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As an emerging technology marked by rapid advancements, artificial intelligence (AI) has the potential to profoundly transform higher education, particularly after the emergence of ChatGPT at the end of November 2022. Because of its immense power, it poses greater expectations and challenges than any technological advancement in the past. Thus, this paper aims to identify and discuss the need for AI-driven transformation, its challenges as well as policies and expectations of AI's successful integration into teaching and learning. This study examined recent literature and policy documents mostly published after ChatGPT's launch. This study may assist students and instructors in promoting awareness of the importance of ethical, positive and productive AI applications. Besides, the findings of this paper may aid in developing and adopting appropriate educational policies, improving curricula and training pre-service and in-service instructors in adopting knowledge, competencies and strategies for the efficient integration of AI in the teaching process. Thus, the study may help build a strategy for integrating AI systematically into higher education processes and contributing to the transformation of higher education.

This chapter proposes that artificial general intelligence (AGI), once fully deployed, will pose existential questions for higher education institutions as they currently operate. Drawing on the theoretical perspectives of the theory of technological determinism and disruptive innovation theory, the authors attempt to project how higher education institutions will be impacted by recent and upcoming developments in AI by juxtaposing current operations against expected future transformations. This chapter comes in four parts. In Part 1, the authors briefly review the advancements in AI technology, focusing on the distinction between artificial narrow intelligence (ANI) and AGI. Part 2 introduces the theory of technological determinism and disruptive innovation theory as a framework for conceptualizing the magnitude of the transformations expected to overtake higher education and their inevitability in some fashion. In Part 3, the authors tentatively juxtapose a series of expected AI-driven disruptions against their current forms. These disruptions will affect the academic infrastructure, instructional practice, curriculum design, grading and assessment, graduation pathways and global accessibility. Finally, the authors consider the implications of these transformations, which, taken together, amount to recasting the university system and constitute an invitation for theorizing these disruptions, assessing their impact and mitigating their effects. This chapter offers a dual contribution to the book. The first is conceptual, and it allows policymakers, educators and stakeholders to use existing theoretical frameworks to understand, imagine and possibly steer the direction of academic institutions so our futures are aided by AGI and not determined by it. The second contribution is practical. Identifying how and where disruptions will occur helps the authors oversee the transition to the new academic landscape with as much foresight and forethought as possible.

The purpose of this study is to investigate how the different generations of consumers behave in the field of healthy and quality food consumption, considering their perceptions about healthy attributes and healthy eating style, what are the main trusted sources influencing consumption or the attention towards healthy and quality food, how do they behave towards healthy and quality foods and which benefits and barriers affect their consumption.

Data for this study were obtained from a questionnaire survey carried out over a six-month period in 2021. The questionnaire was administered online. The sampling procedure was based on a convenient non-random sampling method applied to the Italian population aged between 18 and 75 years old. The data collection process resulted in 1,646 completed questionnaires.

The results show that, in line with the theory of generational cohorts, each generation has its own specificities regarding food behaviour. The study reveals a highly sensitive approach towards healthy and quality food consumption from both Z-ers and the Baby Boomers, whilst X-ers are quite aligned with the other generations. Millennials show specific, sometimes contradictory, attitudes and habits.

The present results offer new insights into the analysis of healthy and quality food consumption, highlighting significant differences amongst generations, which can inspire public and private intervention aimed at encouraging the overall attention and consumption of healthy and quality food with related implications in terms of society's well-being and longevity improvements.

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.