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This research aims to explore and theorize the role of embodied practices – orchestrated by service providers – in the social production of servicescapes. It is claimed that the social character of the servicescape is shaped not only by narratives and materialities but also through the body. Bodily physical behaviors like physical movements in space, gestures, facial expressions, postures and tactile engagements with the surrounding materiality constitute a body language that conveys information and expresses meanings. In this kinetic capacity, the body becomes a building agent in the social constitution of the servicescape. As the author empirically demonstrates in the context of city tourism with diverse experiential opportunities, it is due to the body’s discriminatory orientation, walking, looking, pointing and acting in selective ways that the city emerges as a servicescape of particular kind.

Market-oriented ethnography was conducted in Saint Petersburg, Russia, where the author observed the guiding practices of tour guides leading international tourists during two-day city excursions.

This research identifies and unpacks three clusters of embodied practices deployed by service providers as they guide customers at the servicescape: spatializing, emplacing and regulating. The role of the body and its association with narratives and materialities is identified in each cluster.

A number of embodied practices are provided for use by contact employees as they guide customers in the servicescape. Specific guidelines are also offered to service providers for the strategic employment of body language, their training is navigational skills and the coordination of body, narratives and materialities.

This study extends current materialistic and communicative approaches on the construction of servicescapes by claiming that the servicescape in not only a physical and narrative construction but something that is also configured through the body; provides three clusters of embodied practices deployed by service providers; theorizes the intertwined nature of narratives, materiality and the body; defines servicescapes as dynamic socio-spatial entities emerging from the constant {narrative-material-body} arrangements orchestrated by service providers; and sheds light on the mediating role of the body in the social production of servicescapes.

Al Bastakiya (now Al Fahidi) historic neighborhood in Dubai stands as one of the last remaining residential historic neighborhoods in a city notoriously known to favor newness. Among the existing research about the neighborhood, most focuses on the allure of the neighborhood’s 13-meter-high wind-catching towers and private courtyards, but some delve into the histories of the merchant families who lived in the neighborhood. I argue that the existing literature does not capture the multiplicity of experiences of Al Bastakiya residents, especially the experiences of women. In fact, at times it sits in opposition to it.

This paper is part of an ongoing research project titled Ayesha Al Bastaki and the Windtower Houses of Old Dubai, which seeks to challenge the male-centered rendition of Al Bastakiya by re-introducing women as active agents in the narrative of Al Bastakiya. Ayesha Al Bastaki is a well-established Dubai-based architectural engineer with over 50 completed projects.

Using her memories in one of the biggest houses in the neighborhood, the Abbas House (now demolished), and the collective memory of her community in Al Bastakiya in the 1970s and early 1980s, a story is told about the role of women in the development of the Al Bastakiya neighborhood and their negotiation of their built environment.

Bringing to the forefront for the first time, women of the Al Bastakiya.

The purpose of this study is to explore the long-term, deeper transformations occurring in the wider energy transition to anticipate emerging issues through collective anticipatory intelligence.

Through a co-productive research design, the authors collectively scanned and discussed contemporary developments in the Swedish energy transition. The acquired insight was used in a causal layered analysis over three horizons to separate between views and developments in time and space.

Findings of this study present current, transitionary and emerging issues and how they emerge from deeper levels such as values and worldviews. These issues are discussed around how underlying changes may change to mitigate them, suggesting three strategies.

The framed and anticipated issues enable monitoring and proactive response, and the discussion contributes insight to ongoing political debates, as well as implications for managing similar initiatives.

Insights are provided into the changing cultures and values required in a future energy system, showing, e.g. how demand-side response may either come through relinquishing control over consumption or through increased flexibility and change.

Studying issues of growing concern and novel approaches, this paper should be of interest to practitioners in the energy sector and foresight professionals. It provides a critique and framing of issues to be monitored, adding to the growing library of energy futures studies.

Arts-integration is a promising approach to building students’ abilities to create and critique arguments with data, also known as informal inferential reasoning (IIR). However, differences in disciplinary practices and routines, as well as school organization and culture, can pose barriers to subject integration. The purpose of this study is to describe synergies and tensions between data science and the arts, and how these can create or constrain opportunities for learners to engage in IIR.

The authors co-designed and implemented four arts-integrated data literacy units with 10 teachers of arts and mathematics in middle school classrooms from four different schools in the USA. The data include student-generated artwork and their written rationales, and interviews with teachers and students. Through maximum variation sampling, the authors identified examples from the data to illustrate disciplinary synergies and tensions that appeared to support different IIR processes among students.

Aspects of artistic representation, including embodiment, narrative and visual image; and aspects of the culture of arts, including an emphasis on personal experience, the acknowledgement of subjectivity and considerations for the audience’s perspective, created synergies and tensions that both offered and hindered opportunities for IIR (i.e. going beyond data, using data as evidence and expressing uncertainty).

This study answers calls for humanistic approaches to data literacy education. It contributes an interdisciplinary perspective on data literacy that complements other context-oriented perspectives on data science. This study also offers recommendations for how designers and educators can capitalize on synergies and mitigate tensions between domains to promote successful IIR in arts-integrated data literacy education.

This pilot study aimed to evaluate the impact of the big five personality traits on user engagement with chatbots at the early stages of artificial intelligence (AI) adoption.

The pilot study involved 62 participants segmented into two groups to measure variables including engagement duration, task performance and future AI usage intentions.

The findings advocate for the incorporation of psychological principles into technology design to facilitate more tailored and efficient human–AI collaboration.

This pilot research study highlights the relationship between the big five personality traits and chatbot usage and provides valuable insights for customizing chatbot development to align with specific user characteristics. This will serve to enhance both user satisfaction and task productivity.

The goal of this study is to propose and test a model of the effect of the socio-cultural context on the disability inclusion climate of organizations. The model has implications of hiring people with disabilities.

To test the model, we conducted a cross-sectional study across four countries with very different socio-cultural contexts. Data were gathered from 266 managers with hiring responsibilities in Canada, China, Norway and France. Participants responded to an online survey that measured the effect of societal based variables on the disability inclusion climate of organizations.

Results indicated support for the theoretical model, which proposed that the socio-cultural context influenced the disability inclusion climate of organizations through two distinct but related paths; manager’s value orientations and their perception of the legitimacy of legislation regarding people with disabilities.

The vast majority of research regarding employment of people with disabilities has focused on supply side factors that involve characteristics of the people with disabilities. In contrast, this research focuses on the less researched demand side issue of the socio-cultural context. In addition, it responds to the “limited systematic research examining and comparing how country-related factors shape the treatment of persons with disability” (Beatty et al., 2019, p. 122).

This paper identifies how the operations of labour market intermediaries (LMIs) transform dyadic employment relationships into triadic ones. It reveals the change dynamics that LMIs engage in to bring about this transformation and that contribute to the projectification of work.

Drawing on an institutional-work lens and using interview data from both TempX, a German-based staffing service provider, and its client organizations, the analytical framework details the dynamics by which LMIs appropriate various HR tasks and different labour-market-organizing roles and thus create these triadic employment relationships.

TempX assumes a powerful position between its client organizations and workers by increasingly taking over HR tasks from its client organizations, alternating between profiting from market transactions and engaging as a buyer and seller of labour. This powerful position, gradually created through four distinct, sequential, institutional work dynamics, allows it to transform dyadic employment relationships into triadic ones and to promote project-based work.

By showing how LMIs capitalize on the multiple services they offer, and how they use these services to establish a powerful position in both the labour market and in their relations with client organizations, this paper contributes to research on how LMIs change their institutional environment. Second, by showing that LMIs switch between different labour-market organizing roles and HR tasks, this paper reveals how essential this switching is for LMIs to establish triadic employment relationships and to drive the projectification of work, and thus it also contributes to research on LMIs’ role in the projectification of work.

The main aim of this paper is to provide a living tribute of lived expert by experience and researcher Andrew Voyce.

Andrew provided the author with a list of names of people he might approach to write a tribute on his behalf.

The accounts describe the influence that Andrew has had both as an educator and as a trusted colleague for the people approached.

In many ways, the voices of people with mental health problems have been marginalised. Few mental health journals, with only some exceptions, encourage lived experience contributions.

The mental health agenda continues to be dominated by professional groups. The remarkable individuals who continually battle with serious mental illness are often lost in official discourses.

Despite the fact that the topic of mental health is now much more in the public domain, research tells us that the most effective anti-stigma strategy is contact with sufferers.

The archivist Dr Anna Sexton co-produced one of the few mental health archives that only featured people with lived experience. Andrew was one of the four people featured in it. This account “showcases” the work of this remarkable man.