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Time banking is a form of alternative consumer market where members trade services, non-reciprocally creating a local marketplace for services. Time Banks facilitate dyadic exchanges, meeting members’ practical needs and building diverse skills. The purpose of this research was to determine the broad capabilities developed in the Time Bank economy, and to demonstrate how these capabilities were mobilised following a series of earthquakes, contributing to the larger community’s resiliency.

Taking an ethnographic approach, data were collected using a variety of methods including interviews, focus groups, participant observation and secondary research.

Over time, this alternative consumer market developed a significant communication and social network that members activated to solve diverse practical problems facing the community. Similar to other exchange communities, the Time Bank also fostered a strong sense of community based on reciprocity and egalitarian values. Although the Time Bank was created as a marketplace to exchange local services, during a series of devastating earthquakes, it galvanised adaptive capacities, increasing the resiliency of the local community during disaster relief and reconstruction.

The data were drawn from one alternative exchange system in New Zealand.

The study shows how grassroots alternative consumer markets like Time Banks build community capacities alongside the formal economy. During normal times, this system meets consumer needs, but in extraordinary times, this system provides community shock absorbers, thereby enhancing community resiliency.

The Time Bank was particularly adept at leveraging local knowledge to provide social support to those residents who were most vulnerable.

Data were collected before, during, and after the earthquakes, providing a rare opportunity to explore the process of community resiliency in action. This research extends existing theories of community resiliency explaining the development and activation of capacities by a local alternative consumer market.

Food rituals are an ever present part of consumers’ lives that have practical implications for well-being. This paper aims to explore how food and its relationship to pleasure evolve, as women navigate social norms around gender and aging.

Ethnographic data were collected using in-depth interviews and participant observations of members of the Red Hat Society (RHS) across 27 months. This approach provided a more nuanced perspective on how food experiences shape consumption rituals and communal ties over time.

Older women in the RHS eat rebelliously when they break social norms of gender and aging by indulging together in food and drink. Their rituals of rebellious eating have implications on well-being, heightening their experiential pleasure of food and conviviality and forging social support and a sense of community. The dark side of personal indulgence is explored within a larger framework of food well-being.

This study shows how older women challenge social expectations around age and gender through food pleasure rituals. The concept of rebellious eating is introduced to conceptualize how these older women rethink aging and indulgence within a supportive community of consumption and integrate the concepts into their personal narratives.

This chapter presents an overview of participatory action research and explores how this approach can inform the study of subsistence marketplaces. The diverse historical roots of action research are traced from Kurt Lewin's research on workplace democracy and Paulo Freire's conceptual ideas forged from working with low-literate peasants. We illustrate the potential of action research approaches by exploring in detail a more contemporary form of action research, participatory rural appraisal, and we show the usefulness of this approach to understanding consumer well-being in resource-poor areas. Special emphasis is given to the discussion of the methodology of this popular form of action research and its various applications.

The purpose of this study was to ascertain the existence and strength of the relationship between proactive environmental policies and brand equity for the winery. Results of this study suggest that consumer perceptions about product quality, consumer trust, consumer perceptions about pricing, and positive expectations for the consequences of the winery's actions undertaking the pro‐environmental policies, all have strong, positive relationships with the winery's brand equity. Trust in the winery and brand equity for the winery increased significantly when the winery in this study adopted proactive environmental business policies.

American business enterprise is increasingly seeking export markets for products as a means of expansion, and in some instances to offset loss in domestic business due to declining markets or international competitors. This paper deals with market segmentation and its role in the successful positioning of products in foreign markets. More specifically, the focus here is how consumer political identifications and ideological values can be used as a basis for effectively segmenting markets. To U.S. firms, the potential benefit of gaining this insight is twofold. First, firms may thus have at their disposal a segmentation tool as yet unrecognized by competitors. Second, politics and political ideology have constructs which appear to be common to most election‐based governmental forms; thus the segmentation applications explored here would be transferable to foreign markets, whereas many other more conventional means of segmentation transfer poorly from the U.S. to other countries.