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In the popular imagination sex sells. Yet, marketing theory has relatively little to say about sexuality per se. Drawing on Žižek's metaphor of critical theory as 'short-circuiting' the dominant discourse, we conceptualise marketing as a field that theorises sexuality only in a series of 'closed circuits'. Knowledge becomes hierarchical when some topics, such as sexuality, are denied the theoretical freedom to roam in wider open circuits alongside other 'mainstream' marketing topics. We identify four ways in which certain topics are enclosed: theoretical, empirical, institutional and neo-colonial. We then seek to short-circuit this state of affairs by bringing together a heterogeneous group of scholars interested in sexuality. By crossing their critical insights like unexpected connections in a circuit, we create sparks of inspiration that challenge the contents, contexts and concepts that relate to marketing theories of sexuality. Our paper makes a specific theoretical contribution in arguing for sexuality to be treated as a phenomenon worth studying and theorising in its own right. However, it also makes a wider methodological and epistemological contribution in showing how various topics within marketing theory might be short-circuited to help flatten the hierarchies of knowledge created by closed and open circuits. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study bridges CCT and macromarketing perspectives in carrying out an ethnographic study examining how Moroccan women empower themselves in shopping in the supermarket. Our three-year ethnographic study in Casablanca among women and men illuminates the ways in which women develop new capabilities and alter social relations with family members, friends, store employees and customers. In turn, the interplay of women's competencies, their interactions with men and women, and their socio-demographics of age and social class, together with supermarket characteristics, provide favorable conditions for the women to empower themselves. As women gain confidence to demonstrate their competencies and manifest their desires in leveraging their traditional nurturing roles and taking on tasks previously in the domain of men, they alter their relations with their husband and with the women who exercise control over them. Theoretical contributions contribute to knowledge of the importance of gender and family interactions as they impact the acquisition of key competencies in novel marketspaces through which women empower themselves, and generate further insight into the complex interweaving of market and social systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The predominant value discourse among scholars characterizes value cocreation as involving multiple actors at the micro-, meso-, and macrolevels in service systems. This research contributes to the knowledge of the interdependencies among multiple resource-integrating actors and value outcomes by employing a relational perspective on value cocreation within the empirical context of family caregiving. The findings reveal how interdependent actors orchestrate value cocreation in service systems, how this impacts value, and how orchestration precipitates system adjustments, which form the recursive context of value cocreation over time. We differentiate and delineate three multi-actor orchestration mechanisms— assembling, performing, and brokering —through which nonreferent beneficiaries coordinate value cocreation on behalf of dependent referent beneficiaries. We term the mutually generalized oscillating multiform negative and positive well-being outcomes that emerge from orchestration among interdependent actors as relational value. In employing the metaphor of the kaleidoscope to emphasize system dynamism, our discussion of relational value cocreation deepens our understanding of how nonreferent beneficiary-led orchestration, founded on generalized mutuality and on behalf of referent beneficiaries with reduced agency, enhances and balances multiform, oscillating and positive and negative well-being outcomes in service systems. This will help service practitioners facilitate orchestration and optimize value for all. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Situated at the intersection of markets and development, this commentary aims to promote a cross-fertilization of macromarketing and Transformative Consumer Research (TCR) that directs attention to the sociocultural context and situational embeddedness of consumer experience and well-being, while acknowledging complex, systemic interdependencies between markets, marketing, and society. Based on a critical review of the meaning of development and an interrogation of various developmental discourses, the authors develop a conceptual framework that brings together issues of development, well-being, and social inequalities. We suggest that these issues are better understood and addressed when examined via grounded investigations of the role of markets in shaping the management of resources, consumer agency, power inequalities and ethics. The use of markets as units of analysis may lead to further cross-fertilizations of TCR and macromarketing and to more comprehensive theorizing and transformational impact. Two empirical cases are provided to illustrate our framework. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

It is well known that markets are value creating economic, social and cultural systems. In marketing, Sydney Levy originally proposed symbolic value as the notion underlying consumption activity. This was followed by Kotler's elaboration of customer value or customer satisfaction as the basis and justification for marketing. We have also seen the emergence of exchange value and use value in the works of Bagozzi and Holbrook respectively as the corner stone of all marketing and consumption activities. More recently, with the emergence of brand marketing globally, Peñaloza and Venkatesh introduced the notion of sign value, asserting that the market economy is tending toward a sign economy. Thus markets are viewed as social/cultural constructions and what is created is a system of meanings, especially in the global and cross-cultural environments. It is in the broad context of established works and more specifically in the context of consumer culture that we comment on Karababa and Kjeldgaard's article in this issue that takes the value discourse one step further by enunciating a cultural paradigm. They present a comprehensive analysis that includes “exchange value,” “perceived value,” “value as cognitive evaluation,” “social values and value systems,” “value as co-created,” “aesthetic value,” and “identity and linking value.” We believe that Karababa/Kjeldgaard's framework is a good start and is indeed a contribution to the growing literature on market value. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: This paper conceptualised a model of customer trust in buyer–seller relationships in rural India by integrating variables studied in developed counties with the emphasis of social aspects of market exchange by including generalised trust sources. We have applied Fishbein’s model of behavioural intention and Fafchamps’s (2002) trust theory in developing countries and proposed that the customer trust is not only based on often-studied personalised trust sources only but also through generalised trust sources. In the model, we have included normative and informational social influences as generalised trust sources and product quality, service quality and customer dependence as personalised trust sources. We empirically validated our model with the survey data collected from farmers who buy chemical fertilisers from rural traders in India. We found that the generalised trust sources significantly impact customer trust for traders. Furthermore, we also found that the personalised trust sources impact customer trust for traders in a different way in rural India. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

This paper contributes theoretical and practical understandings regarding market co-creation by cross-fertilizing insights from consumer culture theory (CCT) on the production of meaning with service-dominant logic (SDL) on the co-creation of value. Examining nine firms acting to achieve environmental, social, and economic sustainability, we suggest that cultural meanings are an important part of the value elaborated in SDL, and conversely that such value informs the meanings emphasized in CCT. Findings demonstrate three levels of meaning and value negotiated by multiple actors in markets: cosmological principles, norms and standards, and individual judgments and interpretations. Discussion deciphers key overlaps and distinctions between meaning and value, operand and operant resources, and economic, social and environmental domains as they converge in market co-creation. Contributions theorize asymmetries of value and meaning in the intricate interweaving of social and market domains characterizing contemporary market co-creation. We close with practical implications for consumers, firms, and public policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This work calls for a paradigmatic shift from marketing techniques and concepts to markets as a social construction. Our argument is composed of six facets: (1) revisioning the creation of value in markets to include meanings; (2) reconsidering the efficacy and limits of working from the perspective of the marketer; (3) incorporating more conscientiously consumer subjectivity and agency; (4) reformulating the nature of relationships between consumers and marketers from individuals to social beings inhabiting communities; (5) addressing more explicitly cultural differences in the form of subcultures within nations and international differences between nations in level of development; and finally, (6) exhorting the importance of marketer reflexivity. In charting these key transitions and tracing them to particular academic communities over time, we work towards a more radically transformative marketing practice that is socio-historically situated, culturally sensitive, and organic, in accounting for and adapting to contemporary global, technological, and socio-cultural developments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]