Search

Ethnoracial minorities are often racialized and consequently excluded from various consumption contexts. Racialized market actors strive to overcome exclusion and gain participation in markets; however, these efforts are often insufficient because they cannot create equitable access to market resources, fair opportunities for voice, and empowerment to shape market practices. This research identifies digital enclave movements as a unique means by which racialized market actors redirect their resources and mobilize digital network tools to participate in markets. Using a qualitative study of the digital enclave #MyBlackReceipt, the authors explore tactics supporting the formation and sustenance of digital enclaves and how they support participation in markets. The authors identify five tactics that racialized market actors employ to foster digital enclaves and enhance market participation: legitimizing, delimiting, vitalizing, manifesting, and bridging. Last, the authors provide recommendations for policy makers on how to support and foster more equitable participation of ethnic minority groups in markets while addressing the risks of radicalization and the backlash related to enclaves.

Academia has changed over the last decades and so have academic careers. In a 2019 special issue of the journal Academy of Management Learning and Education, we have brought together a set of paper...

This study examines academic isolation – an involuntary perceived separation from the academic field to which one aspires to belong, associated with a perceived lack of agency in terms of one’s engagement with the field – as a key challenge for researchers in increasingly globalized academic careers. While prior research describes early career researchers’ isolation in their institutions, we theorize early career researchers’ isolation in their academic fields and reveal how they attempt to mitigate isolation to improve their career prospects. Using a collaborative autoethnographic approach, we generate and analyze a dataset focused on the experiences of ten early career researchers in a globalizing business academic field known as Consumer Culture Theory. We identify bricolage practices, polycentric governance practices, and integration mechanisms that work to enhance early career researchers’ perceptions of agency and consequently mitigate their academic isolation. Our findings extend discussions on isolation and its role in new academic careers. Early career researchers, in particular, can benefit from a deeper understanding of practices that can enable them to mitigate isolation and reclaim agency as they engage with global academic fields.

Based on three empirical studies, this research sets out to conceptualise and subsequently operationalise the construct of consumer perceived ethicality (CPE) of a company or brand. Study 1 investigates consumer meanings of the term ethical and reveals that, contrary to philosophical scholars’ exclusively consequentialist or nonconsequentialist positions, consumers’ ethical judgments are a function of both these evaluation principles, illustrating that not any one scholarly definition of ethics alone is capable of capturing the content domain. The resulting conceptualisation identifies six key themes explicating the construct. Building upon these findings, studies 2 and 3 were conducted to operationalise CPE. Such operationalisation is an essential prerequisite for future explorations and theory development given the absence of a suitable tool to capture and quantify the strength and direction of CPE. The key focus was on developing a valid and reliable multi-item measurement tool that is practical, parsimonious and easy to administer. The scale’s general applicability allows deployment in academic and business contexts as well as different research areas and doing thus facilitates the much-needed theory building in this new research area.

This research investigates the process of how consumers form ethical perceptions of companies or brands by means of twenty in-depth interviews with general consumers. The study offers illustrative examples of evidence that the formation of consumer perceived ethicality (CPE) appears more in line with the configural model of impression formation, suggesting that perception formation is holistic and gestalt-like, rather than following the algebraic model, which takes a piecemeal information integration position. Given the explorative nature of the study, the paper concludes with developing research propositions for future – confirmative – testing.

This research provides a much needed consumer perspective of corporate ethics. Based on twenty consumer interviews, the study conceptualizes potential sources of ‘consumer perceived ethicality (CPE) of a company/brand by investigating consumers’ ethical perceptions of business behavior. The developed taxonomy delineates six domains and sub-domains of CPE origin, relating to the impact corporate behavior has on: (1) consumers, (2) employees, (3) the environment, (4) the overseas community, (5) the local economy and community, and (6) the business community. The findings underscore that the consumer and company perspective on corporate ethics may differ. More importantly, the results highlight that dimensions of consumer perception of a company/brand’s ethics are far more diverse than previously assumed in the literature.