Increasing numbers of corporations are vying to capture one of the largest untapped consumer markets – the world's poor – in ways that are not only economically profitable but socially responsible. One type of initiative that has gained increased traction is trading partnerships between...

This chapter from my 2005 book, Fresh Lipstick: Redressing Fashion and Feminism, was dropped for length considerations because it focused on such a short period of time (the war only lasted a little more than four years, while my book was trying to cover 150 years and still be affordable as a...

Irish immigrants to America during the second half of the nineteenth century presented significant challenge to the existing Protestant ruling elite. The provenance, religion and behaviour of the arriving Catholic Irish stood in particular opposition to the morality of the Puritan descendents,...

Studies of response to advertising images follow parallel streams: one treats visuals as sensory data; the other, operating under rhetorical theory, presumes that images are communicative artifacts. By revisiting a seminal article by Mitchell and Olson, we empirically demonstrate an alternative...

Art has been boxed in, framed by narrow constraints set to satisfy a forgotten aristocratic imperative. Though we have lost touch with the origins of our convictions about what is and is not art, we still suffer from a continuing compulsion to confer that name upon a small subset of human...

The article articulates a new view of markets by reflecting a matriarchal philosophy and by drawing from the work of new age philosophers and feminist economists. The paper also employs a holistic and activist approach to research. The neo-pagan movement has shifted toward agitating for...

The authors propose and demonstrate a discourse model of the dynamic relationships between consumption practices and consumption texts. They use discourse theory to show how product meanings are created, negotiated, and altered. Then they demonstrate an interpretive method based on the model,...

Explores the interrelationship between advertising and consumer rituals using a framework for examining the influence of these cultural institutions. Illustrates the ways in which advertising uses ritual symbolism to create messages about products and services not designed for use during such...

In this article, past consumer research dealing with advertising images is analyzed and critiqued for its underlying assumption: that pictures are reflections of reality. The case against this assumption is presented, and an alternative view, in which visuals are a convention-based symbolic...