Context and theorizing in the global South: Challenges and opportunities for an international dialogue

Brazilian researchers have been encouraged to internationalize their research, expanding their insertions into high impact international journals. This task in turn demands thinking outside the commonly used Eurocentric prism. How can Brazilian scholars say something that would be of interest globally and have an impact on the work done in the global North? How should the researcher from the global South deal with context in the international dialogue to avoid being perceived as the exotic Other? This interview with professor Guliz Ger addresses these and other important issues related to the challenge of theorizing and publishing research from a global perspective. Professor Ger’s work inspires Brazilian researchers in their internationalization efforts by offering concrete examples of how to theorize, strategies to overcome editors’ and journals’ prejudices and convince the international audience of the value of global South, and more particularly, Brazilian research. Professor Ger’s experience as a visiting professor in numerous universities around the world including in Brazil, and her service on a number of journal editorial boards, including the Journal of Consumer Research, for which she served as Associate Editor, provided the background for this interview produced by Maribel Suarez and Thaysa Nascimento

Reasons for materialism in four cultures

Los autores en este artículo plantean el impacto cultural que tiene el materialismo en Europa Occidental, Turquía, Rumania y Estados Unidos, su influencia y las razones para su existencia en consumidores de clase media. La metodología para la investigación fue basada con entrevistas en profundidad, grupos foco, revistas especializadas y observación participativa, aplicada a estudiantes de universidades públicas y privadas. A lo largo de la investigación los autores encontraron razones como: "El materialismo es bueno siempre y cuando no sea un materialismo vulgar", "gastar dinero en beneficio de otros"," los medios de comunicación me hicieron ser materialista", "s0y materialista porque es parte del mundo moderno". Se concluye que gran parte del mundo es materialista en una forma u otra por diferentes razones y cada cultura acoge el materialismo de una manera diferente.The authors in this article raise the cultural impact that materialism has in Western Europe, Turkey, Romania and the United States, its influence and the reasons for its existence on middle class consumers. The methodology for the research was based on in-depth interviews, focus groups, specialized journals and participatory observation, applied to students from public and private universities. Throughout the investigation, the authors found reasons such as: "Materialism is good as long as it is not vulgar materialism", "spending money for the benefit of others", "the media made me a materialist", "I am a materialist because it is part of the modern world". It is concluded that much of the world is materialistic in one form or another for different reasons and each culture embraces materialism in a different way.Modalidad Presencia

The emergence of the posthuman consumer and the fusion of the virtual and the real: A critical analysis of Sony's ad for memory Stick (TM)

As the world moves closer to new cybernetic life forms (i.e. self-regulating technological entities) a fundamental question arises as to what the term "human" means. An equally important question is whether we are entering a new phase of "posthuman" lifeworld inhabited by cyborgs composed of organisms and machines. At first glance, such questions might appear to have no theoretical or practical significance. However, some recent developments in human/machine interactions suggest that this requires more than cursory attention. This paper makes a modest beginning in addressing relevant issues and examines their implications to some new ways of constructing the consumer, or more precisely the posthuman consumer. In developing our paper, we use Sony ad for Memory Stick(TM) as an illustration and perform a critical analysis of the ad