Search results

Dual marketing, i.e. selling the same product to both consumers and business customers, calls for a rearrangement of companies’ organizational chart. New figures, appointed with new roles, need to be integrated within the organization. In addition, dual marketers are required new skills by the market, having to learn to blend push and pull marketing techniques. This chapter discusses how the market's imperatives make the dual marketer an on-the-edge figure within the business landscape, able to constantly reinvent herself to keep pace with innovations.

Fantasy is a concept often used in everyday life and in academic research. While it has received attention in consumer research due to its connection to desires, community creation, meaning evocation, and identity development, it lacks a commonly shared understanding. This paper explores and theorizes consumers’ experiences of fantasy as performed in real-life situations.

The research was conducted as an ethnographic study of live action role-playing games (LARP) and analyzed through the lens of performance theory.

LARPs are performances that take place between imagination and embodied reality, with participants drawing on each realm to enrich the other. Consumption elements of LARP include media products and materials used in creating settings, costumes, and props. LARPers gain various benefits from the performance of fantasy, including escapist entertainment, self-reflection, personal growth, and participation in social criticism. Fantasy performance is, therefore, an important and under-theorized vehicle for consumer identity development and social interaction.

This research theorizes the experience of fantasy as a performance that takes place between reality and imagination. As such, it involves both embodied and social aspects that have largely been ignored in prior research. A richer theorization of fantasy performance promises greater insights into research areas including the dynamics of consumer identity projects and of consumption communities.

In this chapter, the title theme of “Disaster by Design” is explored and justified. Even from early times, the Aral Region was subject to alterations of natural conditions due to human intervention, often deliberate and designed. After the final conquest by Russia, the region became a fixed colony as part of the Soviet Union, ripe for exploitation characteristic of the Soviet approach to nature broadly and to stigmatized areas specifically. The Aral region was selected for irrigated cotton and other cultivation even though the consequences for desiccation of the sea, desertification, and salinization were understood. The decision was so calculated that even a cost–benefit analysis was offered to show that the Aral fishery was worth but a fraction of the cotton potential. The destruction of the region was made possible by a Soviet system of central planning and peripheral control. The brief glimmer of hope for the region evidenced during glasnost was the only moment where the Aral's fate was not sealed. The outcome is a model of ecological disaster by design, an environmental injustice, and an indication of the abusive nature of authoritarian power.

Purpose – The mingling of economic transactions with sexual intimacy, friendship, and kinship sometimes causes trouble in workplaces, but prevailing analyses misrepresent how and why that trouble occurs. Analyses of the impact of intimate relations on organizational effectiveness range from claims of disruption to claims of sociable satisfaction. Such relations often coexist with organizational effectiveness, and sometimes contribute to it.

Methodology – A review and synthesis of available literature identifies theoretical and empirical obstacles to recognition of how intimacy operates within organizations.

Findings – This analysis draws attention to relations between intimate pairs and third parties as crucial to intimacy's impact.

Motion pictures can serve as an educational tool to shed light on ethical issues in the health insurance industry. To the chagrin of the health insurance industry, this light has oftentimes been unfavorable, as illustrated in such motion pictures as: Damaged Care (Winer, 2002), John Q (Cassavetes, 2002), and The Rainmaker (Coppola, 1997). In reaction to this unfavorable portrayal, health maintenance organizations have taken action to cast themselves in a more positive light. The objectives of this article are: to demonstrate how motion pictures that feature the health insurance industry can serve as a vehicle to illustrate management concepts such as planning, decision making, ethics, and conflict resolution; and to underscore the interrelationships and mutual dependencies of the ethical decisions, the decision-makers, and the context of the ethical dilemmas. Suggestions on how environmental response strategies can be used to improve public perceptions of the health insurance industry are also provided. The teaching method proposed in this article can be used in undergraduate level and graduate level principles of management, organizational behavior, and ethics courses.

As a response to the COVID-19 pandemic, both educators and students adapted to course delivery modes no longer centered on in-person interactions. Resiliency and self-regulation are key to success in online contexts, but the rapid transition to remote learning left many students without the necessary support to develop these skills. Much of the existing literature on self-regulation and resiliency focuses on cognitive processes and strategies such as goal orientation, time management, and mindset. However, the added stress and trauma of learning in the context of a global pandemic highlighted the many other factors relevant to students’ development of these skills. Drawing from the literature, the authors explore evidence-informed teaching practices to foster self-regulation and resiliency, highlight the power and privilege of being able to be resilient, advocate for the development of pedagogies of kindness, and emphasize the “how” of implementing techniques to best support students. The authors provide evidence-informed suggestions with the goal of assisting instructors and students during times of high stress, while acknowledging their limitations in addressing structural inequalities highlighted by the COVID-19 pandemic. Nonetheless, the authors argue that evidence-informed techniques and compassionate pedagogies adopted during a period of upheaval remain applicable to future in-person and online pedagogies.