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The purpose of this paper is to propose future directions for research into stories and metaphors as concise communication tools that are particularly salient for the fast pace of today’s retail sales environment.

A cross disciplinary approach is taken to propose new avenues for sales communication research.

This work highlights research possibilities into the contextually sensitive constructs of stories and metaphors with associated theoretical approaches. This could improve research into stories and metaphors as communication techniques for retail selling.

The findings indicate that stories and metaphors are highly engaging sensemaking tools that salespeople can use in retail sales encounters. The lack of existing literature within the sales domain suggests a significant learning curve in demarcating the use of these tools.

Stories and metaphors are presently used by salespeople but without the benefit of extensive scientific understanding. This paper builds a foundation for research that could bring clarity to the use of these tools in retail selling.

Researchers will benefit from a finer grained conceptualization with which to examine sales communication. The proposed research should get sales practitioners a clearer understanding of using stories and metaphors in sales encounters.

This paper aims to examine how other-regarding personality traits relate to reciprocity among frontline employees (FLEs).

Other-regarding personality variables were used to model the propensity for reciprocity and actual reciprocal behaviors with coworkers. Surveys of 276 FLEs were examined via structural equations modeling.

Other-regarding personality traits proved to be antecedents of reciprocity. Cynicism was particularly interesting in that it was positively related to reciprocity contrary to findings in other research.

Among the interesting findings relating personality to reciprocity are a more affective type of reciprocity based on empathy and altruism, and a more calculative type based on cynicism related to Machiavellianism.

Managers can use the effects of personality traits on reciprocity and cooperation to hire and place FLEs in ways that provide superior service and increased profits.

This paper indicates that certain individuals who might not typically be thought of as cooperative can in fact reciprocate. Specific ideas about cynicism and Machiavellian reciprocity in FLEs are discussed.

The findings will aid researchers and managers in understanding personality and FLEs cooperation. The findings on cynicism are particularly valuable in that they contradict some earlier research and commonly held managerial ideas.

Narratives are central to consumers’ understanding of brands especially during change. The financial crisis that began in 2008 offered a changing marketplace from which to develop two managerially useful frameworks of consumer narratives. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

Consumer focus groups, interviews with bankers and qualitative consumer surveys were used to gather consumers’ narratives about retail banking. The narratives were examined through frameworks from both the humanities and psychology (narrative identity).

The individual consumer narratives were used to create first a possible cultural narrative or bird’s eye view and later archetypal narratives of groups of consumers for a ground-level view of the changing marketplace.

Like all early research, the findings must be examined in other contexts to improve generalizability.

The narrative results revealed the impact of change on consumers’ identities, views of other entities and retail banking activity to yield managerially actionable information for segmentation, target marketing, branding and communication.

Frameworks are developed for consumer narratives which are shown to be useful tools in examining consumers’ reactions to changing markets and in formulating marketing responses.

Latent constructs represent the building blocks of marketing theory. The purpose of this paper is to provide marketing researchers with a practical procedure for writing construct definitions.

The paper reviews important contributions to construct definition in the literature from marketing, management, psychology and the philosophy of science. The authors expound construct definition in both practical and theoretical spheres to motivate the proposed procedure.

A six‐step procedure for construct definition and redefinition in marketing is developed. The proposed procedure addresses important aspects of definitions including the level of abstraction, scope, nomological relationships, explanatory and predictive power, ambiguity, vagueness, and preventing construct proliferation.

While techniques for developing measures have received a great deal of attention, those for the earlier step of construct definition have not. Researchers will benefit from more precise definitions through improved model specification, better measures, and more reliable determination of the direction of causality. The role of the individual researcher's linguistic skill in construct definition must still be determined.

Marketing practitioners can also use the procedure to define latent constructs for which they must develop measures.

The literature on construct definition is fragmentary, scattered across disciplines and occasionally even arcane. It is further often descriptive of what a good definition looks like rather than prescriptive of how a good definition can be developed. The six steps are simple, broadly applicable, based on both theory and practical experience, consist of relatively few discrete steps, and feed directly into the modern measure development paradigm in marketing.

This study compares filmic and televisual representations of fictional black presidents to white Americans’ reactions to the advent of the United States’s first African American president. My main goal is to determine if there is convergence between these mediated representations and whites’ real-world representations of Barack Obama. I then weigh the evidence for media pundits’ speculations that Obama owes his election to positive portrayals of these fictional heads of state.

The film and television analyses examine each black president’s social network, personality, character traits, preparation for office, and leadership ability. I then compare the ideological messages conveyed through these portrayals to the messages implicated in white Americans’ discursive and pictorial representations of Barack Obama.

Both filmic and televisual narratives and public discourses and images construct and portray black presidents with stereotypical character traits and abilities. These representations are overwhelmingly negative and provide no support for the argument that there is a cause–effect relationship between filmic and televisual black presidents and Obama’s election victory.

Neither reel nor real-life black presidents can elude the representational quagmire that distorts African Americans’ abilities and diversity. Discourses, iconography, narratives, and other representations that define black presidents through negative tropes imply that blacks are incapable of effective leadership. These hegemonic representations seek to delegitimize black presidents and symbolically return them to subordinate statuses.

This study explores (1) the impacts of COVID-19 on the environmental sustainability of Australian events; (2) the measures undertaken to minimise the impacts of COVID-19 on environmental sustainability; (3) the key impediments to incorporating COVID-Safe measures in an environmentally sustainable way; and (4) the expected long-term impact of the COVID-19 situation on the development of the environmental sustainability of the Australian events industry.

The study follows a qualitative approach by undertaking semi-structured interviews with (N = 23) event industry professionals. The data collection phase took place between November 2020 and May 2021 and the study was completed in February 2022.

Adverse environmental impacts included increased waste output and the stagnation of planned or existing environmental practices. The study reveals positive effects such as reduced carbon emission outputs and increased environmental awareness of event participants. Financial costs, time pressure, uncertainty and sourcing issues are significant impediments to organising events in an environmentally sustainable manner during a global pandemic situation.

Understanding how COVID-19 impacts the environmental sustainability of events will help the industry to preserve previous progress made, overcome similar obstacles during future crises, and capitalise on opportunities for positive environmental change.

This is the first study to examine the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the environmental sustainability practices of Australian events.

This chapter focusses on the importance of young people's families and relations outside school. In interviews, a significant number of the young informants from the Danish part of the MaCE project speak of their relationship with parents, siblings, other family members or friends outside school, when they express the crucial role such support or lack thereof have played in relation to their educational experiences. In the final section of the chapter, we argue that when working with children and young people in education, remembering a holistic perspective is of utter importance. Daring to talk with students about their whole personality and extensive experiences, and not just their school identity, seems self-evident, but perhaps too often forgotten.

The growth of Inter‐ and intranets and the sharing of software have led to a rise in the transmission of viruses, especially among the PC and MAC platforms. However, maintaining virus protection software and pattern updates for any large organization is a monumental problem, especially when the organization supports multiple platforms and operating systems. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) and other National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) Centers have had problems maintaining current virus protection software and pattern files, and so NASA asked the JPL Network and Computer Security (NCS) Group to lead an effort to search for a comprehensive solution. This paper puts forward a study, analysis and recommendations concerning anti‐virus software solutions, problems encountered and their resolutions. One of the key issues was finding a single‐source anti‐virus software solution. Selection and deployment of single‐source anti‐virus software were successful. The lessons learned in the deployment of a software product site‐wide may benefit other organizations facing a similar situation.

As numerous scholars have noted, the law takes a strikingly incoherent approach to adolescent reproduction. States overwhelmingly allow a teenage girl to independently consent to pregnancy care and medical treatment for her child, and even to give up her child for adoption, all without notice to her parents, but require parental notice or consent for abortion. This chapter argues that this oft-noted contradiction in the law on teenage reproductive decision-making is in fact not as contradictory as it first appears. A closer look at the law’s apparently conflicting approaches to teenage abortion and teenage childbirth exposes common ground that scholars have overlooked. The chapter compares the full spectrum of minors’ reproductive rights and unmasks deep similarities in the law on adolescent reproduction – in particular an undercurrent of desire to punish (female) teenage sexuality, whether pregnant girls choose abortion or childbirth. It demonstrates that in practice, the law undermines adolescents’ reproductive rights, whichever path of pregnancy resolution they choose. At the same time that the law thwarts adolescents’ access to abortion care, it also fails to protect adolescents’ rights as parents. The analysis shows that these two superficially conflicting sets of rules in fact work in tandem to enforce a traditional gender script – that self-sacrificing mothers should give birth and give up their infants to better circumstances, no matter the emotional costs to themselves. This chapter also suggests novel policy solutions to the difficulties posed by adolescent reproduction by urging reforms that look to third parties other than parents or the State to better support adolescent decision-making relating to pregnancy and parenting.

This chapter focusses on three young, female students from Denmark and their quiet voices in a world full of loud expectations – in this case the expectations of education. The chapter is based on a research project named Marginalization and Co-created Education (MaCE), which is constructed through indirect conversations with young students. These students were either attending an Adult Education Centre (In Danish: VUC) or a Production School (an institution for people who for a short period have to consider what to do in relation to the system of education). The aim of the study was to obtain an understanding of being a young person on an educational journey and to let the young students express their experiences through their own voices and views. The findings of this research present an overwhelmingly negative view of the school experiences by the young students, who all at some point felt neglected and not acknowledged through their school time by both teachers and classmates. These findings are illustrated through German sociologist Norbert Elias and his work on The Civilizing Process, and focusses on the unavoidable connection between civilising and distinction processes.