Birmingham Business School

The objective of this note is to formulate conceptual links between nation brands, international relations, and politics through the development of research questions that are underpinned by a brand-culture approach. The focus is on the export of Turkey's soap operas to diverse locations around the globe, but in particular to the Middle East and the Balkans. The note calls for (1) Forging a dialogue across international relations, political science, media, and management studies through a brand-culture lens which allows for a historical understanding, (2) Focusing on historical and political discourses as resources in interpreting nation brands and cultural and creative goods, and, (3) Focusing on nation branding between countries in the Global South. Forging a dialogue across disciplines and focusing on how consumers make use of historical and political discourses informs both commercial and diplomatic co-creators of nation brands.

We introduce and explore the notion of hegemonic dividend in the context of a country which does not have hierarchy attenuating means such as legal measures to protect workforce diversity. This paper explains the consequences of two hierarchy enhancing ideologies on workforce diversity in Turkey; meritocracy, an ideology that privileges merit, and ‘biat’, an ideology of subservience to the structures of power. We illustrate how these two ideologies operate as a duality, as meritocracy vanes with dire circumstances for workforce diversity in nation-branding efforts of Turkey. Drawing on Bourdieu and Gramsci, we illustrate hegemonic dividend in the increasingly hegemonic system in which journalism, as a state apparatus, is embedded in Turkey, where privileged few are sustaining and advancing their positions of power by appealing to and submitting themselves to the revisioned nation brand. We focus on the news industry as it commands a special position of power in terms of creating, mo...

We explore the knowledge production experiences of marketing academics who currently work in countries that have previously colonized their home countries. Building on Bourdieu’s concepts of illusio and the field, we first demonstrate that participants are drawn to the appeal of the academic game which perpetuates itself as a toxic field of neo-colonial relations. Second, we illustrate that two dominant exploitative academic practices sustain this toxic field. Third, we demonstrate that there is a toxic illusio which prevents academics from developing a healthy sense of colonial relations in their knowledge production.

This study aims to explore Turkish citizen-consumers’ understanding of and reactions to censorship of websites in Turkey by using in-depth interviews and online ethnography. In an environment where sites such as YouTube and others are increasingly being banned, the citizen-consumers’ macro-level understanding is that such censorship is part of a wider ideological plan and their micro-level understanding is that their relationship with the wider global network is reduced, in the sense that they have trouble accessing full information on products, services and experiences. The study revealed that citizen-consumers engage in two types of resistance strategies against such domination by the state: using irony as passive resistance, and using the very same technology used by the state to resist its domination.