CAQTUS Collaborative & Global Demography

At a meet organized at the University of Texas- Pan American (UTPA) in August 2009, Professor A. Fuat FIRAT and associated scholars launched the CAQTUS Collaborative. The goal of CAQTUS Collaborative is to initiate, support, and critique studies of Culture, Business, Markets, Consumption, Organizations, Globalization, and related topics from poststructural and cognate perspectives. In addition to A. Fuat FIRAT, Nikhilesh Dholakia, Romain Laufer, Cory Wemberly, Alladi Venkatesh, Amy Wendling, Jorge Rocha, Salavador Trevino Martinez, and Mohammadali Zolfagharian attended the founding discussions of the CAQTUS Collaborative.

Among the initial topics that CAQTUS Collaborative will focus on are these:

- Paradoxes of Value, Contradictions of Capital

- Bureaucracy, Legitimacy, and Emancipatory Possibilities

- Cultures of Migration, Migrating Cultures

- Dynamic Reshaping of Needs, Wants, Desires

- Technology, Culture & Experience

- Cultural Embeddedness of Business Frameworks

- Rhetoric, Symbols, Strategies, Subversions

- Marketing as a Desire Machine

- Appropriation, Reappropriation, Exploitation, Liberation

Generations and Markets

The American marketplace is being shaped by glacially-paced but massively inevitale shifts in generational cohorts of population. The aging baby boomers have reshaped every age-specific lifestyle category they have passed through, and their children -- the echo boomers -- are likely to do the same. The smaller and emergent "Generation Z" generation-- the cohort of the very young, born in 1995 or later -- and "Generation X", are influentials in their own rights, as arbiters of new tastes and styles.

In this blog, researchers from the University of Rhode Island (URI) -- faculty as well as students -- examine the impact on lifestyles and markets of generations ranging from the very young millenials to the aging baby boomers. Later, other observers and researchers could join this blog also.

This is a non-commercial blog, based on principles of civil dialogue. Therefore, those posting items to this blog are requested to refrain from including advertising messages and links, and to maintain decorum and civility in the language employed in the postings.

Welcome to the "Generations: Generation Z to Baby Boomers" blog.

Nik Dholakia, Ph.D.
Professor of Marketing, E-Commerce & International Business
University of Rhode Island