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As the lines between physical and virtual worlds blur, this chapter delves into the transformative potential of the smart technology of Metaverse for people's mobility. Through a literature review, the concepts of smart city and Metaverse are revealed, and a comparison between urban mobility and virtual mobility is conducted, looking for a seamless blend of virtual and physical realms. This chapter paves the way for exciting possibilities, from enhanced travel experiences to environmental and societal benefits. However, cautiously, acknowledging the potential downsides of relying on the virtual realm in mobility, this chapter advocates for a balanced approach. Ultimately, this chapter seeks to ignite a conversation about reimagining our cities with Metaverse-driven mobility as a guiding force, where people and places harmoniously converge with Metaverse technology. By combining real-time information, virtual platforms, shared mobility services, efficient urban design and supportive policies, people can make smarter mobility choices that reduce environmental impact and enhance the overall travel experience.

Genderwashing is an organizational phenomenon in which claims to gender equity remain superficial because organizational efforts toward gender equity are unsuccessful at creating substantive change. I introduce the concept of encounter as a useful framework in extending our understandings of the ways that genderwashing might occur within workplaces. Drawing on “encounters” as fundamentally informal, everyday interactions, I explore the ways in which these seemingly trivial social interactions make significant contributions to the quality of workplace relationships. Using the manager–employee relationship and performance review process as a basis, I show how paying attention to “small talk” is not trivial, but rather has a significant impact on the performance review process, and functions as an important site for the reproduction of or challenge to existing gender inequities. I also suggest that the consideration of “encounters” offers practical insights that can help identify additional behaviors that result in significant movement toward gender equity.

Despite being conjointly stronger in their synergies in the past, there is still a significant gap between management and organization studies and sociology. The temporal lag is also, on occasion, a substantive lag. The emergent sociological concept of emotional reflexivity has recently been used in organizational studies. The question that animates this contribution concerns the nature of this translation, reception, and extension; thus, we ask how organization studies have been using the sociological concept of emotional reflexivity? We will examine recent seminal sociological studies on emotional reflexivity to answer this inquiry and consider some organizational studies citing these. We describe the reception of sociological ideas of emotional reflexivity in management and organization studies literature. By analyzing the differences and disconnections produced within this discourse, it will be possible to understand that emotional reflexivity is rarely addressed in emotional encounters between people and other modes of being in modern organizations. We introduce narrative fiction as a method; the narrative focuses on the relationships between humans and other beings in the workplace dynamics of a vocational school. The story tells how Charlie, a deaf student, changed his life after entering the vocational school and becoming involved with different pedagogical teaching-learning strategies. Adopting two deaf dogs, which had both suffered from past unsuccessful adoption experiences, produced life-enhancing emotional reflexivity. We conclude with a research agenda scoping further directions.

Ethical principles and practices frequently support the position that people with disability are vulnerable. Vulnerability in research traditionally infers a need for protection from harm and raises questions over the person’s capacity to consent and engage. In addition, vulnerability in ethics infers a state of permanency and one that is all-encompassing for everyone within the vulnerable groups. This construction of vulnerability in effect legitimises the exclusion of people with disability from research or monitors and restricts how people with disability can engage in research. This results in an implicitly ableist environment for research. In this chapter, which has been led by researchers with disability, we argue that there is a critical need to move beyond a popularised social construction of vulnerability which serves to perpetuate barriers to including people with disability in research. Like all terms, the traditional and popular construction of vulnerability is open to reclaiming and reframing. Under this reconstruction, what is traditionally viewed as a limiting vulnerability can be owned, openly disclosed and accommodated. Following a pandemic-inspired ‘new normal’ that supports flexible workplace practices, and in accordance with UNCRPD goals of inclusive employment and reducing disability inequity, we argue that the pathway for people with disability as career researchers needs an ethical review and overhaul. We provide readers with a practical roadmap to advance a more inclusive academy for researchers with disability.

Currently, attention to customer experience management is one of the most important management approaches in the business field. Focussing on improving customer experience and having a customer experience management strategy is one of the actions that service providers can take to improve their marketing performance by providing superior experiences to customers. The nature of customer experience is very important for the retail industry, especially for sportswear stores, because sports products are mostly experience-oriented and can be classified as a general experience. Despite the importance of consumption experience in consumer behaviour studies, the design of sports customer experiences has received less attention from researchers. Therefore, this chapter seeks to answer the question of what aspects of creating and developing customer experience in sportswear retail stores are. To answer this question, this chapter attempts to identify the areas of creating customer experiences in sports stores by using the views of sports marketing experts through qualitative research and using content analysis techniques. The findings indicate that sports stores try to provide the best experience for their customers by considering six aspects of human resources and employees, products, interior design, exterior space, technology and interaction and communication in their strategic marketing plans and investing in creating and developing these aspects. They create a distinct experience for customers and provide a basis for purchasing, satisfaction, loyalty and other positive marketing consequences for customers.

School exclusion in England is highly gendered, racialised and classed. For instance, boys are three times more likely than girls to be excluded from school and certain groups, including Black Caribbean boys are subject to disproportionate levels of exclusion. Against this backdrop, I explore the context and consequences of exclusion from English mainstream schooling for young masculinities. The arguments presented also have broader international significance due to a global tendency towards punitive measures in schooling. Through bringing masculinities scholarship into conversation with childhood studies, this chapter aims to present a nuanced theorisation of young masculinities which foregrounds lived experience and is located within the interdisciplinary field of childhood studies. It examines ways in which exclusion and schooling in alternative settings, such as a Pupil Referral school, can shape the identities of boys and their subjectivities. The empirical data demonstrate that excluded boys face severe constraints arising from ways in which they are positioned. Drawing on original qualitative data, it is argued that boys who are categorised in this way demonstrate highly agentic ways of ‘doing boy’. This chapter is underpinned by two questions, firstly, how can we theorise boyhood and school exclusion in ways that recognise excluded boys as agentic and constrained subjects? Secondly, what possibilities for change might our theorisation reveal? This chapter concludes by arguing for intersectional masculinities and strengthened theorisation of childhood studies which explicitly recognises lived experience. Through this discussion, I seek to illuminate the emotional costs of school exclusion and insights into ways to achieve change.

Drawing on interviews with two types of essential workers – wound clinicians and care workers – the chapter examines stigma management in dirty care work through the lens of emotion management. The study combines two dimensions of dirty work: physical taint in relation to bodywork and social taint linked to working in close proximity to socially stigmatized clients. Hence, stigma management extends to dealing with the physically and socially dirty features of essential care work. In addition, the authors’ assessment of social stigma includes how essential care workers also sought to alleviate the social stigma encountered by their clients. In so doing, the authors extend the literature on dirty work to identify how emotion management skills are central to the stigma management strategies of the essential care workers in this study. The authors demonstrate how both groups deal with their stigma by emphasizing the emotion management skills in ‘doing’ dirty work and in the ‘purpose’ of this work, which includes acknowledging how the authors attempt to address the social taint encountered by their clients. Additionally, by comparing two occupations with different contexts and conditions of work, the authors show how complex emotion management skills are gendered in care work to expand the understanding of gender and stigma management. Furthermore, these emotion management skills emanate from the deep relational work with clients rather than through occupational communities. The authors argue that by focussing on emotion management, the hidden skills of dirty work in gendered care work are illuminated and contribute to contemporary debates about whether stigma can be overcome.