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This study aims to explore the dual identity role of joint gift-giving among adolescents. Studying this phenomenon through the lens of impression management theory enabled us to analyze private and group motives, drivers of these motives (givers’ public self-consciousness and self-monitoring and group cohesiveness) and the influence of group motives on the joint process. The characteristics of the joint process reflect a mutual social activity that enables adolescents to strengthen social group ties and define and nurture group identity. This research showed how a mutual consumer process, specifically, joint gift-giving, enhances the outcomes of social resources by defining groups’ mutual extended selves.

In this study, quantitative tools were used. Selection of constructs for the study was based on a literature review and existing qualitative research. To test the validity and the reliability of the scales, a convenience sample of 103 adolescents (13 to 16 years old) was used in a pre-test survey. In the main study, a convenience sample of 129 adolescences was used. Self-report questionnaires were distributed to adolescents (aged 13-16 years). The survey included scales covering private and group motives for joint gift-giving, givers’ personality, group cohesiveness and the characteristics of the joint process.

Givers’ public self-consciousness and self-monitoring were positively related to the motivation to engage in joint gift-giving to facilitate the development of desired private identities. High public self-consciousness and self-monitoring givers were motivated to enhance their private role in the group task and managed their impression among multiple audiences. We found that high-cohesiveness groups were motivated to nurture and strengthen social resources through joint gift-giving. Engaging in joint gift-giving is motivated not only by functional motives (e.g. saving money) but also by social motives that strengthen a group’s extended-self and social resources that all members enjoy.

Although gift-giving is a three-stage process per gestation presentation and reformulation stage, the current study explored joint gift-giving behavior only in the gestation stage. Future research should include the other two stages. Also the current research concentrated on adolescents. Exploring joint gift-giving among adults is recommended as well. Comparing the two age groups should allow a better understanding of the special characteristics of adolescents and adults. Additionally, other personality characteristics could affect givers private identity in the group task and other group characteristics such as group size gender of members and group context in the workplace could affect identity.

This research can provide marketers with a deeper understanding of the joint gift-giving process. For example, marketers should recognize that joint gift-giving involves adolescent groups’ time-consuming activities in the joint process, i.e. gift selection effort, making handmade gifts and putting special efforts in gift appearance that enable them to define and nurture their group identity.

Parents and educators should recognize the importance of social identity dual role in participating in joint gift-giving. Hence, we recommend them to encourage adolescents to participate in this joint consuming process to enable them to protect and define their identity.

Adolescents are an important market segment with unique cognitive, social and personality processes. While these processes have been explored in several consumer behavior studies, adolescents’ gift-giving has been largely ignored in the literature. This study contributes to an understanding of the drivers of private and group joint gift-giving motives, how sense of belonging and group identity are reflected in the social dynamics of joint gift-giving and how adolescents manage group and private impressions in the eyes of a single receiver and in the eyes of multiple peers participating in the group task.

Provides an introduction to corporate identity management; gives an overview of the private banking sector both in the UK and overseas and, using a case study focusing on the private bankers Adam and Co., describes the elements forming that bank’s corporate identity. These elements were history; key incidents; and service quality. The latter was found to be the most likely contributor to that bank’s identity. Argues that bank managers, in addition to asking the questions What is our business?, and what is our image? , should ask, What is our identity?

This study aims to integrate and extend existing approaches from self-identity literature by examining the underexplored aspects of online private self-disclosure. The study first explores the experiential value co-created when consumers voluntarily self-disclose on public platforms. Second, it sheds light on what motivates such consumers to disclose private self-images and experiences, thus giving up some degree of privacy on an unrestricted platform.

This study conducted 65 laddering interviews and observed the profiles of ten consumers, who actively posted self-images on Instagram, through a netnographic study. Then, this study implemented a means-ends chain analysis on interview data.

This study found that online private self-disclosure can involve a co-created experiential value that consists of consumers’ self-affirmation, affective belief and emotional connection. These value components derive from three higher-order psychological consequences – empowerment, buffering offline inadequacy of self-worth and engagement – and four functional consequences – opportunity to learn, online control, self-brand authenticity and impression management.

Operationally, this study proposes that Instagram could be configured and synched with other social networking sites to provide a more complete representation of the online self. Using algorithms that simultaneously pull from other social networking sites can emotionally connect consumers to a more relevant and gratifying personalized experience. Additionally, managers could leverage the findings to tailor supporting tools to transfer consumers’ private self-disclosure skills learned during online communication into their offline settings.

This research contributes to the extant marketing literature by providing insights into how consumers can use private self-disclosure to co-create experiential value, an emerging concept in modern marketing that is key to attaining satisfied and loyal consumers. This study shows that, even in anonymous online settings, consumers are willing to self-disclose and progress to stable intimate exchanges of disclosure by breaking their inner repression and becoming more comfortable with releasing their desires in an emotional exchange.

To provide an employee perspective on ambassadorship in the context of corporate communication, the purpose of this paper is to explore how employees relate to and experience ambassadorship.

The study has a qualitative approach, and the empirical material consists of semi-structured interviews with, and focus groups of, employees of seven organizations in both the public and private sectors. The paper draws on a contemporary understanding of identity where identity is perceived as an ongoing reflexive process in which employees negotiate and construct of their selves through relating to role expectations and interacting with others. Therefore, ambassadorship is understood as a social-identity, or persona, that is referenced by employees in their identity work.

The findings indicate that employees embrace this persona as they imagine that external stakeholders, colleagues and managers expect it of them. However, the ambassador persona also gives rise to identity-tensions both during work and off work.

The paper contributes a novel way to understand ambassadorship as well as highlighting some of the more problematic aspects of it and furthering the understanding of the concept.

The findings highlight that ambassadorship can have problematic consequences that needs to be addressed. They suggest that the employee perspective should be taken into consideration in internal communication education and training.

The paper contributes a novel employee perspective on ambassadorship.

There is fragmentation in the academic study of identity theory, and it is dislocated from personality theory. The paper aims to develop a model that resolves both of these issues using autonomous agency theory. It is shown that identities can be evaluated using mindset agency theory. Application is then made to a case study of Donald Trump’s US election campaign.

In the first of this three-part paper, the fragmented identity theory is examined ontologically to generate a coherent model of multiple identities.

A new coherent model of multiple identities is created.

There is not currently any that has created coherent theory of multiple identities.

The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the personal identity of Donald Trump in the US presidential election using the mindset agency theory framework and content analysis.

The qualitative evaluation of identity type is determined by the personality mindset agency theory (PMAT). This measures qualitatively by assigning a type to the personal identity. The methods being adopted are content analysis, and a coding frame is constructed that arises from the key words defined in PMAT.

Using PMAT, the authors determine that Trump’s personal identity is of the type hierarchical popularism (HP), from which behavioural patterns are derived, supposing that this is consistent with his public identity type measured using agency MAT (AMAT), which will be assessed in part 3 of this paper.

Appropriate image management can be used in an attempt to hide problematic purely self-interest aspects of a personality. This paper shows that it is possible to evaluate personality mindsets using content analysis. In a later paper, exploration of agency mindsets will occur that is indicative of the potential for behaviour.

Building on theory in Part 2 of this paper, a relationship is developed between the strategic multiple identities considered there. Personality analytic pathologies arise when these identities are not consistent. This theory is then examined using the mindset agency theory (MAT) developed in Part 2 of the paper. Two classes of MAT models exist: a three-trait (MAT3T) and a five-trait (MAT5T). The former centres on personality traits, while the latter includes traits that are external to the personality. These are then applied to a case study of Donald Trump’s US election campaign.

By applying MAT3T and MAT5T to the Trump election campaign, personal and public identities are analysed using content analysis of his narratives.

Of the strategic identities, data can be accessed for two, and measured qualitatively using mindset theory, these indicating the likelihood of a personality with pathologies. It is found that Trump MAT3T and MAT5T take different values, suggesting that he has an analytical pathology in his political agency.

There is not currently any coherent dynamic theory of multiple identities able to provide measures indicative of personality pathologies.

The recent wave of immigration to North American society from new source countries challenges old theories of acculturation that were based on European immigration streams that assumed that ethnic retention was generationally conditioned. For Caucasian immigrants, it was assumed that assimilation was linear and that by the third generation, all traces of ethnic origin would be absent, save for a nostalgic interest in quaint and ephemeral aspects of an ethnic past labeled symbolic ethnicity (Child, 1943; Gans, 1979; Rumbaut, 1997; Waters, 1990). Since 1965 in the United States, and 1967 in Canada, changes in immigration policy suggest that alternative assimilation patterns may exist. Whereas previous immigration policy had discouraged non-Caucasian immigration, the new policy brought with it large-scale immigration from Asia in particular which introduced a different element of race into assimilation expectations. For these new immigrants, race continues to be a marker whereby prejudice, stereotyping, and discrimination produce assumptions of “foreignness” regardless of generational status (Neckerman, Carter & Lee, 1999; Tuan, 1999).

In this chapter, I argue that the activism of Muslims in France is complex and diverse and illustrates the equally diverse politics and life experiences of these Muslims. For all the disagreement among French activists who are Muslim, they are united in their opposition to an elite frame of failed citizenship and their efforts to project a new image of French Muslims that is thoroughly French. In this sense, we cannot understand French Muslim activism without considering French elites, particularly the government, and their role in shaping Muslim identity in France.