Search results

The British East India Company (EIC) made connections between the Malay Archipelago and Bengal and established a penal settlement at Bencoolen, followed by the Straits Settlements for the Indian convicts. The convicts from different parts of South Asia today were generally described as “Indian”, such generalisation often hides the identity of specific convicts from South Asia. Among the Indian convicts, the Bengalis were transported to Bencoolen and the Straits Settlements. However, the generic term has made it difficult to reconstruct the history of Bengali convicts’ experiences and pathos. Therefore, this paper attempts to “rediscover” the afterlife of transportation of Bengali felons in the Malay Peninsula.

By examining a range of archival records and current scholarships, this article shows the inclusivity, diversity and accessibility of convict labourers with mainstream society. This study will open up a new avenue of convict histories and subaltern studies on Asia.

The Bengali convicts in the Straits Settlements, one of the oldest migrant sections, have largely been ignored in historical literature. Though the Bengalis, among other South Asian convicts, constituted a significant portion, they were categorised under the generic term “Indian” (Rai, 2014). Their manual labour was invaluable for the colonial economy and the development of the Straits Settlements.

Researcher faced difficulties to get the descendant of Bengali convicts.

This article is a research paper based on mostly archival records; therefore, it is an original contribution to the existing knowledge on the convict history.

The research aim of this article is to generate novel insights into how public sector organizations (PSOs) strategically communicate with the public about critical issues on social media. To this end, the study explores the public's experiences of the Swedish Police's sense of safety communication on Instagram in the third largest city in Sweden, where the lack of a sense of public safety is a main societal challenge.

The research was designed as a case study employing photo-elicitation interviews as a method to collect the empirical material. A phenomenography approach was used to analyze public experiences of the Swedish Police's Instagram communication in Malmö, Sweden.

Findings show that the police's strategic communication of safety on Instagram is experienced along the dimensions of a sense of protection, a sense of proximity and a sense of ambiguity. Taken together, these dimensions broaden and develop the knowledge of what communicating a sense of safety in the public sphere entails.

This study adds to previous research on strategic communication in public sector organizations by demonstrating what strategic communication accomplishes at the receiving end outside of the organization.

This paper is determined to examine the role of body image and materialism in predicting the identity exploration of university students when conspicuous consumption is a mediator variable.

The study used a quantitative method. Data were collected from students of three federal universities in Nigeria. The sample size was 331. A self-report questionnaire was used to collect data and analysis was performed using the partial least squares structural equation modelling.

Findings reveal that materialism has a negative association in predicting the identity exploration of students. At the same time, there was a significant full and partial mediating effect of conspicuous consumption on the relationship between body image and materialism on identity exploration, respectively.

The study provides valuable information for parents in understanding how conspicuous consumption may influence their children’s identity formation. The findings can also be helpful for educators in the design of discussions and interventions for students on the social-psychological antecedents of conspicuous consumption and identity exploration. Government and regulatory agencies can use the study’s findings to shape student financial literacy and consumer protection policies.

This study makes both theoretical and methodological contributions to the existing literature. It provided concrete empirical evidence establishing a subtle connection between the symbolic self-completion theory and the identity status paradigm. It is also amongst the first single research conducted within the scope of these two theories in the Nigerian higher education context.

The purpose of this paper is to conduct a within-gender analysis and between-gender differences in seeking (personal and interpersonal) and escaping (personal and interpersonal) motivations to attend a non-traditional festival in Saudi Arabia. Specific objectives were: to conduct a within-gender analysis in motivations to attend a non-traditional festival in Saudi Arabia; and to examine between-gender differences in motivations to attend a non-traditional festival in Saudi Arabia.

Based on the data collected from 458 attendees at a non-traditional festival in Saudi Arabia, the authors employed network analysis for within-gender analysis and MANOVA and ANOVA for between-gender comparison. The network analysis served two purposes, in that it examined each item’s predictability for each gender, and analyzed the correlations among motivation items within each gender. In addition, the General Linear Model served to compare the male and female groups’ motivations to attend the non-traditional festival. The authors first performed MANOVA for each dimension and then ANOVA for each dimension’s individual items.

Within-gender analysis reveals that several sets of motivations were associated strongly for both genders. This suggests that Saudi Arabians seem to enjoy entertainment because it projects the festival mood; they want to escape both from home and work and attend the festival to relieve stress by changing their routine pace. However, gender differences were apparent in several other items, especially for the group of women. Between-group comparison analysis shows significant gender differences in several elements of motivation. Overall, personal seeking and escaping were greater for males than females. In contrast, interpersonal seeking was greater for females than males.

Entertainment seems to be a key contributor to the festival mood because entertainment and the festival mood were related closely for both genders. In fact, personal and interpersonal escaping means were greater than personal interpersonal seeking means for both genders. Indeed, opportunities exist to develop non-traditional festivals in the country further. Gender differences were identified in several items of personal seeking and escaping, and interpersonal seeking. With respect to personal seeking, men tend to seek the entertainment, festival mood and the event’s uniqueness more than do women, a finding that their higher means in personal escaping supported. It is clear that men view the festival as a way to enjoy themselves to escape from their jobs and daily stress to a greater degree than do their female counterparts. Women are more likely to seek interpersonal experiences in that they are more likely to enjoy the festival because it offers the opportunity to meet new people and spend quality time with family and friends. This study has several limitations, leading to suggestions for future research. Because seeking and escaping motivations have been used relatively little in the festival setting, future researchers should develop a valid scale of personal and interpersonal seeking and escaping motivations specifically for festivals employing both qualitative and quantitative methods. Second, while the data were collected at a single non-traditional festival, future research can use multiple sites to increase the ability to generalize the findings. Third, although this study was limited to Saudi Arabia, further research can apply seeking and escaping motivations, both at the personal and interpersonal levels, to other cultures to extend the applicability of the framework used in this study.

Non-traditional festival managers need to focus on an atmosphere that provides festivities, as many people in the Saudi Arabian culture appear to be escaping from their everyday lives to enjoy themselves and with family and friends. To appeal to male workers, festival organizers and managers need to advertise and market the events’ mood and liveliness overall with photos of workers leaving the office free of stress and looking forward to attending an event. To appeal to women who desire unique experiences that a variety of forms of entertainment provide, event managers must ensure that the entertainment is innovative and creative, and differs from what other festivals provide to attract more female attendees. Also, festival planners must focus on events that incorporate the family unit and promote the opportunity to meet new people to appeal to women in Saudi Arabia.

This is the first study to examine gender differences in festival motivations in Saudi Arabia. The relaxation of the historically strict and conservative cultural values, coupled with the country’s desire to develop its tourism and event sector, provides an ideal opportunity for future research. The authors hope that this research will stimulate further interest in the country with the goal to develop and market its tourism sector and products on the world’s stage.

Fetishism has been often linked to misrecognition and false belief, to one being “ideologically duped” so to speak. But could we think that fetishism may be precisely the very opposite? The purpose of this paper is to explore the potential of this at first sight counterintuitive notion. It locates the problem of fetishism at the crux of the problem of disavowal and argues that one needs to distinguish between a disavowal – marked by cynical knowledge – and fetishistic disavowal, which can be understood as a subcategory of the same belief structure of ideology.

This conceptual paper is based on literature review and utilizes examples from the author’s ethnographic fieldworks in India (2008-2013) and central Europe (2015-2019).

The paper provides a new insight into the structure of fetishism, relying on the psychoanalytic structure of disavowal, where all disavowal is ideological, but not all disavowal is fetishistic, thereby positing a crucial, often unacknowledged distinction. Where disavowal follows the structure “I know quite well how things are, but still […],” fetishistic disavowal follows the formula: “I don’t only know how things are, but also how they appear to me, and nonetheless […].”

The paper develops an original conceptualization of fetishism by distinguishing ideological disavowal from fetishistic disavowal.

Understanding customers is critical for service researchers and practitioners. Today, customers are increasingly active online, and valuable information about their opinions, experiences and behaviors can be retrieved from a variety of online platforms. Online customer information creates new opportunities to design personalized and high-quality service. This paper aims to review how netnography as a method can help service researchers and practitioners to better use such data.

A systematic review and analysis were conducted on 321 netnography studies published in marketing journals between 1997 and 2017.

The systematic review reveals that netnography has been applied in a variety of ways across different marketing fields and topics. Based on the analysis of existing netnography literature, empirical, theoretical and methodological recommendations for future netnographic service research are presented.

This paper shows how netnography can offer service researchers unprecedented opportunities to access naturalistic online data about customers and, hence, why it is an important method for future service research.

Netnographic research can help service firms with, for example, service innovation, advertising and environmental scanning. This paper provides guidelines for service managers who want to use netnography as a market research tool.

Netnography has seen limited use in service research despite many promising applications in this field. This paper is the first to encourage and support service researchers in their use of the method and aims to stimulate interesting future netnographic service research.

Wearable technologies are a near future concept and cyborgs are in fact reality. The authors’ proposition is how cyborgisation could and will occur. The paper aims to discuss this issue.

The approach used by this paper is a general review.

The authors explain how the line between humans and technology is becoming more and more blurred as this trends paper explores the concepts of singularity and cyborgs as a future state highlighting the world's first cyborg games.

The paper contributes to our understanding that science fiction is fiction to some but reality to others depending on a person's cognition and insight.

The authors provide a personal insight into how they see the potential of urban culture as a vehicle for creative placemaking. The purpose of this study is to highlight the opportunities for the tourism industry to embrace this global youth culture now that one of its pillars, breakdance, is on the brink of becoming an Olympic discipline in 2024, thus nudging this youth culture from underground to mainstream.

The authors interviewed two Dutch pioneers in the field of urban culture: Tyrone van der Meer, founder of The Notorious IBE (IBE), an international breaking event, and Angelo Martinus, founder of the urban scene in Eindhoven and initiator of EMOVES, an urban culture and sports event.

The authors illustrate the added value of urban culture to creative placemaking by addressing the initiatives of previously mentioned Dutch pioneers. Their urban culture events on Dutch soil, yearly attract thousands of participants and visitors from the urban scene, covering over 40 nationalities, to the South of The Netherlands.

This study provides a glimpse into a global youth culture that is primarily invisible to the tourism industry and a foresight in how the tourism industry and other stakeholders (e.g. policy makers, city marketeers, tourism managers and event organisers) can pick up on this evolving trend. The study is meant as a wake-up call.

Blood donation knowledge of healthy young students is crucial to donate blood voluntarily and regularly in long-term. This study aimed to determine the influencing factors on the blood donation knowledge, to identify gaps of blood donation knowledge and reasons for not donating blood among university and college students in Yangon, Myanmar.

Cross-section survey (May 2019) was conducted in students of Yangon Technological University (YTU) and National Management Degree College (NMDC) with the use of quota and convenience sampling method. The questionnaires covered sociodemographic characteristics, blood donation knowledge and reasons for not donating blood.

Total 320 students (129 males and 191 females) with age of 18 to 23 years old participated. Previous blood donation had statistically significant influence on blood donation knowledge scores (ß = 0.396, p < 0.001). Gaps of knowledge between nondonors and blood donors were recorded, especially in universal recipient blood groups, Rh blood groups, blood donation interval, eligibility criteria, transfusion-transmitted infections (TTIs), amount of blood removed in donation, benefits of blood donations and misbelief of infections from blood donation. Top three reasons for not donating blood among nondonors were (1) no opportunity, (2) fear to donate and (3) still underage to donate.

Blood donations programs should extend awareness-raising programs in academic society and population at large. Raising awareness should focus on the knowledge gaps such as donor eligibility, interval of blood donations, TTIs and benefits of donating blood to recipients.