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The purpose of this paper is to explore the value of oral history for marketing historians and provide case studies from projects in the Australian context to demonstrate its utility. These case studies are framed within a theme of market research and its historical development in two industries: advertising and retail property.

This study examines oral histories from two marketing history projects. The first, a study of the advertising industry, examines the globalisation of the advertising agency in Australia over the period spanning the 1950s to the 1980s, through 120 interviews. The second, a history of the retail property industry in Australia, included 25 interviews with executives from Australia’s largest retail property firms whose careers spanned from the mid-1960s through to the present day.

The research demonstrates that oral histories provide a valuable entry port through which histories of marketing, shifts in approaches to market research and changing attitudes within industries can be examined. Interviews provided insights into firm culture and practices; demonstrated the variability of individual approaches within firms and across industries; created a record of the ways that market research has been conducted over time; and revealed the ways that some experienced operators continued to rely on traditional practices despite technological advances in research methods.

Despite their ubiquity, both the advertising and retail property industries in Australia have received limited scholarly attention. Recent scholarship is redressing this gap, but more needs to be understood about the inner workings of firms in an historical context. Oral histories provide an avenue for developing such understandings. The paper also contributes to broader debates about the role of oral history in business and marketing history.

This paper aims to trace the emergence, rise and eventual fall of Mojo-MDA. Established as a creative consultancy in 1975, Mojo embarked on an ambitious growth strategy that would see it emerge as Australia’s first multinational agency. By examining the agency’s trajectory over the 1970s and 1980s, this paper revisits the story of an Australian agency with boundless confidence to develop a more nuanced understanding of the dynamic role played by corporate culture in the agency's fortunes.

This study uses reports and features published in the Australian advertising trade press, along with other first-hand accounts, including oral history interviews and personal correspondence with former agency staff.

By identifying the forces and influences affecting Mojo-MDA’s outlook and operations, this paper demonstrates the important yet paradoxical role that corporate culture plays in both building and undermining an agency’s ambitions and the need for marketing historians to pay closer attention to it.

This examination of an agency’s inner machinations over an extended period presents a unique perspective of the ways that advertising agencies operate, as well as the forces that drive and impede them, at both national and global levels. The Mojo-MDA story also illustrates the need for marketing and business historians to pay close attention to corporate culture and the different ways that it affects marketing business and practices.

This paper aims to examine the evolution of the advertising agency and its offices in Australia over the course of the twentieth century. Historical accounts of advertising have paid scant attention to agencies’ attempts to organise and manage their offices, as well as the impact that these efforts has had on the work undertaken by agency staff.

This study draws on reports in the advertising industry press, as well as oral history testimony to examine the agencies’ changing layout and interior design. It identifies three distinct periods, which reveal the impact of modernist and post-industrialist ideas on the organisation and functions of the advertising agency’s offices and, indeed, their impact on the agency’s outputs.

This examination of the office space within the agency setting not only offers a new perspective of the advertising agency business as a whole but also demonstrates the importance of material culture for historians working across management, business and marketing fields.

The originality of this study lies in its use of material culture and space as a tool for examining management history and understanding its impact on everyday work practices. By charting the changes reflected in advertising agency office spaces, this study also offers a unique overview of the ways that management practices have historically interacted with business work spaces.

Recently, there has been a shift toward the embodied energy assessment of buildings. However, the impact of material service life on the life-cycle embodied energy has received little attention. We aimed to address this knowledge gap, particularly in the context of the UAE and investigated the embodied energy associated with the use of concrete and other materials commonly used in residential buildings in the hot desert climate of the UAE.

Using input–output based hybrid analysis, we quantified the life-cycle embodied energy of a villa in the UAE with over 50 years of building life using the average, minimum, and maximum material service life values. Mathematical calculations were performed using MS Excel, and a detailed bill of quantities with >170 building materials and components of the villa were used for investigation.

For the base case, the initial embodied energy was 57% (7390.5 GJ), whereas the recurrent embodied energy was 43% (5,690 GJ) of the life-cycle embodied energy based on average material service life values. The proportion of the recurrent embodied energy with minimum material service life values was increased to 68% of the life-cycle embodied energy, while it dropped to 15% with maximum material service life values.

The findings provide new data to guide building construction in the UAE and show that recurrent embodied energy contributes significantly to life-cycle energy demand. Further, the study of material service life variations provides deeper insights into future building material specifications and management considerations for building maintenance.

This paper aims to provide an insight into the emergence of the global advertising industry by undertaking a comparison of the respective entries of the advertising agencies J. Walter Thompson and McCann Erickson into the Australian market in the 1930s and 1960s.

This study undertakes a comparison of the strategies and initiatives implemented by J. Walter Thompson and McCann Erickson as documented in the agencies’ respective archival collections as well as industry press reports.

The similarities between J. Walter Thompson and McCann Erickson reveal that globalisation of the advertising industry was both driven and restricted in even parts by profitability and pragmatism.

The experiences of the J. Walter Thompson and McCann Erickson agencies in establishing their Australian operations offer a unique, long-term view of the emergence and development of a global advertising industry.

The pandemic has accelerated the use of virtual learning spaces and led to rethinking post-pandemic course delivery. However, it remains unclear whether students’ online engagement in e-servicescapes can influence attachment to a place, i.e. a physical servicescape. This study conducted an exploratory study to inform place attachment and actor engagement literature in an online service context.

Quantitative survey design was used and 98 usable responses were collected from undergraduate and postgraduate students at a major New Zealand university during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. The questionnaire consisted of 23 items relating to three dimensions of online student engagement and 19 items referring to six dimensions of campus attachment.

Results of the exploratory study indicate that classmate community in online lectures, referring to student–student interactions, can positively influence five of the dimensions of campus attachment, including place identity, place dependence, affective attachment, social bonding and place memory, even though students are physically not on campus. However, it cannot influence place expectation. Moreover, instructor community (student–instructor interaction) and learning engagement (student–content interaction) in online lectures have insignificant impact on campus attachment.

This study emphasises the social dimension when interacting in e-servicescapes. Person-based interactions are more influential than content-based interactions for student engagement. Educational service providers should integrate the e-servicescape and the physical servicescape by encouraging more student–student interactions to contribute to service ecosystem well-being at the micro, meso and macro levels.

This study indicates that customer-to-customer interaction serves to integrate customer engagement across the digital and physical realms for process-based services like education.

With many natural disasters such as earthquakes, cyclones, bushfires and tsunamis destroying human habitats around the world, post-disaster housing reconstruction has become a critical topic. The current practice of post-disaster reconstruction consists of various approaches that carry affected homeowners from temporary shelters to permanent housing. While temporary shelters may be provided within a matter of days as immediate disaster relief, permanent housing can take years to complete. However, time is critical, as affected communities will need to restore their livelihoods as soon as possible. Prefabricated modular construction has the potential to drastically improve the time taken to provide permanent housing. Due to this time-efficiency, which is an inherent characteristic of modular construction, it can be a desirable strategy for post-disaster housing reconstruction. This paper discusses how prefabricated modular structures can provide a more time-efficient solution by analysing several present-day examples taken from published post-disaster housing reconstruction processes that have been carried out in different parts of the world. It also evaluates how other features of modular construction, such as ease of decommissioning and reusability, can add value to post-disaster reconstruction processes and organisations that contribute to the planning, design and construction stages of the reconstruction process. The suitability of modular construction will also be discussed in the context of the guidelines and best practice guides for post-disaster housing reconstruction published by international organisations. Through this analysis and discussion, it is concluded that prefabricated modular structures are a highly desirable time-efficient solution to post-disaster housing reconstruction.

The construction and operation of buildings is a major contributor to global energy demand, greenhouse gases emissions, resource depletion, waste generation, and associated environmental effects, such as climate change, pollution and habitat destruction. Despite its wide relevance, research on building-related environmental effects often fails to achieve global visibility and attention, particularly in premiere interdisciplinary journals – thus representing a major gap in the research these journals offer. In this article we review and reflect on the factors that are likely causing this lack of visibility for such a prominent research topic and emphasise the need to reconcile the construction and operational phases into the physical unity of a building, to contribute to the global environmental discourse using a lifecycle-based approach. This article also aims to act as a call for action and to raise awareness of this important gap. The evidence contained in the article can support institutional policies to improve the status quo and provide a practical help to researchers in the field to bring their work to wide interdisciplinary audiences.