Scaling Consultative Selling with Virtual Reality: Design and Evaluation of Digitally Enhanced Services

Virtual, augmented, and mixed reality technologies allow creation of powerful customer experiences and illustrative demonstrations especially in use cases that benefit from spatial visualizations. Our study focuses on the natural resource management sector and digitalizing of consultative selling process. More specifically, we look at how to improve customer engagement with the use of virtual reality (VR) and thus digitally scale consultative selling. In this process, a VR application is used to demonstrate various management operations and their economic results. Design research methodology is applied to a pre-development phase and three application development iterations between 2016 and 2018. Data consists of user interviews and video observations (N = 129) during various development iterations and three application development plans. The results show that VR offers an emotionally engaging and illustrative tool in consultative selling. Further, it opens a novel way for interaction between the salesperson and customer and possibilities to scale consultative selling digitally, emphasizing the role of trust.Peer reviewe

Telling the collective story? Moroccan-Dutch young adults’ negotiation of a collective identity through storytelling

Researchers taking a social constructionist perspective on identity agree that identities are constructed and negotiated in interaction. However, empirical studies in this field are often based on interviewer–interviewee interaction or focus on interactions with members of a socially dominant out-group. How identities are negotiated in interaction with in-group members remains understudied. In this article we use a narrative approach to study identity negotiation among Moroccan-Dutch young adults, who constitute both an ethnic and a religious (Muslim) minority in the Netherlands. Our analysis focuses on the topics that appear in focus group participants’ stories and on participants’ responses to each other’s stories. We find that Moroccan-Dutch young adults collectively narrate their experiences in Dutch society in terms of discrimination and injustice. Firmly grounded in media discourse and popular wisdom, a collective narrative of a disadvantaged minority identity emerges. However, we also find that this identity is not uncontested. We use the concept of second stories to explain how participants negotiate their collective identity by alternating stories in which the collective experience of deprivation is reaffirmed with stories in which challenging or new evaluations of the collective experience are offered. In particular, participants narrate their personal experiences to challenge recurring evaluations of discrimination and injustice. A new collective narrative emerges from this work of joint storytelling

News Interviews: Clayman and Heritage’s The News Interview

News interviews: Clayman and Heritage’s ‘The News Interview

Quitting is not an option: An analysis of online diet talk between celiac disease patients

This is an empirical study of the way in which celiac disease patients manage the risk of gluten intake in their everyday life. The article examines naturally occurring conversational data in order to study how patients cope interactionally with constantly being at risk in their day-to-day living. They reject quitting the diet as a valid option, and instead construct a ‘diet world’ in which dietary transgression is presented as an integrated part of everyday life. In this way, patients can manage occasional diet lapses without putting the validity of the diet itself at stake. By examining how the gluten-free diet is treated in interaction, we find out more about the pre-existing everyday strategies that have to be taken into account when new therapies are being introduced