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This paper aims to develop a model that supports public organisations in making informed strategic decisions as to which public services are most suitable to be improved through co-creation. Thus, it first identifies the features that make public services (un)suitable for co-creation and then applies this knowledge to develop a multi-criteria decision support model for the assessment of their co-creation readiness.

The decision support model is the result of design science research. While its structure is determined by a qualitative multi-criteria decision analysis, its substance builds on a content analysis of Web of Science papers and over a dozen empirical case studies.

The model is comprised of 13 criteria clustered into two groups: service readiness criteria from the perspective of service users and service readiness criteria from the perspective of a public organisation.

The model attributes rely on a limited number of empirical cases and references from the literature review. The model was tested by only one public organisation on four of its services.

The paper shifts the research focus from organisational properties and capacity, as the key co-creation drivers and barriers, to features of public services as additional factors that affect the prospect of co-creation. Thus, it makes a pioneering step towards the conceptualisation of the idea of “service readiness for co-creation” and the development of a practical instrument that supports co-creation in the public sector.

While it is essential to further research the growing diversity in western metropolitan cities, little is currently known about how the members of various ethnic communities acculturate to multicultural societies. The purpose of this paper is to explore immigrants’ cosmopolitanism and acculturation strategies through an analysis of the food consumption behaviour of ethnic consumers in multicultural London.

The study was set within the socio-cultural context of London. A number of qualitative methods such as in-depth interviews, observation and photographs were used to assess consumers’ acculturation strategies in a multicultural environment and how that is influenced by consumer cosmopolitanism.

Ethnic consumers’ food consumption behaviour reflects their acculturation strategies, which can be classified into four groups: rebellion, rarefaction, resonance and refrainment. This classification demonstrates ethnic consumers’ multi-directional acculturation strategies, which are also determined by their level of cosmopolitanism.

The taxonomy presented in this paper advances current acculturation scholarship by suggesting a multi-directional model for acculturation strategies as opposed to the existing uni-directional and bi-directional perspectives and explicates the role of consumer cosmopolitanism in consumer acculturation. The paper did not engage host communities and there is hence a need for future research on how and to what extent host communities are acculturated to the multicultural environment.

The findings have direct implications for the choice of standardisation vs adaptation as a marketing strategy within multicultural cities. Whilst the rebellion group are more likely to respond to standardisation, increasing adaptation of goods and service can ideally target members of the resistance and resonance groups and more fusion products should be exclusively earmarked for the resonance group.

The paper makes original contribution by introducing a multi-directional perspective to acculturation by delineating four-group taxonomy (rebellion, rarefaction, resonance and refrainment). This paper also presents a dynamic model that captures how consumer cosmopolitanism impinges upon the process and outcome of multi-directional acculturation strategies.

The purpose of this paper is to explore problematisations of urban diversity in urban and integration policies in Denmark and Sweden; the paper aims to show how such policies express social imaginaries about the self and the other and underlying assumptions of sameness that legitimise diverging ways of managing urban diversity and (re)organising the city.

Inspired by anthropology of policy and post-structural approaches to policy analysis, the authors approach urban and integration policies as cultural texts that are central to the organisation of cities and societies. With a comparative approach, the authors explore how visions of diversity take shape and develop over time in Swedish and Danish policies on urban development and integration.

Swedish policy constructs productiveness as crucial to the imagined national sameness, whereas Danish policy constructs cultural sameness as fundamental to the national self-image. By constructing the figure of “the unproductive”/“the non-Western” as the other, diverging from an imagined sameness, policies for organising the city through removing and “improving” urban diverse others are legitimised.

The authors add to previous research by focussing on the construction of the self as crucial in processes of othering and by highlighting how both nationalistic and colour-blind policy discourses construct myths of national sameness, which legitimise the governing of urban diversity. The authors highlight and de-naturalise assumptions and categorisations by showing how problem representations differ over time and between two neighbouring countries.