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According to legend, the fall of Troy was accomplished by a clever ruse. After 10 years of unsuccessfully dashing themselves against the impregnable walls of Troy, the Greeks pretended to give up and sail away from the besieged City, leaving behind a giant, hollow wooden horse. The Trojans, considering the wooden horse to be symbolic of their hard‐earned victory, demolished the walls that had protected them for so long and triumphantly wheeled the horse inside their city. Only a handful of the jubilant Trojans suspected that there might be something wrong. One of them, supposedly the high priest, is said to have muttered the memorable phrase as the horse was pushed and dragged into Troy, “Whatever that thing is, I fear the Greeks bearing gifts.” Fateful and prescient words. That night, as the reveling Trojans slept, Greek soldiers poured out of the hollow wooden horse and the fall of Troy was at long last accomplished. The modern world has its counterpart to the lesson of Troy: money laundering. And the results can be equally as devastating to the modern business person: loss of reputation, draconian fines, bankruptcy, imprisonment. Once let a money launderer, the modern equivalent of the Trojan Horse, into a business without heeding the warning to “fear the Greeks bearing gifts” and this can be the result. It is not so long ago that money laundering was relatively easy to recognize. It involved scruffy looking characters delivering hordes of cash in cardboard boxes, paper shopping bags, duffel bags, suitcases and the like. More often than not, the delivery persons had not even counted the hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash they were delivering. Receipts never were expected. A classic example is the Miami bank in which over $242 million in cash was deposited into one checking account in one branch in the space of eight months, all in cash and all delivered to the bank in precisely the manner just described. In that case, the cash poured in so quickly that the bank itself limited the amount of cash it would accept ‐ to no more than $2 million per day.

Not that long ago, half of all sales research was demonstrably if not unequivocally “atheoretical” (Williams and Plouffe, 2007). The foundational argument of this paper is that stronger theoretical development and application of theory in sales research is critical for the sales field to retain its relevancy. The purpose of this paper is to underscore that deliberate and cogent application of HWV (2018) is scant in the recent sales literature (over five years after publication in Journal of Marketing) for one or both of two reasons: scholars either do not understand the paper and/or are fearful of (mis)applying it.

More than simply introducing the articles to this special issue of the European Journal of Marketing (EJM), this paper also makes a number of important, overdue contributions. Although Hartmann, Wieland and Vargo’s JM (HWV, 2018) theoretical and conceptual paper has been well-received by the sales community, it has seen limited meaningful integration or application in sales research since its publication. This paper thus clarifies key misunderstandings and misperceptions with HWV (2018) so that sales researchers can more impactfully apply it to future sales research.

This paper identifies and then explains key aspects of service-dominant logic (S-D logic) and commonly misapplied and/or misunderstood aspects of HWV (2018) to guide future sales research. Ultimately, the overarching goal of this special issue of EJM is to focus a “spotlight” on sales theory development, while simultaneously demonstrating – through the five articles the special issue reports – that with purposeful effort, rich theoretical insights can effectively be applied to both “classic” and more current and emergent sales research topics.

Because HWV (2018) draw heavily upon S-D logic, it follows that some aspects of their article have been misinterpreted or misapplied by sales scholars. In particular, the critical concept of “crossing points” (both of the “thick” and “thin” variety) are explicated and detailed further, so as to afford sales researchers with better knowledge and insight on how to apply these key tools within HWV (2018).

The practical implications of this paper primarily revolve around further educating and clarifying for sales researchers “how” to better apply HWV (2018) to sales research, rather than simply citing it in passing. The paper also concludes by providing a summary and introduction to each of the five EJM special issue articles.

The originality and value of this paper and this special issue of the EJM is twofold. First, both this paper and the entire special issue itself emphasize the ongoing importance of advancing sales research through the meaningful and cogent application of theory. Second, the paper demonstrates that purposeful effort can lead to successful applications of HWV (2018) – as exhibited by the five articles in the EJM special issue – such that rich theoretical insights can be woven into both traditional and contemporary sales research topics.

The purpose of this paper is to clarify the relationship between subjective experience of an event, motivational style for participating and satisfaction afterwards. It proposes that subjective experience of positive affect acts as a mediator between motivation and satisfaction.

The paper opted for a quantitative survey among 285 respondents asking about their motivation to participate in celebrating Queen's Day, a Dutch national event around the birthday of the Queen Mother. Their satisfaction levels and subjective experience of the event were collected after the event. The (mediation) hypotheses were tested through a series of regression analyses.

The paper provides empirical insights about how subjective experience mediates the effect between motivational style and satisfaction.

This paper fulfils an identified need to study the effects of subjective experience in events.

Iron and steel is an old industry. As a cyclical and a strategically important industry, it has long been subject to extensive government intervention in most countries, including Britain. When Labour won the general election in 1945, it was already pledged to nationalise several industries, including coal and steel. But steel had a lower priority than coal; the labour movement had not agreed a plan for steel nationalisation, which became the most complex and bitterly contested of the post‐war nationalisations.

The marketing concept is an idea that has been adopted in non‐marketing contexts, such as the relationships between universities and their students. This paper aims to posit that marketing metaphors are inappropriate to describe the student‐university relationship.

The authors provide a conceptual discussion of the topic.

The use of marketing metaphors appears sometimes to be indiscriminate and the appropriateness to use them in student‐university relationships is questioned in this article.

This notion of students as customers has caused a misinterpretation of the relationship between universities and students.

Students should not be viewed as customers of the university, but as citizens of the university community. The contention contained within this paper is that the customer metaphor is inappropriate to describe students' relationships to universities.

The use of marketing buzzwords does not contribute to a correct description or an accurate understanding of the student‐university relationship. On the contrary, misconceptions and misunderstandings flourish due to misleading terminology and contradictory vocabulary. These frameworks tend to be illusionary if used in non‐marketing contexts, such as universities.

Changes in Australian segment reporting standards over the last decade changed the required disaggregation of segment information. The purpose of this paper is to investigate whether increased disaggregation has implications for users' confidence in decisions based on segment reports and perceptions of segment reporting usefulness.

Using an experiment based on the differences between the original AASB 1005 and the more detailed requirements of AASB 114, the authors test whether segment report users' confidence in forecasting and their perceptions of segment report usefulness differ between the different information sets provided under these standards.

It was found that the more disaggregated or finer reports based on AASB 114 provide significantly more confidence to users, compared to the coarser segment reports based on the original AASB 1005, but this is not associated with differences in segment report usefulness scores.

The authors' experiment is based on AASB 1005 and AASB 114 and the results cannot be generalized to differences with other reporting standards. Examination of differences in recently released AASB 8 may reveal different implications for users' confidence and perceptions of usefulness. More generally, other tests of usefulness are needed to confirm whether opinions of usefulness that are not confirmed by decision‐making practices provide a reliable basis for determining usefulness.

By confirming that decision makers' confidence can be increased by the provision of finer information sets, the authors' results have practical implications for accounting standard setting.

By testing the impact of report differences on user decision confidence, the paper addresses a previously overlooked issue.

This paper seeks to provide a textual analysis of the anti money laundering practices of the central banks of Australia (Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA)) and Ukraine (National Bank of Ukraine (NBU)).

The analysis is performed two ways by both calculating a disclosure index and through use of textual analysis.

The results show very low levels of anti money laundering disclosures by both NBU and RBA with NBU usually showing more. Textual analysis reveals that the NBU is prepared to internalise its discussion on anti‐money laundering discussing wide‐ranging topics. There appears to be a concerted communication effort by NBU to tackle the issues of money laundering head‐on. Textual analysis of the RBA's four annual reports show a clipped discourse on anti‐money laundering, treating it as if it were a distant concern. Over the four year period, there is little acknowledgement in the way of RBA textual discourse that Australia is a jurisdiction of primary concern.

The value of this paper is that, it emphasizes that, if the globalised activity of money laundering is to be crushed further energies are needed to woo central banks from varied backgrounds into exerting their considerable resources toward anti‐money laundering enforcement.

Purpose – Using elective egg and sperm freezing as a case to compare representations of men and women as agents of biological reproduction, this chapter aims to understand how gender and risk are co-produced in the context of new reproductive technologies (NRTs).

Methodology – Through a content analysis of newspaper articles published between 1980 and 2016 about egg and sperm freezing, the author traces how fertility risks facing men and women are portrayed in the media.

Findings – Candidates for egg freezing were portrayed in one of the three ways: as cancer patients, career women, or single and waiting for a partner. The ideal users of sperm freezing are depicted in primarily two ways: as cancer patients and as employees in professions with hazardous working conditions. Threats to future fertility for women pursuing careers uninterrupted by pregnancy and child-rearing and women seeking romantic partners are largely portrayed as the result of internal risks. However, threats to future fertility for men working in dangerous professions are largely portrayed as external to them.

Research Limitations – Race and class did not emerge as dominant themes in these data; given the lack of accessibility to NRTs by class and race, this silence must be interrogated by further research.

Value – By comparing the constructions of at-risk groups, the author argues the medicalization of reproduction is gendered as fertility risks portrayed in the media take on a different character between men and women. This research shows how the gendered construction of infertility risk reinforces normative expectations around child-rearing and perpetuates gender inequity in parenting norms.

In this chapter, I reflect on the place of hope in activist criminology. Offering reflections from my own activist scholarship, this chapter draws out the ways in which hope structures and sustains our work across temporal frames and distinct modes of academic practice. This chapter develops a hopeful analysis of lineage, memory and resistance, reflecting on my participatory research with the Tamil community in London, and reflects on the revival of utopian thought in criminological scholarship. Hopeful imaginaries of an abolitionist future inform my scholar-activism with Reclaim Holloway – an abolitionist collective formed to influence the redevelopment of the Holloway prison site. I describe this future-oriented work before considering hope as a practice in the present, focusing on ‘pedagogies of hope’ as activist criminology in the classroom.

Traditional construction planning relies upon the critical path method and bar charts. Both of these methods suffer from visualization and timing issues that could be addressed by 4D technology specifically geared to meet the needs of the construction industry. The purpose of this paper is to propose a new construction planning approach based on simulation by using a game engine.

A 4D automatic simulation tool was developed and a case study was carried out. The proposed tool was used to simulate and optimize the plans for the installation of a temporary platform for piling in a civil construction project in Hong Kong. The tool simulated the result of the construction process with three variables: equipment, site layout and schedule. Through this, the construction team was able to repeatedly simulate a range of options.

The results indicate that the proposed approach can provide a user-friendly 4D simulation platform for the construction industry. The simulation can also identify the solution being sought by the construction team. The paper also identifies directions for further development of the 4D technology as an aid in construction planning and decision making.

The tests on the tool are limited to a single case study and further research is needed to test the use of game engines for construction planning in different construction projects to verify its effectiveness. Future research could also explore the use of alternative game engines and compare their performance and results.

The authors proposed the use of game engine to simulate the construction process based on resources, working space and construction schedule. The developed tool can be used by end-users without simulation experience.