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This paper aims to understand how young people manage the dramaturgical dilemmas related to drinking alcohol and performing multiple identities.

Drawing on qualitative data collected with 16-18-year olds, the authors adopt Goffman’s dramaturgical perspective to examine youth alcohol consumption in relation to multiple identities.

Young people continuously and skilfully juggle multiple identities across multiple contexts, where identities overflow and audiences and interactions overlap. Techniques of audience segregation, mystification and misrepresentation and justification are used to perform and manage multiple identities in a risky health behaviour context.

The approach may facilitate some over- and under-claiming. Future studies could observe young people’s performances of self across multiple contexts, paying particular attention to how alcohol features in these performances.

Social marketing campaigns should demonstrate an understanding of how alcohol relates to the contexts of youth lives beyond the “night out” and engage more directly with young peoples’ navigation between different identities, contexts and audiences. Campaigns could tap into the secretive nature of youth alcohol consumption and discourage youth from prioritising audience segregation and mystification above their own safety.

Extant work has argued that consumers find multiplicity unmanageable or manage multiple identities through internal dialogue. Instead, this paper demonstrates how young people manage multiple identities through interaction and performance. This study challenges the neat compartmentalisation of identities identified in prior literature and Goffman’s clear-cut division of performances into front and back stage.

This paper aims to adopt a relational dialectics analysis approach to provide qualitative depth and insight into the ways intercultural families manage intercultural tensions around consumption. The authors pay particular attention to how a relational dialectics analysis reveals a relational change in the family providing evidence to demonstrate how a family’s unique relational culture evolves and transitions.

Qualitative insights from a relational-dialectic analysis on 15 intercultural families are used to illustrate the interplay of stability with instability in the management of intercultural dialectic tensions within these families.

Intercultural dialectical interplay around food consumption tensions are implicit tensions in the household’s relational culture. Examples of dialectical movement indicating relational change are illustrated; this change has developmental consequences for the couples’ relational cultures.

This study provides qualitative insights on relational dialectics in one intercultural family context and reveals and analyses the dialectical dimensions around consumption in the context of intercultural family relationships. The research approach could be considered in other intercultural and relational contexts.

Family narratives can be analysed within the context of two meta-dialectics that directly address how personal relationships evolve; indigenous dialectic tensions within a family can also be identified.

This paper demonstrates the qualitative value of a relational dialectics analysis in revealing how food consumption changes within families are the result of reciprocal or interdependent learning, which has consequences for relational change.

Recent global migration trends have led to an increased prevalence, and new patterning, of intercultural family configurations. This paper is about intercultural couples and how they manage tensions associated with change as they settle in their new cultural context. The focus is specifically on the role food plays in navigating these tensions and the effects on the couples’ relational cultures.

A qualitative relational–dialectic approach is taken for studying Polish–Irish intercultural couples. Engagement with relevant communities provided multiple points of access to informants.

Intercultural tensions arise as the couples jointly transition, and food consumption represents implicit tensions in the household’s relational culture. Such tensions are sometimes resolved, but sometimes not, leading to enduring tensions. Dialectical movement causes change, which has developmental consequences for the couples’ relational cultures.

This study shows how the ways that tensions are addressed are fundamental to the formation of a relational family identity.

Recommendations emphasise the importance of understanding how the family relational culture develops in the creation of family food practices. Marketers can look at the ways of supporting the intercultural couple retain tradition, while smoothly navigating their new cultural context. Social policy analysts may reflect on the ways that the couples develop an intercultural identity rooted in each other’s culture, and the range of strategies to demonstrate they can synthesise and successfully negotiate the challenges they face.

Dealing simultaneously and separately with a variety of dialectical oppositions around food, intercultural couples weave together elements from each other’s cultures and simultaneously facilitate both relational and social change. Within the relationship, stability–change dialectic is experienced and negotiated, while at the relationship’s nexus with the couple’s social ecology, negotiating conventionality–uniqueness dialectic enables them reproduce or depart from societal conventions, and thus facilitate social change.

Describes a study investigating the motivations of food retailers to engage in corporate socially responsible (CSR) activities. Focusing on confectionery retailing and merchandising, the study sought to establish the extent of CSR activities and the motivations for companies to act as they do. An audit of food retailers was first conducted to establish the nature and extent of CSR activities. This was followed by a series of in‐depth interviews with key decision makers in food retailing organisations, to reveal motivations behind their policies on confectionery retailing. The authors found the main motivations driving confectionery merchandising decisions to be space maximisation, profitability and customer pressure. While certain proactive companies recognised the benefits of being seen as a socially responsible company, none of the companies was driven primarily by philanthropic motivations.

Purpose – To extend understanding of the rituals and practices of alcohol consumption through a focus on the consumption object (the Dirty Pint) as a central actant in the practices of extreme alcohol consumption.

Design/methodology/approach – Seventeen paired and group interviews were conducted with young consumers (aged 16–18). An Actor-Network Theory (ANT)-inspired approach to data analysis was used in conjunction with Bourdieu's key concepts of habitus, field and capital to present a detailed understanding of the practices and rituals of extreme alcohol consumption.

Findings – The same consumption object takes on a very different role and has different forms of agency, depending on the social space (field) in which it is embedded. The Dirty Pint acts differently within different social spaces or sub-fields of the field of adolescence, particularly when combined with individual subjects of differing habitus to produce an object+subject hybrid.

Social implications – Paying attention to all the relevant actants (both human and non-human) involved in the practice of alcohol consumption could lead to more novel and relevant alcohol-harm reduction strategies or campaigns that young people can both relate to and take more seriously.

Originality/value of paper – We stress the need to grant greater agency to objects in studying consumption practices and identity enactment and contribute to the literature on identity by extending Gergen's (2009) ‘relational being’, conceiving of the self as embedded in both inter-subjective and inter-objective interactions and relationships (Latour, 1996).

Purpose – By analysing the experience of homelessness, this chapter aims to understand how individuals experience involuntary life changes in uncertain contexts and analyses the role of consumption, in terms of possessions and practices, along the process.

Methodology/approach – This study adopts a phenomenological approach, focusing on the homelessness experience. It involves an 18 month quasi-ethnography study in a charity that supports the homeless individuals, where interviews about their retrospective biographical accounts were performed. The data was analysed using existential phenomenological procedures.

Findings – Informants’ pathways to homelessness reveal a four-stage process of forced self-transformation (initial self, forced negotiation, transition, transformed self) which takes place across two stressful situational contexts: the triggering events for transformation (i.e. that led informants to lose their home) and the persisting state of uncertainty (i.e. further survival living in the streets).

Social implications – In the current postmodern times there is greater uncertainty surrounding individuals’ life changes. The consequences of the current economic crisis have threatened individuals to lose their homes. By having a better understanding of the way individuals experience this type of loss, the study brings new information about how to support them.

Originality/value of chapter – This study highlights contexts where Van Gennep's transformational routine may not be suitable in the current postmodern times, and provides an alternative transformational routine that takes into account the uncertainty that accompanies involuntary transformations.

The purpose of this article is to explore how the (War) Advertising Council organized the advertising community to assist the US government's home front campaigns during the Second World War. It aims to discuss how the council urged individual advertisers to use their product‐ads to instruct the civilian population about behavioral changes that the government deemed essential to the war effort. The task required great ambidexterity: paying a high level of attention to the government's wartime needs while coaching and encouraging advertisers into compliance. As such, the article also aims to discuss the council's challenge in weighing the government's wartime needs against commercial pressures. A case study of the Advertising Council's 1944 campaign to “Stamp out VD” seeks to illustrate the latter concern.

The article comprises an historical account of the US advertising industry during the Second World War. Applying a qualitative approach, it relies on archival sources, industry trade publications, newspapers accounts and existing scholarship for its information.

While publicly framing its wartime contribution as a patriotic gesture, the council's underlying rationale was that of serving the advertising industry in a public relations capacity. Unsure of its standing as America entered the war, the donation of time and talent to the government's war effort helped strengthen the advertising industry's economic position and social standing. As such, the council was not only a pioneer of “social marketing”, but also demonstrated a sophisticated use of “strategic philanthropy,” long before it became a common marketing practice.

Analyzing previously un‐explored sources, the article sheds new light on the US advertising industry's public relations strategies during the Second World War.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the use of qualitative approaches to add depth and insight to understanding concerning the issues involved when consumers try to make changes in their behaviour. The context of this study is people trying to make and sustain changes to their dietary behaviour. Taking Prochaska and Di Clemente's Stages of Change model as the starting point, this paper marks a departure from other work in the behavioural change area in so far as a qualitative approach is adopted rather than a quantitative perspective.

This study was longitudinal in design and the data presented concern groups of people who were categorized as belonging to stages of change and who followed a similar stage of change pattern over a period of 18 months (according to the Stage of Change algorithm described by Curry et al.).

By examining peoples' behaviour changes in depth, the similarities and differences in their attitudes and motivations are revealed in terms of their dietary behaviour change and maintenance of change. This provides a more refined understanding of how people make changes and maintain them over time.

While focusing only on a small number of people, the weaknesses of the Stages of Change model is demonstrated and how qualitative research approaches can be used to add depth and meaning to quantitative methodologies popular in the social marketing domain.

This paper demonstrates that the Stages of Change model has value in categorizing people into stages of change and measuring these changes over time but is limited in its ability to develop understanding of the lived experience of trying to change behaviour.

The purpose of this paper is to understand how Agfa, a division of IG Farben and Germany's leading producer of photographic equipment, adapted its marketing strategy to the new political environment created by the Nazi regime. This was a time when many consumer goods manufacturers suffered from the state‐driven reallocation of resources favoring the armament industry. Agfa, however, expanded its production well into the war.

This case study is based on archival records of Agfa's sales department.

This paper shows that Hitler's armament drive left room for non‐essential consumer goods such as cameras, film, and photographic paper as they fitted the regime's consumption policy, as well as its import and foreign exchange policy. A pioneer in marketing, Agfa was able to secure its growth strategy and its room to maneuver by focusing its product and promotion program on the socioeconomic needs of the “Volksgemeinschaft” and the “Four Year Plan”.

This paper sheds new light on the often‐underestimated role of consumption during the “Third Reich.” Furthermore, it supports the evolutionary – rather than revolutionary – nature of the history of marketing practice in Germany, as Agfa's interwar marketing policy features many sophisticated modern elements prior to the “Marketing Revolution” of the 1960s.

The purpose of this article is to present an inside look at the history of a little‐known but interesting initiative in the marketing field, one that involved the infusion of marketing thought into public policy decision‐making in the USA. It aims to trace the interesting tale of how marketing academics came to be included in the activities of the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) through the FTC's “Marketing Academic Consultancy Program” (MACP) during the 1970s. This story also aims to include descriptions of the contributions made by those marketing academics and how those scholars were later phased out of the FTC.

An autobiographical approach is used since each of the authors was personally involved in the MACP. As participants in the program and as scholars whose careers were thereafter tremendously affected by that participation, these personal accounts provide considerable insight into the impact on both FTC operations and on marketing academic thought itself.

Over the decade of the 1970s some 30 marketing academics participated in this program, with considerable impact on both FTC operations and on marketing academic thought itself. Reflecting positive impact within public policy, for example, was a massive increase in the FTC budget for marketing and consumer research activities – from essentially zero at the start of the program to some $ 1 million in 1978. Benefits also flowed back into academia, as this program formed a prime basis for the development of today's “Marketing and Society” research area.

Although there are histories of the FTC, this is an original, first‐hand account of a little‐known era during which marketing academics and public policy decision‐makers were given a unique opportunity to work together and learn from each other. It offers personal insights into the workings of this innovative program and the benefits that accrued for both the FTC and for the marketing discipline.