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In their work on ‘online consumer stewards’ in E-sports, the authors point to the competing social and commercial imperatives that govern behaviour and who can be seen as ‘authentic’ in a fast-paced digital environment. Drawing on insights from Bauman’s work on ‘liquidity’ they explore the case of Starcraft II, a global, multi-player online game, and show how the most successful stewards need to be both adaptable and free-floating whilst at the same time anchored in solid community structures. The most successful of these stewards are then able to leverage this (perceived) authenticity to meet both community and commercial objectives.

The purpose of this paper is to explore economic conditions of contemporary society to provide insight into the ways in which the consequences of disaster, including environmental migration, are accentuated.

This research draws on Zygmunt Bauman’s theory of liquid modernity and notions of development to analyse disaster. From the analysis, a new concept, liquid development, is proposed and critiqued as a contributing factor leading to severe contemporary disaster.

Liquid development provides a new way of making sense of the conditions and consequences of economic growth and a business as usual attitude. It further provides a framework to explore the potential disaster of environmental migration in the Pacific Islands arising from liquid development driven climate change-induced sea level rise.

Analysing these conditions provides greater understanding of the resulting impact of disaster, creating awareness and informing the need for accountability and social policy. This study aims to contribute to further practical and research enquiry that will challenge liquid developers to reconsider their impact and to accept responsibility for vulnerable members of society as part of their business as usual structure.

This paper adds to Bauman’s understanding of the consequences of globalisation through the construct of liquid development. It also continues his debate by giving awareness to the global issue of environmental migration.

To claim for communication professionals the ethical responsibility of contributing to the public debate within the realm of their function in scientific and technological organizations, giving people the power to analyze the information available to them and based on that make better-informed decisions on issues that affect their lives, is the sole purpose of this exercise. Departing from a focus on the messages – information, misinformation and disinformation – we defend to refocus on relations to enable people to make the distinction between them, and then fulfilling communication’s purpose of reflexion.

Through a review of literature, we set out to delimitate and contextualize the role of communication professionals in scientific and technological organizations in today’s social and political environments. We conclude that communication professionals in scientific and technological organizations do need to embrace the responsibility to contribute to the empowerment of citizens regarding their access to information and ability to navigate through the overwhelming amount of data they have access to daily.

As we witness the rise and expansion of populist movements throughout the globe, it is not of lesser importance to reflect on the role of scientific and technological organizations in the public debate. As it is here that public opinion forms, it is important that organizations involved in the scientific and technology development call on themselves and embrace it as part of their identity, the responsibility to inform the decision-making process of citizens with the purpose of bettering it.

Tourism studies have conceptualized social media as artifacts and networks of tangible objects based on neat distinctions and categorizations. These neat ontological distinctions and categorizations have been discussed within the academic field of actor-network theory. Several scholars have most significantly investigated the spatialities of messier ways of conceptualizing and approaching societal objects and the trajectories of societal phenomena. Efforts are being made to widen the ontological register that has traditionally dominated social science research, including tourism studies. The purpose of this chapter is to address and problematize the social media pertaining to tourism, focusing on a research project as analytical and methodological lens.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the tendencies of liquid consumption in Muslim communities and analyse its impact on Muslims’ consumption practices from the holistic perspective. Liquid consumption refers to a transient and less-materialised mode of consumption that requires both minimal attachment to possessions and hybrid ownership.

This is a conceptual paper that is based on the distinction between Islam as a holistic perspective and Islamic practice as it is applied in different contexts and situations. The Continual Drift Adjustment (CDA) framework of Muslim consumers’ behaviour is developed to be deployed as an analysis framework.

The CDA framework maintains that some problematic cases of Muslim consumption behaviours indicate the drift towards disbalance. Depending on their nature, liquid consumption practices can have different impacts on the drift. Liquid consumption practices underscored by instrumental dissemblance, intellectual insecurity and spiritual scepticism intensify the drift, whereas the incorporation of spiritual sincerity, faithful submission and existential gratefulness into practices and behaviour helps to attenuate the drift.

This research contributes to the theory of liquid consumption by incorporating the religious perspective. Liquid consumption in Islam is a complex area of research, specifically considering the ambivalent meanings of liquidity in Islamic thought.

Marketers of liquid consumption solutions must be aware of these offerings’ double-edged impact on the well-being of Muslim communities. Muslim consumers should be guided towards spiritual sincerity, faithful submission and existential gratefulness in the best way possible, although it must be noted that the customary techniques of marketing would lean towards stimulating the disbalance.

This research is unique because it deals with a topic that has not been researched in the Islamic marketing discipline to this date.