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This article focuses on consumer movements that seek ideological and cultural change. Building from a basis in New Social Movement (NSM) theory, we study these movements among anti‐advertising, anti‐Nike, and anti‐GE food activists. We find activists’ collective identity linked to an evangelical identity related to U.S. activism’s religious roots. Our findings elucidate the value of spiritual and religious identities to gaining commitment, warn of the perils of preaching to the unconverted, and highlight movements that seek to transform the ideology and culture of consumerism. Conceiving mainstream consumers as ideological opponents inverts conventional NSM theories that view them as activists’ clients.

Magical thinking is often regarded as a cognitive distortion, whereby consumers irrationally invoke mystical, supernatural forces to cope with stressful situations. Adopting a culture-based theoretical lens, this article examines magical thinking as an integral element of contemporary consumer society, a cultural practice of meaning negotiation that works to restore the experience of interconnectedness when this experience has been broken. The analysis of interview and blog narratives of consumers attempting to lose weight reveals how they adopt practices imbued with magical thinking in the form of creative persuasion, retribution, and efficient causality. Magical thinking allows participants to construct a space of uncertainty and ambiguity that transforms impossibilities into possibilities, thus sustaining their hope in the pursuit of goals. In so doing, consumers demonstrate a chimerical agency where they creatively blur fantasy and reality to cope with cultural expectations of control.

The interaction between marketing actions with a social dimension and marketing actions with an economic orientation is at the heart of this study. The authors introduce institutional theory as the theoretical lens used to inform this research. Results from an experiment in a retail context show that there is a minimum acceptable level of marketing actions with a social dimension, below which the effectiveness of a firm's economic-oriented actions is hindered significantly.

This mixed-methods case study describes the experiences of a rural health organization in Canada that was a pioneer in undergoing institutionally driven radical change. This change was advocated by senior managers and physicians with the strong backing of the government. The senior managers and physicians made a strong case for the radical change and argued that a focus on efficiency and wellness would lead to improved service and quality of patient-care. However, this radical change initiative was resisted by nurses and support staff who perceived that these changes were being driven by market-based institutional logics and questioned their ethical appropriateness in a public system. They also expressed a lack of trust given the large-scale layoffs in a prior restructuring. These findings run counter to extant theory by highlighting the role of agency despite institutional pressures. Specifically, change implementers not only face the burden of justifying ethical appropriateness of institutional logics, but also are required to engage in persuasive discourse that these institutional logics protect the interests of the members.

Increasingly, the management of corporations' identities is being conducted in the context of empowered, socially engaged, culturally adept social actors who present organizations with a range of conflicting societal and economic expectations. These social actors, referred to as societal constituents, claim moral legitimacy to influence the decisions and actions of corporations they feel have affected their personal and community space. Firms' environments come to be regarded as complex webs of social groups whereby the cultural meanings embedded in their corporate brands come to be morphed across the range of social groups. As such, the management of corporate brands becomes a task of symbolic facilitation and managing contradictions. [PUBLICATION ABSTRACT]

Purpose - The purpose of this paper is to explore the historical origins of consumer well-being as well as the factors that shaped its evolution.Design methodology approach - The paper presents a review of original publications that highlight classic views of consumer well-being, including schools of thought on functionalism, management, buyer-behavior, macromarketing, and consumer activism.Findings - There has been a tendency to understand consumer well-being as a function of economic-based choice, where a \"more-is-better\" ideology has motivated much of the extant literature on the topic.Originality value - Integrating literature from the twentieth century demonstrates that perspectives on consumer well-being have been influenced by forces beyond the classic economic model. The paper speculates that incorporating more community-oriented and contextually-bound criteria into the understanding of consumer well-being may yield new research insights.

This article adopts an institutional-based perspective to stakeholder marketing. This perspective directs attention to an organizational field level of analysis in which an organization's environment is punctuated by trigger events that prompt the assemblage of a particular mix of stakeholders. A thematic, interpretive, and longitudinal analysis of more than 2000 articles from 45 years of grocery retail trade journals reveals that the ensuing stakeholder dynamics that constitute an organizational field serve to afford or deny the marketer vital cultural, social, and economic capital. In turn, the capital possessed by or denied to the marketer influences the ideological frame the marketer may use in coming to terms with how to interact with stakeholders. Importantly, the authors find that strategic and institutional factors interpenetrate, presenting important implications for how stakeholder marketing should be understood.

Handelman and Patry-Beaudoin's study contributes to the marketplace literature by investigating the ideological nature of happiness. First, it shifts the focus away from the individual experience of happiness to a cultural level of understanding, highlighting that happiness is associated with various meanings in the marketplace. Second, the analysis reveals how these different happiness discourses interact in the marketplace by introducing the idea of happiness heterotopia. Third, the findings highlight how consumers and producers enact this ideology and analyze their roles in co-constructing this happiness heterotopia. Finally, these findings are of great interest for marketers and organizations, as they identify marketplace structures that producers can put in place to create spaces of happiness in a variety of contexts.

Purpose - This study seeks to investigate the interaction between marketers' strategic behaviors, social norms, and societal stakeholders within a particular historical time period, the 1960s and 1970s.Design methodology approach - The study's findings are based on an analysis of two dominant retail industry trade publications, Chain Store Age and Progressive Grocer.Findings - The analysis reveals an intriguing array of strategic marketing activity throughout these two decades not captured in considerations of marketing strategy at the time. The retailers examined engaged in two interesting behaviors. First, they responded to a wide range of stakeholder demands in a paradoxical fashion. Second, as retailers were confronted with social norms, instead of conforming to these norms they worked to help influence and shape them to their own advantage. This examination of retailers' behaviors over two decades has allowed the authors to present an intriguing new dimension to the understanding of marketing strategy.Originality value - The study found that throughout the 1960s and 1970s, marketers appeared to be actively engaged in a social dialogue. Through this dialogue, they not only responded to norms, but also attempted to shape the norms that came to define legitimate behavior for the marketers. This kind of strategic marketing endeavor was not accounted for in the managerial school of thought that dominated marketing thinking at the time.

This mixed-methods case study describes the experiences of a rural health organization in Canada that was a pioneer in undergoing institutionally driven radical change. This change was advocated by senior managers and physicians with the strong backing of the government. The senior managers and physicians made a strong case for the radical change and argued that a focus on efficiency and wellness would lead to improved service and quality of patient-care. However, this radical change initiative was resisted by nurses and support staff who perceived that these changes were being driven by market-based institutional logics and questioned their ethical appropriateness in a public system. They also expressed a lack of trust given the large-scale layoffs in a prior restructuring. These findings run counter to extant theory by highlighting the role of agency despite institutional pressures. Specifically, change implementers not only face the burden of justifying ethical appropriateness of institutional logics, but also are required to engage in persuasive discourse that these institutional logics protect the interests of the members.