Territorialising brand experience and consumption: negotiating a role for pop-up retailing

The evolving consumption landscape creates challenges for retailers in accommodating their modus operandi to negotiate changing consumer needs, arguably requiring a ‘new’ type of retailing to hopefully facilitate future success. We suggest that an important aspect of such negotiation will be the use of ‘pop-up’ activity, and we critically evaluate the potential of these ephemeral consumption spaces to constitute and shape consumers’ brand-oriented relations and experiences into the future. Informed by the work of Deleuze and Guattari, we take a territorological perspective. Drawing on data from eight UK-based pop-up cases, we analyse: (1) how these temporary ‘territories’ of brand experience are developed and implemented; (2) what differentiates them from other, traditionally conceived, territories of brand experience; and (3) critically evaluate pop-up’s neglected characterisation in terms of a more ‘fluid’ spatial-temporal retail territory, to better understand its role in contemporary consumer culture. We posit that the development of pop-up activities occurs through the coordination of actions of a variety of stakeholders, constituting a spatial-temporal confluence of both material and processual elements to create a ‘refrain’, through the compression and compaction of interior, intermediary, exterior and annexed milieus. In doing so, we offer a new lens through which to view the creation of retail consumption spaces

Service learning and sustainability education

In the context of higher education, service-learning has been adopted for various dimensions of sustainability education across disciplines including environmental studies (Helicke 2014), engineering (Seay et al 2016), entrepreneurship (Niehm et al 2015), nursing (Dalmida 2016), clinical studies (Petersen et al 2015), psychology (Bringle et al 2016), and political sciences (Benjamin-Alvarado, 2015). It has been described as a philosophy, pedagogy, and programme (Jacoby 2015), conceptualised as a form of experiential education based on ‘reciprocal learning’ (Sigmon, 1979) where the ‘head, hands and heart’ can become integrated (Sipos et al 2008). Here, both the learner offering service and the recipient of that service are considered equally important, and both are mutually changed or transformed in some way (a relationship signified by the use of a hyphen between service and learning, ibid). Such reciprocity, however, distinguishes service-learning from volunteering and community service (which typically tend to prioritise the recipient of the service learner’s efforts), as well as field and internship education (which typically tend to prioritise the learner) (Sigmon, 1994)..

Innovativeness in family firms: Effects of positive leadership styles

WOS: 000444687500012Family business is an unique kind of business, that can be depicted by an ownership structure mostly dominated by members of a particular family, shared familial norms and values and a shared way of thinking accumulated over a long period of time. This socioemotional wealth of the family owning the family business and overlapping family and business goals make them more harmonious, ambitious, hard working and more engaged regarding both their familial and business goals. In family a firm, central decision making that is accumulated on the hands of founder owners and their desire for further growth result in an inclination to respond quickly to opportunities that have the probability to provide economic gains which will be useful for both the owner family and the business itself. Moreover, sustainability and long run performance in these kind of companies are significant both business goals and family honor. And in this paper it is claimed that like other firms, family businesses, also prefer to benefit from innovation for economic growth due to the fact that innovation is an activity that is fast in financial return. That is to say, engaging in innovation process is both difficult and time consuming, but once a company accomplished to innovate a certain product or service, financial returns of this accomplishment are highly satisfying and rapid. And in this process, as in the case with other kind of businesses, proper style of leadership is an important factor in motivating employers to engage in innovation processes, and unique characteristics of family businesses and antecedents of an innovative work atmosphere effects this proper leadership style

Corporate social responsibility reporting:a content analysis in family and non-family firms

Family firms are ubiquitous and play a crucial role across all world economies, but how they differ in the disclosure of social and environmental actions from non-family firms has been largely overlooked in the literature. Advancing the discourse on corporate social responsibility reporting, we examine how family influence on a business organization affects CSR reporting. The arguments developed here draw on institutional theory, using a rich body of empirical evidence gathered through a content analysis of the CSR reports of 98 large and medium-sized Italian firms. The grounded theory analysis informs and contextualizes several differences in the type and content of corporate social responsibility reports of family and non-family firms. Our findings show that in comparison to non-family firms, family firms disseminate a greater variety of CSR reports, are less compliant with CSR standards and place emphasis on different CSR topics. We thus contribute to family business and corporate social responsibility reporting literatures in several ways, offering implications for practice and outlining promising avenues for future research

Internal Drivers and Performance Consequences of Small Firm Green Business Strategy: The Moderating Role of External Forces

Growing detrimental effects on the bio-physical environment have been responsible for a large number of small firms to adopt a more strategic stance toward exploiting green-related opportunities. This article aims to shed light on how internal company factors help to formulate a green business strategy among small manufacturing firms, and how this, in turn, influences their competitive advantage and performance. Based on data received from 153 small Cypriot manufacturers, we propose and test a conceptual model anchored on the Resource-based View of the firm. The findings underscore the critical role of both organizational resources and capabilities in pursuing a green business strategy. The adoption of this strategy was more evident in the case of firms operating in more harmful, as opposed to less harmful, industries. The implementation of a green business strategy was found to generate a positional competitive advantage, with this association becoming stronger under conditions of high regulatory intensity, high market dynamism, high public concern, and high competitive intensity. It was also revealed that this competitive advantage is conducive to gaining heightened market and financial performance. Our study makes a fivefold contribution: it injects a theoretical perspective into a relatively atheoretic field, underlines the role of organizational resources/capabilities as drivers of eco-friendly initiatives, highlights the often neglected strategic aspects of small firms’ ecological business activities, stresses the contingent role of external forces in moderating the positive impact of small firm green business strategy on competitive advantage, and focuses on the performance implications of the small firm’s engagement in environmental operations