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The essential investments in new product development (NPD) made by industrial companies entail effective management of NPD activities. In this context, performance measurement is one of the means that can be employed in the pursuit of effectiveness.

This chapter proposes a more holistic approach to understanding work stress by incorporating eustress, the positive response to stressors. We begin by casting the study of eustress as part of a contemporary movement in both psychology and organizational behavior that accentuates the positive aspects of human adaptation and functioning. We discuss the development of the concept of eustress, and provide extensive evidence, both psychological and physiological, for the purpose of developing an explicit construct definition. An exploratory study of hospital nurses is presented as an initial test of our holistic model of stress. We conclude by asserting that there must exist a complement to coping with distress such that rather than preventing or resolving the negative side of stress, individuals savor the positive side of stress.

This study aims to determine whether the branded luxury guestroom amenities provided in five-star hotels of Delhi influence the guest's hotel purchase decisions. It also identified the amenities which are found to be most and least influential in affecting the guest's hotel selection and purchase behaviour. The study was conducted in the three upscale five-star hotels of Delhi. The selection of amenities and brands to be considered as luxury was based upon three focus group interviews with the room's division manager of the hotels. A structured questionnaire was drafted to identify the most and least useful hotel amenities among the respondents, influencing their hotel selection and purchase behaviours. Wi-Fi in the guestroom was found to be the most valuable amenity, with stationery items regarded as least valuable. It was also found that the guest's hotel selection and purchase decisions were significantly influenced when luxury branded amenities were placed in the guestroom. Guests were even found to pay extra when the hotel provided access to luxury branded amenities in the guestrooms. This is a novel attempt to find how the guests' hotel selection and purchase intentions are influenced by the placement of branded luxury amenities in guestrooms.

This chapter explores how the narrative-based walking simulator What Remains of Edith Finch ludifies traditions of Gothic fiction. Combining Gothic themes of death, the family and the family curse, the game involves the protagonist investigating her abandoned childhood home where every family member died a dramatic and untimely death. Sealed rooms, preserved since their inhabitants’ demise, contain shrine-like displays including a document of some form allowing players to experience the last moments of each Finch. Play involves penetrating these spaces, according to the ludo-Gothic emphasis on boundary crossing, piecing together interactive narrative fragments consistent with Gothic fiction’s patchwork storytelling. In accessing each lost manuscript, players engage in a generically specific process of multi-media trans-subjectivity, experiencing various first person perspectives and engaging with numerous gameplay interfaces. The title’s series of ambiguous unreliable narratives, its refusal of a consistent subjective position, and unreal dream-like sensation contribute to the game’s Gothic atmosphere. In a restriction of videogame agency and control, consistent with horror games, no player option is available other than to complete each pre-determined death. Gothic pastiche, a compulsion to repeat the past, and the embalming processes of photographic media are variously employed across these sequences. Play evokes the melancholy heroine, consumed by maternal loss, masochistically replaying her family’s sorrowful past, hunting for lost objects and exhuming the ghosts of her history. With its nested narrative, morbid preoccupation and ambivalent supernatural presence, the game effectively translates Gothic traditions into the videogame medium.

Transgender prisoners are subject to violence of many kinds. They are tortured, beaten, sexually assaulted, raped, and denied access to qualified public health services. This is because legal and justice systems in most countries disregard the unique conditions, needs, and requirements of transgender people. Transgender prisoners around the world suffer from mental health issues and lack of continuous access to sexual health services and hormone treatment. Like most countries in Southeast Asia, and regardless of a significantly large population of transgender prisoners, Thailand still provides no standard policies on how transgender prisoners should be managed, and transgender prisoners’ experiences remain under-researched. Through an anthropological and gendered lens, this chapter theoretically and practically examines transgender prisoners’ gendered life experiences behind bars in Thailand, debates transgender prisoners’ vulnerabilities and the myths behind them, identifies challenges around gendered-housing, analyses cultural nuances of Thai (trans)gender performativity in prisons, discusses the impact of heterosexual-binary prison management, and offers real-world policy recommendations, which are urgently needed by the Thai justice and correctional system.

The competition reality television show Dragula (Boulet Brothers, 2016-present) features a parade of monsters from the horror canon. Each episode, queer drag artists present outfits based on the show's aesthetic tenants: horror, filth and glamour. Nearly every outfit presented by the show's contestants, dubbed ‘drag monsters’, features some element of monstrosity and many pay specific homage to monsters from horror cinema. In drawing the monster figure into the world of gender performance, Dragula showcases the vast queer possibility of the monster figure. Like queerness itself, these drag monsters prove monstrosity is fluid and need not by associated to any one specific gender; the monster figure provides a canvas on which these artists can move between both human and non-human and male and female. This chapter traces the show's horror lineage – most notably the text from which it queers its name, Bram Stroker's Dracula (1987), and Stephen King's Carrie (1974) as well as the alternative precedent set by the drag legend Divine. Its analysis demonstrates Dragula's creative power in reimaging gender beyond the binary of man/woman by way of the monster figure.