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Building on Walter Benjamin's philosophical reflections on aura and authenticity, this article aims to conceptualise and theorise brand aura.

This article extends understanding of brand aura within the management, marketing and tourism literature with reference to Benjamin's framing of aura and authenticity in time and space.

Within a Benjaminian framework this article theorises brand aura and offers a conceptualisation of the antecedents of brand aura. It explores the duality of what is termed here as artefactual authenticity and existential authenticity. It illustrates the central role of consumers' mémoire involontaire in the realisation of brand aura. Within this Benjaminian framework, the article explores how artefactual authenticity is preceded by brand essence, while existential authenticity precedes brand essence. Implications for the management of the service encounter are discussed with reference to territorial legitimacy and historical testimony in the context of the firm's role in supporting consumer experiential engagement.

This article advances theoretical understanding of how consumers engage experientially with brand aura and how firms curate brand aura.

Archives are repositories of memory, providing reliable evidence for examining the past. The four types of memory – personal, collective, historical, and archival – interact in complex and sometimes baffling ways to enable one to understand the past and to draw lessons from it. Archival memory is a social construct reflecting power relationships in society. Archivists and manuscripts curators play the important role of mediator in selecting records for preservation and providing research access to such collections. By recognizing and overcoming the bias toward records of powerful groups in society, archivists can provide a more balanced perspective on the past, and enable future generations to examine and evaluate the activities and contributions of all voices in one’s culture. Archives thus serve an important role in identifying and preserving the documentation that forms one’s historical memory.

This research explored the storytelling (collection, curation and use) in the Cabrach, a remote Scottish glen. This study aims to capture the methodological process of storytelling and curation of heritage knowledge through the lens of the Cabrach's whisky distilling history, a central part of the area's cultural heritage, tangible and intangible. This research was conceptualised as “telling the story of telling the story of the Cabrach”. It was concerned with how the history, heritage, historiography and testimony associated with the parish could be harvested, made sense of and subsequently used.

The study was epistemological in nature and the research was concerned with how heritage knowledge is gathered, curated and understood. It was built around the collection of knowledge through expert testimony from Colin Mackenzie and Alan Winchester, who have extensively researched aspects of life in the Cabrach. This was done using a series of theme-based but free-flowing conversational workshop involving participants and research team. Issues of trust and authority in the research team were crucial. Data were recorded, transcribed and coded. A conceptual model for heritage storytelling in the Cabrach was developed together with a transferable version for other contexts.

The research was conceived around identifying the stories of the Cabrach and grouping them into cohesive narrative themes focused on the most important aspect of the glen's history (the development of malt whisky distilling). The research showed how all crucial narratives associated with the Cabrach were interconnected with that malt whisky story. It was concerned with identifying broad thematic narratives rather than the specific detailed stories themselves, but also from a methodological perspective how stories around those themes could be collected, curated and used. It presents the outcome of “expert testimony” oral history conversations and presents a conceptual model for the curation of heritage knowledge.

This paper reports on research which focuses on the confluence of those issues of heritage-led regeneration, intangible cultural heritage, as well as how stories of and from, about and for, a distinctive community in North-East Scotland can be collected, curated and displayed. It presents methodological conceptualisations as well as focused areas of results which can be used to create a strong and inclusive narrative to encapsulate the durable sense of place and support the revival of an economically viable and sustainable community.

This conceptual model offers a framework with universal elements (Place, People, Perception) alongside a strong core narrative of storytelling. That core element may vary but the outer elements remain the same, with people and place being omnipresent and the need to build an emotional or visceral connection with visitors being crucial, beyond “telling stories” which might be regarded as parochial or narrowly focused. The model informs how communities and heritage organisations tell their stories in an authentic and proportionate manner. This can help shape and explain cultures and identities and support visitors' understanding of, and connection with, places they visit and experience.

The originality lies in two principal areas, the exploration of the narratives of a singularly distinctive community – the Cabrach – which plays a disproportionately significant role in the development of malt whisky distilling in Scotland; and also in terms of the methodological approach to the collection and curation of heritage storytelling, drawing not on first-hand accounts as in conventional oral history approaches but through the expert testimony of two historical and ethnographic researchers. The value is demonstrating the creation of a conceptual model which can be transferred to other contexts.

Mediated trauma pumped through information and communication technologies (ICTs), in highlighting the shared vulnerabilities and precarity of human lives, is also invested in the re-distribution and re-articulation of wounding and violence. This chapter examines what is transacted in the dissemination of human trauma through ICTs and how, within this affective architecture, we can come to understand the notions of wounding and woundedness as a pervasive condition of modernity invoking the human figure as continuously transgressed with the enlargement of trauma as a site of the political, visceral and commemorative whilst raising questions over our human qualities to feel as a community of affect through technologies which transmute trauma as part of their material commodification. The transmuting of trauma through technologies in the digital age means that trauma is re-absorbed as data and altered through its platform economics. Equally, trauma can be refracted through the digital terrain as banal content in which the wounded human becomes a transacted form within an incongruous spectrum ranging from the politics of pity to voyeurism. In the digital economy, trauma imagery enters another realm of disorientation in which it is pulled into typologies and vast ahistorical image repertories that hold non-contextual image as data. The digital economy re-modulates trauma through its own modes of (il)logic and turbulence, patterning trauma through its own modes of violence.

Can we broaden the boundaries of the history of economic thought to include positionalities articulated by grassroots movements? Following Keynes’s famous remark from General Theory that ‘practical men […] are usually the slaves of some defunct economist,’ we might be wont to dismiss such a push from below. While it is sometimes true that grassroots movements channel preexisting economic thought, I wish to argue that grassroots economic thought can also precede developments subsequently elaborated by economists. This paper considers such a case: by women at the intersection of the women’s liberation movement and the claimants’ unions movement in 1970s Britain. Oral historical and archival work on these working-class women and on achievements such as their succeeding to establish unconditional basic income as an official demand of the British Women’s Liberation Movement forms the springboard for my reconstruction of the grassroots feminist economic thought underpinning the women’s basic income demand. I hope to demonstrate, firstly, how this was a prefiguration of ideas later developed by feminist economists and philosophers; secondly, how unique it was for its time and a consequence of the intersectionality of class, gender, race, and dis/ability. Thirdly, I should like to suggest that bringing into the fold this particular grassroots feminist economic thought on basic income would widen the mainstream understanding and historiography of the idea of basic income. Lastly, I hope to make the point that, within the history of economic thought, grassroots economic thought ought to be heeded far more than it currently is.

This chapter analyzes Mao Zedong’s decision-making code in foreign policy decisions made during his years as China’s leader: 1949–1976. I examine six decisions in China’s foreign policy during Mao’s tenure: China’s involvement in the Korea war (1951), Annexation of Tibet (1951), attacking the Taiwanese islands (1954), China’s war with India (1962), its involvement in the Vietnamese war (1964), and 1969 incident with the Soviet Army. This, in order to shed more light on the decision-making of leaders from the Far East, and to try and understand insights pertaining to the current foreign policy of China.

The analysis was conducted using the Applied Decision Analysis (ADA) method, based on historical materials, testimonies, and reports. The analysis demonstrates that Mao followed the poliheuristic decision rule in these decisions. Chairman Mao was making his decisions while choosing the most rational, cost-effective decision among alternatives that did not place his political status at risk.

The historic assets are heterogeneous and different to each other, and for this reason, consolidated valuation methodologies do not exist in practice or in the literature. It is, therefore, necessary to dwell on the study of a particular historic building type or category. The assessment process of the valuers of Venetian Villas was explored, focusing on the study of the valuation function construction. The paper investigated if a possible value function, based on the partition of the characteristics, which significantly influence the value, exists and it is generalizable to the whole set of Venetian Villas. The purpose of this paper is to contribute knowledge on the economic valuation of Venetian Villas.

An application of Hedonic Pricing study to a database of 71 Venetian Villas has been tested. This statistical procedure allowed the authors to discover which results in a percentage of property values can be attributed to the historical characteristics of a building. Using a multiple linear regression and its variables an analysis of residuals and data relating to the variance has been performed.

This research identifies and proposes, therefore, a valuation approach that can be generalizable to the whole set of Venetian Villas (over 4,000 properties). The models show that the most important variables which influence the value of the villas are: age, internal and external area, maintenance conditions, and author. This model could be used for future valuations of the same type of asset.

The model enables valuers to address better to the property valuation of the Venetian Villas through the valuation functions, which suggest which are the main features which focus in the case of a Venetian Villa valuation and what impact they have on the value asset. The model can be specifically used for valuation reports in the enhancement project of such properties.

The phenomenon of crisis – of all kinds and at all levels – provides abundant material for study in disciplines centered on the human being. The twentieth century’s complex landscape provides valuable elements for developing a “morphology of crisis,” where crises of all types can be identified, including personal, family, social, economic, ethical, scientific, philosophical, and historical ones. The broad range of crises that exists today requires further study to better understand the concept, and Reinhart Koselleck offered perhaps the most significant interpretative keys for such a task. In his work, Critique and Crisis (1954), Koselleck developed a particularly lucid theory of crisis. His vast historical erudition, steeped in a philosophical quest, offers contemporary readers an approach to the issue of crisis, elucidating its most relevant requirements and challenges.

This chapter studies the historical use of the word crisis, aiming to better understand both the term and whether or not it preserves the concept’s invariable foundation and transversal elements, namely the experience of time as a turning point between the past and future, the need for judgment to guide the development of a particular situation, and a decision that gives shape to a new state of affairs.

This analysis is not just limited to understanding Koselleck’s account of the crisis concept; it also tests and addresses its internal structure. The description of the diversity of crisis phenomena at the beginning supports assessment of the illuminating power of Koselleck’s concept of crisis.

This article sets out to show how principles and questions about method that underlie a way of interpreting the discipline of conservation and restoration can find results in research and studies, aiming at achieving even conscious reuse process. The occasion is the very recent research performed on the former Church of Saints Gerolamo and Francesco Saverio in Genoa, Italy, the Jesuit church annexed to the 17th-century College of the order. It is a small Baroque jewel in the heart of the ancient city, former University Library and actually abandoned, forgotten for years, inaccessible and awaiting a new use.

The two-year work carried out on the monumental building was conducted according to a study and research methodology developed and refined over the years within the activities of the School of Specialisation in Architectural Heritage and Landscape of the University of Genoa. It is a multidisciplinary and rigorous approach, which aims to train high-level professionals, up-to-date and aware of the multiple problems that interventions on existing buildings, especially of a monumental nature, involve.

The biennal study has been carried out within the activities of the Post-Graduate Programme in Architectural Heritage and Landscape of the University of Genoa. The work methodology faces the challenges of the contemporary complexity, raised by the progressive broadening of the concept of cultural “heritage” and by the problems of its conservation, its active safeguard and its reuse: safety in respect of seismic risk, fire and hydro geological instability, universal accessibility – cognitive, physical and alternative – resource efficiency, comfort and savings in energy consumption, sustainability, communication and involvement of local communities and stakeholders.

The goals of the work were the following: understanding of the architectural heritage, through the correlated study of its geometries, elements and construction materials, surfaces, structures, spaces and functions; understanding of the transformations that the building has undergone over time, relating the results of historical reconstructions from indirect sources and those of direct archaeological analysis; assessment of the state of conservation of the building recognising phenomena of deterioration, damage, faults and deficits that affect materials, construction elements, systems and structures; identification of the causes and extent of damage, faults and deficits, assessing the vulnerability and level of exposure of the asset to the aggression of environmental factors and related risks; evaluation of the compatibility between the characteristics of the available spaces, the primary needs of conservation, the instance of regeneration and possible new uses; the definition of criteria and guidelines for establishing the planning of conservation, restoration and redevelopment interventions.