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Branding is essential for business survival and growth, particularly for small firms in their early development. However, small firms approach branding differently than large organisations. This study aims to delve into the evolution of small firm brands over time, emphasising the role of founders’ personal identities on shaping their firms’ brands. It also explores how these firm brands develop through ongoing interactions with stakeholders.

Over eight years, empirical material was collected through a longitudinal multi-case study of small firms and their brands, using in-depth interviews over time with founders as the primary data source. Thematic analysis was used to analyse the empirical data.

This research reveals the intertwined relationship between founders’ identity work and small firm branding. The authors emphasise how founders use their personal identities to shape their small firm brands, influencing recognition, differentiation and value creation. As firm brands evolve over time, they often deviate from founders’ identities due to stakeholder pressure from within and outside the organisations.

This study addresses a significant gap in the literature by focusing on the branding processes within small firms, which have been largely overlooked in favour of larger organisations. By exploring the transformative journey of small firm brands from inception through development and ownership changes, this research elucidates the intricate entanglement of founder identity and brand. It highlights the distinctive challenges faced by small firms, offering new insights into their branding dynamics.

The aim of this study is to explore the characteristics of what is experienced in mental health recovery-oriented places and how these characteristics can facilitate social connections and participation.

This qualitative study has an explorative, interpretive and collaborative design. Dyadic interviews and participatory fieldwork observations were used as methods for data generation. Data were analyzed using a collaborative hermeneutic approach.

Characteristics of recovery-nurturing places involved how concrete and tangible features of place may nurture and enable actions and ways of being with oneself and others. Three broad themes explore the characteristics and how they can enable recovery: nurturing senses, nurturing practical skills and nurturing communication.

This study demonstrates how materiality and recovery are interconnected and expands the understanding of recovery as “in-the-mind processes.” It explores how places and material objects have a recovery-nurturing potential through enabling actions and participation and thereby supporting people in living, storying and restorying their lives.

The purpose of this study is to provide in-depth knowledge on customer-facing technology and customer experience in the grocery retail sector, including how the value-added potential of customer-facing technologies may be enhanced.

The analysis is based on 30 in-depth interviews with “early adopters” of customer-facing digital retail technologies in the Norwegian grocery sector. Theoretically, the study draws on notions of the customer journey and customer experience.

The study contributes to deepening insights concerning how digital retail technology is used and may be geared to further increase value for customers, specifically how retailers may use data on customers and products to personalize digital retail technology offerings and gain a competitive advantage. The findings underline how customer value is context-dependent and show that while grocery retail customers primarily emphasize utilitarian benefits related to customer-facing technologies, hedonic benefits are valuable biproducts. Moreover, the study showcases how personalization is key in addressing customers’ needs and wants, and may serve to increase the overall value of customer-facing technologies for customers and retailers.

The study’s sector-specific focus on technology in use contributes to enhance knowledge on how digital retail technologies can be leveraged to the benefit of customers and retailers, including customers’ sector-specific needs and wants.

Narratives underscoring the necessity of innovation for success are pervasive. Yet, many new products fail or fail to produce their intended impacts. Conventional views typically promote the functional view of innovation, which focuses on identifying and meeting customer needs. The authors argue, however, that culture is an overlooked explanation of innovation success.

This study uses a conceptual approach, grounded in cultural sociology, to illustrate the ways in which innovation success is influenced by cultural beliefs. Accordingly, this study develops a cultural view of innovation and compare it with the functional view.

This study shows that novel products are successful to the extent their meanings and value resonate with relevant stakeholders. Not only does culture matter, but customers’ needs are often shaped by cultural values in the first place.

More systematic qualitative and quantitative research is needed to better understand the best processes for incorporating cultural beliefs into product features.

In addition to customer needs, innovators should include cultural beliefs as design requirements to ensure the product resonates with the values and everyday practices of users. One way to do this is by implementing the productive method, which provides the resources for the relevant potential users to design the product themselves.

It is not always enough to learn and solicit feedback from potential users. To fully understand the obstacles that may inhibit innovation, this study advocates for providing potential users, local engineers and other relevant stakeholders the autonomy to design, manufacture, market and distribute the product.

This conceptual, multi-voiced paper aims to collectively explore and theorize family entrepreneuring, which is a research stream dedicated to investigating the emergence and becoming of entrepreneurial phenomena in business families and family firms.

Because of the novelty of this research stream, the authors asked 20 scholars in entrepreneurship and family business to reflect on topics, methods and issues that should be addressed to move this field forward.

Authors highlight key challenges and point to new research directions for understanding family entrepreneuring in relation to issues such as agency, processualism and context.

This study offers a compilation of multiple perspectives and leverage recent developments in the fields of entrepreneurship and family business to advance research on family entrepreneuring.

This study sought to examine how women founders navigate gender and cultural influences in constructing network ties in Jordan.

In-depth interviews document the experiences of 14 women founders operating digital technology-based businesses in Amman, Jordan.

Gender homogenous ties were perceived to be of diminished quality, limiting the ability of the women founders to acquire resources while risking isolation from diverse networks. Formal professional, male-centric ties were perceived to offer more business impact due to the applicability and usefulness of information. Formal communication, use of intermediaries and industry events were used to develop network ties. These approaches enable founders to respect gendered collectivist norms, such as adhering to family members’ expectations about occupational roles, while meeting new business associates. The strength of network ties emerged as a continuum with strong, weak and midpoint ties. Midpoint ties offered valued encouragement and emotional support but were perceived to be less effective and provided fewer resources compared to strong network ties.

Mechanisms of gender inequality are evidenced in how gender, culture and social networks operate in relation to each other. Perceptions reflect culturally situated, within-group stereotypes, informing how women founders discount other women’s knowledge and experience.

This study aims to examine how veganism is “seen” by young adult non-vegan consumers and how prevailing attitudes reinforce or challenge stigmas around veganism.

Photovoice methodology was used to explore young non-vegan consumers’ attitudes and beliefs towards veganism. Data was collected from students studying advertising at a major university in Australia, who produced images and narratives reflective of their own attitudes towards veganism. Polytextual thematic analysis of the resulting visual data was then undertaken to reveal the dominant themes underpinning participants’ attitudes. Participant narratives were then reviewed to confirm whether the ascribed meaning aligned with participants’ intended meaning.

Participant images were reflective of first, how they saw their world and their place within it, which showed the interplay and interconnectedness between humans, animals and nature, and second, how they saw vegans within this world, with both positive and negative attitudes expressed. Interestingly, vegans were simultaneously admired and condemned. By situating these attitudes along a spectrum of moral evaluation, bounded by stigmatisation and moral legitimacy, participants saw vegans as being either Radicals, Pretenders, Virtuous or Pragmatists. For veganism to become more widely accepted by non-vegans, there is an important role to be played by each vegan type.

This study offers a more nuanced understanding of how and why dissociative groups, such as vegans, become stigmatised, which has implications for messaging and marketing practices around veganism and associated products/services. Future research could use a similar methodology to understand why other minority groups in society are stereotyped and stigmatised, which has broader social implications.

This study aims to explore how a postmodern tribe enacts and re-interprets ideologies as a part of consumers’ collective experience, to enhance our understanding of consumer communities in conjunction with ideological capacities.

The community of “presenteers” is conceptualized as a self-organized tribe with heterogeneous components that generate capacities to act. Netnographic observation was conducted on 18 presenteer accounts and lasted around six months. Real-time data were collected by taking screenshots of the posts and stories that these users created and publicly shared. Data were analysed by adopting assemblage theory, combining inductive and deductive approaches. Firstly, a qualitative visual-textual content analysis of the tribe’s defining components was conducted. Then, the process continued with the thematic analysis of the ideological underpinnings of the tribe’s enactments.

Findings shed light on the ways in which consumer communities interpret the entanglement of religious, political, and cultural ideologies in shaping their experiences. In the case of the presenteers tribe, findings reflect a novel ideological interplay between neo-Ottomanism, post-feminism and consumerism.

The study offers a deep dive into a unique tribe that is being organized around the consumer-created practice of “presenteering” and investigates consumer communalization in alignment with the ideological turn in culture-oriented interpretative research on consumers, consumption, and markets. This exploration helps to bridge the research on the communalization of consumers with the recent discussions of ideology in the postmodern market.

The study offers a deep dive into a unique tribe that is being organized around the consumer-created practice of “presenteering” and investigates consumer communalization in alignment with the ideological turn in culture-oriented interpretative research on consumers, consumption, and markets. This exploration helps to bridge the research on the communalization of consumers with the recent discussions of ideology in the postmodern market.

This article demonstrates the reach of Tuhiwai Smith’s ideas across Pacific research. It discusses the theoretical and practical influence of her seminal work Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples through “holographic epistemology”, an indigenous way of viewing knowledge.

The authors present a talanoa (Pacific-style relational conversation) to explore Tuhiwai Smith’s legacy for Pacific Islander researchers and research. The talanoa between two academics at different career stages draws upon personal and professional research experiences and peer-reviewed published sources to explore the expansive and enduring legacy of Tuhiwai Smith’s life and ideas.

Decolonizing Methodologies has helped Pacific Islander researchers flourish, and Pacific Island research approaches gain legitimacy in higher education. Its epistemological influence can be seen in research which utilises knowledge of body, mind and spirit – holographic epistemology – and in indigenous innovations to qualitative research.

This article has value for those seeking to understand the epistemological underpinnings of indigenous approaches to research. It has originality in its presentation as a talanoa between two researchers who have found affirmation and academic freedom with Tuhiwai Smith’s ideas. It is also original in offering a Pacific perspective from a Hawaiian and a Samoan academic about the immense koha (gift) they have received from a Maori tuahine (sister).

The paper aims to explore how values and knowledge are expressed in student’s discussions about food and health.

Food practices present a complex phenomenon extending beyond biomedical descriptions, including social dynamics of food in families and communities. Contextual conditions of social groups and settings have significant impacts on food choices and practices. Although values constitute a central part of educational goals, deliberate values education remains an often-neglected area, with a tendency in both curricula and educational practice to focus on knowledge and overlook how values intersect with knowledge. The paper utilises group interviews supported by participant observations to study the food and health practices as expressed in students' discussions.

The paper’s findings show how values are expressed together with knowledge as value-knowledges around food and health within the social contexts of family, cultural identities and peer relationships. While moving through their lives, students draw on and utilise biomedical, social-cultural and sensory value-knowledges, simultaneously considering the nutrition and taste of foods, the value of connecting with family and peers in cultural settings as well as getting enough food to feel satiated.

The paper presents an original approach around the necessity to consider and integrate cultural identities in discussions and education about food and health to empower students and their communities in a way that is socially just and equitable. This involves shifting discussions of health education away from students as (ir)rational obstacles but rather as partners in co-creating knowledge for sustainable food and health equity.