This article takes a consumer behavior perspective to investigate how constituents come to identify with organizations. Using longitudinal and cross-sectional interview data collected in two contexts (one consumer and one employee), the data illustrate that constituents engage with two conduits, one formal and one informal. These conduits provide opportunities for sensegiving, which features normative elements particular to an organization, and sensemaking, an integrative process in which productive consumption plays a key role. Three paths (epiphany, emulation, and exploration) leading from these conduits to identification are defined and explored. Second, this article reveals dynamic consequences of identification for both customer and employee constituents, including changes in their consumer values and behaviors extending beyond organizational concerns. Finally, this article defends the merit of softening hard conceptual distinctions drawn between consumers and employees, as the findings show that identification forms in parallel fashion with similar outcomes across a consumer-to-firm and an employee-to-firm context.

Why do some firms not change their strategic orientation despite economic incentives to do so? Most current literature on changing strategic orientations has focused on an antecedents and outcomes approach to business orientations. Intimated, but rarely addressed, are the notions that (1) strategic orientations may be thought of as ideologies and (2) such ideologies are likely to contend with each other. Taking such a perspective may be helpful in discussing why it is challenging to transition to more sustainable strategic orientations even in the presence of financial incentives to do so. In assessing the transition to organic production and marketing in a commodity agriculture context, the authors find that contending ideologies restrict its adoption. In addition, they suggest that strategic orientations are not adopted or contested solely within firms but also among them. The authors find that ideological contestation among firms in this context takes the form of a marketplace drama between a chemical, productionist orientation and an organic orientation in which protagonists mobilize several forms of legitimacy.

The purpose of this essay is to identify factors that constrain customers’ ability to engage in sustainable energy consumption, conceived of as a consumption practice that reduces the moral hazards associated with fossil fuel overconsumption. The authors outline some marketing policy and consumer research issues related to the market system and identify four constraints to sustainable energy consumption: policies and regulation, product accessibility and availability, pricing, and customer knowledge. This topic is important because of changes in the macro context of energy consumption—namely, the growing recognition of a fundamentally resource-constrained environment and the increased salience of various global commons effects to customers. The authors conclude with directions for further research.

We use a socio-historical lens to look at how Community Supported Agriculture programs (CSAs) have gained legitimacy as a market form. In this article, we question the countercultural conception of CSAs, especially given their rapid growth over the past 25 years. We contend that placing CSA within a larger frame of reference that incorporates American pastoral values and connects CSA to the history of American pastoralism helps account for how CSA has gained legitimacy with mainstream users. We show that American pastoralism provides a link between 19th century agrarian ideals, 1950s suburbia, 1970s counter-cultural communards, and today's CSAs. In showing the ubiquity and chameleon like character of American pastoralist ideology, we suggest that it is an important example of a cultural imaginary, which is inducing change in food markets in the United States and at the same time masking certain cultural contradictions. We propose that the development of the Internet as a channel of communication has aided in building legitimacy for this market form by promoting both more personal commercial communications and the possibility of de-massification of communications. Thus, CSAs' web presence reinforces egalitarian principles and the perception of shared community that are central ingredients of pastoralist ideology.