Healing the Digital Divide with Digital Inclusion: Enabling Human Capabilities

Available at: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/10946705221140148

The “digital divide” refers to societal-level inequalities of digital access, capabilities, and outcomes. To explore how the digital divide affects customers experiencing vulnerability, service interactions in essential service settings (health care, education, and social services) were empirically investigated and practices service system members might adopt to address vulnerability were identified. This research upframes the pillars of service inclusion framework to define human capabilities that result from service inclusion practices. Three research topics were addressed: how the digital divide affects vulnerability (RQ1), how the digital divide can be addressed through service inclusion practices (RQ2), and how service inclusion practices enable human capabilities for digital inclusion (RQ3). The findings illuminate: (1) how service employees can engage in service inclusion practices to address the digital divide (by letting go of rules and perspectives, sharing control, providing services beyond job scope, and facilitating social connections), and (2) how these service inclusion practices build human capabilities for digital inclusion (by building basic skills and capabilities for meaningful outcomes through role modeling, coaching, customer-to-customer mentoring, and expanding networks). Contributions include conceptual models of service inclusion practices and fostering digital inclusion that specify a new meso level service organization pathway for healing the digital divide.

Fisk, R., Gallan, A., Joubert, A. M. Beekhuyzen, J., Russell-Bennett, R. & Cheung, L. (2022). Healing the Digital Divide with Digital Inclusion: Enabling Human Capabilities. Journal of Service Research

 

No more Plastic Bags: Overcoming Consumer Reistance to Sustainability Regulation

Available at: https://www.sciendo.com/article/10.2478/nimmir-2022-0006

Reports about environmental problems such as polluted oceans, toxic rivers, and extinction of species pop up everywhere. As the challenges of the environmental crisis accel-erate, governments are searching for solutions to reduce the negative impact of economic activity that threatens communities, regions, and society as a whole. Regulation is a common response to restrict harmful consumer and corporate behavior. A very popular object of regulation is the plastic bag – almost an icon of marine and terrestrial pollution. By 2018, nearly 130 countries had implemented some form of ban on using disposable plastic bags. Despite their popularity, bans on plastic bags are often met with strong pushback by consumers, retailers, and other mem-bers of society. Why do consumers push back against such a seemingly reasonable regulation? And what can be done to reduce such resistance and win consumers over to play along in measures for protecting the environment? Our research on Chile's nationwide ban of plastic bags in 2019 enabled us to answer these questions and develop some guidelines for the successful implementation of sustainability interventions.

Joubert, Alison M., Gonzalez-Arcos, Claudia, Scaraboto, Daiane, Sandberg, Jorgen and Guesalaga, Rodrigo (2022). No more plastic bags: Overcoming consumer resistance to sustainability regulation, NIM Marketing Intelligence Review, 14(1), 37-41. DOI: 10.2478/nimmir-2022-0006

 

“How Do I Carry All This Now?”: Understanding Consumer Resistance to Sustainability Interventions

Available at: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/0022242921992052

Given the increasingly grave environmental crisis, governments and organizations frequently initiate sustainability interventions to encourage sustainable behavior in individual consumers. However, prevalent behavioral approaches to sustainability interventions often have the unintended consequence of generating consumer resistance, undermining their effectiveness. With a practice–theoretical perspective, the authors investigate what generates consumer resistance and how it can be reduced, using consumer responses to a nationwide ban on plastic bags in Chile in 2019. The findings show that consumer resistance to sustainability interventions emerges not primarily because consumers are unwilling to change their individual behavior—as the existing literature commonly assumes—but because the individual behaviors being targeted are embedded in dynamic social practices. When sustainability interventions aim to change individual behaviors rather than social practices, they place excessive responsibility on consumers, unsettle their practice-related emotionality, and destabilize the multiple practices that interconnect to shape consumers’ lives, ultimately leading to resistance. The authors propose a theory of consumer resistance in social practice change that explains consumer resistance to sustainability interventions and ways of reducing it. They also offer recommendations for policy makers and social marketers in designing and managing sustainability initiatives that trigger less consumer resistance and thereby foster sustainable consumer behavior.

Gonzalez-Arcos Claudia, Joubert Alison M., Scaraboto Daiane, Guesalaga Rodrigo, Sandberg Jörgen (2021). “How do I carry all this now?”: Understanding consumer resistance to sustainability interventions. Journal of Marketing. Special issue on Better Marketing for a Better World, 85(3), 44-61. Doi:10.1177/0022242921992052

 

Theorizing Less Visible Forms of Fandom: Practices, Assemblages, Liquidity, and Other Directions

Available at: https://www.igi-global.com/gateway/chapter/237692

This chapter seeks to contribute to the current theorizations of fandom by focusing on the less visible forms that are excluded from the current conceptualizations. The current research contributions to fandom have without a doubt been invaluable in providing theoretical understandings of fan consumption. However, they have largely focused on the stereotypical fan who engages in cumulative, communitarian, and conspicuous expressions of their fandom, thereby largely ignoring the less visible forms of fandom. This chapter aims to begin the construction of an inclusive conceptual counterbalance of fandom theorizations by problematizing the current conceptualizations and providing three potential avenues through which future researchers can explore fandom in a broader way: practice theory, assemblage theory and liquid consumption. In setting this research agenda, the chapter concludes with phenomenological, structural, methodological, managerial, critical, and ethical considerations for future fandom research.

Coffin, Jack and Joubert, Alison M. (2020). Theorizing less visible forms of fandom: Practices, assemblages, liquidity, and other directions. In Handbook of Research on the Impact of Fandom in Society and Consumerism. (pp. 211-233) edited by Cheng Lu Wang. Hershey, United States: IGI Global. Doi: 10.4018/978-1-7998-1048-3.ch011

 

Four Fanatical Friends and Other Alliterative Allegories

Available at: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1470593119897760

Elizabeth thinks of herself as a true fan of the Kerrigan Brown book series. Usually pursuing this passion privately, she is challenged when a friend claims that authentic fans always display their devotion through public consumption. Fortunately, Elizabeth’s grandfather finds a fable of Four Fanatical Friends, who were also challenged to rethink the meaning of fandom after an encounter with a mysterious Genius Fanum. But will our protagonist realise the moral of the story in a journey of self-discovery? Through this fictional short story, the concept of private fandom is implicitly introduced to marketing theory. To date, collective and public expressions of fandom have been the focus of marketing and consumer research. These lines of inquiry have greatly advanced understandings of fans and their consumption. However, private pursuits have been largely overlooked. This short story serves as a fictive framing for future research in this area.

Joubert, Alison M. and Coffin, Jack (2020). Four fanatical friends and other alliterative allegories. Marketing Theory. Special issue on Expressions of Interest: Short Stories, Tall Tales, Novel Articles, 20(2), 195-201. Doi: 10.1177/1470593119897760

 

Battles in Contested Markets: The Processes of Legitimation in the 'Legal High' Market [Thesis]

This thesis explores the research question how are the processes of legitimation shaped in contested markets? The Australian ‘legal high’ market between 2009 and 2013 was selected as a compelling case through which to explore the research question in a longitudinal qualitative study. ‘Legal highs’ were psychoactive substances designed to mimic the effects of mainstream illicit drugs but had chemical structures different enough for them to be ‘legal’. The processes of legitimation occurred over three distinct phases; the transactional legitimation and market opportunism phase, the harm-minimising legitimation and market-fracturing phase, and the moral (de)legitimation and market dissipation phase.

Joubert, Alison M. (2020). Battles in contested markets: The processes of legitimation in the 'legal high' market. PhD Thesis, UQ Business School, The University of Queensland. doi: 10.14264/uql.2020.140

 

Design for Service Inclusion: Creating Inclusive Service Systems by 2050

Available at: https://www.emerald.com/insight/content/doi/10.1108/JOSM-05-2018-0121/full/html

Fantasy Pitching

Available at: https://cig.ase.ro/jcig/art/16_2_7.pdf

This paper outlines a fantasy research pitch exercise conducted in a PhD course at the University of Queensland. Using Faff’s (2015, 2017) pitching research template, students attending the course were asked to engage in a group exercise to pitch a “fantasy” research topic. While the final exercise was completed in a 90-minute timeframe (60 minutes of brainstorming, followed by 30 minutes of reporting back to the full group), the cohort had already been exposed to 5 x 90 minute sessions of related material over the weekend PhD module. Three groups of five were formed and they pitched three “fun” (or nonsense) topics: (a) Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Impact on Society; (b) Wipe-a-Baby; (c) Quality of Dairy Products: The Happiness of the Cow Does Matter.

Faff, Robert, Ali, Searat, Atif, Muhammad, Brenner, Matt, Chowdhury, Hasibul, Cruddas, Leelyn, Joubert, Alison M., Malik, Ihtisham, Mi, Lin, Nagar, Vinu, Pullen, Tim, Siegrist, Manuel, Smythe, Steve, Stephenson, Jeff, Zhang, Beile and Kun Zhang (2017). Fantasy pitching. Journal of Accounting and Management Information Systems, 16(2), 360-379. Doi: 10.24818/jamis.2017.02007

 

Examining Young Consumers’ Motivations to Engage in Controversial Leisure Consumption: A Study of the New Synthetic Recreational Drugs in Australia [Thesis]

In 2009 a new legal recreational product, named Synthetic Drugs, emerged in the Australian marketplace causing great controversy in society (Measham, Moore, Newcombe, & Zoe, 2010; The Legislative Assembly of New South Wales, 2013). The concern stems from reports of youth deaths and other negative health outcomes in the media. The pervasive view in the media is that the problem with Synthetic Drugs is the ease with which they can be accessed online and in retail outlets – such as tobacconists and adult shops, and how little is known about the questionable chemicals used in their manufacture.

Researchers have identified young people as having a ‘culture of intoxication’ (Measham, 2004; Measham & Brain, 2005) and increasingly consuming legal products such as Synthetic Drugs in their pursuit of intoxication. This has left experts and members of society puzzled by what Synthetic Drugs are, which young people consume them and why (Box & Lewis, 2013). Following the interpretivist Consumer Culture Theory perspective, two studies were conducted to describe and gain an understanding of Synthetic Drugs, their consumers and the market in which they exist. Study one involved a media analysis conducted to describe the market. Study two involved interviews with twenty-five young consumers to gain a more holistic understanding of young people’s leisure consumption and where Synthetic Drug consumption might be considered a part of their leisure activities.

Findings from study one indicated that young people are portrayed as disempowered vulnerable consumers in the Synthetic Drug market who need protecting from misleading product and market information. Findings from study two indicate that some young people agree that consumers need protecting from harmful products – expressing that consuming these products is insensible and irresponsible. Many of the young consumers interviewed, however, demonstrated that young people are aware of the risks of harm involved in Synthetic Drug consumption but choose to consume them anyway because of the perceived pleasurable outcomes. Many young consumers engage in controversial activities to experience exhilaration through exerting mastery over risk.

Joubert, Alison M. (2013). Examining young consumers’ motivations to engage in controversial leisure consumption: A study of the new synthetic recreational drugs in Australia. Honours Thesis, UQ Business School, The University of Queensland.