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Incorporating the voice of older adults into all phases of research has the potential to make findings more relevant and impactful. Beyond the direct benefit, researchers have an ethical obligation to elicit the contributions of older adults into their work. Recently, organizations such as the Patient Centered Outcomes Research Institute in the United States, the Canadian Institutes of Health Research and the National Institute of Health Research in the United Kingdom have stepped up to accelerate the incorporation of public and patient voice into research, resulting in innovative engagement strategies for involving stakeholders, including older adults in research. However, those who are physically and mentally capable are more often included in research than those with multiple chronic conditions or living with disabilities. The ability to incorporate older adult voice into research is possible and has provided tangible benefits to researchers. Older adults have expertise based on their lived experiences that can provide invaluable insights on how to conduct research with real-world applications. Programmes such as the Bureau of Sages have worked to implement and disseminate best practices and guidelines for incorporating the voice of older adults into research. Principles for engaging older adults include flexibility, mutual engagement of the older adult and the researcher, time for rapport building and partner development and increased focus on accessibility. By working to understand these principles and overcome challenges to incorporating older adult voice into research, research will be more meaningful and relevant to the public, and will inherently include a focus on translation of research into practice.

Nowadays companies are constantly changing their retail settings and strategies to keep up with technological developments and consumer needs. Digital transformation enabled one’s shopping experience to be more efficient in terms of money, time, physical effort and other elements that determine the price a consumer has to pay. Channels of communication and distribution have evolved, increased in number and also became integrated. Mobile devices, mobile applications and location services help consumers in their shopping journey. These developments have led us to a new concept called omni-channel management. In theory, the omni-channel refers to a single and unified channel experience with multiple touchpoints, which include physical stores, online stores and direct marketing; mass communication channels (television, radio, print media, C2C, etc.), online channels (social media, search engines, comparison sites, e-mail, display etc.) and mobile channels (SMS, branded apps, etc.). Some examples of omni-channel practices are click-reserve, click-collect, tablets as in-store sales tools, in-store product order through mobile apps, etc.

In this chapter, the latest trends in marketing channels are discussed with enabling digital technologies and relevant success factors. Challenges and opportunities in implementing omni-channel strategies and several omni-channel initiatives from Turkey are reported.

A research was employed to present consumers’ preferences of touchpoints/channels for search, payment and delivery, and to find out the drivers that lead consumers to use more than one channel simultaneously and/or interchangeably in a buying process. The results will guide the readers to understand consumer behaviour in the new omni-channel world.

Purpose: Death is a universal inevitability of life, though parents and adults often report difficulty or concerns about discussing the topic with children. This investigation reports on how parents of very young children (ages 3–6) have or would discuss death with their child, and what parents consider in navigating such discussions.

Methodology: In-depth interviews were conducted with parents (N = 24) of very young children (ages 3–6) to develop a grounded theory of parents actual and anticipated approaches to discussing death with children.

Findings: Parents generally described either seeking to protect children’s “innocence” by avoiding or limiting conversations of death, or, seeking to promote children’s socioemotional competence in confronting the complexities of death through more extensive discussions. We identified four factors we hypothesize may influence parents intended strategies for navigating these approaches: (1) parents’ past and current experiences related to death, (2) children’s exposure to deaths, (3) cultural and personal beliefs about death, and (4) parents’ knowledge and awareness of their child’s cognitive competences. While protection of children’s “innocence” and cultivation of children’s socioemotional competences are not opposing goals, these concepts appeared to be situated on a continuum.

Originality/Value: Given the prevalence of death in contemporary media, and an ongoing global pandemic, young children’s exposure to death will remain heightened for the foreseeable future. Family scholars and practitioners would be wise to prepare to assist families and children thoughtfully and compassionately. We further explore tools, resources, and strategies parents and professionals have found helpful in navigating these discussions.

This Introduction gives a historical and theoretical overview of this volume on Fields of Knowledge: Science, Politics and Publics in the Neoliberal Age, which showcases original research in political sociology of science targeting the changes in scientific and technological policy and practice associated with the rise of neoliberal thought and policies since the 1970s. We argue that an existing family of field theoretic frameworks and empirical field analyses provides a particularly useful set of ideas and approaches for the meso-level understanding of these historical changes in ways that complement as well as challenge other theory traditions in sociology of science, broadly defined. The collected papers exhibit a dual focus on sciences’ interfield relations, connecting science and science policy to political, economic, educational, and other fields and on the institutional logics of scientific fields that pattern expert discourses, practices, and knowledge and shape relations of the scientific field to the rest of the world. By reconceptualizing the central problem for political sociology of science as a problem of field- and inter-field dynamics, and by critically engaging other theory traditions whose assumptions are in some ways undermined by the contemporary history of neoliberalism, we believe these papers collectively chart an important theoretical agenda for future research in the sociology of science.

Traditional studies in the sociology of science have highlighted the self-organized character of the academic community. This article focuses on recent interrelated changes that alter that distinctive governance structure and its related patterns of competition and cooperation. The changes that we identify here are contractualization and large-scale cooperative research. We use different data sources to exemplify these new patterns and discuss the illustrative role of research clusters in German academia. Research clusters as funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG) are both a highly prestigious scarce good in the competition for reputation and resources and a means of fostering cooperation. Our analysis of this German example reveals that this new institutional configuration of universities as organizations, academic researchers, and the state has a profound effect on organizational practices. We discuss the implications of our empirical findings with regard to collegiality in academia. Ultimately, we anticipate a further weakening of collegial bonds, not only because universities and the state have become more active in shaping the nature of academic competition and cooperation but also because of the increasing strategic and individualistic orientation of academic researchers. In the final section, we summarize our findings and address the need for further research and an international comparative perspective.

This paper responds to recent calls for deeper scrutiny of the institutional contexts of citizen science. In the last few years, at least two dozen civil society organizations in New York and Pennsylvania have begun monitoring the watershed impacts of unconventional natural gas drilling, also known as “fracking.” This study examines the institutional logics that inform these citizen monitoring efforts and probes how relationships with academic science and the regulatory state affect the practices of citizen scientists. We find that the diverse practices of the organizations in the participatory water monitoring field are guided by logics of consciousness-raising, environmental policing, and science. Organizations that initiate monitoring projects typically attempt to combine two or more of these logics as they develop new practices in response to macro-level social and environmental changes. The dominant logic of the field remains unsettled, and many groups appear uncertain about whether and how their practices might have an influence. We conclude that the impacts of macro-level changes, such as the scientization of politics, the rise of neoliberal policy ideas, or even large-scale industrial transformations, are likely to be experienced in field-specific ways.