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This study aims to offer insights into the embodied concerns that underpin men’s personal grooming practices through which they experience their body as the “existential ground of culture and self” and manage their everyday bodily presentation.

This study analyses 16 interviews with male consumers of age between 20 and 76. The interpretative analysis is informed by both Merleau-Ponty’s concept of the body-subject and the sociology of the body as discursively constituted.

This study proposes four bodily identity positions that link individual personal grooming practices to specific embodied concerns. These bodily identity positions underline the different ways the male body is called upon to carve out a meaningful existence.

The research findings are not intended to generalise or to be exhaustive. Rather, it is hoped that they may stimulate readers to think more deeply about the role of the body in aiding male consumers to seek maximum grip on their life-world.

The study findings provide marketers with rich narratives for brand positioning and image development beyond the traditional sexual and/or alpha male-themed marketing and advertising. They also offer preliminary insights for mental health practitioners into how the male body shapes men’s identity development and experiences of well-being.

The study identifies the different ways personal grooming can become assimilated into an individual’s system of beliefs and practices. It also offers empirical support for a definition of the body as active and acted upon, especially with respect to male grooming.

Explores men’s increasing use of grooming products by considering the link between the construction of the male concept under postmodern conditions and the consumption of toiletries. Applies an interpretist research approach, incorporating phenomenological interviewing and emic as well as interpretative group techniques to data analysis. Suggests that men consume male grooming products to alter their body and body image and proposes that through changing this image, the respondents aimed either to create or to alter their “self‐identity”. Also suggests that the respondents consume male grooming products not simply for the tangible benefits they provide but also for the meanings conveyed by consuming them. Concludes that image creation, concerns about enhancing one’s attractiveness, reducing the ageing process and the maintenance of health are factors combined with the pleasure of using grooming products which fuel the current market growth.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate how dimensions of body image relate to product involvement among gay men.

A survey consisting of body image and product involvement measures was administered to 147 self-identified gay men. Multiple regression was used to examine the relations of the significant body image variables to each of the consumer behavior outcomes in separate analyses.

The more the men were behaviorally invested in their appearance predicted a higher frequency of shopping each month for apparel and grooming-related products. The stronger the men’s psychological drive to have a lean body and the more they focused on their appearance and invested in their looks, the more likely they were to view apparel as important to them. The more psychologically and behaviorally involved the gay men reported being with their appearance, the more importance they gave to grooming-related products.

The sample was drawn primarily from a college population, limiting findings to this age cohort.

The findings of the current research demonstrate the importance of appearance management products to the gay market, where commodities are often used to enhance or maintain a perceived self-image. Retailers can use this information to establish appropriate service options and effective marketing initiatives.

This study replicated others that have investigated gay men’s involvement in consumer products. However, the current study looked at the relationship between involvement and body image.

Formal structured leadership training is increasingly incorporated as a regular fixture in developed nations to produce competent leaders to ensure the provision of quality patient care. However, most low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) rely on one-off external training opportunities for selected individuals as they lack the necessary resources to implement long-term training for a wider pool of potential health care leaders. This case study shares the establishment process of the Talent Grooming Programme for technical health care professionals (TGP), a three-year in-house leadership training programme specially targeted at potential health care leaders in Malaysia.

This case study aims to share a comprehensive overview of the ideation, conceptualisation and implementation of TGP. The authors also outlined its impact from the individual and organisational perspectives, besides highlighting the lessons learned and recommendations for the way forward.

TGP set out to deliver experiential learning focusing on formal training, workplace experiences, practical reflection and mentoring by supervisors and other esteemed leaders to fulfil the five competency domains of leadership, organisational governance, communication and relationship, professional values and personal values. The successes and challenges in TGP programme delivery, post-training assessment, outcome evaluation and programme sustainability were outlined.

The authors’ experience in setting up TGP provided valuable learning points for other leadership development programme providers. As for any development programme, a continuous evaluation is vital to ensure its relevance and sustainability.

Certain aspects of TGP establishment can be referenced and modified to adapt to country-specific settings for others to develop similar leadership programme, especially those in LMICs.

This paper aims to systematically review male cosmetics consumption (CC) literature and, given the dearth of research about the topic, especially on Western emerging country contexts, to shed light on the paradoxical behaviour concerning male grooming by empirically assessing the impact of some psychological and demographic antecedents of consumption.

Six hypotheses derived from a systematic review of the literature were tested through structured equation modelling (SEM), based on data of 476 Brazilian men.

The results empirically sustain the positive influence of vanity and masculinity in grooming product consumption, with partial mediation of vanity between masculinity and consumption. Counterintuitively, it also confirms the negative influence of income. Age and marital status are not statistically relevant.

Practitioners should invest in marketing actions focusing on low-income men, who showed genuine interest in grooming products, promoting them as powerful tools to improve appearance and social recognition. Additionally, educational and wellness-related campaigns could be effective.

Beyond profitability, economic growth and men’s well-being, the results might affect the whole society through male cosmetics' contribution to blending gender paradigms.

This study focuses on an economically relevant segment that defies the status quo. It is the first to systematically demonstrate the state of the art of male CC knowledge and to illuminate the role of psychological and demographic variables in influencing CC, enriching the literature on appearance, gender and consumption.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the applicability of the consumer‐brand typology developed by Fournier to a segment of heterosexual male shoppers of fashion and grooming products.

In‐depth interviews, collage constructions, and shopping trip observations are the three methods of inquiry in this research.

A total of 13 of the 15 brand relationships detailed by Fournier are affirmed. Three new relationships emerge in the data demonstrating the fluidity of the typology across market segments and sociocultural contexts.

The research findings provide implications for other consumption contexts which aid in identity construction. In addition, some of the new relationships that emerge from the text may be prevalent among other segments of men, and/or women.

Managers must be cognizant of the variety of brand relationships that men form with regard to fashion and grooming in order to effectively appeal to this growing market. The new relationships identified exhibit the goal‐driven nature of men's engagement with brands. The prevalence of secretive and adversarial relationships also demonstrates that marketers and retailers must be mindful of men's boundaries of consumption.

Fournier highlights the importance of context to brand relationships. However, little research has investigated the relevance of the original typology across contexts and across segments. This research explores a particular sociocultural consumption context and discovers new relationship forms not previously identified among a segment of male shoppers.

The purpose of this paper is to present a new core hypothesis on laughter. It has been built by putting together ideas from several disciplines: neurodynamics, evolutionary neurobiology, social networks, and communication studies. The hypothesis focusses on the social nature of laughter and contributes to ascertain its evolutionary origins in connection with the cognitive and social-emotional functions it performs.

An in-depth examination of laughter in the social communication context and along the life cycle of the individual is performed. This instinctive behaviour that appears as a “virtual”, non-physical form of “grooming” would serve as a bond-making instrument in human groups. Further, the neurodynamic events underlying laughter production – and particularly the form of the neural entropy gradients – are congruent with a sentic hypothesis about the different emotional contents of laughter and their specific effects on bonding dynamics.

The new behavioural and neurodynamic tenets introduced about this unusual sound feature of our species justify the ubiquitous presence it has in social interactions at large and along the life cycle of the individual. Laughter, far from being a curious evolutionary relic or a rather inconsequential innate behaviour, should be considered as a highly efficient tool for inter-individual problem solving and for maintenance of social bonds.

Laughter, the authors would conclude, has been evolutionarily kept and augmented as an optimized tool for unconscious cognitive-emotional problem solving, and at the same time as a useful way to preserve the essential fabric of social bonds in close-knit groups and within human societies at large.

Despite the fact that about 90 percent of all the businesses in the US and Canada are family‐owned and operated, very little research has been undertaken on how strategy is shaped in family businesses. This paper tracks strategy in two family firms since their inception to their present third generation management, to investigate the unique factors influencing strategy in family businesses. The paper accentuates issues relating to the intensive grooming process and the involvement of the different family and non‐family members in the strategic decision making processes of the family business.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate hazards for minor users while they are exposed to social networks. In particular, it provides the statistical relationship of these hazards with the exposure time as well as the amount of published personal information.

An experiment was conducted that has revealed a huge number of personal information exposed by users of social network applications. Moreover, a significant amount of suspicious activity against minors has been recorded. Experimental data led to the hypothesis that online hazards can be modeled with known statistical distributions. In order to examine this hypothesis, survival analysis techniques, which involve the estimation of certain functions that reflect the relation of a disastrous event with time, were applied.

The results show that the incoming hazards for minor female profiles follow the Logistic distribution, while the corresponding hazards for minor male profiles follow the Normal distribution.

The findings of this work are crucial for developing an effective system for automated grooming recognition in real time by optimizing the detection threshold as a function of time. Thus, the threshold sensitivity can be appropriately adjusted such that lower frequencies of occurrence lead to lower threshold sensitivities, and higher frequencies of occurrence lead to higher threshold sensitivities.

This paper aims to investigate the attitude of males toward the consumption and purchase of men's cosmetic products. More specifically, the research intends to clarify the impact of personal variables (i.e. self‐image consciousness, ageing effects, physical attractiveness, state of health), socio‐cultural variables (i.e. beliefs, lifestyle), and marketing variables (i.e. advertising, purchase situation) on the attitude of Canadian and French males toward the purchase and consumption of men's cosmetics.

A questionnaire was distributed to men living in two metropolitan cities: Paris (France) and Montreal (Canada). The total sample consists of 223 respondents of which 53.8 per cent are Canadian and 46.2 per cent French.

French and Canadian men were found to have different motivations and drives when considering the consumption and purchase of men's grooming products.

The convenience sampling technique used in the present research does not indicate a fully representative profile of the population in Canada and France. Also, it is important to extend the research to some “conservative” societies. Men's cosmetic products in both countries are at different stages of the life cycle and accordingly consumers' attitudes and motivations to buy cosmetics are found to vary between the two countries.

Despite the fact that the cosmetic market is traditionally associated with women, the current paper contributes to shedding light on the importance of the men's grooming segment, revealing the major variables that affect men's behavior and attitude toward the consumption of cosmetic products and pointing out that consumers' motivations and attitudes differ among markets when the product is at different stages of the life cycle.