Search results

This paper aims to outline the purpose, planning, development and delivery of the “1st Academic-Practitioner Research with Impact workshop: Customer Experience Management (CEM) and Big Data” held at Alliance Manchester Business School on 18th and 19th January 2016, at which four subsequent papers were initially developed.

The paper sets out a summary of the importance and significance of the four papers developed at the workshop and how the co-creative dialogue between managerial practitioners, presenting key problems and issues that they face, and carefully selected teams of academics was facilitated.

To develop richer and more impactful understanding of current problems challenging customer-focused managers, there is a need for more dialogue and engagement between academics and practitioners.

The paper serves as a guideline for developing future workshops that aim at strengthening the links between academia and the business world.

This paper highlights the value of academic–practitioner workshops for focusing academic research on areas of importance for practitioners to generate impact. The innovative format of the workshop and the resulting impactful papers should serve as a call and motivation for future academic–practitioner workshop development.

The purpose of this paper is to introduce the contents of the special issue and to clarify and extend conceptual and managerial debates concerning interpretive consumer research (ICR).

A discursive approach is adopted. The arguments are supported by quotes from authoritative publications in the field.

Researching the consumer has progressed far beyond the research for managerial implications and has become a major focus for the social sciences. In the field of qualitative market research, interpretive approaches to studying consumer behaviour are playing an increasing role. However, the economic and psychological heritage of consumer behaviour impedes appreciation of their aims, analytic logics, and methodological contributions. Ten issues about ICR are detailed in order to provide an integrative overview of what ICR is or is not.

Provides an insider's view and serves as a useful overview of debates and developments in the field.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the challenges and opportunities of collaboration in interpretive consumer research.

The paper reviews literature on research teamwork, particularly on qualitative and international projects. It also provides an account of research collaboration on an interpretive research project across four countries, involving eight researchers.

Despite the cult of individualism in academic life, most articles in leading marketing journals are now written by multi‐author teams. The process and implications of research collaboration, particularly on qualitative and international projects, have received little attention within the marketing literature. Qualitative collaborations call for another layer of reflexivity and attention to the politics and emotions of teamwork. They also require the negotiation of a social contract acceptable to the group and conducive to the emergence of different perspectives throughout the research process.

While issues surrounding the researcher‐research participant relationship are well explored in the field, this paper tackles an issue that often remains tacit in the marketing literature, namely the impact of the relationships between researchers. The paper draws on accounts of other research collaborations as well as authors' experiences, and discusses how interpersonal and cross‐cultural dynamics influence the work of interpretive research teams.

Data for the case came from public sources, including legal proceedings, court filings and Securities and Exchange Commission filings. The authors perused hundreds of court documents and identified 28 that were most relevant to this case. The authors also used press interviews with the women highlighted in the case. The authors have no relationship with the company and no one from the company has reviewed the information presented in this case. As the case is drawn from sworn legal testimonies, interviews and related documents in the public domain, the authors did not have to seek approval for publication.

Pinterest touted itself as “the nicest place on the Internet.” It had an almost 80% female user base and purported to have an inclusive culture that embraced diversity. However, in June 2020, in the wake of the Black Lives Matter protests, two former female employees of color violated their non-disclosure agreements (NDAs) to publicly accuse Pinterest of racial and gender discrimination. In August 2020, Pinterest’s former Chief Operating Officer, Francoise Brougher, filed a lawsuit charging the company with gender discrimination, retaliation and wrongful termination, and authored a public blog post titled, The Pinterest Paradox: Cupcakes and Toxicity, detailing her own experience with the company’s discriminatory culture. Three days later 236 of Pinterest’s 2,545 employees staged a virtual walkout and 445 employees signed a petition in an attempt to change Pinterest’s policies and culture. The case provides a brief overview of Pinterest, including its mission, values and organizational culture, and details several incidents and complaints by female and minority employees. The case questions whether employee complaints are a relatively narrow issue involving disgruntled former employees who did not fit at the organization or a much broader issue involving discrimination and managerial neglect in creating and maintaining a nondiscriminatory, inclusive culture. Students are encouraged to evaluate the situation in which Co-Founder, Board Chair and Chief Executive Officer, Ben Silbermann finds himself, evaluate the actions taken and decide if Silbermann should take any additional actions to address the discrimination claims and ensure a positive culture for all employees.

This case is appropriate for graduate and advanced undergraduate level courses in organizational behavior, human resource management and business law or any course where discrimination and workplace culture are discussed.

Data for the case came from public sources, including legal proceedings, court filings, company press releases and Securities and Exchange Commission filings.

In June 2020, former Pinterest employees made public charges of gender and racial discrimination. Despite changes implemented by the company, several Pinterest shareholders filed derivative lawsuits charging the company with breach of fiduciary duty, waste of corporate assets, abuse of control and violating federal securities laws. The case provides an overview of the company’s management, board and stock structures, as well as information on the shareholders who sued the company and their concerns. The case raises substantial questions about management’s and board member’s responsibilities in corporate governance, illustrates how stock structures can be used to impede governance and suggests ways to evaluate activist shareholders.

This case is appropriate for graduate, advanced undergraduate or executive education courses in strategy, corporate governance or strategic human resources that discuss corporate governance, fiduciary responsibilities, designing workplace culture or management responses to shareholders. Instructors can apply two sets of theories and frameworks to this case: theories of corporate governance and Hirschman’s (1970) exit, voice or loyalty framework in the context of shareholder activism.

The concept of digital badges (DBs) as a form of microcredentialing has gained considerable traction in higher education and workplace settings in recent years. This scoping review aims to map the empirical research conducted on DBs in higher education and workplace settings.

The design of this study is a scoping literature review. This scoping review adopts the five-stage scoping framework proposed by Arksey and O’Malley (2005).

Based upon our review of the 45 studies that comprised this scoping review of the empirical literature on DBs, we advance a typology that segments the empirical research based on whether DBs are used as pedagogical tools (PTs) or microcredentials. The authors found some confusion regarding nomenclature, numerous theories offered to explain DBs and divergent findings that suggest room for further exploration of this relatively new phenomenon.

This scoping review of the literature helps make sense of the emerging research landscape on DBs. The findings suggest that using DBs as a PT or as a microcredential has implications for a wide range of stakeholders regarding promoting lifelong learning, upskilling and reskilling the workforce. With the financial constraints facing higher education in a postpandemic environment, understanding the impact of DBs is needed before making an investment in this arena.

With the purpose of promoting cross-field dialogue, this paper aims to review workplace learning (WPL) and human resource (HR) literature. The authors endeavour a conceptual examination and discussion of the bridges that link both research fields in relation to learning, in an effort to establish an integrated understanding of learning in workplaces.

This paper uses a scoping review focused on how learning is approached in WPL and HR studies. An analysis of the selected literature reveals fundamental themes and dimensions that further our understanding of learning in the context of work.

Overall, there are three learning dimensions where WPL and HR conceptually interrelate, namely, skills, incentives and work design. The scoping review also shows that HR is output-oriented and looks to learning as capital for enterprises, especially in light of enterprise performance for competence development. WPL centres more upon socio-cultural and practice-based configurations and the individual. It encompasses the human dimension of learning as something enriching the whole of life, including work life.

This paper contributes with a unique inquiry into the interrelations between WPL and HR approaches to learning, highlighting the complementarity between WPL theoretical features and HR practices. At the core of our findings is that WPL becomes analytically visible through how HR learning strategies are designed and deployed in the forms of skill development, incentive structures and work design, referring to both workplace structure and cultural features.

We examine the extent to which food prices and restaurant outlet density are associated with adolescent fruit and vegetable consumption, body mass index (BMI), and the probability of overweight. We use repeated cross-sections of individual-level data on adolescents from the Monitoring the Future Surveys from 1997 to 2003 combined with fast food and fruit and vegetable prices obtained from the American Chamber of Commerce Researchers Association and fast food and full-service restaurant outlet density measures obtained from Dun & Bradstreet. The results suggest that the price of a fast food meal is an important determinant of adolescents’ body weight and eating habits: a 10% increase in the price of a fast food meal leads to a 3.0% increase in the probability of frequent fruit and vegetable consumption, a 0.4% decrease in BMI, and a 5.9% decrease in probability of overweight. The price of fruits and vegetables and restaurant outlet density are less important determinants, although these variables typically have the expected sign and are often statistically associated with our outcome measures. Despite these findings, changes in all observed economic and socio-demographic characteristics together only explain roughly one-quarter of the change in mean BMI and one-fifth of the change in overweight over the 1997–2003 sampling period.

The purpose of this scoping review was to identify the availability of caregiver-friendly workplace policies (CFWPs) from January 2015 to June 2019.

In order to determine changes over time, the present review is consistent with the methodology used in a scoping review of CFWPs conducted by the same research group five years earlier. This included applying an iterative database search to identify relevant articles, applying inclusion-exclusion criteria and performing qualitative thematic analysis on eligible articles. Both academic literature and literature that is not peer-reviewed were considered.

A total of 80 papers were included, with 82 unique workplaces identified. Three main qualitative themes were discussed: (1) inclusivity, (2) generosity and (3) culture. The finance, education, healthcare and technology industries were most generous. The most common CFWPs offered were support services; paid leave; backup adult care and flexible work arrangements.

This review narrows the gap in the literature by providing a comprehensive synthesis of CFWPs availability to better understand how workplaces are currently supporting caregiver-employees (CEs) while providing recommendations on how to support CEs moving forward.

This paper discusses significant differences from the first scoping review undertaken by the same research group five years ago, suggesting that progress has been made in the workplace culture needed to accommodate carer-employees.