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University‐workplace partnerships are becoming increasingly important as the demands for authentic learning are growing. Partnership management ensures availability of authentic learning environments, joint‐learning tasks, and knowledge‐producing commissions for the students. Universities, however, can have difficulties in managing these crucial partnerships. This paper's purpose is to investigate the problems and to suggest a solution.

The approach is based on a case study of Laurea University of Applied Sciences in Finland.

In the case study, the program is run by business students, who as a part of their education, learn important skills in managing “customers” and projects. This results in improved learning for the students as they not only gain first hand experience in customer relationship management, but also deeper partnerships as the relationships evolve over time. Partnerships are centrally managed and available to all participants. This program is non‐exclusive: it does not assume or require participation from the educators. If an educator wishes to keep his/her own workplace contacts private, this is possible.

The results stem from a case study. Even though good results are reported in the case, every organization is different and using a similar approach is not guaranteed to work.

The paper suggests a way for universities to deepen partnerships, overcoming typical hurdles.

The non‐exclusive approach to partnership management described in the paper is original and will benefit universities in their quest for improving partnerships. The authors believe that the use of students as the task force of the program to this extent is a novel idea and benefits the local workplaces (new knowledge) as well as students (authentic learning).

To describe consumers’ heuristic and analytical searches for a pre‐purchase information acquisition, and to assess the correspondence of flexibility of information task and the information found with a search.

Propositions based on current research in web use and consumer studies. Tracked records of searches are used for descriptive analysis of transitional patterns in the data. Regression is used for statistical verification of the information provided by searches.

Consumer searches center on chaining events, indicating heavy reliance on hyperlink navigation between web sites. Formal searches are seldom used, although when employed, tend to have a high level of diagnosticity. The emphasis on heuristic behavior is logical, as the way consumer information is currently presented on the internet rewards for this type of behavior. Use of heuristic search increases the likelihood of access to flexibly presented information.

Consumers favor heuristic trial‐and‐error searches even in focused fact‐finding search tasks, which are typically considered the domain of analytical seeking. Consumers seem to benefit most from apparently inefficient, reactive and heuristic searches, because these are more likely to provide information in a format that the consumer can adapt. Convenience sample limits generalizability of findings.

While there is an increasing body of knowledge concerning internet use for finding information, fewer studies have focused on consumer uses of the web in search. This paper provides new information of online consumers, an increasingly important topic.

This study investigates how game design, which divides players into static teams, can reinforce group polarisation. The authors study this phenomenon from the perspective of social identity in the context of team-based location-based games, with a focus on game slang.

The authors performed an exploratory data analysis on an original dataset of n = 242,852 messages from five communication channels to find differences in game slang adoption between three teams in the location-based augmented reality game Pokémon GO. A divisive word “jym” (i.e. a Finnish slang derivative of the word “gym”) was discovered, and players' attitudes towards the word were further probed with a survey (n = 185). Finally, selected participants (n = 25) were interviewed in person to discover any underlying reasons for the observed polarised attitudes.

The players' teams were correlated with attitudes towards “jym”. Face-to-face interviews revealed association of the word to a particular player subgroup and it being used with improper grammar as reasons for the observed negative attitudes. Conflict over (virtual) territorial resources reinforced the polarisation.

Game design with static teams and inter-team conflict influences players' social and linguistic identity, which subsequently may result in divisive stratification among otherwise cooperative or friendly player-base.

The presented multi-method study connecting linguistic and social stratification is a novel approach to gaining insight on human social interactions, polarisation and group behaviour in the context of location-based games.