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This study aims to consider how research methodologies and methods can afford holistic inquiry into gendered embodied consumption. Noting the salience of gender in past and present discourse surrounding the body and building on poststructuralist feminist hermeneutic philosophy and practice, the authors introduce a novel methodological framework situated within three considerations borne of the current socio-cultural landscape: the politics of embodiment, embodied identity and intersectionality.

To assist scholars and practitioners in interpreting themes of gendered embodiment in textual data surrounding consumption topics, the authors orient the framework around three principles of listening, questioning and hospitality. This framework fosters embodied empathy by linking the researcher’s body to those of research participants. To illustrate the method, the authors interpret consumption narratives extracted from semi-structured interviews with 26 women-identified recreational runners on the topics of embodiment, sport and media.

The interpretations of gendered consumption narratives show that using the principles of listening, questioning and hospitality invites an understanding of consumers as multifaceted, contradictory and agentic. The authors argue that consumers’ everyday experiences are often simple and quiet but embedded in history wherein bodies are both biological and inescapably social.

The methodological framework allows both the researcher’s and research participants’ embodiment to play a role in the research process. It also illuminates the entanglement of embodiment and consumption in a fraught, politicized context. The authors show that by listening to consumers, questioning their narratives and traditional interpretations thereof and inviting consumers to feel comfortable and heard, researchers can see what other approaches may overlook.

The purpose of this study is to examine whether consumers demonstrate a multi-dimensional understanding of sustainability in their decision-making and addresses the situational influence of confidence and compromise on sustainable product choices.

Using three choice-based conjoint experiments the authors examined the importance of sustainability, compromise and confidence to consumers across two contexts. Two-step cluster analyses were used to segment consumers based on the importance scores.

Data indicates that the environmental dimension of sustainability is the most influential followed by economic and social. The responses suggest three distinct segments identified as self-focused, trend motivated and reality driven that demonstrate significantly different characteristics in their approach to sustainable products.

Current research tends to focus on the environmental dimension, while paying little heed to the economic and social dimensions. This research indicates that consumers consider all three dimensions when making sustainable product choices and highlights that differences may emerge with respect to product utility.

Firms must be aware that consumers differ in the importance they place on sustainability. The reality-driven segment is the most attractive segment, as they are highly engaged and are willing to invest time in understanding the complexities of sustainability. The trend-motivated segments are more fickle with superficial knowledge, and the self-focused segments are self-serving in their orientations and use price as a key decision variable.

The paper addresses an important oversight in the sustainability literature. It provides both a theoretical contribution to advance marketing research and a practical contribution that may be of interest to those trying to market sustainable products.

Purpose: This study seeks to determine the marketplace practices in which consumers engage with regard to masculine and feminine codes employed in product design. Since extant consumer research argues that consumers prefer marketing stimuli that match their sex or gender identity, this study also asks how consumers’ practices inform this understanding of the possession-self link.

Design/methodology/approach: This study used semi-structured interviews with an auto-driving component to answer the research questions. Data from 20 interviews were analyzed using feminist critical discourse analysis and a poststructuralist feminist-informed theoretical framework.

Findings: Four consumer practices identified in the data show that interpretations and evaluations of product gender are sometimes, but not always, a reflection of the gendered self.

Research limitations/implications: This research shares a snapshot of a cohort of individuals that interact with the marketplace, but there are some perspectives missing. Future research must engage with individuals from different socioeconomic backgrounds, as well as non-binary or gender nonconforming individuals, in order to enhance or even challenge these findings.

Practical implications (if applicable): Evidence from the marketplace demonstrates intense criticism of products that have been coded as masculine or feminine based on gender stereotypes or men and women’s perceived aesthetic tastes. Marketers are encouraged to use gender codes to differentiate products catered to men and women based on their ergonomic or biological needs.

Originality/value: This study complicates theory on the possession-self link to show cases in which that link is broken. Engaging critically with the topic of product gender from a poststructuralist feminist perspective also illustrates how marketing practices may help or harm consumers.

To provide a close, detailed analysis of the frequency, nature, and depth of visible use of Michel Foucault's works by library and information science/studies (LIS) scholars.

The study conducted extensive full-text searches in a large number of electronically available LIS journal databases to find citations of Foucault's works, then examined each cited article to evaluate the nature and depth of use.

Most uses of Foucault are brief or in passing. In-depth explorations of Foucault's works are comparatively rare and relatively little-used by other LIS scholars. Yet the relatively brief uses of Foucault encompass a wide array of different topics spread across a wide spectrum of LIS journal literature.

The study was limited to articles from particular relatively prominent LIS journals. Results might vary if different journals or non-journal literature were studied. More sophisticated bibliometric techniques might reveal different relative performance among journals and might better test, confirm, or reject various patterns and relationships found here. Other research approaches, such as discourse analysis, social network analysis, or scholar interviews, might reveal patterns of use and influence not visible in this literature sample.

This intensive study of both quality and quantity of citations may challenge some existing assumptions regarding citation analysis, plus illuminating Foucault scholarship. It also indicates possible problems for future application of artificial intelligence (AI) approaches to similar depth-of-use studies.

The purpose of this paper is to provide a close, detailed analysis of the frequency, nature, and depth of visible use of two of Foucault’s classic early works, The Archaeology of Knowledge and The Order of Things, by library, and information science/studies (LIS) scholars.

The study involved conducting extensive full-text searches in a large number of electronically available LIS journal databases to find citations of Foucault’s works, then examining each citing article and each individual citation to evaluate the nature and depth of each use.

Contrary to initial expectations, the works in question are relatively little used by LIS scholars in journal articles, and where they are used, such use is often only vague, brief, or in passing. In short, works traditionally seen as central and foundational to discourse analysis appear relatively little in discussions of discourse.

The study was limited to a certain batch of LIS journal articles that are electronically available in full text at UCLA, where the study was conducted. The results potentially could change by focussing on a fuller or different collection of journals or on non-journal literature. More sophisticated bibliometric techniques could reveal different relative performance among journals. Other research approaches, such as discourse analysis, social network analysis, or scholar interviews, might reveal patterns of use and influence that are not visible in the journal literature.

This study’s intensive, in-depth study of quality as well as quantity of citations challenges some existing assumptions regarding citation analysis and the sociology of citation practices, plus illuminating Foucault scholarship.

This research provides accounting-ethics authors and administrators with a benchmark for accounting-ethics research. While Bernardi and Bean (2010) considered publications in business-ethics and accounting’s top-40 journals this study considers research in eight accounting-ethics and public-interest journals, as well as, 34 business-ethics journals. We analyzed the contents of our 42 journals for the 25-year period between 1991 through 2015. This research documents the continued growth (Bernardi & Bean, 2007) of accounting-ethics research in both accounting-ethics and business-ethics journals. We provide data on the top-10 ethics authors in each doctoral year group, the top-50 ethics authors over the most recent 10, 20, and 25 years, and a distribution among ethics scholars for these periods. For the 25-year timeframe, our data indicate that only 665 (274) of the 5,125 accounting PhDs/DBAs (13.0% and 5.4% respectively) in Canada and the United States had authored or co-authored one (more than one) ethics article.

Cuteness has grown to be a global phenomenon fueled by the explosive usage of social media. Cute stimuli are ubiquitous, but few have explored their effects on consumer decision-making; direct evidence is particularly lacking in the area of risky choices. In this research, the authors theorize and demonstrate the unintended effects of cuteness exposure on people’s risk preference.

Across five experimental studies situated in various risk contexts, including health, financial and safety, the authors demonstrate that exposure to cuteness makes consumers more risk-seeking due to the reduction of situational conscientiousness. Study 1 used an experimental lab study with a real circumstance to test the effect on the risk associated with food consumption. Study 2 used a classical gambling experiment to test the effect on financial risk. Studies 3a and 3b used a mass shooting news article to test the effect on safety risk. Lastly, study 4 tested the mediating role of low conscientiousness with the classical gambling experiment.

The findings show that exposure to cuteness makes people more likely to take risks in various domains (e.g. food consumption, safety and financial decisions).

This study tested the effect of cuteness on risk-seeking with a limited number of domains of risk. In addition, the authors tested the effect with visual cuteness stimuli, while individuals may perceive cuteness through other senses, such as sound.

The findings have implications for business owners and marketers when deciding whether and how to use cuteness to promote their products and brands, as well as to avoid potential repercussions. For example, a marketer for a new extreme sports company could use videos or images of cute animals participating in sports on the company’s social media channels to expand its market share. In addition, findings from this research would make consumers more attentive when facing cute appeals as they gain a better understanding of how exposure to cuteness could impact their own decision-making.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this research is the first to demonstrate that exposure to subtle, cute environmental cues has a robust effect on consumers’ risk preferences across various domains, regardless of age and gender.

The key purpose of this chapter is to identify some ways of enhancing feminist conceptual, empirical, and theoretical work on violence against women. Much attention is given to addressing the harms caused by new electronic forms of woman abuse, including the role of adult Internet pornography and sex robots. This chapter also emphasises the importance of revisiting some major feminist contributions from the past.

How do racial meanings structure the institution of higher education and the organizations and networks it encompasses? This chapter develops a theory of racial activation to usefully link conceptualizations of race and organizations. This theory examines how racial meanings shape organizational fields, forms or types of organizations, and the strategic use of racial meanings by actors in organizations to create a more robust understanding of the processes by which organizations are themselves made racialized. Predominant scholarship on race can largely be characterized as theorizing the mechanisms by which race is constructed or uncovering the patterns and consequences of inequality along racial lines. Much existing research hovers above at a macro level where national, state, and global powers are understood to impose racial categories, symbols, meanings, and rules onto daily life while higher education has largely been studied as a site where we see the effects of broader social disparities play out. This chapter draws on insights from inhabited institutionalism to develop a theory of racial activation that usefully links conceptualizations of race and organizations to provide an intersectional and interactional approach to the study of fields.