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This paper aims to examine the adjustment experiences of academically successful international students in living and learning in a private Malaysian higher education institution (HEI).

A total of 53 international students participated in a mixed-method study, where they completed a survey (close- and open-ended questions). Also, 12 international students were interviewed.

The findings diverge from other studies, in that issues with respondents' English language proficiency were minimal, but for some of the students, social and cultural adjustment was problematic. However, these students were proactive in improving their situations. These findings indicate foci for university improvement in study and living experiences for all students.

The study is limited to one group of academically successful students at a private university in Malaysia.

There are benefits to HEIs and international students in enabling students to reflect upon and share their successful strategies. These not only enable students to recognise and value their achievements but also contribute to the development of more inclusive practices that will enhance future students' adjustment and overall learning experience.

The study contributes to the literature with its focus on academically successful students at a private university in Malaysia, both of which are areas of limited research coverage.

This paper seeks to gain an understanding of how different consumer conceptualisations in marketing may lead to negative outcomes. Every profession has its grand vision. The guiding vision for most marketing professionals is customer orientation. Of course, reality is more complex and nuanced than a single unified vision. Organisations tout their consumer-centric marketing decisions, in that they use consumer research to make operational decisions about products, prices, distribution and the like. However, marketers’ treatment of consumers is often far from the customer’s best interests. It is proposed that by understanding the different conceptualisations of the consumer over time, we can explore their implications for putting authentic consumer-centric marketing into practise.

A thematic analysis of marketing thought as reflected in the marketing literature.

This review of the history of marketing thought bears out a diversity of opinions concerning the role of consumers in aiding marketing efficiency and effectiveness. Not all views of the customer are nurturing of the marketing concept nor predicated on a solicitous relationship with consumers. A demonstrable lack of consumer orientation can lead to a distrust of marketers as well as the extant marketing system. Often additional regulation of marketers and markets is a compensating result and sometimes the structure of the marketing system itself may require adjustment.

This paper is intended to nudge marketing academics to more thoughtfully examine the pragmatic implications of how marketing managers conceive of the typical consumer. After conducting a thematic analysis of marketing thought, a normative ethical argument is then put forward concerning why an adherence to this fragile grand vision of marketing – genuine customer concern – is important for prudential marketing and the overall health of the marketing system.

This paper aims to offer both a practical and reflective stance on a longitudinal multi-method interpretive consumer research project carried out with tween girls.

This multi-layered approach to data collection, involving qualitative diaries, accompanied shopping trips, e-collages and in-depth interviews, addresses the need, as articulated by Morrow and Richards (1996, p. 96) to “move away from the narrow focus of socialization and child development” toward a research approach that prioritizes children’s own experiences of their lives as children, thereby reconsidering the richness of children’s voices.

In line with those whose work seeks to privilege children’s knowledge of the world they inhabit while also emphasizing the need, as in the case of adult “doing” to place that existence within its broader social context (Russell and Tyler, 2005, p. 227), diaries, in-depth interviews, shopping trips, e-collages and researcher diaries were used to access the world of these social neophytes as they mediate their social worlds through the ever pervasive prism of consumer culture. The light and shade of their worlds cannot be captured by adult-oriented perspectives on research which assume that young consumers are incompetent, worthy of debate merely to ascertain levelness of agency or of interest merely to quantify degrees of participation in and comprehension of the semiotic markers of our consumer society.

Only female consumers were involved in this study which underlines the need to engage with both genders when it comes to researching young consumers.

This paper offers a tangible contribution to the movement of research toward understanding young consumers’ worlds through engagement with multi-layered discourses and representations.

This multi-layered, multi-method research project acknowledges the enthralling complexity of these young consumers’ social worlds, giving a richness and immediacy to their accounts of the compelling intimacy between young adolescent identity and the marketplace.

What information do members of Congress (politicians) use when they trade stocks? The purpose of this paper is to attempt to answer this question by investigating the relationship between an aggregate measure of trading by members of Congress (aggregate congressional trading) and future stock market returns.

The authors follow the empirical framework used in academic work on corporate insiders. In particular, they aggregate 61,998 common stock transactions by politicians over the 2004–2010 period and estimate time series regressions at a monthly frequency with heteroskedasticity and autocorrelation robust t-statistics.

The authors find that aggregate congressional trading predicts future stock market returns, suggesting that politicians use economy-wide (i.e. macroeconomic) information in their stock trades. The authors also present evidence that aggregate congressional trading is related to the growth rate of industrial production, suggesting that industrial production serves as a potential channel through which aggregate congressional trading predicts future stock market returns.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study is the first to document a relationship between aggregate congressional trading and stock market returns. The media and scholarly attention on politicians’ trades have mostly focused on the question of whether politicians have superior information on individual firms. The results from this study suggest that politicians’ informational advantage may go beyond individual firms such that they potentially have superior information on the overall trajectory of the economy as well.