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Consumption ritual has been used to understand the meanings of consumption and consumer behavior, however less attention has been focused on the role of ritual in connoisseurship consumption and how consumption rituals can transform the consumer’s tastes. What is the role played by consumption ritual in connoisseurship taste?

Drawing on key concepts from ritual and taste theories and a qualitative analysis of the North American specialty coffee context, the authors address this question introducing the idea of connoisseurship taste ritual which is based on novelty coffee consumption practices that are opposite of the traditional or regular practices. The data collection set in the United States and Canada includes 15 consumer in-depth interviews, participant observation in 36 independent coffee shops in Canada and the United States, a Specialty Coffee Association of America event, and three barista coffee competitions. The body of qualitative data was interpreted using a hermeneutic approach.

The authors introduce the connoisseurship taste ritual which has several dimensions: (1) variation in the choices of high-quality products, (2) the place to perform the tasting, (3) the moment of tasting, (4) the tasting act, (5) perseverance, and (6) time and money investment.

This research paper extends the notion of consumption ritual introducing the connoisseurship taste ritual and also extends the theories of taste by explaining how, regarding a specific aesthetic category of product, people develop different tastes through ritualistic consumption.

This paper highlights that the strategic use of design, a competitive pattern typically associated with creative industries, those creating and trading meanings, also characterizes industries that produce functional or utilitarian goods not typically considered creative. The paper explores the origins of this phenomenon in the context of three industry settings: cars, speciality coffee and personal computers. The analysis theorizes three distinct strategic paths that explain how design may become an institutionalized aspect of competition in industries that are not creative. We explain how firms link their products to the identities of their users, how design is linked to stakeholders' emotions and visceral reactions to products and how intermediaries are relevant to enhancing attention to design. Illuminating these strategic paths allows harnessing some of the well-established understandings about competition in creative industries towards understanding competition in noncreative industries.

On-site brewery tap rooms are becoming an increasingly common feature of craft beer businesses and are frequently seen as a vital element in their success. With their origins in the sampling room and brewery visitor centres, tap rooms have evolved into drinking destinations where craft beer aficionados can grow their knowledge and enjoy the prestige of having direct contact with brewers in the proximity of production. It is also a stage where an independent local business can perform its ethical superiority over corporate global brewing. More surprisingly, perhaps, brewery tap rooms are becoming a valuable and trusted community resource, as pubs and other gathering places are lost.

The authors analyse narratives of Chinese consumers of Vintage Costume Jewellery to show how value is attributed to vintage items, often in direct contrast to contemporary luxury goods. Examining a range of factors in this process, including uniqueness, scarcity, historical specificity, social meaning and cultural legitimacy, authenticity is shown to be central to the positioning of jewellery and those who collect, trade and appreciate it as tasteful and discerning consumers.

The digitalization process has been influential on the way marketing is conducted. However, luxury brands have not yet fully channeled the benefits of the integration of various touchpoints. The aim of this chapter is to provide insights into building a luxury fashion omnichannel strategy through the integration of online and offline consumer journeys, based on the emerging needs and lifestyles of different luxury consumer segments. Accordingly, exploratory research is designed to understand luxury consumer typologies and luxury fashion shopping journeys. In-depth interviews were conducted for data collection in Istanbul, with 16 participants. Grounded theory coding was used for analyzing the data. Findings revealed four-consumer typologies –Luxury Beginners, Nouveaux Riches, Conservatives, Established Luxury Consumers. Luxury fashion journey map covering three major steps – pre-purchase, purchase, and post-­purchase – was illustrated based on the usage of both digital and non-digital channels and agents through the journey with discussions to present consumer differences. The results of the study add to the current literature and provide an omnichannel roadmap for the practitioners.

This chapter proposes selected cultural values and worldviews of cosmopolitan individual cultural identity as an ideal and model for international and transnational higher education, in teaching and learning, benefitting individuals and institutions. As a “metacultural position” and interactive engagement with the “Other,” cosmopolitan teaching and learning could impact national and global higher education. Such reflection of timeless educational values and ideals could benefit the development higher education systems in our ever more globalizing world.

Conceptually, cosmopolitan identity is defined via a complex literature matrix of key issues and concerns of world citizenship, substantiated and enriched by considerable critical thinking. Empirically, an investigation of highly multilingual students for revelations of their global identity strengthens and furthers this framework. Overall, interdisciplinary insights from literary, social, media and gender studies complement contributions to higher education's universality and values, so as to suit individual, institutional, and international needs.

Cosmopolitan features and values could harmonize global knowledge systems yet without cultural hegemonies, by building cross-cultural standards via best identity notions and practices. Recognizing equally valuable cultural contributions would also improve institutions' diversity, equity, and inclusion, raising educational quality, motivations, and expectations. Cosmopolitan identity could thus educationally enrich and institutionally empower for global complexity and uncertainty.

Educational stakeholders could shape institutions for cosmopolitan cultural values and increased diversity, with transnational norms and practices grounded in local realities, such as improved linguistic competences, or increased cultural understanding and engagement. Individual internationalization could therefore develop parallel to cultural and educational worldviews, expandable and improvable on an open-ended scale.

To reflect on the central role of gender and age in qualitative research practice, particularly in regard to how the gender and age of the researcher influence fieldwork interactions.

A reflection of three separate qualitative research undertakings, all of which made use of interviews and participant-observation fieldwork.

Gender and age intersections of both the researcher and research subjects influence fieldwork interactions both in terms of discursive and embodied interactions. Reflections on past research involve considering the relative changing subject position of the researcher in terms of masculinity, youth and social status. Rapport is established in the field through talk and interaction that can involve the performance of knowledge and gender. The researcher’s embodied feeling of ‘fitting in’ during fieldwork therefore draws on gender-, age- and ethnicity-specific privilege.

Unlike many acts of researcher reflexivity which reflect on a single research project, this chapter recalls experiences of fieldwork during three separate research undertakings. It adds to debates about methodological issues of doing research into men and masculinities by exploring how such is intersected by the age of both the researcher and research participants.

This chapter introduces the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) Cultural Value Project and the ensuing legacy work. It suggests that this work has resulted in the re-positioning of the field of enquiry into cultural value by shifting attention away from policy constructs and towards lived experiences; away from measuring the outcomes of cultural participation and towards understanding the process of engagement. The challenge still remaining is to develop an empirically grounded pragmatist account of cultural value as a form of practice – a situated interface of agents, actions and structures taking place in an institutionalised and materially circumscribed environment. Reconceiving cultural value in these terms will have profound methodological implications, not least the challenge of finding methodologies appropriate to its analysis within the realm of historically and geographically variable relations and structures. It is, however, a challenge worth taking. The proposed shift, it is suggested, will provide a way of addressing some long-standing ‘problems’ arising in relation to cultural value: the separation of conditions and consciousness; the overemphasis on the cognitive at the cost of the bodily; the separation between ‘the best and the brightest’ and the ‘everyday’ conceptions of culture. The proposed approach may also drive the refinement of flat(ter)-ontology methodologies which neither succumb to methodological individualism nor overemphasise methodological structuralism.

This is a personal narrative, but I trust not a self-regarding one. For more years than I care to remember I have been working in the field of curriculum (or ‘program’) evaluation. The field by any standards is dispersed and fragmented, with variously ascribed purposes, roles, implicit values, political contexts, and social research methods. Attempts to organize this territory into an ‘evaluation theory tree’ (e.g. Alkin, M., & Christie, C. (2003). An evaluation theory tree. In M. Alkin (Ed.), Evaluation roots: Tracing theorists’ views and influences (pp. 12–65). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage) have identified broad types or ‘branches’, but the migration of specific characteristics (like ‘case study’) or individual practitioners across the boundaries has tended to undermine the analysis at the level of detail, and there is no suggestion that it represents a cladistic taxonomy. There is, however, general agreement that the roots of evaluation practice tap into a variety of cultural sources, being grounded bureaucratically in (potentially conflicting) doctrines of accountability and methodologically in discipline-based or pragmatically eclectic formats for systematic social enquiry.

In general, this diversity is not treated as problematic. The professional evaluation community has increasingly taken the view (‘let all the flowers grow’) that evaluation models can be deemed appropriate across a wide spectrum, with their appropriateness determined by the nature of the task and its context, including in relation to hybrid studies using mixed models or displaying what Geertz (Geertz, C. (1980/1993). Blurred genres: The refiguration of social thought. The American Scholar, 49(2), 165–179) called ‘blurred genres’. However, from time to time historic tribal rivalries re-emerge as particular practitioners feel the need to defend their modus operandi (and thereby their livelihood) against paradigm shifts or governments and other sponsors of program evaluation seeking for ideological reasons to prioritize certain types of study at the expense of others. The latter possibility poses a potential threat that needs to be taken seriously by evaluators within the broad tradition showcased in this volume, interpretive qualitative case studies of educational programs that combine naturalistic description (often ‘thick’; Geertz, C. (1973). Thick description: Towards an interpretive theory of culture. In The interpretation of culture (pp. 3–30). New York, NY: Basic Books.) description with a values-orientated analysis of their implications. Such studies are more likely to seek inspiration from anthropology or critical discourse analysis than from the randomly controlled trials familiar in medical research or laboratory practice in the physical sciences, despite the impressive rigour of the latter in appropriate contexts. It is the risk of ideological allegiance that I address in this chapter.

This chapter highlights the personal side of research methods. We begin with an overview of Hans-Georg Gadamer's insights into the general problem of method in the social sciences and hermeneutics. This is followed by an overview of Michael Polanyi's explanation of the practice of scientific investigation. The second half of the chapter considers implications of the personal side of methods for how we conduct management research. This section discusses critical realism as a philosophy of science consistent with the assumptions of our field, the reasons for methodological pluralism and possible responses, and management research as a social practice.