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The purpose of this paper is to interrogate the concept of meaning and the meaning making process in consumer behavior. While the study of the consumption focuses increasingly on how consumers create meaning in a marketing dominated world, it views this process as relatively unproblematic. This paper challenges that perspective and argues that this process is inherently ambiguous.

This paper is primarily conceptual in nature. It utilizes a post-structural perspective to theoretically examine the concept of meaning and the meaning making process. It then applies this analysis to the consumption and production of popular culture. Three exemplars from the domain of digital fandom are provided to explore the conceptual arguments in the paper.

The paper argues that if the meanings of all texts are fundamentally unstable and that meaning itself is endlessly deferred in the meaning making process, then as the consumer becomes the author of the text, the instability and ambiguity of meaning and the meaning making process transfers equally to the consumption process. Rather than view this as a negative aspect of consumer culture, this paper argues that some consumers relish this ambiguity and the freedom that it gives them to manipulate these products, their textual meanings, and the readers’ identities.

The primary limitation of this paper is that it is conceptual in nature. Future research should empirically examine different cases of meaningless consumption to provide more evidence of this interesting and potentially pervasive aspect of consumer behavior.

There is virtually no research that examines meaningless consumption. The value of the paper is that it challenges a core concept in cultural theories of consumer behavior and extends our understanding of consumption.

A substantial number of students read significantly below grade level, and students with disabilities perform far below their non-disabled peers. Reading achievement data indicate that many students with and at-risk for reading disabilities require more intensive reading interventions. This chapter utilizes the theoretical model of the Simple View of Reading to describe the benefit of early reading instruction, targeting both word reading and word meaning. In addition, evidence is presented supporting the use of word meaning instruction to improve accurate and efficient word reading for students who have failed to respond to explicit decoding instruction.

The study seeks to address the research question: “How can Gadamerian and Ricoeurian hermeneutics be operationalized in an interpretive accounting research project”? The purpose of this paper is twofold: first, to review the key hermeneutic concepts of philosophers Gadamer and Ricoeur; and second, to share insights from the researcher’s experience of applying Gadamerian and Ricoeurian hermeneutics to an interpretive accounting research project.

The paper draws on the extant literature and the researcher’s own experience using hermeneutics theory in an interpretive accounting research project involving in-depth interviews with organisational managers.

The process of interpretation is described using the core concept of the hermeneutic circle where the reader and the text engage in dialogue. The readers’ pre-understandings play a key role in this dialogue and assist in drawing meaning from the text. However, it is necessary for the reader to adopt a critically reflexive approach remaining alert for both unproductive pre-understandings and hidden power structures and ideologies in the text being interpreted. Each reading of a text involves the completion of one cycle of the hermeneutic circle in which the reader transitions from pre-configuration to configuration and ultimately re-configuration concluding with the reader acquiring new horizons of understanding. The researcher’s experience of applying hermeneutic theory to an interpretive accounting research project are reflected on and nine lessons are offered.

These insights will prove valuable to interpretive researchers within the social sciences, including accounting and management studies, as well as those working in the natural sciences.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the application of post‐structuralist theory to understanding hypertext and the World Wide Web, and the challenge posed by digital information technology to the practices of the information profession.

The method adopted is that of a critical study.

The paper argues for the importance of post‐structuralism for an understanding of the implications of digital information for the information management profession.

Focuses on an epistemological gap between the traditional practices of the information profession, and the structure of the World Wide Web.

This paper explores the use of intertextuality in advertising texts. It identifies that there are two distinctive methods of researching meanings found in and around advertisements. The two methods are textual strategy and interpretive practice. The results of a phenomenological study of the interpretive practices are shown. The empirical study was completed with young people from the United Kingdom who used interpretive practices to form meaning from an alcohol advertisement. The study reveals that young audiences draw on intertexts, from a very wide variety of sources, both in and around themselves. There are, however, common intertextual themes. The intertextual themes will be categorised into taxonomies for analysis, which extends the current process for analysing advertisements.

Organizations from the same industry or field often tend to become more similar over time, despite being different in terms of for example strategies, goals, or performance. However, recently scholars pointed out that organizational fields are dynamic entities with permeable boundaries, thus indicating that prior literature may have oversimplified the phenomenon. Indeed, in this paper we draw attention to an organizational field that centers on text, and revolves around shared (or debated) meaning stemming from that text. The guiding research question is, “To what extent do organizations converge or diverge from meaning embedded in interconnected text?” We investigate party manifestos and press releases of organizations from the field of politics, focusing on the topic of immigration. We extract meaning from these texts, using document scaling and similarity analysis. Our results show that while most parties become more similar in their framing of immigration, the anti-immigrant PVV actually radicalizes further and as a result takes an isolated position in the policy space. Thus, Dutch political organizations became similar (converge) as well as different (diverge) over time through interaction, in terms of their shared meaning systems. This paper substantiates findings of isomorphic tendencies of organizations within a shared organizational field. At the same time, we find that Dutch politics constitute an issue field, where parties compete about meanings and framings on controversial issues. Our analysis shows that meaning embedded in texts changes over time; this indicates that change mechanisms in organizational fields may be brought about through changes in meaning systems.

The purpose of this paper is to describe a conceptualization and two‐stage pilot study that explores ways in which fuzzy sets can be used to measure the indexability of literary texts.

Participants provided a subject description for each in a series of literary and nonliterary texts. Each participant was also randomly assigned to one of three tasks: using a visual analog scale to rate the clarity of each text, using a visual analog scale to rate the confidence each participant felt in describing the subject of each text, or sorting the texts from most to least clear without the use of a visual analog scale. Nonparametric statistics and qualitative analysis were used to analyze the data.

Participants and coders used the visual analog scales successfully. The participants perceived literary texts as less clear than nonliterary texts, and expressed less confidence in their subject description of literary texts than in their descriptions of literary texts. The study found preliminary support for the idea that fuzzy sets can provide a useful theoretical basis for examining the indexability of texts.

A measure of the indexability of literary texts could help provide sound theoretical guidance for construction of tools to organize those texts. A structured comparison of literary and nonliterary texts could help to build a theoretical base from which to make practical decisions about whether and how to perform subject analysis on each type of text.