Business Management

Since industrialization, both beauty and refinement have been highlighted in many consumer markets, including home decoration, clothes, and fine foods and beverages. Consumers whose habitus resonates with core elements in these markets often formulate the goal of developing aesthetic expertise in them; they learn complex systems of taste evaluation to judge their aesthetic experiences. The authors illuminate how these taste evaluation systems are constituted in consumers after habitus has instilled generic dispositions. The multi-method ethnography studies middle-class US men who are craft beer aficionados seeking to become connoisseurs. This work places the often neglected world of the senses at the center of taste theorizing. It details three learning practices (benchmarking, autodidactics, and scaffolding) that consumers use to bind together the sensory and discursive dimensions of social practices. Second, it reveals interconsumer cooperation as a key mechanism in building consensus on social practices that involve ambiguous aesthetic experiences.

Key words: learning, goals, habitus, taste, expertise, connoisseurship, social class, gender, craft beer

Taste refinement, which refers to the development of complex systems of aesthetic evaluation, has long presented ambiguous meanings for American middle-class men. In the 18th and 19th centuries, this social stratum wanted to further distinguish itself from newly arrived immigrants and the working class, but viewed refinement in housing, clothing, and eating as effeminate and elitist. In the late 20th century, taste refinement remains contested even among well-educated, upper middle-class men, who favor moral and socioeconomic signals over taste in granting someone prestige. Nonetheless, much of the recent market growth of U.S. craft beer relies on taste refinement by middle-class men. This chapter zooms in on the context of craft beer to reveal how contemporary American middle-class men align culturally refined consumption with their class-inflected scripts of gender and morality. Viewing this phenomena through the theoretical lens of symbolic boundaries, I illuminate how these men refine their aesthetic sensibilities while upholding their senses of masculinity and rectitude.

Firms often aim to develop markets as part of their long-term strategies. Research in marketing has explained this complex process, conventionally, by stressing firms’ efforts to outdo their peers. While this emphasis is valuable, it overlooks the role of another major force in market evolution: collective action among peer firms. To address this oversight, this article conceptualizes collaborative market driving, defining it as the collective strategy in which peer firms consistently cooperate among themselves and with other actors to develop markets in ways that increase their overall competitiveness. This conceptualization includes the triggers that lead peer firms to mobilize for collective action and coalesce with other market actors; it also identifies how this coalition converts collective resources into market-driving power. These theoretical contributions, based on a multi-method analysis of the rise of U.S. craft breweries, offer an alternative course of action for firms interested in driving new markets when they lack adequate resources to do so individually.

Consumers can pursue a wide range of market-mediated identities in contemporary culture. However, some consumer identities are more valued than others, creating a form of cultural inequality. The present research considers consumers' deliberate efforts to assert greater cultural value for their identities, a phenomenon termed a "politicized consumer identity project." Specifically, this research focuses on consumers' intentional use of space, a resource that is ubiquitous in social life but has, nonetheless, received limited theoretical attention regarding this type of identity project. This ethnography uses mixed methods to study a sample of women embedded in the new cult of domesticity, an ethos that induces participants to use various spaces as a way of claiming greater value for feminine consumer identities that are often demeaned by others. The results reveal a system of spatial practices that consumers employ to contest this cultural devaluation across a broad range of sites in their lives, from their homes to commercial and public venues. We conceptualize these practices as spatial affirmation, repurposing, and incursion, showing their ideological and material interdependencies. This research advances understanding of the ties among consumer identities, space, and cultural politics.

Reward-based crowdfunding has enabled an unprecedented number of consumers to provision capital for commercial and artistic ventures. Each year, consumers use digital platforms to transfer billions of dollars to entrepreneurs and artists to help them develop a wide range of market innovations. Notably, these consumers obtain no financial benefits, no formal guarantee that their money will be used aptly, and no reimbursement options. Under such materially unfavorable conditions, why do consumers transfer their money to these producers? The present research answers this question by introducing the concept of a “market-fostering gift system”: a social contract that entices consumers to fund the creation and enhancement of market offerings by mobilizing the logic and practices of gift-giving. This conceptualization includes the core stakeholders, processes, outcomes, and shortcomings of reward-based crowdfunding, providing theoretical structure to this consequential articulation of platform capitalism. In addition, this conceptualization advances theory about how gift and market economies intersect. Whereas previous research emphasizes the tensions that characterize their interface, this article brings to the fore the complementary, scalable relationship between gift-giving and market exchange.

There has been a significant increase in scholarly research focusing on marketing capabilities as an important aspect of marketing theory–based explanations of firm performance. This growing research interest in marketing capabilities has also been reflected in the international marketing literature. However, it is unclear whether and how thinking and research about international marketing capabilities differs from that of marketing capabilities in a domestic market context. To explore this question, the authors conduct a review of studies of marketing capabilities in the most influential journals publishing research in international marketing. They supplement this with insights from interviews with executives in firms engaged to varying degrees in international marketing. The study suggests that there remain numerous important unanswered questions in conceptualizing and empirically researching international marketing capabilities.