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This paper aims to report on a qualitative study that explores senior citizen consumers ' empowerment through social engagement in third places and their subsequent loyalty to third places.

Data were collected via a qualitative research design from four seniors ' clubs in Australia using focus groups (12), and participant observation. The data were analyzed using QSR NVivo software using an interpretive approach.

Ten themes based on 34 codes were identified in the study, which were grouped to develop a conceptual model of the antecedents and consequences of seniors ' empowerment in third places for further testing. The themes under consumer empowerment were important in assisting to understand the significance of place and social engagement within the place to empower seniors with a positive self-image, better access to information and exercise of choices for smarter purchase decisions. The themes under social capital contributed to a better understanding of the ramification of social capital to marketing knowledge. This was particularly so for marketing constructs embedded in community or aggregate level issues such as value co-creation, relationship marketing, customer involvement and related outcomes. Finally the study reports three types of loyalty: cognitive, ultimate and communal loyalty, that underpinned the behavioral, attitudinal and cognitive dimension of loyalty. The findings suggested that consequent to seniors ' social capital and feeling of empowerment in third places they display loyalty to the third place.

The present study has three theoretical implications; first, it extends knowledge into the notion of third place which underlies the broader domain of servicescape. It also extends understanding of the significance of third places in practicing consumer centric marketing through consumer empowerment. The study also contributes to understanding how third places enhance seniors ' social capital through social engagement.

The managerial implications suggested by the findings provide a number of aspects that managers may consider in relation to service places in three key broad categories of customer-firm interest: improve customer patronage through community engagement, improve local business practices via customer-owner friendship, and redesigning spatial settings to deliver meaningful customer experiences.

This paper uses the concepts of social engagement within customer community in third places for the development of social capital and empowerment. It provides a customer centric focus to servicescape and incorporates recent works on third places, empowerment, social capital and loyalty.

The purpose of this paper is to offer a framework of third-place value offering that explains how specific consumer groups’, senior citizens, customer-to-customer engagement in third places can develop their value experiences.

Data were collected for two studies from senior citizen clubs in Australia. Study 1 uses focus group (12) and is analysed with QSR NVivo software following content analysis. Study 2 is based on 324 surveys and is analysed with AMOS version 24 software.

Study 1 identifies eight themes based on 29 main codes to develop a framework on the value offerings of third-place value and its consumer-centric effect on seniors’ loyalty and social capital. The themes under social capital and loyalty contributed to a better understanding of how consumers engage with each other in social clubs and develop their social capital. The results of Study 2 support the conceptualisation of third-place value offering as a reflective model and confirm the model’s nomological validity in relation to seniors’ loyalty and social capital outcomes.

The only limitation of the paper is that it presents findings based on data collected in a regional place in Australia.

The findings provide three practical implications for managers to consider in relation to service places: improve consumer patronage through community engagement, improve local business practices via consumer–owner friendship and redesign spatial settings to deliver meaningful consumer experiences.

The present study has three social implications; first, it highlights the significant role of third places in bringing isolated groups of community together for regular interaction and socialisation. It also extends understanding on senior citizen customers and their consumption experiences within third places for value creation. The study also contributes to understanding how senior citizen customers develop loyalty towards third places and enhance their social capital through social engagement in the place.

This paper uses consumption experience to develop the consumer value in third places. It provides a consumer-centric focus to servicescape and incorporates recent works on third places, value, social capital and loyalty.

This paper aims to reveal the marshalling of an emotion – loneliness – over time for the construction of relationships between advertisers and consumers between 1909 and 1934, paying attention to the shifting contexts in which these relationships were built, maintained and extended. It also draws attention to the ways in which advertising and marketing work in society, and advances the understanding of the development of consumer culture in Australia.

The paper uses textual analysis of letters from readers and editorial content published in the magazine over a 25-year period, supplemented by material from newspapers and memoirs.

The paper reveals how a women’s magazine marshalled the loneliness of Australian women, especially rural Australian women, to attach them to the magazine and its advertisers. Over 25 years, the magazine editors built a reservoir of trust between readers and the magazine. When the economy turned, this reservoir could be drawn upon to maintain reader attachment and maximise sales.

This paper examines the use of emotion in just one magazine. A comparative study would be beneficial to see whether this exploitation of emotion was widespread.

The paper suggests the importance of emotion as a tool for attaching consumers to brands and for maintaining that attachment through financial difficulties.

This paper supports the turn to the study of emotion in history and, specifically, in the development of consumer culture.

The United Nation’s Convention of the Rights of Persons with Disabilities in 2006 declared the need for countries to facilitate the right of individuals with disabilities to their full inclusion and participation within communities across the globe. The community clearly plays a necessary role in the overall preparation and quality of life of students with disabilities and their families. The present chapter will specifically address the role of the community within instructional programming and parent advocacy. First, the chapter discusses the importance of integrating community experiences within inclusive K-12 preparation for students with disabilities for the purpose of enhancing students’ postsecondary outcomes. Second, the chapter reviews the role of community organizations in supporting parental advocacy for effective inclusive programming while highlighting the work of two specific community agencies. These sections are followed by concluding comments emphasizing the role of schools and community-based organizations in supporting inclusive education, community-based instruction, and family advocacy for students with disabilities.

The purpose of this paper is to report on a three year research project exploring the impacts of an intervention seeking to reduce social isolation in older people.

This study used qualitative research methods and a participative approach to facilitate the generation of the research objectives and process. Participant observation and individual/focus group interviews were used to collect data from 100 participants.

Overall the perceived benefits for attendees of attending the friendship clubs fell into three key areas: improved well being, social relations and mental and physical health.

A weakness of the participant observation method includes the possibility that the presence of the researcher influenced the findings. The process of gaining different data sets (observation, interviews and focus groups) and checking findings with another researcher and the research participants as the study progressed reduced the likelihood of this bias occurring. This study only considered individuals who attended the clubs. There are many who may not get this opportunity and the issue of how to engage with them through this type of intervention is not addressed.

This study adds to the literature to guide practice and service provision as it introduces the finding that even when living with their families, older people can still feel socially isolated. In addition, this study found that club members and volunteers viewed themselves as assets for each other, offering support, advice and friendship – an important finding for service commissioners and providers.

If social capital is understood as the ability to access resources through social ties, it is clearly important to understand how people form social ties and what types of ties they form. Research has sought to do this, but it has seldom directly examined how organisations shape these processes and outcomes. The paper aims to discuss this issue.

In-depth, comparative case study research was conducted at two voluntary sport organisations in the UK, involving 23 in-depth interviews and participant observation over a 15-month period.

The case studies showed how key organisational practices structured, in meaningful ways, people’s opportunities for interaction and the nature of that interaction, shaping the ways in which they formed ties and exchanged resources. The organisations fostered the formation of both strong and weak ties, but also “compartmentally intimate” ties.

The research challenges individualistic, rational choice accounts of tie formation, highlighting the role of organisations as brokers. In addition, interviewees’ accounts challenge well-accepted distinctions between strong and weak ties, by demonstrating the importance of ongoing, context-specific interaction.

This research offers a rare, direct insight into the role of organisations in shaping people’s ongoing social relationships. In doing so, it problematises existing conceptualisations of social capital and social ties and highlights an alternative, organisationally embedded, process-based perspective on social capital.

Limits may be placed on sociability through a sense of social superiority (middle‐class people separating themselves from working‐class on a housing estate), through strength of sociability within the nuclear family limiting outside contacts, or through placing a value on solitude and personal privacy. Inadequate attention has been paid to those who actually “choose” social isolation; in particular, the group formed by those who never marry but choose the single life and its attendant type of social isolation would be worth study, giving consideration to the reasons behind such choices.

This study aims to identify the benefits and costs of participation in small group consumption communities (SGCCs), and understand how benefits and costs experienced in these communities differ from those experienced in large group consumption communities (LGCCs).

Thematic analysis of data collected through multi-method approach comprising depth-interviews, participant observation of community events and online community forums was used to identify benefits and costs of SGCC participation.

Eight benefits and three costs of SGCC participation were identified. While some benefits and costs were found to be similar to those identified in LGCCs earlier, their experience and manifestation was found to differ significantly in SGCCs.

Data were collected from SGCCs located in India (collectivist culture). Hence, findings may not be reflective of individualist cultures.

Understanding that benefits and costs of community participation are experienced differently in SGCCs and LGCCs may be useful input for managers wanting to seed/nurture consumption communities. By increasing benefits and reducing costs, managers can transform communities into vibrant social systems, and thereby improve members’ engagement and involvement.

Of the eight benefits identified in the study, two benefits – Escape and Meaningful Engagement are identified for the first time. The study also explores costs of SGCC participation (an area hitherto under explored) in detail. In addition, the study illustrates how some of the benefits despite being seemingly similar in SGCCs and LGCCs are inherently different.

Social networking platforms are increasingly using the Follower Link Prediction tool in an effort to expand the number of their users. It facilitates the discovery of previously unidentified individuals and can be employed to determine the relationships among the nodes in a social network. On the other hand, social site firms use follower–followee link prediction (FFLP) to increase their user base. FFLP can help identify unfamiliar people and determine node-to-node links in a social network. Choosing the appropriate person to follow becomes crucial as the number of users increases. A hybrid model employing the Ensemble Learning algorithm for FFLP (HMELA) is proposed to advise the formation of new follower links in large networks.

HMELA includes fundamental classification techniques for treating link prediction as a binary classification problem. The data sets are represented using a variety of machine-learning-friendly hybrid graph features. The HMELA is evaluated using six real-world social network data sets.

The first set of experiments used exploratory data analysis on a di-graph to produce a balanced matrix. The second set of experiments compared the benchmark and hybrid features on data sets. This was followed by using benchmark classifiers and ensemble learning methods. The experiments show that the proposed (HMELA) method predicts missing links better than other methods.

A hybrid suggested model for link prediction is proposed in this paper. The suggested HMELA model makes use of AUC scores to predict new future links. The proposed approach facilitates comprehension and insight into the domain of link prediction. This work is almost entirely aimed at academics, practitioners, and those involved in the field of social networks, etc. Also, the model is quite effective in the field of product recommendation and in recommending a new friend and user on social networks.

The outcome on six benchmark data sets revealed that when the HMELA strategy had been applied to all of the selected data sets, the area under the curve (AUC) scores were greater than when individual techniques were applied to the same data sets. Using the HMELA technique, the maximum AUC score in the Facebook data set has been increased by 10.3 per cent from 0.8449 to 0.9479. There has also been an 8.53 per cent increase in the accuracy of the Net Science, Karate Club and USAir databases. As a result, the HMELA strategy outperforms every other strategy tested in the study.