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This chapter explores the unknown territory of a lost project: an ethnography of a public swimming pool. The discussion is contextualised within my broader sociological theory of ‘nothing’, as a category of unmarked, negative social phenomena, including no-things, no-bodies, no-wheres, non-events and non-identities. These meaningful symbolic objects are constituted through social interaction, which can take two forms: acts of commission and acts of omission. I tell the story of how this project did not happen, through the things I did not do or that did not materialise, and how I consequently did not become a certain type of researcher. I identify three types of negative phenomena that I did not observe and document – invisible figures, silent voices and empty vessels – and, consequently, the knowledge I did not acquire. However, nothing is also productive, generating new symbolic objects as substitutes, alternatives and replacements: the somethings, somebodies and somewheres that are done or made instead. Thus finally, I reflect on how not doing this project led me to pursue others, cultivating a different research identity that would not otherwise have existed.

The purpose of this paper is to provide an in-depth investigation of e-commerce strategy implementation in mature franchise organisations from both franchisor and franchisee perspectives.

This research employed a multiple case study method where the e-commerce strategies of two mature franchise organisations were investigated in depth. Franchising experts were interviewed to provide an additional dimension to this study.

This research found that e-commerce must be integrated with the overall business strategy for optimal franchise performance. Since all parties to the franchising relationship are affected by the introduction of e-commerce, both the franchisees’ and the franchisor’s interests must be considered when the strategy is being developed. In addition, the consumer’s perspective is central to how e-commerce is structured, and franchisees are best placed to know their customers’ needs because they are directly involved in operating their business and interfacing with customers.

A preliminary model for e-commerce structures in service and retail franchising has been developed that depends on the nature of the business, the distribution arrangements and the order fulfilment arrangements. The two main avenues in e-commerce structuring were centralisation and decentralisation.

This study contributes to knowledge through an in-depth investigation of the internal process of e-commerce implementation in franchise networks from both franchisor and franchisee perspectives.

The current study was guided by narrative and feminist inquiry and focuses on the procreative consciousness and the construction of a procreative identity in 14 unmarried, child-free graduate students. Analysis of respondent and narrative interviews revealed five themes in the narrative data, which were used to hypothesize how men and women form their procreative identities, how their stories have been altered through time, and how they think others view their procreative decisions. Findings support five different pathways to the informant’s current procreative consciousness. Informants also perceived an existing traditional stereotype toward the childfree lifestyle.

Institutions play a central role in service-dominant logic. However, the discussion regarding how institutional theory supports service-dominant logic advancements is still insufficient. This paper aims to contribute to a discussion on the multiple service-dominant logic approaches to institutions.

This conceptual paper presents the characterization of the existing streams in the broad institutional literature, highlighting the differences among those streams and elaborates on how one of the discussed streams – neo-institutionalism – is suitable to support service-dominant researchers in understanding the role of institutions in markets and value co-creation.

The paper shows that the three institutional perspectives presented are used indistinctly by service-dominant logic and a greater fit between the service-dominant logic and the neo-institutionalism stands out.

The paper proposes that service-dominant researchers should look at the neo-institutional stream as a particularly fertile ground for furthering their research.

Framed within the theoretical domain of attribution theory, this study aims to investigate the antecedents of experienced regret following an entrepreneur’s business failure (defined as firm discontinuance, closure or bankruptcy) and the impact of regret on personal well-being.

The population of interest was business owners whose businesses had failed within the past five years. The data was collected from 319 failed entrepreneurs using an online survey. Structural equation modelling was used to test the hypotheses presented in this study.

External attribution, including economic uncertainty and contract restrictions, was positively related to feelings of regret. Considering internal attribution, due diligence had a positive effect on regret whereas customer relationship development ability can reduce feelings of regret. Moreover, prevention-focused entrepreneurs were likely to experience higher levels of regret when engaging in extensive consideration in using information. Finally, regret had a detrimental effect on the entrepreneurs’ well-being.

The research provides fresh perspectives on experienced regret, a relatively unexplored emotion in the entrepreneurship literature. In the context of small business operations, the locus of attribution (associated with business failure) is the key influence on learning following failed business attempts.

This study extends current knowledge of regret in the context of entrepreneurial failure, which has a significant catalytic effect on employment and entrepreneurial mobility.

This research sheds light on how emotional responses are derived from an entrepreneur’s self-assessment of their performance and attribution of blame for failure.

This paper aims to investigate the emerging relevance of gratitude within a contracted, long-term business-to-business context. Specifically, the authors examine the relationships between personality, gratitude and performance in franchisor–franchisee relationships.

A self-report survey was used to collect data from a sample of 225 franchisees drawn from across 28 franchise systems.

The results reveal that extraversion had a negative relationship with gratitude, while agreeableness and emotional stability were positively related to gratitude. Gratitude was also positively related to performance and mediated the relationship between extraversion, agreeableness and emotional stability and performance. Moreover, the results confirm that relationship length moderated the relationship between conscientiousness and gratitude.

The study shows that an individual’s personality is a factor in determining the onset of perceived gratitude, which acts as a mediating mechanism between personality and performance. This extends current research into the relational sentiment of gratitude, which has, to date, only examined the traits of the benefactor within the context of perceived benefits.

It is proposed that the knowledge of franchisees’ personal characteristics can be used to develop and maintain on-going interpersonal relationships between franchisees and franchisors. Moreover, the authors suggest that franchisors’ relationship strategy should be revised over time to maintain its effectiveness.

This paper represents the first empirical examination of the influence of personality on an individual’s proclivity to experience felt gratitude in a franchisor–franchisee relationship. This addresses one of the major issues in franchising research, which often overlooks the role of individual dispositional personality traits.

Drawing on an outside-in marketing perspective, this paper aims to outline the development, implementation, evaluation and reflection of a real-world entrepreneurship education (EE) intervention with cognitive, affective and ultimately behavioural objectives.

A specific and uniform EE program specifically targeted to current “would be” entrepreneurs who were investigating the franchising business model was developed, focusing on the behavioural outcomes. The effectiveness of the EE intervention was evaluated using a quasi-experimental research design, which involved franchisees who had not participated in the EE intervention (control group) and franchisees who had participated in the EE intervention (experimental group). The administration of the national on-line survey yielded a total of 520 responses (194 in the experimental group and 326 in the control group).

The planning process in the pre-intervention stage included situation analysis, objective setting and decisions in relation to the communication strategy, i.e. content and mode. The effectiveness of the EE intervention was evaluated in the post-intervention stage. The findings indicate that EE intervention resulted in participants’ positive cognitive, affective and behavioural outcomes such as performance and relationship management. Finally, following a reflection process, additional elements covering topics related to work-life balance were incorporated into the module pertaining to an individual’s suitability to become a franchisee.

This paper proposes a conceptual framework that represents an outside-in EE approach whereby problems, audiences, objectives and communication strategies (content and method) are strategically intertwined to produce relevant, measurable and diagnostic behavioural outcomes. The EE intervention can also improve the B2B relationship between actors in a business network.

The purpose of this paper is to review the past, current and future trends in empirical research and theoretical insights into online relationship marketing.

Review over 100 empirical and theoretical studies in the online relationship marketing from top marketing and management journals.

This paper examined three areas pertinent to online relationship marketing: first, the evolution of online relationship marketing from pre-1990s to the present, which offers a temporal snapshot of changes in and an overview of the critical components that make up the structure of online relationship marketing; second, key theoretical perspectives are underlying the development of online relationship marketing; and third, empirical insights into online relationship marketing. In general, online relationship marketing has evolved from customers being passive receivers of online information and services to active co-producers and value co-creators.

The paper identifies future research areas, including multiple layers of interactions, use of new technologies and platforms and the dark side of online communications.

The authors dedicated summary tables for each area, highlighting key findings, which in turn suggest a series of managerial recommendations for facilitating efficient, effective buyer–seller interactions and maximising firm performance in relation to online relationship marketing.

Recognising the potential of social media as an integral driver of communication that can create engaged communities through dialogic or two-way conversations, this study aims to identify and describe the use of social media in creating participants’ engagement in various social marketing programmes conducted worldwide between 2005 and 2017.

A total of 29 social marketing programmes were identified using systematic literature review procedures.

The majority of the identified programmes used Facebook, and social media were mostly used to share content-based information in an attempt to connect with target audiences, raise awareness and reach less accessible populations with programme messages. Social media served as an extended channel to traditional media efforts, and very few programmes used social media to create mechanisms for supporting their target audiences’ ability to revisit their social media communications and encourage them to act as advocates for the programmes’ activities.

The analysis presented in this paper is limited by the information provided in the identified studies.

Despite the growing popularity and significance of social media as a channel for consumer engagement, little has been done to synthesise how social marketers are incorporating the use of social media in their social marketing programmes. This research fills this gap by providing systematic understanding of the use of social media in social marketing programmes to date.

In spring of 2005, Tim Scott, president of Pharmatek Laboratories, Inc., decided to focus more time and effort on a product that had previously received little marketing attention within the company. Although this product, the Hot Rod Chemistry® kit, accounted for only a tiny percentage of sales, it had the potential to introduce Pharmatek to clients who might later hire the firm for customized, and very profitable, drug development work. Moreover, the Hot Rod Chemistry® kit represented a spin‐off opportunity for Pharmatek Laboratories. Scott needed to decide the future of the kit. He was considering several options: (1) working to improve the sales of the kit as a stand‐alone product, (2) using the kit more strategically to generate downstream business, or (3) spinning the kit off as part of a new business venture.