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This paper aims to explore consumer experiences of spiritual value and investigates whether it is distinct from ethical value within a large and growing private sector health-care setting. Understanding consumers’ experiences of spiritual value versus ethical value has important implications for corporate social responsibility as increasingly, consumers want their spiritual needs met.

The research adopts an exploratory case study approach using in-depth interviews with 16 consumers who use complementary and alternative medicine health-care services. Drawing on consumer value frameworks, a thematic analysis identified dimensions of spiritual and ethical values co-created during their consumption experiences.

From a consumer’s perspective, spiritual value is distinct from ethical value. The key finding is that participants talked about spiritual value predominantly in reactive terms (apprehending, appreciating, admiring or responding), whereas ethical value was referred to as active (taking action).

This paper enhances the understanding of spiritual value and provides evidence that people want their spiritual needs met in a private health-care context. Furthermore, this study provides insights into the consumption experience of spiritual value that can be considered, with further research, in other health-care and service contexts.

This paper offers a new view on corporate social responsibility by taking a consumer’s perspective, and identifying that consumer experiences of spiritual value are important and distinct from ethical value.

Consumer experiences of healthcare services are challenging for researchers to study because of the complex, intangible and temporal nature of service provision. The purpose of this paper is to introduce a novel longitudinal three-phase research protocol, which combines iterative interviewing with visual techniques. This approach is utilised to study consumer service experiences, dimensions of consumer value and consumer value co-creation in a transformational service setting: complementary and alternative medicine healthcare.

This research employed a three-phase qualitative longitudinal research protocol, which incorporated: an initial in-depth interview, implementation of the visual elicitation technique Zaltman Metaphor Elicitation Technique and a final interview to gain participant feedback on the analysis of data collected in the first two phases.

Four key benefits derived from using the three-phase protocol are reported: confirmation and elaboration of consumer value themes, emergence of underreported themes, evidence of transformation and refinement of themes, ensuring dependability of data and subsequent theory development.

The study provides evidence that a longitudinal multi-method approach using in-depth interviews and visual methods is a powerful tool that service researchers should consider, particularly for transformative service research settings with sensitive contexts, such as healthcare, and when studying difficult to articulate concepts, such as consumer value and value co-creation.

The presence of fair trade coffee in cafés may help in strategic positioning and market differentiation. This paper aims to explore the extent to which this is evident for café customers.

Customers were surveyed on their perceptions of café and coffee attributes including taste, price and store atmosphere. Respondents were analysed by knowledge of the concept of fair trade, and by frequency and place of purchase.

The study finds that nearly half of respondents claimed moderate self‐assessed knowledge, although objective knowledge was lower. More knowledgeable customers cared more for fair trade products and for café atmosphere, of which fair trade promotional material plays a part. Customers stated they expected to pay more for fair trade coffee, although on average not as much as current margins require. When exposed to more information about fair trade, stated price premium support increased, but coffee taste expectations worsened.

Promoting fair trade coffee can help distinguish and position cafés, but not as much as was expected. Customer beliefs about the provision of fair trade products appear to have a stronger influence on their choices than actuality.

The paper contributes to understanding customer motives for purchasing fair trade coffee, particularly in the context of cafés/coffee houses, and for their patronage.

This paper aims to report results from an exploratory study of farmers' markets, taking particular interest in the motives for participation of customers, and their perceptions of the functioning of markets as co‐created sites of local food production, retail and consumption. Customer perceptions are also compared between farmers' markets and supermarkets.

Questionnaires were completed by 252 customers at 11 farmers' markets around New Zealand in 2008‐2009. Customers rated the importance of 31 constructs that might influence their involvement. For comparison, 257 supermarket shoppers in Auckland completed a similar questionnaire. Student t‐tests are used to distinguish between samples and subsample groups.

The paper finds that product quality is the key motivator for patronage, with price not a significant barrier to purchase or visits to farmers' markets. The “retail environment” has only a modest influence on market customer choices, and markets are only partially co‐created, with customers not highly valuing interaction with producers. Customers rated price, location and store environment constructs to be much more important at supermarkets than at markets.

Farmers' markets have experienced recent rapid growth and diffusion in many parts of the world, including Australasia, becoming popular sites of small retail trade and local cultural exchange. This paper contributes to the understanding of what motivates customers to participate in them, and what distinguishes markets from other food retailing sites such as supermarkets, at least in the New Zealand context.

This paper explores a range of issues surrounding the adoption of ICT and e‐business technologies and techniques by small and medium‐sized enterprises (SMEs). The paper reviews the nature and extent of the take‐up of these technologies by small firms, and the digital divides that have emerged. Models of e‐business adoption by SMEs are examined, the linear model being contrasted with the more realistic “PIT” model. Barriers to the adoption of e‐business technologies and techniques are discussed, together with factors that promote successful adoption, and the major role played by human capital. It is concluded that the take‐up of e‐business by SMEs needs to be seen as a means to an end and not an end in itself. Government preoccupation with the take‐up of the technology of e‐commerce needs to be tempered with a more realistic view of how small firms operate.

The present study aims to examine the scope and contribution of behavioural investigative advice (BIA) reports from the National Crime Agency (NCA).

The 77 BIA reports reviewed were written between 2016 and 2021. They were evaluated using Toulmin’s (1958) strategy for structuring pertinent arguments, current compliance with professional standards, the grounds and backing provided for the claims made and the potential utility of the recommendations provided.

Consistent with previous research, most of the reports involved murder and sexual offences. The BIA reports met professional standards with extremely high frequency. The 77 reports contained a total of 1,308 claims of which 99% were based on stated grounds. A warrant and/or backing was provided for 73% of the claims. Most of the claims in the BIA reports involved a behavioural evaluation of the crime scene and offender characteristics. The potential utility of the reports was judged to be 95% for informative behavioural crime scene analysis and 40% for potential new lines of enquiry.

The reports should serve as a model for the work of behavioural investigative advisers internationally.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study to systematically evaluate BIA reports commissioned by the NCA; it adds to previous similar studies by evaluating the largest number of BIA reports ever reviewed, and uniquely provides judgement of overall utility.