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Few published studies have examined which values and motives might encourage the purchase of craft beer (CB) over the Internet by Millennials. This study aims to investigate the motivations behind CB online buying habits among Millennials, and the chosen context is Italy. Adopting a revised model of the Alphabet Theory, a questionnaire-based consumer survey was designed. The data were collected in Italy, between January and April 2020, from a convenience sample composed of 273 interviewees aged 25–39. A structural equations model was estimated using a three-stage least squares regression. The interviewees were segmented into two groups based on their habits of purchasing CB online, using a triadic split procedure. The findings confirm the significant role played in Millennials’ attitudes towards CB online purchasing habits. Specifically, within the whole sample, our concern was with the essential role played by online product availability. The impulsive desire to discover a moment of pleasure is the principal aspect influencing Millennials’ attitudes (among those who are more inclined to purchase CB online). Whereas, for consumers less inclined, sensorial aspects, self-identity and local identity remain relevant. Given the lack of research on Millennials in this purchasing context for CB, this study breaks new ground to better understand this group and the CB consumer culture in this evolving sector. These findings shed new light on making and selling CB, as well as on the interests of beer consuming communities. The findings may help marketing managers develop appropriate marketing strategies based on a better understanding of Millennial-specific needs.

In much of philosophy and social theory since classical antiquity, human belief and reason have been placed in the driving seat of individual action. In particular, social theory has often taken it for granted, or even by definition, that action is motivated by reasons based on beliefs. In contrast, a minority has criticized the adoption of this ‘folk psychology’ that explains human action wholly in such ‘mind first’ terms. Critics point out that such explanations are a mere gloss on a much more complex neurophysiological reality. These dualistic and ‘mind-first’ explanations of human behavior are unable to explain adequately such phenomena as sleep, memory, learning, mental illness, or the effects of chemicals or drugs on our perceptions or actions (Bunge, 1980; Churchland, 1984, 1989; Churchland, 1986; Rosenberg, 1995, 1998; Kilpinen, 2000).

Drawing on Dewey’s accounts of learning the Alexander Technique (AT), this chapter explores why he found the process so powerful. As AT teachers, we explain how the technique enables practitioners to become aware of fixed, unconscious habits and to bring them under conscious control. With a new student, work begins with physical habits. However, because physical, cognitive, emotional and social functionings are interdependent, AT lessons typically enable flexibility in each of these spheres. Dewey’s writings show his strong theoretical commitment to the idea of learning as practical and experiential. His AT lessons were truly revelatory in providing him with both direct, embodied experience of the power of habit to drive human behaviour and a practical means of becoming aware of, and resisting, his own habits of thought and action.

Perceptions are shaped by habit in such a way that the senses can be unreliable in working out how to respond in a given situation. Dewey’s practice of the AT revealed to him the dissonance between his habitual self in activity and his conscious view of himself. Dewey was challenged by his AT lessons, which required an open, enquiring attitude and sense of humility. In the AT, Dewey found a means of pursuing an active, critical, self-directed process of discovery and adaptation akin to childhood learning. AT begins with the self, our ‘tool of tools’. Through fundamentally modifying the self, the AT supports the openness and flexible response to the physical and social world that characterize productive experiential learning.

This study is a comment on Geoffrey Hodgson’s “Discovering Institutionalism: One Person’s Journey.” In this self-description of the evolution of his thought, Hodgson distinctly acknowledges Thorstein Veblen’s influence on his own institutional perspective. This is the issue that I explore in this study. My argument is that Hodgson can be understood as a Veblenian, but he does not fit in the Veblenian notion that became popular in the mid-twentieth century. I argue that Hodgson’s notion of habits is the strongest Veblen’s influence on him, and his reconstitutive downward and upward causations are in line with Veblen’s institutionalism, albeit without the mid-twentieth century Veblenian writings. I also address the approach to the content of habits as a break between Hodgson’s and Veblen’s institutionalism. By offering an unprecedented Veblenianism, I argue that Hodgson’s institutional economics can be understood as a new institutionalist segmentation.

This paper presents a behavioral economics model with bounded rationality to describe an individual's food consumption choices that lead to weight gain and dieting. Using a physiological relationship determining calories needed to maintain weight, we simulate the food consumption choices of a representative female over a 30-year period. Results show an individual will periodically choose to diet, but that diet will reduce weight only temporarily. Recurrence of weight gain leads to cyclical dieting, which reduces the trend rate of weight increase. Dieting frequency is shown to depend on decision period length, dieting costs, and habit persistence.

I build an equilibrium model trying to reconcile investor preferences with several features of the cat bond market. The driving force behind the model is a habit process, in that catastrophes are rare economic shocks that could bring investors closer to their subsistence level. The calibration requires shocks with an impact between −1% and −3% to explain a reasonable level of cat bond spreads. Such investor preferences are not only able to generate realistic cat bond returns and price comovement among different perils, but may also able to explain why cat bonds offer higher rewards compared to equally rated corporate bonds.

In this chapter, we read Ta-Nehisi Coates’ Between the World and Me (2015) against Dewey’s Democracy and Education (1916) to glean insight into how Deweyan transactionalism can help theorize greater democratic participation for the corporeally disenfranchised, that is, those persons who experience sociocultural and/or political marginalization due to the racialized status of their bodies. We argue that transactionalism carries promise to help interrupt current, systemic practice that negatively reifies Black bodies and reasserts Black bodies as central, full participants in democratic action. An analysis of transactionalism as interpreted from Democracy and Education and other Deweyan writings is followed by an analysis of Coates’ memoir, Between the World and Me, focusing on his experiential understanding of how Black bodies exist in educational institutions. We conclude the chapter with possibilities for an embodied ideal of democracy, and some educational practices that can follow from it.

In the past, critics have dismissed American Pragmatism as intellectually naïve and philosophically passé, but in this chapter we argue that it still has much to offer the field of organization studies. Pragmatism is especially relevant to those organizational scholars who are concerned with understanding the dynamic processes and practices of organizational life. This chapter lays out the historical development of Pragmatism, recognizing the originating contributions of Peirce, James, Dewey and Mead. Although each of these writers developed unique philosophical positions, their ideas are all permeated by four key themes: experience, inquiry, habit and transaction. The interplay between these themes informs a temporal view of social practice in which selves and situations are continuously constructed and reconstructed through experimental and reflexive processes of social engagement. We then use organizational learning theory as an example to illustrate the relevance of these four themes, contrasting the anti-dualistic stance of Pragmatism with the work of Argyris and Schön. Finally we turn to consider Weick's organizing and sensemaking, suggesting that Pragmatism offers three potential foci for further development of these theories, namely continuity of past and future in the present, the transactional nature of social agency and reflexivity in social practices. Similarly we see potential for Pragmatism to productively inform the theorizing of other organizational practices such as identity work, strategy work, emotion work and idea work.