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Partnerships and collaborative projects between universities and colleges in higher education have the potential to increase diversity in education and can prepare students for international experiences in the workplace. With this in mind and through the Erasmus plus program, this chapter sets out to discuss the collaborative project between Institute of Technology Carlow, Ireland and Satakunta University of Applied Sciences, Finland, with international business students. The academic objective of the project was for the students to research and compare the marketing of a similar product in both countries. Underpinning this was the objective of providing the students with experience on working online in international teams, and thus preparing them for their career in international business while further engaging them with the module content.

Many challenges were identified during and after the project was complete. There were communication issues and cultural differences identified throughout. From the lecturers viewpoint, there was a need for clear, concise, hands on instruction from start to finish.

These challenges, however, were outweighed by the many benefits to the project. This project offered the students and lecturers with the opportunity to network, learn, gain experience, liaise and collaborate with new cultures. It presented them with a chance to develop their knowledge on international business, culture and communication.

The arena of services marketing provides numerous opportunities for ethical violations. As competition intensifies, service providers strive harder to please the customer which can increase the temptation to make ethical compromises. Presents the narrative paradigm as a normative model for ethical decision making in the services marketing environment. The narrative paradigm is learned through socialization and can be applied to the performances of service providers. By viewing services rendered from the narrative perspective, service marketers may be able to discern hidden moral issues, or potential controversial activities. Introduces the concept of services as a performance and the current status of ethics in marketing with implications for the service industry. Introduces the narrative paradigm and gives examples of how it can be applied to the service marketing environment.

Educational pedagogy is concerned about student-centered learning that engages students and involves them in a meaningful manner to enhance critical thinking and creativity. Creative teaching and learning methods are a catalyst that can improve the learning experiences of students. Good teaching and the experience associated with it helps to connect students, faculty and the subject that is being taught to the students (Palmer, 2007). Many subjects till today are taught with a purely fact-based approach, and such traditional methods overlook the need to bring the subject to life and to make learning meaningful. Multi-dimensional methods are used to encourage students and convert them to successful learners with the ability to think creatively. The issue of student’s disconnectedness is a matter of much academic pursuit and using non-traditional methods such as plays, narratives and even humor are on the rise and have gained popularity due to their success in classroom teaching (Dunn, 2000). This book will help to highlight various case studies and interventions that have used innovative ways to improve the teaching-learning methods and engage students in the classroom. Academicians, through the chapters in this volume, have argued that education does not only mean teaching, learning and research but also the emotional connection and commitment that involves a dialogical process between the faculty and students. It is the responsibility of the faculty members to ultimately create an environment that provides the students with tools that are socially engaging, interactive and meaningful (Dunn, 2000).

The article asserts that systems thinking and its concurrent organizational processes are central organizing structures in schools, yet “hide in plain sight” and are therefore underexplored and underutilized in leadership theorizing.

By exploring the theoretical literature concerning school organization and leadership, tensions and contradictions within the literature are surfaced. The article examines and critiques distributed leadership theory and provides new directions for thinking about leadership practice based on school organization literature.

Recent work (Kruse and Johnson, 2017; Murphy, 2015, 2016) suggests that schools are far too complex to be led and managed by a single dedicated leader, yet the practice of leadership remains largely reified within the literature (Bryk et al., 2015), Insofar as leadership theory relies on narratives derived from and about work of “the” leader, it ignores the larger system. A contrasting literature is that of distributed leadership (Gronn, 2000; Spillane, 2006). Yet, even within that literature, the focus remains on interpersonal interactions and conjoint actions concerning school operation. While not dismissing the importance of leadership as a theoretical and practical construct, thinking about leadership as less a property of individuals and more a variable within effective organizational practice holds promise for the study of educational leadership.

This article extends the existing literature by suggesting how systems processes and structures serve school leaders in addressing the leadership demands of fostering continuous (rather than episodic) change, processing information and creating contextual local knowledge with the potential to enhance school outcomes.

The protective aspects of relationships for health have been extensively studied. Here, we assess whether different dimensions of partnership status at the time of a child’s birth are associated with better self-assessed health later in mid-life. Data are from three countries with different social welfare policies relating to union status and parenting: the US, the UK, and Norway. Results indicate that women who were partnered at first birth had better health at midlife in all three countries than women who were unpartnered. The analysis indicates no differences in the mid-life health of Norwegian women who were married or cohabiting at birth, whereas for US and UK women, being married at the birth of a first child is more beneficial for mid-life health than bearing the child in a cohabiting union. In the US, women who are least likely to marry do not demonstrate better mid-life health if they had wed relative to cohabiting. In the UK, in contrast, the women least likely to be married at the birth experience better returns if they marry. These findings highlight the importance of paying closer attention to heterogeneous treatment effects as they relate to childbearing, relationship status, and mid-life health.

The purpose of this research is to investigate whether and how shopping well-being emerges from multichannel shopping. The multichannel shopper has more choice of where, when and how to shop, and could potentially experience greater shopping well-being than the single-channel equivalent. On the other hand, it is possible that multichannel shopping creates levels of complexity for consumers in terms of their channel decision processes, and therefore, the potential increase in shopping well-being may not actually occur.

An interpretive approach is adopted and narratives are used to provide a focus on the multichannel shopper’s lived experiences. Narrative generation was conducted with 12 participant shoppers from across the UK in March and April 2016.

Multichannel retailing does not deliver universally enhanced shopping well-being. Findings suggest that while well-being is enhanced by some aspects of multichannel shopping, diminished well-being is a more frequent outcome. Six themes emerged from the narratives delineating aspects of multichannel shopping which diminish well-being: finding what you want; ease and flexibility; staying in control; getting a fair deal; pleasure and fulfilment; guilt, regret and annoyance.

This research makes three contributions to our understanding of shopping well-being: by providing more in-depth insight than previous studies, by examining all shopping activity rather than recreational/discretionary shopping and by examining shopping well-being from a multichannel rather than single-channel perspective.

Despite their responsibility for mitigating the influence of commercial culture on children, parents' views of fun food marketing aimed at children remain largely unexplored. This article aims to probe parents' views of supermarket fun foods and the packaging used to promote them to children.

In total 60 in‐depth interviews were conducted with parents from different educational backgrounds, living in three different Canadian cities. Interview responses were analyzed and coded thematically using an iterative process in keeping with grounded theory.

Parents generally discussed the promotion of supermarket fun foods to children as either an issue of the nutritional quality of foods promoted to children and/or in light of the communication quality of marketing aimed at children. Parents were also divided along education lines: parents with higher educational backgrounds were more likely to oppose fun foods and praise more pastoral ideals food production and consumption, while those with less education more often praised fun foods.

These findings cannot be generalized to other parents or parents in other countries. The findings, however, suggest that a more nuanced consideration of differences within and across parents' views is warranted in debates about responsible marketing to children.

This article provides a qualitatively rich snapshot of the views of 60 Canadian parents regarding child‐targeted food marketing, and raises important questions about how to incorporate parents' views into discussions about responsible marketing, rather than presuming they are all of one mindset.