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This study investigates the brand selfies that have the capability to help brands thrive through crises. The brand selfies spark a self-inferential process that makes customers feel connected to the brand and makes them biased toward a specific brand during an uncertain situation.

A total of 166 questionnaires were analyzed through structural equation modelling (Smart PLS) and a niche group of young millennials from Thailand was selected based on their luxury items usage, frequency of visits to leisure spas and hotels, expensive car showrooms, branded jewelry stores and luxury watch shops.

The study highlights the emergence of brand selfies during the crisis and the priority given by customers as compared to brand-generated content or promotional campaigns. The results indicated a positive influence of brand selfies on brand preferences directly and through the mediation of brand signature.

It is fascinating for brands that customers voluntarily include their products in their carefully crafted and staged selfies that deliver their image and massages as social signifiers during a chaotic situation.

The research classifies the impacts of brand selfies in the luxury, leisure and tourism market of Thailand and its assistance in thriving through crises. The study is one of the rare studies that present brand selfies as a hassle-free promotional tool for brand signature and a game-changing strategy to deal with crises.

Based on the reception of the principle of self-organization, the core of Heinz von Foerster's operational theories, I hypothesize how Heinz von Foerster's theory can be an orientation model for the epistemological problem of complexity. I have chosen this study to demonstrate complexity as an epistemological problem. This is because the question of how order arises - the core problem of complexity - is an epistemological question for which Heinz von Foerster developed an epistemology of self-organization. I do not present new research because HvF already had the complex organization of systems in mind. Rather, I build a critical approach to complexity on the research and work on operational epistemology in HvF.

This article aims to provide an orientation for a philosophical and epistemological understanding of complexity through a reading of Heinz von Foerster's operational theory. The article attempts to establish complexity as an epistemological phenomenon through the following method: (1) a conceptual description of the science of complexity based on the turn to thermodynamic time, (2) a genealogy of complexity going back to the systemic method, and (3) Heinz von Foerster's cybernetic approach to self-organization.

Based on the reception of the principle of self-organization, the core of Heinz von Foerster's operational theories, the conclusion is drawn that complexity as a description is based on language games.

The results present complexity not as an object of science, but as a description that stands for the understanding of complex description.

The hypothesis that complexity is a question of description or observation, i.e. of description for what language serves, has enormous social implications, in that the description of complexes and the recognition of their orders (patterns) cannot be left to algorithmic governmentality, but must be carried out by a social agency.

HvF's operational epistemology can serve as an epistemological model for critical complexity theory.

This study aims to empirically investigate the relationship between artificial intelligence (AI) in marketing (AIM) and business performance from the resource-based view (RBV) perspective.

A survey strategy was used in this study to collect data from 225 small and medium enterprises (SMEs) respondents who were on the registered list of the Ghana Enterprise Agency in the Eastern Region of Ghana. Structural equation modeling – path analysis was used to estimate the impact of AIM on the performance of SMEs.

The analyzed data shows that AIM has significant impact on the financial performance, customer performance, internal business process performance and learning and growth performance in the case of SMEs in Ghana. This study establishes the significance of AIM approach in achieving financial performance, customer performance, internal business process performance and learning and growth performance through the application of AIM determinants including, Internet of Things (IoT), collaborative decision-making systems (CDMS), virtual and augmented reality (VAR) and personalization.

Aside the aforementioned significance of this research study, this study has limitations. The sample size of this research study can be expanded to include SME respondents in other geographical areas that were not considered in this study. Future research studies should concentrate on how AIM can analyze customer communications and information such as posts on social media to develop future communications that may enhance customer engagement.

The practical implications comprise of two key items. First, this research study encourages SME owners and managers to develop an AIM method as a fundamental strategic goal in their pursuit to improve SME performance. Second, SME owners and managers should increasingly implement the four determinants of AIM indicated in this research study (i.e., IOT, CDMS, VAR and personalization) to develop essential resources for effective application of AIM to improve their performance.

The results of this study provide a strong support to RBV theory and the proposition that AIM and its determinants (i.e., IOT, CDMS, VAR and personalization) should be recognized as an essential strategic resource for improving the performance (i.e., financial performance, customer performance, internal business process performance and learning and growth performance) of SMEs. This study also contributes to the current body of knowledge on AIM and management, particularly in the context of an emerging economy.

In recent years, many Western states have moved towards funding the asylum processing and resettlement systems of countries in the Global South. These forms of outsourced migration governance are upheld by a vast industry of state and non-state actors. This chapter draws on fieldwork conducted in the Republic of Nauru to look at the people and places on the frontlines of the extractive asylum industry. Using Alexander Weheliye’s (2014) concept of ‘racialising assemblages’, the author argues that outsourced asylum regimes exacerbate the continuous subjection of Indigenous and migrant communities to toxic practices and discourses. Outsourced asylum is a contemporary practice of resource extraction (much like other forms of mining) that builds on colonial extractive projects that disproportionately target communities of colour. Ongoing processes of dispossession and displacement are occurring as people and places are rendered into resources and frontline sites for the extractive asylum industry. This chapter also shows how humanitarian and liberal democratic discourses are part of the mechanics of racialised geopolitical ordering. Racialised refugees are made into destitute victims, whereas locals become brutish villains, rather than political subjects. In attending to the politics of refusal, where Nauruans and refugees refuse ingrained racialising assemblages that deny them personhood, the author stresses the importance of intersectional advocacy that highlights the toxic effects of extractive asylum regimes on local and migrant populations alike.

Past research has shown that wellness culture projects identities that are predominantly middle-class, white, thin, able-bodied women. Wellness cultures are amplified through digital media, namely highly visual social media platforms such as Instagram and TikTok, that promote a feminine ideal that women can (and should) achieve through rigorous commitment and investment. However, discourses surrounding wellness culture are a cause for concern when consumption, choice, and responsibility are positioned as a mode to constantly improve oneself until an idealised appearance is achieved.

In this chapter, the author explores the experiences of five Asian-Australian women aged 18–35 living in Australia as they navigate ideals of femininity. The author draws on perspectives from feminist new materialism to understand the material-discursive practices that form norms and ideals of the female body. Findings are presented in the form of vignettes to help trace affective encounters with objects, digital media, discourses, and other bodies that produce different affective relations as they seek to understand Asian-Australian femininity. The author argues that digital media and wellness culture prompt individual understanding and practices to adhere to transnational ideals of the feminine body rather than dismantling social and cultural norms that limit individual choice, an issue that has thus far received limited scholarly attention for Asian-Australians. This chapter builds on previous studies that position wellness culture within an established white female neoliberal rhetoric.

This paper aims to offer a reflection on the alliance between accounting theory and social research in general, focussing on the conjunction of accounting theory and ethnography in particular.

The author builds on Stefan Hirschauer’s methodological reflections on ethnography and the “silence of the social” to briefly re-articulate some of the ideas the author had associated, in an earlier piece, with the investigation of tacit coordination in accounting.

Ethnography is an intrinsically theoretical practice and also a particular form of accounting. As such, it presents a paradigm case for how accounting theory builds on, and emerges from, social research in joint efforts of breaking the silence of the social. Ethnographic research, like the practice of accounting and social research more generally, is associated with a stewardship of silence and an “ethics of mattering” (Karen Barad), and accounting theory is an invitation to reflect on the underlying practices of (dis-)articulation.

The paper invites readers to engage with accounting practice as a topic of systematic theoretical interest in exploring how we put the world on the record, understand the choices we make in the process and the silences we let lie.

This chapter offers a critical evaluation of the concept and application of global carceral archipelagos designed as punitive barriers to refugees. With a focus on policies and practices in Australia for over two decades, the chapter shows how more recently, the European Union (EU) and the United Kingdom (UK) are also adopting similar strategies to Australia in a pattern of Western countries turning their backs on their human rights obligations. The histories of colonial practices of the racialisation of certain minorities within and outside nation-state borders are an important aspect of understanding contemporary bordering regimes that exclude refugees. The chapter discusses examples of resistance, as well as alternative politics emerging from refugees who have suffered from the carceral border complex, drawing on creative and collaborative work and practices.

This chapter considers the role and significance of ‘wellness’ as an idealised image, mode of being and subjecthood connected to ‘a perfect life’ in neoliberal Western contexts, which is made particularly visible through social media platforms such as Instagram. I discuss how ‘wellness’ is attached to particular bodily styles of presentation and appearance, such as the ‘Instagram influencer’, drawing on data from a qualitative study that used interview and digital photo-voice methods to explore how young people make sense of and encounter ‘perfect social media bodies’. I draw on feminist new materialist understandings of the body as socially and materially co-produced to theorise the body as assembled through the socio-material conditions of everyday life. This theorisation contributes to emerging efforts to interrogate the sociological and material dynamics of ‘wellness’ assemblages as important contemporary modes through which bodies (particularly connected to gendered aspects of feminine bodies) are felt and lived. Importantly, the gendered bodily appearances coded as representing an ‘ideal life’ and ‘perfect body’, which align with comportments of ‘wellness’, are central for understanding how aesthetic capital and bodily value are attributed in a Western neoliberal context. This analysis aims to contribute to feminist analyses of the affective and socio-material dynamics through which bodies and images ‘become’ through each other. The chapter concludes with an examination of the paradoxical and jarring dimensions signalled in the promises of wellness as a pursuit towards attaining an ‘ideal life’ against the backdrop of late capitalism and impending climate collapse.

This study examines the barriers and drivers to student-led mobilization for sustainability in higher education institutions (HEIs) across Canada. Findings indicate that the most common barrier to student mobilization was a lack of political opportunities and social capital. In response, the findings indicate that the primary drivers that student-led sustainability groups used to overcome barriers included: sharing framing perspectives to inspire and motivate action across campuses, using social networks to borrow and leverage social capital from other stakeholders, and impacting campus stakeholder behaviors resulting in the creation of a culture of sustainability. Social movement theories have been applied to the barriers and drivers to student-led action in order to provide a deeper understanding of how students mobilize on campuses. The findings suggest that while students may struggle to elicit policy changes across HEIs due to common barriers, their efforts can successfully shift the campus culture of sustainability. This study addresses an identified need for more literature investigating sustainability activism in higher education more broadly and more specifically fills a gap in our understanding of how student activism may contribute to social change.