Culinary communication practices:The role of retail spaces in producing field-specific cultural capital

Purpose: This chapter explores the practices underpinning the production of field-specific cultural capital at festivals, understood here as retail spaces that gather a plethora of distinct market actors. Methodology/Approach: This research presents evidence from an ethnographic study employing an interpretative paradigm and multiple data collection processes. The empirical research has been undertaken in the context of food festivals associated with the foodie taste regime. Findings: Three categories of practices that play a role in the production of field-specific cultural capital, namely representational, exchange, and experiential practices, are presented. Practical Implications: Our chapter provides recommendations for food festival organizers and participants who need to improve their practices when facing challenges such as increasing international competition and costs or declining sponsorship. Research Limitations/Implications: This chapter contributes to the growing body of field-level market analysis by showing how practices enabled by complex retail spaces contribute to the production of field-specific cultural capital. However, this chapter is limited by its focus on food festivals. Originality/Value of the Paper: This chapter theorizes how practices enable the acceleration and diversification of field-specific capital exchange, as well as its integration with other forms of capital

A Discourse Analysis of Pilgrimage Reviews

This paper is the first to provide an account of the discursive features of online consumer reviews of pilgrimage sites. Drawing from pilgrimage studies and narrativity theory in consumer research, we explore how consumers communicate the spiritual and material aspects of pilgrimage experiences by examining a corpus of 833 consumer reviews on TripAdvisor of the most sacred pilgrimage sites of the world’s major five faith groups. Pilgrims include analytical discursive features to communicate the material aspect of their consumption experience. They reserve narration for spiritual transformation and the experience of strong emotions. Moreover, review ratings are only reflective of the spiritual aspect of their consumption experience. As such, our research complements previous studies by highlighting the material, physical aspect of this extraordinary consumption experience

Tradição Mercantilizada: Construção de Mercados Baseados na Tradição

A mercantilização das sociedades contemporâneas tem sido apontada como um processo responsável pela elevação do mercado à posição de intermediário dos sistemas sociais e culturais, inclusive da tradição. Fazendo uso de um estudo etnográfico na cultura gaúcha, buscamos analisar como as práticas culturais têm contribuído para a preservação da tradição por meio de dinâmicas de mercado. Para tanto, adotamos um olhar interpretativo sobre as práticas que múltiplos agentes desempenham no mercado e o reflexo destas na mercantilização da cultura tradicionalista gaúcha. Resultados apontam a tradição como uma invenção que serve de referência cultural para a construção de um mercado por três grupos distintos de agentes: produtores, consumidores e organizadores. Esses agentes fazem uso de construções históricas, do orgulho em ser gaúcho e do vínculo identitário como referência cultural para guiar três estratégias distintas de mercantilização: tangibilização, aproximação mercadológica, e valorização da tradição. Concluímos que a mercantilização da tradição pode transformar o mercado num ambiente fecundo para a preservação de tradições culturais

How consumers reconcile discordant food retailer brand images

This paper is positioned in relation to the evolving market conditions of UK grocery retail and offers insight into the consumer led co-creative processes underlying the switching behaviour to discount food retailers by middle-class consumers. Based on phenomenological interviews with ideographic analysis, this research draws on theories related to cultural branding and brand relationships, to demonstrate how consumers negotiate individuated brand meanings. It reveals how, in spite of normative marketplace discourses, consumers are able to reframe and negotiate personally relevant meanings suitable to their own lifestyles and life projects. In so doing, this study contributes to the literature by offering an account of how brand relationships are appropriated in negotiations with stigmatised brand images to make them relevant and suitable for hitherto incongruent market segments. The findings therefore hold relevance for grocery retail managers and other practitioners engaged with the management of low involvement and mundane brands, who will have a better understanding of the process through which such relationships manifest themselves in food retail switching behaviour

International Collaboration in Times of Pandemics:An Urgent Need for Reforming our Global Financial System

Better, swifter and more responsive international coordination is needed within our global financial system for the containment of the pandemic and its effects. This requires better international tax coordination with a higher global minimum corporate tax, comprehensive coverage of sectors and firms, inclusion of all current tax havens and more generous redistribution of excess profits to developing nations based on user location. There also needs to be a more substantial and easier-to-access mechanism for debt relief and restructuring, one that generously suspends debt payments in periods of crises and provides financial support without strict and painful conditionalities