Getting attached to a classic Mustang. Use, maintenance and the burden of authenticity

2022 ◽  
pp. 135918352110689
Author(s):  
Jérôme Denis ◽  
Cornelia Hummel ◽  
David Pontille
Keyword(s):  
Intimate Relationship ◽  
Mass Market ◽  
Social Distinction ◽  
Symbolic Value ◽  
Maintenance Intervention ◽  
The Relationship

This paper investigates the relationships consumers cultivate with mass-market commodities while caring for their authenticity. Drawing on a six-year ethnography of classic Mustang owners communities in France, Switzerland and Belgium, the authors show that, far from being a symbolic value only, or a resource into which people can “invest” in a mechanism of social distinction, authenticity can also appear as a burden that weighs constantly on the relationship between people and things. Indeed, throughout their uses and maintenance, the material integrity of classic Mustangs is of great concern for their owners, who apprehend every breakdown or maintenance intervention as threats that could jeopardize their car's authenticity. For the sake of security, comfort or health, because new regulations come up, or because some original parts are not available anymore, classic Mustangs owners compose with heterogeneous elements, constantlyreshaping both their cars and their concerns for authenticity. The authors draw on Hennion's notion of “attachement” to describe the intimate relationship that grows through these arrangements. The notion particularly helps to grasp the ambivalence of the bonds between people and things: while they get more and more attached to their classic Mustang, owners are getting more and more worried. Moreover, throughout this growing relationship and the recurrent material interventions it draws on, the car does not remain passive. It progressively reveals itself, sometimes surprising its owner. Therefore, not only is authenticity “in the making” in this process, the contours of the thing itself evolve, as well as the knowledge of its owner.

Home, Sweet Home: Negotiating Intimacy in Brazilian Elitist Closed Condominiums

2020 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 374-395
Author(s):  
Rafael Ignacio Estrada Mejia ◽  
Carla Guerrón Guerron Montero
Keyword(s):  
Collective Mode ◽  
Living Arrangement ◽  
Public Life ◽  
Ethnographic Research ◽  
Social Distinction ◽  
History Of ◽  
Collective Production ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Do So

This article aims to decrease the cultural invisibility of the wealthy by exploring the Brazilian emergent elites and their preferred living arrangement: elitist closed condominiums (BECCs) from a micropolitical perspective.  We answer the question: What is the relationship between intimacy and subjectivity that is produced in the collective mode of existence of BECCs? To do so, we trace the history of the elite home, from the master’s house (casa grande) to contemporary closed condominiums. Following, we discuss the features of closed condominiums as spaces of segregation, fragmentation and social distinction, characterized by minimal public life and an internalized sociability. Finally, based on ethnographic research conducted in the mid-size city of Londrina (state of Paraná) between 2015 and 2017, we concentrate on four members of the emergent elite who live in BECCs, addressing their collective production of subjectivity. 

Palestinian Refugees between the City and the Camp

2020 ◽  
Vol 52 (4) ◽  
pp. 607-621
Author(s):  
Faedah M. Totah
Keyword(s):  
National Identity ◽  
Daily Life ◽  
National Belonging ◽  
Palestinian Refugees ◽  
Social Distinction ◽  
Urban Refugees ◽  
Old City ◽  
Refugee Experience ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
The City

AbstractThe camp and the city are both important for understanding the relationship between space and identity in the refugee experience of exile. In the Palestinian example, the camp has emerged as a potent symbol in the narrative of exile although only a third of refugees registered with UNRWA live in camps. Moreover, the city and urban refugees remain missing in most of the scholarship on the Palestinian experience with space, exile, and identity. Furthermore, there is little attention to how refugees understand the concept of the city and camp in their daily life. This article examines how Palestinian urban refugees in the Old City of Damascus conceptualized the relationship between the camp and the city. It illustrates how the concept of the camp remained necessary for the construction of their collective national identity while in Syria. However, the city was essential in the articulation of individual desires and establishing social distinction from other refugees. Thus, during a protracted exile it is in the interstice between the city and the camp, where most urban refugees in the Old City situated themselves, that informed their national belonging and personal aspirations.

scholarly journals Consumer Engagement in Online Brand Communities: Community Values, Brand Symbolism and Social Strategies

10.28945/4536 ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 15 ◽  
pp. 065-090
Author(s):  
Haili Pan
Keyword(s):  
Data Collection ◽  
Community Engagement ◽  
Social Value ◽  
Brand Community ◽  
Consumer Engagement ◽  
Brand Communities ◽  
Online Brand Communities ◽  
Online Brand Community ◽  
Symbolic Value ◽  
The Relationship

Aim/Purpose: This study examines the kind of community value companies should provide when strengthening the relationship between customers and brands through the establishment of an online brand community, and how this kind of community value promotes customers’ sense of community engagement and willingness to spread brand reputation. The paper also discusses how an enterprise’s brand symbolism affects the relationship between community value and customers’ engagement in online brand community. This study explored the important role of brand symbolism in the establishment of an online brand community. Background: Many companies want to create online brand communities to strengthen their relationships with consumers as well as to provide better service and value to consumers, for example, Huawei’s Huafen community (club.huawei.com), Apple’s support community (support.apple.com/zh-cn), and Samsung’s Galaxy community (samsungmembers.cn). However, these brand communities may have different interests and consumer engagement about the kind of community value to offer to their customers. Methodology: This study uses data collection from questionnaire surveys to design a quantitative research method. An online questionnaire survey of mobile phone users in China was conducted to collect data on social value, cognitive value, brand symbolism, customer community engagement, and brand recommendation. The brands of mobile phone include Apple, Huawei, Samsung, OPPO, VIVO, MI, and Meizu. The researcher purchased a sample service of WJX, an online survey company (www.wjx.cn), and WJX company distributed the questionnaire to research participants. The WJX company randomly selected 240 subjects from their sample database and then sent the questionnaire link to research participants’ mobile phones. Among the 240 research participants, the researcher excluded participants who lacked online brand community experience or had invalid data to qualify for data collection. After the researcher excluded participants who did not qualify for data collection, only 203 qualified questionnaire surveys advanced to the data collection and analysis phase, which was the questionnaire recovery rate of 84.58%. For the model analysis and hypotheses testing, the researcher used statistical software IBM SPSS Statistics and AMOS 21 and Smartpls3. Contribution: This study deepens the body of literature knowledge by combining online brand community value and brand symbolic value to explore issues that companies should consider when establishing an online brand community for their products and services. This study confirms that brands with high symbolic value establish communities and strengthen social values in the online brand community rather than reducing brand symbolism. Online brand community involves a horizontal interaction (peer interaction) among peers, which can have an effect on the symbolic value of brand (social distance). Findings: First, online brand community value (both cognitive and social value) has a positive impact on customer community engagement. Second, customer community engagement has a positive impact on customers’ brand recommend intention. Third, the customer community engagement is a mediator between the online brand community value and the customer brand recommend intention. Most importantly, fourth, the symbolic value of the brand controls the relationship between community value and customer community engagement. For brands with high symbolic value, the community value should emphasize cognitive value rather than social value. For brands with a low symbolic value, the community provides cognitive or social value, which is not affected by the symbolism of the brand. Recommendations for Practitioners: Practitioners can share best practices with the corporate sectors. Brand owners can work with researchers to explore the characteristics of their online brand communities. On this basis, brand owners and researchers can jointly build and manage online brand communities. Recommendation for Researchers: Researchers can explore different perspectives and factors of brand symbolism that involve brand owners when establishing an online brand community to advance consumer engagement, community value, and brand symbolism. Impact on Society: Online brand community is relevant for brand owners to establish brand symbolism, community value, and customer engagement. Readers of this paper can gain an understanding that cognitive and social values are two important drivers of individual participation in online brand communities. The discussion of these two factors can give readers and brand owners the perception to gain more understanding on social and behavior activities in online brand communities. Future Research: Practitioners and researchers could follow-up in the future with a study to provide more understanding and updated research information from different perspectives of research samples and hypotheses on online brand community.

Positive moods and word-of-mouth in the banking industry

2018 ◽  
Vol 36 (4) ◽  
pp. 764-783 ◽  
Author(s):  
Che-Hui Lien ◽  
Jyh-Jeng Wu ◽  
Maxwell K. Hsu ◽  
Stephen W. Wang
Keyword(s):  
Word Of Mouth ◽  
Banking Industry ◽  
Mediating Effect ◽  
Equation Modeling ◽  
Special Treatment ◽  
Content Type ◽  
Functional Value ◽  
Relational Benefits ◽  
Symbolic Value ◽  
The Relationship

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to examine the mediating effect of functional value and symbolic value between positive moods and word-of-mouth (WOM) referrals in the context of Taiwan’s banking industry. In addition, this study investigates the moderating effect of relational benefits on the relationship between perceived value and WOM.Design/methodology/approachThe research model was tested using data collected from customers (n=362) of the top 10 domestic banks in Taiwan. Structure equation modeling was employed to test and validate the conceptual model.FindingsPositive moods are found to be an important predictor of functional value, symbolic value and WOM in this banking service study. Four types of relational benefits are identified including social, special treatment, confidence and face. Note that two distinct segments of bank customers are identified in terms of relational benefits: those who appreciate face benefits (n1=169), and those who appreciate general relational benefits (n2=193). The findings reveal the existence of partial mediation between a banking customer’s mood and WOM through functional value and symbolic value in the overall sample (n=362). However, it was found that functional value partially mediates the influence of positive moods on WOM among respondents in the “general relational benefits” segment only. That is, relational benefits are found to moderate the relationship between functional value and WOM.Originality/valueThis study expands the existing body of knowledge on customers’ perceptions of value by differentiating types of value perceptions.

‘Yield to the mighty mind of the Popular Instructor’: Print and the Press in Martin Chuzzlewit

2020 ◽  
pp. 137-179
Author(s):  
Iain Crawford
Keyword(s):  
Mass Culture ◽  
Significant Contribution ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Negative Experience ◽  
Mass Market ◽  
The Press ◽  
Martin Chuzzlewit ◽  
First Time ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Made In

Building on the case made in chapter 3, chapter 4 tunes to consider Martin Chuzzlewit and examines the ways in which the novel addresses the relationship between literacy, print media, and the experience of modern urbanism. Together eith its predecessor, the chapter argues that for Dickens America was far more than what has been generally perceived as an increasingly negative experience that chastened his understanding of the press and of mass culture. Rather, and notwithstanding all his complaints about Americans, tobacco, and spit, the encounter with America in fact provided him with a new sense, at once disturbing and alluring, of the potential power of a cheap mass-market press led by entrepreneurial editors operating in a print environment unconstrained by state controls. Moreover, in writing about America, and above all in writing about its newspapers in both American Notes and Martin Chuzzlewit, Dickens for the first time discovered a methodology for fusing fiction and the press in ways that would be foundational his most significant contribution to Victorian journalism, Household Words and its successor, All the Year Round.

Peace, Friendship, and “The Educated Man’s Sister” in Woolf’s Pacifist Writing

2020 ◽  
pp. 117-128
Author(s):  
Kate Haffey
Keyword(s):  
Intimate Relationship ◽  
Western Thought ◽  
The Feminine ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Critical Writings

This chapter explores the connection between Woolf’s notions of friendship and her critical writings about peace and pacifism. For Woolf, friendship not only constitutes a personal intimate relationship with another person, but it also represents a force that stands in opposition to oppressive impersonal concepts like nationalism, imperialism, and militarism—and is thus deeply intertwined with her particular brand of pacifism. In order to make this argument, the chapter employs Derrida’s The Politics of Friendship and explores the place of the sister in his text. Though Derrida traces the relationship between the friend and the brother throughout the history of western thought concerning friendship, he often stops to ask about the absence of the sister. His book ultimately shows that this figure of the “friend in the feminine” could be the key to thinking politics “beyond the principle of fraternity.”

Consumer Self-Concept, Symbolism and Market Behavior: A Theoretical Approach

1967 ◽  
Vol 31 (4) ◽  
pp. 22-27 ◽  
Author(s):  
Edward L. Grubb ◽  
Harrison L. Grathwohl
Keyword(s):  
Consumer Behavior ◽  
Theoretical Approach ◽  
Psychological Characteristics ◽  
Self Concept ◽  
Purchase Behavior ◽  
Market Behavior ◽  
Symbolic Value ◽  
Behavior Based ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Theoretical Foundations

What is the relationship between the psychological characteristics of a consumer and his purchase behavior? In this paper the authors briefly review pertinent research and lay theoretical foundations for a model of consumer behavior based upon an individual's self-concept and the symbolic value of the goods he buys.

Supporting Parents in the NICU: Guidelines for Promoting Parent Confidence and Competence

2000 ◽  
Vol 19 (8) ◽  
pp. 63-64 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kathleen Vanden Berg
Keyword(s):  
Intensive Care ◽  
Essential Role ◽  
Intimate Relationship ◽  
Attachment Relationship ◽  
Sick Newborn ◽  
Developmentally Supportive Care ◽  
Care Practices ◽  
Positive Feelings ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Family Centered

AS INTENSIVE CARE NURSERIES move toward implementation of family-centered and developmentally supportive care practices, we are encouraged to focus on the relationship between parents and their infants and recognize the essential role that parents play in promoting the health and recovery of their infant. Supporting parents and facilitating a closer, more intimate relationship with their fragile, sick newborn is often a challenge. Yet these first weeks and months can lay a foundation either of positive feelings or of ambivalence and negativity, which can have consequences for the future stability of the attachment relationship so important to the infant’s development.

Effect of Viscoelastic Behavior on Electroconductivity of Recycled Activated Carbon Composites

2011 ◽  
Vol 70 ◽  
pp. 231-236 ◽  
Author(s):  
Takenobu Sakai ◽  
Tomohiko Gushiken ◽  
Jun Koyanagi ◽  
Rolando Rios-Soberanis ◽  
Tomoki Masuko ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Composite Material ◽  
Activated Carbon ◽  
Composite Materials ◽  
Activated Carbons ◽  
Viscoelastic Behavior ◽  
Intimate Relationship ◽  
Carbon Composites ◽  
Stress Relaxation Behavior ◽  
Carbon Particles ◽  
The Relationship

In the Waterworks Bureau, the activated carbon has been used for filtering water. After the life service of activated carbon, it is normally disposed. This work focuses on the processing of a composite material in order to recycle these wasted carbon particles. These activated carbons were used for the filler of composite materials, and a composite with carbon contents of 10% ~ 60% was manufactured and characterized. They exhibited electroconductive behavior because of the carbon particles used as fillers. The electroconductivity have an intimate relationship with the strain of the material. However, because of the composite viscoelasticity, the electroconductivity presented changes by their stress relaxation behavior with the same strain. In this study, it was revealed the relationship between the viscoelasticity and the electroconductivity of recycled activated carbon composites.

scholarly journals DOA PUASA DI ANTARA KEPEMIMPINAN PENGGEMBALAAN, ROH KUDUS, DAN PERTUMBUHAN GEREJA

2020 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 35-50
Author(s):  
Sewie Elia Huang
Keyword(s):  
Holy Spirit ◽  
Research Method ◽  
Intimate Relationship ◽  
Relationship With God ◽  
Literature Research ◽  
The Holy Spirit ◽  
Relationship Of ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
The Voice ◽  
The Church

Abstract Fasting prayer has a very significant role for the growth of faith and congregation in the growth of the church because fasting prayer is their intimate relationship with God. The purpose of this paper answers the question: What is meant by fasting prayer? What is the relationship between fasting prayer and the Holy Spirit? What is the relationship between fasting prayer and shepherding leadership? What is the relation of fasting prayer in the growth of the Church? The research method uses descriptive literature research. The results of the study are: (1) fasting prayer is abstaining from all physical food for other bodies describing the consequences of fasting, namely: "suffering of the soul". (2) the relationship of fasting prayer with the Holy Spirit is fasting prayer which brings clarity of the way, the voice of the spirit, so that it will be sensitive to the voice of the Holy Spirit to provide guidance in obtaining spiritual and material victory as well. (3) the relationship of fasting prayer with the leadership of the shepherding is a servant of God who truly is a servant of God whose life of prayer is accompanied by fasting. (4) the relation of fasting prayer in the growth of the Church is the pastoral service can help realize the need for maturity and encourage growth in spirituality.AbstrakDoa puasa mempunyai peran yang sangatlah signifikan bagi pertumbuhan iman dan jemaatnya dalam pertumbuhan gereja karena doa puasa merupakan hubungan intim mereka dengan Allah. Tujuan penulisan ini menjawab pertanyaan: Apakah yang dimaksud dengan doa puasa? Bagaimanakah relasi doa puasa dengan Roh Kudus? Bagaimanakah relasi doa puasa dengan kepemimpinan pengembalaan? Bagaimanakah relasi doa puasa dalam pertumbuhan Gereja? Metode penelitian menggunakan penelitian deskriptif literature. Hasil penelitian adalah: (1) doa puasa adalah berpantang dengan semua makanan jasmani untuk tubuh yang lain menggambarkan akibat berpuasa, yaitu: “penderitaan jiwa”. (2) relasi doa puasa dengan Roh Kudus adalah doa puasa mendatangkan kejernihan jalan, akan suara roh, sehingga akan peka dengan suara Roh Kudus untuk memberikan bimbingan memperoleh kemenangan rohani dan materi juga. (3) relasi doa puasa dengan kepemimpinan pengembalaan adalah seorang hamba Tuhan yang sungguh sungguh adalah hamba Tuhan yang hidup doanya disertai puasa. (4) relasi doa puasa dalam pertumbuhan Gereja adalah pelayanan penggembalaan dapat menolong menyadari kebutuhan akan kedewasaan dan mendorong bertumbuh dalam kerohanian.

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