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Focussing on the stratification of expatriates and the boundaries between different types of expatriates and locals, this study investigates the lived experiences and testimonies of Eastern European expatriates and their relationships in Dubai. The purpose of this article to develop the current knowledge on expatriates cohabiting in a cosmopolitan city by providing empirical evidence on expatriate bubbles in Dubai.

Explorative qualitative research was conducted using online and face-to-face interviews, along with a week-long intensive ethnography with observations, interviews and informal discussions.

Three distinct groups of people live in Dubai, namely, Westerners, expatriates from the East and Emiratis. They hardly mingle with each other on equal terms, but they do work in a complementary fashion. In Dubai, the status of East European experts, a subgroup of Westerners, is similar to their Western counterparts and in that they are considered European. Consequently, they experience a slight status development in comparison to when they work in the West. The research provides evidence on social stratification of expatriate bubbles.

This very short ethnography with a relatively small number of qualitative interviews could be complemented by a further in-depth study.

Expatriate bubbles have not previously been empirically investigated from an Eastern European perspective, nor has the unique case of Dubai been analysed extensively. Distinct expatriate bubbles with their stratified hierarchies have been identified in this study.

While there is anecdotal evidence that internationally mobile workers often form isolated nation-based communities or “expatriate bubbles,” previous academic scholarship on the expatriate communities and their subjective boundaries is limited. The primary purpose of this article is to advance the theoretical or conceptual understanding of expatriate communities as bubbles.

As developed by Lamont and Molnár (2002), the theory of symbolic boundaries is applied and set to scrutinize the production and maintenance of insulated expatriate communities. Empirically, an ethnographic study of a community of Finnish expatriates in a Southeast Asian country is undertaken to describe how symbolic boundaries are constructed.

The main theoretical implication of the paper is the recognition that expatriates themselves are involved in creating the “bubble.” The boundaries separating the national expatriate community are not externally imposed but can be viewed as consequences of the active boundary work of the expatriates. The empirical study demonstrates how the Finnish expatriates negotiated the symbolic boundaries of their community, drawing on cultural, moral and spatial modalities in different levels of boundary work.

There need to be more systematic attempts to develop a theoretically grounded understanding of insulated expatriate communities and their boundaries. This article contributes to the sociological conceptualization of expatriate bubbles by utilizing the symbolic boundary approach, which adds perspective to the embryonic theory of the subjective boundaries of expatriate communities. The multiplicity of different types of symbolic boundaries and their modalities suggests that an expatriate bubble is rarely a finished state or structure.

This paper aims to focus on academic library managers’ learning practices in the context of cooperative work supported by computational artefacts. Academic library managers’ everyday work is mainly cooperative. Their cooperation is supported predominantly by computational artefacts. Learning how to use the computational artefacts efficiently and effectively involves understanding the changes in everyday work that affect managers and, therefore, it requires deep understanding of their cooperative work practices.

Focused ethnography was conducted through participant observations, interviews and document analysis. Ten managers from a university library in Sweden participated in the research. A thematic method was used to analyse the empirical material. Computer supported cooperative work (CSCW) and work-integrated learning was used as the conceptual lens.

Five learning practices were identified: collaboration, communication, coordination, decision-making processes and computational artefacts’ use. The findings show that learning is embedded in managers’ cooperative work practices, which do not necessarily include sufficient training time. Furthermore, learning was intertwined with cooperating and was situational. Managers learned by reflecting together on their own experiences and through joint cooperation and information sharing while using the computational artefacts.

The main contribution lies in providing insights into how academic library managers learn and cooperate in their everyday work, emphasizing the role of computational artefacts, the importance of the work context and the collective nature of learning. It also highlights the need for continual workplace learning in contemporary knowledge work environments. Thus, the research generates contributions to the informatics field by extending the understanding of managers’ work-integrated learning in their everyday cooperative work practices supported by computational artefacts’ use. It also contributes to the intersection of CSCW and work-integrated learning.

The playground is a commonly advised means to integrate children into the public realm of “child-friendly cities”, yet research has tended not to examine it in relation to adjacent public space. This paper aims to understand the extent to which the playground – a socio-spatial phenomenon – facilitates children's integration into the public realm, enabling critical examination of the “child-friendly space” concept.

An ethnographic study was carried out across three sites in Athens, Greece, where typical neighbourhood playgrounds replicate features common across the global north. Methods combined observation (167 h; morning, afternoon, evening), visual-mapping and 61 semi-structured interviews with 112 playground users (including adults and children from the playgrounds and surroundings). Rigorous qualitative thematic analysis, involving an iterative post-coding process, allowed identification of spatial patterns and emergent themes.

Findings reveal perceptions surrounding the protective and age-specific aspects of child-friendly design, limit the playgrounds' public value. However, a paradox emerges whereby the playgrounds' adjacency to public spaces designed without child-friendly principles affords children's engagement with the public realm.

Reconceptualisation of the “child-friendly playground” is proposed, embracing interdependence with the public realm – highly significant for child-friendly urban design theory and practice globally. Researchers are encouraged to compare findings in other geographical contexts.

This original finding is enabled by the novel approach to studying the playground in relation to adjacent public realm. The study also offers the first empirical examination of child-friendly city principles – participation in social life and urban play – in a Greek context, addressing a geographical gap in literature on children's everyday spaces.

This paper aims to explore how unreflective and reflective value experience emerges in value co-creation and co-destruction practices in a consumer context.

This paper presents a Heideggerian phenomenological heuristic consisting of three interrelated modes of engagement, which is used for interpretive sense-making in a dynamic and lively case context of amateur-level football (soccer) played on artificial grass. Based on a qualitative study using ethnographic techniques, this study examines the whats and the hows of value experience by individuals playing football at different qualities and in varying conditions across 25 Dutch football teams.

The findings reveal three interrelated yet distinct modalities of experience in value co-creation and co-destruction presented in a continuum of triplex spaces of unreflective and reflective value experience. The first is a joyful flow of unreflective value experience in emergent and undisrupted value co-creation practice with no potential for value co-destruction. Second, a semireflective value experience caused by interruptions in value co-creation has a higher potential for value co-destruction. Third, a fully reflective value experience through a completely interrupted value co-creation practice results in high-value co-destruction.

This research contributes to the literature on the microfoundations of value experience and value creation by proposing a conceptual relationship between unreflective/reflective value experience and value co-creation and co-destruction mediated through interruptions in consumer usage situations.

This study’s novel perspective on this relationship offers practitioners a useful vantage point on understanding how enhanced value experience comes about in value co-creation practice and how this is linked to value co-destruction when interruptions occur. These insights help bolster alignment and prevent misalignment in resource integration and foster service strategies, designs and innovations to better influence consumer experience in journeys.

This study deploys an integral view of how consumer value experience manifests in value co-creation and co-destruction that offers conceptual, methodological and practical clarity.

At Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University, an annual short-term, research abroad non-credit program was created in 2012 as a core component of the undergraduate research initiative that achieves learning outcomes in a meaningful way. The paper aims to discuss this issue.

In order to describe, and analyze the short-term research abroad activity, an instrumental case study design was created. The instrumental case study was chosen as a means of allowing the facilitators/authors to communicate how they attempted to assure that the program was educative. In order to determine if the program was in fact educative and that it met its goal of being an effective research experience the authors utilized two additional research methods. The first was a document analysis of the participant’s research artifacts. Each participant was required to communicate their findings by writing a paper that was submitted for publication to an applicable research journal.

The study found that an experiential education as a pedagogical framework coupled with a short-term research abroad activity can lead to a substantive educative experience, where the authors described and analyzed attempts to ensure that the short-term research abroad program was educative, it also describes the educational assessment findings which describe what was found when the authors tested whether they, in fact, met this goal.

During the design phase of the short-term research abroad program, the authors turned to experiential education as a principle for how they would ensure that the program was grounded in an acceptable educational theory. Experiential education is a widely accepted educational practice used in experiences such as co-ops and internships, study abroad, undergraduate research and service learning.

To frame the short-term cultural research abroad program as something from which student could learn the authors utilized the National Society of Experiential Education’s (2013) list of eight principles of good practice. In order to safeguard that an activity is educative, an assessment or an evaluation of a demonstrative artifact is essential. In assessing the final artifact against a rubric or some other non-biased or less biased criteria, an educator can ensure that the student has gained new knowledge in the form of student learning outcomes (SLOs). In addition, the educator can use the results of this assessment to modify many different aspects of the experience ranging from the timing, the modality, the pre-work, even the learning outcomes themselves.

Given financial and curriculum inflexibility of some students, Universities and faculty could achieve attainment of research-based, program agnostic, SLOs by offering short-term study abroad alternatives to the traditional semester or year-long experiences. With graduates looking to enter the job market where businesses are more globalized and executive’s recognition of a need for more international experience, carefully constructed short-term study abroad programs are meaningful avenues to build those credentials.

Such offerings can be constructed as customized experiences to achieve highly integrated skills across all degree programs.

The purpose of this paper is to develop a process model for the role transformation of vulnerable consumers through support services.

The study is based on four years of participant observation at a community-based support service and in-depth interviews with the consumers. Visual ethnography was used to document the process of the consumers' role transformation through service exchanges.

The main outcome of this study is a consumer transformation model, describing consumers' role transformation processes, from recipients to generic actors. The model demonstrates that vulnerable consumers will transform from recipients to quasi-actors before becoming generic actors.

Vulnerable consumers' participation in value cocreation can be promoted by providing social support according to their dynamic roles. By enabling consumers to participate in value cocreation, social support provision can become sustainable and inclusive, especially in rural areas affected by aging and depopulation. Transforming recipients into generic actors should be a critical aim of service provision in the global challenge of aging societies.

Beyond identifying service factors, the research findings describe the mechanism of consumers' role transformation process as a service mechanics study. Furthermore, this study contributes to transformative service research by applying social exchange theory and broadening service-dominant logic by describing the process of consumer growth for individual and community well-being.

During the evaluation of European Capital of Culture (ECoC) Aarhus 2017, the evaluation organisation rethinkIMPACTS 2017 formulated a set of “dilemmas” capturing the main challenges arising during the design of the ECoC evaluation. This functioned as a framework for the evaluation process. This paper aims to present and discuss the relevance of the “Evaluation Dilemmas Model” as subsequently applied to the Galway 2020 ECoC programme evaluation.

The paper takes an empirical approach including auto-ethnography and interview data to document and map the dilemmas involved in undertaking an evaluation in two different European cities. Evolved via a process of practice-based research, the article addresses the development of and the arguments for the dilemmas model and considers its potential for wider applicability in the evaluation of large-scale cultural projects.

The authors conclude that the “Evaluation Dilemmas Model” is a valuable heuristic for considering the endogenous and exogenous issues in cultural evaluation.

The model developed is useful for a wide range of cultural evaluation processes including – but not limited to – European Capitals of Culture.

What has not been addressed in the academic literature is the process of evaluating ECoCs; especially how evaluators often take part in an overall process that is not just about the evaluation but also planning and delivering a project that includes stakeholder management and the development of evaluation criteria, design and methods.