Search results

Fungus-resistant grape varieties (FRGVs) are the key to more environment-friendly wine growing. This paper aims to examine whether German consumers are willing to buy environment-friendly wines. The study focuses on reducing the amount of fungicides applied and the improvement of the carbon footprint, which are both related to the FRGVs . Furthermore, a cluster analysis leads to more insights into the consumer groups that are open to environment-friendly wine.

A choice experiment was conducted among 1,500 German wine drinkers with the following attributes: “reduction of pesticides”, “reduction of carbon emissions”,“familiarity with the grape variety”,“organic certification”, the slogan “better for the environment” and“price”. The individual-level, part-worth utilities were estimated using the Hierarchical Bayes method. The Ward’s method was used to cluster the individual-level, part-worth utilities. The participants’ wine involvement and environmentalism are used to further analyse the sample.

The most important attribute is “price”, followed by the “familiarity with the grape variety” and the “reduction of pesticides” and of “carbon emissions”. The least important attribute is “better for the environment”. The cluster analysis results in three clusters: the green-minded, the traditionalists and the price-minded.

The insights about the consumer acceptance of environment-friendly wines can be used to market these wines more effectively to consumers.

This is the first study that combines a choice experiment with attributes that are derived from the benefits of fungus-resistant grape varieties.

The purpose of this paper is to show that consumer education in the form of information can effectively overcome adoption barriers to new and innovative wine packaging. This effectiveness depends on both the degree in packaging innovation and the level of consumer involvement.

The paper is based on an online experiment conducted with a sample of 427 German consumers to analyse the perception of consumers about innovative packaging. The experiment featured three different packaging options: bottles with screw-cap closures, bag-in-box and StackTek®. For each packaging form, a treatment group with additional information about the packaging and a reference group without this information were surveyed. ANOVA and t-tests were carried out to test the hypotheses. A moderated regression analysis was used to examine the effect of involvement in combination with information on intention to buy.

The results revealed that low-involvement consumers react positively to additional information about the benefits of a new packaging. For highly involved consumers, however, the effect of information is not significant. Furthermore, the analysis showed that low-involvement consumers mainly buy wine in supermarkets.

Information about new packaging forms should be presented in places where low-involvement consumers buy wine, such as at supermarkets. These consumers can be influenced by the additional information about the innovative packaging.

The use of a moderated regression analysis in the context of wine packaging and involvement is a first and reveals new and valuable insights.

This chapter introduces the book through discussing the context in which it came about, namely a conference to mark the centenary of the publication of Dewey’s Democracy and Education. The first section relates to the book’s subtitle by describing and analysing the context in which speakers at the conference engaged in a ‘fightback’ against educational policies found to be narrowly based on economic aims, and to have lost sight of the humanistic aims of education, aims which Dewey analysed and championed. The book is structured around three key areas, all related to Dewey’s philosophy of education – the first concerns technology, the second, embodiment and the third, democracy and development. A discussion on the significance of each of these areas for contemporary educational theory is followed by detail on the individual chapters within them. This chapter concludes with an introduction to the cautiously optimistic and forward-looking epilogue by Gert Biesta on the matters and issues raised in the book.

This chapter draws on Michel de Certeau's work on strategies and tactics to critique the Teaching Excellence Framework (TEF) and, importantly, suggests a form of creative resistance to it. The TEF operates as a strategy of English higher education to reduce teaching and learning to quantifiable proxy measures which are then used to hold academics' performance to account. The selection and use of these proxy measures introduces a specific relationship between academics and students rooted in the underlying neoliberal principles of exchange and private gain, reducing HE teaching and learning to a provider–consumer relationship. In defiance of this academics need to utilise increasingly creative tactics to enable them to conform to the requirements of the TEF while simultaneously resisting and subverting this provider–consumer relationship. De Certeau's work on la perruque, or wiggery, as alternative tactics disguised as work for an employer offers us a way to counter the pervasive presence of TEF. La perruque encourages us to make use of the structures and places provided to us by higher education institutions to make something alien to them, for example, reorganising classroom spaces in such a way that does not prioritise the presence of the lecturer or designing sessions and modules starting from existing student knowledge rather than assuming a deficit to be addressed. Each of these tactics of resistance is fleeting and temporary, but each provides academics with a creative possibility to navigate the tensions of neoliberal provider–consumer relationships on the one hand and collaborative knowledge production on the other.

Dewey argues throughout Democracy and Education that schooling plays a powerful role in forming how we are disposed towards democracy. Disposition underlies and determines both thinking and activity. A disposition which operates habitually tends to maintain the moral, social and intellectual status quo. A humane democracy demands a disposition which both challenges existing conditions and is concerned to change them for social well-being. A student’s experience at school would ideally need to be one which supports the motivation and skills to foster such a democracy. Dewey claims that we dispose ourselves to think in particular ways. If our mental processes are habitual then teaching and pastoral care may be done in a way that might impose rigidity of thought on students. If the intelligent concern for social well-being is missing from our thinking, the educational experience we offer provides neither model nor means for the development of a humane democracy. Using vignettes from our own experience as educators, together with our interpretation of Dewey’s thinking in Democracy and Education and How We Think, we consider how our own mental processes as educators and dispositions which underlie them might impact for good or for ill on students’ day-to-day experience. We argue that the main responsibility for conditions of experience falls on policymakers, school leadership, management and teachers, who, we conclude with Dewey, should aim to be aware of their disposition and its manifestation in thinking and activity in order to create conditions which make schooling a truly democratic experience.

The year 2016 marked the 100th anniversary of Democracy and Education, one of John Dewey’s most widely translated and published books around the world still in the author’s lifetime. Nowadays, in a context in which pedagogy is bogged down in ‘economicism’ and suspicion towards any proposal that hints of value, Dewey’s ideas once again provide a ray of hope for a possible future. One of the contemporary authors that has fostered this hopeful reading of Dewey is Martha C. Nussbaum, whose appeal to bringing the humanities back to schools motivated a project on approaching the classic texts with the Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs), which we have developed during the past years with secondary education students from three schools in Santiago de Chile, Madrid and London. The project is based on an open reading of Sophocles’s Antigone through an online application that enables students from the participating schools to interact. This chapter delves deeper into the theoretical bases of the project. In the first two sections, we analyse the interpretation that Nussbaum and Dewey each made of Antigone. Then, in the third, we present the Antigone project as a learning experience promoting a creative democracy, as Dewey called it.