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This article presents a history of the visual merchandising of American firearms from the mid-19th century until the present day. Although the scholarly literature has investigated visual representations of guns in advertising and popular media, it has paid far less attention to how sellers have displayed these objects at or near the point of purchase.

Primary sources include frescoes, engravings and photographs, plus papers, advertising and illustrations in popular newspapers and trade magazines. These and other period visual data are supplemented by secondary sources from a variety of fields, especially retailing and firearms history.

Evidence shows that American firearms were merchandised visually by Samuel Colt at three world expositions in the 1850s, by gunmakers and retailers in the latter 19th century, by Winchester and Remington dealers in the 1920s and 1930s, by high- and low-end retailers in New York in the first half of the 20th century and by gun stores, auctions and shows up to the present day.

The history of visual merchandising generally has focused upon major department stores, their alluring street-front windows and their fancy interior displays. This research explores past and present visual merchandising of firearms by manufacturers and smaller retailers. To the best of the author’s knowledge, it is the first such history of the subject.

This paper aims to develop an alternative perspective on marketing informed by service scholarship to resolve marketing’s challenges as a discipline and practice.

This paper is conceptual and builds on the ongoing debate regarding marketing’s challenges and on service research to develop a new alternative marketing perspective and model, which could contribute to reforming marketing.

An analysis of the current understanding of marketing showed that the discipline’s myopic focus on activities, which disregards what marketing is as a phenomenon, is the primary reason for the prevailing problems and failure to reform marketing. Based on research into service logic (SL), the paper demonstrates that a higher level view of service can be characterized as the provision of help to the users of goods and services to ensure that these goods and services deliver meaningful assistance in their lives and work. This suggests that the ultimate objective for marketing is to make firms meaningful to the users of their goods and services.

To the best of the author’s knowledge, since this paper is the first to conceptually develop a perspective on marketing and a corresponding model informed by service scholarship, more conceptual and empirical research is necessary. Developing the new meaningfulness-based perspective and model for marketing brings a new approach to the process of resolving marketing’s current troubled situation.

The meaningfulness approach to marketing enables customer-centered marketing strategies to be implemented. Such strategies include both demand-stimulating and demand-satisfying programs.

To the best of the author’s knowledge, this paper is the first to examine marketing’s troubled situation from a service research and SL perspective.

This research explores the paradigm of coopetition and the different theories that contribute to its evolution. The variation of cooperation and competition in a relationship depends on the resource flows identified in the literature. However, this research focusses on coopetition behaviours in the business world. Coopetition, simultaneous collaboration, and competition between firms, has emerged as a pivotal factor influencing organisational success in today's dynamic business environment. Based on game theory, the different types of competitive relationships between adversaries will also be presented in this chapter, where the interdependencies between the players and their choices to co-operate or compete are explored. Another perspective presented is how companies use game theory to achieve gains in both zero-sum and non-zero-sum games by changing the players, the perceptions of risk, the associated returns, and the rules and scope of the game. This chapter also will show the prisoner's dilemma applied to business practices. Finally, we present the ‘tit-for-tat’ theory of strategy. The conclusion underscores the need for organisations to navigate a delicate balance between collaboration and competition to thrive in a complex and interconnected tourism global marketplace.

Working conditions, pay rates and the rights of workers to collectively negotiate have become important points of discussions in recent years, with support for unions and union applications rising to levels long unseen in America. In many instances, though, companies have responded aggressively. This is not the first time such a dynamic has played out in American business. This study aims to take a fresh look at one of America’s most prominent historical disputes between labor and ownership – the Homestead Massacre of 1892 – to glean lessons from that conflict that remain relevant to today’s business environment.

This study adopts game theory and the principles of repeated interaction to assess how differing discount factors led to differences in time orientations between the workers and the Carnegie company. These differing time orientations affected both the strategy each side deployed in the negotiations and the payoffs received by the parties. Letters, contemporary news reports and histories of the events leading up to and immediately following the 1892 Homestead Massacre are qualitatively analyzed with a genealogical pragmatic approach.

Differences in temporal orientation between management and workers exacerbated the conflict, with the workers adopting a more cooperative stance and distal time orientation, while the Carnegie company negotiated with a proximal time orientation and played to “win” a game that, in fact, could not be fully won or lost given its infinitely repeating nature. The result was a short-term victory for the Carnegie company but with long-term negative consequences that highlight the suboptimal outcome the company achieved by playing a proximal strategy in an infinite game.

Although the incident at Homestead is a well-studied labor dispute, many of the themes that preceded the incident have resurfaced in the modern work context. This work, by adopting game theory as an analytical framework, provides new insights into management mistakes that led to the labor conflict and lessons for what present-day managers can do to avoid exacerbating labor strife.

In this research, we magnify the role of hybrid leadership style in facing uncertain turbulence in the market. Due to the rapid change in innovation and other macroeconomic developments, the already existing market turbulence has become uncertain. This uncertainty has further been accentuated by recent events like COVID-19 and Russia–Ukraine invasion. One solution that is crucial in facing this uncertainty is effective leadership. However, taking the wide groups of individuals present in the market into account, this leadership has to be tailored for each, and this is where the topic for this research, hybrid leadership style to face uncertain market turbulence, comes to play. Here, we gather the existing roles of different leadership styles in different businesses that help in facing the uncertainties and explore the possibilities of new ones. This work can therefore act as a guide to practice hybrid leadership style during market turbulences where following a single specific style may prove unhelpful or lead to dissatisfaction and even aggravation.