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The purpose of this paper is to re-examine the important question of what is wrong with interactive voice response (IVR) system service by expanding a spatially informed conceptualisation of virtual navigation which recognises the experience of movement within and through space.

First, previous research on IVR systems is reviewed to highlight key themes to a service audience. Second, the metaphorical aspects of language used by the popular and trade press to describe IVR systems is examined. Usability and design issues are identified from previous research as a basis from reinterpreting them from a spatial perspective of navigation.

Both figurative and conceptual spatial metaphors are used to describe the IVR system as an enclosed physical space, within which customers enter, feel stuck, get lost, or try to escape from. The usability issues of human memory, linearity, and feedback, can be reinterpreted from a spatial perspective as a basis for explaining confusion and frustration with IVR systems.

Since the paper is conceptual, further research is needed to empirically investigate different types and features of IVR systems. The possible influence of age and culture upon the spatial nature of experience is especially interesting topics for future study.

The paper identifies the absence of space as an inherent limitation of IVR systems. It subsequently recommends that firms should provide spatial resources to support customer use of IVR systems, which is supported by the recent emergence of visual IVR.

The paper introduces the broader literature on IVR systems to the service field as a basis for raising awareness about this ubiquitous technological component of telephone-based service delivery. It applies and develops a highly abstract conceptual perspective to examine and interpret the representation and experience of IVR systems, as a basis for explaining the confusion, frustration, and dislike of them.

This paper aims to examine how metaphors mediate organizational change across space and time.

The data consist of 113 speeches by vice‐chancellors of a distance learning university, recorded in texts. Texts are apposite for this research as they transmit meaning across time and space. Hermeneutics is an appropriate methodology because it enables interpretation across temporal and spatial distance.

The paper finds that textual metaphors mediate organizational change across space and time in five ways: transferring from familiarity to strangeness, providing coherence, “breaking distance” changing reality through changing language, and recontextualising.

The study focuses on formal organizational texts and excludes informal texts and conversation. Change outcomes are not studied; there should be further research on how metaphors affect change over time and space.

Metaphors enable managers to communicate change across time and space. Textual metaphors are continuously available and interactive, enabling dialogue between managers and staff across space and time.

The paper furthers our knowledge of how metaphors mediate change across both space and time. Metaphors translate the organization across distance, fusing spatial and temporal horizons, effecting organizational change by changing language. The organization becomes a metaphor of itself, recontextualising across time and space.

The purpose of this paper is to explore persuasive rhetoric by critically scrutinizing metaphorical devices utilized by leaders of the cloud industry. This paper introduces a critical approach to the promotion of cloud technology.

In total, 13 video clips from YouTube were analyzed, containing presentations and talks delivered by leaders of Google, Apple, Facebook and Amazon – four of the most influential companies within the information technology industry, sometimes referred to as GAFA. With the help of conceptual metaphor theory, often-repeated metaphors for cloud technologies reveal what properties were promoted and hidden.

GAFA mainly used the same persuasive metaphors to promote cloud computing’s positive aspects. Potentially negative or complex issues were mostly avoided. Cloud technology was uniformly described in metaphors of control, empowerment, transformation and automation. Implicitly, GAFA exerts power through the extensive dissemination of their metaphors and these are used in order to negotiate and overcome doubts about cloud computing and related technologies.

This is the first study aimed at understanding the persuasive rhetoric of GAFA, seen as a uniform object of study.

This study aims to investigate consumers’ construction of food localness through the politics of belonging in a regional context.

Following a socio-spatial lens and considering the “realm of meaning” of place, this research focusses on local consumers’ lived meanings of “local” food choice, and hence adopts a phenomenological approach to the data collection and analysis of 20 in-depth interviews with residents of the Italian region of Marche.

Drawing on Trudeau’s (2006) politics of belonging, this study reveals three interconnected themes which show how local consumers articulate a local food “orthodoxy” and how their discourses and practices draw and maintain a boundary between local and non-local food, whereby local food is considered “autochthonous” of rural space. Thus, this study’s participants construct a local food landscape, conveying rural (vs urban) meanings through which food acquires “localness” (vs non-“localness”) status.

There exists further theoretical opportunity to consider local consumers’ construction of food localness through the politics of belonging in terms of non-representational theory (Thrift, 2008), to help reveal added nuances to the construction of food localness as well as to the complex process of formulating place meaning.

The findings provide considerable scope for food producers, manufacturers and/or marketers to differentiate local food products by enhancing consumers’ direct experience of it in relation to rural space. Thus, enabling local food producers to convey rural (vs urban) meanings to consumers, who would develop an orthodoxy guiding future choice.

The findings enable regional promoters and food policymakers to leverage the symbolic distinctiveness of food autochthony to promote place and encourage consumers to participate in their local food system.

By using the politics of belonging as an analytical framework, this study shows that the urban–rural dichotomy – rather than being an obsolete epistemological category – fuels politics of belonging dynamics, and that local food consumers socially construct food localness not merely as a romanticisation of rurality but as a territorial expression of the contemporary local/non-local cultural conflict implied in the politics of belonging. Thus, this study advances our theoretical understanding by demonstrating that food “becomes” local and therefore, builds on extant food localness conceptualisations.

The purpose of this paper is to describe challenges and lessons learned in the design and development of a comprehensive, flexible environmental management system (EMS) in a real university setting; also to inform development of similar systems elsewhere and provide a modular, extensible software architecture for such efforts.

A modular, flexible software architecture was designed as the cornerstone of a comprehensive, secure web‐based data collection and analysis framework. Environmental data such as utility usages, waste generation and transportation services were identified, collected, and entered into the evolving system. The system is easily extensible to new environmental data types, and supported manual and automated data entry, custom “at‐the‐source data entry” mechanisms, and flexible tools for visually analyzing environmental data captured.

Development of automated EMS systems for large institutions is significantly complicated by profound heterogeneity in campus infrastructure, management policies, and limited data accessibility; legacy data are often incomplete or inaccurate. Successful EMS initiatives must explicitly address these challenges through realistic project planning, choice of software technologies, design of system architecture, and administrative commitment. Detailed insights in each of the above areas are provided.

The authors provide clarifying discussion of sustainability plans versus monitoring systems, place popular technological gadgets such as live building energy monitors into perspective within this framework, and describe design and implementation of a comprehensive environmental monitoring framework. The modular concept for system architecture, design approach, and lessons learned can inform the development of similar comprehensive EMS development efforts.

Because the voice-to-technology (V2T) encounter remains under-theorised, the purpose of this paper is to overcome this gap by investigating customers use of the interactive voice response (IVR) system and “the customer journey” through the call centre service system.

From an interpretive study of a UK call centre, the metaphorical aspects of language used to represent the service process are analysed, accompanied by an examination of how the servicescape dimensions of spatial layout and signs are constituted in the call centre service process, and the resulting implications for virtual-aural navigation.

Despite no physical movement, customers represent their experience of navigating “through” the service process in spatial terms. Therefore, understanding precisely how servicescape dimensions are reconfigured within the virtual-aural setting of the call centre is necessary to appreciate customer experience of V2T but also voice-to-voice (V2V) encounters. The call centre servicescape lacks a spatial representation of layout and signs that would conventionally support navigation and purposeful movement.

Despite observing live calls, direct interaction with customers was not possible. The paper was based upon a single case study, and the hermeneutic focus on understanding and meaning meant that the study did not emphasise the quantification of phenomenon. Therefore, further research on virtual navigation is required.

Problematic V2T encounters compromise the quality and efficiency of service provision. A visual representation of the IVR system may possibly support V2T encounters, while encouraging customer service advisors to act as “guides” during V2V encounters may reduce problems emerging from V2T encounters.

First, an original theorisation of the customer experience of the V2T encounter is provided through the theoretical notion of spatialisation metaphors. Second, a preliminary conceptualisation of the call centre servicescape is developed, which shows how spatial layout and signs are reconfigured and represented in this virtual-aural setting.

The purpose of this paper is to question and reflect on the spatial metaphors that inform Mats Alvesson’s (2009) conception of an organizational home in his description of at-home ethnography. (Cultural) hybridity is proposed as an alternative metaphor because the concept of hybridity can be used to highlight the complex nature of the relationships between an at-home ethnographer and the people she or he studies as they are produced during ethnographic work in an era where multiple (organizational) cultural sites are increasingly connected; where (organizational) cultural boundaries are uncertain; and where the notion of (organizational) culture itself is opaque, rather than transparent. Thus, this paper suggests that it may be more appropriate to speak of “hybrid home ethnography,” rather than “at-home ethnography.”

This paper explicates the concept of (cultural) hybridity and shows that this concept provides a useful metaphor for understanding and studying one’s own organizational home in these times of globalization where complex societies and the social collectivities of which they are composed are increasingly dispersed and mediated. Subsequently, the value of this metaphor is briefly illustrated through a hypothetical study of an academic department.

The metaphor of (cultural) hybridity reveals how studying one’s own organizational home (or homes) entails investigating a web of relationships between other organizational members, nonmembers, and oneself (the ethnographer) that are blends of diverse cultures and traditions constituted in the course of everyday communication. In addition, this metaphor shows that liminality is a key feature of this web and invites at-home ethnographers to combine first-, second-, and third-person perspectives in their fieldwork, deskwork, and textwork. Moreover, this metaphor highlights the importance of practicing “radical-reflexivity” in this kind of ethnography.

This paper provides a relational, communicative view of at-home ethnography based on a critical reflection on what it means to examine one’s own organizational home.

The purpose of this paper is to document the conceptual metaphors (Lakoff and Johnson, 2003) found in the talk of Greek and Australian adults to describe how people think about money. As money becomes increasingly abstract, understanding money, dealing with debt and encouraging financial literacy become more problematic.

Semi-structured interviews of a small sample (n = 7) are analysed using Lakoff and Johnson’s model of metaphor to map the underlying conceptual structures of money.

This paper argues that the abstraction of money has led people to search for a conceptual object. The forms and features of this object are recovered by tracing the metaphors, their presuppositions and entailments. This shows that people think about money as a physical object that needs to be carefully managed to avoid bodily harm and personal physical discomfort. Specifically, money is an object with weight that physically constrains the body, a substance that can be addictive albeit with the agentive capacity of sentient beings.

While the physical and corporeal nature of money implicitly underpins existing money management techniques (e.g. “jam jar” accounts), a detailed understanding of money as a (conceptual) object provides detailed discursive, lexical and persuasive resources for promoting sound financial behaviour and perhaps informing both economic and social policies.

While metaphor has been studied in economics texts, very little attention has been paid to the language that ordinary people use to talk about money. This research gives a clear picture of money as a metaphorically physical object.

To analyse common metaphors used in the intellectual capital (IC) and knowledge management literatures to conceptualise knowledge, in order to study the nature of the intellectual capital concept.

A textual analysis methodology is used to analyse texts from The Knowledge‐Creating Company by Nonaka and Takeuchi, Working Knowledge by Davenport and Prusak and “Brainpower” by Stewart, in order to identify underlying metaphors.

Over 95 per cent of the statements about knowledge identified are based on some kind of metaphor. The two dominant metaphors that form the basis for the concept of intellectual capital are “knowledge as a resource” and “knowledge as capital”.

Metaphors highlight certain characteristics and ignore others, so the IC community should ask itself what characteristics of knowledge the “knowledge as a resource” and “knowledge as capital” metaphors ignore.

Knowledge has no referent in the real world and requires metaphor to be defined, conceptualised, and acted upon. When using such metaphors we should become aware of their limitations as they steer us in certain directions and this may happen unconsciously. The paper concludes by asking whether we need new metaphors to better understand the mechanisms of the knowledge economy, hence allowing us to potentially change some of the more negative structural features of contemporary society.

This paper is the first to highlight that intellectual capital is a metaphor and that the metaphorical nature of the concept has far reaching consequences.