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In the current information age, when the attention spans of most people have become very short, marketers are facings serious challenges to grab the attention of their target audience effectively and fruitfully. From street corner to bedroom, virtually every perceivable location of human traces are littered with activity of marketers, whether they are small or large in scale or the recipients of their information understand the message properly. Studying consumers’ acceptance of the main ethical issues in communication, mainly in advertising, has recently been receiving much attention from scholars. Therefore, to grab the attention of people in the increasing competitive environment, advertisers have resorted to using what they feel can quickly attract the audience. For example, the attachment of attractive women with their physical natural endowments presented in explicit sexually appealing postures to products/services that have no linkage with women. These practices have raised some moral and ethical questions within the society. Therefore, this study aims to focus on discussing marketing communication through presenting women as a sexual object from the morality, ethics and religious perspectives.

This is a descriptive study based on the systematic literature review. Initially, this paper discusses the ethical issues of using women and sexual appeals in the process of marketing communication, as well as the current level of practices in the industry. Then, it discusses the consequences and dimensions of the issues from different types of ethical grounds. Finally, it provides recommendations with the objective of finding a common ground from business and social perspectives. It also mentions the scopes of further research, which could lead the secular world to modify their moral values and come closer to the norms of other civilized societies.

The position of the paper takes is that considering the negative effects of the prevalent advertising in society, the practice falls short of human moral values; as a result, it is considered unethical.

This review paper examines the ethical implication of using women as marketing tools from the perspectives of morality, business and Islamic principles that will help business groups, as well as the whole religious community, especially Muslims.

Using the perspectives of dramaturgy and symbolic interactionists like George Herbert Mead and Carl Couch this study focuses on paid sex work in the hypermodern, virtual world of Second Life. Using seventeen semi-structured interviews and six months of ethnographic fieldwork, I find that the employment of sexual scripts, carrying off a successful erotic scene, and the creative use of communication and embodiment are highly valued in escorts’ performance of Second Life sex work. Escorts craft an online persona that is a digital representation of the self, which is manifested in the embodiment of their digital body or avatar. In addition to digital representations of the physical self, Second Life allows for multiple methods of computer-mediated communication, and escorts are able to re-embody the first life body through the trading of first life pictures, voice cybersex, and web cam cybersex. The data allow the conclusion that most escorts are unwilling to re-embody the first life body for reasons of personal safety and the desire to restrict access to the first life self. I find, however, that there is a porous boundary between first life and Second Life in which the first life self comes through in the Second Life persona. In the concluding remarks, I explore the implications this study has for the negotiation of privacy for new social media actors who are reluctant to fully disclose their lives yet perform a persistent, archived persona for friends and followers on the Internet. This study contributes to a small, but growing, body of literature on Second Life and expands the existing work on embodiment and privacy in the digital realm.

The purpose of this research is to explore the reasons for brand avoidance among Generation Y consumers. Researchers have traditionally focused on the positive relationship between consumers and brands, but, increasingly, consumers are consciously avoiding brands.

A qualitative study consisting of both focus groups and interviews was conducted among Generation Y participants.

The findings support previous research that identifies four types of brand avoidance, namely, experiential, identity, moral and deficit-value avoidance. However, the study also suggests that an additional type of brand avoidance, namely, advertising avoidance, also occurs. Aspects of advertising that can contribute to brand avoidance include the content of the advertising, the use of a celebrity endorser and the music in the advertising, as well as the response to the advertising. This study thus proposes an expanded framework of brand avoidance.

This study has found support for the existing types and reasons impacting brand avoidance but suggests that advertising may also impact brand avoidance. This is an aspect that requires further research.

For marketing managers, the findings suggest that not only can product experiences result in brand avoidance, but that advertising may be a further reason for this phenomenon.

While there has been a great deal of attention on the positive aspects of brands, research on the negative aspects has largely been ignored. Further, the identification of advertising as a reason for brand avoidance is also suggested.

Repeated exposure to unrealistic notions of female beauty and body shapes, and limited gender stereotypes, may result in the internalization of those standards by pre‐adolescent girls. The purpose of this content analysis is to examine the celebrity role models to whom young girls are exposed via magazines specifically targeted at the “tween” audience. Female celebrities are contrasted with those in magazines targeted at older adolescent girls.

Two pre‐adolescent girls' magazines, Total Girl and Barbie, and two adolescent girls' magazines, Dolly and Girlfriend, were analyzed for the first six months of 2005. All photos (including advertising images) of female celebrities were recorded along with image context; celebrity occupation and age were researched.

Results showed that there was little difference between pre‐adolescent girls' magazines and adolescent magazines in the frequency of celebrity images, and surprisingly only minimal difference in the average age of featured celebrities (22 compared with 23 years old). The occupations of the most frequent celebrities (in all magazines) were limited to actors, singers, and socialites. Further examination of the 12 most frequent celebrities appearing in the pre‐adolescent magazines identified that many of them were publicly recorded as engaging in behaviors such as disordered eating and drug use.

The study is novel in its analysis of celebrities in pre‐adolescent magazines, which have grown in popularity over the last decade. The frequent appearance of relatively older celebrities who could be considered age‐inappropriate role‐models is cause for concern; educational interventions that focus on criticality towards female beauty standards need to be reinforced in primary schools.

The purpose of this paper is to trace the changes in the retail outlets that supply erotic products and toys. It explores changes in attitude towards these products over the four decades under review.

The marketing mix (the 4Ps of marketing) is the lens through which the past and contemporary retail environment for such erotic products is examined.

What emerges from the story of the journey from backstreet to online is the change in attitude towards both shops and products, and the development of shops selling sexually‐arousing products to women, a trend unique to the last decades of the twentieth century.

The combination of an historical approach and the theoretical concept of the marketing mix provides a fresh view of the under‐researched area of erotic retailing.

The librarian and researcher have to be able to uncover specific articles in their areas of interest. This Bibliography is designed to help. Volume IV, like Volume III, contains features to help the reader to retrieve relevant literature from MCB University Press' considerable output. Each entry within has been indexed according to author(s) and the Fifth Edition of the SCIMP/SCAMP Thesaurus. The latter thus provides a full subject index to facilitate rapid retrieval. Each article or book is assigned its own unique number and this is used in both the subject and author index. This Volume indexes 29 journals indicating the depth, coverage and expansion of MCB's portfolio.

This paper aims to examine, from a global macro perspective, the relationships between commercial sex, regulatory system and shadow economies.

The paper draws on eight years of research in the sex industries and literature from other sources that explore the nuances of the economic and social organisation of the sex markets in different countries.

First, a four point continuum is presented, based on the following types of economies: legal formal; legal informal; illegal informal and illegal criminal. Second, challenging principles that the sex industry is only “demand” driven, this paper looks at the nature of the sex industry, examining the dynamics of supply in the context of a prolific global shadow sex economy. Third, the concept of “supply” is broadened out to refer not only to women involved in selling direct and indirect sexual services but the legitimate and illegitimate service industries that are ancillary to the sex industry: namely: advertising, marketing, leisure industries, security, policing and welfare.

Contributing to the cultural analysis of the sex industry and drawing on original ethnographic observations, this paper stresses the relevance of the “supply” side of the sex industry, including ancillary industries that support the sex markets in the shadow economies.

The Equal Pay Act 1970 (which came into operation on 29 December 1975) provides for an “equality clause” to be written into all contracts of employment. S.1(2) (a) of the 1970 Act (which has been amended by the Sex Discrimination Act 1975) provides:

A distinction must be drawn between a dismissal on the one hand, and on the other a repudiation of a contract of employment as a result of a breach of a fundamental term of that contract. When such a repudiation has been accepted by the innocent party then a termination of employment takes place. Such termination does not constitute dismissal (see London v. James Laidlaw & Sons Ltd (1974) IRLR 136 and Gannon v. J. C. Firth (1976) IRLR 415 EAT).

The Howard Shuttering Contractors case throws considerable light on the importance which the tribunals attach to warnings before dismissing an employee. In this case the tribunal took great pains to interpret the intention of the parties to the different site agreements, and it came to the conclusion that the agreed procedure was not followed. One other matter, which must be particularly noted by employers, is that where a final warning is required, this final warning must be “a warning”, and not the actual dismissal. So that where, for example, three warnings are to be given, the third must be a “warning”. It is after the employee has misconducted himself thereafter that the employer may dismiss.