Showing papers in "Journal of Macromarketing in 2002"

What is Globalization

Abstract: Ulrich Beck argues here that globalization has transformed the old categories of political action away from the national state. This transformation is possible because the multinational corporation has recaptured the power it lost in the development of democratic capitalism and the welfare state. This is made possible by its ability to withhold material resources from the state. Thus, they can change not only the economy of a nation but society itself. Globalization policies, he argues, are intended to sever the power of both trade unions and the state itself. The “final aim” of such policies is to dismantle the state to achieve the “market utopia” of the minimal state, which is the implementation of the ideology of neoliberalism. The power to achieve the above is created by the transnational corporations’ (TNCs) ability to export jobs from uncooperative states, to develop a global division of labor, and to play countries off against one another. This leads to the development of “subpolitics” in which the TNC has power beyond established political systems. Thus, in the new modernity, politics recedes before the expansion of the economic realm. Globalization undermines the nation-state because its effects cut across traditional boundaries. Ironically, as politicians court the TNC with incentives, they undermine their own political authority and the public good. Rather than enhancing social justice as the rhetoric of globalization suggests, globalization increases injustice even further. The framework for balancing the conflicts between rich and poor no longer exist at the time when the gulf between them is widening at alarming rates. Thus, Beck concludes that neoliberals who present themselves as the reformers of the West are ultimately its destroyers. Beck distinguishes between globalism, globality, and globalization. Globalism is the ideology of neoliberalism, which demands rule by the world market. It effectively negates the political, resulting in complete economic reductionism. Globality suggests a world society in which closed spaces of the past have become illusory. Rather, social relationships are not determined by national state politics. Its essence is “multiplicity without unity.” Finally, globalization denotes the processes by which the nation-state is undermined by transnational actors. He argues within this framework that globality in the new modernity is irreversible for a number of reasons. Among these are density of international trade, the revolution in information technology, the global culture industry, and growing power of transnational actors to name a few. Unlike global homogenization theorists, world society is conceived here as multiplicity and nonintegration. It also means no world state or world society without a world state or world government. Globalization thus leads to “globally disorganized capitalism” unconstrained by external control. Noting that the discourse of globalization is fuzzy at best, Beck argues that there are multiple dimensions of globalization that need to be considered. These include information, ecological, economic, production, and cultural globalization. Within these contexts, the fundamental premise of modernity has been that the various contours of society coincide with national borders. It is within the context of globality that the identification of society with the state is becoming less meaningful. It is thus a negation of the “container theory of society” that has informed social theory to date and made the nation-state the unit of analysis. How this has played out in various theories is demonstrated by an examination of several prevalent approaches to globalization. The progress of globalization is characterized as a somewhat dialectical process between the nation-state and the transnational corporation. In consideration of transnational civil society, Beck suggests that new transnational spaces open for transnational actors who have no legitimate power. Several theorists are examined. These range from Wallerstein’s (1979) world system that suggests that the global logic of capitalism dominates the process, to Gilpin and Gilpin (2000), who argue that the development of transnational social spaces requires a permissive political structure making globalization contingent. Beck then offers his own “world risk society” based on global ecological risks that know no boundaries. He sees a new cosmopolitan consciousness predicated on the notion that global threats create global society. Here the TNC is not a direct agent of change as it is in other approaches. It is tied indirectly, however, in the consequences of its actions caused by both affluence and poverty. Such global risks bring involuntary politicization. The cultural transformations of globalization that might be summed in the “McDonaldization” thesis are disputed because they suggest a one-dimensional process. Globalization actually gives new meaning to the idea of the local as narrowly geographic because, for example, there can be no global production but only multiple local productions. He refers to this process as translocal or occurring in several places at one time. Within the translocal view, he refers to different types of distinction as exclusive or inclusive. In the former, one is a member of one group or another depending on the side of the

Transition, The First Ten Years: Analysis and Lessons for Eastern Europe and the Former Soviet Union

Abstract: flicts with the globality of the ecological crisis, and (10) the protection of the welfare state from changes. The ultimate question for Beck is how responsible globalization can be effected. It involves first a radical critique of the neoliberal ideology of globalism. He begins with international cooperation in keeping the TNCs under control. Also, a new definition of the relationship between state, business, and society must be established. Transnational states are created by alliances to develop regional sovereignty beyond the individual states. Thus, to increase their capacity to control, they must give up some individual power. Joint ownership of capital with workers sharing in ownership provides an antidote for increasing unemployment. This can be supplemented by education policies that create a knowledge society commensurate with global capital. Capital must be tied to place and then to products. This avoids capital flight and superfluous production. In addition, the politicization of consumption to constrain corporations would be an integral part of control. To compensate for decreasing industrial employment, new value in civil labor should be developed. He also argues for increased self-employment and an elimination of exclusion, particularly for income reasons. Globalism is irreversible through the efforts of any state, but a transnational structure as large a Europe might offer an opportunity to restore politics. This enables a reregulation of transnational business and an implementation of social and ecological policies. Balanced trade would then minimize the degree to which fewer and fewer get richer and richer while the majority foot the bill. It is clear from Beck’s sociological perspective that globalization is more than the internationalization of business. The book presents his perspective, which differs from the typical business approach to globalization. While it is hard to follow at times, appearing to be a collection of short pieces integrated into a book, it is well worth the effort of working through it. It is of particular interest to the macromarketing world because of the unique sociological perspective focusing on institutional change immanent in globalization. The book would be a good supplement in any graduate-level multinational marketing class but would be a bit daunting for undergraduates. It should be required reading for anyone who teaches in the international area as it would provide new dimensions and an alternative way of thinking about the globalization process including as it does, the political, cultural, and social dimensions of the process that marketing generally plays down or ignores. In combination with others, such as Giddens (1998), Wallerstein (1979), or Held (1995), the macro nature of the globalization process is inescapable as is the neoliberal philosophy that drives it in the quest to reduce the political and cultural to the logic of the world market. REFERENCES

The Sustainability of “Sustainable Consumption”:

Abstract: This article examines the limitations of the concept of sustainable consumption in terms of the inadequate attention given to the social, cultural, and historical contextualization of consumption. The author argues that macromarketing should adopt modes of inquiry that fully engage with this contextualization. The implicit assumptions of sustainable consumption center on the rational individual and his or her needs and wants, and neglect the significance of consumption practices as embodying the relations between individuals. Acts of consumption are not in opposition to, and prior to, macro structures and processes; they are macro processes at work. Consumer practices are cultural and social practices that have historically developed and are manifestations of local and global linkages of social interdependencies. To continually look at the consumer as the cause of the ecological problem effectively decontextualizes consumption from such interdependencies. It posits a macro problem onto a micro situation a...

Developing a Subjective Measure of Consumer Well-Being

Abstract: This study develops a macro measure of consumer well-being based on the notion that consumer well-being is determined by satisfaction with the acquisition, possession, consumption, maintenance, and disposition of consumer goods and services. In a survey of 298 university students, the proposed measure was found to have predictive (nomological) validity in relation to life satisfaction for three out of its five dimensions—acquisition, possession, and consumption. In sum, satisfaction in the consumer life domain was demonstrated to be an important component of life satisfaction.

Complexity and Management: Fad or Radical Challenge to Systems Thinking?

Abstract: I personally find this result to be rather depressing. I mean—to make an admission that seems shameful—I have never even heard of Burkina Faso. What is worse, Parker’s highly instructive Table 7.2 shows that, based on filtered data for economic performance, the United States also falls short of Ecuador, Barbados, Guam, the Cayman Islands, and Aruba, just to name a few of the 21 countries in this enviable position vis-à-vis America (p. 226). Although I have certainly heard of these other countries and visited most of them, I have never before considered them ahead of the United States in terms of their standard of living. Another analysis, comparing actual income with that needed to maintain a “decent” standard of living (across physioeconomic locations) shows that the highest “relative performance index” appears in Gabon (Africa), the lowest in Denmark (pp. 229-31). Apparently, the time has come for some rather fundamental revisions in our CAS-related concepts of physioeconomic welfare! While packing our bags for the move to Burkina Faso, Ecuador, or Gabon, we still have time to contemplate Parker’s concluding chapter on “Predictions.” These include the proposition that “Physioeconomic Factors Will Generate Most Variances in Long-Run Growth” (p. 264) according to the principle that “high consumption growth will occur in countries that are now farthest from their steady states [mostly concentrated in former communist countries, especially in the higher latitudes]” (p. 274). These would include North Korea, Poland, and Russia (p. 275) and—judging from Table 7.2—Estonia, Hungary, and East Germany (p. 226). Based on this same logic, I am thinking, maybe even the United States. So—at the end of the day—perhaps there is some hope for the United States. Meanwhile, Phil Parker—sort of like Jacques Brel in the old off-Broadway show—is alive, well, and living near Paris.

A Framework for Understanding the Relationships between Religions and Markets

Abstract: Religions and religious institutions affect markets in a variety of ways. The objectives of this study are threefold. First, it details the parameters of market activity affected by religions and r...

Out in the Market: A History of the Gay Market Segment in the United States:

Abstract: In recent years, the American gay market segment has been recognized by publications and businesses as large and lucrative. Whether purposefully or inadvertently, U.S. businesses have been marketin...

Compassionate Love, Agape, and Altruism: A New Framework for Understanding and Supporting Impoverished Consumers:

Abstract: This article advances the premise that other-centered love is a resource that may improve the lives of impoverished consumers. It opens with a brief description of compassionate love, agape, and altruism and their potential relationship to helping behaviors. Data description and analysis are next, followed by ethnographic evidence that support the love-as-resource perspective. This support is distilled into five interrelated themes: loss/lack of familial/friendship love, lack of other-centered love or disdain, reactions to the loss/lack of love, expressions of other-centered love, and consumption adequacy. The article closes with implications for other-centered love as a paradigm to further the consumption adequacy of the poor on a global basis.

Salaula: The World of Secondhand Clothing and Zambia:

Abstract: Chapter 7 on privatization, while not contributing anything new, does provide a useful summary of the lessons learned from the different privatization schemata employed within this geographic region. Chapter 8 on supportive social policies contains brief and thin discussions of pension system, education, and health care reforms. On each topic, there are better sources. On education, chapter 6 of the EBRD 2000 Transition Report would be a better place to start. On pension system reform, the World Bank itself has done better (Lindeman, Rutkowski, and Sluchynskyy 2000).

Physioeconomics: The Basis for Long-Run Economic Growth:

Abstract: accomplished as quickly as it was. The authors cover the events following February 2, 1990, again in some detail: the lifting of the CAAA sanctions in July 1991, the Notre Dame conference in October 1991, and finally the windup of the Principles Program in May 1994. As South Africa continues in the postapartheid era, the challenges that this essentially “new nation” faces will require real effort on the part of all ethnic groups. As the new government is finding, it is not easy to attract new investment or bring back former investors. This raises two questions: (1) whether the country would not have been better off had all the corporations remained or (2) if the reforms would have come more slowly had they remained. Certainly those corporations that resisted the pressures and remained will be operating in a country with the best infrastructure and, despite all the evils of apartheid, the best trained and educated, although vastly underused, workforce on the continent. It is almost inevitable that one or more groups will seek to draft codes of behavior for domestic or international corporations. In the case under review, apartheid was so abhorrent that it met with almost universal condemnation. Yet there was more than one approach to its elimination; stay and work for change or walk away and hope the system will destroy itself. In other instances, the evil might not be so readily apparent, and the group seeking to correct the perceived evil will have to illustrate this and then seek the voluntary compliance of the corporations. Imposition of a code is not and will not be acceptable. While there are some minor points where different views may exist, the book is very insightful and provides a valuable short course for business leaders and academics on the strengths and weaknesses to be found in codes of conduct.

Commercial Amphoras: The Earliest Consumer Packages?

Abstract: Commercial amphoras are large ceramic vessels that were used from 1500 B.C. to 500 A.D. to ship wine and other products throughout the Mediterranean, supplying the ancient Greek and Roman empires. Although their form is much different from our own packages, the shape and design were clearly the result of the same reasoning that we use to design successful packaging today. The unusual shape, especially the pointed base, facilitated handling, storage, transport, and use in marketing channels that were very differently shaped from those that are used today. This article investigates amphoras’ physical properties, manufacturing process, and logistical and marketing advantages and illustrates the value of such packaging artifacts in documenting the history of trade.

Postmodernism and Marketing: Separating the Wheat from the Chaff:

Abstract: Postmodernism, as a philosophy and a set of doctrines, has made incursions into marketing. The incursion into marketing has given postmodernism visibility among marketing academics. This article argues that there is a need for a critical appraisal of postmodernism’s potential contribution to marketing. What has been written so far on postmodernism as applied to marketing tends to be peripheral to the key doctrines of postmodernism. In setting out the postmodernist claims, this article argues that while some of these claims may be defensible, most are not. Insofar as the influence of postmodernism has been benign or progressive, it is because it has dramatized and intensified criticism already under way of the claim that the methodology of the physical sciences represents the only way to certain knowledge. The downside of postmodernism is an untenable extension of this insight that would, if adopted by marketing, be highly dysfunctional.

Enterprise Development under an Economic Detour? Black-Owned Advertising Agencies, 1940-2000:

Abstract: This article uses the economic detour theory of enterprise development to assess the origins and development of black-owned advertising agencies in the United States since the World War II era. In light of this concept, key socioeconomic phenomena—racial segregation, desegregation, and multiculturalism—are addressed in terms of their impact on opportunities for and practices among black advertising entrepreneurs. Historical evidence is largely consistent with key principles of the economic detour model. In sum, it appears that a contemporary form of racial separation persists in the advertising business, which serves to constrain entrepreneurial efforts among black and other ethnic minority entrepreneurs in the industry.

Economic Imperatives and Ethical Values in Global Business: The South African Experience and International Codes Today:

Abstract: century trade cards by first mistaking its audience and then imagining that she can know how it would appeal to them. Assuming that the cards’ audience comprised the African Americans whom the cards cruelly caricatured, she determines that they might find “achieving an aura of middle-class respectability” an attractive and reasonable “promise” for a soap (p. 257). However, advertisers of that era rarely tried to put themselves into their audiences’ frames of mind; they expressed their own tastes as a rule until communication professionals, like copywriters, taught them to pick their bait by the taste of the fish. Instead, the genre of derogatory messages to which these cards belong tells us about the overriding racism that the advertisers themselves thought amusing, with careless disregard for anyone else’s attitudes. At least a half dozen major secondary sources are missing from the sources used, including historical marketing analyses of both gender and race. Their absence shows in some of Sivulka’s errors of omission, explanation, and contextualization. (Yes, my book is there, although the title is incorrectly listed each time.) Even so, because Sivulka shows how advertising strategies fit into a larger cultural context, Stronger Than Dirt will usefully contribute to the growing literature on marketing and the rise of a consumer culture.

Macromarketing and International Trade: Comparative Advantage versus Cosmopolitan Considerations

Abstract: Within the context of international trade, the case study method is used as an analogue of a natural experiment to contrast the economic concept of “comparative advantage” with the social network “cosmopoliteness” construct. Specifically, a conceptual reconciliation between these macro/micro theories is developed, and then rival propositions are derived pertaining to the initiation of new export ventures. These alternative explanations are juxtaposed in an empirical setting, which not only provides an approximation of a “crucial test” but also demonstrates the rather unusual situation (in marketing) of hypothesis testing with the qualitative case study method on macro to micro translations. The findings favored the social exchange cosmopolitan explanation and led to the rejection of the hypothesis derived from comparative advantage.

Understanding Organizational Change: Comments on Carman and Dominguez

Abstract: This article attempts to address some of the issues raised in the recently published article titled “Organizational Transformation in Transition Economies: Hypotheses.” The discussion challenges the fundamental reasoning in the Carman and Dominquez (2001) piece. Their basic arguments fall short of what is necessary to fully explain and understand the processes of economic reform taking place in Central and Eastern Europe and elsewhere. Their premises are drawn from the American institutional setting, and they fail to fully include the basic cultural, historical, political, and societal elements that are part of change, especially with regard to the very individual characteristics found in the economies they refer to. This response is an attempt to widen the framework to better understand organizational change and the role that marketing has within it.

Organizational and Institutional Change: A Reply to Savitt:

Abstract: We agree with Professor Savitt (2002 [this issue]) that there is a paucity of research on competition andmarkets. It is our hope that our original article and these remarks will act as catalysts for work that will increase the number of articles appearing in the “Competition and Markets” section of the Journal of Macromarketing. Professor Savitt certainly has some things he feels are important to say that may contribute to our understanding of the transition process. Most of his remarks touch on topics, defined below as “H0,” on which we chose not to expand—because we wanted to focus on others. It is regrettable that he was not encouraged to submit a manuscript on his topic for review rather than using the method of commenting on our article as a vehicle.We show that his characterizations and criticisms are imprecise, incorrect, or surprisingly reiterative of our arguments. Because Savitt’s (2002) argumentation intermingles many topics and levels of aggregation, we have not organized this reply employing his section headings. It is important to remind readers that the focus of our original article (Carman and Dominguez 2001) was on organizational transformation in the context of the interplay between societal and organizational transformation (in both directions); therefore, we will focus the discussion on this level. Curiously, his section entitled “Reformulating theHypotheses” underscores rather than contradicts our hypotheses. He attacks the perspective we have taken by emphasizing that in hypotheses 1 and 2, the greater the degree to which market distortions have been eliminated in a nation and industry may be easier said than done. In fact, our areas of disagreement on this point are few. He simply wants to focus on the Czech Republic and to give more emphasis to obstacles encountered there on the path to successful transition to becoming a country that can compete successfully in a global environment. In the course of doing this, he has made a number of sweeping assertions, relying at times on sources that purportedly support them. Savitt’s (2002) assertions may be grouped into five categories. He asserts that we propose a static model of convergence that prescribes convergence to a unique state that imposes a U.S. prescription while ignoring issues of equity and fairness, our treatment of environment is inappropriate, transformation is uniquely more difficult in Central and Eastern Europe than elsewhere, there are important hurdles in privatization, and organizational learning is not taking place—and cannot take place—quickly in that region of the world. We find that either the assertions are reiterative of our article or that they do not stand close scrutiny and are not supported by the evidence.

Rethinking Marketing: Qualitative Strategies and Exotic Visions

Abstract: to the maker of the gesture and to the recipient” (p. 172). It follows that “mind is always a social phenomenon” (p. 172), that one’s identity is socially constructed, and that one’s sense of self—an “I” or a “me”—derives from “the perceived community view of him/herself” (p. 173), as represented by the shared gesture-and-response patterns of language: “The self is a social construction emerging in relationships with others and only animals that possess language can possess a self that they are aware of” (p. 173). The key point here concerns the social embeddedness or relationship centeredness of mind and self: “Mind and self emerge in social relationships and they are ‘internalizations’ of those social relationships” (p. 174). This perspective—as echoed by Bhaktin (p. 174), Vygotsky (p. 175), and Elias (p. 175)—captures the essence of a TransTel conceptualization of causality:

Marketing—The Retro Revolution

Abstract: ing research techniques from social sciences are gaining ground. Marketing Research: A Magazine of Management & Application 11 (fall): 21-26. Holbrook, Morris. 1997. Looking backward on looking backwards: A retrospective review of Edward Bellamy’s macromarketing classic. Journal of Macromarketing 17 (1): 145-51. Lederer, William, and Eugene Burdick. 1958. The ugly American. New York: Norton. Stern, Barbara. 1996. Deconstructive strategy and consumer research: Concepts and illustrative exemplar. Journal of Consumer Research 23 (2): 136-48. Wister, Owen. 1902. The Virginian. New York: MacMillan. Zaltman, Gerald. 1996. Metaphorically speaking: New technique uses multidisciplinary ideas to improve qualitative research. Marketing Research: A Magazine of Management & Application 8 (summer): 13-20.