SPECIAL ISSUES

Individuals with mental disorders (MD) not only struggle with functional impairment; they must also manage the stigma accompanying their diagnosis. In this research we explore the role of the marketplace as a resource to help consumers cope with MD-related stressors. Coping efforts are actions taken to protect, maintain, or restore wellbeing. However, the coping literature is largely silent on the process through which this is achieved.Our findings suggest the marketplace helps consumers cope by restoring or bolstering one of three conceptually distinct aspects of the self-concept: self-esteem, self-efficacy, and/or self-compassion. The self-concept goals prove differentially effective for wellbeing. We advocate future coping research focus on understanding self-concept goals rather than specific coping strategies.We also present recommendations for consumers and marketplace stakeholders to promote self-concept goals and wellbeing outcomes.

This paper proposes that popular culture has the potential to be progressive, opening the possibility for social change and the motivation to drive it. Based on a hermeneutic analysis of twelve popular culture cases, a processual theory of transformation is constructed. Processual theories embrace and emphasize a dynamic temporal sequence where one conceptual category sets the stage for the next. They are useful in helping to explain how complex social processes unfold over time. The processual theory presented in this paper is based on four concepts: contradictions, emotions, progressive literacy, and praxis. This theory is useful to the TCR movement in three ways: first, the theory is descriptive, helping TCR researchers understand how society changes over time; second, the theory is prescriptive, enabling TCR researchers to think about potential social change strategies; and finally, the process used in this research serves as a paradigmatic frame for theory development in TCR.

Drawing on intersectionality's historical feminist roots of critical praxis and recent re-radicalization of the theory, this paper urges for an expansion of the concept of intersectionality in business and marketing-related studies. To extend the transformative potential of intersectionality theory, we call for scholars and practitioners to move beyond the study of intersecting identity markers (e.g., gender, race, class) to include assessments of power structures and intersectional oppressions. We propose the transformative intersectional framework (TIF) to help scholars and practitioners to explore sources of oppressions more deeply and broadly.We illustrate the analytical capability of the TIF by examining a much lauded business-to-business service that seeks social justice and change—diversity training programs. Using the TIF, we identify the inherent and (in)visible complexities of injustices with which organizations must grapple. We close by demonstrating how the TIF can enrich practice and propose recommendations for action.• Re-radicalized intersectionality provides transformational potential to firms.• Diversity programs require intersectionality and context-specific perspective.• Standardization of implicit bias tests neglects intersecting identities.• Diversity training overlooks deep systemic issues and glocalized conditions.• Depth and breadth are key to managerially useful intersectional understanding.

Despite growing awareness of the importance of gender equality in the advancement of global economies, the involvement of marketing and policy in (re)producing and resolving gender injustices remains understudied. This article proposes a transformative consumer research approach to studying gender-related issues. It develops the “transformative gender justice framework” (TGJF), which identifies perspectives from three enfranchisement theories: social and distributive justice, capabilities approach, and recognition theory. By applying a multiparadigmatic analysis, the authors encourage a dialogic and recursive approach so that scholars and policy makers can assess the interactions between structural, agentic, and sociocultural forces that underlie gender injustices. They argue the TGJF is necessary for full comprehension of the complex, systemic, glocalized, institutionalized, and embodied nature of gender injustices, as well as how policy, markets and marketing can both perpetuate and resolve gender injustices. To demonstrate the TGJF's analytical power, the authors apply the framework to one site of gender injustice (i.e., the sex tourism industry), propose applications across additional sites, and discuss questions it raises for future research.

Despite progress toward poverty alleviation, policy making still lags in thinking about how individuals experience poverty as overlapping sources of disadvantage. Using the lens of intersectionality, this article identifies the gaps that arise from a conventional focus on isolated facets of poverty. Insights generated from an analysis of extant scholarship are used to develop a road map to help policy makers develop programs that address the complex experience of poverty and promote transformative solutions.

Responsibilization, or the shift of functions and risks from providers and producers to consumers, has become an increasingly common policy in service systems and marketplaces (e.g., financial, health, governmental). Because responsibilization is often considered synonymous with consumer agency and well-being, the authors take a transformative service research perspective and draw on resource integration literature to investigate whether responsibilization is truly associated with well-being. The authors focus on expert services, for which responsibilization concerns are particularly salient, and question whether this expanding policy is in the public interest. In the process, they develop a conceptualization of resource integration under responsibilization that includes three levels of actors (consumer, provider, and service system), the identification of structural tensions surrounding resource integration, and three categories of resource-integration practices (access, appropriation, and management) necessary to negotiate responsibilization. The findings have important implications for providers, public and institutional policy makers, and service systems, all of which must pay more active attention to the challenges consumers face in negotiating responsibilization and the resulting well-being outcomes.

Social conflicts are ubiquitous to the human condition and occur throughout markets, marketing processes, and marketing systems. When unchecked or unmitigated, social conflict can have devastating consequences for consumers, marketers, and societies, especially when conflict escalates to war. In this article, the authors offer a systemic analysis of the Colombian war economy, with its conflicted shadow and coping markets, to show how a growing network of fair-trade coffee actors has played a key role in transitioning the country's war economy into a peace economy. They particularly draw attention to the sources of conflict in this market and highlight four transition mechanisms--empowerment, communication, community building, and regulation--through which marketers can contribute to peacemaking and thus produce mutually beneficial outcomes for consumers and society. The article concludes with a discussion of implications for marketing theory, practice, and public policy.

Stigmas, or discredited personal attributes, emanate from social perceptions of physical characteristics, aspects of character, and "tribal" associations (e.g., race; Goffman 1963). Extant research has emphasized the perspective of the stigma target, with some scholars exploring how social institutions shape stigma.Yet the ways stakeholders within the sociocommercial sphere create, perpetuate, or resist stigma remain overlooked. The authors introduce and define marketplace stigma as the labeling, stereotyping, and devaluation by and of commercial stakeholders (consumers, companies and their employees, stockholders, and institutions) and their offerings (products, services, and experiences). The authors offer the Stigma Turbine as a unifying conceptual framework that locates marketplace stigma within the broader sociocultural context and illuminates its relationship to forces that exacerbate or blunt stigma. In unpacking the Stigma Turbine, the authors reveal the critical role that market stakeholders can play in (de)stigmatization, explore implications for marketing practice and public policy, and offer a research agenda to further understanding of marketplace stigma and stakeholder welfare.