Search results

Russell Belk is one of the most distinguished thought leaders in marketing and consumer research. He is also one of its most distinctive. This paper examines the distinctiveness of Russell Belk's remarkable writing style, arguing that it exemplifies the `academic gothic'. Five characteristically gothic traits are found in his published corpus — excess, monstrosity, irony, supernaturalism, doubling — and the implications for writing marketing research are considered.

Abstract
Writing is a core scholarly competence. Not only is it a skill that every academic must acquire, regardless of their methodological, philosophical or empirical affiliations, but also it is 'a substantial differentiating characteristic of eminent researchers'. This article offers an analysis of the writing style of one of the field's most eminent researchers, Russell W. Belk. It identifies five literary devices that help Belk's writing stand out from the crowd and, while the article does not claim to contain the secret of writing success, it considers the crucial part writing plays in the consumer research process.
Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

AbstractLocal food systems (LFSs) are complex and diverse social structures. The processes that influence the formation and evolution of LFSs are obscure, relatively uncoordinated, and somewhat mysterious. This study develops a stronger understanding of such processes through a qualitative exploration of the influence of routine practice work at the organization level on the entrepreneurial development of two distinct LFSs in the Southwest region of the United States: southeastern Arizona and Albuquerque−Santa Fe. We gathered data between August 2014 and September 2017 through semistructured interviews with and direct observations of 53 local food practitioners operating in one of the two LFSs. Theoretical principles of institutional entrepreneurship, embedded agency, and practice work guided the study. The findings reveal three forms of ingenuity (technological, organizational, policy) that regularly emerge through the day‐to‐day organization‐level work of local food practitioners. We argue that the system‐level influence of these forms, whether intentional or not, are indicators of the embedded agency of the practitioners and their capacities to serve as institutional entrepreneurs. We discuss implications for both practice and future research.

AbstractEntrepreneurial activities are sometimes framed as market‐based strategies that compromise the integrity of the movement against the global agrifood system. Other times, scholars have argued that entrepreneurship is a critical component of local food system viability. This study helps reconcile these conflicting views through a qualitative exploration of the variations in the commercially and socially oriented features of local food entrepreneurship in the southeastern Arizona local food system. Researchers gathered data between August 2014 and December 2016 through semistructured interviews with and direct observations of 36 southeastern Arizona local food entrepreneurs. A conceptual continuum that articulates the variations between commercial and social entrepreneurship according to market condition, mission, resource mobilization, and performance measurement guides the exploration. The findings reveal commercial and social variations in local food entrepreneurship to be assorted, yet synergistic enactments of the economic, environmental, and social conditions and principles that characterize the southeastern Arizona local food system. The findings push the local food entrepreneurship narrative beyond the limitations of a rigid activist‐market dichotomy by illuminating the synergistic complexities that influence the form and function of local food systems. The article discusses implications for both local food practitioners and scholars.

Abstract
This article examines personal Web sites as a conspicuous form of consumer self-presentation. Using theories of self-presentation, possessions, and computer-mediated environments (CMEs), we investigate the ways in which consumers construct identities by digitally associating themselves with signs, symbols, material objects, and places. Specifically, the issues of interest include why consumers create personal Web sites, what consumers want to communicate, what strategies they devise to achieve their goal of self-presentation, and how those Web space strategies compare to the self-presentation strategies of real life (RL). The data reveal insights into the strategies behind constructing a digital self, projecting a digital likeness, digitally associating as a new form of possession, and reorganizing linear narrative structures.

AbstractThis research directs our attention to the dynamics surrounding the changing cultural understanding of the place we call home. Traditionally, the home is regarded as a place of singularization that is to be aligned with the homeowner's unique identity. This traditional meaning has come to be confronted with a contradictory understanding of the home as a marketplace asset. Homeowners come to experience a market-reflected gaze that shuns singularization while driving homeowners to exhibit expertise in aligning their homes with marketplace standards. Professionalization of the home, through marketplace expertise and standardization, discourages personalization, leading to an experience of disorientation with the place of home. In this ethnography of the home renovation marketplace, we build on the concept of 'dysplacement' whereby this contradictory cultural understanding of the home disrupts the homeowner's ability to achieve implacement. The concept of dysplacement and the corresponding place disorientation experience has the potential to enrich our theoretical understanding of place by integrating the cultural meaning of place as a domain with marketplace dynamics and individual consumer practices surrounding place.

Abstract
This article proposes a novel theory, based on relational paradoxes, to explain how consumers enable or disable their relationships with brands over time. Analysis of data from in-depth, longitudinal interviews with 26 consumers reveals four relational tensions and seven actions that consumers take in response to these tensions, thus affecting the course and character of their brand relationships. Four consumer actions enable the consumer–brand relationship by creating patterns of relationship change based on equilibrium or transformation; three actions disable the relationship via patterns of vicious cycles or conflict. Overall, consumers do relationship work as they act to navigate tensions, thereby creating, maintaining, changing, and terminating their brand relationships. This research has implications for current theory on brand relationship templates, dysfunctional brand relationships, and customer relationship management.

Abstract
Countervailing discourses of cultural appreciation versus cultural appropriation are fueling a tension between the ethnic consumer subject, who views the consumption of cultural difference as a valorized identity project, and the responsibilized consumer subject, who is tasked with considering the societal impacts of such consumption. Drawing on an extended qualitative investigation of international K-pop consumers, this study illustrates that this tension spurs consumers to pursue self-authorization—the reflexive reconfiguration of the self in relation to the social world—through which consumers grant themselves permission to continue consuming cultural difference. Four consumer self-authorization strategies are identified: reforming, restraining, recontextualizing, and rationalizing. Each strategy relies upon an amalgam of countervailing moral interpretations about acts of consuming difference, informing ideologies about the power relationships between cultures, and emergent subject positions that situate the consuming self in relation to others whose differences are packaged for consumption. Findings show notable conditions under which each self-authorization strategy is deployed, alongside consumers' capacity to adjust and recombine different strategies as they navigate changing sociocultural and idiographic conditions. Overall, this study advances understanding of how consumers navigate the resurgent politics of marketized cultural diversity in an era of woke capitalism.