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This study draws on the experiences of a consortium of UK universities seeking to enhance the quality of undergraduate building education. Their initiative called, student‐centred learning in construction education (SLICE) was funded by the UK government to improve student learning by inspiring and equipping lecturers to develop effective student‐centred learning activities. The benefits of student‐centred and flexible learning are explored and the projects' outputs are described in general. One of the outputs, the “Building Pathology Lecturers' Toolkit” is examined in depth. A review of its content reveals that to be a valuable and practical resource for lecturers, providing them with guidance and ready‐to‐use yet adaptable exemplar learning materials for students. The potential impact of this toolkit and the toolkit programme generally is scrutinised using feedback data from lecturers and students, concluding that the flexible format and content offers considerable opportunities to enhance learning in the building pathology field.

This paper focuses on the analytical importance of voice and the value of listening and representing voices in private contexts. It highlights the under-theorised position of relationality in family research. The paper introduces the listening guide as a unique analytical approach to sharpen researchers’ understanding of private experiences and articulations.

This is a conceptual and technical paper. It problematises voice, authority and analytical representation in the private location of family and examines how relational dynamics interact with the subtleties of voice in research. It also provides a practical illustration of the listening guide detailing how researchers can use this analytical approach.

The paper illustrates how the listening guide works as an analytical method, structured around four stages and applied to interview transcript excerpts.

The listening guide bridges private and public knowledge-making, by identifying competing voices and recognises relations of power in family research. It provides qualitative market researchers with an analytical tool to hear changes and continuities in participants’ sense of self over time.

The paper highlights how peripheral voices and silence can be analytically surfaced in private domains. A variety of studies and data can be explored with this approach, however, research questions involving vulnerable or marginal experiences are particularly suitable.

The paper presents the listening guide as a novel analytic method for researching family life – one, which recovers the importance of voice and serves as a means to address the lack of debate on voice and authority in qualitative market research. It also highlights the under-theorised position of relationality in tracing the multiple subjectivities of research participants. It interrupts conventional qualitative analysis methods, directing attention away from conventional coding and towards listening as an alternative route to knowledge.

The three concepts that denote the focus of POS were deliberately selected and are important in elucidating the uniqueness of POS as a field of study. The “O” (organizational) and the “S” (scholarship) are relatively noncontroversial concepts. The “P” (positive), however, is more contentious and requires more explanation.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the effect of financial derivatives usage and country’s tax environment characteristics on the relationship between financial derivatives and tax avoidance.

This study uses a cross-country analysis with the scope of ASEAN (Association of Southeast Asian Nations) countries which consists of the Philippines, Indonesia, Malaysia, and Singapore.

The level of financial derivatives usage positively affects the level of tax avoidance. This finding indicates that financial derivatives can be used as tax avoidance tool. Furthermore, the positive effect of the level of financial derivatives usage on the level of tax avoidance is lower in countries with a competitive tax environment than in countries with an uncompetitive tax environment. This finding indicates that in country with a competitive tax environment, the use of financial derivatives as a tax avoidance tool can be replaced by the tax facilities provided by that country.

This study uses four countries in the Association of Southeast Asian Nations region and does not test the sample based on the financial derivative types.

Tax authorities need to establish a clear tax regulation in regard to the tax treatment of financial derivatives transactions, e.g. define the definition of financial derivatives for hedging purposes and financial derivatives for speculative purposes; and define specific criteria to separate financial derivatives for hedging purposes from financial derivatives for speculative purposes. It is necessary to determine whether losses arising from derivative transactions are classified as deductible expenses or non-deductible expenses.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study is also the first that provide empirical evidence that the relationship between financial derivatives and tax avoidance activities depends on a country’s tax environment.

The aim of this article is to explore children's understanding of television advertising intent.

A different perspective on advertising intent is offered in this paper, as evidenced in an interpretive study of Irish children, aged between seven and nine years. A qualitative approach was employed, involving a series of focus group discussions and in‐depth interviews with 52 children.

The findings indicate that the participating children view advertising as serving interests including, but not limited to, the advertiser. The existence of other interested parties is suggested by the children, namely the agendas of viewers and television channels. The authors assert that these children view advertising as being larger and more complex than the advertiser's perspective, which has been the traditional focus in the extant research.

Adopting an advertising literacy perspective, the authors seek to explore children's “reading” and understanding of advertising. Advertising literacy is an approach to understanding advertising that has not received substantial attention in the child‐advertising literature. The literature to date has tended to focus on the following question – do children understand the persuasive intent of advertising? This question is suggestive of a “yes/no” answer. In contrast, the authors view the concept of understanding as being more complex and multi‐faceted, and accordingly, seek to develop this concept by way of a classification that suggests four different levels of understanding that children may exhibit towards advertising

Bereavement is far reaching and has a significant impact on many lives as widow(er)s are faced with countless changes to their everyday routines, their relationships and their consumption patterns. It is in this context that the purpose of this study is to examine the links between the meanings of bereavement for widows and the types and sources of social support sought. This deepens the understanding of the reasons for the success or failure of service encounters and thus contributes to consumer well-being.

A qualitative study was carried out to gain more insight into this issue. A total of 24 in-depth interviews were conducted with French widows 59 years of age and older. To fully understand the diversity of bereavement experiences, the authors examined the following factors: life trajectory, life, as the spouse’s/partner’s death, support received and/or solicited and the success or failure of service encounters.

The findings suggest that bereavement experiences hold different meanings related to the types and sources of the preferred support. The following six classes were identified: dealing with administrative and financial issues, maintaining parental roles, enduring the memories of the circumstances of the spouse’s/partner’s death, reorganizing daily life, facing the loneliness of widowhood and expressing the affects of bereavement. These classes help to identify the conditions for the success or failure of service encounters.

The following two avenues emerge that contribute to the well-being of widows: “loss-oriented” and “restoration-oriented” bereavement classes of meanings. The former is embodied by widows primarily seeking “nurturant support” who expect self-oriented and relationship-focused service behaviour on the part of service providers, and the latter by widows primarily seeking “action-facilitating” support who expect “task-oriented” service behaviour from service providers. These results should allow service providers to be aware of when to prioritize the task, the self and/or the relationship, to provide a successful service encounter for consumers of bereavement services.

Young people’s attachment to their smartphones is well-documented, with smartphones often described as prostheses. While prior studies typically assume a clear human/machine divide, this paper aims to build on posthuman perspectives, exploring intercorporeality, the blurring of human/technology boundaries, between emerging adults and their smartphones. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

Drawing on assemblage theory, this interpretive study uses smartphone diaries and friendship pair/small group discussions with 27 British emerging adults.

Participants in this study are characterized as homo prostheticus, living with and through their phones, treating them as extensions of their mind and part of their selves as they navigated between their online and offline, private and social lives. Homo prostheticus was part of a broader assemblage or amalgamation of human and non-human components. As these components interacted with each other, the assemblage could be strengthened or weakened by various technological, personal and social factors.

These qualitative findings are based on a particular sample at a particular point in time, within a particular culture. Further research could explore intercorporeality in human–smartphone relationships among other groups, in other cultures.

Although other studies have used prosthetic metaphors, this paper contributes to understanding of smartphones as a prostheses in the lives of emerging adults, highlighting intercorporeality as a key feature of homo prostheticus. It also uses assemblage theory to contextualize homo prostheticus and explores factors strengthening or weakening the broader human–smartphone assemblage.

The purpose of this paper is to explore why young people use and participate in social networking sites (SNSs) with specific reference to Bebo.

A qualitative approach is employed in this paper with a view to exploring the uses and gratifications (U and G) that girls aged 12‐14 years, both seek and obtain from the Bebo SNS. The research is conducted in a school setting in Ireland.

The findings indicate that the participants are actively using Bebo for their own personal motives and gratifications in terms of presenting and managing a certain identity and persona in a social context. Furthermore, the relatively impersonal nature of the online environment is seen to especially facilitate the young participants in negotiating the practicalities and difficulties that can arise offline, in terms of forging identities and managing relationships.

U and G theory has attracted criticism in terms of a perceived limitation that it only serves to offer lists of reasons as to why audiences attend to the media, and furthermore, a perception that much of the extant U and G research has desisted from discerning between gratifications sought (GS) and gratifications obtained (GO). This paper affirms the appropriateness of the U and G theoretical approach in the context of online research. The authors conclude that SNS such as Bebo facilitate the participants in this paper in executing personal aims (for example, identity creation and management) with a view to obtaining certain gratifications (for example, peer acceptance). Therefore, a clear distinction but inextricable link is demonstrated between the GS and GO from participating in SNS.

This study aims to explore how a postmodern tribe enacts and re-interprets ideologies as a part of consumers’ collective experience, to enhance our understanding of consumer communities in conjunction with ideological capacities.

The community of “presenteers” is conceptualized as a self-organized tribe with heterogeneous components that generate capacities to act. Netnographic observation was conducted on 18 presenteer accounts and lasted around six months. Real-time data were collected by taking screenshots of the posts and stories that these users created and publicly shared. Data were analysed by adopting assemblage theory, combining inductive and deductive approaches. Firstly, a qualitative visual-textual content analysis of the tribe’s defining components was conducted. Then, the process continued with the thematic analysis of the ideological underpinnings of the tribe’s enactments.

Findings shed light on the ways in which consumer communities interpret the entanglement of religious, political, and cultural ideologies in shaping their experiences. In the case of the presenteers tribe, findings reflect a novel ideological interplay between neo-Ottomanism, post-feminism and consumerism.

The study offers a deep dive into a unique tribe that is being organized around the consumer-created practice of “presenteering” and investigates consumer communalization in alignment with the ideological turn in culture-oriented interpretative research on consumers, consumption, and markets. This exploration helps to bridge the research on the communalization of consumers with the recent discussions of ideology in the postmodern market.

The study offers a deep dive into a unique tribe that is being organized around the consumer-created practice of “presenteering” and investigates consumer communalization in alignment with the ideological turn in culture-oriented interpretative research on consumers, consumption, and markets. This exploration helps to bridge the research on the communalization of consumers with the recent discussions of ideology in the postmodern market.

The purpose of the paper is to analyze what notions of infants parents are visually met through addressed direct marketing. Questions discussed are: How are infants visually constructed as a category? and How are they argued to be in need of consumption?

Unsolicited direct marketing sent to three Swedish first-time parents during their child’s first year has been collected and analyzed. Using critical visual discourse analysis, attention is paid to recurring visual patterns and contradictions in how infants are visualized and described at the intersection of materiality, image and text.

The analysis shows three dominant visual commercial discourses of infants, here called “the angel”, “the adventurer” and “the transformer”. These discourses are articulated in such a way and with such a strong claim to truth that it appears as if it is not the marketer that is arguing for consumption, but that it is the infant’s character that demands and drives parents toward consumption.

As the visualizations of the age category infants, as well as of parents, are shown to be very uniform and that the marketing play on especially mothers’ fear of not providing the optimal conditions for the child, the study highlights the necessity of a critical dialogue between marketers, producers, parents and other actors in the child consumer business about their respective responsibilities and needs.

The youngest children are practically invisible in childhood studies as well as in the field of consumer culture. The paper thus contributes to those fields and to the study of visualization of children.