Sustainability reports are a crucial instrument to inform outside stakeholders not only about a company's sustainability performance but also to manage impressions. However, they are often prone to greenwashing and the reporting of negative topics can jeopardize corporate legitimacy. Therefore, this paper aims to analyze reporting quality and how grocery retailing companies deal with this challenge of reporting the true picture. The empirical material is taken from the latest sustainability reports and information available on the Internet for two major German (...) supermarkets, six grocery discount retailers, and two organic supermarkets. The Global Reporting Initiative standards are used to assess and compare the extent of information disclosure. A qualitative content analysis is applied to identify negative disclosure aspects and their legitimation. While the main focus areas (supply chain, employees, environment/climate, and society) are similar for the companies, different levels of reporting quality appeared. Negative information is rarely reported and “abstraction” and “indicating facts” are the dominant legitimation strategies. (shrink)

While most studies dealing with waste reduction at the consumer level focus on recycling, this paper rather concentrates on precycling strategies and purchasing behaviors in order to understand how to promote waste reduction at the source. More specifically, the purpose of this work is to grasp consumers’ perceptions of overpackaging and understand the mechanisms underlying their choice of overpackaged versus non-overpackaged food products. Based on the different themes that emerged from a qualitative study, a quantitative research was conducted among French (...) interviewees in order to identify relevant groups of consumers. Five profiles emerged from the cluster analysis: the supporters, the self-sacrificing, the detractors, the indifferent, and the self-centered. Finally, an experiment was conducted that highlights the influence of range positioning and salience of non-overpackaging on consumer choice. Implications for public policy makers and companies are discussed. (shrink)

The book provides an analysis of the grocery retail market in a very large number of countries with an international report written by an economist. The second part of the book offers the analysis of liability issues in relation to non-compliance with CSRs with an international report by a British barrister. Both topics are very timely.

Accounts of big data practices often assume that they target individuals. Personalization, with all the risks of discrimination and bias it entails, has been the critical focus in accounts of consumption, government, social media, and health. This paper argues that personalization through models using large-scale data is part of a more expansive change in probabilization that, in principle, is not reducible to individual or ‘personal’ attributes and actions. It describes the ‘personalization’ of an online grocery shopping recommender system to list (...) a small number of grocery items of personal relevance for each of the millions of online grocery shoppers at a major UK supermarket chain. Drawing on a theory of probability proposed by the philosopher of science Karl Popper and anthropological work on shopping, it suggests that the attempt to generate personalized predictions necessarily incorporates impersonal relations to others and things. Using a mixture of discourse analysis and code-based reconstruction of key elements of the recommender system, it suggests that personalization is one facet of an open-ended weave of propensities associated with people and things in contemporary big data configurations. The paper explores how, in the context of recommender systems, the constitutive incompleteness of shopping lists, their propensity to expand or change, might be more important than their capacity to be personalized. (shrink)

Multinational corporations (MNCs) are increasingly judged not only on their own social impacts but also on those of their supply chain partners. To reduce this environmental dependence, many MNCs implement social evaluations and codes of conduct which suppliers must follow. But how do MNCs legitimise and implement social evaluations in their supply chains? To address this, we draw on and augment resource dependence and legitimacy theories, to analyse a multinational grocery retailer’s implementation of labour standards for its fruit and vegetable (...) suppliers. The case study utilises interviews, analysis of a database of audits, internal documents, and observational data. It provides the basis for theorizing corporate reputation as a resource dependency, with social evaluations a distinct means to co-opt external actors to preserve the focal organization’s autonomy while reducing environmental contingencies. The legitimacy of social evaluations of supply chain partners depends on processes that reconcile both moral and pragmatic concerns, allowing the focal organization to mitigate resource dependencies without ceding control over enforcement and enabling actions. (shrink)

Attention to big data analytics is ubiquitous and growing given the online shopping revolution and its potential to generate individual-specific actionable datasets which were previously unavailable or cumbersome to cultivate. However, the food industry has not drawn much attention to discussions of individualized pricing strategies using online grocery datasets. Considering growth of the online grocery market and consumers data abundance to grocers, this brief viewpoint article focuses on potentials of incorporating big data analytics into pricing strategies in online grocery markets. (...) This discussion informs of various practices of big data analytics and ultimately calls to attention the potential for personalized pricing in online food markets. This article proposes the need for empirical analysis and developing research agendas investigating impacts of personalized pricing on market efficiencies, which is not as unambiguous in practices as it is theoretically. In addition, the status of online groceries, concepts of price differentiation, societal, economic, and regulatory implications of personalized pricing are discussed. (shrink)

The article reconstructs, in economic terms, managerial business ethics perceptions in the Japanese consumer market for fast-moving daily consumption products. An economic, three-level model of moral agency was applied that distinguishes unintentional moral agency, passive intentional moral agency and active intentional moral agency. The study took a qualitative approach and utilized as empirical research design an interview procedure. The study found that moral agency of Japanese firms mostly extended up to unintentional and intentional passive moral agency. Certain myopic managerial views (...) were found to affect active moral agency. This leaves room for business ethics program that aim at the development of active moral agency. (shrink)

Genetically modified food crops have been called ‘frankenfoods’ since 1992. Although some might dismiss the phenomena as clever marketing by anti-GM groups, of no philosophic interest, its resonance with the general public suggests otherwise. I argue that examination of the intersection of popular conceptions of monsters, nature, and food at which ‘frankenfood’ stands reveals significant and disturbing trends in our relationship to organic nature of interest to moral and social philosophy and to environmental ethics.

The HealthyFood program offers members up to 25% cash back monthly on healthy food purchases. In this randomized controlled trial, we tested the efficacy of financial incentives combined with text messages in increasing healthy food purchases among HF members. Members receiving the lowest cash back level were randomized to one of six arms: Arm 1 : 10% cash back, no weekly text, standard monthly text; Arm 2: 10% cash back, generic weekly text, standard monthly text; Arm 3: 10% cash back, (...) personalized weekly text, standard monthly text; Arm 4: 25% cash back, personalized weekly text, standard monthly text; Arm 5: 10 + 15%NET cash back, personalized weekly text, standard monthly text; and, Arm 6: 10 + 15%NET cash back, personalized weekly text, unbundled monthly text. In the 10 + 15%NET cash back, the cash back amount was the baseline 10% plus 15% of the net difference between healthy and unhealthy spending. The generic text included information on HF and healthy eating, while the personalized text had individualized feedback on purchases. The standard monthly text contained the cash back amount. The unbundled monthly text included the amount lost due to unhealthy purchases. The primary outcome was the average monthly percent healthy food spending. Secondary outcomes were the percent unhealthy food spending, and the percent healthy and unhealthy food items. Of the members contacted, 20 opted out, and 2841 met all inclusion criteria. There were no between-arm differences in the examined outcomes. The largest mean difference in percent healthy spending was between Arm 1 and Arm 2, and the largest mean difference in percent unhealthy spending was also between Arm 1 and Arm 2, but no differences were statistically significant after correction for multiple comparisons. None of the tested financial incentive structures or text strategies differentially affected food purchasing. Notably, more than doubling the cash back amount and introducing a financial disincentive for unhealthy purchases did not affect purchasing. These findings speak to the difficulty of changing shopping habits and to the need for innovative strategies to shift complex health behaviors. NCT02486588 Increasing Engagement with a Healthy Food Benefit. The trial was prospectively registered on July 1, 2015. (shrink)

The contemporary US food systemis characterized by both an unprecedentedconcentration of corporate control as well as afragmentation of sourcing and marketingprocesses, introducing both new constraints andnew opportunities for more localized foodsystems. The purpose of our study is to explorethese issues by investigating three keyquestions. First, what are the key trends inthe US grocery industry? Second, how dodifferent kinds of food outlets choose,procure, and promote food products? Finally,what are the implications of recent trends inthe food retailing process for strengtheninglocal flows of (...) the production, distribution,and consumption of food? Background informationon the grocery industry and the results ofseven open-ended interviews conducted withowners and managers of grocery stores in oneupstate New York county indicate that theretailing process differs in complex ways fromstore to store and in most aspects cannot beinferred from store type. The paper concludeswith a discussion of the implications of ourfindings for local food system efforts,specifically in terms of new collaborationsamong producers, distributors, retailers, andshoppers, who play an indispensable role indeveloping viable alternatives to increasingcorporate control. (shrink)

The food justice movement is a budding social movement premised on ideologies that critique the structural oppression responsible for many injustices throughout the agrifood system. Tensions often arise however when a radical ideology in various versions from multiple previous movements is woven into mobilization efforts by organizations seeking to build the activist base needed to transform the agrifood system. I provide a detailed case study of the People’s Grocery, a food justice organization in West Oakland, California, to show how anti-oppression (...) ideology provides the foundation upon which food justice activists mobilize. People’s Grocery builds off of previous social justice movements within West Oakland, reflected in activist meaning making around ideas of social justice and autonomy. However, the ongoing mobilization process also faces complications stemming from diverse individual interpretations of food justice—that may not be reflected in the stated goals of food justice organizations—as well as structural constraints. Consequently, building a social movement premised on food justice opens up social spaces for new activism, but may not be a panacea for solving food-related racial and economic inequality. The findings have implications for newly forming food justice organizations, future research on the food justice movement, as well as for theories on social movement mobilization. (shrink)

A list of groceries, Professor Anscombe once suggested, might be used as a shopping list, telling what to buy, or it might be used as an inventory list, telling what has been bought (Anscombe 1957). If used as a shopping list, the world is supposed to conform to the representation: if the list does not match what is in the grocery bag, it is what is in the bag that is at fault. But if used as an inventory list, (...) the representation is supposed to conform to the world: if the list does not match what is in the bag, it is the list that is at fault. The first kind of representation, where the world is supposed to conform to the list, can be called "directive"; it represents or directs what is to be done. The second, where the list is supposed to conform to the world, can be called "descriptive"; it represents or describes what is the case. I wish to propose that there exist representations that face both these ways at once. With apologies to Dr. Doolittle, I call them pushmi-pullyu representations or PPRs. (shrink)

A list of groceries, Professor Anscombe once suggested, might be used as a shopping list, telling what to buy, or it might be used as an inventory list, telling what has been bought (Anscombe 1957). If used as a shopping list, the world is supposed to conform to the representation: if the list does not match what is in the grocery bag, it is what is in the bag that is at fault. But if used as an inventory list, (...) the representation is supposed to conform to the world: if the list does not match what is in the bag, it is the list that is at fault. The first kind of representation, where the world is supposed to conform to the list, can be called "directive"; it represents or directs what is to be done. The second, where the list is supposed to conform to the world, can be called "descriptive"; it represents or describes what is the case. I wish to propose that there exist representations that face both these ways at once. With apologies to Dr. Doolittle, I call them pushmi-pullyu representations or PPRs. (shrink)

You are in a grocery store, and thinking of buying some meat. You think you know what buying and eating this meat would mean for your taste buds, your nutrition, and your pocketbook, and let's assume that on those grounds it looks like a good deal. But now you want to think about the..

Most previous research on human cognition has focused on problem-solving, and has confined its investigations to the laboratory. As a result, it has been difficult to account for complex mental processes and their place in culture and history. In this startling - indeed, disco in forting - study, Jean Lave moves the analysis of one particular form of cognitive activity, - arithmetic problem-solving - out of the laboratory into the domain of everyday life. In so doing, she shows how mathematics (...) in the 'real world', like all thinking, is shaped by the dynamic encounter between the culturally endowed mind and its total context, a subtle interaction that shapes 1) Both tile human subject and the world within which it acts. The study is focused on mundane daily, activities, such as grocery shopping for 'best buys' in the supermarket, dieting, and so on. Innovative in its method, fascinating in its findings, the research is above all significant in its theoretical contributions. Have offers a cogent critique of conventional cognitive theory, turning for an alternative to recent social theory, and weaving a compelling synthesis from elements of culture theory, theories of practice, and Marxist discourse. The result is a new way of understanding human thought processes, a vision of cognition as the dialectic between persons-acting, and the settings in which their activity is constituted. The book will appeal to anthropologists, for its novel theory of the relation of cognition to culture and context; to cognitive scientists and educational theorists; and to the 'plain folks' who form its subject, and who will recognize themselves in it, a rare accomplishment in the modern social sciences. (shrink)

Tourism, as an industry, has become one of the most dynamic sectors of the world economy these days and has specific features that are different from other industries. In the tourism industry, production and consumption points occur spatially at the same time. In addition, the tourism industry contributes to the economic growth of developed regions and can simultaneously distribute the wealth created geographically. It is notable that the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic has caused many challenges in the tourism industry (...) regarding the presence of tourists in tourism centres and the closing of all tourism service chains, including food, entertainment, transportation and travel services worldwide. Tourism-related businesses, which are considered as invisible export and one of the engines of development and occupation, have been rendered obsolete. In other words, the businesses, as well as multiple units and activities in the related chain, have been damaged and employees of this industry have lost their jobs. This has led to the recession and regressive course of the developing and large industry of tourism in the world. It is worth noting that the tourism industry includes various sections, the most important of which is religious tourism. All religions in the world have different religious places, works, traditions and customs, which have become amongst the most important tourist attractions. Meanwhile, Muslims and the religion of Islam play a significant role in this branch of tourism. The Hajj, pilgrimage to holy places and the existence of mourning ceremonies or religious celebrations of Muslims are amongst the largest religious tourism events in the world. Given the importance of this issue, the present study aimed to evaluate the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on religious tourism in Iraq in 2021. This field study was conducted on 4500 Muslim managers and staff of restaurants, hotels, grocery stores, clothing stores and souvenir shops around the holy shrines of imams and religious places in Karbala, Najaf, Kufa, Samarra and Kazemi. According to the results, the tourism of Iraq, which is mainly limited to Muslim religious sites in several major Iraqi cities, has also seen a decline in the number of religious tourists. The negative effects of COVID-19 on religious tourism have also been proved statistically by the Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS), as µ ≥ 3 has been counted in all indices.Contribution: Our findings offered new insights into the impact of COVID-19 on tourism, based on statistical analysis. In this study, the authors showed how COVID-19 affects various aspects of religious tourism, which has not been addressed in previous researches. (shrink)

It is the purpose of this paper to carry out a partial syntactical analysis of imperatives. Imperatives form a large body of linguistic expressions, appearing, e.g. in mathematical proofs be a continuous function!”), laws, moral injunctions, instruction, etc. For analytical purposes we distinguish between two forms of imperatives, the fiat and the directive. By a directive we mean an imperative which includes an indication of the agent who is to carry it out. For example, “Henry, don't forget to stop at (...) the grocery!” is a directive. By a fiat we mean an imperative which includes no reference to an agent who is to carry it out. For example, “Let there be light!” is a fiat. This is a distinction made in terms of meaning. If, however, proper symbolic devices were introduced for the formalization of imperatives, it could be made in a syntactical manner. Thus we could distinguish between imperatives which possess a certain operator—the directive operator formed by putting a name within square brackets—as “[Henry]!”, and imperatives which do not possess this operator, e.g. “Let it be the case that Henry does not forget to stop at the grocery!” In the following we pay attention only to fiats. This, of course, involves a great limitation of subject matter and excludes topics of great interest. (shrink)

Years of research clearly shows that relying on traditional organizational power bases is not effective when companies want to promote business ethics and performance. It is not only that the use of legitimate power to establish ethics codes and coercive power to punish employees who do not comply does not work; this study—based on a multi-method research approach in the retail industry—indicates that the classic iron fist leads to unethical business values and lower service performance. But there is a light (...) at the end of the tunnel for forward-looking managers. The ethical attitudes and behaviors of employees within international organizations is a dynamic variable that is possible to change by the use of values-based leadership. Our extensive study of a large grocery store chain owned by a multinational corporation indicates that managers who lead by example will boost team values and commitment. (shrink)

“Since today is Saturday, the grocery store is open today and will be closed tomorrow; so let’s go today”. That is an example of everyday practical reasoning—reasoning directly with the propositions that one believes but may not be fully certain of. Everyday practical reasoning is one of our most familiar kinds of decisions but, unfortunately, some foundational questions about it are largely ignored in the standard decision theory: (Q1) What are the decision rules in everyday practical reasoning that connect qualitative (...) belief and desire to preference over acts? (Q2) What sort of logic should govern qualitative beliefs in everyday practical reasoning, and to what extent is that logic necessary for the purposes of qualitative decisions? (Q3) What kinds of qualitative decisions are always representable as results of everyday practical reasoning? (Q4) Under what circumstances do the results of everyday practical reasoning agree with the Bayesian ideal of expected utility maximization? This paper proposes a rigorous decision theory for answering all of those questions, which is developed in parallel to Savage’s (1954) foundation of expected utility maximization. In light of a new representation result, everyday practical reasoning provides a sound and complete method for a very wide class of qualitative decisions; and, to that end, qualitative beliefs must be allowed to be closed under classical logic plus a well-known nonmonotonic logic—the so-called system ℙ. (shrink)

There is a growing commitment by different parts of the alternative food movement (AFM) to improve labor conditions for conventional food chain workers, and to develop economically fair alternatives, albeit under a range of conditions that structure mobilization. This has direct implications for the process of intra-movement building and therefore the degree to which the movement ameliorates economic inequality at the point of food labor. This article asks what accounts for the variation in AFM labor commitments across different contexts. It (...) then appraises a range of activist perspectives, practices, and organizational approaches. The answer emerges through a comparative analysis of three California social movement organizations enmeshed in the particularities of local contentious food politics. The cases include a labor union representing grocery store and meatpacking/food processing workers, a food justice organization working to create green jobs and independent funding models, and an organic urban farming and educational organization. Commitment to fair labor standards varies due to differences in organizational capacity, the degree of dedication to ending economic inequality in local activist culture, and the openness of local political and economic institutions to working class struggles. The article concludes with a discussion of how these findings inform our understanding of the process of cooperation and division in the AFM, particularly regarding the complexities and contradictions of using food labor to combat economic inequality. Movement building in the midst of varying institutional, organizational, and cultural contexts reinforces the value of a reflexive approach to this imperfect politics of process. (shrink)

It is generally agreed that there are two kinds of indicative conditionals that do not contain conditional 'then.' There are hypothetical conditionals such as 'If Mary has done the groceries, there is beer in the fridge' and there are biscuit conditionals such as 'If you are thirsty, there is beer in the fridge.' There is also broad consensus that we cannot find an analogous distinction between hypothetical and biscuit conditionals within indicative conditionals that do feature 'then.' Conditionals containing 'then,' (...) it is assumed, are uniformly read as hypothetical conditionals. In this article, I shall argue that there are biscuit conditionals featuring 'then.' This result, I take it, is not only interesting on its own. It also puts pressure on the popular view that conditional 'then' triggers the presupposition that in some situations in which the conditional's antecedent is not true, its consequent is not true either. (shrink)

In this paper we critically examine mobile markets as an emerging approach to serving communities with limited healthy food options. Mobile markets are essentially farm stands on wheels, bringing fresh fruits, vegetables and other food staples into neighborhoods, especially those lacking traditional, full service grocery stores, or where a significant proportion of the population lacks transportation to grocery stores. We first trace the emergence of contemporary mobile markets, including a brief summary about how and where they operate, what they aim (...) to achieve, who they serve, and the general constraints on their operations. We then report case study findings that examine the operational benefits and challenges of two mobile markets operating in Syracuse, New York. Our research suggests that although Syracuse’s mobile markets play a positive role in alleviating geographic, economic and social barriers to fresh food access experienced by elderly, immobile and low income residents living in Syracuse’s urban neighborhoods, the impacts of the mobile markets are dampened by both operational constraints and larger political and economic forces. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Shame is Not an Effective Diet PlanJudith BrukThe stigma of being obese is so strong that it is assumed that anyone with the condition is (or should be) deeply ashamed. After all, it’s really easy to lose weight, right? Just cut out dessert and walk around the block three times a week. If you can’t even do that, then you are definitely a moral failure, have succumbed to Gluttony (...) and Sloth, and deserve to be shunned by society.The problem is that shame is not a very effective diet plan; quite the opposite. It’s no surprise that recent research shows that shame leads to depression that leads to isolation, which, in the morbidly obese, leads to a suicide rate twelve times that of healthy–weight people.Unfortunately, it is indeed true that many obese people feel a great deal of shame, even if we occasionally put on a façade of bravado or seeming shamelessness, e.g., the “large and in charge” sitcom staple trope. The bottom line is that our shame about our weight does keep us from engaging with other people, limits our willingness to participate in physical activities, and generally makes us reluctant to simply exist out in public. None of these are behaviors conducive to positive lifestyle changes.For years I engineered my life so I would only go out of my house when absolutely necessary: grocery shopping and the occasional meeting at work were pretty much it (I usually work from home). I went for years without going to a movie, shopping for clothes in a store, eating in a restaurant, gardening, or any of the other activities I once enjoyed. I was ashamed to be seen. And since I had tried and tried and tried and tried to lose weight for three decades and only ended up more overweight as the years went by, I finally, truly gave up. I convinced myself my psychological makeup was so flawed (or was missing whatever ingredient it was that made someone succeed at sustained weight loss) that I just hoped my inevitable heart attack would be instantaneously fatal. This thinking is irrational, or at least unhealthy. (I am an otherwise fairly smart person with an advanced degree and am professionally employed.) Yet, it is basically the path that both societal attitudes and medical treatment lead us down at this point in time.Here are a few examples that illustrate how the path to irrationality evolved for me.About twelve years ago, I decided to see a psychotherapist to get to the bottom of my subconscious psychological issue that was keeping me overweight. This therapist suggested I see a nutritionist who gave me a list of detailed thyroid tests to take to my doctor so she could order the labs and we could get a full profile of how my thyroid was functioning. Upon presenting the list to my doctor’s PA (my doctor was not available that day), she rolled her eyes, gave a very deep sigh and said to me, “Every fat woman wants to believe it’s because of her thyroid and it never, ever is.” I was so embarrassed for having even brought the subject up that in an effort to save face, I reacted to my shame by replying, “Yeah, I just assume my extreme lack of energy and excess weight is simply because I eat too much.” She said, “Right, so let’s not even bother running these tests.” It was at least ten years later that I finally had the thyroid panel run and found out it was very low functioning.After about a year of seeing that shrink, she declared me “cured” and sent me on my way, though I had not lost any weight. It was about this time I first began thinking that throwing in the towel [End Page 91] was a good option. That didn’t mean that I went out and ate pizza and ice cream every day. Not at all. In fact, given the fact that I had been vegetarian and general health–food freak beginning in my mid–twenties, I rarely had anything in the house that contained sugar... (shrink)

Access to fruits and vegetables by low-income residents living in selected urban and rural Minnesotan communities was investigated. Communities were selected based on higher than state average poverty rates, limited access to grocery stores, and urban influence codes (USDA ERS codes). Four communities, two urban and two rural, were selected. Data were gathered from focus group discussions (n = 41), responses to a consumer survey (n = 396 in urban neighborhoods and n = 400 in rural communities), and an inventory (...) of foodstuffs available at stores located in all the communities and at large grocery stores in neighborhoods adjacent to the urban communities. In the two urban neighborhoods, a significant number of foods (26% and 52%) were significantly more expensive than the Thrifty Food Plan’s (TFP) market basket price (MBP). Additionally, a significant number of foods in the two rural communities were more expensive (11% and 26%). In focus groups, participants identified major barriers to shopping in their community to be cost, quality of food, and food choice limitations. Results of the food inventory show that foods within the communities were costly, of fair or poor quality, and limited in number and type available, supporting complaints verbalized by focus group participants. Through focus groups and surveys, participants expressed concern that healthy food choices were not affordable within their communities and believed that people in their community suffered from food insecurity. The absence of quality, affordable food for low-income residents in these four Minnesota communities prevents or diminishes their ability to choose foods that help maintain a healthy lifestyle. (shrink)

Introduction. Regardless of the perturbations and transformations of the external, a person realizes himself and presents himself to others in the direction of the so-called subjectivity. The topic of subjectivity, including the social identity of the subject, is widely represented in modern academic discourses. However, already in the first decade of the XXI century in the context of social and humanitarian reflections on the subject, the idea of the so-called digital subject was raised. In comparison with its biosociocultural counterpart, the (...) digital subject occupies a specific position, a position between the real world of physical objects and the information space. Therefore, reflections on the social identity of a modern person are brought into the digital space, into those of its variants where the digital subject “dwells” and creates narratives about himself. The definitions of “social identity” and “digital subject” proposed in the article will be taken as basic. The purpose of the article is to identify and analyze the key variants of social identity that are presented today in the Internet. Methods. The study is based on general scientific methods, analysis and synthesis, induction, deduction, abstraction. The analysis of variants of social identity in the Internet was carried out primarily on the basis of content analysis, the method of interpretation and a systematic approach. Scientific novelty of the study. The article presents options for designing social identity in the digital space, e-mail and instant messengers, contextual advertising, social networks; the specifics of designing in each of the named options are analyzed. Results. The exposition of options for designing social identity on digital material opens up a spectrum of different forms of being a subject in the Internet. To the greatest extent, these forms are associated with the communicative nature of a person. Increasingly, the social subject is turning to digital communication options, which include instant messengers, social networks and e-mail. It seems that in the 21st century, when the Internet has its own specific signs, including emoji, the so-called literacy qualification, the ability to communicate via the Internet, is available to anyone. At the same time, the real subject not only leaves its unique imprint on the network; the information he receives from the Internet leaves its mark on his decisions, in a series of diverse elections, from a grocery store to a political leader. Conclusion. In modern academic reflections on the specifics of human existence in the Internet, the idea of a digital subject has taken shape. In the discourses of domestic and foreign researchers, the digital subject is usually represented as a prefabricated construct. It has a connection with the real subject and social groups, but its origin is ideological. According to its purpose, it carries some idea that inclines the real subject to make just such a decision, not another. Hence, digital research acquires epistemological value, more precisely, the search and analysis of options through which a person realizes his identity in the network. (shrink)

“Would you like to contribute to XYZ charity by adding a dollar to your bill today?” Point-of-sale campaigns for fundraising are common to grocery stores, pharmacies, restaurants and warehouse clubs. Commonly referred to as ‘checkout charity,’ these fundraisers have generated over $4.1 billion in contributions for nonprofits over the past three decades. Yet little research has focused on the ethicality of this type of campaign. To address this need, we analyze the issue using behavioral ethics and normative theory. We consider (...) three stakeholder perspectives, including the nonprofit initiating the campaign, the business hosting the campaign, and the donor. Often ethical theories are seen as competing for primacy rather than being complementary perspectives in choosing the best action. We demonstrate that ethical discernment results in a richer analysis when consulting multiple frameworks. The purpose of this paper is to provide a set of ethical considerations for individuals to draw upon when devising and donating to checkout charity campaigns. This analysis will serve as a conceptual resource for scholars, practitioners, and students of nonprofit and for-profit management. (shrink)

A sample of tourists responded to a survey addressing purchasing intentions and consumption motives in relation to buying sustainable groceries at a local food market. These intentions and motives were contrasted for two consumption contexts: on vacation vs. at home. An initial analysis of the data indicated that self-reported purchasing intentions were weaker for a vacation scenario than for a home scenario. Further analyses suggested that motives associated with purchasing intentions were not universal between contexts. At home, normative motives (...) were positively associated with intentions, whereas other motives failed to explain significant variance. On vacation, associations with intentions followed a similar pattern, except for the finding that hedonic motives added explanatory variance. Despite the increased importance of hedonic motives on vacation compared to at home, normative motives showed the strongest association with purchasing intentions in both consumption contexts. The findings are discussed with reference to the literature on contextual discrepancies in environmental behavior, while noting possible implications for promoting sustainable consumption among tourists. (shrink)

Food Deserts have recently beenidentified in the United Kingdom. They havebeen defined by Tessa Jowell, UK GovernmentHealth Minister, as an area ``where people donot have easy access to healthy, fresh foods,particularly if they are poor and have limitedmobility.'' The above definition is particularlyrelevant in Northern Ireland, where it isestimated that 32% of households do not haveeasy access to a car and it is recognized thatcertain groups in Northern Ireland are amongstthe poorest consumers in the United Kingdom.The phenomenon has been further (...) exacerbated bythe effect of large grocery retailers locatingon the periphery of towns and the subsequentdisplacement effect of independent retailers inthe town center. The resultant effect is suchthat disadvantaged consumers cannot accessfresh, quality, nutritious foods at anaffordable price. Preliminary researchindicates that certain consumer groups areexcluded from equitable shopping provision –possibly to the detriment of their healthstatus. Research methodology includes aconsumer questionnaire, consumer focus groups,interviews, and comparative shopping exercisesthat confirm an inability among vulnerableconsumer groups to achieve an affordable,healthy diet. This was further complicated bynon-car owners' and lower-income family unitsneeding to shop locally and more frequentlythan their higher-income, car-ownercounterparts. This was demonstrated with theuse of shopping diaries. Future research to beconducted includes a large-scale survey acrossNorthern Ireland to ascertain accessibility,availability, and affordability of qualityfresh foods and to distinguish the consumergroups who are most vulnerable. (shrink)

It is an old wag among environmentalists that humans have become disconnected from nature. The culprits for this conundrum are various. If it is not our addiction to technological enticements then it is our life in big cities which alienate us from our “earthen elements.” The presumed result of this disconnection is that we do not respect the land anymore and turn a blind eye to the environmental consequences of our collective acts of consumption and pollution. Various bits of evidence (...) are produced to prove this point – mostly anecdotal – such as the claim that many city-dwellers, when asked where their food comes from, will respond blankly, “from a grocery store.” What is the curative for this ailment? Surprisingly, it is not that we should send urbanites out to the factory farms, county-sized feed lots, or flavor factories in New Jersey, which actually put most of the food on the shelves of neighborhood markets. It is instead usually suggested that we should send people to wilderness areas, that we should become more connected with nature in the raw, as it were. E. O. Wilson’s “biophilia” hypothesis is a good case in point. Defending a sociobiological account of why humans are innately attracted to living things, Wilson suggests that this connection is best realized in the residual attachment of humans to wild nature. This grounds a claim that the most important task at hand is to focus on “the central questions of human origins in the wild environment” (Wilson 1992, 351). It is probably unfair to suggest that Wilson thinks that we should all go to the wilderness in order to be better connected with nature, and implicitly, to then.. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Coughin'/Coffin AirAdilifu Nama (bio)Rummaging through the early remnants of a society that is facing climatic transformations, a single microbe forced America to pause, ponder and grasp the meaning of mortality in the early spring of 2020. Such a characterization is much more poetic than necessary, yet it is a frail attempt to capture the grand scale of the psychological and economic disorientation that has assailed the world and continues (...) to make suffocation a pervasive and global experience. Unfortunately, against a backdrop of pandemic savagery, a new spectacle of suffocation emerged to rival COVID-19's viral chokehold on humanity. On May 25th, 2020, George Floyd, a 46-year-old Black man, went down the streets of Minneapolis to buy a pack of cigarettes at his local grocery store. Shortly afterward, a new barbarism was broadcast for millions to partake in primetime consumption. The world witnessed a white police officer place his knee on Floyd's neck as he lay handcuffed, face on the pavement. The medical stat line reads "suffocation to death" but, in reality, Floyd cried out for his mother while a white man murdered him in broad daylight, had his knee pressed against Floyd's neck for over nine minutes: nine minutes that feels like nine hours to see it unfold. Floyd's final moments consisted of cries for his mother, the woman who breathed him into being. She had already passed but his last breaths before he died was for his mother, and with that, the world was reminded that America was birthed out of violence.America, where petty settler concerns were repackaged as God's imperative to morally justify the eradication of the indigenous population and cultural molestation resulted in annual holidays of thanks for bounties stolen and scalps delivered. Despite this, for far too many Americans, the true "gung-ho" spirit of rugged American individualism and notions of exceptionalism is not in declarations of accomplishment but found in the radical real-estate politics of manifest destiny and a torture economy, commonly referred to as American enslavement. This system of wealth extraction enshrined the public ruin of Black bodies with public beatings to compel compliance, and later public lynchings to intimidate and psychologically terrorize Black folk into a forever state of political timidity. Public lynching was the booby prized bait-and-switch from a [End Page 140] Reconstruction paradise to an extra-legal purgatory of terroristic intimidation: a spiffed-up spectacle of human degradation inspired by the old American barbarism of Indian removal and witch burning.When it comes to American lynching, not only was it a morbid spectacle but, for some, a depraved keepsake for posterity. If one missed Black corpses dangling from sturdy tree limbs, and the grapevine could only deliver soured tidbits and not juicy details of the slaying, a picture was worth a thousand obscene words. The alchemy of flash powder mixed with white smoke created eerie postcards to purchase by the time you got to town. This was some of that ole time religion. How could it not get worse than that? But when it concerns the destruction of Black bodies, like a morbid merry-go-round, something wicked this way comes. New incarnations of public death practices are guaranteed to return with extreme prejudice, laying waste to Black bodies, minds, dreams, and futures. Live births are not shown on television, but when it concerns Black folk, live deaths are shown ad nauseam. And there will be reruns, brothers and sisters. This was the traumatic reality of the digital documentation of George Floyd's savage public execution. The reruns of his tortured asphyxiation.Although political injustices, massacres, and wars have ebbed and flowed, waxed, and waned over decades, Black folk have lived in a constant state of vulnerability of negation; for Black folk, there is no place for us to catch our breath, to grab a brief respite from race in America. This is a cornerstone of the Black Experience in America. The cost of being the wrong color can leave you breathless: at the park playing, in group homes, police detention cells, making a sojourn back to the crib after a quick Skittles run, jogging around town... (shrink)

Why do we have a brain? After all, it's a good deal of trouble. A brain is very expensive; a hefty percentage of our cardiac output goes towards its nourishment. A brain is fragile. If you cut off its groceries for even a few minutes, it's gone, taking the rest of us with it. Worst of all, it is highly likely that pain, fear, sadness and other undesirable states require a brain. None of these things are issues for our (...) brainless relatives, such as lichens or pond scum. On the other hand, a brain comes in handy sometimes. Its very useful at tax time. I find it particularly helpful when watching "Jeopardy" or when taking board examinations. But those are just special cases; in general, why bother with a brain? 2012 APA, all rights reserved). (shrink)

An evaluation was made of theassociations between self-reported healthconscious consumerism, body-mass index (BMI),and consumer beliefs, attitudes, intentions,and behaviors regarding sustainably producedfoods. Self-administered surveys were completedby adult consumers (n = 550) in threemetropolitan Minnesota grocery stores. Selecteddemographic and psychographic differencesbetween health conscious consumers andnon-health conscious consumers were evaluated.Compared to non-health conscious consumers,health conscious consumers were more likely tobe female, older, more educated, higher incomeearners, more active, healthier, and possess ahealthier body mass index. They also held moresupportive beliefs, attitudes, and intentionswith regard (...) to sustainably produced foods. Inconclusion, some consumers are interested insupporting sustainable production practices andtheir support may be linked to improvedpersonal, environmental, and communityhealth. (shrink)

Time was when you could bite a tomato and not ingest fish genes. Time was when you could eat french fries and just worry about the fat and salt, not the bacterial genes that produce insecticides in the potato. Those times are over, thanks to corporate control over both genetic engineering and the lack of food-labeling. Unless you are a “hard core” consumer of organic foods, you eat genetically engineered foods everyday. While 80-90% of US consumers believe genetically engineered foods (...) should be labeled, only 3% know they already on the market.[1] Today 60-70% of the food in a grocery store contains components from genetically modified crops. Moreover, this technology was unleashed on over 45 million acres of US farmland last year alone, after having been commercially introduced only four years ago.[2] Here we will provide a brief background on the types of genetically engineered crops that are being surreptitiously forced upon consumers, then argue against their current widespread use. (shrink)

Concerns that cash payments to people who inject drugs (PWID) to reimburse research participation will facilitate illicit drug purchases have led some ethical authorities to mandate department store/supermarket vouchers as research reimbursement. To examine the relative efficacy of the two forms of reimbursement in engaging PWID in research, clients of two public opioid substitution therapy clinics were invited to participate in a 20–30 min, anonymous and confidential interview about alcohol consumption on two separate occasions, 4 months apart. Under the crossover (...) design, at Time 1, clients of Clinic 1 were offered $A20 cash as reimbursement, while clients of Clinic 2 were offered an $A20 voucher; at Time 2, the form of reimbursement was reversed. Using clinic records to determine the denominator (number of clients dosed), we found that compared with clients offered a voucher, a significantly higher proportion of clients who were offered cash participated in the survey (58% (139/241) vs 74% (186/252); χ2=14.27; p=0.0002). At first participation, respondents most commonly reported planning to purchase food/drinks/groceries (68%), cigarettes (21%) and transport/fuel (11%) with their payments, with those reimbursed in cash more likely to report planning to fund transport/fuel (19% vs 1%; p<.01) and less likely to report planning to purchase food/drinks/groceries (62% vs 76%; p=0.02). Just three out of 155 cash participants reported planning to purchase illicit drugs with their payment. Results demonstrate that modest cash payments enhanced recruitment of this group, an important consideration given the challenges of delineating the parameters of a population defined by illegal activity, seemingly without promoting excessive additional drug use. (shrink)

Local food systems are growing, and little is known about how the constellation of farms and markets change over time. We trace the evolution of two local food systems over six years, including a dataset of over 2690 market connections between 1520 locations. Longitudinal social network analysis reveals how the architecture, actor network centrality, magnitude, and spatiality of these supply chains shifted during the 2012–2018 time period. Our findings demonstrate that, despite growth in the number of farmers’ markets, grocery stores, (...) farms and restaurants in both counties, each local food system also experienced high turnover rates. Over 80% of the market connections changed during the study period. Farms, farmers’ markets, and grocery stores showed a 40–50% ‘survival’ rate, indicating their role in sustaining local food systems over longer time periods. Other actors, such as restaurants, had a much higher turnover rate within the network. Both food systems became more close-knit and consolidated as the center of gravity for both local food systems pulled away from urban areas toward rural farmland. Evidence of both growth and decay within local food systems provides a new understanding of the social networks behind local food markets. (shrink)

Over a decade ago, Arthur Danto announced that art ended in the sixties. Ever since this declaration, he has been at the forefront of a radical critique of the nature of art in our time. After the End of Art presents Danto's first full-scale reformulation of his original insight, showing how, with the eclipse of abstract expressionism, art has deviated irrevocably from the narrative course that Vasari helped define for it in the Renaissance. Moreover, he leads the way to a (...) new type of criticism that can help us understand art in a posthistorical age where, for example, an artist can produce a work in the style of Rembrandt to create a visual pun, and where traditional theories cannot explain the difference between Andy Warhol's Brillo Box and the product found in the grocery store. Here we are engaged in a series of insightful and entertaining conversations on the most relevant aesthetic and philosophical issues of art, conducted by an especially acute observer of the art scene today.Originally delivered as the prestigious Mellon Lectures on the Fine Arts, these writings cover art history, pop art, "people's art," the future role of museums, and the critical contributions of Clement Greenberg--who helped make sense of modernism for viewers over two generations ago through an aesthetics-based criticism. Tracing art history from a mimetic tradition through the modern era of manifestos, Danto shows that it wasn't until the invention of Pop art that the historical understanding of the means and ends of art was nullified. Even modernist art, which tried to break with the past by questioning the ways of producing art, hinged on a narrative.Traditional notions of aesthetics can no longer apply to contemporary art, argues Danto. Instead he focuses on a philosophy of art criticism that can deal with perhaps the most perplexing feature of contemporary art: that everything is possible. (shrink)

This paper considers whether individual companies have an ethical obligation to label their Genetically Modified (GM) foods. GM foods and ingredients pervade grocery store shelves, despite the fact that a majority of North Americans have worries about eating those products. The market as whole has largely failed to respond to consumer preference in this regard, as have North American governments. A number of consumer groups, NGO’s, and activist organizations have urged corporations to label their GM products. This paper asks whether, (...) in such a situation, individual corporations can be ethically required to take such unilateral action. We argue that they cannot. Given the lack of solid evidence for any risk to human health, and the serious market disadvantage almost surely associated with costly unilateral action, no individual company has an ethical obligation to label its GM foods. (shrink)

There is no doughnut without a hole, the saying goes. And that’s true. If you think you can come up with an exception, it simply wouldn’t be a doughnut. Holeless doughnuts are like extensionless color, or durationless sound—nonsense. Does it follow, then, that when we buy a doughnut we really purchase two sorts of thing—the edible stuff plus the little chunk of void in the middle? Surely we cannot just take the doughnut and leave the hole at the grocery store, (...) as we cannot just eat the doughnut and save the hole for later. But then, again, surely when we eat a doughnut we do not also eat the hole. Or do we? (shrink)

There is widespread and growing concern among U.S. consumers about the treatment of farmed animals, and consumers are consequently paying attention to food product labels that indicate humane production practices. However, labels vary in their standards for animal welfare, and prior research suggests that consumers are confused by welfare-related labels: many shoppers cannot differentiate between labels that indicate changes in the way animals are raised and those that do not. We administered a survey to 1,000 American grocery shoppers to better (...) understand the extent to which consumers purchase and pay more for food with certain labels based on an assumption of welfare improvement. Results showed that 86% of shoppers reported purchasing at least one product with the following labels in the last year: “cage or crate-free”, “free-range”, “pasture-raised”, “natural”, “organic”, “no hormone”, “no antibiotic”, “no rBST”, “humane”, “vegetarian-fed”, “grass-fed”, “farm-raised”. Of those who purchased one of the aforementioned labels, 89% did so because they thought the label indicated higher-welfare production practices, and 79% consciously paid more for the product with the label because they thought that the label indicated better-than-standard animal welfare. However, many of these labels lack uniform standards for the production practices they represent, and some labels represent production practices that do not influence animal welfare, thus the degree of the animal welfare impact of a given label is highly variable. These results indicate that labels need to clearly and accurately specify their animal welfare benefits to improve the consumers’ ability to purchase products that align with their expectations. (shrink)

Some animal ethicists argue that eating roadkill is permissible because salvaging and consuming already dead animals doesn’t cause harm to anyone. Moreover, some argue that eating roadkill is actually obligatory, insofar as a diet that includes some roadkill is less harmful than a diet that consists of protein (animal or plant) obtained only from grocery stores and restaurants. Against this view, Abbate argues that eating roadkill is wrong for at least two reasons: (1) better consequences would be produced if roadkill (...) were either left in surrounding habitats for scavenger animals or given to other would-be meat eaters (such as meat-eating friends, family, and/or neighbors), and (2) those who salvage and consume roadkill both benefit from and are involved in wrongdoing, insofar as the animals who are killed by motor vehicles are killed as a result of injustice. (shrink)

Anyone who has ever lived with roommates understands the Hobbesian state of nature implicitly. People sharing accommodations quickly discover that buying groceries, doing the dishes, sweeping the floor, and a thousand other household tasks, are all prisoner's dilemmas waiting to happen. For instance, if food is purchased communally, it gives everyone an incentive to overconsume. Individuals also have an incentive to buy expensive items that the others are unlikely to want. As a result, everyone's food bill will be higher (...) than it would be if everyone did their own shopping. Things are not much better when it comes to other aspects of household organization. Cleaning is a common sticking point. Once there are a certain number of people living in a house, cleanliness becomes a quasi-public good. If everyone ‘pitched in’ to clean up, then everyone would be happier. But there is a free-rider incentive—before cleaning, it's best to wait around a bit to see if someone else will do it. As a result, the dishes will stack up in the sink, the carpet will get grungy, and so on. (shrink)

Anyone who has ever lived with roommates understands the Hobbesian state of nature implicitly. People sharing accommodations quickly discover that buying groceries, doing the dishes, sweeping the floor, and a thousand other household tasks, are all prisoner's dilemmas waiting to happen. For instance, if food is purchased communally, it gives everyone an incentive to overconsume. Individuals also have an incentive to buy expensive items that the others are unlikely to want. As a result, everyone's food bill will be higher (...) than it would be if everyone did their own shopping. Things are not much better when it comes to other aspects of household organization. Cleaning is a common sticking point. Once there are a certain number of people living in a house, cleanliness becomes a quasi-public good. If everyone ‘pitched in’ to clean up, then everyone would be happier. But there is a free-rider incentive—before cleaning, it's best to wait around a bit to see if someone else will do it. As a result, the dishes will stack up in the sink, the carpet will get grungy, and so on. (shrink)

Few studies have examined the influence of the food environment on obesity rates among very young, low-income consumers. This research contributes to this growing literature by examining the relationship between modifications to the retail environment and obesity rates for low-income, preschool-aged children. Based on data combined from various secondary sources, this study finds that changes in the retail environment are significantly related to obesity rates. More specifically, the authors find a positive relationship between the number of convenience stores in the (...) retail environment and obesity rates among low-income, preschool-aged children. Results also show that the percent change in grocery stores and supercenters and club stores in the retail environment is negatively related to the obesity rates of low-income, preschool-aged children [i.e., as grocery stores and supercenters/club stores increase, obesity decreases ].Further, the percent change in supercenters and club stores mediates the positive relationship between participation in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program and obesity rates. (shrink)