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There are multiple threats that cause consumers to be vulnerable in the marketplace, with poverty being a leading cause. Impoverishment often negatively impacts access to multiple categories of goods and services that consumers require to experience a reasonable quality of life. While there is research that explores the underlying factors that lead to resource deficits and marketplace restrictions, as well as their physical and emotional outcomes, an understanding of what is necessary to survive and thrive across societies is more elusive. To this end, our chapter carefully examines the concept of consumption adequacy (CA), which historically captures consumer needs for food and potable water, socially acceptable clothing adapted to weather conditions, safe housing that provides for privacy needs of occupants, preventative and remedial health care, and opportunities to grow and advance through education and training. After briefly summarizing the extant literature, each is described in turn, and ways of empirically investigating them across societies are advanced. This chapter closes with both marketer and public policy implications.

Menstrual hygienic practices are an essential component in public health that significantly impact and, in turn, are affected by the economic and social status of women. This study aims to investigate the usage of hygienic menstrual products among young girls and women between the age group of 15 and 24 years. It also tries to explore various other socio-economic factors including regional disparities in menstrual hygiene management (MHM) practices. To analyze the relationship between these factors, a bivariate statistical analysis has been carried out. The results are based on a secondary dataset, that is, the National Family Health Survey, Fifth Round (NFHS-5), 2019–2021 for India. This study further examines the regional disparities across India, in terms of hygienic practices adopted by women to ensure menstrual health. The results show that there exists a positive relationship between hygienic methods of protection against bloodstains and the socio-economic status of women. This has been analyzed across four dimensions – educational attainment, access to sanitation, financial autonomy and exposure to mass media/mobile phones. A stark urban–rural gap has been observed in terms of the MHM practices in Western and Central Indian states. Therefore, enhancing the economic and social status of rural women requires a more holistic approach toward elevating MHM practices in these regions. The de-stigmatization of menstruation and greater involvement of men in doing so would prove to be pivotal. To accelerate the level of hygienic menstrual practices among rural women in these regions, existing policies need to focus on educational, financial and various other health-related aspects as means to reduce the rural–urban divide in India.

Knowledge of how social movements move, diffuse, and expand collective action events is central to movement scholarship and activist practice. Our purpose is to extend sociological knowledge about how movements (sometimes) diffuse and amplify insurgent actions, that is, how movements move. We extend movement diffusion theory by drawing a conceptual analogue with military theory and practice applied to the case of the organized and highly disciplined nonviolent Nashville civil rights movement in the late 1950s and early 1960s. We emphasize emplacement in a base-mission extension model whereby a movement base is built in a community establishing a social movement school for inculcating discipline and performative training in cadre who engage in insurgent operations extended from that base to outlying events and campaigns. Our data are drawn from secondary sources and semi-structured interviews conducted with participants of the Nashville civil rights movement. The analytic strategy employs a variant of the “extended case method,” where extension is constituted by movement agents following paths from base to outlying campaigns or events. Evidence shows that the Nashville movement established an exemplary local movement base that led to important changes in that city but also spawned traveling movement cadre who moved movement actions in an extensive series of pathways linking the Nashville base to events and campaigns across the southern theater of the civil rights movement. We conclude with theoretical and practical implications.

Employability skills have transformed from the acquisition of university degrees to possessions of cognate skills other than only degrees that can help employees secure employment in contemporary work environments. This study evaluates essential skills that will prepare millennia of youths and graduates for employment in the present job market. The study investigated four major hypotheses to underscore the employability opportunities of graduates in challenging 21st-century work environments.

To clearly gain an understanding of women’s disparity in society, the study employed a qualitative approach to evaluate the incidence of gender prejudice in a men’s dominant world. The study utilised two distinguished sampling strategies, purposive and snowballing sampling techniques, which were deemed suitable and useful due to the nature of the study. The study recruited 42 participants by conducting semi-structured interview sessions for the study. The study employed a deductive approach to analyse the data obtained from participants. A thematic content analysis was used to take away prejudice and establish an overarching impression of the interviewed data. Atlas.ti was used to analyse the transcribed interview data from the participants to establish common themes from the surveyed informants.

The results of this investigation indicated that there is a deep-rooted trend of institutionalised men’s dominance in politics and religious leadership. Women perceived less representation and men dominated the two domains of existence in their local environment. The study established that women are optimistic about a turnaround narrative on gender equality in politics and religious leadership. They expressed their concern about strengthened public debate and campaigns on women’s representation, and against gender discrimination. The study further shows that women are influencing the ethical and moral sense for change against women’s neglect in society. They expressed their concerns against the selection of people into political offices for elected political posts and observed the peculiarity of political godfathers fixing their favourite men into those offices.

The study discovered that women are leading campaigns for their representation in politics as well as church leadership today. The novelty of this study bothering around two domains of women’s lives – politics and religion, in particular, church leadership. These have not been evidence before in a study.

Several African American educators served as an inspiration in the development and scholarship of an African American female who teaches at a Predominantly White Institution (PWI) of higher learning. This chapter shares the author's foundational beginnings and persistence in academe while teaching and leading in a race-conscious society. She shares some of her upbringing, education, and early teaching experiences. She also shares her motivation to learn and serve (Bethune, 1950, 1963), while walking in circles. Sizemore (1973, 2008) to provide a roadmap of her journey to support new and developing African American female professors. She uses poetry and the dimensions of African American culture (Boykin, 1983) to guide her sharing. The author uses her exploration of identity development as an African American womanist who advocates as an African American first, to share how she has developed as a scholar whose renewal of purpose targets becoming a full professor.

Vulnerabilities in subsistence marketplaces arise from the multifaceted deprivation that characterizes poverty. Associated with low income is low literacy, leading to vulnerabilities in terms of thinking, feeling, and coping. We review literature on vulnerability and on subsistence marketplaces, bringing out the confluence of vulnerabilities consumers in these contexts face. We also describe marketplace literacy, a way of addressing vulnerabilities and developing capabilities. We provide a case study of women in agriculture and conclude with a discussion of implications for research, education, and practice.

The aim of this study is to investigate the highly dynamic cultural landscape relating to economically active Emirati women who are supported by government policy but may be exposed to some societal disapprobation.

Narrative methodology is used to explore how women respond to the perceived discord between their economic agency and enduring traditional norms associated with women.

Results indicate that a prevailing discursive mode within participants’ narratives is that the working woman is not at all a new phenomenon in their society but has always been a feature of Emirati history.

This study’s contribution to theory building is its demonstration of how traditional Arab Islamic values and modern state policy are being combined in a way that blurs the apparent dichotomy between tradition and modernity.