Newell Wright, director of the Center for Global Initiatives, recently had three journal articles accepted for publication in refereed journals.
The first article, co-written with Val Larsen, an associate professor of marketing at James Madison University, is titled “Every Brick Tells a Story: Study Abroad as an Extraordinary Experience.” The paper will be published in the August 2012 edition of the journal Marketing Education Review.
According to the authors, research on study abroad programs traditionally focuses on logistics or the development of attitudes and skills. Less attention has been given to the subjective value of the participants’ experience, which is the focus of the study. Drawing insights from an evolving genre of graffiti data and autodriving interviews, the study identifies dimensions of the study abroad experience that cause participants to describe it as life changing and the best experience of their lives. Key dimensions include program-directed and self-directed travel, magic moments and the experience of communitas. The article discusses the implications of its findings for study abroad program management.
A second article, also co-written with Larsen, is titled “Bringing Culture Alive in the Marketing Classroom: Using the Novel ‘Speaker for the Dead’ to Teach Global Marketing.” The article will be published in the Academy of Educational Leadership Journal in March 2012.
According to the authors, cultural awareness and sensitivity is one of the most important topics in international marketing courses. But when students have little or no personal experience dealing with different cultures, it can be difficult for them to deeply understand the manifold ways in which cultural differences and consequent misunderstandings affect global marketing effectiveness. The article proposes a pedagogical remedy for students’ lack of experience with cultural differences—having them read and discuss the novel “Speaker for the Dead” by Orson Scott Card. Wright and Larsen propose that by reading the novel, students vicariously experience both intellectually and emotionally what it means to misunderstand and then, by degrees, better understand another culture. The article highlights telling details in the novel that graphically illustrate important global marketing concepts such as the self-reference criterion. The article concludes with suggestions on how to incorporate literature into many different marketing courses.
A third article, co-written with Larsen and Joseph Goodman, assistant professor of management at Illinois State University, is titled “Equity Versus Utility: The Moderating Effect of Acquaintance and its Effect on Consumer Grudgeholding Behavior.” It will appear in the December 2011 edition of the Journal of Consumer Satisfaction, Dissatisfaction, and Complaining Behavior.
According to the authors, utility theory and equity theory make contradictory predictions about the effects of declining costs on consumer satisfaction. In a standard economic analysis, satisfaction increases as costs fall but in an equity theoretical analysis satisfaction decreases as costs fall when the consumer receives more than she gives up in exchange for a benefit. This study demonstrates that the claims of both these widely accepted theories may be valid if the effects of cost on satisfaction are moderated by degree of acquaintance with the exchange partner. Where personal acquaintance is high, the effects predicted by equity theory predominate. Where acquaintance is low, the effects predicted by utility theory predominate. Secular changes in marketing philosophy (the shift to a service dominant logic in marketing) and the growth of technologies that facilitate mass personalization (the Internet, databases, social networking) make degree of perceived acquaintance an important marketing variable. This variable is a double-edged sword that can magnify consumer responses to good/bad experiences with a business.
