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The transition from multichannel to omnichannel retailing requires a better conceptualisation, especially for customer experience in smart shopping malls. Therefore, this study aims to propose a theoretical model that captures customers’ omnichannel experiences in smart shopping malls in terms of personal interaction, physical environment and virtual environment encounters. It examines the mediating role of flow experience on the relationship between the three types of encounters and customers’ intention to revisit smart shopping malls.

The study draws on four key theories: the service encounter model, trust-commitment theory, flow theory and experiential value theory. A total of 553 completed questionnaires were collected from customers (millennials) in the United Kingdom (UK). The data was analysed using partial least squares-structural equation modelling.

The findings show that physical environment encounters and personal interaction encounters play a significant role in customers’ omnichannel experiences in smart malls. Also, of significance are the following aspects of virtual environment encounters: interface design, personalisation, trust, privacy, consumer–peer interaction and relationship commitment. The findings highlight the significant mediating role of flow on the relationships between these three types of encounters and intention, and the effect of flow on omnichannel service usage in smart shopping malls.

The research contributes to the existing literature by proposing a conceptual model: the smart shopping mall omnichannel customer experience (SSMCE) model. The findings offer practical guidance to shopping malls and retailers who wish to enhance the customer omnichannel experience.

This study explores the impact of virtual classrooms as an emerging classroom typology in comparison to the physical classrooms in the design process. Two case studies were held in order to infer design students' classroom preferences in the project lifecycle. The findings put forth figures that compare two forms of design communication in the two classroom types in terms of their contribution to design development. Although the students acknowledged many advantages of web-based communication in the virtual classroom, they indicated that they are unwilling to let go off face-to-face encounters with the instructors and fellow students in the physical classroom. It is asserted that the future design studio will be an integrated learning environment where both physical and virtual encounters will be presented to the student. Utilizing the positive aspects of both communication techniques, a hybrid setting for the design studio is introduced, comprising the physical classroom as well as the virtual one. The proposed use for the hybrid setting is grouped under 3 phases according to the stage of the design process; as the initial, development and final phases. Within this framework, it is inferred that the design studio of the future will be an integrated form of space, where the physical meets the virtual.

Firms have begun to introduce virtual agents (VAs) in service encounters, both in online and offline environments. Such VAs typically resemble human frontline employees in several ways (e.g. the VAs may have a gender and a name), which indicates the presence of an assumption by VA designers – and by firms that employ them – that VA humanness is a positively charged characteristic. This study aims to address this assumption by examining antecedents to perceived humanness in terms of attribution of agency, emotionality and morality, and the impact of perceived humanness on customer satisfaction.

A questionnaire was distributed online to participants who had been interacting with existing VAs, and they were asked to focus on one of them for this study. The questionnaire comprised measures of antecedents to perceived humanness of VAs, perceived humanness per se and customer satisfaction. A structural equation modeling approach was used to assess associations between the variables.

Attributions of agency, emotionality and morality to VAs contributed positively to the perceived humanness of the VAs, and perceived humanness was positively associated with customer satisfaction.

Additional humanness capabilities should be explored in further research.

Firms using VAs in service encounters should make attempts to maximize perceived VA humanness, and this study shows that it may be beneficial if such attempts comprise signals that VAs have agency, emotionality and morality.

By examining VAs in terms of a set of fundamental human capabilities, the present study contributes to existing research on human–VA service encounters, which to date has focused on more superficial VA characteristics (such as if the VA has a face and gender).

The purpose of this paper is to document the experiences of team members in order to map the kinds of experiential outcomes that they report while working in virtual teams. The study will help to expand the understanding of various issues related to virtual work arrangements from the perceptions of information technology (IT) professionals in India.

The study was conducted by adopting an exploratory approach with the use of qualitative methodology. The method of sampling adopted was purposive cum snowball sampling. Semi-structured interviews (face-to-face and telephonic) were conducted by taking a sample of 52 respondents, who are employed by IT organisations. The interviews were recorded digitally, transcribed and analysed by using the content-coding approach followed by a thematic analysis.

The foremost contribution of the study is that it has considered the various motivators and the skills required to be a successful virtual team player. Significant challenges encountered in virtual teams have also been identified.

Virtual teams in the contemporary business environment are evolving with an unparalleled velocity. The findings of the paper have implications for managers, team leaders and change agents regarding how to transform and sustain in the rapidly changing business context of emerging economies.

In the extant literature on virtual teams very little is known about how individual members perceive this new form of teamwork. The findings of the study advance research on the topic of virtual teams by lending empirical support with respect to the interaction effects between IT and human beings. Recommendations have been provided for individual team members and organisations.

Using the perspectives of dramaturgy and symbolic interactionists like George Herbert Mead and Carl Couch this study focuses on paid sex work in the hypermodern, virtual world of Second Life. Using seventeen semi-structured interviews and six months of ethnographic fieldwork, I find that the employment of sexual scripts, carrying off a successful erotic scene, and the creative use of communication and embodiment are highly valued in escorts’ performance of Second Life sex work. Escorts craft an online persona that is a digital representation of the self, which is manifested in the embodiment of their digital body or avatar. In addition to digital representations of the physical self, Second Life allows for multiple methods of computer-mediated communication, and escorts are able to re-embody the first life body through the trading of first life pictures, voice cybersex, and web cam cybersex. The data allow the conclusion that most escorts are unwilling to re-embody the first life body for reasons of personal safety and the desire to restrict access to the first life self. I find, however, that there is a porous boundary between first life and Second Life in which the first life self comes through in the Second Life persona. In the concluding remarks, I explore the implications this study has for the negotiation of privacy for new social media actors who are reluctant to fully disclose their lives yet perform a persistent, archived persona for friends and followers on the Internet. This study contributes to a small, but growing, body of literature on Second Life and expands the existing work on embodiment and privacy in the digital realm.

The purpose of this paper is to argue for the sustained need for the physical workplace and real-life encounters in higher education even in the digital age despite being seemingly transformable into the virtual sphere as seen during the COVID-19 situation.

This study is based on a collaborative autoethnography by a group of seven higher educators with an overall 2,134 student encounters during the study’s time span. The authors then connect these practitioner observations with relevant COVID-19-related studies thereby adding to research on higher education as a workplace.

The data suggest that the physical workplace strongly bolsters the personal experience and effectiveness of higher education through contributing to its dynamics. Spaces predetermine the scope and levels of human interaction of teaching and learning. In a physical setting, all senses serve as mediators, whereas, online, only two senses are involved: vision and hearing. The two-dimensional screen becomes a mediator of communications. In the physical space, actors are free to adjust the working space, whereas the online working space is limited and defined by platforms.

Although higher education institutions may indeed fully substitute most practices formerly in a physical setting with online solutions, real-time encounters in the physical working space belong to its deeper raisons d'être.

This paper highlights the necessity of the physical workplace in higher education and describes the depriving potential of the exclusively online higher education teaching setting.

The virtual organization is emerging as a much‐researched phenomenon in the context of inter‐organizational relationships as well as intra‐organizational issues. However, the existing literature on the subject provides multifarious views of virtual organizations, making it difficult to compare findings in research and derive actionable inputs for practice. This paper proposes a multi‐dimensional model with nine possible variants that serves to accommodate and understand virtuality in its various forms, giving greater conceptual clarity on how virtuality can be measured and interpreted in an organizational context.

A review of the literature shows that most discussions on virtuality have not made a clear delineation of its facets.

This paper first identifies the granularity and directionality of virtuality in order to understand virtuality in its different contexts. It then suggests that virtuality should be examined in terms of factors that influence it, the degree of virtuality, and the outcomes of virtuality.

Given the breadth of coverage required to present a model in an area that is as large and complex as virtual organizations, a detailed discussion of the operationalization of the constructs has not been possible.

From a researcher's perspective, this model should aid a better understanding of virtuality whilst providing a framework within which existing and future contributions in this area can be studied. From a managerial perspective, this can be used by organizations to assess whether virtuality is indeed leveraged as a strategic tool or is largely a mere technological phenomenon.

The concepts of supply‐chain design and management have come to the fore, owing to the ever‐increasing complexity of the systems driving buyer‐supplier relations in both industrial and consumer‐based markets. The unprecedented levels of supply‐chain management complexity are partly attributed to the Internet, through its more recent business acceptance and commercial use. Deals with new competitive challenges being realised from the unprecedented speed of growth of the Internet and building commercially‐viable supply chains to meet the challenges faced by emerging virtual organisations.

As the information superhighway reaches unprecedented levels of growth and acceptance in the commercial business sector, the key challenge for many firms is to become an architect in the new revolution of electronic commerce. The Internet increases the richness of communications through greater interactivity between the firm and the customer. This article is about new competitive challenges being realised through non‐linear forms of innovation emerging on the Internet and building a commercial capability to meet the challenge.

Service encounters are becoming increasingly virtual through the infusion of computer-mediated technologies. Virtual services separate consumers and service providers both spatially and temporally. With the advent of virtual services is the need to theoretically explain how service separability is psychologically perceived by consumers across the spectrum of computer-mediated technologies. Drawing on construal-level theory, the purpose of this paper is to conceptualize a theoretical framework depicting consumer’s construal of spatial and temporal separation across a continuum of technology-mediated service virtuality.

The authors conducted two studies: first, to investigate consumers’ levels of mental construal associated with varying degrees of service separation across a spectrum of technology-mediated services; second, to empirically examine consumer evaluations of service quality in response to varying degrees of spatial and temporal service separation. These relationships were tested across two service industries: education and tourism.

Consumers mentally construe psychological distance in response to service separation and these observations vary across the spectrum of service offerings ranging from face-to-face (no psychological distance) through to virtual (spatially and temporally separated – high psychological distance) services. Further, spatial separation negatively affects consumers’ service evaluations; such that as service separation increases, consumers’ service evaluations decrease. No such significant findings support the similar effect of temporal separation on customer service evaluations. Moreover, specific service industry-based distances exist such that consumers responded differentially for a credence (education) vs an experiential (tourism) service.

Recent studies in services marketing have challenged the inseparability assumption inherent for services. This paper builds on this knowledge and is the first to integrate literature on construal-level theory, service separability, and virtual services into a holistic conceptual framework which explains variance in consumer evaluations of separated service encounters. This is important due to the increasingly virtual nature of service provider-customer interactions across a diverse range of service industries (i.e. banking and finance, tourism, education, and health care). Service providers must be cognisant of the psychological barriers which are imposed by increased technology infusion in virtual services.