This article examines the popular trend among management academics, consultants, and practitioners of prescribing “cultures of fun” to enhance productivity. This management approach suggests inter alia that organizations should break with the conventional wisdom of delineating work from play and instead craft an environment of fun and humor. Drawing on a field study of a communications firm, the article demonstrates how managed “fun” involves the symbolic blurring of traditional boundaries that usually distinguish work and nonwork. Typically nonwork experiences associated with family, lifestyle, consumption, and school are evoked to create a more pleasurable atmosphere. In the study however, this blurring had an unintended effect of fuelling cynicism among some employees. Although this cynicism probably has a number of sources, it is argued that its relationship to boundary management provides some interesting insights about the limitations of contemporary culture management.

Advances in information technology and e-commerce enable firms to make personalized offers to individual consumers based on information about the consumers. However, the collection and use of private information have caused serious concerns about privacy invasion by consumers, creating a personalization–privacy tradeoff. The key approach to address privacy concerns is via the protection of privacy through the implementation of fair information practices, a set of standards governing the collection and use of personal information. In this paper, we take a game-theoretic approach to explore the motivation of firms for privacy protection and its impact on competition and social welfare in the context of product and price personalization. We find that privacy protection can work as a competition-mitigating mechanism by generating asymmetry in the consumer segments to which firms offer personalization, enhancing the profit extraction abilities of the firms. In equilibrium, both symmetric and asymmetric choices of privacy protection by the firms can result, depending on the size of the personalization scope and the investment cost of protection. Further, as consumers become more concerned about their privacy, it is more likely that all firms adopt privacy protection. In the perspective of welfare, we show that autonomous choices of privacy protection by personalizing firms can improve social welfare at the expense of consumer welfare. We further find that regulation enforcing the implementation of fair information practices can be efficient from the social welfare perspective mainly by limiting the incentives of the firms to exploit the competition-mitigation effect.

The purpose of this paper is to offer a new perspective on resistance and anti‐consumption literature by relating it to consumer cynicism.

Despite a decade since the inception of B2C e-commerce, the uncertainty of the online environment still makes many consumers reluctant to engage in online exchange relationships. Even if uncertainty has been widely touted as the primary barrier to online transactions, the literature has viewed uncertainty as a “background” mediator with insufficient conceptualization and measurement. To better understand the nature of uncertainty and mitigate its potentially harmful effects on B2C e-commerce adoption (especially for important purchases), this study draws upon and extends the principal-agent perspective to identify and propose a set of four antecedents of perceived uncertainty in online buyer–seller relationships—perceived information asymmetry, fears of seller opportunism, information privacy concerns, and information security concerns—which are drawn from the agency problems of adverse selection (hidden information) and moral hazard (hidden action).

A comprehensive model of attitudes toward advertising includes three personal utility factors (product information, social image information, and hedonic amusement) and four socioeconomic factors (good for economy, fostering materialism, corrupting values, and falsity/no-sense). The proposed 7-factor model was tested on two independent samples: collegians (188) and householders (195) from Ohio and Mississippi Valley states, explaining 62% and 56% of the variance in their global attitudes, respectively. The model's dimensions were used to profile these publics and to identify attitudinal segments within them. Most respondents exhibited conflict between an appreciation of the personal uses and economic value of advertising and an apprehension of cultural degradation.

Marketers have been challenged by proponents of individual (one-to-one) marketing to shift from focusing on market segments to making individually customized offers. Building on current knowledge regarding the construction of customers’ preferences, the author examines the basic assumptions underlying individual marketing and presents a process model of customers’ responses to customized offers. The model addresses (1) preference development, (2) evaluation of customized offers, (3) likelihood of purchasing the customized offers, and (4) maintenance of relationships with one-to-one marketers. The analysis leads to specific propositions regarding determinants of customers’ responses to customized offers. The author discusses future research directions and managerial implications.

\n What should conscientious employees and their ethical employers expect? It's hard to say.\n

To date, many important threads of information privacy research have developed, but these threads have not been woven together into a cohesive fabric. This paper provides an interdisciplinary review of privacy-related research in order to enable a more cohesive treatment. With a sample of 320 privacy articles and 128 books and book sections, we classify previous literature in two ways: (1) using an ethics-based nomenclature of normative, purely descriptive, and empirically descriptive, and (2) based on their level of analysis: individual, group, organizational, and societal.

Privacy has been an enduring concern associated with commercial information technology (IT) applications, in particular regarding the issue of personalization. IT-enabled personalization, while potentially making the user computing experience more gratifying, often relies heavily on the user’s personal information to deliver individualized services, which raises the user’s privacy concerns. We term the tension between personalization and privacy, which follows from marketers exploiting consumers’ data to offer personalized product information, the personalization–privacy paradox. To better understand this paradox, we build on the theoretical lenses of uses and gratification theory and information boundary theory to conceptualize the extent to which privacy impacts the process and content gratifications derived from personalization, and how an IT solution can be designed to alleviate privacy concerns.