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Explores the relationship between educational providers and company clients on tailored MBA programmes. Examines the potential benefits and disadvantages of such programmes in terms of the relative number of providers/companies involved, and describes and evaluates the authors′ experience of developing and operating a consortium MBA involving two providers and nine companies. Presents both provider and company perspectives, and concludes that the resolution of potential conflicts resulted in a programme which satisfied the requirements of providers, companies and participants. Further, increased collaboration between educational providers may more accurately respond to the needs of clients, who may wish to use a number of providers in constructing “their” MBA programme.

This study aims to provide a historical understanding of conspicuous consumption phenomena in the context of the UK, between 1945 and 2000. It considers how status-driven consumption has been shaped by economic, technological and cultural factors.

Adopting a periodization scheme, concerning two time structures between 1945 and 2000, this paper is based on research stemming from a wide range of data such as academic studies, research articles, narrative history books, past advertisements, novels and biographies. Rich interdisciplinary data from the realms of political economy, sociology, cultural geography and consumption studies have been synthesized so as to provide a marketing-oriented historical outlook on conspicuous consumption phenomena.

Status-driven consumption in the UK has been heavily influenced by economic policies, cultural changes and public perceptions towards wealth during the second half of the twentieth century. Post-war rationing, youth-driven fashion, free-market economics and technological advances have played a crucial role in forming consumers’ tastes and engagement with ostentatious economic display.

Although the vast majority of marketing studies have approached luxury consumption through a psychological angle, this examination identifies the capacity of historical research to uncover and highlight the interrelationships between socio-economic factors and status-motivated consumption.

This chapter is an exercise in speaking, letting individuals speak for themselves insofar as possible. As Marx famously put it, “they cannot represent themselves, they must be represented.” The “they” were peasants, potato farmers in 1840s France, and by extension peasants, workers, and other lower class groups, not to mention women and minorities who rarely made it into the historical record, and even more rarely in their own words. To give “voice to the voiceless,” as the now old new social historians of the 1960s and 1970s put it, I consciously include here numerous speakers, arranged in two sets of different voices: quotes in the text and endnotes to further document and amplify points. With this plethora of voices, the aim is not to complicate but to speak clearly, listen carefully, and engage respectfully. To multiply the speakers speaking is the single best way to make two primary points concerning what is most important about the Chief Illiniwek mascot controversy: that the sheer number of individuals speaking out is in itself significant, and that this community colloquy all comes down to identity – who we are, individual identity, communal identity.