Search results

Children’s finances are increasingly digitised through the emergence and development of a range of finance applications, or apps, for managing chores, saving and spending. This paper aims to offer a preliminary scoping study of these child finance apps in the nascent consumer research area of children’s FinTech.

This paper undertakes a qualitative analysis of the design features and marketing taglines of child finance apps to explore their role in the digitisation of children’s financial literacy, consumer socialisation and economic agency.

The present analysis reveals five key design functions of child finance apps: chore management; child savings; payment and spending systems; parental control features; and banking and finance features. Furthermore, three key child consumer themes emerge from the analysis of these child finance apps: gamification of child household labour; surveillance of children’s consumer participation; and datafication of children’s financial lives.

To date, there is little research into the increasingly popular use of child chore, consumption and financial management apps, and thus a research gap or problem is that we do not yet have sufficient understanding of how finance apps operate through their design and marketing to influence the financial conditions of contemporary childhoods. This study is significant in bringing theories of surveillance, gamification and datafication from digital platform studies to the fields of childhood studies, children’s consumer research and child FinTech studies. The findings suggest that child finance apps use gamification features to encourage children’s financial learning, surveillance features to enable parenting care in children’s financial development and datafication to exploit children’s financial data within the finance industry. This study is clearly limited to the app environment, and so future work should investigate the use and perceptions of these apps in more detail using more situated social research methods with families and children.

Alienation, a legacy of the Marxian Hegelian critique of domination, remains one of the most heuristic yet ambiguous concepts in social thought. Yet there endure questions of its definition, indications, level of analysis, relationships to capitalism or modernity in general. To speak of alienation raises a notion that there was once either a pristine era of bliss or a Utopian promise of universal self‐realization. I cannot enter this debate but only note that throughout most historical eras people have created societies, institutions and beliefs that have benefited the powerful few at the cost of the powerless many. Yet the few have had the power to construct definitions of reality and ideologies of legitimacy that are reproduced in the everday life routines of the many, so that arbitrary power arrangements seem natural and typical. Insofar as these routines are sustained by habits, fear and anxiety and thwart human potential, we can talk of alienated selfhood and interaction.

Rational time accompanies the onslaught of hyper-globalization. The Inuit of Arviat, Nunavut, paradoxically use rational time to resist rational time, setting aside temporal zones to protect Western cultural paradigms from impinging on their lives all of the time. Additionally, because temporal norms indicate membership in a group, doing time differently is one of the most effective ways in which to say “I’m not a part of your group!” While resisting rational clock-time, for example by walking off the job each day promptly at 4:59 pm, the Inuit of Arviat nevertheless have a myriad of clocks in their homes. This chapter explores their temporal resistance and the riddle of “why so many clocks in Arviat?”

The purpose of this paper is to describe programs that support open educational resources (OER) publishing in academic libraries. Insights, opportunities and challenges are shared in relation to the broader open education movement.

This paper provides two case studies describing the development of OER publishing programs at large, public research universities – the University of Houston and the University of Washington. Each program takes an Author DIY approach to publishing support and is in the early years of supporting OER adoption and creation.

These case studies demonstrate the need for a greater focus on decision-making and workflows. They illuminate challenges and opportunities for librarians supporting OER initiatives, including adapting existing models of OER publishing, navigating institutional culture, moving OER programs beyond affordability and how to sustain and scale OER programs with shifting institutional support.

OER is an emerging program area within academic libraries, and much of the focus has been on outreach and advocacy around affordable alternatives to commercial textbooks. Little has been written about programmatic initiatives to support OER publishing. This paper adds unique examples to the OER literature and raises new questions around support for OER publishing.

Arthur Schlessinger (1983) suggested that the contradictions and paradoxes of American foreign policy reflected contradictions and paradoxes in the underlying character of the people. We would go further to suggest that the early years of colonial life, much like the early years of a person's life, had major consequences ever since. The intersection of Puritanism, available land, and eventually the rise of a commercial culture would forge a unique trajectory of what would be called “American Exceptionalism”, reflecting an “American character”, which itself is subject to three paradoxes or polarities, individualism vs. community, toughness vs. compassion, and moralism vs. pragmatism. The effect of this legacy and the dialectical aspect of American character were first evident when Winthrop proclaimed the city on the hill as the new Jerusalem. The legacy of that vision is taking place today in Iraq.

The study aims to provide an insight into the inherent diversities and ambiguities of Soviet touristic landscapes during the period of late socialism by a means of Estonian biographical sources. Based on written narratives, the study focuses on the embodied ways in which Estonian travellers engaged with and experienced foreign landscapes and people during trips within the Soviet Union.

The study treats tourists’ travel landscapes as meaningful, lived experiences that highlight features and everyday life strategies that were characteristic of the Soviet period. Approaching via the lens of Estonian culture and nationality, the study analyses the meaningful experiences through which the narrators drew boundaries between the self and the other.

The Soviet tourism landscape of the 1960s–1980s was marked by sharp cultural contrasts. The landscapes that unfold in the narratives were full of contradictions, arousing feelings of both admiration and alienation. Whilst the ideological purpose of Soviet tourism was to build a “socialist nation”, the themed narratives, on the other hand, demonstrate the wide spectrum of everyday life practices, which show both the distancing of oneself from the Soviet system as well as conformation with it. Although tourism helped travellers accept the Union, this was achieved not by consenting to socialist ideology, but by becoming familiar with its heterogeneity.

Research on Soviet tourism has largely relied on archival sources and the press, which shed light mainly on the organisation and ideological basis of tourism. Drawing on oral sources, this study contributes to a more comprehensive understanding of the complex nature of Soviet tourist landscapes.

Investigates the various major sociolinguistic subcultures of China with specific attention to their distinctive food preferences, coupled with a tradition of food symbols which interweave Chinese subcultures. Points out that, contrary to popular belief among foreign business people, there is no “China market”; rather, there are many diverse markets within China. Notes that there are many languages and, hence, cultures in the country, and the people do not all eat the same foods; yet, at the same time, there is a rich unity of symbolic tradition associated with the foods the Chinese eat ‐ indeed there is an elaborate food linguistic the semantics of which need to be understood by outsiders. Presents an introduction and overview of the diversity and unity of China as it relates to food, and its findings should be of value to those working in various aspects of the food and agriculture industries who may have an interest in China markets, those interested in either importing or exporting Chinese food products, exporting food processing equipment or farming and agricultural technology, and those in the food business serving Chinese populations of significant size around the world.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the influence of Islamic beliefs and practices on leisure and travel behavior of Muslims in Clemson, South Carolina. With the increase of Muslims in the USA, from both conversion and immigration, it is important to examine the effects of their religion on leisure and travel behavior.

Using the grounded theory approach, semi-structured interviews with six Muslim men and six Muslim women of different nationalities were conducted in English in the local Mosque of Clemson, South Carolina, in the fall of 2011.

The results provide some evidence that Islamic beliefs and behavioral practices influence leisure and travel behavior of Muslims in the USA. The study identifies seven major themes that play an important role in determining leisure and travel behavior of Muslims in Clemson. These are the importance of mosques, traveling with a Mohram, Hijab and a dress code for men and women, drinking alcohol and being in places where alcohol is served, eating pork, Holy Month of Ramadan and Dabiha.

The study highlights the need for tourism marketers to pay more attention to the influence of religion on leisure and travel behavior of Muslim travelers.

The study provides the tourism industry with a better understanding of the importance of religion influences on the special needs of Muslim travelers and shows how the industry can better accommodate these needs.

Hepatitis C virus (HCV) is highly prevalent in the United States, yet is largely culturally invisible. This study examines what people know about their illness, both before and after diagnosis, and the relationship to race. The data are from in-depth interviews in 2004 with 53 persons, mostly white or African American, with HCV in the southeastern United States. The respondents have varying educational backgrounds, family incomes, and possible modes of transmission of HCV. Regardless of whether the diagnosis of HCV came as a surprise, respondents had a range of reactions including fear, shock, sadness, and ambivalence. Knowledge of the disease postdiagnosis varies as some people have expert knowledge, moderate knowledge, or inaccurate to no knowledge of the disease. Minority respondents have less knowledge of HCV than whites. This racial disparity in knowledge has profound implications for people with HCV and the larger society.

Based on Greimas' contributions in 2002 and on qualitative research, this paper aims to focus on a semiotic analysis of the meaning of nostalgia related to products and brands.

This paper involves a two‐stage interview process. Informants were interviewed first in T1 (July‐August 2005) about products and brands connected to nostalgic feelings. They were re‐interviewed a year after in T2 (June‐July 2006). Pictures of products and brands evoked in T1 were shown and informants where asked what came to mind when they where exposed to such material. Based on the transcription of the interviews, a three‐step content analysis was performed: a first reading of the corpus made it possible to identify the two dimensions of time that structure the informant's discourse: “continuity” and “discontinuity”. Then a lexical analysis of the vocabulary associated with nostalgic experience was computed. Finally, a semiotic analysis of the texts was performed.

The two opposing dimensions of a semiotic square, “continuity” versus “discontinuity” provide a structure for understanding the most important features of nostalgia: “long‐standing nostalgia” (continuity) and “first‐time nostalgia” (discontinuity). This provides a typology of four nostalgic moments: everyday past, uniqueness, tradition and transition which are linked to specific brands and objects.

Since this typology is qualitative, it must be confirmed on a larger scale in order to be implemented by managers in the marketing decision‐making process.

These four distinct moments enable a researcher to propose a typology of brands, products or objects that when considered in association, can provide a better understanding of emotional attachment.