Whole grains and health:attitudes to whole grains against a prevailing background of increased marketing and promotion

To explore current awareness and perceptions of whole grain foods and perceived barriers and facilitators of whole grain consumption.

European Law and New Health Technologies

Health is a matter of fundamental importance in European societies, both as a human right in itself, and as a factor in a productive workforce and therefore a healthy economy. New health technologies promise improved quality of life for patients suffering from a range of diseases, and the potential for the prevention of incidence of disease in the future. At the same time, new health technologies pose significant challenges for governments, particularly in relation to ensuring the technologies are safe, effective, and provide appropriate value for (public) money.

To guard against the possible dangers arising from new health technologies, and to maximize the benefits, all European governments regulate their development, marketing, and public financing. In addition, several international institutions operating at European level, in particular the European Union, the Council of Europe, and the European Patent Office, have become involved in the regulation of new health technologies. They have done so both through traditional 'command and control' legal measures, and through other regulatory mechanisms, including guidelines, soft law, 'steering' through redistribution of resources, and private or quasi-private regulation.

This collection analyses European law and its relationships with new health technologies. It uses interdisciplinary insights, particularly from law but also drawing on regulation theory, and science and technology studies, to shed new light on some of the key defining features of the relationships and especially the roles of risk, rights, ethics, and markets. The collection explores the way in which European law's engagement with new health technologies is to be legitimized, and discusses the implications for biological or biomedical citizenship.

Death and Consumer Culture

Among the most veiled and emotionally charged of life’s experiences are those related to death. Given that poetry has long been recognized as an unparalleled means of expressing and understanding the most complex and emotional aspects of life (Sherry and Schouten, 2002), it is of little surprise that few poets regarded as the finest of all wordsmiths have not, since time immemorial, grappled with death.

Recently, within marketing and consumer research, poetry has slowly but progressively come to be recognized as a means by which to understand, express, celebrate, and/or confront that which defies scientific or other more “scholarly” explanation (Canniford, 2012; Wijland, 2011; Sherry and Schouten, 2002). This “poetic turn” has manifest itself most notably within the nascent realm of Consumer Culture Theory (CCT); mainly in poetry reading sessions held—with published chapbooks in hand—in concurrence with the annual CCT symposium. Death-related poetry penned by marketing and consumer researchers has there entered—albeit randomly—the CCT circuit (see, for example: Arnould, 2014; Steinfield, 2014; Gabel, 2013, 2010; Downey, 2011, 2010a, 2010b, 2010c).

This chapter represents the first formal, organized attempt to better understand death-related consumption experience and meaning via the creation and dissemination of original works of poetry. The chapter’s title reflects the broad, eclectic perspective of death and consumption herein pursued. We consider funerary and other—good, service, and ideological—product consumption activities and experiences transpiring in the context of death. We also embrace the notion that death often brutally consumes those dealing with it; a sort of “consumption of consumers by death.” In turn, as vividly expressed in several of the poems in this chapter, consumption acts or experiences and/or memories thereof may be instrumental in coping with “being consumed by death.”

Responsibility and Well-Being: Resource Integration Under Responsibilization in Expert Services

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). As 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 to resource integration, and three categories of resource integration practices (access, appropriation, and management) necessary to negotiate responsibilization. The findings have important implications for health care providers, public and institutional policy makers, and other service systems, all of which must pay more active attention to the challenges consumers face in negotiating responsibilization and the resulting well-being outcomes.

Reciprocal value propositions in practice: Constraints in digital markets

The value proposition concept, while forming a central foundational premise of service-dominant (S-D) logic, has nevertheless been treated somewhat ambiguously. Recent work in attempting to address this has focused through a S-D logic lens on the reciprocal nature of value propositions. Important to this work has been a focus on communicative interactions and resource integration between network suppliers and customers. Overall, value proposition thinking has not studied in detail their adoption and use in practice. Considering the compelling notion of reciprocity, there have been recent calls for research to consider reciprocal value propositions in practice. The overall aim of this paper, therefore, was to explore how reciprocal value propositions are developed (or not) in practice at the network level. The study was set in the mobile television (TV) sector, which, as an internet-driven sector, is viewed as particularly pertinent. To conduct the study an S-D logic and Industrial Marketing and Purchasing (IMP) Group framework are integrated for the first time. A key finding is that while the reciprocal value proposition concept is theoretically intuitive, it is by no means inevitable in practice. Reciprocal value propositions were found to be simultaneously constrained, and, potentially enabled by these constraints in practice. At an overall level this paper contributes to the ongoing collaborative process, which aims to move S-D logic from a framework to a theory. More specifically, we provide new insights into the development of reciprocal value propositions in practice.