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This paper aims to investigate the influential aspects of industrial branding in building customer brand engagement from the buyer’s and the seller’s points of view. Collecting buyer and seller information is essential to understand business-to-business interaction better. Buyer’s and seller’s perspective integration is significant for stakeholders to develop proper strategies to achieve customer brand engagement.

This study uses a structural equation model to examine the antecedents of customer brand engagement from the buyer’s perspective; then, the result is compared with the seller’s view by conducting an analytical hierarchy process. The authors exercise 140 valid data from the buyer’s industry and 9 experts from the seller’s industry.

This study finds that in developing customer brand engagement, rational brand quality is the most influential from the buyer’s view and top priority from the seller’s view. Surprisingly, both parties have different perspectives about the second and third priorities. The buyers put emotional brand associations as a second priority; perceived value is meaningless and insignificant. On the contrary, the sellers set the perceived value as the second priority and emotional brand associations as the last.

The respondents from the buyer industry cover various industries, and the research is limited to the buyer and the seller in the chemical polymer emulsion market, a market where product quality and application quality on the buyers’ side are essential and where the buyer–seller interaction is intense. Replicating the study in other industries and cultural backgrounds is recommended for generalization.

The paper’s novelty is that there are different priorities and perspectives from the buyer’s and the seller’s views. This study contributes to industrial brand engagement research studies. Investigation of the buyer’s and the seller’s perspectives in industrial brand engagement research studies is still limited.

Food marketing has long been recognized to influence food preferences, consumption and health, yet little is known about the nature and extent of food marketing to young adults – especially with respect to their real-world encounters with food marketing and the appeals they find persuasive. This study aims to engage young adults to explore the persuasive power of food marketing and its platforms of exposure.

Participatory research with 45 young adults, who used a specially designed mobile app to capture the food marketing they encountered for seven days, including information on brand, product, platform and “power” (i.e. the specific techniques that made the advertisement persuasive).

A total of 618 ads were captured for analysis. Results revealed the dominance of digital platforms (especially Instagram, comprising 43% of ads), fast food and beverage brands (48% of ads) and the top persuasive techniques of visual style, special offer and theme.

This study uniquely draws from framing theory to advance the notions of selection and salience to understand food marketing power. It is the first study of its kind to provide a comprehensive look at the platforms and persuasive techniques of food marketing to adults as selected, captured and tagged by participants. It provides timely insights into young adults and food marketing to adults, including where it is encountered, the (generally unhealthy) brands and products promoted and how it is made meaningful.

This chapter proposes selected cultural values and worldviews of cosmopolitan individual cultural identity as an ideal and model for international and transnational higher education, in teaching and learning, benefitting individuals and institutions. As a “metacultural position” and interactive engagement with the “Other,” cosmopolitan teaching and learning could impact national and global higher education. Such reflection of timeless educational values and ideals could benefit the development higher education systems in our ever more globalizing world.

Conceptually, cosmopolitan identity is defined via a complex literature matrix of key issues and concerns of world citizenship, substantiated and enriched by considerable critical thinking. Empirically, an investigation of highly multilingual students for revelations of their global identity strengthens and furthers this framework. Overall, interdisciplinary insights from literary, social, media and gender studies complement contributions to higher education's universality and values, so as to suit individual, institutional, and international needs.

Cosmopolitan features and values could harmonize global knowledge systems yet without cultural hegemonies, by building cross-cultural standards via best identity notions and practices. Recognizing equally valuable cultural contributions would also improve institutions' diversity, equity, and inclusion, raising educational quality, motivations, and expectations. Cosmopolitan identity could thus educationally enrich and institutionally empower for global complexity and uncertainty.

Educational stakeholders could shape institutions for cosmopolitan cultural values and increased diversity, with transnational norms and practices grounded in local realities, such as improved linguistic competences, or increased cultural understanding and engagement. Individual internationalization could therefore develop parallel to cultural and educational worldviews, expandable and improvable on an open-ended scale.

Drawing upon the stimulus-organism-response model, this study aims to explore the impact of soft aspects of service quality on revisit intention through the mechanism of perceived empathy.

For the examination of the hypothesized relationships, the study adopts structural equation modelling to analyse the data of 562 respondents (i.e. 281 family members and 281 inpatients).

The empirical results suggest that service quality increased family member empathy perception, which, in turn, improved inpatients’ revisit intentions.

Past studies have focused on the roles of overall service quality. The authors have extended the literature by examining the specific but important aspect of service quality and its effects on emotional response. Importantly, the study explains that the affective reactions of a patient’s family, fastened with perceived empathy, have a central role in influencing the patients’ subsequent reactions. Moreover, the prior studies collected the data either from hospital employees or patients. However, in the present study, the authors used a unique sample (family members as well as patients) to have a deeper understanding. Thus, the study enhances the literature on the stimuli-response (i.e. service quality – revisit intentions) relationship in the context of service marketing in general and health care in specific. Important academic and managerial contributions and recommendations for future research are discussed.

The authors study the effect of increasing environmental awareness on shareholders' activism. Specificallly, this study aims to examine whether growing environmental awareness is reflected in more aggressive environmental shareholder proposals.

This study uses the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill disaster as an exogenous event that increased shareholders' environmental awareness. This study analyzes the spill’s effect on the tone of proposals about environmental issues and nonenvironmental topics.

After the disaster, the tone of environmental proposals (i.e. the treatment group) is significantly more negative. In contrast, the tone of nonenvironmental proposals (i.e. the control group) is unaffected. This study interprets this finding as direct evidence that the oil spill led to increased shareholder environmental activism through proposals that targeted the environmental risks surrounding the business more aggressively. By contrast, this study finds no effect of the oil spill on the tone of managers' responses to the proposals, consistent with managers refraining from emphasizing environmental threats.

Anecdotal evidence and recent studies suggest a link between environmental disasters and shareholder pressure for corporate change. However, no prior research has investigated the channel through which shareholders could have exerted such pressure or has looked for direct evidence of it in the negotiations between shareholders and managers. By finding such evidence in shareholder proposals, this study fills in this gap.

The study aims to analyze factors impacting firms’ success and persistence in a digital platform competition using the structure-conduct-performance (SCP) framework. The study also includes real-life cases that are beneficial to academicians and practitioners to understand and develop strategies for success and persistence during uncertainty.

A literature review to identify the factors that impact success and persistence in a digital platform competition was conducted following Webster and Watson (2002). Findings were integrated into a SCP framework to examine and understand the identified factors’ relational impact.

While analyzing factors under the SCP framework, all factors were divided into three categories: those impacting positively, those impacting negatively and those with ambiguous impact on the success and persistence in digital platform competition. Digital platform firms can exploit the positively impacting factors to increase market share by being distinctive from other digital platform firms and becoming dominant by withstanding competition. On the other hand, negatively impacting factors increase barriers to entry, intensify competition and reduce the distinctiveness of digital platform firms. Lastly, a few factors may have either a positive or a negative impact depending upon the particular characteristics of the firm/industry.

The study opens the scope for future research on empirically testing the developed conceptual framework and relationships by developing propositions to posit the possible impact of these factors on digital platforms’ success and persistence.

The study contributed to the existing literature by using SCP framework to analyze the factors affecting firm’s success and persistence in a digital platform competition. Also, the study has discussed the relational impact of factors rather than their impact in isolation.

This article aims to provide a new paradigm for thinking about disability, which can be applied to other social groups, historically invisible and whose rights have been violated. The Model of Communication and Legitimate Acknowledgement of Disability (MCLAD) tries to break with the logic of continuing to add terms and euphemisms around the issue. The author proposes a new line to think about relationships in democratic societies. Taking the step from inclusion to acknowledgment does not imply another way of naming the disability, but rather addressing the problem from concrete practices of recognition. In order to arrive at the proposal of the MCLAD, the author will make a journey that addresses how disability has been understood throughout history, according to the study of different authors.

Disability has been perceived over time in many different ways, which led some authors to build models in order to explain certain social approaches to the subject. This article traces a journey from the first model to the present. In turn, it proposes a new one: the MCLAD, which is characterized by a paradigm shift: moving from inclusion to acknowledgment. To substantiate this, three categories are presented: acknowledgment, distance and vulnerability. The different theories and concepts that support the model will also be presented. The purpose of the MCLAD is to deepen the idea of empowering people with disabilities as part of today’s diverse societies and closing historically constructed gaps which are still in force.

The MCLAD proposes three categories: acknowledgment, distance and vulnerability. In turn, in each of them, there is a link between three axes: person with disability/society/state, analyzing the dynamics of these relationships presented, will provide us with the necessary elements to understand the proposed turnaround.

Although the different models will be presented according to the chronological order of definition over time, all of them still coexist today, in many cases in hybrid and naturalized ways in social practices. Recognizing what practices and conceptions are behind each model, allows us to recognize and resignify the ways of communicating toward people with disabilities (PWD) and on the issue of disability. It also allows other specific recognition practices, such as the legitimization of public policies from the laws that protect them.

To replace the paradigm of inclusion for that of acknowledgment and to recognize how the three categories (acknowledgment, distance and vulnerability) are linked with the three issues (PWD – society and state) allowing specific relationship and practises of legitimate or not acknowledgement. When the author affirms that the MCLAD implies a paradigm shift, the author means that it provides some elements from legitimate acknowledgment to complement aspects which inclusion does not address, and that the other models did not take into account. These are: the self-acknowledgment of people with disabilities and the sense of responsibility linked to empowerment; vulnerability as a category of reconciliation, which is typical of every human being; the contribution of the Phenomenology of the Among to think about how relationships and practices actually occur in society and, finally, the role of the state, which must watch over all its citizens, avoiding the distance between discourse (laws) and practices and, above all, avoiding exclusion from the system due to lack of monitoring of actions.

It should be noted that the MCLAD starts from the idea of language as a constructor of realities and conceives communication as an enabler of the acknowledgment of the other, who is also subject to rights. At the same time, it vindicates the voice of people with disabilities as protagonists (“Nothing about us without us”) and fosters the need for PWD themselves to be active in their struggles, promulgating legitimate acknowledgment. At the same time, it points out that the empowerment of PWD implies not only that they are aware of their rights but also that they themselves know and fulfill their duties within the democratic societies of which they are a part of and which, at least discursively, are regulated by laws. In other words, being empowered is also being responsible for living in society.

The main contribution that the MCLAD has to offer is to replace the paradigm of inclusion for that of acknowledgment. And, throughout the path followed in this article, an attempt has been made to establish that the turnaround is not to capriciously install a new concept (acknowledgment), but to demonstrate that the new paradigm involves three categories that sustain and support a model that seeks to be the basis for effective public policies, for a society that values diversity and for people who feel worthy and contribute to dignify others.

A region’s transforming care partnership identified that autistic adults without an intellectual disability (ID) may be falling through gaps in services when presenting with a significant emotional and/or behavioural need in the absence of a mental health diagnosis. The region’s intensive support teams (ISTs) for adults with ID therefore piloted a short-term “behavioural support service” for this population. The purpose of this paper is to evaluate this pilot.

This study represents a mixed-methods service evaluation over a four year pilot period. The quantitative component examined referral rates and demographic data of accepted and declined referrals; and length of referral episodes and Health of The Nation Outcomes Scores (HoNOS) for accepted referrals. The qualitative component used thematic analysis to identify key themes relating to reasons for referral, clinical/therapeutic needs, and the models of support that most informed assessments and interventions at individual and systems levels.

The ISTs accepted 30 referrals and declined 53. Most accepted referrals were male (83%), and under 24 years old (57%). Average HoNOS scores were above the thresholds generally associated with hospital admission. Key qualitative themes were: transitional support; sexual risks/vulnerabilities; physical aggression; domestic violence; and attachment, trauma and personality difficulties. Support mostly followed psychotherapeutic modalities couched in trauma, attachment and second- and third-wave cognitive behavioural therapies. Positive Behaviour Support (PBS) did not emerge as a model of preference for service users or professionals.

This project represents one of the first of this type for autistic adults without an ID in the UK. It provides recommendations for future service development and research, with implications for Transforming Care policy and guidance.