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This paper aims to contribute to the project of recognising the contribution of female scholars to the development of marketing thought. The paper presents a biography of Elizabeth Ellis Hoyt, a home economist, who contributed to the shaping of contemporary ideas about consumption and the consumer.

Source material used includes the Elizabeth Ellis Hoyt Papers (1884‐2009) in the Iowa State University Archives. The collection contains a variety of materials, of which the most important for this paper were news clippings, personal diaries (1907‐1918), and published and unpublished manuscripts (1953, 1964, n.d.). Also important for this study were two sources published by Alison Comish Thorne, Elizabeth Hoyt's PhD student. These include Thorne's autobiography Leave the Dishes in the Sink and her entry on Elizabeth Hoyt in the Biographical Dictionary of Women Economists.

The paper documents Elizabeth Hoyt's development of marketing thought, focusing on her early work on the cost of living index and subsequent contributions to an expanded theory of consumption and consumer learning.

Elizabeth Hoyt is one of a group of female home economists who pioneered consumption economics in America in the 1920s and 1930s yet who have been neglected in published accounts. Notwithstanding a short biographical note in the Biographical Dictionary of Women Economists, Hoyt's life and work are not yet documented.

This paper argues that, by focusing on the use of the Internet for one‐to‐one communications, marketers are in danger of ignoring the many‐to‐many communications that are taking place as consumers interact with one another. The authors explore the increasing proliferation of Internet discussion groups and chat rooms that are often market‐orientated in their focus and discuss how the study of virtual communities can provide rich insights for marketers. Detailing how ethnographic research methods can assist the understanding of such online environments, they consider the theoretical and methodological differences between offline and online ethnographic research.

Explores the “glasshouse effect” that women marketing managers may experience as they carry out their marketing roles. Addresses, specifically, the invisible organizational environments which constrict and stifle values which are traditionally perceived as “feminine” in the workplace. Research with women in marketing management indicates that these barriers are not only vertical, as implied by the phrase “the glass ceiling”, but also horizontal, and are consequently more appropriately encapsulated in the image of a “glasshouse”, a colloquial term for a prison.

This article aims to explore the work lives and contributions of a group of women employed at the J. Walter Thompson advertising agency in the early twentieth century.

Archival source material from the J. Walter Thompson Company archives at Duke University includes personnel files, advertising campaign reports, and meeting minutes. The archival work is placed in historical context.

The J. Walter Thompson Women's Editorial Department played a significant role in the development of advertising and in furthering women's opportunities as advertising professionals.

Advertising was one of the few male‐dominated professions open to women in the early years of the twentieth century. An exploration of these women's work experiences greatly enhances our understanding of the field, of women's roles as advertisers, and of women's roles as consumers.

Critical marketing studies are currently on the margins of the discipline, and the ideas and challenges to conventional marketing thought posed by these critiques are rarely examined in the marketing classroom. Drawing largely from debates in the management literature, discusses the problems and considers the possibilities of integrating critical reflection into the marketing curriculum.

The purpose of this paper is to look at the role played by home economists in providing information to consumers about household products. The work of home economist and educator Martha Van Rensselaer is reviewed, specifically her time as editor of the homemaking department of women's magazine Delineator from 1921‐1926.

The paper used qualitative analysis of the content of the homemaking department under Van Rensselaer as well as quantitative analysis of the advertising during those years. Documents from several manuscript collections were used as well.

Content analysis showed a shift over the years from 1921‐1926 from broader social themes to greater emphasis on specific homemaking tasks. Ads were regularly placed next to related editorial content, but under Van Rensselaer no brand names were mentioned editorially.

Since this research focused on one magazine, comparison with homemaking departments in other women's journals at this time would provide useful context.

The specific example provided illuminates the evolving relationship between advertisers, home economists, media and consumers.

Once the domain of theologians, sociologists and (religion) anthropologists, we have seen more recently how consumer researchers have enriched the study of spirituality and religion. Researching the sacred can be fraught with challenges, in and out of the field. Russell Belk, Samuelson Appau and Diego Rinallo address key questions, issues and conceptualisations in the scholarship on sacred consumption, contemplating the past and mapping future research avenues. A reading list is also included for those interested in joining the authors in this collective discovery of the sacred.

Contributors answered the following four questions: How has the study of sacred consumption evolved since you started researching the field? What would be the critical methodological issues that researchers need to consider when approaching the “sacred”? What are some of the key authors that have influenced your thinking? What do you think will be the key questions that researchers will need to focus on?

Rinallo, Belk and Appau’s reflections on studying the sacred provide food for thought for both novice and weathered researchers alike. Researching the sacred both shapes and is shaped by our positionality: by our insider/outsider status, our gender and race and our cosmovisions as believers or sceptics. Researchers should be mindful and reflective of their subject positionings as they approach, enter and leave the field. Researching the sacred requires an open mind as we broaden our vision of what constitutes the sacred. Such research calls for scholarly as well as phenomenological curiosity. Reading widely and across disciplines to better familiarise ourselves with our sacred context helps to craft novel and meaningful research.

This paper provides a multivocal genealogy of consumer culture work on religion and spirituality, methodological advice and reading resources for researchers.

The purpose of this paper is to argue that the function of history in critical marketing studies centres on the issue of contextualisation. It aims to put forward the idea that historically informed critical marketing studies highlight that key institutions, actors and scholarly writings have all helped to constitute, perform and destabilise marketing theory, thought and practice in ways that reflect multiple constellations of interests.

By way of an engagement with various strands of the literature, it is suggested that the history of marketing thought and marketing history are riven with power relations. They include economically derived power relations and culturally significant changes in the social environment. However, while important, they are only part of a more pluralistic tapestry of factors that come from sometimes completely unrelated areas that helped constitute the conditions which fostered a given area of inquiry, debate and so on, in marketing and consumer research.

Weaved into accounts such as those articulated within critical marketing studies are attempts to rethink aspects of theory, concept formation, thought, practice and institutions that have assumed a taken‐for‐granted status.

This account is based on a detailed reading of interdisciplinary debates read into the history of marketing thought and marketing history.