Based on a series of pathbreaking lectures given at Yale University in 2012, this powerful, thought-provoking work by national best-selling author Cass R. Sunstein combines legal theory with ...behavioral economics to make a fresh argument about the legitimate scope of government, bearing on obesity, smoking, distracted driving, health care, food safety, and other highly volatile, high-profile public issues. Behavioral economists have established that people often make decisions that run counter to their best interests-producing what Sunstein describes as "behavioral market failures." Sometimes we disregard the long term; sometimes we are unrealistically optimistic; sometimes we do not see what is in front of us. With this evidence in mind, Sunstein argues for a new form of paternalism, one that protects people against serious errors but also recognizes the risk of government overreaching and usually preserves freedom of choice.Against those who reject paternalism of any kind, Sunstein shows that "choice architecture"-government-imposed structures that affect our choices-is inevitable, and hence that a form of paternalism cannot be avoided. He urges that there are profoundly moral reasons to ensure that choice architecture is helpful rather than harmful-and that it makes people's lives better and longer.
Highlighting the important role of marketing in encouraging sustainable consumption, the current research presents a review of the academic literature from marketing and behavioral science that ...examines the most effective ways to shift consumer behaviors to be more sustainable. In the process of the review, the authors develop a comprehensive framework for conceptualizing and encouraging sustainable consumer behavior change. The framework is represented by the acronym SHIFT, and it proposes that consumers are more inclined to engage in pro-environmental behaviors when the message or context leverages the following psychological factors: Social influence, Habit formation, Individual self, Feelings and cognition, and Tangibility. The authors also identify five broad challenges to encouraging sustainable behaviors and use these to develop novel theoretical propositions and directions for future research. Finally, the authors outline how practitioners aiming to encourage sustainable consumer behaviors can use this framework.
This research examines customer engagement in social media (CESM) using a meta-analytic model of 814 effect sizes across 97 studies involving 161,059 respondents. Findings reveal that customer ...engagement is driven by satisfaction, positive emotions, and trust, but not by commitment. Satisfaction is a stronger predictor of customer engagement in high (vs. low) convenience, B2B (vs. B2C), and Twitter (vs. Facebook and Blogs). Twitter appears twice as likely as other social media platforms to improve customer engagement via satisfaction and positive emotions. Customer engagement is also found to have substantial value for companies, directly impacting firm performance, behavioral intention, and word-of-mouth. Moreover, hedonic consumption yields nearly three times stronger customer engagement to firm performance effects vis-à-vis utilitarian consumption. However, contrary to conventional managerial wisdom, word-of-mouth does not improve firm performance nor does it mediate customer engagement effects on firm performance. Contributions to customer engagement theory, including an embellishment of the customer engagement mechanics definition, and practical implications for managers are discussed.
This book addresses the rapidly changing citizen roles in innovation, technology adoption, intermediation, market creation, and legitimacy building for low-carbon solutions. It links research in ...innovation studies, sustainability transitions, and science and technology studies, and builds a new approach for the study of user contributions to innovation and sociotechnical change. Citizen Activities in Energy Transition gives detailed and empirically grounded overall appraisal of citizens’ active technological engagement in the current energy transition, in an era when Internet connectivity has given rise to important new forms of citizen communities and interactions. It elaborates a new way to study users in sociotechnical change through long-term ethnographic and historical research and reports its deployment in a major, decade-long line of investigation on user activities in small-scale renewables, addressing user contributions from the early years to the late proliferation stages of small-scale renewable energy technologies (S-RETs). It offers a much-needed empirical and theoretical understanding of the dynamics of the activities in which users are engaged over the course of sociotechnical change, including innovation, adoption, adjustment, intermediation, community building, digital communities, market creation, and legitimacy creation. This work is a must-read for those seeking to understand the role of users in innovation, energy systems change and the significance of new digital communities in present and future sociotechnical change. Academics, policymakers, and managers are given a new resource to understand the "demand side" of sociotechnical change beyond the patterns of investment, adoption, and social acceptance that have traditionally occupied their attention.
Yugoslavia was unique among the communist countries of the Cold War era in its openness to mixing cultural elements from both socialism and capitalism. Unlike their counterparts in the nations of the ...Soviet Bloc, ordinary Yugoslavs enjoyed access to a wide range of consumer goods and services, from clothes and appliances to travel agencies and discotheques. From the mid-1950s onward the political climate in Yugoslavia permitted, and later at times encouraged, a consumerist lifestyle of shopping, spending, acquiring, and enjoying that engaged the public on a day-to-day basis through modern advertising and sales techniques. InBought and Sold, Patrick Hyder Patterson reveals the extent to which socialist Yugoslavia embraced a consumer culture usually associated with capitalism and explores the role of consumerism in the federation's collapse into civil war in 1991.
Patterson argues, became a land where the symbolic, cultural value of consumer goods was a primary factor in individual and group identity. He shows how a new, aggressive business establishment promoted consumerist tendencies that ordinary citizens eagerly adopted, while the Communist leadership alternately encouraged and constrained the consumer orientation. Abundance translated into civic contentment and seemed to prove that the regime could provide goods and services equal to those of the capitalist West, but many Yugoslavs, both inside and outside the circles of official power, worried about the contradiction between the population's embrace of consumption and the dictates of Marxist ideology. The result was a heated public debate over creeping consumerist values, with the new way of life finding fierce critics and, surprisingly for a communist country, many passionate and vocal defenders.
The concept of brand activism has recently gained in importance. Nevertheless, theoretically sound studies that address the impact of brand activism are still rare in many areas. This is especially ...the case with regard to the meaning of brand activism for consumer participation in the context of sustainable consumption. This article focuses on this research gap by using a model developed in the social sciences to derive and empirically test various hypotheses. The results show that brand activism can have an effect on some constructs associated with consumer participation, but that this differs according to brand type and context. However, a direct effect of brand activism on consumer participation could not be found. Companies that intend to instrumentalize the concept of brand activism should take this differentiated effect into account.
Das Konzept Markenaktivismus hat in letzter Zeit an Bedeutung gewonnen. Gleichwohl fehlt es an vielen Stellen noch an theoretisch fundierten Studien, die die Wirkung von Markenaktivismus adressieren. Dies gilt insbesondere im Hinblick auf die Bedeutung von Markenaktivismus für die Verbraucherteilhabe im Kontext des nachhaltigen Konsums. Diese Forschungslücke fokussiert der vorliegende Beitrag, in dem mit Hilfe eines in den Sozialwissenschaften entwickelten Modells verschiedene Hypothesen abgeleitet und empirisch getestet werden. Die Ergebnisse zeigen, dass Markenaktivismus zwar einen Einfluss auf einige mit der Verbraucherteilhabe assoziierte Konstrukte haben kann, dieser sich allerdings nach Markentyp und Kontext unterscheidet. Ein direkter Effekt von Markenaktivismus auf die Verbraucherteilhabe konnte allerdings nicht festgestellt werden. Unternehmen die das Konzept des Markenaktivismus instrumentalisieren wollen, sollten diese differenzierte Wirkung berücksichtigen.
Even as they see their wages go down and their buying power decrease, many parents are still putting their kids' material desires first. These parents struggle with how to handle children's consumer ...wants, which continue unabated despite the economic downturn. And, indeed, parents and other adults continue to spend billions of dollars on children every year. Why do children seem to desire so much, so often, so soon, and why do parents capitulate so readily? To determine what forces lie behind the onslaught of Nintendo Wiis and Bratz dolls, Allison J. Pugh spent three years observing and interviewing children and their families. In Longing and Belonging: Parents, Children, and Consumer Culture, Pugh teases out the complex factors that contribute to how we buy, from lunchroom conversations about Game Boys to the stark inequalities facing American children. Pugh finds that children's desires stem less from striving for status or falling victim to advertising than from their yearning to join the conversation at school or in the neighborhood. Most parents respond to children's need to belong by buying the particular goods and experiences that act as passports in children's social worlds, because they sympathize with their children's fear of being different from their peers. Even under financial constraints, families prioritize children "feeling normal". Pugh masterfully illuminates the surprising similarities in the fears and hopes of parents and children from vastly different social contexts, showing that while corporate marketing and materialism play a part in the commodification of childhood, at the heart of the matter is the desire to belong.
This book boldly unsettles the idea of globalization as a recent phenomenon—and one driven solely by Western interests—by offering a compelling new perspective on global interconnectivity in the ...nineteenth century. Jeremy Prestholdt examines East African consumers' changing desires for material goods from around the world in an era of sweeping social and economic change. Exploring complex webs of local consumer demands that affected patterns of exchange and production as far away as India and the United States, the book challenges presumptions that Africa's global relationships have always been dictated by outsiders. Full of rich and often-surprising vignettes that outline forgotten trajectories of global trade and consumption, it powerfully demonstrates how contemporary globalization is foreshadowed in deep histories of intersecting and reciprocal relationships across vast distances.
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