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In this paper I bring together interaction, media, deviance, self, and identity to make sense of how young Singaporeans consume Korean popular (hereafter, K-pop) music and culture. My overarching goal is to highlight that being a music fan is not a straightforward or even easy experience. Rather, the self as music fan is continually developing within a complex variety of social processes, from the circulation of global, mass media representations to inter- and intra-personal interactions. I present data collected from a study on K-pop music consumption in Singapore, a small island-nation in Southeast Asia with an insatiable thirst for foreign culture. The data show how a group of Singaporean K-pop fans were regularly bombarded with largely negative messages about what it means to be K-pop music fans, and how these meanings affected their own negotiations as fans. K-pop fandom provided a sense of shared identity and status within popular youth culture, yet their experiences were often soured by negative media portrayals of deviant fans, whose behaviors risked stigmatizing the K-pop social identity. This paper thus deals with some of the problems for self that being a music fans entails.

Purpose: In this paper, we focus on the mythic nature of the anonymous Bitcoin creator, Satoshi Nakamoto. Drawing on ideas from Foucault and Barthes on authorship, we analyze the notion of the absence of the author and how that sustains the brand. Design/methodology/approach: Based on interview data, participant observation, archival data, and a netnography, we examine the discourses that emerge in the wake of multiple Satoshi Nakamoto exposés that serve as both stabilizing and destabilizing forces in the Bitcoin ecosystem. Findings: We analyze the different interpretations of Satoshi Nakamoto through his own text and how his readers interpret him. We identify how consumers employ motifs of myth and religiosity in trying to find meaning in Satoshi’s disappearance. His absence allows for multiple interpretations of how the Bitcoin brand is viewed and adopted by a diverse community of enthusiasts.

Implications: Our findings provide a richer understanding of how, in a period of celebrity brands, Satoshi Nakamoto’s anti-celebrity stance helps sustain the Bitcoin ecosystem.

Originality/value: Our analysis examines the nature of anonymity in our hyper-celebrity culture and the mystique of the anonymous creator that fuels modern-day myths for brands without owners.

Purpose: The paper makes use of Kuhn’s “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions” to explain Consumer Culture Theory (CCT) as a normal scientific tradition. The paper intends to show how a previously marginalized research tradition has now started solidifying its paradigmatic boundaries, and what implications this holds for aspiring CCT scholars.

Method/approach: The paper makes use of literature from the Journal of Consumer Research and Marketing Theory to point out the methodological and practical issues in the discipline that have been pointed out by CCT proponents. These criticisms are discussed as scientific “anomalies.” Furthermore, the paper critically analyzes immigrant acculturation literature produced by CCT researchers in the past 30 years through a Kuhnian lens to show proponents of the fields implicitly addressing different “anomalies,” explaining the tradition to be a normal scientific one.

Findings: An in-depth analysis of immigrant acculturation literature within CCT shows every successive project within the field has addressed “anomalies” by pointing out research gaps, providing a rationale for their respective methodology, and, in turn, adding precision to theoretical frameworks, depicting a normal scientific tradition.

Originality and value: The paper adds value by discussing the probable consequences of this boundary solidification. On one hand, aspiring scholars will have scientific assumptions with which to enter the laboratory (consumer world) and guidelines that can be used toward publishing. On the other, this can also lead to a possible dogmatization of an emerging consumer research paradigm, making it difficult for new scholars to be creative.

This chapter critically examines whether it may be possible to create an AI-based authentic leader, questioning the inherent contradiction between artificial and authentic. The authors pose central research questions: Does the application of AI – even just as a powerful resource – challenge the tenets of authentic leadership? What are the possibilities and limitations of the concept of authenticity in AI-based management systems? Moreover, with the help of three vignettes illustrating practical applications of AI-based systems in leadership and management tasks, the authors illustrate how technology may be used to either control or empower workers and leaders. The authors call for research to assess whether the search for authenticity in AI-based leadership could lead anywhere, warning that it could entrap us in unresolvable existential and conceptual ambiguity, ultimately diverting our focus from the essence of leadership altogether.

The key purpose of this chapter is to identify some ways of enhancing feminist conceptual, empirical, and theoretical work on violence against women. Much attention is given to addressing the harms caused by new electronic forms of woman abuse, including the role of adult Internet pornography and sex robots. This chapter also emphasises the importance of revisiting some major feminist contributions from the past.

In this paper, we review the literature on pay variation (e.g., pay dispersion, pay compression, pay range) in organizations. Pay variation research has increased markedly in the past two decades and much progress has been made in terms of understanding its consequences for individual, team, and organizational outcomes. Our review of this research exposes several levels-related assumptions that have limited theoretical and empirical progress. We isolate the issues that deserve attention, develop an illustrative multilevel model, and offer a number of testable propositions to guide future research on pay structures.

Purpose: This paper examines beef consumption practices in two villages of Tamil Nadu, India. It inquires into how the upper castes create spatial boundaries to separate the inside from the outside in their consumption of beef.

Methodology: The research was carried out in two villages of Kariacheri and Pudupattinam located in the Kanchipuram district of Tamil Nadu, India. We conducted 70 in-depth interviews, and observed beef buying and consumption practices.

Findings: The research shows how the upper castes separate the inside from the outside and surreptitiously consume beef. Dalits or untouchables are unable to create such separations, and as a result are stigmatized and ostracized. Moreover, the distinction between the inside and the outside is not fixed but is in a state of transition.

Originality and value: This study offers insights into how stigma is defined by spatial boundaries. These insights help to understand purity, pollution, and stigma in consumption practices as ongoing processes that are often created to justify social divisions and discriminatory practices.

Purpose: The study makes use of situational crime prevention framework for analyzing online community reactions to the banning of deepfake pornographic content from Reddit.

Methodology/approach: Qualitative text analysis of user comments posted to Reddit’s rule-change announcement (N = 582) was carried out. Analysis relied on the original 25 techniques of situational crime prevention that were adapted into a table of activities and mechanisms meant specifically for use with online platforms.

Findings: Analysis indicates that Reddit users voiced several shortcomings that are currently present in Reddit’s platform management approach. In particular, users emphasized issues related to the lack of a consistent and transparent approach to community rule enforcement, as users believed the rule changes to be sudden and poorly reasoned. The general reactionary nature of Reddit’s approach to moderating community-harming actions also was a point of emphasis, alongside the platform’s continued rigid stance on freedom of expression, even with regard to illegal and demeaning content. Regarding Reddit and the new rules on involuntary pornography and the sexualization of minors, enforcement of sitewide policy appears contingent on external influences, such as attention from mainstream media or financial matters, rather than stemming from an inherent stance on decreasing community-harming activities.

Research limitations: The study only pertains to a specific rule change by Reddit and subsequent reactions from the platform’s community. Future research is needed to test the applicability of the adapted table of 25 techniques of situational crime prevention in the context of other online platforms.

Originality/value: First, the study applies the situational crime prevention approach in the context of moderating online platforms. Second, results from the study shed light on current practices in online content moderation from the perspective of criminological theory, as well as inform specific actions that can be taken to decrease the presence of community-harming phenomena and improve the enforcement of sitewide policy rules in general. Finally, by adapting the original 25 techniques of situational crime prevention to online content moderation, the study suggests a tentative roadmap for similar research in the future.

This chapter will explore the links between coercive control and ‘rough sex’. The chapter will highlight how easily sexual behaviour within a coercively controlling relationship can be presented as consensual. The chapter will explain how coercive control is typically about compelling a partner to comply with traditional gender norms and this makes consent within such a relationship particularly difficult to assess. However, it will be argued that there should be a strong legal presumption that if a relationship is marked by coercive control that sexual behaviour within it is non-consensual. The chapter will also explore in what circumstances rough sex should be regarded as lawful.