Beyond the Local: Places, People, and Brands in New England Beer Marketing

Despite decades of domination by a few large companies, the American beer market has seen a dramatic resurgence of microbreweries. Contrary to conventional oligopolistic market theories, small firms have consistently gained market share from their entrenched competitors. Researchers have attributed this success to ‘neolocalism.’ Through their marketing, microbreweries appeal to consumers’ desire for connections to real people and distinctive products from local places. However, no study has verified whether this pattern is most characteristic of microbreweries. With newer firms threatening their market share, larger firms might adopt neolocal claims, but little empirical attention has been directed at large brewers, and mid-sized, regional firms have been largely ignored by researchers. This paper uses content analysis of beer packaging to investigate the nature of the appeals made to consumers. I find that while microbreweries do make neolocal claims, regional breweries are more likely to associate their products with places on a local scale. Large breweries make few such claims, but instead rely on ‘reflexive branding’: marketing that refers back to the brand itself rather than borrowing existing symbolism from people or places. These findings partly support the neolocal perspective, but also challenge our expectations of which firms use neolocal appeals the most

Click “Here” to Post a Comment: Legend Discussion and Transformation in Online Forums

The internet has become the predominant source of dissemination for dubious legends, ranging from medical misinformation to conspiracy theories and supernatural encounters. Building on previous work in this area, I examine contemporary legends as they are told and discussed in online forums. Drawing on Nancy Baym’s outline of the characteristics of the internet that distinguish it from other forms of communication, I analyze how the internet’s interactivity, temporal structure, social cues, storage, replicability, reach, and mobility affect the form and function of the legend process. I find that the internet subverts some of the traditional characteristics of the legend-telling process, but paradoxically, other characteristics of the internet actually reinforce or valorize traditional elements, while surprisingly, sometimes the internet has no effect at all even in areas where we might expect the most dramatic effects. These findings provide significant insights into the role the internet plays in today’s world where bizarre claims increasingly characterize everyday social and political life. They shed light on how the internet provides a window into our concerns while simultaneously exacerbating them

Print is Dead: the Promise and Peril of Online Media for Subcultural Resistance

Researchers have maintained a consistent interest in subcultural resistance: marginalized groups challenging their subordinate positions in society through words or deeds. Resisting groups increasingly use online media for resistance, but we know little about the web’s consequences for subcultural challengers. In this article, I explore the promise and peril of digital media for resistance relative to traditional, printed media, from an ethnographic exploration of punk subculture. Rather than finding support for either supporters or critics of online resistance, I find evidence for an alternative, dialectical perspective in which the Internet simultaneously invigorates and problematizes punk resistance. It provides the oppositional group with many technical advantages for the dissemination of subversive culture but also entails social costs such as making the subculture more accessible to its opponents, undermining some of its more radical aspects, and making it complicit in processes of commodification and exploitation. Previous studies, which tend to focus on how the Internet empowers challenging groups, largely neglect this dark side of the web. These findings contribute to our understanding of resistance in the new millennium, and its feasibility for subcultural goal attainment, by elucidating the transformative relationship between resistance and the media through which groups practice it

Mapping the Residual Landscape: Dilapidation, Abandonment, and Ruin in the Built Environment

This article examines the extent to which spaces are structuring influences on, or targets of, action. Two factors and their interactions are presented: the extent to which a space is 1) maintained and 2) used. As these factors increase in strength, the structural influences of a space increase while agential opportunities are diminished. Conversely, as spaces become dilapidated and abandoned, structural forces are weakened and the potential for creative action heightens. These spaces can be conceptualized as elements of the ‘residual landscape’: spaces left behind by socio-historical processes and practices. Special cases are considered where the factors are inversely related and issues of structure and agency are complicated. A brief case study serves to illustrate each type of space and the factors which operate therein

Are the Kids Alright? A Critique and Agenda for Taking Youth Subcultures Seriously

Researchers have long been fascinated with youth subcultures. Decades of study have yielded several competing paradigms, which attempt to interpret these subcultures in diverse ways, with each succeeding paradigm criticizing, and attempting to improve on, those that came before it. Rather than offering criticism of a specific youth studies paradigm, this article provides a critique of this body of theory as a whole by delineating several theoretical assumptions that have persisted across these perspectives. These include: (1) the tendency to group all youth phenomena under a monolithic conceptual umbrella; (2) a preoccupation on the part of researchers with style and the consumption of goods; and (3) the assumed lack of rational behavior found in subcultures and an accompanying inability on the part of subcultures to achieve real goals or effect social change. It is argued that such assumptions trivialize subcultures, have led to a priori understandings of these without adequate empirical grounding, and must be addressed if subcultures are to be adequately understood and appreciated

\u27City Air Makes Free’: A Multi-Level, Cross-National Analysis of Self-Efficacy

The effects of cities on the subjective states of individuals have been the subject of continuous inquiry. Recent research has demonstrated potential links between immediate environments and individual outcomes such as perceived powerlessness. However, the results of such studies are inconsistent and fail to account for the greater societal environment in which observations occur. Using a more comparative, cross-national sample and multi-level modeling, we retest the expectation that the immediate physical and social environment influences feelings of powerlessness, and extend the test to consider urbanism operating at societal levels beyond the local. Controlling for demographic composition, we find that urban factors operating at both societal and local levels are important predictors of self-efficacy and powerlessness. While one factor was found to correspond with decreased self-efficacy, two aspects of urban environments—one local and one societal—are found to be consistent with Simmel\u27s assertion that urban settings increase individual feelings of efficacy and freedom. The implications of these findings for urban theory are discussed

Tolerance in the City: The Multilevel Effects of Urban Environments on Permissive Attitudes

Studies on urbanism often suggest a link between urbanites and increased tolerance. While most research supports this claim, it is hampered by several limitations: it focuses almost exclusively on the United States, it neglects classical arguments that urbanism is a macro-level as well as local phenomena, and it does not direct attention to the different mechanisms through which urbanism is believed to operate. In this paper, we reexamine the tolerance-producing capacity of urbanism by addressing these limitations. This study uses a large cross-national sample, multi-level modeling to examine urban factors at both the local and societal level, and two measures of tolerance to account for the different forms it might take depending on competing conceptualizations. We find that local urban environments promote tolerance cross-nationally and that societal level urbanization is significantly associated with tolerance, but the effect is not always positive. We conclude by discussing the implications of these patterns and their impact on our understanding of urban tolerance

A p53/miRNA-34 axis regulates Snail1-dependent cancer cell epithelial–mesenchymal transition

Expression of the essential EMT inducer Snail1 is inhibited by miR-34 through a p53-dependent regulatory pathway

CDH1 promoter hypermethylation and E-cadherin protein expression in infiltrating breast cancer

BACKGROUND: The E-cadherin gene (CDH1) maps, at chromosome 16q22.1, a region often associated with loss of heterozygosity (LOH) in human breast cancer. LOH at this site is thought to lead to loss of function of this tumor suppressor gene and was correlated with decreased disease-free survival, poor prognosis, and metastasis. Differential CpG island methylation in the promoter region of the CDH1 gene might be an alternative way for the loss of expression and function of E-cadherin, leading to loss of tissue integrity, an essential step in tumor progression. METHODS: The aim of our study was to assess, by Methylation-Specific Polymerase Chain Reaction (MSP), the methylation pattern of the CDH1 gene and its possible correlation with the expression of E-cadherin and other standard immunohistochemical parameters (Her-2, ER, PgR, p53, and K-67) in a series of 79 primary breast cancers (71 infiltrating ductal, 5 infiltrating lobular, 1 metaplastic, 1 apocrine, and 1 papillary carcinoma). RESULTS: CDH1 hypermethylation was observed in 72% of the cases including 52/71 ductal, 4/5 lobular carcinomas and 1 apocrine carcinoma. Reduced levels of E-cadherin protein were observed in 85% of our samples. Although not statistically significant, the levels of E-cadherin expression tended to diminish with the CDH1 promoter region methylation. In the group of 71 ductal cancinomas, most of the cases of showing CDH1 hypermethylation also presented reduced levels of expression of ER and PgR proteins, and a possible association was observed between CDH1 methylation and ER expression (p = 0.0301, Fisher's exact test). However, this finding was not considered significant after Bonferroni correction of p-value. CONCLUSION: Our preliminary findings suggested that abnormal CDH1 methylation occurs in high frequencies in infiltrating breast cancers associated with a decrease in E-cadherin expression in a subgroup of cases characterized by loss of expression of other important genes to the mammary carcinogenesis process, probably due to the disruption of the mechanism of maintenance of DNA methylation in tumoral cells