Journal ArticleDOI
Why Do Brands Cause Trouble? A Dialectical Theory of Consumer Culture and Branding
TLDR
In this paper, the authors trace the rise of the modern cultural engineering paradigm of branding, premised upon a consumer culture that granted marketers cultural authority, and describe the current post-postmodern consumer culture, which is premised on the pursuit of personal sovereignty through brands.Abstract:
Brands are today under attack by an emerging countercultural movement. This study builds a dialectical theory of consumer culture and branding that explains the rise of this movement and its potential effects. Results of an interpretive study challenge existing theories of consumer resistance. To develop an alternative model, I first trace the rise of the modern cultural engineering paradigm of branding, premised upon a consumer culture that granted marketers cultural authority. Intrinsic contradictions erased its efficacy. Next I describe the current postmodern consumer culture, which is premised upon the pursuit of personal sovereignty through brands. I detail five postmodern branding techniques that are premised upon the principle that brands are authentic cultural resources. Postmodern branding is now giving rise to new contradictions that have inflamed the antibranding sentiment sweeping Western countries. I detail these contradictions and project that they will give rise to a new post-postmodern branding paradigm premised upon brands as citizen-artists.read more
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Journal ArticleDOI
Consumer Culture Theory (Cct): Twenty Years of Research
TL;DR: In this paper, a synthesizing overview of consumer research addressing the sociocultural, experiential, symbolic, and ideological aspects of consumption is provided, with the aim of providing a viable disciplinary brand for this research tradition that we call consumer culture theory.
Journal ArticleDOI
Putting the S back in corporate social responsibility: A multilevel theory of social change in organizations
TL;DR: In this article, a multilevel theoretical model is proposed to understand why business organizations are increasingly engaging in corporate social responsibility (CSR) initiatives and thereby exhibiting the potential to exert positive social change.
The iron cage revisited: Institutional isomorphism and collective rationality in organizational fields (Chinese Translation)
Paul DiMaggio,Walter W. Powell +1 more
TL;DR: In this article, the authors argue that rational actors make their organizations increasingly similar as they try to change them, and describe three isomorphic processes-coercive, mimetic, and normative.
Journal ArticleDOI
Corporate social responsibility and marketing: An integrative framework
Isabelle Maignan,O. C. Ferrell +1 more
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors introduce a conceptualization of corporate social responsibility (CSR) that emphasizes the role and potential contribution of the marketing discipline and discuss the managerial processes needed to monitor, meet, and even exceed, stakeholder norms.
Posted Content
Networked Narratives: Understanding Word-of-Mouth Marketing in Online Communities
TL;DR: In this article, the authors overview and synthesize extant word of mouth theory and present a study of a marketing campaign in which mobile phones were seeded with prominent bloggers, revealing the complex cultural conditions through which marketing "hype" is transformed by consumers into the "honey" of relevant, shared communications.
References
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Book ChapterDOI
The iron cage revisited institutional isomorphism and collective rationality in organizational fields
Paul DiMaggio,Walter W. Powell +1 more
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors argue that rational actors make their organizations increasingly similar as they try to change them, and describe three isomorphic processes-coercive, mimetic, and normative.
Book
The Practice of Everyday Life
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors present a very different view of the arts of practice in a very diverse culture, focusing on the use of ordinary language and making do in the art of practice.
Book
The Theory of Communicative Action
Jürgen Habermas,Thomas McCarthy +1 more
TL;DR: In this article, an apex seal for a rotary combustion engine is disclosed having a hollow, thin wall, tubular, metal core member embedded in an extruded composite metal-carbon matrix, adapted to slideably engage the slot of the rotor in which it rides and sealingly engage the rotor housing against which it is spring and gas pressure biased.
Book
Dialectic of Enlightenment
Max Horkheimer,Theodor W. Adorno +1 more
TL;DR: The Dialectic of Enlightenment as mentioned in this paper is one of the most celebrated and often cited works of modern social philosophy, and it has been identified as the keystone of the 'Frankfurt School', of which Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer were the leading members.