Exploring the optimal customer experience online

Customer experience research is widely considered to be cutting edge. Despite this very little research has been conducted on the optimal online customer experience. Whilst some research has been conducted on the Business to Consumer Sector (B2C) there appears to be very little on Business to Business (B2B). Work conducted on behalf of the Henley Centre for Customer Management explored the perceptions of both B2B and B2C customers with online experience in both Europe and the United States. 132 people were interviewed in depth using a qualitative version of Repertory Grid. Over 100 hours of interview were analyzed. The research also adopted a cross industry approach as an aid to generalizability. We found 13 themes and 109 factors for the optimum B2C experience. Themes include; interactivity, security, informative, trustworthy, personal, community, emotional engagement, aesthetics, usability, quality of content, commercialization customer orientation, fulfilment. We found 13 themes and 97 factors for the optimum B2B experience. Themes; usability, aesthetics, subject relevance, hedonic experience, information processing, trustworthy, relational, learning, contemporary, customer oriented, community, commercialization, fulfilment. The report also contains a checklist of factors members should consider when crafting the optimum experience for their online customers

Stage directions: Shakespeare's use of the map

This study argues that sixteenth-century map culture is a source for Shakespeare's plays, and that his use of the map, as cartographic language and as stage property, is a factor in understanding Shakespeare's representation of power. Maps empower their users and their makers, at the expense of those who are mapped those who live on the land represented. However, the stage counters the map's effectiveness as a tool of power. In Shakespeare's plays, characters using the map to achieve power fail, partly because of their inability to read maps and use them properly, and partly because the map and the stage's relationship with the space they represent is different. Land is staged refusing to yield to the map's attempts to break it down, and those living on the land are staged resisting their inclusion or exclusion from it. Plays and issues discussed include the mis-use of the map in The Second Tetralogy, the weaknesses of cartography and stage-mapping in Richard III and King Lear, the presence of death on the map in relation to Antony and Cleopatra, and mapping body-space in Cymbeline

Surrealism and the prose fiction of José Martínez Ruiz (Azorín)

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Boston UniversityThis dissertation is a critical study of surrealist tendencies and manifestations in the prose fiction of José Martínez Ruiz (AzorÍn). Using as primary source materials the Spanish author's novels, short stories and literary criticism and representative French works, conclusions have been derived both from a projection of Azorin 1s prose fiction against French surrealist texts and from an analysis of the Spaniard's surrealist and non-surrealist production. Showing his adherence to the authentic school, Azorín distinctly enunciated surrealist principles in his 1928-29 literary contributions. He made new interpretations of some principles and hence his conspicuous additions in the areas of surrealist techniques, surrealist imagery, surrealist characterology, and surrealist language. These findings, greatly enhanced by an overall relationship linking together the early and later works, place Azorin firmly in the surrealist tradition. [TRUNCATED

Monstrosity and Philosophy

Amazons and giants, snakes and gorgons, centaurs and gryphons: monsters abounded in the ancient world. They raise enduring philosophical questions: about chaos and order; about divinity and perversion; about meaning and purpose; about the hierarchy of nature or its absence. Del Lucchese grapples with the concept of monstrosity, showing how ancient philosophers explored metaphysics, ontology, theology and politics to respond to the challenge of radical otherness in nature and in thought

Civic and Symbolic Space in Representation and Ritual in the Renaissance

PhDThis project examines the conception and imaging of the city in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. The thesis aims to chart the ways in which a spatialised reading of the metropolis most fully realised in ceremonial representations of the city informs representational strategies of the time. Chapter 1 looks at the transformations taking place during this period in the practice of land surveying, exploring the implications of the new techniques of geometrical survey for conceptions of civic space. Examining the parallels between the viewing of the estate and the reformation of the Rogationtide ceremonies of perambulating the bounds, the urban context for spatial description is analysed through a reading of John Stow's Survey of London. In Chapter 2 the resistance of the city to a strictly geometrical conception of space is traced through an analysis of early printed maps of the city and the texts of civic ceremonies. The shared interest of these cultural practices in the representation of civic space is interrogated to reveal an understanding of the city as comprising !oth built environment and social body which informs the deployment of the city as a subject of cartographic representation. The next chapter analyses the costume book in the context of a Europewide project of geographical description. The production of a clothed body capable of articulating spatial and hierarchical difference is examined in relation to the available ceremonial models for the negotiation of these intersecting axes of description and the tensions generated by this representational strategy The final chapter undertakes a reinvestigation of the Earl of Essex's rebellion, reading a wide range of materials to argue for the centrality of anxieties over the control of the civic sign to the understanding of this event

Golding’s Metaphysics: William Golding’s Novels in the Light of Arthur Schopenhauer’s Philosophy

Esta tese analiza as preocupacións metafísicas do novelista británico William Golding a través do prisma da filosofía de Arthur Schopenhauer, coa cal ten importantes puntos en común: o asombro metafísico que leva á procura da esencia do mundo, as preocupacións morais e un suposto pesimismo que vai contra toda esperanza utópica. Após ofrecer una visión panorámica do tratamento que esas preocupacións teñen recibido pola crítica, e da teoría metafísica de Schopenhauer, a tese examina os aspectos das novelas de Golding que coinciden con esta. En primeiro lugar analízanse as clases de coñecemento — racional e non racional — de que os seus personaxes dispón, e a súa capacidade para atinxir unha comprensión metafísico do mundo. A seguir examínase o tratamento que Golding dá ás descricións do mundo fornecidas pola ciencia, a arte e a relixión. Esta última pon o foco na esencia do mundo, a miúdo conceptualizándoa como unha vontade todopoderosa e amoral. Como a vontade esencial é un impulso que non pode ser satisfeito e no cal ten as súas raíces o carácter innato e inmutable de cada un dos individuos, para Golding a vida humana caracterízase pola agresión mutua e a dor. A pesar de ofrecer varias maneiras de evitar o sufrimento — a contemplación estética, o altruísmo compasivo, a morte e a represión moral e física — Golding suxire que, coa excepción da morte, estas só poden mitigar a dor, nunca pórlle fin; de aí o seu pesimismo e o rexeitamento de toda solución utópica. Todos estes aspectos das súas novelas coinciden coa filosofía de Schopenhauer. Porén, Golding introduce pouco a pouco unha serie de elementos que difiren da visión do mundo a que Schopenhauer deu expresión filosófica: a primeira mudanza prodúcese cando as novelas de Golding afirman que o carácter moral das persoas, lonxe de depender dunha vontade inmutable que excede o individuo, veñen determinados pola libre escolla individual; despois Golding cuestiona a posibilidade de coñecer a esencia do mundo; finalmente, Golding abre a porta á posibilidade de que as decisións libres dos individuos dean lugar a unha comunidade utópica non gobernada pola competición e a represión. Aparte destes elementos, as súas novelas conteñen outro que non está incluído no modelo de Schopenhauer: a divindade. O estudo das novelas de Golding acaba explorando o lugar que a divindade ocupa nelas, e que pode resumirse afirmando que a caracterización das deidades de que fala o autor coincide nos seus trazos esenciais coa caracterización da vontade esencial, e que, por tanto, a única función desas deidades nas novelas é dar testemuño das crenzas relixiosas de Golding e de moitos dos seus personaxes

Experiences of bodily disorder in French books 1573-1592

Mary Douglas, in Purity and Danger and Elizabeth Grosz, in Volatile Bodies concur that the human body whose boundaries are traversed or transgressed is troubling, threatening and risky. The threats to which Douglas and Grosz separately refer are largely ideological and cultural threats, but their identification of the problematic nature of ruptured or unusual bodily boundaries is nevertheless relevant to the analysis of the actual bodily disorder with which this thesis is concerned. Disease, cannibalism and monstrosity are forms of bodily behaviour or conditions in which boundaries are inherently, or are rendered, unclear, and in the sixteenth-century books of Ambroise Paré, Jean de Léry and Michel de Montaigne, the question of the disorderly nature of these three physical phenomena is addressed. A fundamental feature of the books produced by these three writers is the emphasis on the experience of the form of bodily disorder in question on which the written account is based. Paré, a surgeon, treated plague patients and dissected monstrous specimens before writing about his experiences in his Œuvres completes', Léry observed the practice of cannibalism in Brazil before returning to Europe and witnessing the consumption of human flesh during the siege of Sancerre; and Montaigne, whose final essay is significantly entitled 'De ľexperience', develops a method of writing, or essaying, which involves the writer attempting to evaluate critically all received experiences and information before arriving at his own conclusion. The depiction of cannibalism, monstrosity and disease in the books of these three writers will be examined using a methodology developed around the principles of Mikhail Bakhtin's theory of dialogism. The particular relevance of this literary theory to the theme of the disordered body in French sixteenth-century books is the emphasis that Bakhtm also places on the writer's experience of his subject matter. In addition, Bakhtm argues that writers experience an impulse to consummate, in other words to define, explain and contextualise, and present as complete the world they observe. This thesis argues that the question of bodily boundaries raised by Douglas and Grosz can be addressed by Bakhtinian theory, and seeks to illustrate the ways in which Paré, Léry and Montaigne exhibit an awareness of the problem of the disordered body, and develop narrative strategies to overcome it which correspond to the functions of a Bakhtinian Author

Franco\u27s Children: Representations of Franco-Era Childhood in Contemporary Spanish Literature and Cinema

This study explores the politicization of Franco\u27s children in El sur : 1981;1983), El florido pensil : 1994), Habíamos ganado la guerra: 2007), and La gloria de los niños: 2007). The phrase Franco\u27s children, on the one hand, implies the status of the authors and filmmakers as those who survived the early Franco regime as children and recall their childhood as adults; on the other hand, it refers to the child protagonists in the selected works that are set in wartime and the post-War period. The aim of the present study is to explore different strategies - both rhetorical and political - Franco\u27s children used at three key historical moments: 1) the transition to democracy in the early 1980s; 2) the mid and later 1990s; and 3) the period following the Law of Historical Memory [October 31, 2007]. The four individual chapters respond to these three consecutive moments, showing the chronopolitical evolution of repressive childhood memory in post-Franco literature and cinema. The present study links childhood studies and studies of memory, pointing to the double meaning of the title: the selected works are about Franco\u27s children and by Franco\u27s children. This generation of Spaniards has been shaped by the past and now they are shaping the past retrospectively from the standpoint of the present. Juxtaposing discourses on model children under Francoism and representations of Franco-era childhood in the present, I demonstrate the complexity of the constant process of construction and reconstruction of children and childhood. Linking individual childhood memories to public debates in contemporary Spain, these recollections gain political importance as social catalysts: they arouse people\u27s historical awareness, prevent indulgence in uncritical nostalgia for a romanticized past, construct a collective identity, and relate the local and the national to the global

Subversion and Transcendence in the Latin American Modern Travel Novel (1928-1976)

The focus of this dissertation is the role that travel plays in Latin American novels that stem from 1928 to 1976, specifically, Macunaíma, Los pasos perdidos, El reino de este mundo, and Mascaró, el cazador americano. Departing from the fact that this period of time in history was marked by political and cultural change and upheaval, different aspects and interpretations of travel as manifested in the novels of the corpus are explored as a means of subversion and transcendence to hegemonic discourses. Travel is viewed as a means of disruption, particularly of limits and borders, be they geographical, political, and cultural. The idea of a heightened sense of potentiality inherent in travel is also explored as part of the subversive and transcendent nature of travel. The beginning of the work delves into alternative spaces that are created by voyage. These spaces are described as differential spaces using Lefebvre’s definition of the term. Following a discussion of space, myth in travel is explained as an open system that resists particular power structures. Travel’s role in disseminating myths is also studied. Subsequently, the function of the Trickster as a mythological figure and as a peripatetic storyteller is analyzed. The final aspect considered in this study is the creation and the use of alternative semiotic systems that exist inside and outside of travel that subvert and transcend authoritative discourses of power