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The purpose of this paper is to understand the effect of store messiness and human crowding on shoppers' competitive behaviours, in-store hoarding and in-store hiding, through the mediating effect of perceived scarcity and perceived competition.

2 (store messiness: messy × tidy) × 2 (human crowding: high × low) between-subject factorial experiment was conducted online to manipulate retail store atmospheric factors. A total of 154 responses were collected through Amazon MTurk. The hypotheses were analysed using ANOVA and PROCESS (Hayes, 2013) procedure.

Results suggest that store messiness and human crowding within a fast-fashion store lead to perception of scarcity and competition that further affects competitive behaviours. When consumers experience store messiness, they are likely to hide merchandise in store, thus making it inaccessible for other consumers. Further, when they experience human crowding in the store, they feel that the products will be gone immediately so they have a tendency to hoard them.

This study examined the effects of scarcity perception by studying the case of fast-fashion retailers; generalizability needs to be established across different contexts.

Retailers by manipulating human crowding and store messiness can create a perception of scarcity in their stores, thus enhancing sales. However, they should also pay attention to deviant behaviours such as in-store hoarding and in-store hiding as these behaviours may decrease the store sales.

This research contributed to the retailing literature by finding a significant relationship between human crowding, store messiness and competitive behaviours through perceived scarcity and competition.

This chapter explores how the case studies were ‘messy’ research. Because we were researching in contexts with many unknowns, the research process was unpredictable. ‘Tidying up’ the research in advance and working within clearly defined parameters was not usually possible. Across the case studies, mess occurred at different points and in different ways in the research process. For some projects, the design itself was subject to uncertainty and change; sometimes what had been planned was not possible; sometimes what had been planned was not the best course of action as the project progressed; and sometimes the design itself was emergent, requiring creativity and flexibility to meet the project outcomes. Some projects faced messiness when trying to combine methods and data. Others encountered messiness when collecting data, deciding what counted as data, and interpreting data. The real-world nature of our research and our need to be responsive to dynamic and often unknown out-of-school contexts meant that our methods could not fit into the neatly structured shorthand that is often used to think about (and teach about) methods. As researchers, we were constantly dealing with fluid and changing identities, as our relationships with participants and spaces developed during the project. This also means that tidying up our research could be counter-productive. The chapter concludes that making sense of mess in research can reveal understandings that are sometimes hidden. Mess and complexity, then, is something to be held on to, celebrated and engaged with, rather than tidied away.

The purpose of this paper is to provide a quantitative analysis of the “messiness” of the social tags in folksonomies to see how useful they might be for general search and retrieval in library catalogs.

The study harvested tags for ten books from LibraryThing measuring characteristics which would hinder search and retrieval in library catalogs.

Because there are no rules governing the way people tag, folksonomies suffer from a certain degree of messiness and inconsistency. More than a third of this messiness is in the form of tag variations followed by tags containing non‐alphabetic characters. The other types of messiness measured were less significant, making tag variations the most prominent hindrance to search and retrieval.

The paper supplies quantitative support for giving users guidance for creating tags in a library catalog. However, libraries should remember that part of the attraction of social tagging is its open and self‐created environment and that too many rules and regulations may discourage participation.

It has recently become more acknowledged that there is a quality of “messiness” to the qualitative research process. The purpose of this paper is to introduce the fieldpath approach—a hermeneutically inspired framework—to account for the non-linearity, uncertainty and ambiguity of the research process.

This conceptual paper reviews how the scope of hermeneutics has been partly misunderstood. The paper discusses how the scope of hermeneutics has lately been expanded by works such as Günter Figal’s (2010) Objectivity: The Hermeneutical and Philosophy.

The fieldpath approach proposes that a heightened relation to materiality enables the messiness of the process to be preserved, while at the same time offering a way to find one’s footing in the midst of ontologically incomplete phenomena that are still—in a processual fashion—forming and becoming.

This is a conceptual paper. In addition to the research mentioned here, more studies would be needed to legitimise, test and refine the approach.

Objectivity provides an additional criterion for researchers to lean on when facing the non-linearity and unexpected turns inherent in the qualitative research process.

The stress on materiality involves an ethical dimension. Post-human ethics are concerned with the future environmental consequences and sustainability of the material world. The way that matter matters in our methodologies is of primary importance.

First, the paper emphasises that hermeneutics, contrary to the common perception, does offer criteria for evaluating between interpretations. Second, it introduces the notion of hermeneutic objectivity, which stresses the importance of materiality for interpretations. Third, it introduces the fieldpath approach, which, based on the previous criterion of hermeneutic objectivity, allows for the messiness of the research process, while also preserving a tight grip on the hermeneutic imperative of “understanding in a new way”.

The research process is commonly viewed as a succession of linear, structured and planned practices that exclude informal and unplanned practices, engaging with the unexpected or the uncertain. The authors’ aim is to explore this aspect of researching in connection with the narratives of researchers as they oscillate between past and present, theory and empiricism.

The authors first draw on the concept of “bricolage” to validate informal research practices as researchers seek to lend “thickness” to their research. To deal with the apparent “messiness” of research narratives, they apply the concepts of kairotic time and action nets. Kairotic times are key moments in research narratives when actions, under tension, interconnect to form action nets, which, in turn, generate meaning or knowledge.

The authors analyse two research episodes. The first recounts how personal experiences and contingencies influence a researcher's choice of research objects and his associated theoretical reflections. The second highlights how some concrete difficulties in choosing a field and gaining access trigger a set of actions that force a researcher to review his initial choices and to reposition himself methodologically. Discussing the concept of kairotic time, the authors show the importance of context and timing and demonstrate how stories build around a gravitational point. From there, they discuss how the concept of action nets, breaking linearity, helps to envision research practice not as a sequence, but as networks of actions that produce scientific outcomes.

This paper provides an operational method of using kairotic time and action nets to account for, and acknowledge, the messiness in research narratives.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the growing use of Twitter in academic and artist practices. The authors explore commonalities, overlaps and differences within the reflections on the initial and ongoing motivations, usage and learnings the authors have encountered whilst immersed in this environment.

The authors locate the particular inquiry by drawing on the literature surrounding digital identities, academic literacies and digital scholarship. Departing from other studies, the focus is on a narrative inquiry of the lived experiences as academics and as artists using Twitter.

Academics use of Twitter plays a distinctly social role enabling communication that connects, and fostering accessible and approachable acts. It enables a space for challenging norms of academic ways of being and behaving. In addition, the authors draw conclusions about the “messiness” of the interconnected space that incorporates multiple identities, and highlight the risk taking the authors associate with using Twitter.

Academic practice is ever changing in the contemporary university. This initial study of academic and artist practices and the use of Twitter suggests future developments including participants using similar questions to elicit notions of practice to engage in a deeper understanding of motivations and behaviours.

In using social media tools such as Twitter, individual academics and their practices are modified; the impact of this practice is visible.

The authors contribute to emerging discussions and understandings about academics, social media and identity. The authors argue that by participating in the use of Twitter, the authors are part of the collective process of challenging what it means to be an academic and artist.

This article offers practical advice to ethnographers venturing into doing participant observations through, but not about, videoconferencing applications such as Zoom, for which the methods literature offers little guidance.

The article stems from a research project about a BioMedical Design Fellowship. As the COVID-19 pandemic hit, the Fellowship converted all teaching activities to online learning via Zoom, and the participant observations followed along. Taking an autoethnographic approach, the authors present and discuss concrete examples of encountered obstacles produced by the video-mediated format, such as limited access and interactions, technical glitches and changing experiences of embodiment.

Changing embodiment in particular initially led the authors to believe that the “messiness” of ethnography (i.e. misunderstandings, emotions, politics, self-doubts etc.) was lost online. However, over time the authors realized that the mess was still there, albeit in new manifestations, because Zoom shaped the interactions of the people the authors observed, the observations the authors could make and how the authors related to research participants and vice versa.

The article succinctly summarizes the key advice offered by the researchers (see Section 5) based on their experiences of converting on-site ethnographic observations into video-mediated observations enabling easy use by other researchers in relation to other projects and contexts.

The article positions video-mediated observations, via e.g. Zoom, which are distinctly characterised by happening in real time and having an object of study other than the online sphere itself, vis-à-vis other “online ethnography” methods. The article further aims to enable researchers to more rapidly rediscover and re-incite the new manifestations of the messiness of ethnography online, which is key to ensuring high-quality research.

Adaptivity has long been recognized as a key aspect of teaching and shown to be particularly important for English Language Arts (ELA) teachers leading discussions about texts. Teachers' abilities to make such adjustments are especially important when facilitating discussions in digital contexts, as was made clear with the shift to virtual teaching caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. The purpose of this paper is to explore how the structure and process of teacher inquiry supported ELA teachers in enacting and cultivating adaptive repertoires for facilitating discussion in online contexts during the disruptions of the 2020–2021 school year.

As an inquiry team comprising teacher-researchers from secondary and university-based contexts, the authors used practitioner inquiry methods in the context of a multi-year, multi-sited study involving, design-based and teacher-research methodologies.

This paper shows how teachers’ engagement in digital teacher inquiry groups supported their willingness to be playful and adapt their practices in response to one another, creating conditions for powerful teacher learning through relational inquiry online. This paper identified three specific relational practices that were critical for cultivating adaptive repertories in teachers’ learning with and from each other: cultivating empathy; attuning to silences and actively listening; and decentering authority across multiple platforms and modalities. The authors discuss how teachers carried these practices to and from their digital discussions with their students and with each other, demonstrating how this recursive cycle of inquiry and practice deepened their learning, relationships and adaptive repertoires.

The authors discuss the implications of these practices for equity-oriented and dialogic teacher learning that can transform classroom practice, illustrating the power of online teacher inquiry groups for developing ELA teachers’ adaptive expertise – something urgently important for teaching in digitally mediated contexts and through unsettled times.

The purpose of this paper is to study the relationship between accuracy and conscientiousness among people working in a tidy/messy work environment.

A laboratory experiment was conducted, where participants performing a simple task in a highly controlled environment were sorted into two different treatments, a tidy or a messy work environment.

The results of this study suggest that conscientious people commit more errors in a messy environment than in a tidy environment. Therefore, one of the most significant findings to emerge from this study is that a messy environment could be detrimental to the accuracy of conscientious people.

This study is limited in several respects. First of all, the sample is not large, with 80 participants; some variables, such us IQ levels, fatigue levels, caffeine consumption, etc. were not controlled for. Third, the task was restricted to inputting data into a computer.

Taken together, these findings suggest the need to promote excellence in work environment tidiness, because highly conscientious employees will work with greater accuracy, while the less conscientious will not be affected. Therefore, overall, accuracy will be better. Consequently, the managers of the organization should be committed to defining policies about high standards of tidiness in the workplace environment.

This is the first study to provide evidence of the moderation of the tidy/messy work environment in the relationship between conscientiousness and human accuracy. The present study sheds light on the impact of messy work environment on accuracy of high conscientious people, inducing them to work in a defective way.

The purpose of this paper is to employ a reflection on at-home ethnographic (AHE) practice to unpack the backstage messiness of an account to demonstrate how management students can craft fine-grained accounts of their practice and develop further our understanding of management practices in situ.

The paper reflects upon an example of AHE from an 18-month period at a chemical plant. Through exposure and exploration, the paper outlines how this method was used, the emotion involved and the challenges to conduct “good” research.

The paper does not seek to define “best practice”; it highlights the epistemic and ethical practices used in an account to demonstrate how AHE could enhance management literature through a series of practice accounts. More insider accounts would demonstrate understandings that go beyond distant accounts that purport to show managerial work as rational and scientific. In addition, such accounts would inform teaching of the complexities and messiness of managerial practice.

Ethnographic accounts (products) are often neat and tidy rather than messy, irrational and complex. Reflection on ethnographer (person) and ethnographic methodology (process) is limited. However, ethnographic practices are mostly unreported. By reflecting on ethnographic epistemic and ethical practices, the paper demonstrates how a largely untapped area has much to offer both management students and in making a fundamental contribution to understanding and teaching managerial practice.