Search results

There is a growing body of research into the utilisation of social networking sites (SNS) by alcohol marketers, but less research into how young people utilise SNS to create their own meanings of, and interactions with, alcohol. The purpose of this study was to explore young adults’ perceptions of the nexus between alcohol and SNS.

In total, 60 adults aged 18-21 years took part in an intensive data collection process over six months. All references to social media in the interviews, focus groups and written introspections were compiled and analysed.

Results showed social media use stimulates alcohol consumption and alcohol consumption stimulates social media use. Four main themes emerged: social engagement, identity, drinking culture and distancing. Participants reported being constantly exposed to, and often influenced by, images of their peers enjoying themselves while consuming alcohol, with little representation of negative outcomes.

The relationship between SNS, social norms and drinking behaviours is complex; there is a need for further research into the dynamics of this relationship to inform social marketing interventions.

While there is a body of research into commercial references to alcohol on SNS, there is less research into the ways young people utilise SNS to create their own meanings of, and interactions with, alcohol. The consumer research that has been conducted to date has focused on quantifying references to alcohol and drinking behaviours, observing profiles or surveying users. This study addresses a key gap in the literature that is needed to inform social marketing interventions to reduce excessive alcohol consumption: when, why and how do young people post about alcohol.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the impact of attending a Recovery College (RC) on NHS staff attitudes towards mental health and recovery, clinical and peer interactions, and personal wellbeing.

Qualitative and quantitative data were collected via online surveys from 94 participants. Thematic analysis and descriptive statistics were used.

Themes were identified for change in attitudes towards mental health and recovery: new meanings of recovery; challenging traditional views on recovery; hope for recovery; and increased parity. The majority felt that the RC positively influenced the way they supported others. Themes relating to this were: using or sharing taught skills; increased understanding and empathy; challenging non-recovery practices; and adopting recovery practices. Responses highlighted themes surrounding impacts on personal wellbeing: connectedness; safe place; self-care; and sense of competency and morale at work. Another category labelled “Design of RC” emerged with the themes co-learning, co-production and co-facilitation, and content.

It is important to understand whether RCs are a useful resource for staff. This research suggests that RCs could help to reconcile Implementing Recovery through Organisational Change’s 10 Key Challenges and reduce staff burnout, which has implications for service provision.

This is one of the first papers to directly explore the value of RCs for staff attending as students, highlighting experiences of co-learning.

This article seeks to answer the question: how should we conceptualise the “gig economy”? In doing so the authors shall explore if gig economy work should be understood as a novel concept that stands alone, a concept that is a subtype, or whether it may in fact be conceptually redundant.

The authors conduct a thematic analysis of interview data drawn from 27 interviews with policymakers, trade union officials, key figures within labour organisations and gig economy workers.

The authors reveal how, from the perspective of key stakeholders, the concept of the gig economy exhibits a lack of “differentiation” from the long-established concept of precarious work of which it is best understood as a subtype.

The empirical findings from the authors’ study should be regarded as limited in terms of being situated in the specific employment context of the UK. Nevertheless, the implications of the study have a broader reach. The authors seek to provoke debate and discussion among scholars across disciplines and contexts working in the areas of precarious work and the gig economy. The authors’ analysis will be of interest to scholars who are concerned with how they conceptualise “new” forms of work.

The analysis offers a novel intervention by revealing how key stakeholders perceive the gig economy through a prism of continuity rather than change and connect it with broader processes of precarity.

This paper aims to describe a method of training for practitioners in democratic Therapeutic Communities (TCs) which has been used in several settings across the world over the past 25 years: the “Living-Learning Experience” (LLE) workshop. It goes on to consider the cross-cultural implications of the work.

Drawing on the experience of running exactly the same programme in different countries and cultures, the paper examines the cross-cultural adaptability and describes necessary adaptations for local circumstances. It also contains original ethnographic research in UK and Italy; further study is planned for other countries.

The workshops are readily transferable to different cultures and are appreciated for their democratic and relational way of working.

The ethnographic study examines the workshops in some depth, in UK and Italy, and could usefully be replicated in other countries. No quantitative, outcome or follow-up studies have yet been done, and this paper could contribute to the design of useful quantitative studies.

The paper demonstrates that the LLE is a useful experiential learning tool in widely different settings. It could be developed in different ways, such as for developing relational practice or establishing therapeutic environments in different settings.

The workshops' acceptance in widely different cultures indicates that the open and non-didactic format addresses essential and fundamental qualities required for therapeutic engagement and human relatedness.

This is the first description of the principles of democratic TCs being applied across different international settings. Its value extends beyond the TC field, to the use of democratic and relational principles' applicability in therapeutic pedagogy and training.

Research on the diffusion and adaptation of LGBT diversity management practices has, until now, rarely considered the role of unions in this process; where it has done, the consideration has largely been cursory or tangential. In order to contribute towards overcoming this research gap, the purpose of this paper is to focus more closely on this issue, within the Italian context.

Theoretically based on the notion of institutional entrepreneurship, the paper analyses the ways in which trade unions contribute to the diffusion of LG-inclusive policies. Empirically this study is based on qualitative interviews with representatives from the unions, LGBT activists and individuals from those companies that have received support from the unions in terms of shaping their initiatives.

Italian unions act as institutional entrepreneurs in the sexual orientation field by framing the issue of the inclusion of LGBT workers as an issue of including minority groups under the broad umbrella of equality in workplaces, and by cooperating with LGBT associations. The latter provides the unions with two different things. First, with more legitimacy, from the viewpoint of LGBT employees; second, with the specific competencies in dealing with these issues. The accomplishments of the unions consist of arranging single agreements concerning the establishment of “punishment systems” for discriminatory behaviours, rather than promoting inclusion-oriented behaviours within the organization.

This paper highlights the role of unions, and in doing so, focusses on a hitherto marginalized actor in the process of adapting LGBT diversity initiatives. In focussing on the Italian context, it adds an important perspective to a discourse that has previously consisted of predominantly Anglo-American views.

The study objective was to understand if uniformity of approach exists in evaluation methods of public food tender for schools at national and local level. This purpose was divided into three sub-objectives: (1) to extract the main criteria, (2) to document the synthesizing findings process and (3) to prioritize the different decision-making alternatives through pairwise comparisons.

To achieve the sub-objectives (1) and (2), a content analysis of the Italian food tenders was carried out. Analytic hierarchy process was used to evaluate and compare the importance of various food tender evaluation criteria (3). The inclusion criteria were: cities' selection; metro area population; population density; duration of the contract; years.

Six public food tenders were analyzed. The first one concerned the National legislation guidelines. The remaining five food tenders were categorized according to the city investigated. Four macro-categories (Food quality; Sustainability; Resources; Ancillary services) were classified. AHP revealed that “Food quality” and “Resources” categories have greater importance in the evaluation phase of almost all cities investigated.

This study in-depth analyzes each criterion used to evaluate public food tenders, providing a new methodological framework for assigning scores to clusters of criteria. Since the literature search did not reveal any previous study on a quantitative evaluation of elements such as short supply chain, organic food and environmental impacts on public food tenders, this research delivers interesting results and fills this knowledge gap.

In the context of European consumers’ experiences of austerity, this study aims to advance current resilience theory in marketing through developing persistent resilience from a context of austerity influenced consumption.

Following an interpretivist approach, 38 face to face, in-depth interviews were conducted with European consumers from Ireland, UK, Spain, Portugal, Italy and Greece who were affected in some way by the global financial crisis.

Building upon limited conceptual and empirical investigations in social geography, the analysis identifies the themes of persistent stressors and temporal orientation as constants, alongside day-to-day coping, relating and pragmatism, consumer adjustment, repertoires of resistance and transformation as key elements of persistent resilience within the consumption context of austerity.

The study addresses the limited theoretical and empirical focus on persistent resilience and austerity and directly contributes to consumer behaviour and marketing theory in understanding persistent resilience and its implications.

Changes to behaviours as a result of persistent resilience included reducing and stopping consumption, discount shopping, alternative consumption in the form of growing or making and mindful consumption through wastage reduction and re-use.

The study highlights the significant social impact of austerity while also identifying positive outcomes for social relations among family, friends and the wider community.

This study develops and extends Golubchikov’s (2011) theory of persistent resilience through exploring European consumer responses to austerity, identifying key consumption characteristics relevant for marketing theory and practice.

The study investigates the use of early forms of environmental accounting in the implementation of environmental strategies in the Grand Duchy of Tuscany between the 16th and 17th centuries.

The study adopts the Foucauldian concept of raison d’État to shed light on the ways in which environmental accounting practices were used by Tuscan Grand Dukes to form a detailed knowledge of the territory to be governed and act accordingly.

Financial and non-financial information relating to environmental issues enabled the Grand Dukes to “visualise” the territory to be managed as an enclosed disciplinary space whereby the conduct of people living therein could be decisively influenced. Accounting practices as a tool for the implementation of environmental strategies did not merely aim to protect the environment but were a means to reinforce the power of the State.

The paper can inform future works that investigate the ways in which environmental policies and accounting are used to pursue far-reaching governmental goals. It encourages scholars to examine further the origins of environmental accounting and its early forms.

The study documents how environmental strategies and the related use of accounting can have a significant influence on how individuals are allowed to conduct themselves. It also shows that environmental accounting practices can be an important tool in a State’s machinery of power.

The study offers a novel perspective on the use of environmental accounting information as a tool in the exercise of State power. It explores explicitly the interrelations between accounting, sustainability and power. It also adds new evidence to historical research that has engaged with early forms of environmental accounting.

The purpose of this paper is to explore a method of incorporating on-line role play in mental health nursing education. Recreation of meaningful and realistic simulations for mental health nurses is challenging. Examination of the literature reveals there is a gap in the provision of simulations that replicate practice, encourage the development of skills and promote responsibility. Those that exist may require significant investment in complex technologies or a high degree of planning and time commitment.

An evaluation of a pedagogical design that used an on-line survey to gather responses and thematic analysis was undertaken.

The findings identified that students engaged with the case leading to a realistic experience of case management and development of professional communication skills.

This evaluation could be expanded further to a more formal study examining the students’ emotional responses and learning as they progress through the activity.

The activity outlined in this paper demonstrates that a relatively simple approach can result in deep learning whereby the student can fully experience the role of a qualified practitioner. This model could easily be adopted by other higher education institutions or as a part of continuing professional development.

This paper combines previously researched methods of providing role play to mental health nursing students. It has addressed the critiques of other methodologies such as being time consuming, expensive or lacking in realism. The end product, is low cost, manageable from the lecturers perspective and delivers important learning outcomes to the students.

Despite the longstanding use of music therapy with people with intellectual disabilities and the growing evidence base for using music therapy as a tool to aid behavioural and psychological symptoms of dementia in the general population, there is little work published which details the use of music therapy groups for people with intellectual disabilities who have a diagnosis of dementia. The purpose of this paper is to report a qualitative evaluation of staff views of a music therapy group for people with intellectual disabilities and dementia.

Carers of service users attending the group were interviewed either individually or through a focus group in order to ascertain their views about the music therapy group. The interview transcripts were then analysed using thematic analysis.

Two core themes and eight sub themes emerged from the data. These themes show that the group was felt to be pleasurable and enjoyable for the service users and that some tangible benefits of attending the group were observed by staff members. Notwithstanding the positive feedback, the results also suggested that more work is needed to inform carers of the goals and purpose of such groups. Further psycho-education for carers is suggested as a strategy to support future groups to run successfully.

There is little published research into the use of music therapy for people with intellectual disabilities who also have dementia. The current paper provides a starting point for future work in the area and further recommendations for future practice and research are considered.