134 research outputs found
Navigating the emergence of brand meaning in service ecosystems
Purpose â The purpose of this paper is to clarify how brand meaning evolves as an emergent property through the cocreation processes of stakeholders on multiple levels of a brandâs service ecosystem. This provides new insight into the intersection between brands, consumers and society, and emphasizes the institutionally situated nature of brand meaning cocreation processes. It further lays a holistic foundation for a much-needed discussion on purpose-driven branding. Design/methodology/approach â Combining the ecosystem perspective of branding with the concept of social emergence allows clarification of brand meaning cocreation at different levels of aggregation. Emergence means collective phenomena â like social structures, concepts, preferences, states, mechanisms, laws and brand meaning â manifest from the interactions of individuals. Drawing on Sawyerâs (2005) social emergence perspective, the authors propose a processual multi-level framework to explore brand meaning emergence. Findings â Our framework spans five levels of brand meaning emergence: individual (e.g. employees and customers); interactional (e.g. where work teams or friend groups interact); relational (e.g. where internal and external actors meet); strategic (e.g. markets and strategic alliances); and systemic (e.g. regulators, NGOs and society). It acknowledges that brand positioning is an inherently co-creative process of negotiating value propositions and aligning behaviors and beliefs among broad sets of actors, as opposed to a firm-centric task. Originality/value â Service research has only recently embraced a macroâmicro perspective of branding processes. This paper extends that perspective by paying attention to the nested service ecosystems in which brand meaning emerges and the degree to which this process can (and cannot) be navigated by individual actors.Jonathan J. Baker, Julia A. Fehrer, Roderick J. Brodi
Young people, crime and school exclusion: a case of some surprises
During the 1990s the number of young people being permanently excluded from schools in England and Wales increased dramatically from 2,910 (1990/91) to a peak of 12,700 (1996/97). Coinciding with this rise was a resurgence of the debate centring on lawless and delinquent youth. With the publication of Young People and Crime (Graham and Bowling 1995) and Misspent Youth (Audit Commission 1996) the 'common sense assumption' that exclusion from school inexorably promoted crime received wide support, with the school excludee portrayed as another latter day 'folk devil'. This article explores the link between school exclusion and juvenile crime, and offers some key findings from a research study undertaken with 56 young people who had experience of being excluded from school. Self-report interview questions reveal that whilst 40 of the young people had offended, 90% (36) reported that the onset of their offending commenced prior to their first exclusion. Moreover, 50 (89.2% of the total number of young people in the sample), stated that they were no more likely to offend subsequent to being excluded and 31 (55.4%) stated that they were less likely to offend during their exclusion period. Often, this was because on being excluded, they were 'grounded' by their parents
Time dependent solitons of noncommutative Chern-Simons theory coupled to scalar fields
We study one- and two-soliton solutions of noncommutative Chern-Simons theory
coupled to a nonrelativistic or a relativistic scalar field. In the
nonrelativistic case, we find a tower of new stationary time-dependent
solutions, all with the same charge density, but with increasing energies. The
dynamics of these solitons cannot be studied using traditional moduli space
techniques, but we do find a nontrivial symplectic form on the phase space
indicating that the moduli space is not flat. In the relativistic case we find
the metric on the two soliton moduli space.Comment: 22 pages, 2 figures, JHEP3 style. v2: This paper is a thoroughly
revised version. We thank P.A. Horvathy, L. Martina and P.C. Stichel for
illuminating comments that led us to reconsider some of our previously
reported results; see note added at the end of the paper. v3:
Acknowledgements adde
Beyond the Shade of the Oak Tree: The Recent Growth of Johannine Studies
The recent growth within Johannine studies has developed as a result of several factors. First, the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls led to an appreciation of the Jewishness of Johnâs origin. Second, new approaches to Johnâs composition have emerged, followed by a larger set of inquiries as to the Johannine traditionâs relation to parallel traditions. This has been accompanied by a fourth interest: the history of the Johannine situation. Fifth, new literary studies have posed new horizons for interpretation, and sixth, theories continue to abound on the identity of the Beloved Disciple. A seventh development involves new ways of conceiving Johnâs theological features, leading to an eighth: reconsidering Johnâs historical features and re-envisioning its historical contributions in new perspective
Noncommutative Fluids
We review the connection between noncommutative gauge theory, matrix models
and fluid mechanical systems. The noncommutative Chern-Simons description of
the quantum Hall effect and bosonization of collective fermion states are used
as specific examples.Comment: To appear in "Seminaire Poincare X", Institut Henri Poincare, Paris;
references adde
Star clusters near and far; tracing star formation across cosmic time
© 2020 Springer-Verlag. The final publication is available at Springer via https://doi.org/10.1007/s11214-020-00690-x.Star clusters are fundamental units of stellar feedback and unique tracers of their host galactic properties. In this review, we will first focus on their constituents, i.e.\ detailed insight into their stellar populations and their surrounding ionised, warm, neutral, and molecular gas. We, then, move beyond the Local Group to review star cluster populations at various evolutionary stages, and in diverse galactic environmental conditions accessible in the local Universe. At high redshift, where conditions for cluster formation and evolution are more extreme, we are only able to observe the integrated light of a handful of objects that we believe will become globular clusters. We therefore discuss how numerical and analytical methods, informed by the observed properties of cluster populations in the local Universe, are used to develop sophisticated simulations potentially capable of disentangling the genetic map of galaxy formation and assembly that is carried by globular cluster populations.Peer reviewedFinal Accepted Versio
State of the worldâs plants and fungi 2020
Kewâs State of the Worldâs Plants and Fungi project provides assessments of our current knowledge of the diversity of plants and fungi on Earth, the global threats that they face, and the policies to safeguard them. Produced in conjunction with an international scientific symposium, Kewâs State of the Worldâs Plants and Fungi sets an important international standard from which we can annually track trends in the global status of plant and fungal diversity
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