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Project

Sabbatical during professorship in marketing

A sabbatical leave has the objective to free a professor from any teaching and/or administrative duties in order to devote oneself exclusively to their scientific research. Each professor uses this time according to one’s own objectives.

Heath or pleasure: what is your goal? To counter the obesity epidemic, some governments follow a moralizing and stigmatizing approach to make people pursue a health goal. However, recent academic research shows that a health goal often induces self-control conflicts, leading to adverse eating patterns. To enhance our insights on this issue, this project first investigates how many people and which type of people (in terms of socio demos and nationality) currently pursue a health goal, and to what extent the absence of a health goal is related to obesity. Although this relation seems straightforward, recent findings concerning the ‘ronic’effects of self-control conflicts suggest reality may be otherwise. This project next focuses on gaining insight into when self-control conflicts occur. The extent to which individuals associate unhealthy food with good taste and healthy food with bad taste may be a first determining factor as only in the former case a self-control conflict is expected to emerge. A second potential determinant concerns the origin of the health goal: do consumers set a health goal because they genuinely ‘WANT’ to be healthy or because they “SHOULD”be more healthy? Only should-motivations are expected to induce self-control conflicts. The results of this project will indicate whether avoiding self-control conflicts (by changing consumers’food perceptions or having consumers internalize their health goals) seems more promising than, for example, an approach of stigmatization.

Date:1 Jan 2014 →  31 Dec 2014
Keywords:sabbatical
Disciplines:Business-to-business marketing