Despite the wide-ranging benefits of using client-based projects (CBPs) in the classroom, such projects can be overwhelming for instructors, and many shy away from the considerable workload and time commitment often required by CBPs. This article is designed to help marketing educators overcome such apprehensions and provide them with concrete tools to simplify CBPs and make them easier to manage. The authors discuss five principles they have developed for creating and implementing workable client projects. Their principles come directly “from the trenches” of their own experiences in planning and managing client-based projects across multiple courses. They address, for example, ways to customize CBPs to fit within specific course and professor time constraints, tips to manage the client relationship and students’ expectations, and strategies to streamline the feedback process. They offer workbench-level insights and practices drawn from their own experiences that instructors can put into practice immediately.
Pierre Bourdieu's work on the political economy of symbolic power is particularly relevant to marketing and public policy aimed at ameliorating consumer vulnerability and persistent social inequities. This theoretical framework highlights various resources, or capital, that individuals possess and how these resources (or lack of) affect power relations. The authors use an ethnographic study of women's health care encounters in a rural Appalachian coal mining community to explore and demonstrate the usefulness of this approach. Specifically, in some health care encounters, social inequality is reinforced through the interplay of different forms of capital between the service provider and consumer. However, practices that are sensitive to capital increase the possibility of more successful and just service encounters. In this article, the authors examine health care practices that are resource sensitive and insensitive and offer recommendations.
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