Belief formation is a neglected part of research in consumer behaviour and a potentially valuable area of study for helping to clarify the conditions under which they relate to actual patterns of behaviour. Outlines the results of qualitative research undertaken as part of a major study of readers of the UK Ethical Consumer magazine, which used focus groups to explore issues of major concern to ethical consumers – such as fair trade – and an elicitation questionnaire with a broader sample to ascertain the nature of factors influencing their beliefs on this subject.

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The considerable volume of theory and research that has sought to illuminate the nature and significance of cognitive processes in strategy formulation and implementation represents but an important first step in the re-humanization of strategy research. In order to achieve the sorts of fine-grained analyses that will ultimately advance understanding of cognition in action, strategy researchers need to move beyond the static analysis of actors’ cognitive maps to a deeper understanding of what lies behind the actions of strategists as they engage with particular strategy practices in their praxis. To accomplish this key goal, strategy researchers need to become more reflective in their own practices, augmenting the observational and interview techniques advocated by various leading contributors to the strategy-as-practice (s-as-p) perspective with a profiling of the cognitive characteristics of strategists, based on psychometrically robust procedures. To this end, drawing on dual-process theories from cognitive psychology and social cognition, we outline a basic two-dimensional framework to inform the investigation of the impact of individual differences in cognitive style (analytical and intuitive approaches to the processing of information) on the observed behaviours of strategy workers in strategy-making episodes and consider its implications for the advancement of theory, research and practice.

This paper complements the preceding one by Clarke et al (2004a) which looked at the long-term impact of retail restructuring on consumer choice at the local level. While the previous paper was based on quantitative evidence from survey research, this paper draws on the qualitative phases of the same three-year study, aiming to understand how the changing forms of retail provision are experienced at the neighbourhood level within selected households. The empirical material is drawn from focus groups, accompanied shopping trips, diaries, interviews and kitchen visits with eight households in two contrasting neighbourhoods in the Portsmouth area. The data demonstrate that consumer choice involves judgements of taste, quality and value as well as more 'objective' questions of convenience, price and accessibility. These judgements are related to households' differential levels of cultural capital and involve ethical and moral considerations as well as more mundane considerations of practical utility. Our evidence suggests that many of the terms that are conventionally advanced as explanations of consumer choice (such as 'convenience', 'value' and 'habit') have very different meanings according to different household circumstances. To understand these meanings requires us to relate consumers' at-store behaviour to the domestic context in which their consumption choices are embedded. Our research demonstrates that consumer choice between stores can be understood in terms of accessibility and convenience, while choice within stores involves notions of value, price and quality. We conclude that choice between and within stores is strongly mediated by consumers' household context reflecting the extent to which shopping practices are embedded within consumers' domestic routines and complex everyday lives.

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Meetings are increasingly seen as sites where organizing and strategic change take place, but the role of specific discursive strategies and related linguistic-pragmatic and argumentative devices, employed by meeting chairs, is little understood. The purpose of this article is to address the range of behaviours of chairs in business organizations by comparing strategies employed by the same chief executive officer (CEO) in two key meeting genres: regular management team meetings and 'away-days'. While drawing on research from organization studies on the role of leadership in meetings and studies of language in the workplace from (socio)linguistics and discourse studies, we abductively identified five salient discursive strategies which meeting chairs employ in driving decision making: (1) Bonding; (2) Encouraging; (3) Directing; (4) Modulating; and (5) Re/Committing. We investigate the leadership styles of the CEO in both meeting genres via a multi-level approach using empirical data drawn from meetings of a single management team in a multinational defence corporation. Our key findings are, first, that the chair of the meetings (and leading manager) influences the outcome of the meetings in both negative and positive ways, through the choice of discursive strategies. Second, it becomes apparent that the specific context and related meeting genre mediate participation and the ability of the chair to control interactions

Focuses on the changing nature of retail competition and the way it affects local consumer choice in the UK grocery sector. Integrates relevant literature on the economic aspects of competition with work on the changing corporate geographies of retailers. Links vertical market power (relative to suppliers) and multiple retailers' ability to compete horizontally (relative to other retailers) in a given trading locality, and argues that this interaction has fundamentally altered the nature of competition. The increase in retail power that has resulted has served to redefine local consumer choice. Smaller retailers are disadvantaged by this shift because it has directly affected the store and product choices of consumer groups depending on their relative mobility. Argues for empirical work to ground and validate these assertions.

Management scholars have explored how certain actors in meetings – especially leaders – shape social processes of interaction and use different linguistic devices, as methods, to affect how sense is made of strategic issues. Less attention has been paid to interactions between members of the team as a whole and the repertoire of discursive strategies, or goal‐directed behaviours, that they deploy to create shared views around issues. We analyse rare empirical episodes of team discussions of strategic issues in board meetings to inductively conceptualize how this is achieved. To do this we use the Discourse‐Historical Approach (DHA) to critical discourse analysis (CDA). We reveal five discursive strategies teams use to develop shared views around strategic issues (Re/defining, Equalizing, Simplifying, Legitimating, and Reconciling) and demonstrate how they are skilfully operationalized through a range of linguistic devices or means.