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This paper offers a new vision of responsible service leadership for service organizations nested in economic, societal and environmental contexts across time to foster collective flourishing.

Following the call for novel perspectives that recognize service as a game among (vs between) people in service ecosystems, we build on service leadership theory to integrate insights from infinite (vs finite) games and biomimicry practices to propose a holistic model for responsible service leadership.

We extend the 3C (competence, character and care) model of service leadership (Shek et al., 2021) adding context and chronos as essential pillars of responsible service leadership in nested ecosystems. We offer new interpretations and applications of the 3Cs through the lens of context and chronos.

This paper furthers the emerging conversation about unique leadership approaches for service, linking existing service leadership theories with holistic views of service ecosystems and enabling a shift from decontextualized models of leadership to a more inclusive approach.

We propose that responsible service leadership can inspire new approaches to leadership development within organizations and in business education (e.g. competencies, settings) and a reconsideration of organizational structures (e.g. culture, selection and incentive design).

The proposed 5C model revisits foundational assumptions of responsibility in service leadership, integrating actors across and within service ecosystems, society at large and the environment in the present and future.

This paper offers a conceptual framework – the 5Cs model of responsible service leadership – aimed at reimagining service leadership.

The purpose of this paper is to combine the evolving fields of customer delight and positive psychology to investigate a broader conceptualization of customer delight. Furthermore, to investigate antecedent variables that impact this broader conceptualization.

This research employed structural equation modeling in a hedonic context.

Key findings indicate that aside from joy and surprise, gratitude also has a positive impact on customer delight. Furthermore, psychological sense of brand community (PSBC) and transcendent customer experiences (TCE) were shown to positively impact the proximal antecedents of customer delight.

Extending the domain of customer delight beyond joy and surprise contributes to the theoretical discussion on what customer delight represents to the service firm. Further, this research identifies new theoretical relationships between PSBC/TCE and customer delight.

By offering the broader conceptualization of customer delight, this research contributes to the discussion of whether delight is possible or even profitable. Namely, by moving past joy/surprise, this research suggests that managing gratitude can be a strategic lever that the modern service firm can utilize.

This is the first research to evaluate gratitude as an antecedent to customer delight. Further, by combining positive psychology and delight research this research identifies new predictors of positive customer experiences.

This research aims to better understand customer experience, as it relates to customer commitment and provides a framework for future research into the intersection of these emerging streams of research.

This research contributes to theoretical and practical perspectives on customer experience and its measurement by integrating extant literature with customer commitment and customer satisfaction literature.

The breadth of the domains that encompass customer experience – cognitive, emotional, physical, sensorial and social – makes simplistic metrics impossible for gauging the entirety of customers’ experiences. These findings provide strong support of the need for new research into customer experience and customer commitment.

Given the complexity of customer experience, managers are unlikely to track and manage all relevant elements of the concept. This research provides a framework identifying empirically the most salient attributes of customer experience with particular emphasis on those elements that enhance commitment. This offers insight into service design to correspond with specific commitment and experience dimensions.

This research is the first to examine the customer experience as it relates to customer commitment – a key factor in customer loyalty, positive word of mouth and other desired outcomes for managers and marketers. This paper provides a framework for future research into these emerging topics.

The purpose of this paper is to identify the key drivers of share of wallet for credit cards issued by either a credit union (CU) or bank using a Wallet Allocation Rule (WAR) framework.

A survey approach engaging 1,649 current CU members at nine CUs regarding their use of 3,487 different credit cards is employed. Binary logistic regression is used to discriminate when CU issued vs bank issued credit cards are perceived to be “best” by their owners.

This research indicates the key drivers differ significantly when CU members prefer a CU-issued credit card vs a bank-issued credit card. For example, CU-issued credit cards are attractive to some CU members because of prior relationships with the CU and offering lower interest rates on revolving balances. By contrast, customers who choose a bank-issued credit card are much more likely to be driven by the rewards offered on the card.

Using the WAR key driver approach, managers can identify differentiating attributes that influence customers’ perceptions of their rank vis-à-vis competition and thereby grow share.

This research provides a significant contribution to both the banking literature and the scientific literature by examining the robustness of a relative metrics approach within the retail banking and CU market. It represents the first empirical analysis of a WAR key driver approach in the scientific literature.

Responding to an increasing call for a more comprehensive conceptualization of customer delight, the purpose of this paper is to expand the theory of customer delight and to examine the implications of such an expanded view for service theory and practice.

This paper presents the results of three qualitative studies. The first study explores customer delight through self-reported consumption experiences in customer-selected contexts, followed by one-on-one in-depth interviews. The second involves focus groups and the third examines self-reported incidents of delightful customer experiences.

This research finds that customer delight goes beyond extreme satisfaction and joy and surprise to include six properties that—individually or in combination—characterize customer delight. An expanded conceptualization of how customer delight can be defined is proposed in which customer delight is associated with various combinations of six properties – the customer experiencing positive emotions, interacting with others, successful problem-solving, engaging customer’s senses, timing of the events and sense of control that characterizes the customer's encounter.

It is clear from the findings of this research that there is no single property that is associated with delight. Through the facilitation of multiple properties, managers have the potential to create a multitude of routes to delight. It is recommended that future research (1) identify and explicate these alternative routes for engendering delight using the six properties identified, and (2) develop a general typology based on service context and characteristics, customer segment, etc. that further stimulates scholarship on delight, and offers more industry-specific insights for managers.

Insights from this investigation will encourage managers and service designers to think more broadly and creatively about delight. Doing so will open up new opportunities for achieving customer delight, beyond merely focusing on extreme satisfaction or surprise and joy strategies currently dominating discussions of customer delight.

This paper makes several contributions to the service literature. First, it extends current conceptualizations of customer delight and offers an expanded definition. Next, it demonstrates how this new understanding extends the existing literature on delight. Finally, it proposes an agenda for future delight research and discusses managerial implications, opening up new opportunities for firms to design delightful customer experiences.

This paper aims to outline the purpose, planning, development and delivery of the “1st Academic-Practitioner Research with Impact workshop: Customer Experience Management (CEM) and Big Data” held at Alliance Manchester Business School on 18th and 19th January 2016, at which four subsequent papers were initially developed.

The paper sets out a summary of the importance and significance of the four papers developed at the workshop and how the co-creative dialogue between managerial practitioners, presenting key problems and issues that they face, and carefully selected teams of academics was facilitated.

To develop richer and more impactful understanding of current problems challenging customer-focused managers, there is a need for more dialogue and engagement between academics and practitioners.

The paper serves as a guideline for developing future workshops that aim at strengthening the links between academia and the business world.

This paper highlights the value of academic–practitioner workshops for focusing academic research on areas of importance for practitioners to generate impact. The innovative format of the workshop and the resulting impactful papers should serve as a call and motivation for future academic–practitioner workshop development.

The purpose of this paper is to contribute a broader understanding of the complexity in relationships of power and responsibility in employability in higher education contexts and posits a conceptual framework for employability as a process, something to be achieved.

This conceptual paper arises from experience of and research into placement practices and draws upon Joan Tronto’s feminist epistemology (1993, 2012) to argue for a critical understanding of employability.

There is little in the literature that discusses employability as a process involving moral and political work. The conceptual framework offers a process of five phases to provide a foundation for understanding employability that moves beyond a focus on skills and attributes.

The conceptual framework enables all employability professionals, including researchers, to think beyond skills and attributes for employment to explore the implications of the relations that shape the need for employability within and outside their sphere.

Developing a conceptual framework enables employability professionals to evaluate their practices and assess: if practices are inclusive or excluding; the implications of power and responsibility; the tensions arising from the diverse nature of need in employability work.

This paper posits a conceptual framework for understanding the process of employability work as something to be achieved.

The purpose of this paper is to review and explore topics that might constitute a history of branding in sport and might also contribute to understanding today's sport branding practices.

The paper employs both secondary and primary sources on a range of sports across centuries of time and space. The paper also employs Mayer's principles of multi‐media learning.

The paper finds that sport brands have a long history driven by entrepreneurs and organizations through rule‐making, equipment, distinct names, and employment of new technologies.

The paper identifies a series of topics that merit closer scrutiny by historians whose research might inform contemporary scholars and practitioners of sport marketing.

The purpose of this paper is to propose an initial, exploratory and tentative theoretical construct related to the current consumption of landscape as a key symbolic and physical element in territorial representation and evocation, and for the deployment of place branding strategy. It constructs a line of argument to support what shall be referred to as “landscape branding”, that is, the paradigmatic role of landscape in place branding. It is, therefore, of interest to define the value of landscape as a social and cultural construction, which is why the paper awards importance to the specific analysis of their capacity for visual and/or aesthetic evocation within the context of a general branding strategy for geographical spaces.

To develop a sufficient proposal for sustaining “a theory of landscape branding”, the paper deploys a meta-analysis, that is, an extensive review and interpretation of the literature related to visual landscape and place branding, to propose a tentative initial approach to landscape-infused place branding theory.

The relationship existing between landscape images and texts and their possible situating and subsequent interpreting within the context of the political, cultural and economic logics of contemporary society give rise to a renewed analytical framework for cultural geographies (Wylie, 2007). At this point, place branding becomes a recurring argument for the consumption of carefully staged places, representing, to use Scott’s terms (2014), the arrival of a cognitive-cultural capitalism characteristic of post-Fordism.

From a practical perspective, the landscape branding approach provides several benefits. First of all, regardless of the fact that many commentators have argued that logos, slogans and advertising campaigns are relatively ineffective in place branding, practitioners still seem to be focussed on these visual design and advertising tools. The landscape branding approach facilitates an identity-focussed perspective that reconfirms the importance of linking reality with perception and hence reinforces the need to link place branding to policy-making, infrastructure and events.

Landscapes’ imageability facilitates visual storytelling and the creation of attractive symbolic actions (e.g. outdoor events/arts in attractive landscape and augmented reality or landscaping itself). This is the type of imaginative content that people easily share in social media. And, of course, landscape branding reiterated the importance of experience. If policymakers and publics alike understand this considerable symbolic value of landscape, it might convince them to preserve it and, hence, contribute to sustainability and quality of life.

The novelty lies not in the familiar use of visual landscape resources to promote places, but in the carefully orchestrated construction of gazes, angles, representations, narratives and interpretations characteristic of geographic space, which somehow hijack the spontaneous gaze to take it to a certain place. Everything is perfectly premeditated. According to this, the visual landscape represents a critical point as a way of seeing the essence of places through a place branding strategy. In this sense, that place branding which finds in visual landscape a definitive argument for the projection of aspirational places imposes a new “way of seeing” places and landscape based on a highly visual story with which to make a particular place desirable, not only for tourism promotion purposes but also with the intention of capturing talent, infrastructures and investment, among other objectives.

The purpose of this paper is to review the use and application of shell entities, as they facilitate crime and terrorism, impede investigations and harm societies.

The study details the types and characteristics of shell entities, reviews actual cases to exhibit how shells are abused, outlines reasons shells disguise beneficial ownership and analyzes steps taken by countries and organizations to thwart the abuse of shell entities.

Many types of shell entities are used by white-collar criminals and are often layered in an intricate network which conceals the identity of beneficial owners. Nominees and bearer shares are used in tandem with shell entities to optimize concealment. Accountants, lawyers and trust and company service providers facilitate and promote the use and abuse of shell entities by lawbreakers. The G-8, Financial Action Task Force and G-20 have begun steps to improve ownership transparency, but the effort is moving at a modest pace.

The analysis makes clear the reasons for and means by which the wealthy and powerful, along with criminals, conceal trillions of dollars of income and wealth that remain untaxed and may be used for nefarious purposes. The paper is limited by the paucity of data on concealed assets and their beneficial owners.

The findings clearly show the need for more concerted action by national governments, organizations, the United Nations and law enforcement and to improve ownership transparency and information exchange regarding shell entities.

The findings demonstrate that shell entities used to conceal wealth prevent untold trillions in taxes from being collected by governments worldwide. This lack of revenue facilitates income inequality and skews national economic and fiscal policies. Also, more white-collar criminals and terrorist financiers could be brought to justice if ownership transparency is improved.

This study adds to the limited literature on shell entities, their characteristics and uses and abuses.