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Drawn from the social playfulness literature and the elaboration likelihood model, the purpose of this paper is to propose and test a research model to examine users’ continuous participation in SNS game applications.

A field survey with 133 subjects was conducted to test the research model.

Two identified design features, symbolic physicality and inherent sociability, are found to influence users’ perceived curiosity and perceived enjoyment toward playing SNS game applications. Perceived enjoyment is significantly associated with perceived curiosity and predicts users’ continuous participation of SNS game applications. The authors also observed a gender difference of social playfulness design on perceived curiosity.

Use intention was used as a proxy for actual use behavior, since objective data on continuance behavior was not available. Additionally, the contributions of this study may be constrained by one single sample.

The findings of the study suggest practical guidelines for designing game applications in SNS through socialization design and symbolic physicality. Further, based on the findings of gender differences, a personalization game design strategy is provided.

The study contributes to the post-adoption IS literature and sheds light on the interesting area of social media participation. Additionally, this study enriches the online gaming research by demonstrating gender differences.

Based on a critique of reductive understandings of physicality, this chapter explores the significance of embodied materiality, the artefactual physical, the role of the living body and embodiment in relation to ‘intra and inter’ practices of leadership from a phenomenological perspective. Using a phenomenological and cross-disciplinary approach, issues of an embodied physicality in leadership are systematically explored and implications discussed beyond physicalist empiricism and meta-physical idealism. Furthermore, the chosen phenomenological approach reveals problematising limitations of naturalist and constructionist approaches.

Following Merleau-Ponty an extended understanding of physicality as well as the significance of the co-constitutive role of embodiment, inter-corporeality and intra-action in and of leadership practices in organisational life-worlds are identified and discussed. Insights into the role of corporeal materio-socio phenomena and expressions of meaningful practices of leading and following are rendered. The chapter concludes by noting limitations and implications of embodied physicality and physical inter-becoming of ‘bodiment’ for a more integral and sustainable conception of leader-and followership in organisations. Through its specific post-dualistic approach the chapter provides an innovative perspective on the interrelations between living, material, bodily and embodied dimensions of physicality in leadership.

In this chapter, I take a symbolic interactionist look at the anthropomorphic projections of 38 people in four large Canadian cities who report having encountered ghosts. As part of a larger project on perceived encounters with ghosts, I interviewed these people using audiotape, transcribed the interviews, and identified themes within them. Together, they mentioned 195 ghosts and described their appearances and actions. I identified anthropomorphic projections in four areas: (1) Physicality – pertaining to the bodies of the ghosts, (2) Relational – pertaining to kinship ties, e.g., mothers, fathers, grandmothers, (3) Rational – the ghosts' motivations and justifications, and (4) Affective – pertaining to the ghosts' emotions. These anthropomorphic projections were the respondents' efforts at sense making after having encountered what they believed to be phantasmal.

This chapter focusses on multi-local families and more specifically on the ways in which children of separated parents, living in joint physical custody arrangements, define and construct their ‘home’ in a context of circular mobility. It is based on two case studies drawn from ongoing fieldwork conducted in Belgium with children aged 10–16 in the context of the ERC Starting Grant project ‘MobileKids’. The main aim is to understand how family relations structure children’s ‘life spaces’ and ‘lived space’ (di Meo, 2012). The authors explore in particular the meanings and feelings that family relations confer to the space of the ‘house’ in children’s experiences, including both the physicality of the place of residence, and the relations and emotions that children attach to it (Forsberg, Autonen-Vaaraniemi, & Kauko, 2016, p. 435). The authors also highlight the various strategies that children develop to mediate/influence their family relations through ‘space’, including strategies of spatial appropriation and territorialisation. The authors conclude by summarising the main findings and considering future developments.

The sexual and erotic dimensions inherent in leadership’s physicality impact on power dynamics within organizations but have been rendered largely invisible by current scholarship. In organizational practice, leadership is a masculine activity ideally carried out by male bodies, such that women’s leadership is still perceived as problematic. This suggests that the field is fearful of allowing sexual bodies to pollute what should be a functional, cognitive and instrumental activity. This chapter therefore draws on Julia Kristeva’s concept of abjection to explain how and why the sexual body is positioned as the unspoken other of leadership. To do this, I explore the representation of two very contrasting leaders, Jean Luc Picard and the Borg Queen, in the popular film Star Trek: First Contact. The film illuminates how leadership ideally resides in a virile, mastered and distant male body. The sexual female body is represented as disgusting, dangerous, and a source of contamination and so must be cast out and destroyed. Finally, I ask whether the representation of the Borg Queen is useful as a transgressive means to undermine the abjection of the female leader’s body. However, I conclude that to counter abjection, scholars of leadership need instead to build discursive and material practices that revalue the feminine and respect the alterity of self and others.

Drawing on Bourdieu's conceptualisation of physical capital, this article explores the experiences of male and female employees in non-traditional occupations where body work is an integral part of the role. Specifically, the authors examine how being an underrepresented gender in this context impacts the experience of work, including challenges faced and perceptions for future opportunities in the role.

The research is based on two in-depth case studies undertaken in the social care and security/door work sector. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with male social care workers and female security workers in the night-time hospitality sector. Management representatives were also interviewed in each case. The interviews examined how the nature of the work in these roles impacted on the underrepresented gender's perceptions of various aspects of their working lives.

The findings illustrate how many of the challenges associated with non-traditional occupations are experienced differently in body work roles, either being amplified or instead presenting opportunities for the role holder with implications for the day-to-day and longer-term experience of work. The findings illustrate how the actions and behaviour of management and colleagues can exacerbate the extent to which underrepresented gender feel accepted within their role and organisation.

Organisational decision makers need to be aware of the importance of reviewing practices regarding hiring, promotion and the allocation of tasks and duties for non-traditional role holders engaged in body work.

The article contributes to understandings of “body work” and physical capital in non-traditional occupations, illustrating how gender-based assumptions can restrict individuals in these roles to a greater extent than in other forms of work where the body is salient to the performance of the role.

This chapter explores the challenges for the application of the concept of disability to other categories of oppression utilized in the notion of intersectionality.

The concept of intersectionality argues that oppression occurs within the contexts of class, race/ethnicity, religion, gender, and sexual orientation. We raise questions about the applicability of intersectionality to persons with disabilities. Using a Symbolic Interactionist approach to understand the matrix of domination or subordination, we examine how well disability as a category of disadvantage applies to intersectionality.

We argue that the fluid, heterogeneous, and discordant status characteristics, physicality, and diagnostic ambiguity of disability present a considerable challenge for the application of intersectionality as a useful paradigm for disability studies. While several ascribed statuses may contribute to the oppression of persons with disabilities, disability itself offers many unique challenges to understanding the intersection of these traits in the lives of these same people.

The conceptual uniqueness of disability produces rather complex methodological circumstances for understanding the social identity of persons with disabilities who are simultaneously members of additional categories of oppression. These complex and challenging methodological issues can best be met qualitatively, i.e., by approaching disability as lived experience.

For students of intersectionality, this chapter offers a comprehensive analysis and assessment of the concept of disability as a category of oppression.

The purpose of this paper was to extend understanding of the sense of place captured by the servicescape concept, as a means by which customers clarify their service expectations and their satisfaction with service experiences.

The design is conceptual. This article critically examines and extends the servicescape concept in the light of insights from the service-dominant (S-D) logic.

First, we explain how servicescape adds meaning to a service provider’s value proposition, part of a pattern of customer expectations which are later confirmed or disconfirmed as value-in-use. Second, the servicescape is a more socially imbued context than has previously been recognized, because the service experience is co-created by customer and service provider. Third, the context for service is not restricted to the traditional physical servicescape, as other more fluid and web-based settings are now common.

Extending the understanding of place as a context for value determination in new ways.

The literature on servicescape is extensive, but it is anchored to the physicality of the service environment. Given the rise of the Internet and, more recently, digital social media as a virtual “place” of business, the relevance of servicescape is due for critical review. Our critical examination adds to the experience value of service and also extends the S-D logic understanding of value-in-use.

Few organisations exhibit the importance of physicality in leadership as explicitly as the symphony orchestra. While usually attributed to the direction of the conductor my own experience suggests that leading in orchestral performance is grounded in physical relations between individuals and among instrumental groups across the orchestra as much as in the interaction between musicians and maestro. In order to further interrogate this experience while enhancing our understanding of onstage relations among orchestral musicians, I recently undertook research that employed an autoethnographic methodology underpinned by the phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty (2002, 2004) and the sense-making ideas of Weick (1995, 2001a). Using this method while drawing on ideas such as kinaesthetic empathy (Pallaro, 1995; Parviainen, 2002), the picture presented in what follows is one of leadership embedded in physical interaction among colleagues.

This interaction is, I suggest, based on sense-making and sense-giving activity that occurs in a ‘kinaesthetic loop’ that draws on and is generated by auditory, visual and gestural information given and received by individual musicians. This activity in turn mediates the acoustic space between musicians and thus, ultimately, determines how leadership and coordination in the orchestra are constituted. Rather than being disembodied products of dictatorial direction dispensed through the orchestra’s hierarchy, orchestral performance and leadership emerge in this more nuanced account as co-creative processes in which all the musicians on stage share responsibility.