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The research outlined in this paper seeks to establish whether or not there are discernible differences in the positioning attributes of Aldi and Sainsbury's. Particular emphasis is given to price positioning and to what extent this can be explained by product quality differences.

Price differences are assessed using the shopping basket technique and product quality differences are evaluated using perceptual discrimination tests conducted blind of brand. Where differences between products are discernible, product preference is identified.

The study identified discernible differences in the pricing strategies of Sainsbury's and Aldi particularly amongst the higher added value products. Although differences in product quality were evident in some product categories, there was no statistically significant preference for one brand over the other.

Owing to the resource intensive nature of perceptual discrimination tests, this research was conducted on a relatively small number of products and cannot be extrapolated to the full range of products available from either retailer, though it may indicate comparable quality.

This paper evaluates the brand description of two UK‐based retailers, Sainsbury's and Aldi. In market positioning, they are at different ends of the retailing spectrum, with Sainsbury's a high added value retailer with an ABC₁ consumer profile, and Aldi a hard discounter with a largely C₂D consumer base. However, this study is based on a retail site that has the two brands located directly opposite each other in a conspicuously AB suburb of a major UK city. This location deviates from the holistic profile of the Aldi brand and as such provides a special research site.

The author argues that we must stop and take a look at what our insistence on human labour as the basis of our society is doing to us, and begin to search for possible alternatives. We need the vision and the courage to aim for the highest level of technology attainable for the widest possible use in both industry and services. We need financial arrangements that will encourage people to invent themselves out of work. Our goal, the article argues, must be the reduction of human labour to the greatest extent possible, to free people for more enjoyable, creative, human activities.

Social class has long existed in tension with other forms of social difference such as race, gender, and sexuality, both in academic and popular debate. While Marxist-influenced class primacy perspectives gained prominence in US sociology in the 1970s, they faded from view by the 1990s, replaced by perspectives focusing on culture and institutions or on intersectional analyses of how multiple forms of social difference shape durable patterns of disempowerment and marginalization. More recently, class and capitalism have reasserted their place on the academic agenda, but continue to coexist uneasily with analyses of oppression and social difference. Here we discuss possibilities for bridging the gap between studies of class and other forms of social difference. We contend that these categories are best understood in relation to each other when situated in a larger system with its own endogenous dynamics and tendencies, namely capitalism. After providing an historical account of the fraught relationship between studies of class and other forms of social difference, we propose a theoretical model for integrating understandings of class and social difference using Wright et al.‘s concept of dynamic asymmetry. This shifts us away from discussions of which factors are most important in general toward concrete discussions of how these factors interact in particular cases and processes. We contend that class and other forms of social difference should not be studied primarily as traits embodied in individuals, but rather with respect to how these differences are organized in relation to each other within a framework shaped by the dynamics of capitalist development.

According to a recent report the relative importance of the price of food is increasing, which, it is claimed, could lead to the consumer becoming more selective and placing greater importance on the flavour of food.

The paper aims to examine how employees influence their employer’s brand by applying Taylor’s (1999) six segment message strategy wheel in an employee influencer context.

The research uses a content analysis of employees’ public social media posts – including captions and images – to analyze the message strategies employees use to promote their employers.

While ego and social were popular message strategies in both the images and captions, the findings evidence the varying message strategies employees use in text-based versus image-based messages. Four “imagined audiences” of employee influencers are identified: current customers, prospective customers, current employees and prospective employees.

The research provides insight into how employees act as influencers in building their employer brand on social media.

A unique measurement tool is developed that can be used by companies and future researchers to decode employees’ online communications.

This research contributes to theory and practice in the following important ways. First, the research provides a modernization of an existing framework from an offline setting to an applied industry context in an online setting. Second, this research focuses on a subtype of social media influencer, the employee influencer, which is an underdeveloped area of research. Third, a unique measurement tool to analyze text-based and image-based social media data is developed that can be used by companies and future researchers to decode employees’ online communications.

I begin with a dispute over a fox hunt, by which to understand the law of tangible property, then develop that metaphor for the major types of intellectual property. I start with domestic U.S. patent law for the sake of concreteness, and generalize to other jurisdictions and types of intellectual property. In the latter parts of the paper I discuss the international implications of intellectual property, including especially the effects of information spillovers. The last part of the paper describes the hazards in analogizing “trade” in intellectual property rights to trade in goods, and particularly in interpreting international patent data. These hazards motivate the search for a structural model specially adapted to the purpose of valuing international intellectual property rights and rules. The goal is to give economists a simple and integrated framework for analyzing intellectual property across time, jurisdiction and regime type, with an eye towards eventually developing other incentive systems that have the advantages of property (such as decentralized decision-making), but fewer of the disadvantages.

Today, the need for renewable energy is rising steadily. Various steps are being taken by nations to address the rising need. The developments occurring in proportion to the industrial structures and economic levels of the countries, these efforts, the political structure of the country, some established patterns from the past, and many other external factors affect the use of renewable energy and therefore sustainable development, which has been one of the most important agendas since the early 1990s. In this study, it is examined whether certain characteristics of the Scandinavian Welfare Model affect the background of this successful image of Finland, Denmark, and Sweden, which rank in the top three positions in both the Global Energy Innovation Index and the Sustainable Development Report. As a result, although the use of fossil fuels increases the ecological footprint in the Scandinavian countries, which are evaluated as in the rest of the world, continuing the principles of innovation, trust, equality, openness, and sustainability with determination, the Nordic approach has not departed from the welfare state principle compatible with its own codes, unlike the transformations experienced by other welfare regimes, and has become a distinctive factor.

Prevailing explanations of the US secession crisis trace the latter’s origins to slavery and slaveowners’ interests. The central problem with all such explanations, however, is that the Whig Party, the party of the largest slaveowners, opposed secession until the mid-1850s. Why did southern Whigs and their planter base resist secession through the political crisis over slavery only to fold by 1861? Drawing on archival electoral returns by precinct, party newspapers, speeches, and personal correspondence from antebellum Tuscaloosa County, Alabama, I argue for an institutional and sequential approach to the secession crisis that does not take social actors’ individual interests as given, but rather as naturalized and denaturalized in the back and forth struggle of political parties to advance competing solutions to the problem of preserving slavery.