Search results

Purpose – To explore how young men negotiate the matriarchal domain of fashion consumption and self-presentation, observing techniques adopted by these men to navigate this feminized space and construct their identity project.

Methodology/approach – Engaging Foucauldian theory, a constructionist approach is followed to analyze qualitative interview data with the understanding that a consumer's narrated experience is embedded in a social web of possible interpretation. Rather than seeking to discover a respondents “essential self” within interview data, this research takes a narrative analysis approach, considering individuals storytelling within the context of circulating discourses and power relations.

Findings – As young, fashion-forward men navigate new configurations of power relationships and adopt new modes of performing masculinity, they come to legitimate themselves by forging new categories of existence. They engage various techniques to include the arts and the art of irony in an effort to constitute their masculine subjectivity within discourses of fashionable self-presentation practices.

Social implications – By exploring the social context wherein consumer choices are made, we see consumer identity projects are in fact constricted and influenced by a myriad of sociocultural forces.

Originality/value of paper – Within consumer culture theory, there is much focus on the agency of consumers and their identity projects. However, there is a dearth of work that considers the social and cultural context wherein these identity constructions take place. This study makes a contribution toward addressing this gap.

This chapter seeks to elucidate specific behavioral patterns that occur when people travel and consume luxury items using concepts drawn from sociocultural and economic theories. These concepts are Walter Benjamin's “aura,” Karl Marx's “commodity fetishism,” and Arnold Van Gennep's “liminality.” These concepts are deployed within the spheres of tourism and luxury in order to analyze how tourists on a shopping spree search for forms of authenticity, how this type of travel is similar in many respects to a religious quest, and, finally, how the design of luxury outlets in European capitals convey religious overtones.

The authors examine the tensions between the public and commercial functions of social media platforms with a particular focus on how Instagram influencers look to demonstrate their “authenticity” whilst also pursuing commercial objectives. Drawing on a large-scale quantitative content analysis of the accounts of prominent Dutch fashion and lifestyle influencers, the authors demonstrate an “authenticity gap” between the way these influencers claim to be authentic in the way they talk about influencer culture, and the extent to which they actually implement “authenticity marker’s” in their Instagram posts.

It is fashionable among Russians to travel all over the world. The author researches the social and cultural phenomenon of fashions in tourism based on analysis of the views of Russian tourists and experts from the tourism sphere. The criteria for prestige of a tourism destination are considered. Fashion trends in the practices of Russian tourists are analyzed.

The term “fashion” triggers images of frivolous symbolic production with a particular impact on women, quite a world apart at first sight from high technology and mobile telephony that traditionally tend to be associated with science, rationality and masculinity. Surprisingly, we show in this paper that the field of mobile telephony has, for a number of years now, been impacted and significantly transformed by the transposition of fashion logics. We deconstruct the process of logic transposition, considering key moments and key actors, key modes and mechanisms. The comparison of multiple case studies within the mobile telephony industry also points to the limits of transposition and to varying degrees of hybridization and logic co-habitation. This process of logic transposition is, we argue, profoundly transforming the mobile telephony industry, bringing it closer, on many counts, to “cultural industries”. In the end, we draw a number of theoretical conclusions on logic transposition as an important mechanism of institutional change.

Globalization and its impacts on economies, societies and cultures has been a hot topic of research and discussion in the past few years. Recent times are witnessing the upsurge of another doctrine in the international arena – the practice of isolationism, a policy majorly related to political affairs but extendable to business, sustainability, green behaviour and various other spheres.

Globalization has resulted in various kinds of disordering and reordering of business objectives and practices. Modern day consumers have new needs and lifestyle orientations. The flip side is that increased global operations have precipitated newer challenges for Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR). But for managing globalization, isolationism is not the answer (Altman, 2007). Isolationism cannot be expected to have reciprocative effects of globalization. In fact, it may be in dispute with interests of many social stakeholders.

Responsible businesses have reoriented their CSR initiatives towards environmental and social stewardship. Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are the more recent strategic tools that provide a more focussed mandate to address sustainability issues emerging from increased production, consumption and disposal. In the times of vulnerabilities and disruption, there is an increasing emphasis on developing CSR as a horizontal enabler of SDGs.

Fashion & textile industry is the second most polluting industry globally. Fast fashion is having catastrophic impacts on the environment. Due to the massive size and magnitude of the global fashion & textile industry (USD 920 billion in 2018 and projected to grow to USD 1,230 billion by 2024), it becomes important to examine dimensions of CSR, in reference to SDGs in this sector. The fashion & textile industry is one of the most globally integrated. Sourcing, production, supply chain management, market development and retailing are all dependent on integration and collaboration amongst various business entities and regulatory bodies across national boundaries. Isolationism may result in disorientations in the enabling environments of this industry.

As sustainability is going to be the most important directive in coming future, the study aims to examine the cohesiveness between the current CSR initiatives of the fashion & textile sector and the prescribed SDGs. The study will further investigate if the instantaneous momentum of isolationism could cultivate multifaceted challenges for the horizontal integration of CSR in SDGs; and if yes, what will be the nature of these challenges?

The evolution of the Fair Trade movement offers an apposite case through which to examine the idea of regulating risk through a “social sphere.” An analysis of Fair Trade through the lens of “defiance” reveals discrete models and actors of risk regulation that evolve in an iterative fashion. These findings not only add complexity and heterogeneity to the social actors and mechanisms of regulation in the social sphere, but also highlight the challenges this diversity poses for the project of alleviating market risk. In turn, the framework of defiance offers a fertile analytical framework for the study of transnational risk regulation by capturing the dynamic actor and institutional complexities that underpin, and embody challenges for, the regulation of risk through the social sphere. The article begins with an overview of the Fair Trade movement and consideration of Fair Trade’s approach to regulating market risk. It then introduces the notion of defiance, focusing on two of its subtypes: game playing and resistance. Following a short overview of the methodological framework employed to analyze these dynamics, the third section applies these analytical categories of defiance to explore primary data gathered on Fair Trade’s evolution. The article shows that the motivational posture of game playing, through its continued experimentation and entrepreneurship in transnational risk regulation, is pregnant with potential to mitigate the risks generated by economic activity.

This chapter concerns itself with a garment factory in Trinidad, West Indies, producing brand-name clothing for the Eastern Caribbean market. Workers in this factory not only stitch garments for an hourly wage; but also stealthily operate a secondary assembly line, creating precise duplicates of the factory's products for themselves to take home and wear. Manufactured on the shop-floor alongside “legitimate” production, the copied garments are identical in every way to the genuine ones they mimic. In this chapter, I argue that workers have created a “loop” in the value chain: a simultaneous moment in which they are both producers and consumers of the factory's products. While “genuine” garments circulate through market-capitalist networks of exchange, copied garments only circulate through social networks – thereby accruing and representing forms of “value” that are distinct from market value. By looping the value chain, factory workers create non-market values alongside market-oriented ones, showing both sets of values to be interdependent. Workers’ own commentary on these processes offers a unique window onto contested meanings of “value” at work on the shop-floor.