Search results

This paper aims to investigate two seminal market-scanning frameworks – the five-forces analysis and PESTEL environmental scanning tool – to assess their readiness for anticipating market-shaping acts.

Drawing on the market-shaping literature that conceptualizes markets as complex adaptive systems, this conceptual paper interrogates the underlying assumptions and “blind spots” in two seminal market-scanning frameworks. The paper showcases three illustrative vignettes in which non-industry actors catalyzed market change in ways that these market-scanning frameworks would not be able to anticipate.

Marketing strategists can be “blindsided” as seminal market-scanning frameworks have either too narrow an interpretation of market change or are too broad to anticipate specific types of market-shaping acts. The assumptions about markets that underpin these market-scanning frameworks contribute to incumbents being slow to realize market-shaping acts are taking place.

The authors extend market-scanning to include a type of managerial myopia that fails to register the socially embedded, systemic nature of complex contemporary markets. Furthermore, the paper provides an “actors-agendas-outcomes” scanning framework that offers awareness of market-shaping acts.

This paper is the first to consider market-scanning frameworks from a market-shaping perspective.

This paper aims to investigate the dynamics of ephemerality within consumer tribes by conceptualizing how tribes constitute, disperse and reconstitute. Building upon assemblage thinking, a philosophical approach that redistributes agency from the subject to a web of interconnected human–material actants, this paper shows that tribes manifest via hybrid assemblages of people, things and ideas.

Insights are drawn from a three-year assemblage-oriented ethnographic study of a salsa-dancing tribe, specifically their ephemeral gatherings across multiple sites without hierarchical organization. Methods include observations as a consumer–participant, producer–participant and in-depth interviewing.

Introduces a framework documenting how tribes disperse temporarily and reconstitute via a dual process of ascription and distribution. Tribes reconstitute when consumers reproduce an assemblage that effectively overcomes a meshwork of practical challenges. Consumers ascribe to the standards of the tribe while, alternatively, tribes distribute the assemblage beyond the immediate group.

Conceptualizes the socio-technical dynamics that tribes mobilize to disassemble and reassemble through ephemeral gatherings. Proposes a framework on hybrid interdependencies, including not only participants but also techniques, devices and sites.

While previous research shows that tribes can collapse, the authors propose that marketers can intervene to foster long-term resilience. As tribes disperse, consumer and marketing efforts operate at different temporal sequences to enable tribal reconstitutions.

Contributes to the literature on consumer tribes by theorizing ephemerality per ascription and distribution mechanisms.

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 study aims to present the climate change effect on soil moisture regimes in Mexico in a global 1.5°C warming scenario.

The soil moisture regimes were determined using the Newhall simulation model with the database of mean monthly precipitation and temperature at a scale of 1: 250,000 for the current scenario and with the climate change scenarios associated with a mean global temperature increase of 1.5°C, considering two Representative Concentration Pathways, 4.5 and 8.5 W/m² and three general models of atmospheric circulation, namely, GFDL, HADGEM and MPI. The different vegetation types of the country were related to the soil moisture regimes for current conditions and for climate change.

According to the HADGEM and MPI models, almost the entire country is predicted to undergo a considerable increase in soil moisture deficit, and part of the areas of each moisture regime will shift to the next drier regime. The GFDL model also predicts this trend but at smaller proportions.

The changes in soil moisture at the regional scale that reveal the impacts of climate change and indicate where these changes will occur are important elements of the knowledge concerning the vulnerability of soils to climate change. New cartography is available in Mexico.

Recent research demonstrates how firms strive to shape their business environment and level the playing field in their favor. To explain this phenomenon, business scholars use competing notions: markets, business networks and service ecosystems. The purpose of this paper is to identify and address a potential problem, in that these notions overlap to a considerable extent, as scholars tend to draw from and contribute to academic silos.

The authors approach the issue of potential overlaps in the current literature on markets, business networks and service ecosystems through a literature review of each of these three concepts, with special attention to both their overlaps and differences.

The authors’ review of the extant literature allows the authors to concur with Ballantyne et al. (2011) that contemporary service research shows a tendency to create, adopt and overuse labels. This situation has given rise to what the authors term “academic silos” in which even closely related research stream tend to become isolated, and the authors posit that a more holistic view would be beneficial.

The authors offer two main contributions to the existing literature. The first contribution is mainly theoretical, aimed at business research, and consists of providing a review and understanding of the partly competing, partly complimentary concepts of markets, business networks and service ecosystems, in which the authors’ further address service ecosystems based on both a service-dominant logic and a service logic understanding. The second contribution is more managerial, arguing for the need of the successful business research to consider the desired end result of contributing to successful business practices.

This paper aims to conceptualize corporate reference management as a strategic signaling activity in business networks. While research has extensively outlined how firms develop and maintain social capital through business-to-business (B2B) relationships, less is known about how they signal their participation in business networks to develop this social capital. Therefore, this paper conceptualizes B2B references, in particular corporate online references (COR), as a tool through which firms “borrow” attractiveness from their business network. Through the lens of structural social capital theory, COR is shown to capture advantages related to interconnectedness between firms.

The paper reports on a two-step qualitative and quantitative research design. First, the authors undertook a qualitative study that reports on the COR practices of senior business managers. A quantitative study then uses social network analysis (SNA) to audit a digital business network comprising 1,098 firms in a metropolitan area of the UK, referencing to each other through their corporate websites using COR.

The analyses find that COR practices contribute to building structural social capital in networks through strategic signaling. Firms do so by managing B2B references to craft strategic signals, using five steps: requesting, granting, curating, coding and decoding references. While the existing literature on business marketing portrays reference management as a routine and operational management practice, this investigation conceptualizes reference management, in particular COR, as a strategic activity.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study to use SNA to represent B2B references in the form of COR as a network, which overlaps with (but is not entirely identical to) the business network. Further, the study re-conceptualizes reference management as a strategic signaling activity that leverages the firm’s participation in business networks to build structural social capital by borrowing attractiveness of prestigious business partners that leverages existing structural social capital. Finally, the paper coins and conceptualizes COR as an exemplar of referencing management and offers propositions for further research.

This paper aims to present a new master’s programme for promoting energy access and energy efficiency in Southern Africa.

A transdisciplinary approach called “participatory integrated assessment of energy systems” (PARTICIPIA) was used for the development of the curriculum. This approach is based on the two emerging fields of “multi-scale integrated assessment” and “science for governance”, which bring innovative concepts and methods.

The application of the PARTICIPIA methodology to three case studies reveals that the proposed transdisciplinary approach could support energy and development policies in the region. The implementation of the PARTICIPIA curriculum in three higher education institutions reveals its ability to respond to the needs of specific contexts and its connection with existing higher education programmes.

Considering energy issues from a transdisciplinary approach in higher education is absolutely critical because such a holistic view cannot be achieved through engineering curricula. Deliberate and greater efforts should be made to integrate methods from “multi-scale integrated assessment” and “science for governance” in higher education curricula to train a new breed of modern-day energy planners in charge of coming up with solutions that are shared by all relevant stakeholders.

This paper presents an innovative higher education curriculum in terms of the attention given to energy access and energy efficiency that affect the southern Africa region and the nature of the methodology adopted to face these issues.

This paper aims to analyze the relationship between sustainability practices and the degree of innovation in the service provided by restaurants. The study identifies relevant restaurant segments in relation to sustainable practice-based service innovation so that effective actions to raise awareness and train managers and staff may be developed. Segmentation has been identified as a key tool when designing strategies and proposing actions. Yet, the use of segmentation techniques is still scarce regarding service innovation and sustainability in restaurants.

A segmentation analysis was carried out applying the CHAID algorithm from 300 valid questionnaires completed by restaurant owners or managers from coastal Ecuador, where tourism and gastronomy may be drivers of service innovation.

A typology of restaurants based on the sustainability-service innovation interrelation suggests three final segments: sustainable innovators focused on the value chain, moderate innovators focused on saving resources and restaurants with a low innovative profile.

The three segments derived from the analysis present differences in terms of the degree of implementation of sustainability practices, as well as in terms of the demographic profile of the restaurant manager. These segments are measurable, substantial, accessible and actionable, so that tailored initiatives to raise awareness and boost sustainability-oriented innovativeness among restaurant owners/managers may be targeted to each group of establishments.

The present research provides evidence of the positive relationship between sustainability practices and service innovation in foodservices. The segments of restaurants identified enable the design and implementation of actions that facilitate the transition of less sustainability-oriented restaurants towards more innovative and sustainable business models.

This chapter examines the training of indigenous Mayan catechists by the Roman Catholic Diocese of San Cristóbal de Las Casas in Chiapas, Mexico, and their subsequent role in the establishment and growth of the Ejercito Zapatista de Liberación Nacional (EZLN) in the period prior to the Zapatistas' 1994 uprising. It considers the adequacy of Timothy Wickham-Crowley's model of guerrilla insurgencies in Latin America in explaining the Zapatista case. It finds, contrary to Wickham-Crowley's model of the relations between urban university leadership groups and peasant support bases, that the catechists constituted a stratum of “organic indigenous-campesino intellectuals” that radically undermined their communities’ traditional intellectual dependence on outsiders and enabled them to constitute themselves as a new collective political subject.

This chapter is designed with the aim to determine the influence of sociodemographic variables on the capacity to generate social enterprises, such as sex, the student’s country, if only they study or if they study and work, as well as if they participate or direct a social enterprise in university students of Latin American business schools. This research adopted an inductive quantitative approach using a questionnaire. The participants were university students of business schools from Colombia, Mexico and Peru. Second-generation structural equation method (SEM-PLS) was used to analyse the results, using the SmartPLS 3.2.7 software applied to data on 3,739 university students. The results suggest that the entrepreneur role, labour situation, country and sex have a moderating effect in the relation between entrepreneurial orientation and entrepreneurial intention. Also, by using resampling technique Bootstrapping (5,000 times,p < 0.01), significance of the trajectory coefficients (beta) and effect size of the coefficients (beta) were measured to demonstrate significance. Finally, with this research the authors ascertain that entrepreneurial orientation positively influences entrepreneurial intention. thus explaining 42.4% of its variance. This chapter is the first attempt on investigating in university students of Latin American business schools about factors of entrepreneurship orientation and entrepreneurship intention, and has strong potential to contribute to development of policies and strategies to promote the growth of entrepreneurship activities in the universities.