Facilitating Racial Equity: Evaluating a Leadership Workshop Series for School Social Workers

This article provides an overview of a leadership training workshop series designed to provide professional development to Pre-K through 12th grade school social workers about racial equity and leadership. The series\u27 objectives included promoting social workers’ understanding of and obligation to facilitating racial equity in schools, analyzing educational data through a racial equity lens, conceptualizing school social workers as influencers in addressing racial inequities in schools, and collaborating with school professionals of various disciplines to practice and implement evidence-based approaches for facilitating racial equity in schools. The authors conducted five workshops that were developed based on state school social work practice standards, school systems data, scholarly literature, and social work values and ethics, and used a pretest/ posttest, workshop surveys, and a follow-up survey one year later to measure change in participants’ knowledge, self-readiness in assessing, facilitating, and leading change in school settings, and self-perceptions as leaders versus support staff. Survey findings are discussed in relation to participants’ perceived identity in the school environment, knowledge of racial equity, perceived readiness in assessing and facilitating racial equity in school cultures, perceived identity in the school environment, and possible barriers to promoting a racially equitable school culture

Advancing Customer Experience Theory: Five-Way Conversations in Two-Person Customer-Marketer Talk

This study advances customer experience theory (CET) by configuring research on talk, storytelling, customer-marketer interactions, and customer assessments of experiences in encounters with sales and hospitality/service representatives. Customers’ introspections and assessments of their meetings with marketers constitutes one genre of storytelling that include not only surface talk between two persons but surface and subsurface (nonconscious) talk between persons and within self. Practical implications include creative storytelling scripts for performing in sales and service training programs in firms and classroom contexts. Given the centrality of face-to-face meetings in many consumer shopping contexts (e.g., cars, houses, medical services; campus visits by high school seniors and parents, insurance selling, clothes shopping; tourism and hospitality), advancing CET and personal selling/buying effectiveness represent worthwhile pursuits. The study is one step forward in reducing the relative scarcity of extant research on customer-marketer talk. Empirically, the study includes customers’ thick descriptions of their self-marketer interactions via subjective personal introspections (SPI) and assessments of these exchanges. Interpersonal verbalization is only one of five levels of processing that take place when a researcher observes a decision-maker in a marketing organization interact with a decision-maker in a customer organization. At level 2, the speaker, listener, and observer are consciously editing thoughts as well as surfacing unconscious thoughts to combine and change conscious editing of what is said, heard, or observed. Level 3 is an automatic process in which unconscious thoughts are brought into working memory to mingle with conscious processing and to send some of the conscious processing into unconscious storage. Level 4 includes unconscious processing between or among individuals that do not become part of conscious processes or verbalization. Level 5 processing spreads activation within the person’s unconscious so that automatic thoughts and behaviors are set into motion without the individual being aware of the process. Customers’ introspections and assessments of their meetings with marketers constitutes one genre of storytelling that include not only surface talk between two persons but surface and subsurface (nonconscious) talk between persons and in within self. The study here includes customers’ thick descriptions of their self-marketer interactions via subjective personal introspections (SPI) and assessments of these exchanges. SPI uses the researcher as the subject of the study and allows for rich, thick, impressionistic narratives of the author’s own experiences in a particular context. Students in various marketing classes in five nations participated in a Trade Tales project. The Appendix provides a common set of instructions used by the Trade Tales Team members. All Trade Tales had a title page, abstract, story (with dialogue), five possible solutions with points awarded for choosing a particular solution and the rationale behind the choice, and surface (explicit) and deep (implicit/personal) assessments of the situation, story, and outcome assessments. Theory and practical implications: the participating student experiences “proper pleasure” in the re-telling of his or her story and also achieves better sense making and problem solving. The finalized versions of the Trade Tales can be used in other classes as case lets for studying customer-marketer interactions. The following case study illustrates one of the stories collected for the Trade Tales Team project. To achieve anonymity, the names of firms and persons are disguised. “AbsolutelyBest Ham to Pocatello, Idaho, USA: Arrival Delay in Customer\u27s Order” is the title of the case study. A customer goes on-line at firm’s (AbsolutelyBest) website and orders 9-lb ham to be delivered to daughter’s home in Pocatello, Idaho, on December 29th. Customer pays extra for two-day delivery service. Ham fails to arrive on December 29 due date. Customer asks for a credit on service not received. Bad weather hit most of the U.S. on December 28. What should the firm do? The full story appears in the paper with possible solutions for students to assess. Practical implications for Trade Tales include creative scripts for performing in sales and service training programs in firms and classroom contexts. Trade Tales are useful as case studies in classroom instruction. Given the centrality of face-to-face meetings in many consumer shopping contexts (e.g., cars, houses, medical services; campus visits by high school seniors, insurance selling; clothes shopping; tourism and hospitality), the relative scarcity of extant research on customer-marketer talk is surprising and represents a vacuum that researchers need to fill

ATOM: model-driven autoscaling for microservices

Microservices based architectures are increasinglywidespread in the cloud software industry. Still, there is ashortage of auto-scaling methods designed to leverage the uniquefeatures of these architectures, such as the ability to indepen-dently scale a subset of microservices, as well as the ease ofmonitoring their state and reciprocal calls.We propose to address this shortage with ATOM, a model-driven autoscaling controller for microservices. ATOM instanti-ates and solves at run-time a layered queueing network model ofthe application. Computational optimization is used to dynami-cally control the number of replicas for each microservice and itsassociated container CPU share, overall achieving a fine-grainedcontrol of the application capacity at run-time.Experimental results indicate that for heavy workloads ATOMoffers around 30%-37% higher throughput than baseline model-agnostic controllers based on simple static rules. We also find thatmodel-driven reasoning reduces the number of actions needed toscale the system as it reduces the number of bottleneck shiftsthat we observe with model-agnostic controllers

Broadening the concept of luxury : Transformations and contributions to well-being

Luxury has always been an intrinsic part of human societies. Prior research shows how luxury transforms from being-to-having and owning-to-searching for meaningfulness via shifting from having-to-being and from owning-to-experiencing. The study here is a critical commentary of foundational literature that includes examining the ongoing luxury transformation in the ongoing COVID-19 era in a world of climate change and disaster displacements, environmental degradation, and awareness of future pandemics. Building on prior advances in luxury transformations and the macromarketing literature on well-being, this commentary takes a fresh look at the prevailing role of luxury and its accompanying well-being in Western European societies amid the progressing tripartite storm. This critical commentary serves to clarify and broaden luxury's meaning and roles in making the shift from a micro individualistic focus to a macromarketing sustainable foundation. Entering the fourth year of COVID-19, the commentary implies that luxury goes beyond experiencing to catalyze cherishing self-care, nurturing, and the well-being of others.Peer reviewe

A native-visitor in Western Australia: an account of an insider-outsider

Purpose – This study aims to apply confirmatory personal introspection (CPI) to illuminate the experiences of the authors as partial native-visitors to Western Australia. The native-visitor is the tourist who is able to see beyond Urry’s shallow conception of the Tourist Gaze through their lengthy immersion as “insiders” in the destination’s culture. In this paper, the experiences of two immigrants, the authors, to Western Australia illustrate the different perspectives of the Tourist Gaze 4.0. Design/methodology/approach – The paper uses CPI, as this is a more reliable method of uncovering a traveler’s experiences than subjective personal introspection because CPI uses additional data sources such as written historical records and photographs for confirming the researcher’s accounts. In this study, accounts of both authors alongside photographs are used to both confirm and contrast their individual experiences. Findings – The paper demonstrates the varied forms of the tourist gaze, with an emphasis on that of the native visitor. The findings illustrate how individuals’ both maintain aspects of their original cultural identity and adopt those of the new country after an extended time living in that country. This enables individuals to see attractions and destinations from an insider perspective. Practical implications – This study shows how even after an extended period of time living in a new country, visitors may not have the cultural confidence to behave as local residents at tourist attractions and destinations, which could limit their engagement and enjoyment of these experiences. Marketers should take this into account in designing and promoting tourist experiences to visitors. Originality/value – CPI provides a valuable means for illustrating the range of perspectives within the Tourist Gaze 4.0. The method enables individuals’ rich experiences to be uncovered but at the same time uses multiple data sources to provide additional rigour

Embrace•perform•model: Complexity theory, contrarian case analysis, and multiple realities ☆

This essay describes tenets of complexity theory including the precept that within the same set of data X relates to Y positively, negatively, and not at all. A consequence to this first precept is that reporting how X relates positively to Y with and without additional terms in multiple regression models ignores important information available in a data set. Performing contrarian case analysis indicates that cases having low X with high Y and high X with low Y occur even when the relationship between X and Y is positive and the effect size of the relationship is large. Findings from contrarian case analysis support the necessity of modeling multiple realities using complex antecedent configurations. Complex antecedent configurations (i.e., 2 to 7 features per recipe) can show that high X is an indicator of high Y when high X combines with certain additional antecedent conditions (e.g., high A, high B, and low C)-and low X is an indicator of high Y as well when low X combines in other recipes (e.g., high A, low R, and high S), where A, B, C, R, and S are additional antecedent conditions. Thus, modeling multiple realities-configural analysis-is necessary, to learn the configurations of multiple indicators for high Y outcomes and the negation of high Y. For a number of X antecedent conditions, a high X may be necessary for high Y to occur but high X alone is almost never sufficient for a high Y outcome

Strong coupling between single-electron tunneling and nano-mechanical motion

Nanoscale resonators that oscillate at high frequencies are useful in many measurement applications. We studied a high-quality mechanical resonator made from a suspended carbon nanotube driven into motion by applying a periodic radio frequency potential using a nearby antenna. Single-electron charge fluctuations created periodic modulations of the mechanical resonance frequency. A quality factor exceeding 10^5 allows the detection of a shift in resonance frequency caused by the addition of a single-electron charge on the nanotube. Additional evidence for the strong coupling of mechanical motion and electron tunneling is provided by an energy transfer to the electrons causing mechanical damping and unusual nonlinear behavior. We also discovered that a direct current through the nanotube spontaneously drives the mechanical resonator, exerting a force that is coherent with the high-frequency resonant mechanical motion.Comment: Main text 12 pages, 4 Figures, Supplement 13 pages, 6 Figure

Applying configurational theory to build a typology of ethnocentric consumers

Purpose – Individuals showing high consumer ethnocentrism (CE) prefer domestic over foreign-made products and their preferences may contribute to barriers to international market entry. Therefore, how to identify such consumers is an important question. Shankarmahesh’s (2006) review reveals inconsistencies in the literature with regard to CE and its antecedents. To shed theoretical and empirical light on these inconsistencies, the purpose of this paper is to contribute two new perspectives on CE: first, a typology that classifies ethnocentric consumers by the extent to which they support government-controlled protectionism and consumer-controlled protectionism; and second, a configurational (recipe) perspective on the antecedents. Design/methodology/approach – The study applies fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis of survey data from 3,859 consumers. The study contrasts the findings with findings using traditional statistical hypotheses testing via multiple regression analysis. Findings – The results reveal several configurations of antecedents that are sufficient for consistently explaining three distinct types of CE. No single antecedent condition is necessary for high CE to occur. Practical implications – The findings help global business strategists in their market entry decisions and in their targeting and segmentation efforts. Originality/value – The authors show the value of asymmetrical thinking about the relationship between CE and its antecedents. The results expand understanding of CE and challenge conventional net-effects thinking about its antecedents