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Brand management in industrial markets is an important subject. The relative youth of this interest implies gaps in the understanding of the phenomenon, though. With regard to the emphasis on brands in today's competitive markets, improving the understanding of brand meaning and impact in diverse industrial situations and organizations is valuable to both management and theory. This paper adds to the expansion of such insights by applying the notion of brands to subcontractors; their market offer and situation. An overview of the brand concept and brand research in industrial markets directs the discussion. The chapter reports on a qualitative study with the aim to support better comprehension of the meaning and impact of brands in a subcontractor context. The study focuses on buyers' decision-making processes. Customers, although they ultimately focus on product price and quality, rely on corporate brand image for making decisions at several stages of purchasing. Buyers normally face a situation where they must choose among a number of potential suppliers, where they perceive uncertainty and limits regarding time and information. In the process of finding and selecting suitable suppliers, subcontractor corporate brands therefore revolve around proxies for expertise and reliability. A focus on subcontractor brand management can render benefits to individual suppliers concerning the amount of potential clients and signed contracts. Also, paying more attention to corporate brand meaning and content can improve the efficiency of matching buyers with supplier.

This chapter explores leadership failure by way of performance appraisal. A series of experiences in two different organizations with two different managers is examined through the lens of four critical performance appraisal mistakes – lack of objectivism (assessment based upon own experiences, beliefs and expectations), freshness (relying on recent events with little consideration for past behavior), causal attribution (flawed interpretation of employee behavior) and first impression (assessment based upon something learned from early introduction to employee, often the first encounter) These mistakes represent a continuum of infractions for which ethical leadership is offered as an antidote. Ethical leadership strategies are provided to support employees, managers, teams, and organizations in counteracting, avoiding, surviving and eliminating these mistakes, respectively.

Using netnography, this report analyzes travel blogs to show the take-away impressions of first-time visitors to three South American cities: Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, Buenos Aires, Argentina, and Santiago, Chile. Visitors recount their travel experiences according to the kernel myths of the respective city (Holt, 2003). The report includes concept maps using Heider's (1958) balance theory for each positive and negative blog to decode the visitor's relationship to a particular iconic myth. Furthermore, the study describes the role of storytelling (McKee, 2003) in marketing for destination brand experiences.

Relationships are socially constructed by companies in interaction. This study explains the dynamic character of business-to-business relationships with the aid of rules theory, a theory borrowed from the communications field. Two forms of rules are identified: constitutive rules guide the interpretation of the other's acts, and regulative rules guide the appropriate response to the interpreted act. Rules theory asserts that companies act as if applying these rules. Relationships provide not only the context in which the parties’ acts are performed but are also the result of such acts. Thus, relationships are potentially reshaped each time one party performs an act and the other party gives meaning to that act and reacts.

In this story, I provide a personal history of Norman Denzin's profound influence on the development of interpretive qualitative inquiry, and on me, over the past 30 years. Norman saw the need to move qualitative inquiry from the field to the text to the reader in order to meet the needs of a new and broadening global generation of qualitative researchers, writers, and performance artists who did not want merely to describe the world but rather to interpret, critique, and change it. Through new journals, handbooks, and international/cross-disciplinary conferences, Norman provided the leadership and kindness that inspired the development of a new global community of qualitative researchers committed to social justice and to showing how to feel the sufferings of others.

We theorize the critical role of angel investors' affective experiences and first impressions in the context of entrepreneurial finance. We develop a model and propositions to illustrate why angel investors make the decision to continue screening, thus explaining why certain investment proposals make it, while others do not.

Drawing on affective events theory and the literature on affective experiences, we theorize how the perceptions of pitches that trigger positive or/and negative physiological arousal, short-lived emotions, and associated thoughts are different, thus allowing us to build new theory of how these different experiences can influence the outcome of the evaluation process in the initial screening stage.

Our model suggests that the initial evaluation unfolds in five stages: perception of an entrepreneurial pitch, physiological arousal, emotions, first impression, and a decision to continue screening. When different manifestations of physiological arousal and subsequent emotions set the tone of first impressions, they can be either a positive, negative, or mixed experience. While positive and mixed first impression can lead to selection, negative first impression can lead to rejection.

We illustrate what is of value for angel investors when they look for new investments, and why certain entrepreneurial pitches lead to the decision to continue screening, while others do not. We propose that what angel investors feel is particularly important in situations where they are not yet making the ultimate decision to invest money but are involved in decisions about whether to continue to spend time to investigate the investment proposal.