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The purpose of this paper is to analyze the Swedish Advertisers’ Association's role in the institutional development of Swedish international advertising during 1955–1972.

A qualitative analysis of business association sources is used to explore the institutional development of international advertising.

A new postwar paradigm that focused on a consumer-oriented brand ideology enabled marketing executives in the Swedish Advertisers’ Association to develop a new discourse on international advertising in Sweden, which then was institutionalized within a national network on export promotion. The institutionalization process was supported by a corporatist system typical of smaller export dependent postwar European economies.

While based on a national case, this study points to the importance of understanding how advertising concepts are embedded within other economic, political and cultural systems than in those they originated in and how this contributes to a heterogenous implementation of similar ideas and practices. This study also illustrates how members can use their association to institutionalize a new discourse on marketing and network with other actors to enhance the use and reputation of its ideas and practices.

By highlighting the importance of analyzing both internal and external organizational relations, this study contributes to the research on history of marketing by making salient the importance of an institutional perspective to understand key processes in marketing. In practice neither the institutional perspective nor the explanatory power of discourse has received much attention, therefore the study results should be both interesting and valid for practitioners as well.

The study of the historical development of international advertising is limited and often descriptive. This study contributes to the literature by using a theoretical and methodological approach to make salient how the interaction between discourse, marketing associations and other collective actors propelled the institutionalization of international advertising within a specific national context.

This paper aims to unpack how small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) can operationalise coopetition in talent management, addressing ongoing talent shortages in the hospitality industry which were intensified during the Covid-19 pandemic.

This conceptual paper draws from literature on coopetition and talent management in SMEs. Specifically, the authors take an interorganisational talent pool lens and develop a framework following the principles of open-systems theory.

The authors find that the traditional use of talent pools is often impractical for SMEs because of a lack of resources and capabilities. Instead, interorganisational talent pools, through coopetition in talent management, can aid these firms to address talent shortages. The authors identify potential for SME coopetition at various stages, including attraction, development and retention of talent.

Coopetition in talent management can aid industries in establishing market-thickening pipelines. Through co-attracting, co-developing and co-retaining talent, SMEs can create interorganisational talent pools. To develop talent management coopetition, a set of prerequisites, catalysts and potential inhibitors must be analysed and managed.

This paper moves the talent management debate beyond competition for talent, introducing coopetition as a viable alternative. Taking an open-systems perspective, the authors develop an integrative framework for coopetition in talent management in SMEs encompassing input, process and output components. The authors reveal the dynamic and complex nature of this coopetition process, highlighting the essential role of coopetition context and illustrating open-system principles.

Relations in university settings are becoming more heterogeneous in terms of race, ethnicity, religion, nationality, class, and gender. In South Africa, transformation imperatives have radically changed the complexion of the country’s university campuses but have also entrenched political imperatives in its universities. As a consequence, the university is a highly politicised space. This is not new. What is new is a communication environment characterised by real-time, global networked digital communication and the uptake of digital media platforms (including social media platforms). We explore the effects of politicisation and new modes of communication using the case of a controversial article published in a South Africa journal and the ensuing polemic. Drawing on both institutional theory and Castells’ description of the network society, we conceptualise collegiality along two dimensions: horizontal collegial relations which exist for the purpose of knowledge creation and transfer which, in turn, depends on self-governance according to a taken-for-granted code of conduct; and vertical collegiality which describes collegial relations between academic staff and university management, and which is necessary for the governance of the university as a complex organisation. We conclude that the highly personal nature of communication that is propelled by digital communication has a direct impact on collegial relations within the university. The motivations of both university academic staff and management, as well as the public, extend beyond stimulating collective debate in the service of knowledge production to serving individual and/or ideological agendas as the communication of science becomes politicised. While issues pertaining to collegiality in South Africa may at first glance appear to be unique to the country, we believe that in a globally transforming academy, the South African case may offer novel insights and useful lessons for other highly politicised university systems.

This chapter looks at the discursive dimension of the working environment in research and higher education organizations; more specifically at neoliberal managerial discourse and at how it participates in shaping the way researchers, teachers and support staff perceive themselves and their experiences. It is based on a multiple case study and combines an intersectional and a socio-clinical approach. The empirical data is constituted by in-depth interviews with women conducted in Ireland and Chile, and includes some observations made in France. A thematic analysis of individual narratives of self-ascribed experiences of being bullied enables to look behind the veil drawn by managerial discourse, thus providing insights into power vectors and power domains contributing to workplace violence. It also shows that workplace bullying may reinforce identification to undervalued social categories. This contribution argues that neoliberal managerial discourse, by encouraging social representations of “neutral” individuals at work, or else celebrating their “diversity,” conceals power relations rooting on different social categories. This process influences one’s perception of one’s experience and its verbalization. At the same time, feeling assigned to one or more of undervalued social category can raise the perception of being bullied or discriminated against. While research has shown that only a minority of incidents of bullying and discrimination are reported within organizations, this contribution suggests that acknowledging the multiplicity and superposition of categories and their influence in shaping power relations could help secure a more collective and caring approach, and thus foster a safer work culture and atmosphere in research organizations.

The paper contributes to the discussion on valuation in organization studies and strategic management literature. The nascent literature on valuation practices has examined established markets where producers and consumers are known and rivalry in the market is a given. Furthermore, previous research has operated with a narrow meaning of value as either a financial profit or a subjective consumer preference. Such a narrow view on value is problematic and insufficient for studying the interlacing of innovation and value creation in emerging technoscientific business domains.

The authors present an empirical study about value creation in an emerging technoscience business domain formed around personalized medicine and digital health data.

The results of this analysis show that in a technoscientific domain, valuation of innovations is multiple and malleable, entails pursuing attractiveness in collaboration and partnerships and is performative, and due to emphatic future orientation, values are indefinite and promissory.

As research implications, this study shows that valuation practices in an emerging technoscience business domain focus on defining the potential economic value in the future and attracting partners as probable future beneficiaries. Commercial value upon innovation in an embryonic business milieu is created and situated in valuation practices that constitute the prospective market, the prevalent economic discourse, and rationale. This is in contrast to an established market, where valuation practices are determined at the intersection of customer preferences and competitive arenas where suppliers, producers, service providers and new entrants to the market present value propositions.

The study findings extend discussion on valuation from established business domains to emerging technoscience business domains which are in a “pre-competition” phase where suppliers, customers, producers and their collaborative and competitive relations are not yet established.

As managerial implications, this study provides insights into health innovation stakeholders, including stakeholders in the public, private and academic sectors, about the ecosystem dynamics in a technoscientific innovation. Such insight is useful in strategic decision-making about ecosystem strategy and ecosystem business model for value proposition, value creation and value capture in an emerging innovation domain characterized by collaborative and competitive relations among stakeholders. To business managers, the findings of this study about valuation practices are useful in strategic decision-making about ecosystem strategy and ecosystem business model for value proposition, value creation and value capture in an emerging innovation domain characterized by collaborative and competitive relations among stakeholders. To policy makers, this study provides an in-depth analysis of an overall business ecosystem in an emerging technoscience business that can be propelled to increase the financial investments in the field. As a policy implication, this study provides insights into the various dimensions of valuation in technoscience business to policy makers, who make governance decisions to guide and control the development of medical innovation using digital health data.

This study's results expand previous theorizing on valuation by showing that in technoscientific innovation all types of value created – scientific, clinical, social or economic – are predominantly promissory. This study complements the nascent theorizing on value creation and valuation practices of technoscientific innovation.

In this paper, women entrepreneurs are seen as leaders and women leaders as entrepreneurial, making both groups an easy target of postfeminist expectations, governed by calls to embody the entrepreneurial self. Acknowledging that the entrepreneurial self has its roots in the universal, rational and autonomous subject, which was shaped in a male form during the Enlightenment, the purpose of this study is to conceptualise feminist resistance as a process through which the autonomous subject can be de-stabilised.

Empirically, this study draws on an extensive research project on women’s rural entrepreneurship that includes 32 in-depth interviews with women entrepreneurs in rural Sweden. This study interpreted expressions of resistance from the women by using an analytical framework the authors developed based on Jonna Bornemark’s philosophical treatise.

Feminist resistance unfolds as an interactive and iterative learning process where the subject recognises their voice, strengthens their voice and beliefs in a relational process and finally sees themselves as a fully fledged actor who finds ways to overcome obstacles that get in their way. Conceptualising resistance as a learning process stands in sharp contrast to the idea of resistance as enacted by the autonomous self.

This study helps researchers to understand that what they may have seen as a sign of weakness among women, is instead a sign of strength: it is a first step in learning resistance that may help women create a life different from that prescribed by the postfeminist discourse. In this way, researchers can avoid reproducing women as “weak and inadequate”.

Through the re-writing of feminist resistance, the masculine entrepreneurship discourse including the notion of the autonomous self is challenged, and a counternarrative to the postfeminist entrepreneurial woman is developed. Theorising resistance as a learning practice enables a more transforming research agenda, making it possible to see women as resisting postfeminist expectations of endless competition with themselves and others.

This paper aims to challenge the assumption that brands of everyday products have only used lifestyle marketing in the past 30 years by conducting the first case study of the marketing practices of the Swedish toothpaste brand Stomatol (1910–1940). Through visual social semiotic analysis, it explores how the brand was a pioneer in lifestyle marketing, using discourses of modernity, beauty and the Swedish “way of life” to sell its toothpaste.

Two hundred Stomatol advertisements were collected from the Swedish Historical Newspaper Archive and analysed using visual social semiotics. The analysis considers how the idea of a cultural Swedishness centred around modernity and beauty developed between 1910 and 1940, and how both linguistic and semiotic resources were used to make these claims seem credible.

At a time when its main adversaries were capitalising upon science in their advertisements to construct authority and credibility, Stomatol instead targeted lifestyle. Modernity, beauty and the Swedish “way of life” were central themes of their marketing campaigns, yet the way these themes were articulated varied between 1910 and 1940 in accordance with changing popular discourse. This made Stomatol more competitive than other toothpaste brands because it was able to sell an experience rather than a product, turning it into Sweden’s most popular toothpaste.

This paper demonstrates the importance of case studies to challenge the assumption that toothpaste brands have only used lifestyle marketing in the past 30 years (a claim based on Anglocentrism). It also showcases the need to further investigate non-Anglo countries when conducting research into lifestyle marketing to build a more nuanced perspective on its origins and the supposed novelty of (largely) US practices. Thus, Stomatol makes an important case for Sweden as a trailblazer in lifestyle marketing.

This paper examines the socio-political affordances of metrics in research evaluation and the consequences of epistemic injustice in research practices and recorded knowledge.

First, the use of metrics is examined as a mechanism that promotes competition and social acceleration. Second, it is argued that the use of metrics in a competitive research culture reproduces systemic inequalities and leads to epistemic injustice. The conceptual analysis draws on works of Hartmut Rosa and Miranda Fricker, amongst others.

The use of metrics is largely driven by competition such as university rankings and league tables. Not only that metrics are not designed to enrich academic and research culture, they also suppress the visibility and credibility of works by minorities. As such, metrics perpetuate epistemic injustice in knowledge practices; at the same time, the reliability of metrics for bibliometric and scientometric studies is put into question.

As metrics leverage who can speak and who will be heard, epistemic injustice is reflected in recorded knowledge and what we consider to be information.

This paper contributes to the discussion of metrics beyond bibliometric studies and research evaluation. It argues that metrics-induced competition is antithetical to equality and diversity in research practices.

The retail sector is not largely studied in Italy. The study offers a comparison between youth retail shift work in Milan and London. The aim of this paper is to contribute to the debate on the one hand on youth work and on the other hand to the debate on agency and structural factors in life planning, representation of the future and the transition to adulthood, observed in the United Kingdom's and Italian labour market. Even if the second one is a Southern European Country, these contexts are both characterised by a service-oriented economy and the widespread of precarious and flexible jobs.

Qualitative methods were used: one year of ethnographic observation, 50 interviews and two focus groups were carried out between 2015 and 2018 with retail workers and trade unionists. The contexts are Corso Buenos Aires in Milan, Italy, and Oxford Street in London, United Kingdom. Analysing young workers' discourses, the author identifies narratives that allow to grasp their present agency and imagined future.

Observing the crisis of the narrative (Sennett, 2020) allows to highlight the social consequences of working times on young workers' everyday life and future. The author argues that young workers struggle with the narrative of their present everyday life and the representation of the future. This relates to the condition of time alienation due to the flexible schedules and the fast pace of work in retail, both affecting the work-life balance.

The social consequences of flexible schedules in retail and fast fashion sector, which are new issues not yet sufficiently explored, are here investigated from the perspective of young workers. The study is focussed on the representations of young people working with customers in social and economic contexts characterised by flexible schedules and the deregulation of shop openings, the so-called 24/7 service society, not largely investigated in the sociological scientific literature, above all in the Italian context.

Focusing on critical discourse analysis, this paper aims to propose a framework for analysing the way activist anti-tourism groups construct their social action of protest. The authors argue that activist groups use different narrative strategies to construct and legitimise their discourse of protest to convey social meanings for social action practices. This study represents an attempt to explain how anti-tourism activist groups have the agency to build different paradigms of protest rooted in particular views of tourism.

As a result of the lack of research in this area, this study used a comparative case study methodology drawn on four case studies in the field of anti-tourism protest. Case study is deemed adequate to explore a complex social phenomenon, how activist groups differ from each other, in a specific socio-economic context. A critical discourse analysis method is used to study primary (interviews) and secondary sources (reports, websites and online campaigns documents) of information, which express the activist group motivations and objectives to protest against tourism.

This study’s findings provide evidence in how discourse differs among the protest groups. Three narrative paradigms of protest are identified, which guide their agency: scepticism, based on a global and ecological approach; non-interventionist transformation, rooted in local community issues; and direct transformation, based on a sectoral problem-solving approach. These differences are interpreted as the consequences of the emergence and the development of different paths of protest according to specific social contexts and power relations in which anti-tourism groups are embedded.

This paper provides a contemporary approach to anti-tourism activism within the context of social movements. This case study may be of interest to practitioners and international destination managers interested in gaining a better understanding of anti-tourism protest strategies, new anti-tourism narratives following COVID-19 and the opportunities and challenges for opening a dialogue with those involved in activism and social urban movements as part of sustainable tourism governance. Our results can also help activists to rethink how they integrate differences and particular strategic positions to avoid hindering collective action. This knowledge is especially useful for managers and authorities seeking to develop more accurate collaborative governance practices with local activists, and especially those interested in fostering participative action without marginalising the diverse range of local community perspectives.