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This paper seeks to understand how a new elite, known as the cork aristocracy, emerged in the Bordeaux wine field, France, between 1850 and 1929 as wine merchants replaced aristocrats. Classic class and status perspectives, and their distinctive social closure dynamics, are mobilized to illuminate the individual and organizational transformations that affected elite wineries grouped in an emerging classification of the Bordeaux best wines. We build on a wealth of archives and historical ethnography techniques to surface complex status and organizational dynamics that reveal how financiers and industrialists intermediated this transition and how organizations are deeply interwoven into social change.

This study applies Garfinkel’s (1967) concept of ‘breaching experiment’ to explore the impact of COVID-19-induced disruptions on the ‘emotion management’ practices of residential care workers in the United Kingdom and Germany. It examines the influence of professional feeling rules on workers, emphasizing the prescribed importance of displaying affective, empathetic concern for residents’ health and well-being. Findings demonstrate that authenticity and adherence to professional feeling rules in relation to emotional management are not mutually exclusive. The authors underscore how adherence to professional feeling rules upholds authentic care by reinforcing a professional ethos, which acts as a cornerstone motivating residential care workers. Ultimately, the study showcases how a professional ethos substantiates altruistic motivations, guiding proficient emotion management practices among care workers. It highlights how these workers drew upon their personal understanding and experiences to determine the appropriate emotions to express while providing care for residents amid the unprecedented challenges of the pandemic.

This paper aims to explores the escapist journey that consumers embark on to reduce self-discrepancy, from the motivation to satisfy personal goals to the fulfilment of these goals. Escapism is a powerful concept for understanding why and how people resolve a perceived self-discrepancy. Previous research has provided rich and diverse insights into the motivations and goals, experience contexts and outcomes that are associated with escapism. However, these notions have been explored in an independent, piecemeal fashion that has hampered the development of cohesive theoretical foundations.

The authors conduct a qualitative study, relying on 33 journeys derived from 20 in-depth interviews, to understand and explain how escapism is initiated, formed and relived.

The findings document the existence of a predominantly utilitarian and a predominantly hedonic model, articulating why and how consumers pursue distinctly different types of escapist journeys. Utilitarian escapism is primarily concerned with the need to avoid negative emotional states, prompting consumers to decide impulsively to engage into routinised experience contexts to find relief. Hedonic escapism is primarily concerned with the desire to achieve positive emotional states. It involves lengthy and thoughtful anticipation, promotes consumers to pursue experiences in out of the ordinary contexts, and is realised when consumers obtain reward.

This study’s contributions present significant opportunities for further knowledge development.

The research findings have substantial practical ramifications for industry.

Understanding people’s needs to avoid the stress of everyday life (i.e. utilitarian escapism) and their desires to seek out excitement and pleasure (i.e. hedonic escapism) has important societal implications.

This research provides a robust theoretical foundation for escapism, one that is applicable across multiple settings. Findings are anchored within existing theory to articulate the notions of utilitarian and hedonic escapism, explaining why and how consumers engage in markedly different escapist journeys.