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Attributing blame for performance failure and credit for success is ubiquitous in organizations. These responsibility attributions can play an important role in aligning individual and organizational performance expectations, but may also exacerbate conflict in groups and organizations. Theory suggests that an actor's organizational role will affect blame and credit attributions, yet empirical work on this prediction is lacking. This article tests an organizational role approach by assessing the effect of the responsible actor's hierarchical position and whether he or she acted as an individual or as part of a group on blame and credit attributions. The study finds that in response to organizational failures and successes leadership roles attract more blame than other positions, but in contrast to previous predictions, these roles do not attract more credit than lower level roles. In addition, upper level positions tend to be assigned greater blame than credit, while lower level positions show a reversed pattern: they attract more credit than blame. Groups are less likely to be assigned blame and more likely to be credited than are individuals, and occupants in flat organizational structures are assigned higher levels of blame and credit than are occupants in taller organizational structures.

This paper aims to provide a theoretical analysis of contemporary brand communication for technology products, focused on how the human body functions as a metaphorical and communicative device, to shed insight into how technological brands make their products understandable, tangible, and attractive in interesting ways.

An interdisciplinary conceptual review and analysis focuses on issues of metaphor and the body in marketing research and social theory. This analysis is discussed and applied to the communication of technological brands.

The paper argues that to successfully communicate technological brands requires interdisciplinary insights in order to understand consumption contexts. It proposes an analytic framework for practice and research focused on visual communication for technology brands and products, and demonstrates how advertising both creates and contributes to culture.

Researchers need to understand that a sole focus on the advertising system needs to be supplemented by an understanding of how the symbol of the body in technology advertisements is reflective and productive of meaning in socio‐cultural discourse.

Brand researchers need to add to the prevailing advertising as persuasion model to encompass representation and culture in brand communications. The paper contributes to understanding how basic visual forms, such as the human body, are employed in technology product marketing. It challenges marketers and researchers to broaden their conception of branding and marketing communications to one more consistent with an image economy.

The Equal Pay Act 1970 (which came into operation on 29 December 1975) provides for an “equality clause” to be written into all contracts of employment. S.1(2) (a) of the 1970 Act (which has been amended by the Sex Discrimination Act 1975) provides:

For the purpose of reconsidering arts marketing methodologies, this paper seeks to contemplate the axiomatic foundations of alternative arts marketing scholarship, to ask what conversation between arts and marketing they herald and to explore the consequent conceptual issues.

The paper reviews and evaluates the arts marketing literature.

The paper develops and presents four categories of arts marketing: the consumption of art; marketing as art; art as marketing; and marketing interpreting art.

The paper contributes to arts marketing paradigmatic and methodological debates by exploring the axiomatic foundations of this nascent field.

This paper offers an ethical analysis of visual representation that provides criteria for and sheds light on the appropriateness dimension of marketing communications. It provides a theoretically informed framework for recognizing and understanding ethical issues in visual representation.

An interdisciplinary conceptual review and analysis focuses on four representational conventions, synthesizing ethical concerns, to provide a broader context for recognizing and understanding ethical issues in marketing representation: face‐ism, idealization, exoticization and exclusion. This framework is discussed and applied to marketing communications.

It argues that valuations of communication appropriateness must be informed by an awareness of the ethical relationship between marketing representations and identity. It is no longer satisfactory to associate advertising solely with persuasion, rather advertising must be seen as a representational system, with pedagogical as well as strategic functions. We conclude by discussing the theoretical, research, and managerial implications that arise from an ethics of visual representation.

Urges moving beyond an advertising=persuasion model to encompass representation and culture in marketing communication studies. Contributes to understanding the ethical implications of marketing communication. Challenges marketers and researchers to broaden their conception of marketing communication to one more consistent with an image economy.

The purpose of this paper is to propose a new method for knowledge worker productivity measurement which is based on valid principles and appropriate viewpoints.

Based on an extensive and thorough literature review the elements that need to be taken into consideration, while designing a method for knowledge worker productivity measurement, are determined and divided into principles and viewpoints. These elements must be incorporated into the design of knowledge worker productivity measurement methods so that the correctness and accuracy of these methods can be verified. The proposed model, which is based on appropriate principles and viewpoints, determines the outputs of knowledge work with respect to the tasks that a worker’s job includes. Considering nine measures, these outputs are evaluated using fuzzy numbers and, then, quantified. The inputs of knowledge work are knowledge, skills and abilities (KSAs) required to do the job. These inputs are identified and quantified using Job Element Method. Furthermore, fuzzy Data Envelopment Analysis is employed to model the productivity.

In this paper, the proposed method for knowledge worker productivity measurement follows both appropriate principles and viewpoints, simultaneously. In order to validate the obtained results and explore the applicability of the proposed method, a case study was carried out at an Iranian organization in electric power industry. Statistical analyses are employed to prove the validity of the results. Based on the obtained results, the productivity of a knowledge worker is said to be high when he/she delivers the expected amount of job outputs considering the values of his/her inputs (KSAs).

The originality of this paper is twofold. First, the extracted principles and viewpoints can serve as a guideline for the development of similar methods. Second, the proposed model offers an effective and efficient tool that can serve as the basis for the comparison among relative productivity of knowledge workers. Furthermore, the obtained results could form a basis to examine the productivity trend of each knowledge worker over different periods of time.

The purpose of this paper is to review a typology of branding that identifies four perspectives on branding: corporate perspectives, consumer perspectives, cultural perspectives and critical perspectives. This typology helps organise and synthesise the growing interdisciplinary literature on brands and branding, and sheds light on the various ways corporate brands work.

A brief synthetic review of branding is offered, along with contemporary examples of emerging aspects of the four branding perspectives.

The four perspectives demonstrate the growing interdisciplinary interest in brands. They also signal a move away from a focus on the brand-consumer dyad, towards broader social cultural and theoretical concerns. Studies that extend brand research into cultural and historical realms may provide an essential bridge between our understandings, on the one hand, of value residing within the product or producer intention, and on the other, value created by individual consumers or brand communities.

The insights from this review may shed light on a number of branding research areas, including studies on corporate marketing, cultural heritage brands and strategic brand communication.

The paper illustrates how complex branding has become and offers conceptual tools to think about and guide branding from multiple points of view.

This paper provides a selective overview of important recent developments in corporate marketing and brand research over as well as a look at visual aspects of four perspectives of branding as a complement to corporate branding research. The typology of brand perspectives helps organise and illuminate a burgeoning brand literature, and provides an interdisciplinary framework for understanding brands.

This paper aims to investigate visual exaggerations of fragrance advertisements by comparing subjects' expectations resulting from print ads to their subsequent product evaluations. It then considers whether the actual scents fall short, meet or exceed these expectations.

By means of a semiotic analysis the authors capture the corresponding literary attributes of the ads to develop adjective pairs describing the meaning of the ads. Interviews are conducted to assess the meaning that consumers draw from the fragrance ads and the authors supplement these findings by performing a blind olfactory product evaluation of the fragrances. Paired sample t‐tests are used to compare subjects' ad expectations to their subsequent product evaluation of the actual scent.

These results show that the visual cues and imagery in the fragrance ads appear, under certain conditions, to result in product expectations that exceed actual product evaluations, suggesting the existence of visual puffery. The authors also found that the more abstract descriptors of the ad resulted in significantly higher expectations, while the more concrete descriptors resulted in significantly lower expectations than the actual product evaluation.

A small sample size of homogenous consumers limits the generalizability of the results. No measures of attitude effectiveness were taken.

Visual puffery may be effective and help marketers, even in countries where verbal puffery is illegal, to use another means to reach consumers.

This paper investigates an under‐researched area in advertising. A multi‐method approach and primary data are used to assess subjects' ad expectations of a fragrance and the actual product evaluation and demonstrate the existence of visual puffery.

The purpose of this paper is to provide a selected bibliography of recent resources on library instruction and information literacy.

The paper identifies and annotates periodical articles, monographs, and audiovisual material, in the area of library instruction and information literacy.

The paper provides information about each source, discusses the characteristics of current scholarship, and describes sources that contain unique scholarly contributions and quality reproductions.

The information in the paper may be used by librarians and interested parties as a quick reference to literature on library instruction and information literacy.

This paper aims to consider the visual literacy mobilized by consumers in their use of brand aesthetics to construct and communicate a curated self.

The research surveyed a range of visual material from Instagram. Specifically, the goal was to use “compositional interpretation”, an approach to visual analysis that is not methodologically explicit but which, in itself, draws upon the visual literacy of the researcher to provide a descriptive analysis of the formal visual quality of images as distinct from their symbolic resonances. The research also incorporates 10 phenomenological-type interviews with consumers. Consistent with a phenomenological approach, informants were selected because they have “lived” the experience under investigation, in this case requiring them to be keen consumers of the Orla Kiely brand.

Findings indicate that consumers deploy their visual literacy in strategic visualization (imaginatively planning and coordinating artifacts with other objects in their collection, positioning and using them as part of an overall visual repertoire), composition (becoming active producers of images) and emergent design (turning design objects into display pieces, repurposing design objects or simply borrowing brand aesthetics to create designed objects of their own).

This research has implications for the understanding of visual literacy within consumer culture. Engaging comprehensively with the visual compositions of consumers, this research moves beyond brand symbolism, semiotics or concepts of social status to examine the self-conscious creation of a curated self. The achievement of such a curated self depends on visual literacy and the deployment of abstract design language by consumers in the pursuit of both aesthetic satisfaction and social communication.

This research has implications for brand designers and managers in terms of how they might control or manage the use of brand aesthetics by consumers.

To date, there has been very little consumer research that explores the nature of visual literacy and even less that offers an empirical investigation of this concept within the context of brand aesthetics. The research moves beyond brand symbolism, semiotics and social status to consider the deployment of abstract visual language in communicating the curated self.