Search results

This paper aims to provide an understanding of how brands acquire meanings in a historical context. It examines the politico-economic environment that led to emergence of khadi in India.

The paper uses historical data to examine political economy of khadi. The author uses both written text and visuals for data collection and analysis.

It elucidates how the significance of khadi changed from being a mere cloth to a product of self-sufficiency and national importance in India’s freedom movement. This work is based on the analysis of Gandhian activities, especially consumption of khadi and usage of spinning wheel, during Indian freedom movement. The work analyzes the evolution of khadi in its historical, social and political context in colonial India. This paper reveals how and why brands acquire certain historical meanings.

The paper is developed in colonial India.

This paper examines the role of institutions, social and political movements in the creation, development and nurturing of a brand and its meanings.

Firms are increasingly making customers key stakeholders in their greening processes, requiring them to voluntarily use their resources to benefit the firm. In this context, this paper develops a new construct – tangible customer citizenship behaviour (CCB), i.e. voluntary participation of customer in operational processes of the company beyond normal requirements of exchange. This requires more involvement than the already documented intangible CCB. The purpose of the paper is to then explore whether service quality (SQ) (online and offline) influences such voluntary customer reciprocity in greening.

This study used a virtual survey among 400 customers of e-commerce firms that have adopted greening practices requiring customer engagement and regressions were used to test the hypotheses.

The authors find that both online and offline SQ positively impact intangible CCB but have no impact on customer greening reciprocity (tangible CCB). Additionally, the authors find that offline SQ positively impacts customer greening awareness. However, in spite of the presence of greening awareness and display of intangible CCB, SQ does not have any impact on greening reciprocity.

This study introduces to literature a more tangible form of voluntary behaviour on the part of the customer, i.e. tangible CCB or reciprocity. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, it is also one of the first to study the customer as an important stakeholder and participant in a business-to-consumer firm’s operating processes, particularly in greening which has no direct impact on the firm’s core offering. The focus on greening in the Indian context is also novel given the greening costs and requirements and the price competition are very different in emerging market contexts where e-commerce firms are experiencing the maximum growth.

This paper explores the confusion in values that underpin the stereotyping of ‘the Muslim woman’. From the point of view of the ‘woman who veils’, it addresses the idea of strategic self‐presentation geared by the logic of negotiation. Avoiding any uncritical celebration of such play of identities, it also engages with the internal struggle for self‐definition typified by feminist criticisms of the patriarchal control of women's bodies. It points out the limits of external criticisms, primarily because they rest upon a self‐aggrandizing view of the enlightened European. The paper concludes with the recommendation to listen to all the women who ‘speak’: the ones that adopt and the ones that abhor the veil from within the designated ‘non‐Europeans’ among the Europeans. It uses the idea of negotiation of identity to underscore the importance of such ‘listening’.