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In this Issue

The articles, essays and book reviews in this issue can be said to be about influences on market behavior. The articles in this issue focus on 1) sustainable business practices of firms, 2) architecture used to reinforce brand meaning, 3) societal dimensions of marketing systems, 4) advertisements in time of war, and 5) the ethicality of consumers. Essayists explore what Gross National Happiness might mean to societies. Finally, the first book review in this issue provides an alternative view about market development over time and across civilizations, while the second book review offers a diverse array of perspectives on consumer ethics. The first article in the issue is “A Ten Country-Company Study of Sustainability and Product-Market Performance: Influences of Doing Good, Warm Glow and Price Fairness” by the five-author team of G. Tomas M. Hult, Jeanette A. Mena, Maria Alejandra Gonzalez-Perez, Katarina Lagerström, and Daniel T. Hult. These authors directed a prodigious effort in collecting data across ten countries from more than 4,000 firms. The focus of the study was investigating whether firms can achieve gains in sustainable business practices above what their countries are achieving. The study’s results suggest that firms can achieve more in sustainability than the countries in which they operate. Importantly, the study’s results suggest that firms’ financial performance will be positively affected by their sustainability efforts even if their costs and/or prices increased by 27 to 72 percent. In the future, these results will likely be cited by many researchers of sustainability and strategy because of the unique micro-macro approach taken by the authors which allows researchers a rare glimpse at how sustainability efforts might affect firm performance. The second article carries a focus on housing, also. In “Building Meaning: Architectural Dialectic in Spatial Marketing Systems, Angela Bargenda highlights the relevance of corporate architecture as an integrative tool in spatial marketing systems. Architecture intersects with micro-level and macrolevel marketing systems, because it projects corporate identity while referring to broader artistic, social and historical ideas. Bargenda argues that these macromarketing dimensions and their meaning-generating potential add much value to market exchanges involving well-designed buildings. A special focus on corporate architecture in the banking sector suggests how symbolic meaning can be derived from the macro-level environmental, historical and cultural properties of buildings. The third article takes the reader to the markets of the Silk Road in Uzbekistan in order to make important observations about markets. In “Towards a Theory of Marketing Systems as a Macro Public Good” by Djavlonbek Kadirov proposes that marketing systems can be regarded as a public good, similar to other public goods, such as the air we breathe, and national defense. Kadirov develops a conceptual framework about marketing systems as public goods and uses the Uzbek Bozor Marketing System to illustrate important elements of his proposed framework. The fourth article goes back in time and travels to Japan during 1937-1940. In “Gifts and Nationalism in Wartime Japan”, authors Yuko Minowa and Russell Belk investigate the shifting text and visual rhetoric of consumer rituals in the cultural media during wartime. Specifically, Minowa and Belk examine Japanese newspaper advertisements for seasonal gifts and sympathy gifts in urban cities published between 1937 and 1940. The results of the study suggests how advertising then strove to be compatible with national policy while expressing empathy for those serving in battle, as well as showing support for family members of Japanese military-service members. Overall, advertisements enhanced nationalism in two ways: (1) through the promotion of nationalistic gift giving, and (2) by appealing to patriotism, which involves emotionally-laden nationalistic sentiments. The fifth article in the issue examines how personal moral philosophies can mediate consumers’ religious orientations and their consumption ethics. Rafi Chowdhury employs an online survey of 500 US consumers in “Religious Orientations and Consumer Ethics: The Mediating Role of Personal Moral Philosophies” and includes the construct of quest religiosity (conceived as an open-ended search in which religion was seen as a process of questioning, doubting, and re-examining ultimate values and beliefs). The study’s results suggest that intrinsic religiosity and quest religiosity lead to negative beliefs regarding unethical consumer actions and positive beliefs regarding pro-social actions mediated through idealism. Quest religiosity also leads to positive beliefs regarding unethical consumer actions (passively benefiting from the mistakes of the seller) mediated through relativism. Supplementing these indirect effects, intrinsic religiosity and quest religiosity have direct influences on some, but not all, dimensions of consumer ethics. In sum, Chowdhury provides evidence that both quest