This ‘state of the art’ paper serves as a roadmap of the past, present and future of gender and the marketplace scholarship, highlighting the key problems scholars have and can continue to interrogate. We present a feminist dialogical review – a novel approach we introduce as an alternative to traditional literature review methods that combines elements of scoping published works alongside dialogue with the scholars who have or are actively involved in shaping knowledge production on the topic. We adopt the feminist standpoint of ‘naming the problem’ to identify and name five key problems – theoretical traditionalism, the hidden hegemo-net, representational reductiveness, binary blindness and silent structures – that can guide scholars as they further the agenda of advancing gender equity in the marketplace.

Gender categorisations permeate markets and fuel gender inequalities. A marketplace strategy to address this is gender-bending, whereby marketers reposition products targeted to one gender to another. In this paper, we explore whether gender-bending challenges or reinforces the gendered norms that maintain gendered inequalities. We examine this through a qualitative research study of dolls designed for boys. Our study demonstrates that gender-bending traverses hybrid masculinities that both challenge and reinforce masculine norms. Specifically, whilst the signalling of alternative masculinities challenges masculine norms, these norms are still reinforced through the signalling of hegemonic masculinities used to render the gender-bended product more palatable. Our paper demonstrates that gender-bending is more than a gender reversal and can involve the navigation of complex gender dynamics in the marketplace. Further, we advance understandings of hybrid masculinities in consumer culture by highlighting the capacity of gender-bending to disrupt gender hierarchies – especially for boys.

We introduce a feminist pedagogical approach to marketing education through designing gender transformative advertising pedagogy, to promote diversity, ethics and gender justice in the classroom towards developing more inclusive industry practice and cultures. We detail how this was implemented through feminist praxis and a problem-based learning assessment task. Our analysis highlights that the feminist classroom raises consciousness of sexist advertising which can awaken students to unconscious gender biases. Further, we demonstrate how gender transformative advertising pedagogy encourages students to confront representational conventions of gender, with students aiming to portray diverse subjectivities yet struggling to transform femininity and relying on more ‘palatable’ forms of masculinity. Finally, we make the case for the marketing classroom as a site for gender justice, where through incremental action students come to link gendered structures with marketing practices and become equipped to act as agents of feminist change in and beyond the classroom.

Digital brand activism is a growing phenomenon in advertising and marketing. This conceptual paper advances this emergent literature by examining firms’ implementation of brand activism on social media and consumers’ varied reactions. It highlights the benefits of social media as the primary vehicle for campaign dissemination, as well as its propensity to amplify criticisms and polarization. However, the unique contributions of digital brand activism to the broader societal agenda remain underexplored. We propose collective action as the primary goal for change-oriented digital brand activism and underscore the significance of outcome expectancy in achieving this goal, offering a clear pathway for mobilizing consumers and demonstrating how individual contributions can be pooled to create significant social impact. We adopt the theory synthesis approach to summarize and integrate knowledge to advance a framework that identifies (1) key challenges that arise for digital brand activism, and (2) corresponding literature-informed strategies to overcome these challenges and achieve collective action.

Purpose Qualitative social media research has flourished in the field of marketing, but navigating the scope of inherent ethical concerns can be challenging, given the dynamic and nuanced nature of social media itself. The purpose of this paper is to propose a feminist ethic of care framework for conducting qualitative social media research in marketing. Design/methodology/approach This paper adopts a conceptual approach, theoretically guided by a feminist ethic of care perspective. A feminist ethic of care encourages ethical principles that align with qualitative methods, including empathy, collaboration, flexibility, interconnectedness, contextuality and recognizing power dynamics. Findings The feminist ethic of care framework outlines three considerations for conducting qualitative social media research: care to the platform, care to the participant and care to the procedure. To develop practical strategies for navigating core concerns, the authors offer reflexive questions that marketing scholars can ask themselves, guided by Tronto’s (1993) ethic of care principles: attentiveness (how am I becoming aware of needs to enact care?), responsibility (how am I willing to take care of needs?), responsiveness (how am I adjusting care practices to meet changing needs?) and competence (how am I developing the skills and knowledge to provide effective care?). Practical implications As a companion guide, the authors provide “A Practical Worksheet for Applying a Feminist Ethic of Care in Qualitative Social Media Research,” designed to support researchers in ethical decision-making at various stages throughout the research lifecycle. Researchers can use this tangible resource to navigate the nuances of their own qualitative social media research projects at critical inflection points (e.g. starting a project, data immersion, drafting a manuscript and preparing a submission). Originality/value This paper argues that a feminist ethic of care provides a context-sensitive, axiological lens for conducting qualitative social media research – starting with the “why-to,” or ethical principles, before moving to the “how-to”, or practical strategies.

Purpose This paper aims to illustrate how multistakeholder partnerships can maximize different forms of impact in relation to the transformative power of advertising, including inclusive gender representation and storytelling as well as the pursuit of gender equity in society more broadly. Design/methodology/approach Two collaborations between Transformative Consumer Research scholars and external partners working as coalitions to progress gender equity in advertising are detailed. Findings This research outlines the success factors and challenges across two multistakeholder initiatives and the forms of impact, both inside and outside the academy, that were realized through these partnerships. Research limitations/implications This research highlights how impactful outcomes, including societal benefits, are within the reach of academic scholars as they partner with industry, nonprofits and governments to produce traditional and nontraditional outputs of their collaborative efforts. This work details how these were achieved in relation progressing gender equity in advertising but may be limited to these cases and contexts. Practical implications This work provides practical advice for navigating challenges related to collaborative initiatives within the advertising ecosystem and underscores success factors for various actors who seek social justice goals – in this case, gender equity. Social implications This research demonstrates how academics can engage in partnerships to advance gender equity goals in society. Originality/value This research addresses a neglected area of research in advertising and marketing, taking a transformative perspective rooted in gender equity goals to illustrate how impact outcomes can be collaboratively realized in the advertising ecosystem.

In this paper, we explore how platformisation facilitates potentially harmful consumption practices of sports betting. Our research draws on ideas from the platformisation and social practice theory literature and features a netnographic study of a sports betting community of practice hosted on the English-language platform Reddit. We consider how platformisation shapes sports betting consumption practices, and the implications for consumers. Our findings demonstrate how platformisation facilitates harmful sports betting consumption practices by causing: (1) intrusion of these practices into work, time, and the consumption of sport; and (2) competitive intensification among and between consumers, against the gambling industry, and against consumers themselves. We discuss the implications from our research findings for platformisation theory, the platformisation of consumption practices, and sociocultural perspectives on gambling. Further, we offer suggestions for how policy and practice can ameliorate gambling harms that are facilitated through platformisation, and identify opportunities for further research.

In turning to the user-generated pornography market and its mainstreaming sexual violence against women, this paper looks to uncover why women are increasingly participating as self-producing content creators. Specifically, we ask how the institutional logics perspective can help uncover more disguised market dynamics encouraging and coercing women to (re)produce their own abuse through self-produced pornographic content creation. With an institutional logics analysis of archival data from five user-generated pornography websites, our findings uncover how social logics act to disguise market logics. We show that a logic of activism is mobilised through two prominent feminist, social justice imperatives of: (i) the representation of diversity and (ii) appeals to environmentalism, which function together to construct a compliant and duty-bound imperative for women’s content creation. In doing so, this paper introduces a concept of moral market compliance : a dark market dynamic that functions to fem wash and (re)produce market violence against women.

Gendered marketing – the division of the marketplace into restrictive binary gender categories – is particularly pronounced in children’s markets. In recent years, this practice has attracted increasing public and policy attention due to concerns about its potential to entrench gendered inequities from a young age. Yet, scholarship has largely overlooked how gendered marketing socialises children into binary gendered categories. To address this, we present an integrative review of the gendered marketing of children’s toys. We synthesise the fragmented interdisciplinary literature on the topic to develop a framework that illustrates how gendered marketing to children operates, in turn conceiving how marketing acts as a key agent of gender socialisation. Specifically, we identify four gendered marketing tools and their underlying tactics that (re)produce limited and harmful gender categorisations in the marketplace. To redress this, we present an agenda for de-gendering marketing to children to take action against gender injustices in markets.

This special issue on ‘Influencer Marketing: Interdisciplinary and Socio-Cultural Perspectives’ aims to discuss, problematise and stimulate debate on how influencer marketing, its consumption and wider implications for the contemporary world can be examined and re-thought from socio-cultural and interdisciplinary perspectives. Influencer marketing is a growing area of interest both inside and outside of the academy. Brands are increasingly devoting their marketing budgets to influencer marketing, which has grown into a $21.1 billion industry (Geyser, 2022). Whilst many definitions of influencers exist, most describe influencers as digital content creators who aim to gain the attention of a ‘following’ on social media and influence the behaviour of this audience through representations of their everyday lives in which commodities play a vital role (Drenten et al., 2020). In this ‘demotic turn’ (Turner, 2010), ordinary people have become increasingly visible in marketing, giving power to ‘real’ voices (Duffy & Hund, 2019) who use social media as a megaphone to reach mass audiences (McQuarrie et al., 2013) and then monetise their following across an array of contextual lifestyle boundaries such as food, fashion, family, technology, politics, activism and health. However, influencer marketing is underscored by dynamics and inequities that are often overlooked in the hype that surrounds this ‘authentic’ way of influencing and connecting with consumers.

Abstract This paper examines the establishment of a feminist academic organization, GENMAC (Gender, Markets, and Consumers; genmac.co), serving gender scholars in business schools and related fields. In so doing, it builds on the emerging literature of feminist academic organizations, as situated within feminist organizational studies (FOS). Through a feminist case study and by assessing the reflections of GENMAC's board members, we tell the story of the emergence of GENMAC and detail the tensions the organization encountered as it formally established itself as a feminist organization within the confines of a business school setting, a patriarchal system, and a neoliberal university paradigm. We build on the FOS literature by considering how our organization counters cultures of heightened individualism and builds collective action to challenge sexism through the nexus of research, support, and advocacy pillars of our organization. We demonstrate how, through these actions, our organization challenges hierarchies of knowledge, prioritizes the care and support needed for the day‐to‐day survival of gender scholars in business schools, and spotlights and challenges structural inequalities and injustices in the academy.

This paper seeks to extend existing conceptualisations of risky and harmful consumption. Our work draws on a qualitative, rhizomatic study of Australian consumers’ sports betting practices. We utilise Deleuze and Guattari’s related concepts of molar and molecular lines and lines of flight to draw attention to sports betting’s mutually affecting discursive, socio-material and emotional intensities. We examine the ongoing tensions between how people understand themselves as gamblers, the social normalisation of gambling and the parameters of risky betting behaviour. We argue that conceiving gambling consumption through molar and molecular lines challenges the binaries inherent in current framings of risky and harmful consumption. We also consider the possibilities for lines of flight and implications for gambling harm.

This study explores how a platform enables social media influencers to promulgate a consumption ideology. We show how gun influencers, or “gunfluencers,” use Instagram to link products, activities, and meanings to Second Amendment ideology—a gun-centric belief system in the United States colloquially known as “2A ideology.” Through a qualitative study of 25 Instagram gunfluencers, we identify a process of curating a consumption ideology wherein social media influencers employ four curatorial tactics: glamourizing, demystifying, victimizing, and tribalizing. Findings suggest gunfluencers extend audiences and leverage algorithms to prescribe and model how supporters of 2A ideology should look, act, speak, feel, and consume. Our research contributes to understanding how consumption ideologies are promulgated in a digital, platformized world. In the context of U.S. gun culture, implications address the role of platformization in supporting gun companies’ promotional efforts, despite government- and platform-based restrictions, and the political dimensions of influencer and consumer cultures.

This qualitative study extends our understanding of the body in practice theoretic consumption research by illuminating its roles in the pre-performative practices that mothers routinely perform when considering the possibility of exercise; namely body evaluation and projection practices. These practices construct the ‘mothering body’ as a failing body because it does not exercise, which is set against the ‘exercising body’ which connotes an effortless, thin and fit idealised body entrenched in the teleoaffective structures of exercise practice. We conceptualise that ‘teleoaffective misalignment’ ensues, which we define as misalignment between the beliefs and understandings in pre-performative practices and the teleoaffective structure of a practice. This process locks affective displeasure into mothers’ relationships with exercise and leading mothers to exit the field. We contribute to practice-theoretic consumption research through our conceptualisation of ‘teleoaffective misalignment’ and by extending understanding and nomenclature of pre-performative practices and how these interconnect unsuccessful practice performances.

The mediated male gaze and the objectification of female bodies have long been a focus of consumer culture research; however, there is an emerging focus on the female gaze. As gender dynamics change with advances in equality, research has begun to interrogate shifting gendered power relations and sexual politics in representational culture, often from a post-feminist perspective and in Western contexts. By examining ‘little fresh meat’ – charismatic young men as influencers of female consumers in China – we consider how the female gaze objectifies men in a non-Western setting. Specifically, we examine ‘Nan Se consumption’, which documents changes in consumer culture arising from Chinese women’s increasing economic and social power. We explore how this gives rise to ‘soft masculinity’ ideals for Chinese men and creates tensions with state-endorsed hegemonic masculinity in Chinese society. This chapter offers an intersectional interrogation of the female gaze and maps future directions for research in this emerging area of marketing, sexuality, gender and consumer culture scholarship.

This paper reviews the progress of geographical research on the gambling industry and presents a framework to comprehend the role of space in gambling consumption and harm. It covers two themes: the casino’s place in urban governance and the agency of gamblers, and how space impacts gambling consumption and harm. The paper introduces a conceptual framework of orientation, affective atmosphere, and intimacy to better comprehend how gambling practices can increase or decrease risk. Finally, the paper suggests that this framework can help to better understand online sports gambling consumption and harm in the context of market growth.

In this article, we explore how a capabilities perspective can advance practice theoretic conceptualisations of persistent health inequalities. Specifically, we seek to understand the capabilities necessary for recruitment to leisure time physical activity (LTPA) practices by low SES mothers, a group traditionally excluded from LTPA. Our study illuminates that mothers living a life of social disadvantage face difficulties in becoming recruited to LTPA practices despite, in many cases, the availability of elements required for performance. We identify that temporal, support and energy capabilities are necessary for low SES mothers to become recruitable to LTPA. The dispossession of these capabilities signals inequalities in the constellation of practices that configure this group's lived experiences, in turn giving rise to practice absence and further consolidating patterns of inequality. We offer a framework of practice capabilities and health inequalities to guide future practice-oriented scholarship in the sociology of illness and health, which signals how capabilities may enable or constrain recruitment to health-promoting practices, give rise to inequalities and condition the possibility of practice absence.

Utilizing a qualitative thematic analysis of submission materials for 18 award-winning, gender-inclusive campaigns at the Cannes International Festival of Creativity, this research reenvisions inclusive advertising with a strengthened focus on impact. While existing literature has largely focused on identity categories and inclusive representation, we identify four mechanisms for impact (perceptual, conceptual, instrumental, and political) and scalability (across micro, meso, and macro levels) as salient themes in the award-winning and shortlisted campaigns that are recognized by the industry as gender inclusive. Theoretical and managerial contributions include (1) identification of how social impact is conceptualized in award-winning inclusive advertising and how impact functions through awards, (2) development in the definition of inclusive advertising to include social impacts as an outcome, and (3) a reimagining and expansion of the concept of inclusive advertising through a proposed Inclusive Advertising Spectrum, which encompasses representation, storytelling, and social impacts.

Addressing mothers’ vaccine hesitancy, which is a state of indecision rather than refusal, may become critical to public health responses to the COVID-19 pandemic. Extant research separately examines how intensive mothering ideology and emotions interact with childhood vaccine hesitancy; however, little is known about the emotions at the intersection of motherhood and vaccine hesitancy. To address this, we seek to understand the emotions experienced by COVID-19 vaccine hesitant mothers who experience the societal pressures arising from the ideology of intensive mothering. Interviews (n = 30) were conducted with women in Australia who identify as mothers and self-report to have concerns about COVID-19 vaccination of their children. The findings suggest ‘emotions of burden’, specifically fear of being a ‘bad mother’ and anticipated guilt about failing to be a ‘good mother’, are experienced by mothers striving to meet societal expectations of intensive mothering though their vaccination decision. These findings provide a more nuanced understanding of mothers’ experiences in making vaccination decisions for their children and lends further empirical support to critiques of intensive mothering ideology as well as public perceptions of vaccine hesitant mothers. Practically, public health campaigns that avoid intimations of ‘bad mothering’ and acknowledge how emotionally burdensome the COVID-19 vaccination decision can be for vaccine hesitant mothers are indicated.

We introduce a feminist pedagogical approach to marketing education through designing gender transformative advertising pedagogy, to promote diversity, ethics and gender justice in the classroom towards developing more inclusive industry practice and cultures. We detail how this was implemented through feminist praxis and a problem-based learning assessment task. Our analysis highlights that the feminist classroom raises consciousness of sexist advertising which can awaken students to unconscious gender biases. Further, we demonstrate how gender transformative advertising pedagogy encourages students to confront representational conventions of gender, with students aiming to portray diverse subjectivities yet struggling to transform femininity and relying on more ‘palatable’ forms of masculinity. Finally, we make the case for the marketing classroom as a site for gender justice, where through incremental action students come to link gendered structures with marketing practices and become equipped to act as agents of feminist change in and beyond the classroom.