Abstract The concept of consumer responsibilization challenges conventional thinking around responsible consumption, draws attention to its political dimensions, and situates the emergence of responsible consumers within the realm of neoliberal governance. In this article, we critique and amend the theoretical anchoring of consumer responsibilization in the concept of governmentality and the Foucauldian theory of power that underpins it. We argue that governmental theorizing implies flattening the power relationship between the state, the market and consumers, and that it thereby marginalizes and eclipses the top-down exercise of power under neoliberal governance. This produces theoretical inconsistencies in the transformative consumer literature on responsibilization that risk impeding theory development and silencing critical empirical trajectories. At worst, it may end up reifying the neoliberal governance it sets out to scrutinize. We draw on Karl Polanyi’s writings to advance a critical political economy perspective on consumer responsibilization designed to address these concerns. We develop these ideas by introducing the concept of “embedded responsibilization” to the field of consumer research. Theorizing responsible consumption as being embedded in the Polanyian sense will solidify consumer responsibilization as a theoretically consistent transformative research project and encourage necessary trajectories for empirical research on responsibilization.

Tom's story: In the second year of my doctoral program, while working on a model for my dissertation, I started writing up some thoughts on how several of the constructs I was studying might fit together. I guess I just didn't know any better, as I submitted this to a special issue of a journal that focused on my area of interest. A year later, my soloauthored conceptual article came out in press, and to this day, nearly 30 years later, still reliably gets 25 citations each year (see Gruen, 1995) . While the model in that article did not end up being the final model used in my dissertation, it provided the foundational elements, and it let me know I was on the right track. It also helped me land my first faculty position. Once my dissertation was completed, it was on to publishing the revised conceptual model along with the empirical findings. I had plenty of encouragement and help from my dissertation committee, and we were successful in getting the empirical article published. But publishing the conceptual model as a stand-alone article was not the focus, and I never did get back to publishing a conceptual article from my dissertation. While it was not my experience, I hear from doctoral students that they are often discouraged from writing and publishing conceptual articles, as their doctoral programs encourage the "safer" route of publishing empirical studies. They are often told to wait to publish conceptual articles until after tenure, when they have less pressure to publish. Supposedly conceptual article writing is more risky than empirical work, as the nature of the evidence is based on reasoning, logic, and connecting previous work, rather than having data generated specifically to support the proposed relationships. This advice is well intended, but good conceptual work is critical for two reasons. First, this is where the new ideas are going to be generated and disseminated. Second, empirical work needs to be grounded on solid conceptual models, so the theoretical implications of the findings become useful.

There is very little research on talent management in the marketing discipline. This is despite the significant time and effort that firms allocate the to the entire marketing talent pipeline—including recruitment, selection, training, development, rewards, and promotion within the firm. Michael Farrington serves as the senior vice president, people and culture at Nuvasive and is responsible for the company’s human resources, talent, and total rewards, as well as the corporate marketing, brand and communication functions. This interview sheds light on the nature of how firms manage the end-to-end talent pipeline in marketing.