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Comparable worth is a theory that has been hailed as the issue of the 90's. Lee Finney, feminist and labour activist from Contra Costa County, asserted in 1986, “It may not be the issue of the eighties. But it's the issue of the nineties. Comparable worth is here to stay”[2, p.202]. Comparable worth has also been referred to as being overblown [3,p.121] and looney [2, p.52]. With so many diverse comments, an analysis of the current and future status of comparable worth is controversial.

Despite the rich history of examining the connections between symbolic consumption and identity formation, nearly all the research has focused on brands and possessions; the role of activities has been critically overlooked. This study aims to expand marketing’s understanding of identity formation by examining it in conjunction with attribution theory, exploring the relationship between activity engagement and separation distress.

A pilot study (n = 90) using a thematic content analysis reveals six themes (i.e. separation distress, negative emotions, indifference, adapting, positive decision and acceptance), providing support for the conceptual model. The main study (n = 347) tests the conceptual model via five hypotheses.

Self-worth match with an activity predicts the perceived separation distress of stopping the activity. Furthermore, self-activity connection mediates this relationship, but only if consumers believe they are in control of or the cause for stopping the activity.

This research provides critical baseline understanding of activity consumption. Yet, future research on the topic of activities is needed to advance activity engagement as a unique category of consumer behavior.

To craft effective messaging and strategies, marketers should consider the meaning and value embedded in consumer activities (not just possessions and brands).

This research reveals that consumers use activities to construct their identity and manage their self-worth. It also demonstrates that stopping an activity may lead to separation distress.

The purpose of this paper is twofold: first, to validate the Contingencies of Self-Worth Scale (CSWS) for adolescents with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and typically developing individuals and, second, examine the association between contingencies of self-worth and subjective adjustment to school.

A self-report was used to examine both contingencies of self-worth and subjective adjustment to school in adolescents with ASD and typically developing individuals.

First, the validity and reliability of the CSWS was verified. Second, the scale was not significant correlation with subjective adjustment to school and contingencies of self-worth in adolescents with ASD. As the reason for this, it has been suggested that there are adaptive aspects and maladaptive aspects in contingencies of self-worth.

This is an original research designed to examine contingencies of self-worth in adolescents with ASD.

The Mallinson Report, published in 1994, emphasised the need for valuers to develop expertise for the purpose of estimating the worth of property investments. Implicit in attempts to estimate worth is the assumption that the property market displays some level of inefficiency and that, in such a market, price and worth may diverge. It is believed that astute investors can exploit such inefficiencies in the market to add value to their portfolios. This paper reviews the main issues relating to the calculation of worth. Specifically it examines market efficiency, individual and market worth, and the use of risk analysis in the calculation. Finally, it recommends a shorter analysis period in view of the uncertainty in the estimation of the variables.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the effect of self-worth on status consumption, focusing on the mediation of self-enhancement and self-compensation and the moderation of power distance belief (PDB) in the relationship of threats to self-worth and consumer choice.

Experiments are used to collect data. Three studies are designed to test the relationship between self-worth, self-enhancement and self-compensation, PDB and status consumption. In total, 180 MBA students participate Study 1, 186 and 244 undergraduate students participate Studies 2 and 3, respectively. ANOVA and bootstrapping method are adopted to analyze the data by using SPSS version 19.0. Study 1 tests the influence of self-worth on status consumption; Study 2 examines the mediation role of self-enhancement and self-compensation; and Study 3 tests the moderation role of PDB.

Results indicate that situational self-worth perception has dual path effects on status consumption. Both improvements in – and threats to – self-worth have a positive impact on status consumption. Improvements in self-worth affect status consumption through the mediation of self-enhancement motives. Threats to self-worth affect status and non-status consumption through the mediation of the self-compensation motive. In the context of a threat to self-worth, compared with consumers with a low PDB, high-PDB consumers have higher purchase intention for status goods but not non-status goods.

In this study, improvements in – and threats to – self-worth are momentarily manipulated. The authors present one product in each experiment, but what would happen if both status goods and non-status goods were shown to participants? Which one will the authors choose under different self-worth manipulations? And how long can the effects last? These questions should be answered in future research.

This research provides a venue for marketers to introduce and advertise status goods. Marketing practitioners should establish the link between self-worth and status consumption appeals. In the Asia-Pacific markets, Confucian value is important to consumers, and high power distance is important in Confucianism. Thus when developing markets in China, international companies should emphasize Confucian values in the design of advertisements or other promotional items. Further, marketing for status goods should attach importance to the expression of their symbolic meanings.

This study contributes to the literature on self-worth and status consumption. It also explores the dual path of the effect of self-worth on status consumption. The motives of self-enhancement and self-compensation are first proposed and tested to explain the mechanism, which differentiates the study from prior work and gives a more reasonable explanation for status and compensatory consumption. The moderation role of PDB delineates the boundary for the effect of a threat to self-worth on status consumption.

A large earnings gap between men and women has persisted in the USA despite legislation intended to reduce it. One cause of this has been thought to be systematic marketplace undervaluing of tasks performed by women. The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission sought to address this perceived inequity by reviving a 1940s concept, “comparable worth”. This article examines litigation that sought to enforce the legal requirement of “equal pay for comparable worth” and the implementation problems and controversies that ensue.

The feasibility of using job evaluation procedures to establish non‐biased pay structure is a central issue in the debate over comparable worth. Results of two investigations indicate that even under carefully controlled conditions job evaluation results are highly susceptible to random and systematic errors on the part of the evaluators, and are apt to vary significantly from the concept of worth underlying the evaluation plan. The choice of evaluation instruments or scoring procedure can also have a major impact on results. Thus, the feasibility of using job evaluation results as the governing criterion of the relative worth of jobs is highly questionable.

Accounting for the worth of employees continues to attract the attention of accounting scholars. After more than thirty years of interest in the topic, however, comparatively little progress has been made in responding to the challenge of taking humans into account. A major reason for this may be that accounting for the worth of employees has hitherto been too closely bound up with the problematics of financial accounting and financial reporting. This has resulted in the widespread practice of conceptualising employee worth in terms of the hard accounting numbers normally associated with the discipline. Drawing on recent developments in the fields of both accounting for strategic positioning and critical accounting, this paper explores the promise which the emergence of a concern with the provision of soft(er) accounting information holds for any future attempts to account for employee worth.

This study aims to illuminate the way in which consumers question the authenticity and worth of musicians, leading to a classification of selling out. The authors contribute to the debate on authenticity by attending to the question of worth that is under-examined in existing literature, by drawing upon French pragmatic sociology with specific attention to convention theory to understand conflicting interpretations of worth.

The considerations music fans go through navigating whether artists are selling out and the loss of worth were explored through 22 semi-structured interviews, complemented by focus group discussions (20 participants) and analysis of an online video blog.

The study identified three key themes: “Authenticity and Worth in the Inspired World”, “Selling Out as Loss of Worth” and “Signifiers of Selling Out”.

The emergent themes enable us to understand the worth that consumers place on musical artists, and the clash between the ideologies of the market world and the inspired world. The ideas regarding selling out and the signifiers may apply to other consumption experiences where the clash between the inspired and the market worlds exists and the conflicting ethos of each can lead to a loss of worth and selling out.

In this research, the authors examine situations in which consumers stigmatise as “sell outs”, artists who are marketised under the influence of capitalist social relations of production. As a result, these artists lose their authenticity and worth in the eyes of consumers. In doing so, this research contributes to the debate on authenticity by attending to the question of worth that is under-examined in existing literature.

The purpose of this paper is to introduce and illustrate the insights of the sociology of worth as advanced by sociologist Luc Boltanski and his collaborator economist/statistician Laurent Thévenot in their works, including their path‐breaking book De la justification published in 1991.

The paper explores the basic tenets of this “new sociology” and draws on it to render a reinterpretation of Ansari and Euske's study of cost accounting in a military depot.

The sociology of worth complements extant sociological approaches to accounting by providing a language and a conceptual tool‐box for understanding the multiple rationalities in which accounting is implicated. In addition, given its pragmatic micro level approach to accounting, it has the potential to act as a bridge between institutional theory and practice theory.

This paper is the first known to render an extensive discussion of Boltanski and Thévenot's work in the accounting literature and to apply insights from this work to accounting research.