Sean A. Tanner, Mary B. McCarthy and Seamus J. O’Reilly
This is an exploratory study leveraging a domain-specific innovativeness (DSI) perspective to understand adoption of QR code delivered mobile marketing. Specifically, the purpose…
Abstract
Purpose
This is an exploratory study leveraging a domain-specific innovativeness (DSI) perspective to understand adoption of QR code delivered mobile marketing. Specifically, the purpose of this paper is to explore the roles of “innovativeness” and “risk aversion” on QR code adoption and usage in the low-involvement context to address tensions between risk and innovation literatures.
Design/methodology/approach
Participants were assigned to “laggard” (n=19) and “innovator/early adopter” (n=19) segments using the DSI scale. A combination of qualitative reductionism (means-end chain analysis) and qualitative holism (semi-structured interviewing) was employed.
Findings
Confusion regarding the functionality and purpose of QR codes adversely affected willingness to use and utility perceptions. Source trust and information credibility emerged as key concerns for those considering QR codes, with consumer risk aversion and innovativeness orientations influencing the nature of trust concerns. A perceived lack of complementarity between QR codes and retail environments reduced perceived relevance. For low-involvement products, marketers should consider moving beyond brand-level communication to align offerings to the broader foodscape.
Research limitations/implications
Findings are limited to the low-involvement product context. Although DSI was considered, the impact of technological innovativeness was not explored. Future research may consider the impact of information provision at the broader foodscape rather than product-specific level when exploring QR code applications in the food domain.
Originality/value
This is the first study to explore the role of product category innovativeness, as distinct from technological innovativeness on the acceptance and usage of mobile marketing applications in the low-involvement context. This research builds on existing risk and innovation literatures and addresses tensions between these literatures presented by QR codes within the low-involvement context.
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James M. Cronin and Mary B. McCarthy
An effective means to promote optimal nutrition for any group of consumers is to expand nutrition professionals' understanding of the cohort's food choice processes. The purpose…
Abstract
Purpose
An effective means to promote optimal nutrition for any group of consumers is to expand nutrition professionals' understanding of the cohort's food choice processes. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the situated food choice influences of the videogames subculture; a known consumption enclave for calorie dense low nutrient foods. The investigation is conducted by application of an abbreviated version of Furst et al.'s model of the food choice process as a conceptual framework.
Design/methodology/approach
This investigation uses an interpretive research strategy and adopts a qualitative approach to data collection and analysis. In total, 14 purposively sampled semi‐structured, in‐depth interviews were carried out with members of the videogames subculture.
Findings
Informants' food choices and preferences during social gameplay were strongly influenced by beliefs related to appropriate food behaviour and ideal characteristics of foods suitable for grazing. All informants described some constraints imposed by the physical surroundings and environmental nature of gameplay such as issues of messiness and inability to eat with utensils while gaming. Social structure played an important role in informants' food choices, and much of this structure was built around the hedonic intersection of food and gameplay. Informants' food choices were also influenced by poor cooking abilities and unwillingness to devote much effort to meal preparation during gameplay.
Practical implications
Used in conjunction with theories of behavioural change, the insights gathered here should help inform interventions and communications strategies. Both commercial and social marketing domains have a role to play in positively influencing gamers' diets.
Originality/value
The paper offers social marketers insight into the influences that underpin unhealthful food choices within the videogames subculture and how to positively bring about change.
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James M. Cronin and Mary B. McCarthy
The purpose of this paper is to understand how food is used to create identity and community for gamers during core rituals. These meanings are to be explored within the broader…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to understand how food is used to create identity and community for gamers during core rituals. These meanings are to be explored within the broader context of subcultural experience in an investigation of the motives and the self‐concept dynamics underlying this symbolic consumer behaviour.
Design/methodology/approach
This paper uses an interpretive research strategy and adopts a multi‐method ethnographic approach that includes: netnography: multiple, in‐depth, ethnographic interviews; and prolonged participant observation. Interview informants are young Irish subcultural members aged between 18 and 23. Data analysis proceeds according to a constant comparative method.
Findings
The findings suggest that the social gaming ritual, when intersected with food, is closely linked to issues of identity, community, fantasy and escape, gustatory rebellion and prolonged hedonism. Commensality during the core social gaming ritual contributes to a sense of communitas, while the “junk” nature of the shared food products helps to manufacture the hedonism of the event. The social ritual then is sovereign and bound by its own subcultural parameters, which oppose mainstream culture's norms and dietary regulations. From its role in helping to create a Utopian and rebellious experience, food is then leveraged as part of the gamers' collective identity. Practitioner implications of the results are discussed.
Originality/value
This paper investigates contemporary food consumption behaviour within a postmodern community. The main contribution pertains to providing an insight into a previously neglected group of food consumers.
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In order to succeed in an action under the Equal Pay Act 1970, should the woman and the man be employed by the same employer on like work at the same time or would the woman still…
Abstract
In order to succeed in an action under the Equal Pay Act 1970, should the woman and the man be employed by the same employer on like work at the same time or would the woman still be covered by the Act if she were employed on like work in succession to the man? This is the question which had to be solved in Macarthys Ltd v. Smith. Unfortunately it was not. Their Lordships interpreted the relevant section in different ways and since Article 119 of the Treaty of Rome was also subject to different interpretations, the case has been referred to the European Court of Justice.
Between the 1830s and 1990s, thousands of Irish women were incarcerated without due process in magdalen asylums for sexual behaviour that violated the Catholic Church’s moral…
Abstract
Between the 1830s and 1990s, thousands of Irish women were incarcerated without due process in magdalen asylums for sexual behaviour that violated the Catholic Church’s moral code. The asylums were operated by congregations of nuns that sought to protect society from the contagion of “wayward” women while simultaneously attempting to reform them through a harsh regimen of laundry work and devotional rituals. Some penitents, as the inmates were often called, embraced the institutional life of labour and prayer with such sincerity that they advanced to the nun‐like status of the Sisters Magdalen. Most simply endured lives of drudgery indistinguishable from slavery until either death or release upon the intervention of relatives. The asylum system had no basis in law and its shadowy existence, its ability to avoid scrutiny or regulation, and its survival until very recent times, illustrate in a striking manner the hegemonic power of the Church in Ireland.
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Emma Tonkin, Annabelle M. Wilson, John Coveney, Julie Henderson, Samantha B. Meyer, Mary Brigid McCarthy, Seamus O’Reilly, Michael Calnan, Aileen McGloin, Edel Kelly and Paul Ward
The purpose of this paper is to compare the perspectives of actors who contribute to trust in the food system in four high income countries which have diverse food incident…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to compare the perspectives of actors who contribute to trust in the food system in four high income countries which have diverse food incident histories: Australia, New Zealand (NZ), the United Kingdom (UK) and the Island of Ireland (IOI), focussing on their communication with the public, and their approach to food system interrelationships.
Design/methodology/approach
Data were collected in two separate studies: the first in Australia, NZ and the UK (Study 1); and the second on the IOI (Study 2). In-depth interviews were conducted with media, food industry and food regulatory actors across the four regions (n=105, Study 1; n=50, Study 2). Analysis focussed on identifying similarities and differences in the perspectives of actors from the four regions regarding the key themes of communication with the public, and relationships between media, industry and regulators.
Findings
While there were many similarities in the way food system actors from the four regions discussed (re)building trust in the context of a food incident, their perceptions differed in a number of critical ways regarding food system actor use of social media, and the attitudes and approaches towards relationships between food system actors.
Originality/value
This paper outlines opportunities for the regions studied to learn from each other when looking for practical strategies to maximise consumer trust in the food system, particularly relating to the use of social media and attitudes towards role definition in industry–regulator relationships.
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This chapter focuses on how the repression of political ideologies can silence feminist voices. It examines how writings by women working with the U.S. Communist Party in the…
Abstract
Purpose
This chapter focuses on how the repression of political ideologies can silence feminist voices. It examines how writings by women working with the U.S. Communist Party in the 1930s, 1940s, 1950s, and early 1960s have been overlooked even though they presaged important linchpins of U.S. second-wave feminist thought.
Methodology/approach
This study is based on historical and archival research.
Findings
Decades before the rise of second-wave feminism, women in the CPUSA had: (1) produced a political economy of domestic labor; (2) employed an intersectional analysis of the interlocking oppressions of race, gender, class, and nation; and (3) called for a global feminist analysis that linked these multiple oppressions to colonialism and imperialism.
Social implications
This study illustrates the costs of political repression and how the canon of feminist thought can be enhanced by resuscitating subjugated knowledges.
Originality/value
Too little attention has focused on the silencing of women because of their political ideologies. This chapter addresses this lacuna in feminist studies and calls into question the oft-repeated notion that the periods between the waves of U.S. feminism were times of movement stagnation. It shows how theory construction can flourish even when feminist activism wanes.