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This chapter advances understandings of emotion work by examining how “doing gender” and “doing health” are implicated in the pursuit of emotional tranquility. The study examines the role of hair loss in women’s illness narratives of cancer using in-depth interviews with 16 white women in the US Northwest who vary in age, marital status, diagnoses, and treatments. The absence of women’s hair presents an appearance of illness that prevents them from doing femininity, which calls into question their health status because of Western beauty standards. To overcome this barrier, the women use emotion work to manage the effects of their appearance through necessarily co-occurring bodily, cognitive, and expressive strategies (Hochschild, 1979). The required emotion work during women’s hair loss makes explicit the symbolic linking of the healthy body with the feminine body through women’s head hair. Pursuing treatment for cancer is often seen as a “fight” or a “battle” against the disease and the bodily assaults of such treatments, including unwanted visible bodily changes. A substantial body of empirical work has established the complex web of social psychological problems associated with breasts and breast cancer, but less attention has been given to the side effect of hair loss that is common across cancer types and treatments.

The paper aims to empirically test a framework to predict the desire and intention to engage with an elective health-care procedure and implement a methodology to test the anticipated positive and negative emotions in hedonic adaptation to an elective procedure.

Two studies in USA and Australia (N = 1,200) confirmed the psychometric properties of the key constructs under the chemical peel condition. Two further studies in the USA and Australia (N = 1,100) explored the research question and hypotheses in the adapted model of goal-directed behaviour under the Botox condition. A survey was self-administered to online panels who had previously engaged in such elective procedures.

The findings highlighted the pragmatic implications for communication and activation strategies to safeguard consumer interests and retain their loyalty.

From the authors’ best understanding, neither a methodology nor a theoretical framework exists to explore hedonic adaptation to recurring engagement with elective health care. A methodology and theoretical framework will highlight the mood states and factors that predict desire and intention to engage. This can advance the research on hedonic adaptation and decision-making and offer pragmatic suggestions for communication and activation strategies to safeguard consumer interests and retain their loyalty.

This qualitative study investigated the relationship between beauty standards and identity in the United States from the perspective of 20 self-identified millennial Black women. During semi-structured virtual interviews, participants defined Black, American, and millennial beauty standards distinctly. American beauty was associated with Eurocentrism and mainstream media representation. Interpretations of a millennial beauty standard were aligned with perceptions of the generation as tolerant and politically conscious. Black American beauty standards embraced the range of hair textures and skin tones present in the African diaspora. While participants were cognizant of the different beauty ideals present, their interaction with beauty standards was ambivalent. Interviewees found beauty knowledge accessible through social media. However, they remain confined to a restrictive beauty standard due to workplace expectations around professionalism. Participants negotiated where and when to express their intracultural beauty ideals but participated in the beauty industry through processes of learning how to care for their hair in its natural state. Even though they have autonomy and flexibility in expressing their cultural styles, personal and professional repercussions are still plausible. Future studies can expand on these findings by exploring perceptions of American beauty standards from a different generation, region, or identity.

This review identifies low self-concept clarity (SCC) as a source of consumer vulnerabilities and explains how the uncertainty associated with low SCC leads to processes that result in materialistic behaviors and overspending, product dissatisfaction, and potential self-harm. Processes include uncertainty reduction efforts through symbolic self-completion and social comparison, responses to everyday self-concept threats that result in feelings of deficiency and reduced consumption constraints, and susceptibility to interpersonal and marketer influences. In addition, the negative association between SCC and materialism is explained, risk factors for low SCC are described, and the need for research to help low SCC consumers deal with their vulnerabilities is explored.

Past research has shown there is a relationship between body image, sexual behavior, and pleasure. However, the majority of this research has centered on heterosexual participants. In this analysis, the author considers how this relationship between body image, sexual behavior, and pleasure may look within women and genderqueer individuals who are all AFAB (assigned female at birth) with 26 out of 30 participants identifying as LGBTQIA+. The author examines perceptions of body size, body hair, and genitals to consider how intersections of social structures – specifically internalized sexism, racism, and misogyny – influence the participants’ experience of sexual interactions. Both resistance and embodiment of traditional gender norms, even as queer women and genderqueer individuals, were examined in these narratives. The majority of the moments where traditional gender norms are examined describe situations when the participants were sexually interacting with cis-gendered men.

This paper examines the factors that influence behavioral intention in the context of medical tourism in Türkiye. With the growing popularity of Türkiye as a destination for medical tourism, it is essential to understand the key determinants influencing individuals’ intention to engage in medical tourism activities.

This study used the Extended Theory of Planned Behavior (E-PBT) variables, which include attitude, subjective norm and perceived behavioral control, to measure their influence on behavioral intention. In addition, a customer experience scale was used to assess the influence of dimensions such as education, entertainment, aesthetics and escapism on behavioral intention. The research instrument was validated by expert review, and data were collected using purposive sampling. A total of 420 surveys were deemed suitable for analysis.

The path analysis revealed that attitudes and perceived behavioral control positively impacted behavioral intention within the domain of medical tourism in Türkiye. Conversely, subjective norms did not have a significant positive effect on behavioral intention. Furthermore, it was observed that the dimensions of entertainment, escape and aesthetics positively affected behavioral intention. However, education and aesthetics did not significantly influence behavioral intentions.

The results of this paper have practical implications for marketers and policymakers in the medical tourism industry in Türkiye. Understanding the factors that drive individuals’ behavioral intentions can assist in developing effective marketing strategies to attract and serve potential medical tourists. Medical tourism providers can enhance their services by optimizing attitudes and perceived behavioral control while emphasizing entertainment and escapism for their clientele.

This research focuses on uncovering factors influencing individuals’ behavioral intentions in medical tourism in Türkiye. Using the E-PBT framework and exploring the dimensions of the customer experience scale, this study aimed to understand the driving forces behind individuals’ decisions to engage in medical tourism.

Past research has shown that wellness culture projects identities that are predominantly middle-class, white, thin, able-bodied women. Wellness cultures are amplified through digital media, namely highly visual social media platforms such as Instagram and TikTok, that promote a feminine ideal that women can (and should) achieve through rigorous commitment and investment. However, discourses surrounding wellness culture are a cause for concern when consumption, choice, and responsibility are positioned as a mode to constantly improve oneself until an idealised appearance is achieved.

In this chapter, the author explores the experiences of five Asian-Australian women aged 18–35 living in Australia as they navigate ideals of femininity. The author draws on perspectives from feminist new materialism to understand the material-discursive practices that form norms and ideals of the female body. Findings are presented in the form of vignettes to help trace affective encounters with objects, digital media, discourses, and other bodies that produce different affective relations as they seek to understand Asian-Australian femininity. The author argues that digital media and wellness culture prompt individual understanding and practices to adhere to transnational ideals of the feminine body rather than dismantling social and cultural norms that limit individual choice, an issue that has thus far received limited scholarly attention for Asian-Australians. This chapter builds on previous studies that position wellness culture within an established white female neoliberal rhetoric.

Drawing on interviews with two types of essential workers – wound clinicians and care workers – the chapter examines stigma management in dirty care work through the lens of emotion management. The study combines two dimensions of dirty work: physical taint in relation to bodywork and social taint linked to working in close proximity to socially stigmatized clients. Hence, stigma management extends to dealing with the physically and socially dirty features of essential care work. In addition, the authors’ assessment of social stigma includes how essential care workers also sought to alleviate the social stigma encountered by their clients. In so doing, the authors extend the literature on dirty work to identify how emotion management skills are central to the stigma management strategies of the essential care workers in this study. The authors demonstrate how both groups deal with their stigma by emphasizing the emotion management skills in ‘doing’ dirty work and in the ‘purpose’ of this work, which includes acknowledging how the authors attempt to address the social taint encountered by their clients. Additionally, by comparing two occupations with different contexts and conditions of work, the authors show how complex emotion management skills are gendered in care work to expand the understanding of gender and stigma management. Furthermore, these emotion management skills emanate from the deep relational work with clients rather than through occupational communities. The authors argue that by focussing on emotion management, the hidden skills of dirty work in gendered care work are illuminated and contribute to contemporary debates about whether stigma can be overcome.

Taking the Mamá Fit memes and other social media eruptions as a starting point and delving deeper into popular print media, this chapter traces the racialized and gendered practices that constitute fitness in El Salvador in a diasporic context. Importantly, the word fit is now often expressed in English, captured in the names of commercial gyms and diet advertisements; the use of this word signals an important cultural change in conventional understandings of the body in a Spanish-speaking society. By charting the emergence of this new health/beauty norm in a transnational domain, this chapter explores the relationship between shifting patterns of gendered body discipline and changes in El Salvador’s location within the global political economy. This chapter argues that fitness discourse has become a subtle, but powerful, conduit for coloniality during a renegotiation of the meaning of gender to fit a neoliberal reality. The argument ends by pointing in the direction of future research to explore how this discourse is experienced in embodied practice with potentially contradictory impacts in Salvadoran society.

The main purpose of this paper is to outline the antecedents of patient satisfaction in the field of medical tourism (MT) applying extant literature and to develop a conceptual model based on the review.

This paper presents a thorough review of prior studies related to the antecedents of patient satisfaction in the MT sector. Moreover, it provides the theoretical base that helped the researcher to identify significant relationship between the patient satisfaction and its antecedents.

The researchers identified the prominent antecedents of patient satisfaction and present the potential interrelationships between different antecedents of patient satisfaction such as treatment quality, cost attractiveness, destination image and service quality with patient satisfaction based on the review.

The results have momentous practical implications as they will help researchers to better understand the antecedents of patient satisfaction and their potential inter linkages with patient satisfaction in MT sector. The conceptual model derived from the review may guide the actions of researchers as well as practitioners in the MT industry as a whole. The present study provides insights for further research in the MT sector and thereby helps to further enrich the existing theoretical base of the MT.

The study brings together the scattered knowledge from the broad and extensive range of medical or health tourism and cognate literature which indicate ideological differences among various aspects of MT as well as potential factors determining patient satisfaction in MT sector (antecedents of satisfaction). The newly developed model incorporates a new construct called “treatment quality” as different from “service quality,” which is a widely used construct to explain customer satisfaction. The antecedents of patient satisfaction and their inter-linkages with patient satisfaction provide a sound theoretical foundation for the future studies.