A Knowledge Management Process-Based Approach to Support Corporate Crisis Management

In the crisis-prone and complex contemporary business environment, modern organisations and their supply chains, large and small, are challenged by crises more than ever. Knowledge management has been acknowledged as an important discipline able to support the management of complexity in times of crisis. However, the role of effective knowledge retrieval and sharing in the process of crisis prevention, management and survival has been relatively underexplored. In this paper, it is argued that organisational crises create additional challenges for knowledge management, mainly because complex, polymorphic and both structured and unstructured knowledge must be efficiently harnessed, processed and disseminated to the appropriate internal and external supply chain actors, under specific time constraints. In this perspective, a process-based approach is proposed to address the knowledge management needs of organisations during a crisis and to help management in establishing the necessary risk avoidance and recovery mechanisms. Finally, the proposed methodological approach is applied in a knowledge- intensive Greek small and medium enterprise from the pharmaceutical industry, producing empirical results, insights on knowledge pathologies during crises and relevant evaluations.

Supply Chain Resilience? Definition of concept and its formative elements.

The objective of this paper is to conceptualize Supply Chain Resilience (SCRes) and identify which supply chain capabilities can support the containment of disruptions and how these capabilities affect SCRes. Through a systematic and structured review of literature, this paper provides insights into the conceptualization and research methodological background of the SCM field. A total of one hundred and thirty four carefully selected refereed journal articles were systematically analyzed leading to the introduction of a novel definition for SCRes, which the authors view as the as “the ability to proactively plan and design the Supply Chain network for anticipating unexpected disruptive (negative) events, respond adaptively to disruptions while maintaining control over structure and function and transcending to a post-event robust state of operations, if possible, more favorable than the one prior to the event, thus gaining competitive advantage”. Finally, a critical examination of existing conceptual frameworks for understanding the relationships between the SCRes concept and its identified formative elements, is taking place.

Postmodern Paralysis: The Critical Impasse in Feminist Perspectives on Consumers

Critical perspectives on theory play an important and valued role in disciplines across the academy. Feminist perspectives might be expected to be at or near the forefront of critical engagement with consumer behaviour theory, especially given the importance of gender in consumer research. Following a brief upsurge during the 1990s, critical feminist voices have been muted of late. This paper explores some reasons for this. It begins with a brief overview of research on gender and consumer behaviour and how insights from feminist theories and feminist activism began to alter our understanding of gendered consumption. It then discusses how postmodern and postfeminist perspectives have diluted feminism as a critique of gendered consumption. Finally, it argues that a return to materialist feminism would open up possibilities for new and more critical analyses of gendered consumption.

Exploring the Shopping Imaginary: The Dreamworld of Women's Magazines

This paper focuses on the consumer imagination and, more specifically, on the imaginary shopping spaces which women's magazines create. It addresses the anticipatory, imaginary and experiential consumption which this medium invites. The paper explores how women's magazines function as ‘dreamworlds’ of shopping; and how contemporary readers consume these imaginary shopping spaces. In order to illustrate what the authors term the ‘shopping imaginary’, they draw on findings from a study of women's experiential consumption of magazines, which show the multifaceted ways around which imaginary consumption is explored and enjoyed by women. The study suggests that women's magazines, like department stores, are spaces that facilitate and celebrate just looking and browsing, and, above all, they are shopping spaces that address the power of the imagination within them. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Red Time is Me-Time: Advertising, Ambivalence, and Women's Magazines

This study explores the concept of self for women in consumer culture, as it is played out in an experiential advertising campaign for a U.K. women's magazine called Red. The study qualitatively explores the tensions and ambivalences experienced by female participants in response to a campaign using the notion of self-indulgence and "me time" as they experience it in the context of their everyday lives. It shows how women attempt to reconcile the mixed emotions that the Red campaign evokes in them.

Critical Reflection in the Marketing Curriculum

This article examines how we can encourage students to engage critically with marketing ideas and activities. Critical marketing studies are currently on the margins of the discipline, and the ideas and challenges to conventional marketing studies posed by critical scholars are rarely tested or implemented in the marketing classroom. Often these are perceived as too academic and elitist to be relevant to the modern business environment. Drawing largely from debates in the management education literature, this article discusses the problems and possibilities of introducing critical reflection into the marketing curriculum and describes some strategies for encouraging critique in the marketing classroom.

Gender, Nationality and Cultural Representations of Ireland: An Irish Woman's Place?

Ireland has struggled with its ‘feminine’ identity throughout its history. The so-called ‘chasmic dichotomy of male and female' is embedded in colonial and postcolonial constructions of Irishness and it continues to manifest itself in contemporary cultural representations of Ireland and Irishness. This study explores issues of gender and nationality via a reading of a 70-second television advertisement for Caffrey's Irish Ale, titled ‘New York’. The article suggests that, although colonial and postcolonial discourse on Ireland continues to perceive the ‘feminine’ in problematic terms, this is gradually changing as Irish women increasingly, in poet Eavan Boland's words, ‘open a window on those silences, those false pastorals, those ornamental reductions’ that have confined us.

Critical Marketing in the Classroom: Possibilities and Challenges

Critical marketing studies are currently on the margins of the discipline, and the ideas and challenges to conventional marketing thought posed by these critiques are rarely examined in the marketing classroom. Drawing largely from debates in the management literature, discusses the problems and considers the possibilities of integrating critical reflection into the marketing curriculum.

I Can't Believe It's Not Bakhtin!: Literary Theory, Postmodern Advertising and the Gender Agenda

Taking the literary theories of Mikhail Bakhtin as a starting point, the authors offer three gendered readings of a postmodern advertisement for Moët & Chandon champagne. They commence with a discussion of the influence of gender on textual interpretation; continue with an outline of Bakhtin's key concepts, with particular reference to gender; present three contrasting readings of Moët's postmodern advertisement; and conclude with a discussion of their interpretations together with some reflexive reflections on the gender agenda. Though not claiming to offer a comprehensive introduction to Bakhtin, they do try to exemplify, in a quasi-carnivalesque mode of exposition, something of the character of that supremely gifted thinker and to demonstrate the insights his concepts provide in relation to gendered readings of advertising texts.