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George Mortimer Pullman (1831-1897), nineteenth century US luxury rail car entrepreneur, divides opinion. Some commemorate Pullman as a brilliant industrialist, innovator and self-made man. Others view him as a loathsome robber baron, union buster, racist and affront to democracy. This paper aims to demonstrate Pullman’s significant contribution to marketing.

Historical accounts of Pullman are re-examined to highlight his company’s unique adaptation of numerous marketing techniques (consumer research, brand strategy, public relations, product launch, fashion cycle, advertising, product placement and customer service marketing).

Pullman’s distinct flair for understanding his market enabled him to develop marketing strategies intertwined with broader cultural changes in ideals and practices. Pullman’s construction of destination tourism met an expanding white middle class desire for recreation and escape from the economic and racial inequality of the city. Pullman’s creed that beauty acted as a civilizing agent spoke to the social norms of leisure class femininity. Constant release of ever-grander rail cars shaped a fashion cycle around which wealthy men’s status competition turned. Pullman pioneered the leasing of luxury to control his best asset: the service of black Porters’.

First, this paper provides a new perspective on George Pullman, a significant figure in US history. Second, it addresses a common bias in nineteenth century historical accounts that privilege the contribution of men, industrial labor and production and shadow the role of consumption, women and leisure. Third, it challenges the idea of a clean divide between industrial and post-industrial economies by tracing contemporary consumer culture practices to their nineteenth century roots (marketing, destination tourism, brand stories, democratization of fashion, tipping and service with a smile).

The purpose of this paper is to examine gender‐related management stereotypes, perceived gender bias and evaluations of actual managers, and to directly compare stereotypes and ratings of actual managers.

Questionnaires were distributed to employees in the bank and insurance sector, and 240 participants rated their actual managers and stereotypes of male and female managers.

Men evaluated the female manager stereotype more positively on communal attributes, and the male manager stereotype more positively on agentic attributes. Women evaluated the female manager stereotype more positively on both communal and agentic attributes, but perceived a higher degree of gender bias in favor of male managers than men did. Actual male and female managers were rated similarly. Still, ratings of actual male managers corresponded more with stereotypes of male than female managers, and ratings of actual female managers corresponded more with stereotypes of female than male managers.

Future research needs to determine the direction of association between stereotypes and evaluations of actual managers, and the relative importance of agentic over communal attributes.

While women appeared biased in favor of their own gender, men may underestimate the difficulties that female managers encounter. Managers and human resource practitioners should notice these different views, and recognize that gender equality is not achieved in Sweden.

The present study contributes with data from an egalitarian society with a positive view of female managers, and a direct comparison of stereotypes and workplace evaluations.

In a story called “The Birthmark,” Nathaniel Hawthorne tells about an extraordinarily lovely woman whose beauty was perfect except for a small birthmark on her cheek. This flaw would not have mattered if found on the face of an ordinary woman, but because of this woman's near perfection, the birthmark could never be ignored. Her husband, a brilliant natural scientist, grieved over the one imperfection and took up research to discover a cure. He finally developed a potion and the birthmark began to disappear. At the moment when the birthmark completely vanished from her skin and she was perfect, she died.

This paper aims to adopt a relational dialectics analysis approach to provide qualitative depth and insight into the ways intercultural families manage intercultural tensions around consumption. The authors pay particular attention to how a relational dialectics analysis reveals a relational change in the family providing evidence to demonstrate how a family’s unique relational culture evolves and transitions.

Qualitative insights from a relational-dialectic analysis on 15 intercultural families are used to illustrate the interplay of stability with instability in the management of intercultural dialectic tensions within these families.

Intercultural dialectical interplay around food consumption tensions are implicit tensions in the household’s relational culture. Examples of dialectical movement indicating relational change are illustrated; this change has developmental consequences for the couples’ relational cultures.

This study provides qualitative insights on relational dialectics in one intercultural family context and reveals and analyses the dialectical dimensions around consumption in the context of intercultural family relationships. The research approach could be considered in other intercultural and relational contexts.

Family narratives can be analysed within the context of two meta-dialectics that directly address how personal relationships evolve; indigenous dialectic tensions within a family can also be identified.

This paper demonstrates the qualitative value of a relational dialectics analysis in revealing how food consumption changes within families are the result of reciprocal or interdependent learning, which has consequences for relational change.

This study of multinational companies in China focuses on the role culture plays in relationship cultivation. The author interviewed 40 participants from 36 multinational companies in China. The findings revealed that characteristics of Chinese culture, such as family orientation, guanxi, relational orientation (role formalisation, relational interdependence, face, favour, relational harmony, relational fatalism and relational determination) had an influence on multinational companies’ relationship cultivation strategies. Multinationals from Western countries were found, however, to be more persistent in maintaining their own cultural values in relationship building than multinational companies from Asian countries.

Drawing on the organizational learning and relational governance literature, this study aims to advance a theoretical model to explain the export performance of emerging market export ventures.

This study selects quantitative methodology because the main objective of this study is to explore the role of export ventures’ performance (past) on guanxi networking, co-creation marketing strategies and present performance.

The empirical evidence suggests that guanxi networking and co-creation strategy can mediate the relationship between export venture performance in the preceding year and export venture performance in the following year. In addition, this study also provides some guidance for emerging market export ventures on how to build a strong guanxi networking and create opportunities for collaboration when the effect of export performance in the preceding year on current performance is absent.

The authors propose the inclusion of strategic guanxi networking-related factors (e.g. top executives’ ties with business-to-business customers, such as distributors in the host market) in the prior performance-current performance paradigm. The outcomes of this study also contribute to extant organizational learning theory research by integrating preceding performance research with the co-creation theory. The study offers new insights into organizational learning and relational governance from the emerging market perspective.

Residential college campuses remain dangerous – especially for women students who face a persistent threat of sexual violence, despite passage of the 1990 Campus Security Act and its multiple amendments. Campuses have developed new programming, yet recent research confirms one in five women will experience some form of sexual assault before graduating. Research on campus crime legislation does not describe in detail the context in which it developed. The purpose of this paper is to draw attention to the effects of early rhetorical frames on the ineffective policy.

The authors discuss the rhetorical construction of “campus crime,” and related “criminals” and “victims,” through content analysis and a close interpretive reading of related newspaper articles.

The 1986 violent rape and murder of Jeanne Clery at Lehigh University in Pennsylvania became iconic in media descriptions of campus crime. Media drew attention to the racial and classed dimensions of the attack on Clery, but elided the misogyny central to all sexual assaults. This reinforced a stereotype that “insiders” on campuses, primarily white and middle class, were most vulnerable to “outsider” attacks by persons of color. Colleges and universities adopted rhetoric of “endangerment” and “unreason” and focused on what potential victims could do to protect themselves, ignoring the role of students in perpetrating crime.

This analysis does not link rhetoric in newspapers to legislative discussion. Further analysis is necessary to confirm the impact of particular claims and to understand why some claims may have superseded others.

This analysis focuses critical attention on how campus crime policy is shaped by cultural frames.

Recently, the institutional performance model has been used to explain the increased distrust of health care system by arguing that distrust is a function of individuals’ perceptions on the quality of life in neighborhood and social institutions. We examined (1) whether individuals assess two dimensions of distrust consistently, (2) if the multilevel institutional performance model explains the variation of distrust across neighborhoods, and (3) how distrust patterns affect preventive health care behaviors.

Using data from 9,497 respondents in 914 census tracts (neighborhoods) in Philadelphia, we examined the patterns of how individuals evaluate the competence and values distrust using the Multilevel Latent Class Analysis (MLCA), and then investigated how neighborhood environment factors are associated with distrust patterns. Finally, we used regression to examine the relationships between distrust patterns and preventive health care.

The MLCA identified four distrust patterns: Believers, Doubters, Competence Skeptics, and Values Skeptics. We found that 55 percent of the individuals evaluated competence and values distrust coherently, with Believers reporting low levels and Doubters having high levels of distrust. Competence and Values Skeptics assessed distrust inconsistently. Believers were the least likely to reside in socioeconomically disadvantaged and racially segregated neighborhoods among these patterns. In contrast to Doubters, Believers were more likely to use preventive health care, even after controlling for other socioeconomic factors including insurance coverage.

Our findings suggest that distrust patterns are a function of neighborhood conditions and distrust patterns are associated with preventive health care. This study provides important policy implications for health care and future interventions.