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The Bureau of Economics in the Federal Trade Commission has a three-part role in the Agency and the strength of its functions changed over time depending on the preferences and ideology of the FTC’s leaders, developments in the field of economics, and the tenor of the times. The over-riding current role is to provide well considered, unbiased economic advice regarding antitrust and consumer protection law enforcement cases to the legal staff and the Commission. The second role, which long ago was primary, is to provide reports on investigations of various industries to the public and public officials. This role was more recently called research or “policy R&D”. A third role is to advocate for competition and markets both domestically and internationally. As a practical matter, the provision of economic advice to the FTC and to the legal staff has required that the economists wear “two hats,” helping the legal staff investigate cases and provide evidence to support law enforcement cases while also providing advice to the legal bureaus and to the Commission on which cases to pursue (thus providing “a second set of eyes” to evaluate cases). There is sometimes a tension in those functions because building a case is not the same as evaluating a case. Economists and the Bureau of Economics have provided such services to the FTC for over 100 years proving that a sub-organization can survive while playing roles that sometimes conflict. Such a life is not, however, always easy or fun.

Logistics at work is rapidly changing. The changing trend is especially prominent when considering the active involvement of individuals that perform diverse forms of formal/informal “logistics work” (e.g. crowd logistics and self-collection). Thus, by conducting a synthesised review (n = 55), this study aims to provide a typology of individuals' logistics work.

The total social organisation of labour is used as a guiding framework. A deductive literature analysis is performed based on the identified journal articles.

The review findings reveal three major contexts where individuals perform logistics work: formal organisation, social community and private household, with a decreased level of formality. Under each context, individuals may be engaged in paid or unpaid activities, creating six forms of logistics work, termed as paid/voluntary professional logistics, incentivised/friendly social logistics and rewarded/free consumer logistics. Furthermore, an actor–sphere–resource–value conceptualisation of individual logistics is proposed, focussing on the chains of actors, work settings, resource input and value outcome.

The results provide a theoretical foundation for further research in individual- or consumer-centrism in logistics. Two research directions and seven research questions are presented for future investigation.

Consumers’ self-interests and personal goals in attaining collective goals are rarely considered in firm-hosted virtual communities (FHVCs). Based on working consumers paradigm and agency theory, the purpose of this paper is to investigate the joint impact of consumers’ psychological states of empowerment, engagement and entitlement on value cocreation behaviors in FHVCs.

US consumer panel data were used to test the proposed model on customers (n=338) participating in a FHVC.

The results show significant effects of the psychological states of empowerment, engagement and entitlement on value cocreation. Of these three states, psychological empowerment had the strongest effect. The predictive strength of entitlement for value cocreation is weaker for individuals with high knowledge of the community (KC). Practitioner interviews conducted with FHVC managers establish the states and set forth an emerging research agenda.

This study extends the cocreation literature to establish the holistic importance of psychological states as key antecedents of value cocreation for working consumers. It acknowledges agency motives and establishes KC as a moderating condition.

The explication of consumers’ psychological states has implications for the benchmarking and design of consumer portfolios.

This study advances the literature on cocreation by collectively examining three psychological states of consumers through the lens of working consumers paradigm and agency theory. It also establishes KC as an important boundary resource condition.

Can market-based regulation based on consumer pressure and ‘independent monitoring’ serve as the basis for transnational corporation regulation? In an increasingly integrated global economy, many scholars and policy makers fear that mobile capital may force a ‘race to the bottom’; can independent non-governmental organizations and ethical consumers provide a counterweight to cost-cutting pressures? This paper compares three of the best known examples of transnational monitoring – the Sullivan Principles in South Africa, the Rugmark social labeling program in India, and the Commission for the Verification of Codes of Conduct's monitoring experiences in the apparel industry of Guatemala – to consider some common features of transnational monitoring.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the extent to which a marketer’s own priorities as a consumer infiltrate workplace decision-making and how this contamination influences the creation of potential value for the end consumer. The “black box” of the organisation is opened to investigate potential value creation at an individual/manager level of analysis.

The authors gathered in-depth qualitative data from amongst marketing managers and directors in the UK, Australia and the USA. The authors theorised these data through boundary theory to develop an integrated producer-as-consumer potential value creation model.

The paper reveals the dynamic interplay in marketing/production decision-making between the individual’s consumer-self, manager-self and the external interface with the organisation.

The producer-as-consumer potential value creation model illuminates the complex role of the firm and its individual managers in the creation of potential value and identifies contingencies that result in a spectrum of possible potential value creation outcomes. These contributions are positioned within the marketing value creation and co-creation literatures.

Marketing organisations/managers may find this research useful when considering the benefits and drawbacks of integrating managers’ consumer-self insights into workplace decision-making and the creation of potential value for the end consumer.

This paper moves value creation/co-creation theory forward by revealing the dynamic potential value creation process and presenting a fluid representation of producers-as-consumers, at individual manager level. This paper is of interest to academic and marketing practitioner audiences.

The purpose of this paper is to address the question of cultural production, consumption and intermediation in the context of digital music.

This research adopts an interpretivist, ethnoconsumerist epistemology along with a netnographic research design combined with hermeneutic analysis. Interpreting both the text view and field view of an ethnoconsumerist approach, the netnographic research design includes participant observation across multiple social media platforms as well as virtual interviews and analysis of media material. The context of application is a digital music subculture known as Vaporwave. Vaporwave participants deliberately distort fundamental aspects of modern and postmodern culture in a digital, musical, artistic and storied manner.

Hermeneutic analysis has identified a critical and nostalgic narrative of consumerism and hyper-reality, evident as symbolic parallels, intertextual relationships, existential themes and cultural codes. As a techno savvy community embracing lo-fi production, self-releasing promotion and anonymity from within a complexity of aliases and myriad collaborations, the vaporous existentialism of Vaporwave participants skirts copyright liability in the process. Accordingly, Vaporwave is documented as blurring reality and fantasy, material and symbolic, production and consumption. Essentially, Vaporwave participants are shown to be digital natives turned digital rebels and heretical consumers, better described as cultural curators.

This research demonstrates a more complex notion of cultural production, consumption and intermediation, argued to be more accurately described as cultural curation.

As digital heretics, Vaporwave participants challenge traditional notions of modernity, such as copyright law, and postmodern notions such as working consumers and consuming producers.

Vaporwave participants present a case of digital natives turned digital rebels and consumer heretics, who are actively curating culture.

This interpretive ethnoconusmerist study combining netnography and hermeneutic analysis of an online underground music subculture known as Vaporwave shows digital music artists as cultural curators.

The purpose of this paper is to cover the gap from the previous literature with regard to the cognitive and the behavioural component of attitude of consumers. The literature was scant in examining the influence of the mostly used traits on the purchase behaviour and the switching behaviour of consumers. Therefore, this research paper examines the impact of different marketing strategies used by the advertisers on the components of the attitude of the consumers.

First, the perception of the consumers towards the traits was measured by the factor analysis approach. Second, the impact of the traits on the purchase behaviour of consumers was scrutinized using regression analysis, and then descriptive statistics approach was used to analyse the switching behaviour and the most important tactic used in the advertisement.

The results indicate that repeated exposure, comparison of products and sexual appeals has a significant impact on the mind of consumers which determines the influence of advertising tactics. Further, the results evaluated that information, pricing element, image of company and sexual appeal are the other important traits influencing the cognitive attitude of consumers. The consumers switch to the advertised products which indicate the behavioural change with the impact of advertisement.

This research paper is suffering from some limitations as the area of research is restrained to the urban population of three districts of Punjab only, i.e. Amritsar, Jalandhar and Ludhiana, because of which the results cannot be generalized for other areas. Due to the changing behaviour and the attitude, income level and media, the response of the consumers in the present study may not be relevant in the future period. The study was confined to the working women consumers only and does not represent the whole population.

This research paper provides an insight to the marketers. The managers can measure how by using appropriate tactics can they make their advertising more effective. In case of unfamiliar products, the attitude of consumers to accept or to avoid the product is influenced by the tactics used by the marketers. It was recommended that the marketers must use the appropriate tactics to make their products/brands more pertinent and important among the consumers.

This research paper examines the impact of TV advertisement of beauty products on the components of the attitude of the urban working women consumers. This study presents the influence of the various marketing strategies used in the advertisement to influence the purchase and the switching behaviour of consumers.

The purpose of this study is to understand how and why consumers engage in market-shaping activities on behalf of firms.

This study uses a combination of archival, netnographic and interview methods to examine how consumers responded to the entry of Tesla into the U.S. automotive market.

Consumers are driven to engage in supportive institutional work by the culturally resonant ideologies embodied in Tesla’s strategic orientation. This work takes both discursive and practical forms and sees consumers adopting responsibilities typically associated with other actors, including activists and sales professionals.

In developing an account of an understudied phenomenon – consumers’ firm-supportive market shaping – this research extends theorization around institutional work and cultural branding.

The purpose is to argue that market-generated and brand-related phenomena such as fandoms work as a social and institutional force beyond the market and to showcase their influence on the society as a whole.

The influence of fandoms on many societal institutions is explored through the literature on fandom studies and consumer research.

The research indicates that market-generated resources and their related sociocultural dynamics play a significant role in shaping the evolution of many institutions of current societies.

The research is exclusively focused on fandoms despite the varied facets of market-related sociocultural dynamics, opportunity exists for research beyond the exploratory work done here shifting the focus from fandoms to brand systems.

Researchers, especially in Consumer Culture Theory (CCT), may use the perspective shift from market to society to enlarge the scope to new fields of study, out of the market.

The research provides new lenses to understand emerging phenomena in fields such as religion and/or politics difficult to understand with traditional frameworks.

This paper provides exploratory research identifying market-related social and institutional processes and emphasizing how they influence other societal institutions, such as family, religion, corporations, professions, and politics; rather than bringing social and institutional processes into the marketplace.

This paper aims to conceptualize brand repulsion as a specific nuance of brand rejection, highlight the boundary work at play in situations of collective brand repulsion and extract implications for the brands that are at the centre of such situations and to delineate future directions for scholars.

The authors’ study of the “I Hate Apple” group on Facebook is grounded in a six-year long naturalistic enquiry designed to capture the boundary work performed by its members. The authors’ sources include netnographic data, online focus groups, observations and personal online correspondence with members and moderators.

This study’s findings reveal that certain brands serve the identity work of consumers by allowing them in erecting boundaries based on three major sources of repulsion: anti-fandom, anti-hegemony and anti-marketing. They show that for each type of boundary work, corporate and product brand repulsion seems prevalent.

This research limits itself to considering the types of boundary work related to brand repulsion as regards a single brand: Apple.

The study can help managers identify the types(s) of boundary work related to their brand and it provides practical recommendations for these various sources of brand repulsion. It also helps them distinguish between consumer brand repulsion directed against their product and their corporation.

This study advances knowledge in the field of brand rejection by exploring a specific nuance: brand repulsion. Its close examination of consumer collective practices offers a deeper understanding of the ins and outs of the paradoxical phenomenon of repulsion/attraction for a brand. The cultural lens is used as an original approach to this under-investigated nuance of brand rejection.