This article provides an analysis of two leading specialist wine magazines, Decanter and Wine Spectator, and the codification and legitimation of a ‘taste for the particular’. Such media of ...connoisseurship are key institutions of evaluation and legitimation in an age of omnivorousness, but are often overlooked in research that foregrounds the agency of tasters and neglects the conventionalization of tasting norms and devices. The wine field has undergone a process of democratization typical of omnivorousness more broadly: former elite/low boundaries (operationalized in the article through the Old/New World dichotomy) are ignored, and a discerning attitude is encouraged for wines from a diversity of regions. Drawing on the magazines’ audience profile and market position data, and a content analysis of advertising and editorial content from 2008 and 2010, I examine the differences in the use of four legitimation frames (transparency, heritage, genuineness and external validation) for the provenance elements of Old and New World wines. The analysis suggests that the Old World – typically French – notion of terroir, on which the traditional Old/New World boundary rested, has been democratized through the particularities of provenance. Yet, the analysis also reveals continuing differences between the two categories (including greater emphasis on the heritage and external validation of Old World context of production, and on the transparency and genuineness of New World producers), and the preservation of established hierarchies of taste through the application of terroir to New World wines, which retain the Old World and France as their master referent.
•This article explores the use of heritage at winery cellar-doors.•Interviews were conducted with representatives of wineries in southern Australia.•Participants used various form of heritage to ...reinforce their branding.•Unscripted storytelling emerged as a key strategy for engaging with tourists.•Authenticity was emphasised as a means of competitive advantage.
The nature of the cellar-door experience varies between wineries and regions. While the literature has identified heritage, storytelling and authenticity as important concepts regarding interaction with tourists at the cellar-door, there is a need to understand how they are operationalised by winery staff, including their strategic objectives. This article aims to explore how New World wineries are using their heritage to engage with tourists at their cellar-doors. The approach is qualitative, based on long semi-structured phenomenological interviews with eleven representatives of south-eastern Australia wineries to understand their lived experience. Findings suggest that the cellar-door represents an important opportunity to reinforce heritage branding and differentiate the winery from its competitors. Different forms of heritage were emphasised by participants, including family and ethnic heritage. Storytelling was seen as a useful strategy to engage with tourists and the importance of authenticity, both intrinsic and existential, was emphasised as a means of competitive advantage.
The 21st century rise of culturally omnivorous tastes and classifications proffers a new dilemma for how markets create attachments and achieve trust for global consumers. Consumer entities must be ...both globally circulatable and offer a sense of localized authenticity without compromising either. Drawing from research on market trust and attachment, this article introduces the concept of mobile trust regimes to account for how sets of actors and repertoires attempt to address this tension. Through two case studies from gastronomic industries—food halls and natural wine—we investigate the devices of mobility used to facilitate the global circulation of the local. These include standardized aesthetic and affective templates communicated through physical décor, recurrent narratives, and social media curation. We argue that the concept of mobile trust regimes helps clarify two key issues in contemporary consumer culture: tensions between homogenization and heterogenization and how the symbolic value of omnivorous tastes becomes institutionalized and even banal.
Acute pulmonary embolism (PE) may be rapidly fatal if not diagnosed and treated. IV heparin reduces mortality and recurrence of PE, but the relationship between survival and timing of anticoagulation ...has not been extensively studied.
We studied 400 consecutive patients in the ED diagnosed with acute PE by CT scan angiography and treated in the hospital with IV unfractionated heparin from 2002 to 2005. Patients received heparin either in the ED or after admission. Time from ED arrival to therapeutic activated partial thromboplastin time (aPTT) was calculated. Outcomes included in-hospital and 30-day mortality, hospital and ICU lengths of stay, hemorrhagic events on heparin, and recurrent venous thromboembolism within 90 days.
In-hospital and 30-day mortality rates were 3.0% and 7.7%, respectively. Patients who received heparin in the ED had lower in-hospital (1.4% vs 6.7%; P = .009) and 30-day (4.4% vs 15.3%; P < .001) mortality rates as compared with patients given heparin after admission. Patients who achieved a therapeutic aPTT within 24 h had lower in-hospital (1.5% vs 5.6%; P = .093) and 30-day (5.6% vs 14.8%; P = .037) mortality rates as compared with patients who achieved a therapeutic aPTT after 24 h. In multiple logistic regression models, receiving heparin in the ED remained predictive of reduced mortality, and ICU admission remained predictive of increased mortality.
We report an association between early anticoagulation and reduced mortality for patients with acute PE. We advocate further study with regard to comorbidities to assess the usefulness of modifications to hospital protocols.
This editorial introduces a Special Issue on food practices and social inequality by outlining a dichotomous tendency in policy-related, academic and populist accounts of the relationship between ...food and class. The Special Issue aims to move our understanding beyond this dichotomous divide, which privileges either middle-class discerning taste or working-class necessity in understandings of the determinants of food practices. The papers call attention to the diverse, complex forms of critical creativity and cultural capital employed by individuals, families and communities across the spectrum of social stratification, in their attempts to acquire and prepare food that is both healthy and desirable. The papers report on research carried out in the United States, Canada, Mexico and Denmark, and cover diverse contexts, from the intense insecurity of food deserts to the relative security of social democratic states. Through quantitative and qualitative cross-class comparisons, and ethnographic accounts of low-income experiences and practices, the papers examine the ways in which food practices and preferences are inflected by social class (alone, and in combination with gender, ethnicity and urban/rural location). Thus, the Special Issue offers a debunking of the figure of the uncritical, uncultured low-income consumer. Calling for the development of a more nuanced, dynamic account of the tastes and cultural competences of socially disadvantaged groups, the editorial concludes by underlining the simultaneous need for structural critiques of the gross inequalities in the degrees of freedom with which different individuals and groups engage in food practices.
This article examines the ways in which Chinese consumers engage with foreign brands, looking specifically at their perceptions and experiences of Starbucks. Rather than assuming an inherent conflict ...between global and local meanings, or collectivist and individualist values, we examine the accomplished meaning of foreign brands: how Chinese consumers make sense of Starbucks, and what their engagements with the brand can tell us about the interplay between the local, global and glocal in the consumption of Western goods. Based on interviews with urban, middle-class consumers, the article explores four major themes in respondents' narratives about Starbucks. First, we discuss the strategies and cues respondents use to understand and authenticate Starbucks as a foreign brand; second, we focus on the local socio-cultural context for engagements with the brand as a symbol of status; third, we discuss the respondents' associations of Starbucks' global status with quality and trustworthiness; and, finally, we consider how respondents use Starbucks as a glocal bridge, to experience a Western way of life. We suggest that these findings highlight the role of foreign brands - and consumer goods more generally - in the problems of individual and collective identity formation.
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Dostopno za:
BFBNIB, DOBA, IZUM, KILJ, NUK, PILJ, PNG, SAZU, SIK, UILJ, UKNU, UL, UM, UPUK
This research examines how provenance - where a product was produced, by whom, how and when - features in the work of cultural intermediaries in the Australian premium wine market, at two different ...stages in the career of a wine. First, evaluations of provenance attributes (in terms of sincerity, tradition and transparency) serve as filters through which wine promoters identify market-worthy wines; second, those attributes are strategically deployed to frame the wine as a worthy choice for consumers (focusing on the use of the winemaker as a framing device). The article offers a distinctive account of the qualification of wine, and makes the case for a cultural economic conceptualization of provenance as a negotiated, accomplished quality. In foregrounding wine promoters' emotional attachments to provenance attributes of wines they choose to promote, the research highlights the affective dimensions of markets, which are made, in part, through the consuming passions of cultural intermediaries.
Cultural intermediaries actively mediate between production and consumption: they operate at the interfaces between and within firms, and between firms and customers, and reflexively negotiate ...between their roles as symbolic producers and taste-leading consumers. The article examines the liminality of cultural intermediaries through a case study of wine promoters, using the theme of provenance as an empirical lens through which to examine both their work in creating added value for particular wines, and their identities as reflexive producer/consumers. In its distinctive account of boundary work in practice, the article contributes to emerging research on the subjectivity of market practitioners — a crucial perspective on the relationship between production and consumption, but one which has yet to be fully developed in marketing theory and its discussions of value co-creation and the prosumer.
This article examines the cultural field of fitness as a network of producers, consumers, products and practices that has developed around the care of the body through physical exercise. Drawing on a ...thematic text analysis of US exercise manuals, the paper focuses on how the commercial fitness field naturalizes associations between physical exercise and leisure, and between leisure and self-work. In particular, the analysis examines three themes and their relevance to our broader understanding of leisure in contemporary consumer society: the management of leisure time; the use of leisure for self-investment strategies; and the promotion of consumption as the framework for leisure and an accompanying notion of pleasure. The fitness field casts light on how leisure more generally is constructed as a sphere of obligations to make productive use of one's time, to improve one's body and self, and to do so through the wares of the consumer marketplace. The cultural imaginary of leisure as a time of freedom from work and responsibility is thus recast, in an age of individualization, as a time of freedom to accomplish the work of self-production.
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