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This paper aims to provide conceptual clarity on the different approaches of place branding in the literature. It discusses three main approaches and provides a new definition of place brands that acknowledges the full multi-sensory experience of place brands. This paper also elaborates brand management within the three approaches.

Conceptual paper

This study identifies three co-existing approaches of place branding and provides a definition of place brands for each of them. The first approach conceptualises place brands as symbolic constructs that identify and differentiate places from others. Brand symbols such as logos and slogans are central, assuming that brand meaning resides in them. The second approach views place brands as images and associations in the minds of target groups, whereby brands reside in individuals’ minds (the cognitive). This paper aligns with a third approach that views place brands as experiential, multi-sensory constructs. Brands invite not only mental representations in people’s minds but especially also multi-sensory embodied experiences. The authors thus define place brands as marketing systems that consist of dynamic performative assemblages of symbolic, discursive, institutional and material elements that selectively invite certain multi-sensory and embodied experiences of place by stakeholders and target groups.

This paper contributes to conceptual clarity by providing an analytical framework identifying three main approaches to place branding. The authors further reflect on the implications of each approach for brand management. This paper also builds on recent literatures to provide a new and contemporary definition of place brands as multi-sensory experiences that encompasses embodiment.

The purpose of this conceptual paper is to trigger a transcendental concern toward building the spiritual capital (SC) particularly focused on the highly relevant domain of work. In doing so, this conceptual framework focuses on potential antecedents and outcomes of the SC.

Such an endeavor is premised on the Christian's teaching that advocates the need for gathering spiritual treasures (i.e. capital). Secondly, the foray into Spiritism Doctrine (SD) literature is due to the fact that this doctrine considers the spiritual construct as the cornerstone of its principles and tenets. Thirdly, it also examines the related perceptions and approaches from the fields of positive psychology, positive organizational scholarship, workplace spirituality and psychology of religion.

The model invites the individual to capitalize on salient virtues and remarkable human qualities so as to build a SC, namely: humility, compassion, forgiveness, empathy, positive emotions, connections/relationships and sense of cooperation. Finally, it is envisaged that the attempt to create a SC may lead the individual to a feeling of well-being and more resilience at work.

At last, the implications to develop a SC in the context of work are sizeable. After all, it implies to add more concerns to one's career much beyond those strictly functional or professional ones. Rather, it means to regard the work domain through unusual lens.

By bringing the conceptual framework of SC to the forefront of management, spirituality and religion studies through an interdisciplinary approach showed that it is not an elusive or mythical topic. On the contrary, this analysis revealed that this is a serious and surprisingly neglected issue that deserves further attention in light of the benefits that it can potentially yield.

This first chapter explores the basic foundation of corporate ethics: the human person in all its dignity and mystery, its corporeality and emotionality, and its cognitive and volitive capacities of moral development. Four fundamental characteristics of the human person, namely individuality, sociality, immanence, and transcendence, will be examined for their potential to understand, live, experience, and witness corporate ethics and morals. We explore the profound meaning and mystery of human personhood invoking several philosophies of the good and human dignity as exposed by Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas in the West, by the doctrine of Dharma in the East as expounded by Gautama Buddha, Mahabharata, and Bhagavad Gita, and by Prophets Confucius and Tao, in the East. Several contemporary cases of great human personhood are analyzed: for example, Peace Nobel Laureate Nelson Mandela from South Africa (1993) and Peace Nobel Laureate Liu Xiaobo from China (2017) – cases of human abuse that turned into triumphs of human dignity.

The purpose of this paper is to expand current knowledge about the recent trend of wearable technology to assess both its potential in the work environment and the challenges concerning the utilisation of wearables in the workplace.

After establishing exclusion and inclusion criteria, an independent systematic search of the ACM Digital Library, IEEE Xplore, ScienceDirect and Web of Science databases for relevant studies was performed. Out of a total of 359 articles, 34 met the selection criteria.

This review identifies 23 categories of wearable devices. Further categorisation of the devices based on their utilisation shows they can be used in the work environment for activities including monitoring, augmenting, assisting, delivering and tracking. The review reveals that wearable technology has the potential to increase work efficiency among employees, improve workers’ physical well-being and reduce work-related injuries. However, the review also reveals that technological, social, policy and economic challenges related to the use of wearable devices remain.

Many studies have investigated the benefits of wearable devices for personal use, but information about the use of wearables in the work environment is limited. Further research is required in the fields of technology, social challenges, organisation strategies, policies and economics to enhance the adoption rate of wearable devices in work environments.

Previous studies indicate that occupational stress and injuries are detrimental to employees’ health; this paper analyses the use of wearable devices as an intervention method to monitor or prevent these problems. Introducing a categorisation framework during implementation may help identify which types of device categories are suitable and could be beneficial for specific utilisation purposes, facilitating the adoption of wearable devices in the workplace.

The purpose of this article is to address research gaps relating to agency and institutionalism in new institutional theory (NIT) and institutional work (IW) and use the critical sensemaking (CSM) approach to bridge the debates around agency, especially on issues of language and discourse, actor network theory (ANT) and history.

A conceptual analysis of the literature is performed to discuss issues of agency in IW and CSM in organizations, and examples of empirical studies are used to illustrate connectivity, contrast and fusion.

The analysis illustrates points of distance (rather than disconnect), but most importantly, connectivity and the potential for further developments between the literature on IW and CSM.

Discussion around new possibilities to focus on agency has the potential to contribute to humanist thinking about the (agentic) character of organizations and the potential for social change.

The article contributes to the discussion of agency in the organization through a starting point (i.e. CSM) outside of NIT.

The purpose of this study is to examine the role of videoconferencing technologies for mediating and transforming emotional experiences in virtual context.

Drawing on empirical data of video conferencing experiences, this study identifies different constitutive relations with technology through which actors cope with actual or potential anxieties in virtual meetings. It draws on the phenomenological-existential tradition (Sartre and Merleau-Ponty) and on an interpretive phenomenological analysis (IPA) to conceptualize and illustrate the role of affective affordances in virtual settings.

The study identifies four different body–technology–other relations that provide different action possibilities, both disclosing and concealing, for navigating emotional experiences in virtual encounters of mutual gazing. These findings offer insights into the anatomy of virtual emotions and provide explanations on the nature of Zoom fatigue (interactive exhaustion) and heightened feelings of self-consciousness resulting from video conferencing interactions.

This paper builds on and extends current scholarship on technological affordances, as well as emotions, to suggest that technologies also afford different tactics for navigating emotional experiences. Thus, this paper proposes the notion of affective affordance that can expand current information system (IS) and organization studies (OS) scholarship in important ways. The focus is on videoconference technologies and meetings that have received little research attention and even less so from a perspective on emotions. Importantly, the paper offers nuanced insights that can advance current research discourse on the relationships between technology, human body and emotions.

The purpose of this paper is to present a conceptual framework based on an understanding of the principles of popular mobile-enabled games, indicating how organisations in the tourism sector could meet the needs of Millennials and Generation Z through engaging with the existing gamified location-based practice of geocaching as an information and communication technology enabled gamified enhancement to the destination experience.

As a primarily conceptual paper, the authors take an inductive qualitative approach to theory building based on the understanding of an existing practice (geocaching) that is undertaken among a community of practitioners (geocachers), which results in the presentation of a conceptual framework, which is the theory itself that the authors have constructed from the understanding of what is going on and which principles can then be applied across other tourism practices.

Findings indicate that through engaging with geocaching, smaller entrepreneurial businesses even in non-urban destinations that fall outside of the remit of smart city developments, and in tourism destinations on the less technologically enabled or resource-rich side of the digital divide, can reap the benefits associated with employing the principles and practices associated with smart tourism to meet the needs of this new generation of tourism consumers who seek richer digital and often gamified tourism experiences.

This paper fills a gap in the literature regarding the way many different types of tourism destinations could meet the needs of Millennials and Generation Z tourists.

Media attention on nonconsensual intimate image dissemination has led to the relatively recent proliferation of academic research on the topic. This literature has focused on many areas including victimization and perpetration prevalence rates, coerced sexting, legal and/or criminal contexts, sexual violence in digital spaces, gendered constructions of blame and risk, and legal analysis of high-profile cases and legislation. Despite this research, several gaps exist, including a lack of empirical research with service providers. Informed by in-depth interviews with 10 sexual violence frontline professionals in Southern Ontario (Canada), this chapter focuses on their perspectives of the additive role of technology. With respect to nonconsensual intimate image dissemination, technology acts as a digital “layer” that operates in addition to the commission of physical acts of sexual violence, and compounds the harms experienced by the victim by adding a virtual – and indelible – “permanent remembering” of the violence. Nuancing the contours of consent in a digital age, this chapter concludes by considering what consent means in a technological context.

The purpose of this contribution is twofold: at the empirical level, it is shown how in the relationship that subjects are encouraged to construct with their bodies major implications for workers' well-being can be found; at a theoretical level, attention is drawn to the importance of framing the different practices workers may display towards digital wellness programmes not just in terms of acceptance or resistance, but also in terms of appropriation.

Empirically, this study concentrates on the pilot study conducted by a large manufacturing firm that decided to implement a digitally assisted corporate wellness programme. The experimentation involves a sample of the company's workers. The 24 participants were interviewed at the beginning, during the programme and at its end, for a total of 69 interviews. Interviews were transcribed and analysed through a template analysis.

This research emphasizes how workers' well-being manifests in the relationship subjects are fostered to construct with their body and, in parallel, how workers may play an active and unpredictable role in corporate wellness programmes.

Differently from the current literature that frames workers' reactions towards digital corporate well-being initiatives in mainly polarized ways, this contribution leads to a less dichotomic and more nuanced interpretation of the “impacts” wellness programmes may have, showing how workers may display practices not just of acceptance or resistance, but also of appropriation.

Critical drug studies have developed a significant body of work that illuminates understanding of gender and drug use as well as drug pleasures. However, framing the study of women and their drug pleasures through critical drug studies presents potential limitations. The posthuman turn de-emphasises the primary goal of drug use: a particular subjective experience. Both the language and theoretical frameworks of new materialism potentially distance researchers, as interlocutors, from engaging the human experience of drug pleasures, rendering drug use abstract and unknowable.

In a historical context in which women’s intoxication has invoked shaming and criminalisation, control of their bodies, and silencing of dissent, scholarly activism by and inclusion of women who use drugs should be foundational to critical drug studies. Autoethnography offers a modality by which personal narrative becomes a convention of academic writing. It also presents a way of performing the self critically and authentically within conceptual frameworks that explore the complex, intersectional politics of women’s drug use, ways that are representationally missing in the scholarship. An ethics of care as part of one’s practice of the self proposes a radically different way of framing drug use. The recognition and normalisation of drug pleasures as the complicated, emergent, expressions of ethical self-care that they are for women (and all people who use drugs) promises fertile ground for future scholarly exploration. Research based in the lived experience of women who use drugs will help establish languages that resituate drug use in the phenomenology of their experience.