The authors argue that employer branding literature needs a new conceptual toolbox, which better reflects the mediated, affective and networked nature of platforms.

To avoid career-washing, employer brands should engage with the networked nature of platforms, fostering authentic conversations with users rather than using platforms merely as a billboard to post content.

The authors theorise the appeal of the employer brand through the concept of the “employer brand promise”. Furthermore, they show how, on social networks, this promise attempts to create value through meaningful engagement. They also conclude by observing how the employer brand promise can act as a form of career-washing, where there is a significant dis-connect between the promise offered and the reality of retail work on the ground.

This paper aims to contribute to understandings of the dynamics of marketplace exclusion and explore the benefits of a performative approach to knowledge production.

Interactive documentary theatre is used to explore the pressing issue of marketplace exclusion in a deprived UK city. The authors present a series of three vignettes taken from the performance to explore the embodied and dialogical nature of performative knowledge production.

The performative mode of knowledge production has a series of advantages over the more traditional research approaches used in marketing. It is arguably more authentic, embodied and collaborative. However, this mode of research also has its challenges particularly in the interpretation and presentation of the data.

The paper highlights the implications of performative knowledge production for critical consumer learning. It also explores how the hitherto neglected concept of marketplace exclusion might bring together insights into the mechanics and outcomes of exclusion.

While theatrical and performative metaphors have been widely used to theorise interactions in the marketplace, as yet the possibility of using theatre as a form of inquiry within marketing has been largely neglected. Documentary theatre is revealing of the ways in which marketplace cultures can perpetuate social inequality. Involving local communities in the co-production of knowledge in this way gives them a voice in the policy arena not hitherto fully addressed in the marketing field. Similarly, marketplace exclusion as a concept has been sidelined in favour of marketplace discrimination and consumer vulnerability – the authors think it has the potential to bring these fields together in exploring the range of dynamics involved.

This paper aims to contribute to the project of recognising the contribution of female scholars to the development of marketing thought. The paper presents a biography of Elizabeth Ellis Hoyt, a home economist, who contributed to the shaping of contemporary ideas about consumption and the consumer.

Source material used includes the Elizabeth Ellis Hoyt Papers (1884‐2009) in the Iowa State University Archives. The collection contains a variety of materials, of which the most important for this paper were news clippings, personal diaries (1907‐1918), and published and unpublished manuscripts (1953, 1964, n.d.). Also important for this study were two sources published by Alison Comish Thorne, Elizabeth Hoyt's PhD student. These include Thorne's autobiography Leave the Dishes in the Sink and her entry on Elizabeth Hoyt in the Biographical Dictionary of Women Economists.

The paper documents Elizabeth Hoyt's development of marketing thought, focusing on her early work on the cost of living index and subsequent contributions to an expanded theory of consumption and consumer learning.

Elizabeth Hoyt is one of a group of female home economists who pioneered consumption economics in America in the 1920s and 1930s yet who have been neglected in published accounts. Notwithstanding a short biographical note in the Biographical Dictionary of Women Economists, Hoyt's life and work are not yet documented.

Purpose – In this chapter, we seek to explore the collective responsibilities undertaken by the family as a whole in maintaining familial bonds through meal consumption. We draw on work which examines the role of gift giving (Ruskola, 2005), sharing (Belk, 2010) and sacrifice (Miller, 1998) in consumption. We take an original approach which does not look at the family meal in isolation but rather focuses on the patterning of meals and the relationships between them.

Methodology – The ethnographic study draws on interviews with 18 families and follows up mealtime observations with 15 families.

Findings – The analysis reveals a mealtime patterning involving collective participation in saving (in the form of consuming ordinary and thrifty meals during the week) and spending (in consuming extraordinary meals at weekends). Even if in the women and mothers in the household tend to sacrifice themselves more than other family members, the consumption of thrifty or ordinary meals implies a process of sacrifice involving the entire family. In viewing the meal as gift, we also observe a process of reciprocity in operation with family members obliged to both share in, and contribute to, the meals that have been cooked for them.

Social implication – Our analysis reveals discordances between the aspirations of family members (which are arguably largely based on cultural ideals), and their everyday experiences of family mealtimes.

Originality/Value – The chapter show how these micro experiences of family mealtimes have implications for a macro understanding of the idealised and culturally loaded construct of the family meal.

This paper extends the debate on gender and career choice using the case study of managers in charity shops in the UK, a group that have previously not been researched. The charity retail sector has undergone considerable change over the last few years, particularly in its effort to professionalize. As a result shop managers' positions have changed from being voluntary to paid. With the changes taking place in the sector, the purpose of this research was to explore the views of current charity shop managers with regard to their career choice and career development issues.

The methodological approach taken to the research was qualitative and used a series of in‐depth interviews with 22 shop managers.

The research found that charity retail management serves an important purpose for many women in the transition from the home to working environment. It provides the balance necessary to effectively combine the multiple role demands between personal and professional lives. Career success for these managers was less to do with occupational status or income, but encompassed the satisfaction, autonomy, challenge and self‐fulfillment the job presented them. As such, the majority had little interest in progressing their careers linearly but were contented with other forms of career development.

Being an exploratory study, the results are not generalisable to the population. A quantitative research methodology could be utilized to test the findings of this paper and enable researchers to draw firmer conclusions.

The findings of this research may aid recruitment and selection practices for the future recruitment and development of charity shop managers.

The purpose of this paper is to explore how gender identity is played out in a particular type of work setting, that of charity retail, and to explore the impacts of increased managerialism on this process of identity construction.

The paper is informed by interviews with 22 charity shop managers from three UK cities. The narratives of three of these managers are chosen for more in‐depth analysis. The paper focuses primarily on understandings of identity as practised, exploring the enactment of a series of conflicting and overlapping “selves” in the workplace. The practices and discourses surrounding the retail (or businesslike) self, the charitable self and the caring self in particular are discussed.

It was found that the process of creeping managerialism in the sector both values and promotes the discourses of “retail” but marginalises those of “charity and of care”. This presents serious dilemmas of identity for charity shop managers and is a source of considerable stress for them. However, it was also found that managers were using the discourses of charity and of care to resist this managerial process. Attention was paid to the ways in which gendered identities are constrained and enabled by and through the discourses circulating in organisational life. Presents a series of observations concerning the future possibilities that retail work in particular might offer for identity construction.

The analysis is based on a small sample of qualitative interviews, therefore the findings are not meant to be generalisable to the wider population. This “vignette” approach allows us to explore in some depth the relations between identity construction and organisational context.

Empirical paper using an alternative lens to analyse gender identity and the impacts of increasing managerialism on processes of identity construction. Highlights in particular the continual struggles over meaning within organisations.

In an environment of constrained resources and related quality assurance efforts, a growing number of American institutions are tapping collaborative relationships to develop creative ways to advance institutional outcomes. The Southeastern Pennsylvania Consortium for Higher Education (SEPCHE), a non-profit organization incorporated in 1993, is a collaborative of eight private colleges and universities located in the Greater Philadelphia region. SEPCHE’s institutions are small to mid-sized colleges and universities, and like other institutions of higher education, they are increasingly challenged by several environmental factors including diminished growth in enrollment; reduced family financial capacity; limitations in availability and types of funding; and greater demand for accountability.

This chapter highlights the challenges faced by faculty to ensure that students are learning at the highest levels while balancing teaching, research and institutional responsibilities, and the role that collaborative professional development can play in helping faculty attend to these challenges. Several examples illustrate how faculty-led professional development efforts have expanded professional and research capacity efforts across institutions.

The chapter includes faculty perspectives on what has helped and hindered adoption of these efforts within and across institutions. It assesses institutional conditions and supports for sustained collaborations. These efforts are part of an initiative examining faculty work and student learning in the 21st century funded by the Teagle Foundation.