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Customer engagement is of critical interest to both academics and practitioners. Extant literature focusses primarily on customer engagement with a single focal object, usually brands; this study takes another view to consider customer engagement with multiple focal objects (service provider and context). In addition to testing the relationship of the individual dimensions of engagement with the service provider and engagement with the context, this research elaborates on their drivers, with a particular focus on distinct engagement platforms. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

A survey captures customer engagement with a service provider and a context in a higher education setting, with 251 responses collected across first- and third-year marketing courses in an Australian, mid-sized university.

Engagement with the service provider can drive engagement with the context. In turn, engagement with the service provider can be stimulated through the use of engagement platforms that enable customer-to-service provider interactions. The results show limited effects of customer-to-customer engagement platforms on engagement with the context though. The results are consistent across gender and student grade levels; some differences arise between international and domestic students.

This unique study broadens understanding of customer engagement with various focal objects and also details the flow of effects, from engagement with a service provider to engagement with the context. This research builds on conceptual discussions of engagement platforms and empirically examines their ability to facilitate affective, cognitive and behavioural engagement.

Despite recognition that organizations operate in interrelated service systems, extant literature has focused strongly on dyadic engagement relationships (e.g. customer-to-brand). Taking into account the multiple engagement foci that exist within a service system, the purpose of this paper is to examine the interdependence among engagement with these multiple foci in a higher education setting. Specifically, the research investigates different configurations of engagement dimensions with the service provider and brand as they pertain to engagement with the study context.

A total of 251 students were surveyed in regards to their engagement with a service provider (lecturer), brand (university) and study context. Data analysis utilized Fuzzy set qualitative comparative analysis to identify the unique combinations of causal condition consistent with high student engagement with the study context.

Five solutions were identified, each with a different constellation of engagement dimensions. Most solutions entailed engagement with both the service provider and the brand, and cognitive processing (service provider) emerged as a core condition for every solution. This suggests service providers should seek to engage with consumers, particularly from a cognitive perspective, understanding this will support engagement with the context of study.

This research provides evidence that students can engage with their study context through different configurations of engagement with the service provider and the brand. Thus, it demonstrates the need to examine constellations of engagement dimensions related to multiple focal objects to understand their interdependencies and potential influence on engagement at a higher level of aggregation in a complex service environment.

The purpose of this paper is to examine how entrepreneurs engage in a virtual community of practice (VCoP) to share knowledge. Intensity of engagement is taken as a proxy to measure the strength of knowledge sharing.

The archival data spanning over a three-year period from “Start-up-Nation^©” (a VCoP purposefully setup for entrepreneurs) are used for analysis. A set of indices are introduced to measure participants’ intensity of engagement in terms of message length, message frequency and reciprocity in the knowledge sharing process. Content analysis is employed to test a sample of “highly engaged”, “moderately engaged”, “low engaged” and “not engaged” discussion topics as part of the online discourse.

The authors find that entrepreneurs normally use short (fewer than 100 words) or medium (fewer than 250 words) message size to contribute to the discussions. In addition, the authors find that senior members and discussion moderators play important roles in igniting the “reciprocity” behaviour in stimulating the interest of the community with the topic discussion. The authors also find that highly engaged topics usually lead to further discussion threads.

This is the first study of its kind to explore how entrepreneurs engage in a VCoP to share their knowledge and experiences. The set of measurement indices tested here provide a tool for the owner, designer and moderator of the VCoP to measure the utility of their website in terms of its members’ participation. In addition, the set of textual and subjective interventions identified here enables the moderator (administrator) of a VCoP to design effective interventions to facilitate online discourse and augments the knowledge sharing process amongst its community members.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the nature of dilemmas that emerge at the theoretical and practical interfaces of ethnographic fieldwork and feminist advocacy. This is done by examining the researcher’s role in the field and the complex relationships between the researcher and the researched.

Critical self-reflections and autoethnographic analyses of fieldwork experiences in the author’s home country in South Asia are used to explore these dilemmas.

Using situated examples from a typical organisational setting involving both the oppressive and the oppressed, the researcher’s participant observation is found to be conflicted between critical participation and critical observation. Conscious and/or unconscious critical participation through enactment of feminist ethics by combining researcher and advocacy roles allows a route to assuage these conflicts. Practical strategies used to accomplish this are also discussed.

Although the practical strategies discussed in this paper are culturally and organisationally specific and hence limited by them, it is hoped that suitable variants will emerge for readers from their discussion. Further research is needed to investigate the variety of ways in which the researcher-advocate positionality proposed in this paper can be strategically adopted conditional on cultural and organisational contexts, feminist research questions, and researchers’ abilities and constraints.

This paper seeks to shed light on the dilemmas of feminist ethics faced by critical feminist researchers conducting ethnographic fieldwork. It also discusses ways to enable researchers to circumvent these dilemmas in both epistemologically productive ways by collecting rich data and in ontologically enriching ways by allowing some enactment of feminist ethics. To this end, a positionality of the feminist researcher-advocate is conceptualised that does not enforce constraints of extreme positionalities of either a conventional ethnographer or an action researcher.

Besides illustrating the need to stretch beyond traditional boundaries of participant observation, the researcher-advocate positionality also allows feminist researchers to make small, but directly tangible impact towards gender equality in their field setting. Implications for researchers’ emotional, and cognitive safety are also discussed especially when they identify with one or more minority identities.

This paper contributes to discussions on the theory of methods by highlighting the benefits of enacting feminist ethics as a way of critical participation in research settings.

The purpose of this paper is to analyse changes in community disclosures by listed companies in Mauritius.

The authors carried out a quantitative and qualitative assessment of annual report disclosures over the period 2004-2010. In particular, the authors consider the influence of a corporate governance code and a government intervention to first persuade and subsequently mandate corporate social responsibility investment (known as a “CSR Levy”).

From a predominantly limited and neutral form of communication, narratives of community involvement morph into assertive and rhetorical statements, emphasising commitment, permanency and an intimate connection to the community and a re-organisation of activities and priorities which seek to portray structure and order in the way companies deliver community interventions. Informed by Gray et al.’s (1995) neo-pluralist framework and documentary evidence pertaining to the country’s social, political and economic context, the authors relate the change in disclosures to the use of corporate impression management techniques with a view to maintain legitimacy and to counter the predominant public narrative on the insufficient extent of community involvement by local companies.

The authors find that community disclosures are not only legitimating mechanisms driven by international pressures but are also the result of local tensions and expectations.

This study provides evidence on forms of “social” – as opposed to environmental – disclosures. Furthermore, it examines a unique setting where a government enacted a legally binding regime for greater corporate social involvement.

The purpose of this paper is to discuss major criticisms of traditional undergraduate accounting programmes and to introduce virtual internships as a curriculum innovation that addresses these criticisms.

The main aim of the paper is to inspire curriculum innovation in accounting programmes though the introduction and discussion of virtual internships as a contemporary teaching model.

The paper provides a detailed outline of the virtual internship model, its advantages and disadvantages, and its development in practice.

The paper is likely to be most relevant for academics in undergraduate accounting programmes because it provides a practical guide to the development of this curriculum innovation.

The ability to attract and retain volunteers is crucial for not-for-profit organizations, and consequently, the need to understand and manage volunteers’ engagement is paramount. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the role of five volunteer engagement dimensions (cognitive, affective, behavioral, social and spiritual engagement) on perceived value-in-context, and its subsequent role for volunteer retention. Thus, providing for the first time an understanding of how unique types of value are determined through different facets of volunteer engagement.

To establish the nature and consequences of volunteer engagement, the authors collaborated with an Australian not-for-profit service organization. Using a survey method, the authors studied the organization’s volunteer workforce resulting in 464 usable responses. To capture volunteers’ degree of spiritual engagement, this paper introduces a rigorously developed unidimensional measure.

The results demonstrate the importance of the five engagement dimensions on volunteers’ perceived value-in-context, while highlighting significant effect differences including some counterintuitive consequences. The authors also establish the role of spiritual engagement and demonstrate the impact of value-in-context for volunteer retention.

This research explores the volunteer engagement-retention chain, by empirically studying the role of value-in-context. The authors provide first evidence for the relationship between volunteer engagement and value-in-context, examining the independent yet relative effects of various facets of volunteer engagement. In doing so, the authors offer new insight into the dimensionality of the volunteer engagement construct, broadening its conceptualization to include spiritual engagement as a core constituent. The authors further demonstrate the impact of value-in-context on volunteer retention, helping organizations to better make sense of meaningful volunteer experiences with long-lasting impacts and mutual benefits.

The purpose of this paper is to provide an in-depth understanding of actor engagement (AE) on social media by proposing a holistic and integrative conceptual framework.

Based on a sample of 118 articles, the paper draws on the service-dominant logic (SDL)-based service ecosystem perspective combined with the tenets of relational dialectics as theoretical lenses to inform AE research in social media.

The paper proposes a framework of AE in social media called the TASC model, an acronym of Thesis-Antithesis-Synthesis-Conflict. TASC introduces the dialectical nature of AE and discusses the contexts and levels of AE in the social media ecosystem and their evolving processes.

Firms can apply the knowledge provided by TASC to gather marketing intelligence and develop marketing strategies to anticipate tensions, motivate the desired AE intensity and valence and reinforce value co-creation in the social media ecosystem.

TASC is a comprehensive framework that, for the first time, explains engagement at all levels of the social media ecosystem by combining the SDL-based service ecosystem view with the relational dialectics perspective.

The purpose of this paper is to broaden extant understanding of actor engagement behavior beyond its currently dominant dyadic (micro-level) focus, by examining it from multiple levels of aggregation within a service ecosystem framework.

This conceptual paper draws on service-dominant logic and structuration theory as theoretical lenses to inform engagement research.

By means of a stepwise exercise of “zooming out,” the paper introduces a multi-perspective (micro-, meso-, macro- and meta-level) view of actor engagement that develops understanding of multiple engagement contexts, and suggests that balancing multiple roles may result in actor disengagement behavior. The role of reference groups and role conflict associated with balancing multiple roles is critical to understanding why engaged actor proclivities may wax and wane between contexts.

The paper offers a set of five propositions that can be utilized by engagement scholars undertaking further research in this area.

Firms need to understand the values and norms embedded in diverse engagement contexts which can affect actor groups’ needs and motivations. Firms should develop appropriate organizational mechanisms to facilitate (rather than impede or obstruct) the desired behaviors of engaged actors.

The broader context within which engaged actors operate, and its effects on engagement, has been largely overlooked to date. By broadening the analytical perspective on engagement beyond the dyadic this paper reveals previously unaddressed aspects of this phenomenon, such as the role of disengagement behavior, and the effects of multiple engagement contexts on actors’ future behaviors.