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This study examines the effects of the online brand community's (OBC) humor climate on the value cocreation (VCC) behavior of consumers using the affective events theory. It also evaluates the serial mediating roles of positive emotions and brand engagement and the moderating effect of membership duration.

The authors collected data from 601 Chinese consumers of OBCs using an online questionnaire survey and applied structural equation modeling to analyze the data.

The authors found a positive relationship between OBC humor climate and VCC behavior, which was mediated by positive emotions and brand engagement. Additionally, there was a serial mediation effect of these two variables. The influence of the OBC humor climate on positive emotions was stronger for short-term members than long-term ones.

This research contributes toward OBC management and VCC marketing strategy for constructing brand equity.

This study is among the first to focus on the significance of the OBC humor climate, thus enriching the OBC literature and providing a new perspective on how to facilitate VCC behavior. It also broadens the application of the affective events theory in marketing.

This paper aims to explore whether or not and how brand community supportive climates (information- versus emotion-supportive climates) have an impact on consumer-to-consumer helping behavior.

A survey of users of cell phone brand communities was conducted, and data from 413 participants were used to validate the hypotheses of this study.

Results indicated that emotion- and information-supportive climates enhance consumer-to-consumer helping behavior through consumer–community relationships (i.e. brand community identification and brand community commitment).

To enhance the external validity of this research, future studies could investigate other settings (e.g. social media-based brand communities and brands of other product types) in countries with different religious beliefs.

Marketers should create an environment where consumers feel informationally and emotionally supported within the brand community, thereby enabling the former to enhance their relationships with their brand communities and ultimately increase consumers' helping behavior.

By dividing the supportive climate into two parts, the current study enriched the literature on community climate. Moreover, the authors complemented and expanded the literature on consumer helping behavior.

This paper aims to present recently published resources on library instruction and information literacy, providing an introductory overview and a selected annotated bibliography of publications covering various library types, study populations and research contexts.

This paper introduces and annotates English-language periodical articles, monographs, dissertations, reports and other materials on library instruction and information literacy published in 2019.

The paper provides a brief description of all 370 sources and highlights sources that contain unique or significant scholarly contributions.

The information may be used by librarians, researchers and anyone interested as a quick and comprehensive reference to literature on library instruction and information literacy.

The focus of the chapter is on disputes around corporate social responsibility (CSR) in the fossil fuel industry and how media and social networking technologies are deployed in a virtual war between oil corporations and dissident, activist and protest groups.

Communications by BP, Shell, and their opponents in this virtual war are compared, especially in relation to the creative use of the internet, digital technologies, and social media. Through a case study approach, the chapter shows how communications often center on contested notions of CSR and claims by the oil giants about their environmental impact, which opponents dismiss as “greenwashing.” The various techniques deployed by both sides in this wide-ranging “PR war” are explored and contrasted in detail.

The findings for each case study reveal the diverse, complex, and changing nature of the relationship between the oil industry and its critics. The chapter concludes by arguing that if CSR is seen as “greenwashing” by the public, it is only likely to fuel widespread skepticism of the oil and gas sector and of corporate claims about the environment more generally.

The research offers a snapshot of online and social media campaigns and PR strategies and tactics within the oil and gas industry rather than empirically grounded set of findings that can be easily applied to other fields.

Practical implications include attention to inflated or understated claims and the use of citizen testimony and humor to puncture CSR “rhetoric.” There is consideration of use of digital technologies by activists and attention to the way public debates and consultations are conducted. The need for a more respectful engagement with local communities by all parties engaging in public relations is underlined.

The chapter applies the concept of “asymmetrical warfare” from conflict studies within the media and communications tradition to provide a fresh revaluation of the term “PR war,” It offers a rare focus on online efforts by activist to subvert CSR-related branding, marketing, and communications. Discussion of the use of parody alongside factual and emotional arguments to challenge corporate hegemony also provides revealing insights.

The death-positive movement can be described as a de-centralised contemporary social movement originating and operating predominantly in the global West, specifically the United States, connecting death workers, educators, artists, journalists, etc., and geared towards encouraging open dialogue about death and dying. It has succeeded in capturing significant media attention over the last few years and is largely driven by its strong social media presence. This chapter looks at ‘playfulness’ within the death-positive movement. Examining the dimension of ‘playfulness’ addresses the affective aspect of communication that in this movement is inseparable from the message. First, the author investigates the aesthetics of representation through death-positive merchandise, produced and advertised by The Order of the Good Death’s (subsequently – The Order) core members. Second, the author considers some of the cultural output produced under the umbrella of death-positivity, but not by the core movement members, specifically taking the first video game to be explicitly marketed as death-positive – A Mortician’s Tale (Laundry Bear Games, 2017) as a case study. Finally, the author analyses the role of entertainment value in the movement’s leaders’ discourse on death, taking leader of The Order Caitlin Doughty’s playful rhetoric on her YouTube channel, Twitter profile, and Instagram pages. The manifesto, found on the movement’s official website (http://www.orderofthegooddeath.com/) encourages its participants to break the ‘culture of silence’ around death, indicating that the whole premise of the movement is based on the supposed presence of death denial in Western countries. Ultimately, the author argues that by eliciting playfulness, this challenge to the social climate becomes a somewhat jovial and enjoyable endeavour and generates response from outside the movement.

This study aims to examine the effects of pathos in sustainable brand stories featuring masculinity on brand masculinity and men’s sustainable brand attitude using Aristotle’s rhetoric theory.

Three independent online experiments (N = 398; N = 216; N = 247) were conducted to observe how participants responded to a sustainable brand story. Data collected through a post-experimental survey were used to test the proposed model. Research hypotheses were inspected using SPSS.

The authors reveal brand masculinity is influenced by varying degrees of pathos: participants who read stories with all three pathos elements (metaphor, humor and empathy) demonstrated the highest level of perceived brand masculinity. Male consumers showed more positive attitudes toward masculine sustainable brand stories than feminine ones. The authors also identify the moderating effect of consumer generation: Gen Z (versus Gen Y) consumers demonstrated stronger character identification with hybrid masculinity (versus hegemonic masculinity) sustainable brand stories, resulting in more favorable sustainable brand attitudes.

The study provides a new angle for exploring the relationship between gendered sustainable brand stories and sustainable brand attitudes. It is the first (to the authors’ knowledge) that links Aristotle’s rhetoric theory to brand gender research, and it empirically demonstrates how male consumers from different generational cohorts respond to different masculinity strategies used by sustainable brands.

This chapter will consider the workings of microcelebrity in the context of an evolving Indian cyber public. In the contemporary moment, large-scale battles for control over the world’s youngest and increasingly digitally active demographic are in full swing – both by corporations like Facebook through efforts like Free Basics, as well as by ideologues who wish to mold the “idea of India” in certain ways. While digital spaces are often framed as liberating, there are also extremely strong conservative forces that are well established. It is within this context that I would like to examine the recent growth of the Indian online comedic scene whose popularity has increased by leaps and bounds. My particular focus will be the comedy collective of AIB (All India Backchod), who are most prominent on Youtube. This collective has garnered significant popularity through their deployment of viral comedic videos riffing off on various aspects of Indian society and have also made socially aware videos around hot button issues like gay rights and women’s rights. I would like to examine their treatment of gender and sexuality particularly in the context of it being made up primarily of straight men and how that has affected their engagement both with the content of their videos, as well as their ability to leverage their online visibility. I will be using ideas of postcolonial cyberspace as theorized by Nishant Shah (2015) as well as theorists of microcelebrity and the use of humor such as Theresa Senft (2013).

While researchers in other disciplines seek to determine the impact that humour has in personal interactions, studies of humour in service delivery are lacking. The purpose of this paper is to examine whether it is beneficial to deliberately use humour in service encounters.

This paper provides a comprehensive review of humour research in multiple disciplines to assess the applicability of their key findings to the service domain. By establishing the antecedents, types, and consequences of humour, the authors build a framework and propositions to help service researchers uncover the potential of injecting humour into service interactions.

The authors find that using humour in service encounters is an ingenious affiliative behaviour which strengthens rapport between service employees and their customers. Humour also permits frontline service employees to better cope with the emotional challenges of their work, thus promising to reduce emotional labour and increase well-being. The effectiveness of service recovery efforts may also grow if employees use humour successfully to soften unpleasant emotional reactions and accept responsibility.

The authors explore cross-disciplinary humour research to apply the findings to the use of humour in service encounters. The authors also attempt to identify situations in which humour usage is most promising or beneficial, as well as its main beneficiaries.