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Spatial identity is an important constituent of general cultural identity in that it provides its share of continuity, sustainability, character and inertia. The purpose of this paper is to trace spatial identity’s formulation, reflection and perception within the mainstream media. The authors are particularly interested in spatial identity’s general aspect, consisting of architectural and other elements that give spatial character to places, making them both common and recognisable at the same time. The proposed spatial identity presence index is one of the indicators through which stakeholders in cultural heritage management could monitor, and even manage, the public perception of built heritage’s wider context.

The research seeks wider relevance through the development of new methodology that combines web search services, visual data quantification, and data mining methods, and compares this with expert opinion. The research methodology is showcased and established in terms of the connection between the fundamental work in relation to Slovenian architectural landscapes from the pre-internet era and spatial identity’s web reflection as broadcast and collectively co-shaped by the internet-permeated society more than 20 years after the internet’s inception.

The findings indicate that results based on expert opinion and results acquired by counting spatial character carrier elements are aligned.

The introduced index of web-sourced spatial identity presence measures web-projected spatial characteristics in selected settlements. It is applicable in similar cases where the existing body of work on local spatial identity allows it, and can be used for comparative purposes. It also has social, economic and political connotations.

Building on Kavaratzis and Hatch’s (2013) identity-based place branding model, this paper aims to explore the spatial and social dimensions of the place brand identity formation process and how residents used social media to participate in the process of shaping a city brand during a crisis.

Adopting an interpretive and social constructionist approach, this study analyses a sample of 187 short videos created and posted by Wuhan residents on the social media app Douyin during a COVID-19 lockdown. The authors read the videos as cultural texts and analysed underlying social processes in the construction of place brand identity by residents.

This study develops an adapted conceptual model of place identity formation unfolding in four sub-processes: expressing, impressing, mirroring and reflecting, and each sub-process subsumes two dimensions: the social and the spatial. In addition, this study empirically describes how residents participated in place branding processes in two ways, namely, their construction of city brand identity via communicative practice and their exertion of changes to a city brand during a crisis. The model reveals how place brands emerge and can be transformed.

This paper amplifies Kavaratzis and Hatch's (2013) identity-based place branding model by testing it in an empirical study and highlighting the social and spatial dimensions. This paper contributes to research about participatory place branding by exploring how residents participated in the place branding process. This study analysed short videos on social media, a new communication format, rather than textual narratives dominating past studies.

Work-life flexibility policies (e.g., flextime, telework, part-time, right-to-disconnect, and leaves) are increasingly important to employers as productivity and well-being strategies. However, policies have not lived up to their potential. In this chapter, the authors argue for increased research attention to implementation and work-life intersectionality considerations influencing effectiveness. Drawing on a typology that conceptualizes flexibility policies as offering employees control across five dimensions of the work role boundary (temporal, spatial, size, permeability, and continuity), the authors develop a model identifying the multilevel moderators and mechanisms of boundary control shaping relationships between using flexibility and work and home performance. Next, the authors review this model with an intersectional lens. The authors direct scholars’ attention to growing workforce diversity and increased variation in flexibility policy experiences, particularly for individuals with higher work-life intersectionality, which is defined as having multiple intersecting identities (e.g., gender, caregiving, and race), that are stigmatized, and link to having less access to and/or benefits from societal resources to support managing the work-life interface in a social context. Such an intersectional focus would address the important need to shift work-life and flexibility research from variable to person-centered approaches. The authors identify six research considerations on work-life intersectionality in order to illuminate how traditionally assumed work-life relationships need to be revisited to address growing variation in: access, needs, and preferences for work-life flexibility; work and nonwork experiences; and benefits from using flexibility policies. The authors hope that this chapter will spur a conversation on how the work-life interface and flexibility policy processes and outcomes may increasingly differ for individuals with higher work-life intersectionality compared to those with lower work-life intersectionality in the context of organizational and social systems that may perpetuate growing work-life and job inequality.

This exploratory study, a Ph.D. dissertation completed at the University of Western Ontario in 2013, examines the materially embedded relations of power between library users and staff in public libraries and how building design regulates spatial behavior according to organizational objectives. It considers three public library buildings as organization spaces (Dale & Burrell, 2008) and determines the extent to which their spatial organizations reproduce the relations of power between the library and its public that originated with the modern public library building type ca. 1900. Adopting a multicase study design, I conducted site visits to three, purposefully selected public library buildings of similar size but various ages. Site visits included: blueprint analysis; organizational document analysis; in-depth, semi-structured interviews with library users and library staff; cognitive mapping exercises; observations; and photography.

Despite newer approaches to designing public library buildings, the use of newer information technologies, and the emergence of newer paradigms of library service delivery (e.g., the user-centered model), findings strongly suggest that the library as an organization still relies on many of the same socio-spatial models of control as it did one century ago when public library design first became standardized. The three public libraries examined show spatial organizations that were designed primarily with the librarian, library materials, and library operations in mind far more than the library user or the user’s many needs. This not only calls into question the public library’s progressiveness over the last century but also hints at its ability to survive in the new century.

The purpose of this empirical study was to introduce the theory of corporate heritage stewardship by focussing on the nascent corporate heritage identity domain. In particular, the research explores managers’ collective understanding of their organisation’s corporate heritage and how the latter is marshalled, and strategically represented, by them. The case study was undertaken in Great Britain’s oldest extant brewery. Established in 1698, Shepherd Neame is one of UK’s oldest companies.

Empirical research informed by a theory-building, case study using qualitative data. This study draws on multiple sources of data generated through semi-structured interviews, the analysis of documents and non-participant observations. The analysis of data was facilitated by a multi-stage coding process and a prolonged hermeneutic interaction between data, emerging concepts and extant literature.

Corporate heritage identity stewardship theory argues that the strategic enactment of a corporate heritage identity is predicated on a particular management mindset, which is meaningfully informed by three awareness dimensions expressed by managers (i.e. awareness of positionality, heritage, and custodianship). These awareness dimensions are underpinned by six managerial stewardship dispositions characterised by a sense of: continuance, belongingness, self, heritage, responsibility and potency. The findings are synthesised into a theoretical framework of managerial corporate heritage identity stewardship.

The insights from this empirical case study meaningfully advance our theoretical understanding of the corporate heritage identity domain. Whilst the empirical contribution of this study is qualitatively different from statistical/substantive generalisations, which seek to establish universal laws, the research insights are valuable in terms of theory-building in their own terms and are analytically generalisable. The insights from this study have the potential to inform further studies on corporate heritage identities, including research underpinned by a positivistic, and quantitative, methodology.

The findings have utility for corporate marketing management, in that they illustrate how a collective corporate heritage mindset can both inform, as well as guide, managers in terms of their stewardship of their firm’s corporate heritage identity. The theoretical framework is of utility in practical terms, in that it reveals the multiple dimensions that are significant for management stewardship of a corporate heritage identity.

The research confirms and expands the notion of management stewardship in corporate identity in corporate marketing contexts by identifying how a multi-dimensional managerial mindset has constitutive and instrumental relevance. Moreover, this study identifies the distinct characteristics of this corporate identity type – corporate heritage identity – which are revealed to have a saliency for managers. Both insights underpin the corporate heritage identity stewardship theory explicated in this article.

The purpose of this paper is to discuss communicative problems and perspectives in the branding‐process of a metropolitan region. It pursues the question of how intended place politics and non‐intended socio‐spatial developments impact the process of place branding for Germany's capital region Berlin‐Brandenburg. The metropolitan region is here discussed as a special type of place identity. This type follows wider trajectories. There seems to be a lack of knowledge in how to manage a metropolitan identity.

The paper focuses on theoretical and practical perspectives of metropolitan place branding. A methodological approach to this case with the research approach public branding was developed by the Leibniz‐Institute for Regional Development and Structural Planning (IRS) in Erkner, Germany.

Berlin, as an urban space of international significance, continues to stand in a direct spatial and functional relation to the structurally weak areas of the surrounding federal state of Brandenburg. As a consequence, the most diverse array of trajectories, resources, infrastructures, lifestyles and spatial interpretations demand new answers for place branding in metropolitan regions as future spaces of identity. The providing and conceptual integration of intermediaries in the field of knowledge‐based institutions plays a fundamental role in the spatial arrangement.

The paper asks for the preconditions to generate public brand‐knowledge. This knowledge is seen as the key factor for communicative re‐constructions and for identity building in disparate social spaces.

The deliberations try to give answers to the discussion of how far metropolitan place branding, as a worldwide future marketing prospect, can integrate old and new conceptual ideas about handling metropolitan disparities. The deliberations also implicate the question to what extent persuasive strategies for metropolitan brands have to observe limits. In this understanding, the paper gives five recommendations for place managers.

Processes of identity formation in social spaces follow certain comprehensive strategic paths and local particularities, whose concurrence becomes an object of metropolitan branding.

A relationship between governance and branding discourses within spaces of identity is discussed. It is here a matter of the fundamental question, namely, under which internal conditions social actors develop a spatial brand in a metropolitan region.

The purpose of this paper is to strengthen the conceptual understanding of place brands and place branding by exploring to what extent place branding implies a level of selectivity and how this relates to the layering of spatial identities.

A conceptual approach has been taken in this paper to provide an analytical conceptualisation of place branding to guide future empirical studies. The research, and the resulting paper has been structured around a progressive discussion of place as concept, of place brands as limited forms of geographical representations and of place branding as a highly selective process.

Places are highly complex and cannot simply be understood as spatial entities within a closed hierarchical, territorial‐administrative system. Places only exist when they have an audience, and the resulting spatial identities often overlap, contradict or complement each other across existing territorial‐administrative levels. The rise of new forms of spatial identities results in new “places”, and all places can be seen as having or being brands. The notion of place branding implies market segmentation and a certain level of power to exercise control by selecting target groups and formulating policy, strategy and undertaking action.

In future empirical and conceptual research concerned with place branding the inherent selectivity of place branding should be given more attention. The ends to which place branding is used as a means should be paid more attention in both policy (practice) and science (theory).

This paper contributes to the understanding of the metaphorical translation of branding and marketing towards places and spaces.

How organizations view, value and manage their place architecture in relation to identification and corporate identity has received little research attention. The main goal of this paper is to provide an integrative understanding of the relationships between corporate identity, place architecture, and identification from a multi-disciplinary approach. It is assumed that the characteristics of the organization and of the way a corporate identity and place architecture are managed will affect employees’ and consumers’ identification.

The paper uses a theory-building case study within the phenomenological/qualitative research tradition. The data were gathered through 15 in-depth interviews with top management who were working at a London-Based Business School. In addition, six focus groups were conducted with a total of 36 academics, and new empirical insights are offered. NVivo software was used to gain insight into the various influences and relationships.

Drawing on one case study, the findings confirm that firms are using the conceptualizations of corporate identity and place architecture, including the leveraging of tangible and intangible forms of consumers’/employees’ identification, toward a university business school. The insights from a single, exploratory, case study might not be generalizable.

The relationships between corporate identity, place architecture and identification have received little research attention and have hardly been studied at all from the perspective of this paper. This paper has value to researchers in the fields of marketing, corporate identity, place architecture, design, as well as professionals involved in managing a company’s architecture. Drawing on the marketing/management theory of identity and architecture alignment, managers and policy advisors should devote attention to each element of the corporate identity and place architecture and ensure that they are meaningful, as well as in dynamic alignment.