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The purpose of this paper is to place empirical research on New Zealand employers’ attitudes to collective bargaining and legislative change within the context of the long running debate of flexibility.

A cross-sectional survey design using a self-administered postal questionnaire, covering private sector employers with ten or more staff and including employers within all 17 standard industry classification. To explore particular issues, an additional in-depth interviews were conducted of 25 employers participating in the survey.

It is found that employers support overwhelmingly recent legislative changes though there are variations across industries and firm sizes. There is also considerable variation in terms of which legislative changes are applied in the workplace. Despite fewer constraints on employer-determined flexibility, there was a rather puzzling finding that most employers still think that employment legislation is even balanced or favouring employees.

Cross-sectional survey findings of New Zealand employer attitudes to legislative changes are few and provide valuable data for policy makers, unions, employers and employment relations researchers. The paper also contributes to a more comprehensive understanding of pressures to increase employer-determined flexibility in many western countries.

The purpose of this paper is to determine the attitudes of employers in a de‐regulated institutional industrial relations framework, and whether they are still willing to engage in collective bargaining (CB).

A cross‐sectional survey design using a self‐administered postal questionnaire, seeks information on employers' attitudes to a range of issues. Included are employers within all 17 standard industry classifications used by previous New Zealand researchers.

The paper quite convincingly shows that unless employers are prepared to engage in dialogue with employees or third parties and unless the benefits to be gained from such a dialogue are more widely accepted it is unlikely they will engage in CB. Therefore, involvement would appear to be limited to those areas that do not hinder managerial freedom.

This is one of the first studies in New Zealand of employers' attitudes to CB since the 1990s. The paper provides valuable data for policy makers, unions, employers and employment relations researchers.

This paper comes from workshop activities and structured reflection by a group of artists and researchers who have been using artistic practice within research projects aimed at enabling researchers to collaborate with communities. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

Three out of four in the group have a practicing creative background and their own studio/workshop space.

Artists are often employed – whether in schools or research projects – to run workshops; to bring a distinctive set of skills that enable learning or collaboration to take place. In this paper the authors reflect on the different meanings and connotations of “workshop” – as noun (as a place where certain types of activity happen, a bounded space) and a verb (to work something through; to make something together). From there the authors will then draw out the different principles of what artistic practice can offer towards creating a collaborative space for new knowledge to emerge.

Key ideas include different repertories of structuring to enable different forms of social interaction; the role of materal/ality and body in shifting what can be recognised as knowing; and the skills of “thinking on your feet”, being responsive and improvising.

The authors will conclude by reflecting on aspects to consider when developing workshops as part of collaborative research projects.

The purpose of this paper is to explore how digital content marketing (DCM) users can be engaged with business-to-business (B2B) brands and determine how such engagement leads to value-laden trusted brand relationships.

Through an online survey, data were collected from the email marketing list of a large B2B brand, and the hypothesised research model was analysed using covariance-based structural equation modelling.

This paper identifies a bundle of helpful brand actions – providing relevant topics and ideas; approaching content with a problem solving orientation; as well as investing in efforts to interpret, analyse and explain topics through DCM – to foster relationship value perceptions and brand trust. Critically however, cognitive-emotional brand engagement is shown to be a necessary requirement for converting these actions into relationship value perceptions.

This paper furthers the understanding of the dual role of helpful brand actions in functionally oriented DCM. Additionally, this paper offers evidence of the central role of cognitive-emotional brand engagement in influencing value-laden customer–brand relationships.

This paper introduces a bundle of helpful brand actions that forms the basis for the dual roles of a brand in enhancing customer value and in fostering brand engagement and building relationships. This approach helps practitioners to steer brand-related perceptions arising from DCM interactions towards building trusted brand relationships.

This paper contributes to the marketing literature by revealing a potential approach to DCM in managing customer relationships. Instead of focusing solely on the content benefit-usage link to support engagement, this paper reveals the potential of helpfulness as a brand-initiated DCM engagement trigger in engaging customers with the brand, vis-à-vis the content.

The purpose of this paper is to conceive the concept of inter-industry creative collaboration; a unique kind of cooperation between business partners from diverse industries. It investigates the motivations that encourage their creation and identifies a method to evaluate consumers’ attitudes towards this kind of partnership. The study analyses consumer-based brand equity and links them to inter-industry creative collaborations within the luxury fashion industry.

Research was conducted using a comparative case design, which was qualitative in nature. Four cases were selected purposively. The data were obtained using semi-structured interviews with industry informants and consumer focus groups. Transcripts were thematically analysed according to common categories identified in the literature to enable cross-case conclusions to be drawn.

The research proposes the existence of a direct relationship between the consumer-based brand equity effects and consumers’ attitudes towards inter-industry creative collaborations. This research not only proves the existence of the stated relationship but also generates a theoretical framework that specifically analyses inter-industry creative collaboration involving luxury fashion brands.

The usage of convenience sampling limited consumer participants to individuals who considered themselves luxury fashion consumers. In addition, the findings are limited to London, UK and cannot be generalised outside the examined cases. That said, the research provides a useful starting point for further empirical research to test the validity and reliability of the model outside of the stated cases.

The proposed theoretical framework serves as a practical guide for luxury managers to assess the planning and execution of inter-industry creative collaborations conducted by their brands.

The research makes a contribution to brand management literature by creating a connection between four topics of academic research: motivations of inter-industry creative collaborations; consumer-based brand equity; consumers’ attitudes towards inter-industry creative collaborations; and the creative and emotional elements of luxury fashion.

This chapter analyzes art-based methods that focus on the deliverables required from the student in an academic exchange.

The study will focus on a group of second-year Master’s students who, accompanied by an artist-coach and a researcher, were asked to produce an artwork reflecting their views on the technical or theoretical issues in accounting. These works were invented and realized in a four-day workshop and exhibition organized by the students.

Student submissions were found to fit into four types of outcomes: instrumental, developmental, directed, and embedded. The first two are produced by the processes mobilized in art-based teaching, while the second two are linked to the specific form of the artwork engaged in by the teaching process. Observing that few theories have explored the range of outcomes attributable to the form, the author draws on the experiment as well as Winnicot’s concepts of transition and intermediate objects to define the specific transformative quality of art forms. By investigating the special area where the delimitations between the self and the world are blurred and changing, the art-maker student adopts a posture of a natural researcher who creates knowledge at the moment he defines his self — or to put it differently, through art-making, the student produces his/her self and his/her knowledge at the same time.

Recognizing that empowering the complexity of expression liberates access to knowing abilities and independent critical learning.

To delineate the range of consumer responses to life‐conditions where sustained powerlessness is experienced. To provide a framework to understand the ways in which these consumers try to reclaim degrees of self‐empowerment and wellbeing.

Goffman's conceptualization of stigma is employed to study a heavy metal music enclave consisting of lower socioeconomic consumers, who exhibit a range of stigmatizing attributes.

A taxonomy of ten consumer remedies for their situation is developed. These include: resignation, confrontation, withdrawal, engagement, concealment, escapism, hedonic, spiritual, nostalgia, and creative. Each can potentially have negative or positive consequences. However, we found consumers often use a blend of these remedies as pathways to self‐empower.

Understanding the strengths and weaknesses of each of the remedies will potentially guide public policy makers in shaping programs better able to foster self‐empowerment among disadvantaged consumers.

The paper advances understanding of consumer response to sustained powerlessness as consequence of disadvantaged life conditions that are resistant to change.

Public mental health can be described as the science, politics and art of creating a mentally healthy society. This paper discusses these three concepts with reference to the literature as the necessary components of any strategy or programme to create, promote and maintain mental well‐being at a community and population level. It goes on to describe how they were applied in a cross‐border rural mental health project in Ireland.

In this chapter, I examine stories that foster care youth tell to legislatures, courts, policymakers, and the public to influence policy decisions. The stories told by these children are analogized to victim truth testimony, analyzed as a therapeutic, procedural, and developmental process, and examined as a catalyst for systemic accountability and change. Youth stories take different forms and appear in different media: testimony in legislatures, courts, research surveys or studies; opinion editorials and interviews in newspapers or blog posts; digital stories on YouTube; and artistic expression. Lawyers often serve as conduits for youth storytelling, translating their clients’ stories to the public. Organized advocacy by youth also informs and animates policy development. One recent example fosters youth organizing to promote “normalcy” in child welfare practices in Florida, and in related federal legislation.