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This paper aims to use embodied theory to analyze consumer experience in a retail brandscape, Hollister Co. By taking a holistic, embodied approach, this study reveals how individual consumers interact with such retail environments in corporeal, instinctive and sensual ways.

The primary source of data was 97 subjective personal introspective accounts undertaken with the target age group for the store. These were supplemented with in-depth interviews with consumers, managers and employees of Hollister.

The authors offer a conceptualization of consumers’ embodied experience, which they term The Immersive Somascape Experience. This identifies four key touch points that evoke the Hollister store experience – each of which reveals how the body is affected by particular relational and material specificities. These are sensory activation, brand materialities, corporeal relationality and (dis)orientation. These may lead to consumer emplacement.

The authors propose that taking an “intelligible embodiment” approach to consumer experiences in retail contexts provides a deeper, more holistic understanding of the embodied processes involved. They also suggest that more anthropological, body-grounded studies are needed for the unique insights they provide. Finally, they note that there is growing consumer demand for experiences, which, they argue, points to the need for more research from an embodied experience perspective in our field.

The study reveals the perils and pitfalls of adopting a sensory marketing perspective. It also offers insights into how the body leads in retail brandscapes, addressing a lack in such approaches in the current retailing literature and suggesting that embodied, experiential aspects of branding are increasingly pertinent in retailing in light of the continued growth of on-line shopping.

Overall, the study shows how an embodied approach challenges the dominance of mind and representation over body and materiality, suggesting an “intelligible embodiment” lens offers unique insights into consumers’ embodied experiences in retail environments.

This study aims to offer insights into the embodied concerns that underpin men’s personal grooming practices through which they experience their body as the “existential ground of culture and self” and manage their everyday bodily presentation.

This study analyses 16 interviews with male consumers of age between 20 and 76. The interpretative analysis is informed by both Merleau-Ponty’s concept of the body-subject and the sociology of the body as discursively constituted.

This study proposes four bodily identity positions that link individual personal grooming practices to specific embodied concerns. These bodily identity positions underline the different ways the male body is called upon to carve out a meaningful existence.

The research findings are not intended to generalise or to be exhaustive. Rather, it is hoped that they may stimulate readers to think more deeply about the role of the body in aiding male consumers to seek maximum grip on their life-world.

The study findings provide marketers with rich narratives for brand positioning and image development beyond the traditional sexual and/or alpha male-themed marketing and advertising. They also offer preliminary insights for mental health practitioners into how the male body shapes men’s identity development and experiences of well-being.

The study identifies the different ways personal grooming can become assimilated into an individual’s system of beliefs and practices. It also offers empirical support for a definition of the body as active and acted upon, especially with respect to male grooming.

The datafication of teaching and learning settings continues to be of broad interest to the learning sciences. In response, this study aims to explore a non-traditional learning setting, specifically two Golf Teaching and Research Programs, to investigate how athletes and coaches capture, analyze and use performance data to improve their practice. Athletic settings are well known for spurring the proliferation of personal data about performance across a range of contexts and ability levels. In these contexts, interest in athletes’ experiences with data has often been overshadowed by a focus on the technologies capturing the data and their capabilities.

This ethnographic research focuses on the data-rich experiences of golf coaches and students during two pedagogical encounters. Using Balka and Star’s (2015) concept of shadow bodies, this article explores how golfing bodies can become infused with data, creating partial representations of a lived experience that can be augmented and manipulated for pedagogical purposes, depending on the context and the individuals involved.

Interaction analysis helps the authors to examine the embodied and interactional nature of coach-golfer pedagogical encounters across two sites, a local Professional Golf Association golf course and a Swing Analysis Lab. The authors also split these encounters into two episodes to identify how coaches and golfers use partial representations of their bodies to analyze performance and interpret data.

This research suggests that as data-driven practices continue to engulf athletic settings, and teaching and learning settings broadly, emphasis needs to be placed on ensuring that athletes (learners) – from the most recreational to elite users – have an embodied understanding of their performance to improve their ability. Furthermore, this article raises questions about what data gets shared between instructors and athletes and how that data is used.

The purpose of this paper is to report on research that uncovered myths about HIV and AIDS held by serodiscordant couples in Malawi, and the sources of these myths. The paper reflects on how the myths affect serodiscordant couples’ engagement with HIV and AIDS information.

Van Manen’s (1997) approach to analysis of phenomenological data was used to analyse data from in-depth interviews conducted in Malawi with 21 serodiscordant couples and three individuals who had separated from their partners because of serodiscordance.

Serodiscordant couples in Malawi believe and hold on to some inaccurate HIV and AIDS information that can be seen as “myths”. Some of these myths are perpetuated by official HIV and AIDS information when it is translated into the local languages. Other myths derive from social norms of the societies where the couples live.

The findings of this paper have practical implications for how HIV and AIDS information providers should engage with target audiences to understand the origins of the myths they hold. The findings also imply that some myths have technical, religious, moral and cultural bases which need to be addressed before challenging the myth itself.

Using real-life descriptions of experiences of HIV and AIDS information provided by serodiscordant couples, the authors reveal how myths can affect engagement with the information. The authors make recommendations on how to address myths in ways that contribute to a positive experience of HIV and AIDS information by serodiscordant couples.

Phenomenology has a long tradition as a qualitative research method in the social and health sciences. The application of phenomenological methods to understand lived experiences and subjectivities offers researchers a rich tapestry of methodological approaches, often however, the availability of these methods to researchers is tempered as a result of inflexible ideas regarding their use. This article aims to highlight the uniting features between approaches.

The paper begins by offering a brief overview of the two traditions within phenomenology, the descriptive and interpretive approaches and traces the development of each one. It then presents an overview of the commonalities shared by both approaches in with particular reference to the philosophical and methodological cohesion between them.

Frequently, the literature fails to focus on how these methodologies can be used together, and instead foregrounds the ontological and methodological differences between them. While an overview of some of the more vociferous debates within phenomenology are included and acknowledged, the paper calls for a focus on the shared goals of the phenomenological project.

This article aims to illustrate that, while recognising differences, the two phenomenological traditions have more in common that unites them, and argues that once this is applied pragmatically, a multiplicity of phenomenological traditions are available to researchers.

Have we grown closer and closer apart? Imagine the plight of our elders. Their history is linked with their geography, where they lived, loved and labored. The purpose of this paper is to explore how, though they have earned their “place” in the world, a world now under the hegemony of accelerated time and blurring of distance, many of them feel displaced, “unseen” and irrelevant.

The paper’s methodology is in narrative structure, at times referring to contemporary philosophical and art sources. The author’s commentary addresses this loss of place and face for today’s elders within the context of our failure, in the USA and much of the West, to construct a consistent, coherent philosophy of life stages. Put simply, the thoroughly pragmatic and future-driven culture of youth and productivity assigns no intrinsic value to getting old.

Place unfolds in particularities – my place, our home, etc. – and is critically distinct from space. As we squeeze together time and space through worldviews and technologies, we have erased the importance of place. This poses unique problems for elders for whom place, in particular home, carries special meaning involving time and relationships.

For elders, in particular, meaning comes through lived, embodied experiences. The author argued that our embodied encounters enable moral meaningfulness, and that it is the face which is the centerpiece of such engagement. Face reveals a moral invitation to authentic person-to-person communication. And in light of this communication, understanding the importance of place and need for face-to-face interaction helps to ground us in our conversations with elders. With our seniors, for whom the greatest gift is our time and attention, it is not only what we say, but how we are with them, through our presence, that matters.

The purpose of this paper is to open up a deeper, more complex discussion about ethical issues in queer autoethnography, by moving beyond either an outline of seminal autoethnographic thinkers, instigators, and writers, or a simple rearticulation of the key issues currently under discussion within the field of autoethnographic ethics.

The author’s intention is to queer autoethnographic ethics – that is, to employ queering as a verb, and to queerly examine autoethnographic scholars through the problematizing lenses of unexamined privilege, and of potential ethical violence to the researcher. After this, the author turns to theological writers to help us to queer the notions of ethical certainty, challenging our fear of ideological uncertainty, our fear of the body, and our fear of ambiguity.

This paper offers a more expansive and challenging approach to traditional autoethnographic ethical guidelines. It also raises several significant questions for ongoing scholarly discussion in the field.

It is hoped is that this paper will open up new possibilities and trajectories in the ongoing debates about autoethnographic ethics.

The purpose of this paper is to look at how phenomenology can be used to explore the meaning and experience of organizational life. It argues that phenomenology provides more than just themes or leitmotifs for post hoc analysis of narrative data; in its basic formulation, phenomenology is a way of thinking – a method – which illuminates the embodied, subjective and inter-subjective qualities of the life-world.

The paper follows Husserl's command to “go back to the things themselves” to access raw experience, asking ourselves, “what does experience mean phenomenologically?” We draw on the work of Merleau-Ponty to “flesh out” the embodied aspects of that phenomenological experience, outlining how the idea of a “field of presence” grounds our reflections in the here-and-now and gives our selfhood its coherence.

The paper presents data on the diverse meanings of “experience” to suggest that phenomenological and organizational understandings can be differentiated in terms of both temporality and selfhood. The paper argues that these differentiations expose different ways of thinking about the world more generally, drawing on Husserl's philosophy of the “natural attitude” to propose that one of its derivations, an “organizational attitude”, is obscuring our view of embodied experience.

The paper provides practical guidelines for those interested in researching the embodied, experiential qualities of organizational life. These emphasize the need to suspend the “organizational attitude”, modify how the authors position and explain the research, and attend to the interplay between the felt sense of the world and the words used to articulate it.

The logic of the body helps the authors to work towards a more integrative, conciliatory epistemological position for qualitative organizational research. The paper uses a phenomenological view of embodiment – as both subjectively experienced and objectively presented to the world – to suggest that the body, particularly when it is sick, is giving us clues for how to conceptualize the life-world of work.

The consumer acculturation literature argues that reconstituting familiar embodied practices from the culture of origin leads to a comforting sense of home for consumers who move from one cultural context to another. This paper aims to extend this thesis by examining further dimensions in migrant consumers’ experiences of home culture consumption.

This paper analyses data gathered through multi-modal depth interviews with Southeast Asian skilled migrants in New Zealand through the conceptual lens of embodiment.

Building on Dion et al.’s (2011) framework of ethnic embodiment, the analysis uncovers home culture consumption as multi-layered experiences of anchoring, de-stabilisation and estrangement, characterised by convergence and divergence between the embodied dimensions of being-in-the-world, being-in-the-world with others and remembering being-in-the-world.

This paper underscores home culture consumption in migration as an ambivalent embodied experience. Further research should investigate how other types of acculturating consumers experience and negotiate the changing meanings of home.

Marketers in migrant-receiving and migrant-sending cultural contexts should be sensitised to disjunctures in migrants’ embodied experience of consuming home and their role in heightening or mitigating these disjunctures.

This paper helps contribute to consumer acculturation theory in two ways. First, the authors show how migrants experience not only comfort and connection but also displacement, in practices of home culture consumption. Second, the authors show how migrant communities do not only encourage cultural maintenance and gatekeeping but also contribute to cultural identity de-stabilisation.

International conflicts and violence are similar in nature to domestic conflicts and violence which are also similar to those taking place between individuals. Only difference between them is that of magnitude that increases as one moves from individual to societal national level and finally to international level of conflicts. The fundamental question at issue here is that of self‐interest with respect to social and political authority and economic power. The conflicts become most intense and violence gets widest and most cruel at the international level. There are two broad methods in dealing with this problem – use of force to coerce and subjugate or application of the power of persuasion to win the hearts and minds of the people. The former is the conventional secular materialistic method but often used invoking the name of religion and the latter is that of true spiritual humanistic practices and applications in preserving and promoting the cause of all of humanity.While the first does not require the system to be fair and just, the latter predicates them. The foundation of the first is “us” vs. “them” as it divides humanity into many nation states, but that of the second is “us” vs. “us” since it recognizes and practices universality of humanity. More importantly, the former grants unfettered authority to the leaders of the society in the form of sovereignty of the “nation state”, the latter subjugates the authority of the leaders to that of a higher supreme Authority.