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This systematic literature review enhances paradigmatic/metaphysic analyses by examining how value-based commitments, intellectual personae, and stances impact the diversity, relevance, and consideration of ethics in gender research published by the top-tier marketing journals in the past 30 years. Theoretical contributions (1) explain how commitments to research values and practices constitute personae and particular stances toward research, (2) attribute value commitments to quantitative/positivist as well as qualitative/neohumanist research, and (3) implicate stances that favor particular theories and procedures and in turn enable the hierarchical development of gender research and its marginalization in the field. Recommendations elaborate the analytic, reflexive, and administrative training and research activities that will foster and reward more relevant, accurate, and ethical research on gender in the marketing academy and in industry. This work is of interest to persons dealing with gender identities, communities, and social issues, those working for greater gender representation and participation in firms and civic organizations, and those concerned with leveraging better marketing research for a better world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How do brands change in environments defined by increasing consumer heterogeneity? Drawing on assemblage theory, this research develops the concepts of brand morphogenesis and consumer sub-assemblage to explain how heterogeneous consumer groups instigate, reinforce, and hinder the evolution of a brand. This longitudinal case study of a Swedish fashion brand delineates the role of heterogeneous consumer sub-assemblages in the continual process of emergence and transformation of a brand assemblage through space and time—a process defined as brand morphogenesis. The findings detail brand morphogenesis in the sub-assemblage dynamics of exploration, actualization, and habituation of value, as heterogeneous consumer groups form consumer sub-assemblages in interaction with other brand components and interact in patterns of coexisting with, coopting, and contesting other sub-assemblages. By charting consumers' value negotiations as they play out within and among consumer sub-assemblages, this research contributes to understanding continuity and change for brands that face increasing consumer heterogeneity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This commentary situates the articles comprising this special issue within the four topics listed in its title. Among these four topics in the field of marketing, consumption and marketing are well-established, markets continues to gaining currency, and market organisation is emerging. It offers four areas of further work to advance gender studies in our field: compensation and the distribution of wealth, gendered consumption and market technologies, religion, and science. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article was written by the organization, GENMAC (www.genmac.co), and has been approved by all members of the GENMAC Board and Council. While some may propose that Title IX is one way for marketing professional associations to address academic DHA, we note that this law falls short in addressing all the systemic power dynamics at play within an institution and an academic discipline (Corlett & Brillon, [4]). Conceptual concerns Overall, the four dimensions framing this study, general experience, explicit discrimination, implicit bias, and social and sexual harassment/assault, are not conceptually distinct nor well-grounded in previous research on gender DHA. [Extracted from the article]

In order to understand the connection between development, marketing and transformative consumer research (TCR), with its attendant interest in promoting human well-being, this article begins by charting the links between US ‘exceptionalism’, ‘Manifest Destiny’ and modernisation theory, demonstrating the confluence of US perspectives and experiences in articulations and understandings of the contributions of marketing practice and consumer research to society. Our narrative subsequently engages with the rise of social marketing (1960s-) and finally TCR (2006-). We move beyond calls for an appreciation of paradigm plurality to encourage TCR scholars to adopt a multiple paradigmatic approach as part of a three-pronged strategy that encompasses an initial ‘provisional moral agnosticism’. As part of this stance, we argue that scholars should value the insights provided by multiple paradigms, turning each paradigmatic lens sequentially on to the issue of the relationship between marketing, development and consumer well-being. After having scrutinised these issues using multiple perspectives, scholars can then decide whether to pursue TCR-led activism. The final strategy that we identify is termed ‘critical intolerance’. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Research into consumer ethnicity is a vital discipline that has substantially evolved in the past three decades. This conceptual article critically reviews its immense literature and examines the extent to which it has provided extensive contributions not only for the understanding of ethnicity in the marketplace but also for personal/collective well-being. We identify two gaps accounting for scant transformative contributions. First, today social transformations and conceptual sophistications require a revised vocabulary to provide adequate interpretive lenses. Second, extant work has mostly addressed the subjective level of ethnic identity projects but left untended the meso/macro forces affecting ethnicity (de)construction and personal/collective well-being. Our contribution stems from filling both gaps and providing a theory of ethnicity (de)construction that includes migrants as well as non-migrants. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This research develops a theoretical account of cultural meanings as integral mechanisms in the normalization of credit/debt. Analysis derives these meanings from the credit/debt discourses and practices of 27 white middle-class consumers in the United States and tracks their negotiation in patterns and trajectories in social and market domains. Discussion elaborates the ways informants normalize credit/ debt in transposing their categories, in improvising meaning combinations, and in suturing the meaning patterns to particular subject positions in constituting themselves as consumers. Theoretical contributions (1) distinguish consumers' collaborative production of cultural meanings with friends, family, and others in the social domain and with financial agents and institutions in the market domain and (2) document the productive capacities of these meanings in patterns and trajectories in configuring people as consuming subjects. Implications situate such cultural reproduction processes in the United States in discussing how the national legacy of abundance informs the normalization of credit/debt. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An introduction is presented for several previously published articles on consumer research, together with abstracts of these articles, discussing topics such as normalization of credit and debt, connections between life satisfaction and societal poverty, and consumption patterns during economic recessions.

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]

This commentary applauds the growing body work in critical marketing and encourages its engagement with community development. Such work might usefully leverage critical marketing concepts and research methods to foster the inclusion of social differences defined in terms of race, ethnicity, gender, religion, and disability in market development. Theoretically, such work will flourish in better understanding how meanings-based assets, like cultural and social capital not valued in financial markets are valued in other social domains, such as organisations and communities, and how particular sets of meanings-based assets that are valued in financial and consumer markets draw from and reinforce social relations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]