Search results

This paper aims to investigate how direct mail consumption contributes to brand relationship quality. Store flyers and other direct mailings continue to play a significant role in many companies’ communication strategies. Research on this topic predominantly investigates driving store traffic and sales. Less is known regarding the consumer side, such as the value that consumers may derive from the consumption of direct mailings and the effects of such a value on brand relationship quality. To address this limitation, this paper tests a causal model of the contribution of direct mail value to brand commitment, drawing on a value framework that integrates social theory of engagement regimes and literature on experiential customer value.

The empirical work of this paper is based on a rigorous four-study mixed methods design, involving qualitative study, confirmatory factor analysis and partial least squares structural modeling.

The authors develop two second-order formatively designed scales – familiar value and planned value scales – that illustrate the role of engagement regimes in consumer behavior. Although both types of value contribute equally to direct mail attachment, they exert contrasting effects on other mediational consumer responses, such as reading and gratitude. Finally, the proposed theoretical model appears to be robust in predicting customers’ brand commitment.

This study provides new insights into the research on consumer value and brand relational communication.

This study is the first to consider consumer benefits from the social perspective of engagement regimes.

This paper aims to explore gender and legitimacy in family business succession.

Within the theoretical framework of French pragmatic sociology, the authors conceptualise the family business as the locus where two regimes of engagement are present, generating the co-presence of two orders of worth, namely the domestic and the industrial. Taking a processual approach to entrepreneuring, and using case studies of small enterprises in Italy, this paper explores the case of daughters taking over the family firms.

The paper shows how the daughters’ perceived gender inequality in the succession process is justified and how the justification work and the production of legitimacy are accomplished, shifting from one order of worth to the other.

The value of the contribution consists in pointing to how gender inequality is reproduced and justified inside the family business. The dual regime of engagement is what justifies the reproduction of a specific gender regime within the family business. Moreover, the paper adds a “gender” perspective to French pragmatist sociology.

The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate an unexploited conceptual pragmatic sociological framework for analyses of action strategies among social assistance recipients, who are affected by contemporary politics of retrenchment.

Noting that existing literature on resistance and coping is mostly concerned with either collective public resistance or sub-public individualised coping strategies, the paper turns to theoretical insights from newer French pragmatic sociologist Laurent Thévenot, enabling the researcher to dissolve the stark boundaries between private/public and coping/resistance. The use of the concepts is demonstrated through a case study analysis of the various actions of Danish social assistance recipients, who were recently affected by a harsh workfare initiative.

The empirical demonstration points to a plurality of individualised strategies of action, taken on by the affected social assistance recipients. Thereby it points to some advantages of the proposed framework, as it makes visible the versatility of the contemporary “welfare client”, as he or she dynamically changes the scope of action and moves between the private and the public and between coping and resistance.

The paper applies hitherto unexploited concepts from French pragmatic sociology to strategies of action among welfare recipients in times of welfare retrenchment.

In this article, we make the point that managerial domination as described by pragmatic sociology is an appropriate notion to make sense of complex forms of domination in contemporary organizations. Based on Lemieux’s work on ‘grammars’, we complement approaches of complex domination put forward by pragmatic sociologists such as Boltanski and Thévenot. We illustrate these ideas by means of an ethnographic study of the financial intermediation industry. Our analysis sketches out an alternative conceptualization of power in such environments, and by so doing, helps us delineate the features that characterize complex financial domination. We conclude by arguing that this type of domination is the result of specific contradictions inherent to the grammars of financial intermediation.

In a village of Eastern Yucatan, Mexico, cargo or kuuch sponsors compare their ritual tasks to “buying life” from crosses, Catholic saints, and Mayan deities or “owners.” The local notion of compromiso, engagement, or commitment, helps these festival participants express the condition of possibility to successfully perform such exchanges. Decisive for these life renewals, promises, and compromisos depend upon empathy to authorize ritualists and subsume social and natural phenomena under exchange paradigms. By defining, critiquing and using the concept of “disposition” as an inherently self-other stance through which economy transforms into religiosity and vice versa, this chapter analyzes this particular regime of engagement and the temporalities it implies. Through a commitment to the past and the practice of promissory exchange, sponsors develop a new perceptual scheme in which the ritual cultivation of discipline, awareness, expectation, and responsibility are expressed.

The purpose of this paper is to explore specific instances of junior doctors' responsibility. Learning is often understood to be a prerequisite for managing responsibility and risk but this paper aims to argue that this is insufficient because learning is integral to the management of responsibility and risk.

This is a “collective” case study of doctors designed to focus on the interrelationships between individual professionals and complex work settings. The authors focussed on two key points of transition: the transition to beginning clinical practice which is the move from medical student to foundation training (F1) and the transition from generalist to specialist clinical practice.

Responsibility in clinical settings is immediate, concrete, demands response and (in) action has an effect. Responsibility is learnt and is not always apparent; it shifts depending on time of day/night and who else is present. Responsibility does not necessarily increase incrementally and can decrease; it can be perceived differently by different actors. Responsibility is experienced as personal although it is distributed.

This detailed examination of practice has enabled the authors to foreground the particularities, urgency and fluidity of everyday clinical practice. It recasts their understandings of responsibility – and managing risk – as involving learning in practice. This is a critical insight because it suggests that the theoretical basis for the current approach to managing risk and responsibility is insufficient. This has significant implications for policy, employment, education and practice of new doctors and for the management of responsibility and risk.

Purpose – This chapter introduces the book collection and sets the theoretical framework for the subsequent chapters.

Design/methodology/approach – The approach of the book is to re-interpret major challenges to global agriculture – particularly climate change and the food crisis of 2008 – as demonstrating shocks to the resilience of global food systems.

Findings – Using resilience to shocks as a key quality of food systems enables recent crises to be understood as central to the ongoing dynamics of food systems rather than simply atypical events. Alongside climate change and food security, other potential shocks are identified: biosecurity, energy, financial and volcanic.

Originality/value – This framework establishes new criteria for examining the potential merit of multifunctional and neo-liberal policy regimes with world food systems.

How is moral legitimacy established in pluralist contexts where multiple moral frameworks co-exist and compete? Situations of moral multiplexity complicate not only whether an organization or practice is legitimate but also which criteria should be used to establish moral legitimacy. We argue that moral legitimacy can be thought of as the property of a dynamic dialogical process in which relations between moral schemes are constantly (re-)negotiated through dynamic exchange with audiences. Drawing on Boltanski and Thévenot’s ‘orders of worth’ framework, we propose a process model of how three types of truces may be negotiated: transcendence, compromise, antagonism. While each can create moral legitimacy in pluralistic contexts, legitimacy is not a binary variable but varying in degrees of scope and certainty.

Joining recent calls to focus our attention on how institutional logics work on the ground, I offer a critique of current studies of institutional logics that often offer a macro and reified depictions thereof. I suggest that to fully appreciate how institutions matter, we need to complement these studies with a research program that is based on a constructivist ontology, ethnographic methods of inquiry, and use of theories of action. I exemplify this emerging research agenda, and discuss its broader analytical and empirical implications.

Particularly in governance and policy processes, critique is embedded in highly institutionalized formats. In this chapter, the authors apply Boltanski’s concept of critical tests to examine accepted forms of expression in the context of an institutionalized policy setting, the annual Conferences of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. The authors find that different policy actors’ uses of critique reflect embedded field positions and interests. While marginal actors drew upon existential tests to construct radical critique, the highly ritualized performance of critique called into question its efficacy in promoting change within the overall structure of a highly institutionalized event. The authors discuss inroads to studying the relations between critique, power, and microfoundations of institutions.