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Wicked problems require holistic and systemic thinking that accommodates interdisciplinary solutions and cross-sectoral collaborations between private and public sectors. This paper explores how public relations (PR) – as a boundary-spanning function at the nexus of corporate and political discourse – can support societies to tackle wicked problems.

This conceptual paper synthesizes literature on PR with a service ecosystem perspective. The authors use the service ecosystem design framework to structure the PR literature and develop a model of service ecosystem shaping for social change, which highlights the important role that PR can play in shaping processes.

The authors explicate how PR can (1) facilitate value cocreation processes between broad sets of stakeholders that drive positive social change, (2) shape institutional arrangements in general and public discourse in particular, (3) provide a platform for recursive feedback loops of reflexivity and (re)formation that enables discourse to ripple through nested service ecosystems and (4) guide collective shaping efforts by bringing stakeholder concerns and beliefs into the open, which provides a foundation for collective sense-making of wicked problems and their solutions.

This paper explains the complexity of shaping service ecosystems for positive social change. Specifically, it highlights how solving wicked problems and driving social change requires reconfiguration of the institutional arrangements that guide various nested service ecosystems. The authors discuss in detail how PR can contribute to the shaping of service ecosystems for social change and present a future research agenda for both service and PR scholars to consider.

The purpose of this paper is to clarify how brand meaning evolves as an emergent property through the cocreation processes of stakeholders on multiple levels of a brand's service ecosystem. This provides new insight into the intersection between brands, consumers and society, and emphasizes the institutionally situated nature of brand meaning cocreation processes. It further lays a holistic foundation for a much-needed discussion on purpose-driven branding.

Combining the ecosystem perspective of branding with the concept of social emergence allows clarification of brand meaning cocreation at different levels of aggregation. Emergence means collective phenomena – like social structures, concepts, preferences, states, mechanisms, laws and brand meaning – manifest from the interactions of individuals. Drawing on Sawyer's (2005) social emergence perspective, the authors propose a processual multi-level framework to explore brand meaning emergence.

Our framework spans five levels of brand meaning emergence: individual (e.g. employees and customers); interactional (e.g. where work teams or friend groups interact); relational (e.g. where internal and external actors meet); strategic (e.g. markets and strategic alliances); and systemic (e.g. regulators, NGOs and society). It acknowledges that brand positioning is an inherently co-creative process of negotiating value propositions and aligning behaviors and beliefs among broad sets of actors, as opposed to a firm-centric task.

Service research has only recently embraced a macro–micro perspective of branding processes. This paper extends that perspective by paying attention to the nested service ecosystems in which brand meaning emerges and the degree to which this process can (and cannot) be navigated by individual actors.

This paper aims to investigate two seminal market-scanning frameworks – the five-forces analysis and PESTEL environmental scanning tool – to assess their readiness for anticipating market-shaping acts.

Drawing on the market-shaping literature that conceptualizes markets as complex adaptive systems, this conceptual paper interrogates the underlying assumptions and “blind spots” in two seminal market-scanning frameworks. The paper showcases three illustrative vignettes in which non-industry actors catalyzed market change in ways that these market-scanning frameworks would not be able to anticipate.

Marketing strategists can be “blindsided” as seminal market-scanning frameworks have either too narrow an interpretation of market change or are too broad to anticipate specific types of market-shaping acts. The assumptions about markets that underpin these market-scanning frameworks contribute to incumbents being slow to realize market-shaping acts are taking place.

The authors extend market-scanning to include a type of managerial myopia that fails to register the socially embedded, systemic nature of complex contemporary markets. Furthermore, the paper provides an “actors-agendas-outcomes” scanning framework that offers awareness of market-shaping acts.

This paper is the first to consider market-scanning frameworks from a market-shaping perspective.

This conceptual study explicates the dynamic, interlinked relationship between two of the most popular theories in marketing today: psychological ownership (PO) and engagement. The study is set in the sharing economy (SE), where platform business success depends on high levels of engagement by users, both individuals and collectives. The study argues individual PO (iPO) acts as the antecedent to engagement within a dyad of brand and user, and collective PO (cPO) as the antecedent to collective engagement by communities of users.

This conceptual study synthesizes PO theory and engagement theory to produce a PO–engagement framework. The authors adopt a dual-level perspective encompassing individual- and group-level phenomena in the SE and employ examples from practice to illustrate their arguments.

PO acts as the antecedent to the positively valenced disposition and engagement activities of actors in the SE. iPO manifests as engagement within a dyad of brand and user. Outcomes include brand love and contributions to brand reputation and service offerings. Collective PO manifests as engagement within a community or collective. Outcomes include community-oriented peer-to-peer (P2P) sharing for the benefit of others.

This study offers a dynamic framework of PO and engagement in the SE, the PO–engagement framework. The authors contribute to PO and engagement literature studies in marketing by illustrating how a platform user's attachment to targets in the SE motivates emergence of PO, and how different types of engagement manifest from different types of PO.

The Bureau of Economics in the Federal Trade Commission has a three-part role in the Agency and the strength of its functions changed over time depending on the preferences and ideology of the FTC’s leaders, developments in the field of economics, and the tenor of the times. The over-riding current role is to provide well considered, unbiased economic advice regarding antitrust and consumer protection law enforcement cases to the legal staff and the Commission. The second role, which long ago was primary, is to provide reports on investigations of various industries to the public and public officials. This role was more recently called research or “policy R&D”. A third role is to advocate for competition and markets both domestically and internationally. As a practical matter, the provision of economic advice to the FTC and to the legal staff has required that the economists wear “two hats,” helping the legal staff investigate cases and provide evidence to support law enforcement cases while also providing advice to the legal bureaus and to the Commission on which cases to pursue (thus providing “a second set of eyes” to evaluate cases). There is sometimes a tension in those functions because building a case is not the same as evaluating a case. Economists and the Bureau of Economics have provided such services to the FTC for over 100 years proving that a sub-organization can survive while playing roles that sometimes conflict. Such a life is not, however, always easy or fun.

Customer service training for food service staff is typically structured around simple procedures (often based on acronyms) and is restricted to induction training. Two potential limitations stem from these practices: current training may fail to address the subtle general changes in approach which come with experience in food service: current approaches may not highlight the differences in service situations which could benefit from changes in specific behaviour, i.e. situations to which customer service can be tailored. Describes a study identifying the sophistication of food service skills and highlights many general behavioural differences between novice and experienced staff. Reveals a framework of different customer/ situation contexts to which service behaviours can be tailored. Discusses the implications of the study for staff training.

Capitalism as a concept is founded on “free economy” guided by a free price system and free access to markets. Many of the ills facing present day society such as unemployment, poverty, rising disparities of income, malnutrition, high polluted environment are getting increasingly linked to this corporate philosophy. Alternatives such as social business enterprises have been suggested and practiced by some of the enlightened entrepreneurs. This paper examines the tenets of social business, which advocates enhancing values to society, and the social benefit to all the stakeholders.

This is an exploratory study and presents the origin, the rationale of the development of the strategic business model and its implementation. The model, based on the philosophy of social business, has been developed and practiced by Grameen Danone Foods Limited. The study has been conducted entirely on the basis of information and data available in the public domain.

The findings show an encouraging contribution towards enhancing social benefits to society. These are visible in meeting the needs of the children suffering from malnutrition, in the generation of employment and providing a rare dignity to the poor of the poorest. The shortfall in business results is traced to missing economy of scale of operations.

Social business is a new and a bold concept. It has faced many hurdles in its journey to meet objectives. The solutions it has discovered are sure to benefit many researchers, entrepreneurs, social‐welfare oriented societies, non‐profit organizations, national planners, regulators and society‐leaders.

This study investigated the asymmetric effects of changes in policy uncertainty on real sector variables in Brazil, China, India and South Africa.

The study used the nonlinear autoregressive distributed lag (NARDL) modeling framework.

The results showed that both in the long run and short run, rising uncertainty not only increases consumer prices significantly in these economies, but also impedes aggregate and sectoral output growths, and deters investment, employment and private consumption. Contrary to economic expectation, the results also showed that in the long run, declining uncertainty impedes aggregate and sectoral output growths in these economies, and significantly hinders employment in South Africa and Brazil. This suggests that in the long run, economic agents in these economies somewhat behave as if uncertainty is rising. The authors also found significant asymmetric effects in the response of real sector variables to uncertainty both in the long run and short run, which justifies the choice of NARDL framework for this study.

The sample is limited to Brazil, India, China and South Africa. While Brazil, India and China are three of the most prominent large emerging market economies, South Africa is the largest emerging market economy in Africa.

To lessen the adverse effects of policy uncertainty observed in the results, there is need for sound institutions and policy regimes that can promote predictable policy responses in these economies so that policy neither serves as a source of uncertainty nor as a channel through which the effects of other shocks are transmitted.

Apart from using the NARDL framework to capture the asymmetric effects of policy uncertainty, this study also accounted for the sectoral effects of uncertainty in emerging markets.