White Male Privilege, Diversity-as-Deficit, and Tokenism in the North American University: Reflections on Netflix’s The Chair

Ji-Yoon, an Asian-American woman, is the newly appointed chair of the English department at Pembroke University, a lower-tier Ivy League school. Most of the department’s faculty are older and white and male, but do include a female white professor, Joan Hambling, clearly suffering from marginalization. There is also a young black faculty member named Yasmin McKay, whom Ji-Yoon wants to make the university’s first black tenured professor in the English department. Yaz, as they call her, has published in the top journals and is loved by her students, who flock to take her courses. There are other story dynamics dealing with issues of culture wars, the struggle of humanities in university settings dominated with \u27professional\u27 disciplines, and so forth. This review essay, going beyond a media review, offers additional reflections on the multiple ongoing tussles in work settings that go beyond just the university campuses

Canadian Ethical Diamonds and Identity Obsession: How Consumers of Ethical Jewelry in Italy Understand Traceability

Through an ethnographic survey of Italian ethical jewelers and representative customers, this study focuses on how the topic of traceability in the Canadian diamond industry is communicated and negotiated within two representative Italian ethical jewelry stores in Milan and Bologna. To better understand communication strategies deployed by jewelers to convey the concepts of ethical jewelry, the authors explore themes related to traceability in the context of Canadian ethical diamonds. A specific dominant narrative built around CEDs is identified that leverages customer concerns about the violation of the safety and human rights of workers on the diamond supply chain. To more deeply analyze how information about the traceability of CEDs successfully mitigates consumer concerns about the ethics of jewelry supply chains, the authors explore the role of identity obsession in ethical jewelry purchase decisions by Italian consumers. They further discuss rationales for the general resistance of many Italian jewelers to offering ethical jewelry in local stores, to better understand why, to date, ethical jewelry remains a niche market segment in Italy, with most Italian consumers unaware of the degrading environmental and sociological impact of such products as blood diamonds

Confronting the Postmodern Intersection of Markets, Development, Globalization, and Technology: The Necessary Radical Vision of Nikhilesh Dholakia

An extensive and complex literature precedes Nikilesh Dholakia critical perspectives on globalization, post-modernity, technology, and development. He invites readers to rethink everything that the Dominant Social Paradigm, capitalist forms of exchange, and western cultures have implanted in mainstream marketing academia. His literature inspires and dares the researcher to explore radical propositions in the intersections of marketing and postmodernity: from early studies on electronic marketspaces and the role of technology in global consumption culture, the developmental analysis of non-aligned and non-represented countries, to the essential analysis of marketing and postmodernism. Nikilesh Dholakia has embraced a critical mindset which encourages brave revisionary approaches, interdisciplinary permeability and collaboration, theoretical openness, and to radically challenge neoliberal paradoxes in globalized markets. He remains hopeful of finding cooperative solutions among international scholars who are unafraid to question capitalist dogmas

From Oceanography to Critical Marketing by way of Dismantling Fast Fashion: The Purposeful Research Trajectory of Deniz Atik

Deniz Atik’s curiosity and persistence has led her to dive in the complex waters of a powerful and ubiquitous contemporary phenomenon: fast fashion. From a critical perspective on marketing studies, Atik has addressed the impact of fast fashion on the environment, workers’ rights, consumer welfare, and the global system of industries and philosophies around fashion markets. Problematizing the logics of sustainability, western beauty standards and consumer vulnerability in terms of identity and representation are central analyses in her literature that proposes new perspectives on the universe of constructs related to fast fashion to be analyzed in the context of post-modern markets. As co-editor in chief of the MGDR journal, Atik has hope in new generations to reduce environmental impact through conscious consumption, embrace new market logics of sustainability, and challenge the underlying ethos of capitalist markets

Doing Well While Doing Good: How the Hybrid Business Model Promotes Sustainability in the Fashion Industry

To examine the mechanics—social, geographical, and logistical—of producing sustainable fashion apparel as a hybrid company (a company that is part-commercial and part-altruistic; i.e., pursues two goals: profitability and environmental/social sustainability), beholden equally to employees, the worker-owned cooperatives with which the company partners, and environmental and ethical best practices; and to investigate the complex interplay of altruism and entrepreneurship endemic to hybrid organizations

Maya Weavers Of Guatemala: Implications For Marketing And Development

This video/presentation focuses on the active participation of women in the development process in Guatemala. Development is viewed as a larger process of socio-economic change that takes into consideration issues of self-determination and selfreliance (Joy and Ross, 1989). Modernization theorists generally assume that there is a general improvement in women\u27s participation and status due to urbanization and capitalist development (Quinn, 1977) while dependency theorists emphasize the detrimental effects of the development process on women. In this video we provide a context for examining the causes and conditions that allow for the participation of women (Nash, 1981). For more than a decade, war and clashing ideologies have left deep scars in the rural communities in Guatemala. According to Smith and Boyer (1987:206) hundreds of villages have been eliminated, and thousands of people have been tortured and killed. Consequently, many Maya women have been socially and economically displaced. In this video the focus is on these displaced women weavers and their cooperative efforts to forge a livelihood through transformations of their traditional textiles. The footage documents the lives and efforts made by these weavers to become self-reliant through their work (weaving) while also examining the long-term and strategic issues that will draw them not only into the regional and national markets but also into the international arena. The harsh realities of eking out a living based on weaving have necessitated a shift in attitudes and behavior regarding the products that Maya weavers create. Historically, handcrafts were produced in order to fulfil functional and ceremonial needs within the craftsperson1s community. Textiles have served as deeply rooted indexical codes of social status and differentiation as represented by the use of Huipiles in highland Guatemala (Schneider, 1987). Indigenous demand for such products, however, has declined given the penetration of mass produced items to even the remote villages and political chaos, such that local weavers have had to seek out new markets in order to survive. But such transformations in economic production have occurred at a cost. Producers know local aesthetic and product preferences but are at a disadvantage when their products have to be tailored to consumers from other cultures

Digital future of luxury brands:Metaverse, digital fashion, and non-fungible tokens

Abstract Leading luxury brands have incorporated technologies to recreate brand images and reinvent consumer experience. The fashion industry is experiencing a historic transformation thanks to emerging technologies such as blockchain and non-fungible tokens (NFTs) along with impactful technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), and virtual reality (VR). With metaverse as a new social platform around the corner, academics and industry alike are querying how these new technologies might reshape luxury brands, reinvent consumer experience, and alter consumer behavior. This research charts new academic territory by investigating how newly evolved technologies affect the fashion industry. With practical examples of luxury brands, this article has theorized the irreversible trend of digital fashion: the attraction of NFT collectibles. It then proposes intriguing questions for scholars and practitioners to ponder, such as will young consumers, essentially living online, buy more fashion products in the digital world than in the real world? How can the fashion industry strategize for the coexistence of digital collections and physical goods

Wine quality and sensory assessments: do distinct local groups of wine experts differ?

This research examines to what extent and in what ways two distinct groups of wine experts differ in their assessments of the same set of wines. Whereas previous research focused on selected wine panels whose members were in some cases trained for a specific tasting, we implemented a blind wine tasting among two distinct groups of wine experts: local wine experts and influencers in two socio-culturally different locations in the Okanagan Valley in British Columbia and Montreal in Quebec in Canada. Our findings suggest significant differences in how certain wine sensory attributes are evaluated. This article provides insights into how quality and taste are constructed by two distinct groups of wine experts. Our research results further shed light on how different types of wines might be perceived differently based on the locales in which they are marketed

Studying Consumption Behaviour through Multiple Lenses: An Overview of Consumer Culture Theory

Since Miller’s (1995) ground-breaking directive to the anthropology community to research consumption within the context of production, CCT has come of age, offering distinctive insights into the complexities of consumer behaviour. CCT positions itself at the nexus of disciplines as varied as anthropology, sociology, media studies, critical studies, and feminist studies; overlapping foci bring theoretical innovation to studies of human behaviours in the marketplace. In this paper, we provide asynthesis of CCT research since its inception, along with more recent publications. We follow the four thematic domains of research as devised by Arnould and Thompson (2005): consumer identity projects, marketplace cultures, the socio-historic patterning of consumption, and mass-mediated marketplace ideologies and consumers’ interpretive strategies. Additionally, we investigate new directions for future connections between CCT research and anthropology