Search results

The purpose of this paper is to uncover the motivational tensions underlying mobile shopping (m-shopping) behaviours. The authors focus on consumer motivations and the pursuit of life end goals with respect to m-shopping.

Based on the means-end chain theory, hard-laddering approach was used to elicit associations between attributes, consequences and values from 251 online participants. Content analysis was used to develop a hierarchical value map “mapping” these associations to uncover underlying values for m-shopping.

Mobile shoppers are motivated by their self-actualisation needs (self-focused) and/or social needs (other-focused). Participants’ response contradictions reflected internal complexities and ambivalences during their purchasing decisions. Decisions are based on their concerns around security, time, technological or financial.

This study provides managerial insights into retail marketing and strategies. Marketers should consider creating user-friendly applications by researching the customer journey experience, heightening security measures and ensuring that added-value offers are clearly communicated to meet consumers’ personal values and motivations.

The paper presents an original conceptual contribution of personal values related to m-shopping as desires for self-empowerment, altruism and relationships with others, self-fulfilment and hedonism and possible consumer internal conflicts.

The purpose of this paper is to address the following questions: how do consumers construct meaning around their inconspicuous luxury fashion experiences? What desires do inconspicuous consumers strive to fulfill? What sentiments do they associate with their inconspicuous luxury fashion consumption?

This exploratory research begins with a netnographic study of 11 online luxury blogs followed by in-depth interviews and home observations of ten luxury consumers with inconspicuous preferences in Dubai.

Inconspicuous choices are not simply for associative or dissociative motivations but several symbolic consumption schemas come into play. A typology of inconspicuous luxury fashion consumers has emerged: fashion influencers, trendsetters, fashion followers, and luxe conservatives.

The findings have potential to yield important managerial implications for fashion retailers and brand communications. The typology of inconspicuous consumers provides a basis for developing a more targeted relationship marketing program for luxury fashion brands.

This research advances luxury knowledge in fashion and consumer behavior research by unveiling how consumers construct meanings around their inconspicuous consumption. The typology developed in this study marks the starting point for further extensions to explore the complexities of inconspicuous luxury consumers, which are grounded in the roles they take on in society, how they plan their luxury consumption journey and how they eventually use these possessions for self-identification and communication to others.

This paper aims to examine the role of technology in shaping the interplay between intimate and economic relations in collaborative consumer networks (CCNs).

This research is based on a three-year participatory netnographic and ethnographic field study of hosts, guests and community members within the Airbnb home-sharing network in New Zealand. The data consist of interviews, online and offline participant observations and brief discussions onsite (large-scale Airbnb events, host meetups and during Airbnb stays).

The findings reveal how technologies shape the relational work of home-sharing between intimate and economic institutions through grooming, bundling, brokerage, buffering and social edgework. This paper proposes a framework of triadic relational work enacted by network actors, involving complex exchange structures.

This study focusses on a single context – a market-mediated home-sharing platform. The findings may not apply to other contexts of economic and social exchanges.

The study reveals that the construction of specific relational packages by Airbnb hosts using their digital technologies pave a path for home-sharing to skirt the norms of the home as a place of intimacy and the market as a place for economics. This allows these two spheres to flourish with little controversy.

By augmenting Zelizer’s relational work, this study produces theoretical insights into the agentic role of technology in creating and stabilising a CCN.

The purpose of the paper is to propose a semantic model for describing open source software (OSS) in a machine–human understandable format. The model is extracted to support source code reusing and revising as the two primary targets of OSS through a systematic review of related documents.

Conducting a systematic review, all the software reusing criteria are identified and introduced to the web of data by an ontology for OSS (O4OSS). The software semantic model introduced in this paper explores OSS through triple expressions in which the O4OSS properties are predicates.

This model improves the quality of web data by describing software in a structured machine–human readable profile, which is linked to the related data that was previously published on the web. Evaluating the OSS semantic model is accomplished through comparing it with previous approaches, comparing the software structured metadata with profile index of software in some well-known repositories, calculating the software retrieval rank and surveying domain experts.

Considering context-specific information and authority levels, the proposed software model would be applicable to any open and close software. Using this model to publish software provides an infrastructure of connected meaningful data and helps developers overcome some specific challenges. By navigating software data, many questions which can be answered only through reading multiple documents can be automatically responded on the web of data.