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The paper introduces ethical and aesthetical implications emerging from participative forms of adaptive heritage reuse. Its aim is to depict the overall framework to contextualize the investigations explored in the Special Issue titled “Ethics and aesthetics of adaptive heritage reuse in Europe.” Therefore, the article confronts with potentialities and contradictions of “open” heritage processes, introducing key critical elements to recode heritage practices and planning in today’s conjuncture of global change.

The paper drawn on a literature review, which combines different bodies of studies: heritage, urban studies, care studies and recent policy documents. A photographic essay, moreover, serves to “augment” the presented argumentations through a visual apparatus resulting from one of Gaia Ginevra Giorgi’s artwork, which develops in the intersection between performative art, participation and territorial reuse.

The author argues that for adaptive heritage reuse to be really sustainable, ethical and aesthetical heritage codes need to be reassessed and reoriented toward the present socio-ecological priorities, multiplicating the ways cultural heritage is conceived, valued and reused. The paper suggests proceeding along the creative paths of uncertainty, providing the first elements to develop political projects of abundance and enjoyment for current urban settlements.

The presented argumentations can be used as a baseline by heritage managers and policymakers to experiment with participative processes of adaptive heritage reuse and to identify more environmentally and socially just trajectories of urban development.

The paper expands the concept of adaptive heritage reuse, considering the active participation of both human and non-human agents. Treating heritage in a laic way, namely free from absolute and preordered judgments of value, it deals with uncomfortable heritage materiality and contexts, illuminating the quality of unpleasant or odd forms of beauty.

The aim of the study is threefold: understanding the interconnections amongst visual and verbal multimodal communication strategies used in food discourse; identifying the themes of celebrity chef's food discourse with respect to pro-environmental behaviour; and providing a methodological framework to visually analyse food-themed videos.

This study uses mise-en-scène and critical discourse and multimodal analyses to gain insights on food discourse from 20 videos shared by a Michelin starred chef on social media platforms.

Results show that a pro-environmental cooking philosophy challenges the normative discourse on food and educates general audiences and foodies alike. Mise-en-scène and discourse analyses of Instagram visual content reveal that leftovers are central to the ethical message and are intertwined – through the aesthetic of the videos-with concepts of inclusivity, diversity and nourishment.

Chefs, and restaurants, are encouraged to recognise their responsibility as role models, thus able to influence the societal production of food discourse.

The findings provide new insights into the role of a celebrity chef in promoting sustainable food preparation and consumption.

The article contributes to affective ethnography focussing on the fluidity of organizational spacing. Through the concept of affective space, it highlights those elements that are ephemeral and elusive – like affect, aesthetics, atmosphere, intensity, moods – and proposes to explore affect as spatialized and space as affective.

Fluidity is proposed as a conceptual lens that sits at the conjunction of space and affect, highlighting both the movement in time and space, and the mutable relationships that the capacity of affecting and being affected weaves. It experiments with “writing differently” in affective ethnography, thus performing the space of representation of affective space.

The article enriches the alternative to a conceptualization of organizations as stable entities, considering organizing in its spatial fluidity and in being a fragmented, affective and dispersed phenomenon.

The article's writing is an example of intertextuality constructed through five praxiographic stories that illustrate the multiple fluidity of affective spacing in terms of temporal fluidity, fluidity of boundaries, of participation, of the object of practice, and atmospheric fluidity.

This study conceptualizes a form of luxury consumption in which luxury brands collaborate with unconventional non-luxury partners. These unconventional luxury brand collaborations are growing in popularity among Chinese luxury consumers of the post-1990s generation. Luxury brands are exploring new branding strategies due to the growing commercial importance of Chinese luxury consumers.

An in-depth qualitative study informs this paper. Interviews with young adult luxury consumers self-identifying as Chinese reveal a growing interest for luxury brands that collaborate with odd partners in social media and online culture.

Unconventional collaborations between luxury brands and non-luxury partners catalyze shifting meanings of luxury through the following juxtapositions: ephemeral instead of timeless, trendy rather than inaccessible, and playful in contrast with traditional. First, young Chinese consumers construct luxury meanings through ephemerality, like digital possessions, social media fame and fleeting experiences. Second, luxury meanings emerge in trendiness among social media influencers and online culture rather than in the seemingly inaccessible taste regimes of the upper class. Third, younger consumers appreciate fun, rebellious and over-the-top aesthetics in luxury brands.

The study contributes to the nascent field of unconventional luxury by conceptualizing how unusual, odd and unexpected collaborations constitute new forms of luxury consumption. The shifting meanings of luxury consumption that this study conceptualizes raise new opportunities and challenges for luxury brands. One of such is the release of limited collections with non-luxury partners seemingly at the opposite spectrum of design, image and values. Moreover, the study adds nuance to the understanding of luxury consumption among young Chinese consumers.

This exploratory study examines and comprehends the relative importance of mobile app attributes from a consumer perspective. Both quantitative and qualitative analysis approaches explore users' behavior and attitudes toward the priorities of mobile app attributes and preferences, identifying correlations between attributes and aggregating individual attributes into groups.

Online convenience sampling and snowball sampling resulted in 417 valid responses. The numerical data are analyzed using the relative to an identified distribution (RIDIT) scoring system and gray relational analysis (GRA), and qualitative responses are investigated using text-mining techniques.

This study finds enhanced nuances of user preferences and provides data-driven insights that might help app developers and marketers create a distinct app that will add value to consumers. The latent semantic analysis indicates relationship structure among the attributes, and text-based cluster analysis determines the subsets of attributes that represent the unique functions of the mobile app.

This study reveals the essential components of mobile apps, paying particular attention to the consumer value component, which boosts user approval and encourages prolonged use. Overall, the results demonstrate that developers must concentrate on its functional, technical and esthetic features to make an app more exciting and practical for potential users.

Most scholarly research on apps has focused on their technological merits, aesthetics and usability from the user's perspective. A post-adoption multi-attribute app analysis using both structured and unstructured data is conducted in this study.

While the economic literature mostly tackled discrimination looking at labour costs, this work focuses on its relation to labour productivity, arguing that discrimination may worsen the performance of female employees. In this view, it represents a source of allocative inefficiency, which contributes to reducing output.

Female discrimination is both a social and an economic problem. In social terms, consolidated gender stereotypes impose constraints on women’s behaviour, worsening their overall well-being. In economic terms, women face generally worse labour market conditions. Using long-run Italian data spanning from 1861 to 2009, the authors propose a novel measure of female discrimination based on the observed frequency of discriminating epithets. Following social capital theory, the authors distinguish between structural and voluntary discrimination, and use Data Envelopment Analysis for time series data to assess the extent of inefficiency that each component of discrimination induces in the production process.

The results draw the trajectory of female discrimination in Italy and provide evidence in favour of the idea that female discrimination reduces productive efficiency. In particular, the structural component of female discrimination, although less sizeable than the voluntary component, plays a major role, especially in recent years, where more stringent beauty standards fuel looks-based discrimination.

The contribution of this work is twofold. First, based on contributions from social sciences different from economics, it proposes a novel theoretical framework that explores the effect of discriminatory language on labour productivity. Second, it introduces a novel and direct measure of female discrimination at the country level, based on the bidirectional link between language and culture. The indicator is easily understood by policymakers and may be used to evaluate the effectiveness of anti-discrimination policies.

This study, a conceptual paper, analyses the growth of curation in tourism and hospitality and the curator role in selecting and framing products and experiences. It considers the growth of expert, algorithmic, social and co-creative curation modes and their effects.

Narrative and integrative reviews of literature on curation and tourism and hospitality are used to develop a typology of curation and identify different curation modes.

Curational techniques are increasingly used to organise experience supply and distribution in mainstream fields, including media, retailing and fashion. In tourism and hospitality, curated tourism, curated hospitality brands and food offerings and place curation by destination marketing organisations are growing. Curation is undertaken by experts, algorithms and social groups and involves many of destination-related actors, producing a trend towards “hybrid curation” of places.

Research is needed on different forms of curation, their differential effects and the power roles of different curational modes.

Curation is a widespread intermediary function in tourism and hospitality, supporting better consumer choice. New curators influence experience supply and the distribution of consumer attention, shaping markets and co-creative activities. Increased curatorial activity should stimulate aesthetic and stylistic innovation and provide the basis for storytelling and narrative in tourism and hospitality.

This is the first study of curational strategies in tourism and hospitality, providing a definition and typology of curation, and linking micro and macro levels of analysis. It suggests the growth of choice-based logic alongside service-dominant logic in tourism and hospitality.

Online food delivery applications (OFDAs) provide an expedient platform, and consumers’ access to food has been drastically altered, especially during and after the COVID-19 pandemic. This study aimed to completely explore the attributes that influence consumers' purchase intention and how an app's aesthetics can evoke feelings that predict continuous usage intentions for OFDAs. The food industry, especially restaurants, heavily relies on mobile technology to facilitate critical online food delivery during the pandemic crisis.

The data for this study are gathered from 477 food consumers located in the federal capital territory (FCT) of Islamabad, Pakistan, through convenient sampling by developing a self-administrated online survey. SmartPLS is used for structural equation modeling to test the proposed research model and perform bootstrapping and algorithmic analysis.

Our findings revealed that perceived value positively predicted consumers’ purchase intentions. Moreover, perceived value mediates the association of information quality, familiarity, time-saving, usability and reputation with purchase intentions and fear of COVID-19 moderates the relationship between perceived value and purchase intention.

This research work has significant implications for researchers, web developers, app designers, delivery services, restaurants and other enterprises as it demonstrates the importance of aesthetically pleasing OFDAs in eliciting positive emotions and bolstering consumers’ intentions to continue using the app for efficient food delivery services.

This study expanded the application of the technology acceptance model (TAM) and attention, interest, desire and action (AIDA) by examining consumers’ purchase intentions in the context of OFDAs. Further, the successful utilization of TAM enhanced the understanding of consumer perceptions and behavioral intentions about the usage of OFDAs.

This study aims to introduce the design and the design process for an innovative sanitary fixture to be used in public facilities for the purpose of ablution. This purpose-made fixture is needed to support the hygienic, safe and comfortable performance of this essential function in public facilities in many parts of the world. The study also clarifies the need for this function and critically reviews current designs to address it.

The study started by critically reviewing the standard built-in models for ablution. It also identified and analyzed new approaches to designing standalone ablution fixtures. The study then specified the characteristics of a better ablution fixture and involved drafting a design based on these characteristics, making a wooden prototype to test the design and receiving users’ feedback. The design was adjusted and tested again for more feedback. Finally, the study resulted in the development of a final design. It used digital fabrication to create the design prototype with improved aesthetics, tested it again and received user feedback.

A survey of users showed that they found the innovative fixture more comfortable and safer than the commonly used built-in models. The main concern was the potential for water to splash on clothes from the high faucet.

In addition to showing an innovative design for a purpose-made sanitary fixture for ablution, the study makes the reader aware of the various challenges of providing a hygienic, safe and comfortable facility for users to perform this function. This is very useful for the many designers and facility managers who deal with the issue.