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This article discusses the methodological implications of a recent study on Luxembourg's offshore financial center. Insight from actor-network theory was essential in undertaking its ethnographic research with elites from the country's state and financial institutions. My intention in documenting this approach is to provide a template for ethnographers studying other localized contexts of global politico-economic significance, in which elite actors usually seek to curtail the enquiries of investigators. With this actor-network from Luxembourg as an example, I demonstrate how elite and difficult-to-access milieus can be entered via “networking” coupled with outreach via interviews and email correspondence. As I show, by initiating various modalities of entry into the context in question, ethnographers can establish themselves within an actor-network for the purposes of conducting interviews and participant observation with elite interlocutors.

This chapter outlines research conducted by Karan Vickers-Hulse (KVH) as part of an educational professional doctorate; Marcus Witt (MW) was one of her supervisory team. Participants were from two initial teacher education (ITE) routes (School Direct and university-led) leading to a PGCE primary teacher qualification. The research was set within the context of continuously evolving policy on the training of teachers and the subsequent impact on developing a professional identity. The introduction of new ITE routes in England (DfE, 2015) aimed to offer a wider range of pathways into teaching, attract more applicants and mitigate the impact of teacher shortages. The research discussed in this chapter explored the experiences of trainees on these routes and the impact on their professional identity formation. This chapter begins with an overview of the literature in the field of professional identity formation, followed by a discussion of the chosen methodology and methods. This chapter concludes with several recommendations for teacher training providers as well as recommendations for future research that may be useful for doctoral students interested in the field of professional identity formation.

This chapter provides an illustration of doctoral case study research and insights to how practitioner research can capture the localised impact of policy shifts.

Research for the case study was conducted using a combination of semi-structured interviews and secondary data sources.

This case traces the international expansion of Sadowsky Guitars’ bass guitar product line. Roger Sadowsky is one of the most respected instrument makers in the world and gained early acclaim for his outstanding repair and restoration work on guitars and basses. Some of his early clients included Prince, Will Lee (The Tonight Show), Tom Hamilton of Aerosmith, Jason Newsted of Metallica, Eddie Van Halen and Marcus Miller. Roger’s reputation and the demand for his instruments led to some customers having to wait for more than a year to obtain the chance to purchase a Sadowsky instrument, while others were unable to do so due to financial constraints. In 2003, Roger made the decision to form Sadowsky Japan to begin the contract manufacturing of more affordable Sadowsky instruments in Tokyo, Japan. As the company grew in size, Roger realized he was becoming more focused on running a business than building instruments. Furthermore, his Japanese partners were only interested in serving the Japanese market. This required him to handle the sales and distribution in the remaining parts of the world. In December of 2019, he announced a new, exclusive licensing agreement and distribution partnership between Sadowsky Guitars and Warwick GmbH & Co Music Equipment KG. The new agreement allowed Roger to continue running the Sadowsky NYC Custom Shop while Warwick would take over building and distributing the Metro instruments and a less-expensive, Chinese-built version of the MetroExpress instruments.

This case is appropriate for undergraduate and graduate-level courses related to marketing and consumer behavior. The case walks students through a real-life scenario when the founder of a well-known musical brand sought to expand internationally as a way to meet growing market demand. Students are asked to consider the advantages and disadvantages of the five key international market entry strategies: exporting, licensing, contract manufacturing, joint ventures and investment (equity/acquisition).

The case works well in the classroom, even if people are unfamiliar with the musical instrument retail industry. Participants are most likely aware of some of the artists and musicians mentioned in the case. Some may also be or know musicians. The instructor should be able to quickly engage participants in a lively discussion about Roger Sadowsky’s vision for his instruments and the opportunities and challenges of expanding product offerings and increasing market share.

Teaching notes are available for educators only.

Travel decreased dramatically during the initial wave of the COVID-19 pandemic, only to return rapidly to prepandemic levels once the degree of fear toward the virus began to diminish among potential travelers. This USA-based 16-month repeated-measure cross-sectional survey study aims to explore the degree to which fear of COVID affected people’s decisions to stay home rather than to travel during the pandemic.

The research used survey data. An extensive data set, composed of over 9,500 respondents, collected through Mechanical Turk over a 16-month time period, was used to compare respondent fear of the pandemic both with their attitudes toward future travel and with Smith Travel Research data reflecting actual pandemic travel patterns.

The results demonstrate how fear of COVID was closely and negatively linked to both travel intentions and travel behavior.

Data were collected from US respondents only.

The findings significantly extend earlier studies and provide guidance for those studying travel consumer behavior regarding trends that should be monitored in the case of a future pandemic or other fear-inducing crisis. For hospitality and tourism managers and marketers, understanding fear as a leading indicator of future travel behavior can result in more timely promotional efforts and staffing and training decisions.

Measuring and understanding consumer fear levels as this relates to travel decisions can help in the future to adjust the message that is sent to the public, perhaps reducing the amount of travel taken during periods when this is unwise and or unsafe.

This paper extends previous work that had been based upon cross-sectional reviews, providing a broader and more valuable study of an important and timely consumer behavior travel topic.

The motivation for this paper is to provide a deeper understanding of some of the important and trending topics in the sport industry. Besides this, to consider the changing landscape of ownership, strategies and organisation of several types of sports in the contemporary environment, there is a need for deeper contextual knowledge of how different sport/s, leagues, clubs, associations, teams etc. own, organise and strategise at local to national to regional to international contexts.

This paper introduces the special issue on the sport industry that welcomes four interesting contributions of focusing on the important themes related to the sport industry. They include (1) digital transformation and needed capabilities, (2) fan engagement in a digital way using social media, (3) network convergence of business, entertainment and geo-politics through sports ownership and finally (4) the relevance and relation of social capital in the organisational strategy of sports organisations.

Four generic insights related to the themes and emerging trends in marketisation, ownership and digitalisation strategies in the sport industry are introduced in this paper. The first insight is that sports digitalisation and politicisation significantly impact the strategising, organising and networking activities of sports owners to foster value capture. Secondly, owners’ performance duality of marketisation of their sports clubs and vested business interests unravels the paradoxes of idealism and profit-maximisation. Thirdly, individual sports stars position themselves as an influential platform of value creation through on-field performance, social engagement and self-interests. Finally, the fourth insight is that the dual aims of sporting on-field success and profit making of large capital-funded sports clubs endanger the autonomy and governance of sports bodies/associations and an equitable sporting competition environment.

This paper provides an overview and reflections on the contributions of the papers in this special issue. The papers give different perspectives on how sport has been influenced by the development in society (1) with increasing digitalisation influencing organising of sport clubs and strategies for engaging fans, and (2) the influence of marketisation and politics in ownership strategies. As such, four insightful reflections are developed based on the originality of the contributions and the related extant literature presented on the themes of marketisation, ownership and digitalisation of the sport industry.

In recent years, counterproductive knowledge behavior (CKB) and its types have received increasing interest in knowledge management as the degree of knowledge sharing and innovation in enterprises continues to increase. A rapidly growing number of studies have shed light on the important antecedents and consequences of employees’ CKB. However, the various labels, conceptualizations and operationalizations of CKB have fragmented this body of research. This study aims to systematically integrate the effects of the six types of organizational characteristics on CKB and further draws more general conclusions based on the results of previous studies.

Based on a survey of 103 effect values responsible for 52 CKB samples, the authors use the ABC theory to explore the effects of the six types of organizational characteristics on CKB. Moderator analysis were performed to resolve inconsistencies in empirical studies and understand the contexts under which CKB has the strongest or weakest effect.

The results showed that task interdependence and a positive organizational atmosphere, in general, negatively affect employees’ CKB in the moderation analysis. In contrast, workplace discomfort, negative organizational atmosphere, internal competition and time pressure positively and partly affect employees’ CKB. The direction and magnitude of these effects were affected by emotional factors, knowledge personnel types and sample sources. Discussing the theoretical, methodological and practical implications of these findings can offer a guiding framework for future research.

Better control of employees’ CKB is not achieved by adjusting organizational characteristics alone but by combining personal characteristics and mood changes with it to balance organizational characteristics and CKB. Furthermore, the large-sample joint study integrated the conceptual definition of CKB. The multivariate data study provided more reliable conclusions and a solid theoretical foundation for CKB research areas.

High levels of child obesity alongside rising stunting and the absence of a coherent food policy have deemed UK’s food system to be broken. The National Food Strategy (NFS) was debated intensely in media, with discussions on how and who should fix the food system.

Using a mixed methods approach, the authors conduct framing analysis on traditional media and sentiment analysis of twitter reactions to the NFS to identify frames used to shape food system policy interventions.

The study finds evidence that the media coverage of the NFS often utilised the tropes of “culture wars” shaping the debate of who is responsible to fix the food system – the government, the public or the industry. NFS recommendations were portrayed as issues of free choice to shift the debate away from government action correcting for market failure. In contrast, the industry was showcased as equipped to intervene on its own accord. Dietary recommendations made by the NFS were depicted as hurting the poor, painting a picture of helplessness and loss of control, while their voices were omitted and not represented in traditional media.

British media’s alignment with free market economic thinking has implications for food systems reform, as it deters the government from acting and relies on the invisible hand of the market to fix the system. Media firms should move beyond tropes of culture wars to discuss interventions that reform the structural causes of the UK’s broken food systems.

As traditional media coverage struggles to capture the diversity of public perception; the authors supplement framing analysis with sentiment analysis of Twitter data. To the best of our knowledge, no such media (and social media) analysis of the NFS has been conducted. The paper is also original as it extends our understanding of how media alignment with free market economic thinking has implications for food systems reform, as it deters the government from acting and relies on the invisible hand of the market to fix the system.

Purpose: Since its inception in 1987, the literature on the VUCA that represents the volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous nature of the business environment has progressively increased. This study systematically evaluates the vast literature on the VUCA world. Since review-based studies have been criticised as biased, this study uniquely amalgamates bibliometric analysis with content analysis, thereby taking a research triangulation discourse.

Need of the Study: This study was conducted to consolidate the literature about the VUCA environment and uncover the foundational and emerging themes for future research agendas.

Design/Methodology/Approach: This study conducts a performance analysis and science mapping of 193 carefully selected articles (using PRISMA) published in various sources during 2012–2023. Articles for the study were procured from the SCOPUS database. While performance analysis focused on analysing publication and citation evolution, thematic evolution, leading publications, country publication analysis, and most relevant authors and sources. On the other hand, science mapping revealed conceptual structures (keyword plus co-occurrence analysis and thematic maps) and intellectual structures (co-authorship analysis). VOSviewer and Biblioshiny (R-tool for comprehensive science mapping) were used for this study’s choice of application.

Findings: This chapter concludes with future research agendas using content analysis of the ‘scope for the future research’ section of selected publications and bibliographic coupling (to unearth emerging themes).

Practical Implications: The work presented in this chapter will help the researchers gain a structured conceptual, intellectual, and social understanding of the vast literature on the VUCA environment.

The American Dream is tightly woven into the American culture and way of life. Despite the importance and ubiquitous nature of the American Dream, the topic is difficult to define and belief in the attainability of the American Dream changes over time. Because of the little academic research on the topic, this study aims to fill this gap and investigate what people think about the American Dream and what factors influence the perception that this concept is outdated among different two generations – Baby Boomers and Millennials.

An online survey containing both open-ended and close-ended questions was conducted in two age groups via Qualtrics – 245 Millennials (born 1980–1996) and 253 Baby Boomers (born 1946–1964). Open-ended questions were analyzed using NVivo and closed-ended questions were analyzed using SPSS. Items on the online survey measured the definition of the American Dream, factors in defining it, the relevancy and attainability of the Dream, whether it was outdated, as well as Schwartz’s list of values (Lindeman and Verkasalo, 2005).

Three research questions were investigated. First, the results show that Baby Boomers and Millennials define the Dream similarly in terms of a house, family, happiness, freedom and equality. Second, they differ, however, in whether they believe that the Dream is relevant and attainable. Specifically, only Baby Boomers believe that the Dream is still relevant, but both generations believe that it is harder for younger generations to achieve the Dream. Third, the authors found similarities and differences in terms of demographics and values predicting whether the two generations believed that the Dream is outdated, and new values should be added. For both generations, values were more likely to predict the belief that the Dream was outdated. Using Schwartz’s values, those high in universalism were more likely to believe that the Dream was outdated and that new values should be added to the definition of the Dream for both generations. The values of security, self-direction, achievement and benevolence differed between the generations in believing that the Dream was outdated and that new values should be added.

This research provides insight into how these macrolevel beliefs influence people at the microlevel and how businesses or public policymakers can use these concepts to influence attitudes or behaviors.