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Purpose – The purpose of this research was to make visible the process of analyzing our narratives of teacher identity.

Design/methodology/approach – These narratives of teacher identity were generated by isolating critical incidents and then drafting them as emblematic narratives. They were then shared with each other and compared against the tool of chronotopic motif developed by Bakhtin.

Findings – We found that our narratives, when filtered through the tool of chronotopic motif, reveal ambivalence about whether we desire to be known or unknown as teacher educators and as people. As we unpack our findings, we move through the tool of chronotopic motif, piece by piece, illuminating our stories by themselves, in relationship with each other, and against the professional literature on teacher educator identity and identity in general.

Practical implications – As teacher educators, we think it is important for others, particularly students, to be known. However, we are ambivalent about whether we want to be known and if so, by whom, and in what pockets of space and temporality.

Social implications – This research has implications for discussions of professional identity, role confusion in teacher education, and professional women in general. It adds to a growing body of literature suggesting that identity is a holistic process that factors heavily into what happens in the context of teacher education courses at a university.

Originality/value – Our chapter demonstrates to colleagues how to conduct a narrative analysis using a tool from literary theory.

A growing literature reports the benefits and challenges of patient and public involvement (PPI) in research; nevertheless, understanding PPI in research design remains under-developed. The purpose of this paper is to report learning experiences from involving service users as research partners in two projects that developed and evaluated guidelines for good practice in this regard. The main objective was to evaluate these guidelines.

PPI research guidelines were developed through five workshops involving service users/patients, carers, health and social care professionals/managers and academics. Using a participatory qualitative approach, these guidelines were evaluated through mapping them against the two service user research partners’ experience within another project.

The guidelines were found to be fit for purpose, as they allowed problems to be easily identified and reassurance that required standards were being met. Both academic and service user research partners learned and gained relevant skills. Two service user research partners also found their daily living skills unexpectedly enhanced by project participation.

The PPI guidelines, the authors developed were produced by consensus involving several stakeholders. Service users involved as research partners in the project experienced unanticipated personal benefits.

Arguments for the development and use of narrative inquiry come out of a view of human experience in which humans, individually and socially, lead storied lives. People shape their daily lives by stories of who they and others are and as they interpret their past in terms of these stories. Story, in the current idiom, is a portal through which a person enters the world and by which his or her experience of the world is interpreted and made personally meaningful. Viewed this way, narrative is the phenomena studied in inquiry. Narrative inquiry, the study of experience as story, then, is first and foremost a way of thinking about experience. Narrative inquiry as methodology entails a view of the phenomena. To use narrative inquiry methodology is to adopt a particular view of experience as phenomena under study. (Connelly & Clandinin, 2006, p. 377)

As narrative inquirers in the midst of our journeys as researchers and teacher educators, we restory a portion of our journeys here, as an invitation for readers to live alongside us – living, telling, reliving, retelling (Clandinin & Connelly, 1994). What resonance, tension, questions, or stories emerge as we enter the past?

While it is essential to further research the growing diversity in western metropolitan cities, little is currently known about how the members of various ethnic communities acculturate to multicultural societies. The purpose of this paper is to explore immigrants’ cosmopolitanism and acculturation strategies through an analysis of the food consumption behaviour of ethnic consumers in multicultural London.

The study was set within the socio-cultural context of London. A number of qualitative methods such as in-depth interviews, observation and photographs were used to assess consumers’ acculturation strategies in a multicultural environment and how that is influenced by consumer cosmopolitanism.

Ethnic consumers’ food consumption behaviour reflects their acculturation strategies, which can be classified into four groups: rebellion, rarefaction, resonance and refrainment. This classification demonstrates ethnic consumers’ multi-directional acculturation strategies, which are also determined by their level of cosmopolitanism.

The taxonomy presented in this paper advances current acculturation scholarship by suggesting a multi-directional model for acculturation strategies as opposed to the existing uni-directional and bi-directional perspectives and explicates the role of consumer cosmopolitanism in consumer acculturation. The paper did not engage host communities and there is hence a need for future research on how and to what extent host communities are acculturated to the multicultural environment.

The findings have direct implications for the choice of standardisation vs adaptation as a marketing strategy within multicultural cities. Whilst the rebellion group are more likely to respond to standardisation, increasing adaptation of goods and service can ideally target members of the resistance and resonance groups and more fusion products should be exclusively earmarked for the resonance group.

The paper makes original contribution by introducing a multi-directional perspective to acculturation by delineating four-group taxonomy (rebellion, rarefaction, resonance and refrainment). This paper also presents a dynamic model that captures how consumer cosmopolitanism impinges upon the process and outcome of multi-directional acculturation strategies.

Dear reader, lift your eyes momentarily from these words and look around you, to observe how this world is fraught with traces of the East, the yeast fermenting your very existence. Your clothes, your food, your Sony television, your Honda Accord, etc. Even the physical distance between you and the East is blurred as the shirt made in China rubs against and seeps into the atoms of your skin, as the Kimchi Ramen from Korea enters your entrails, as images displayed on your Sony television are reflected upside down at the back of your eyeballs, as the very thought of yEast now leavens in your mind – “leaven” as in “the Levant,” the rising of the sun, hence the East.

Since the handling of environmentally sensitive products requires close monitoring under prescribed conditions throughout the supply chain, it is essential to manage specific supply chain risks, i.e. maintaining good environmental conditions, and ensuring occupational safety in the cold environment. The purpose of this paper is to propose an Internet of Things (IoT)-based risk monitoring system (IoTRMS) for controlling product quality and occupational safety risks in cold chains. Real-time product monitoring and risk assessment in personal occupational safety can be then effectively established throughout the entire cold chain.

In the design of IoTRMS, there are three major components for risk monitoring in cold chains, namely: wireless sensor network; cloud database services; and fuzzy logic approach. The wireless sensor network is deployed to collect ambient environmental conditions automatically, and the collected information is then managed and applied to a product quality degradation model in the cloud database. The fuzzy logic approach is applied in evaluating the cold-associated occupational safety risk of the different cold chain parties considering specific personal health status. To examine the performance of the proposed system, a cold chain service provider is selected for conducting a comparative analysis before and after applying the IoTRMS.

The real-time environmental monitoring ensures that the products handled within the desired conditions, namely temperature, humidity and lighting intensity so that any violation of the handling requirements is visible among all cold chain parties. In addition, for cold warehouses and rooms in different cold chain facilities, the personal occupational safety risk assessment is established by considering the surrounding environment and the operators’ personal health status. The frequency of occupational safety risks occurring, including cold-related accidents and injuries, can be greatly reduced. In addition, worker satisfaction and operational efficiency are improved. Therefore, it provides a solid foundation for assessing and identifying product quality and occupational safety risks in cold chain activities.

The cold chain is developed for managing environmentally sensitive products in the right conditions. Most studies found that the risks in cold chain are related to the fluctuation of environmental conditions, resulting in poor product quality and negative influences on consumer health. In addition, there is a lack of occupational safety risk consideration for those who work in cold environments. Therefore, this paper proposes IoTRMS to contribute the area of risk monitoring by means of the IoT application and artificial intelligence techniques. The risk assessment and identification can be effectively established, resulting in secure product quality and appropriate occupational safety management.

The purpose of this paper is to utilize McKenzie’s two-dimensional model of information practices to situate child feeding practices as complex, socially situated information practices. Further, the authors examined a host of contextual factors (financial, physical, and social) that enabled and constrained information practices within the tightly controlled environment that defines the lives of young parents (YPs).

Methods of investigation were ethnographic in nature and data collection methods included naturalistic observation and interviews in two communities in British Columbia, Canada over a period of several years. Data collection and analysis was ongoing. During the initial stages of data analysis, a conventional approach to content analysis was used to identify key concepts, preliminary themes, and illustrative examples. Working within the broader category of child feeding practices, the authors used a constant comparative process of directed content analysis to identify sub-themes, namely, distinct physical, social, and financial influences on child feeding practices.

The YPs in this study described negotiating breastfeeding, formula feeding, and the introduction of solid foods within a heavily surveilled atmosphere with different and conflicting levels of support and information. The findings demonstrated that active seeking by YPs was often discouraged by authorities, and more passive practices of information encountering and receipt of information from proxies were accepted and expected.

This study used McKenzie’s two-dimensional model to paint a richer picture of YPs’ information practices and their physical, geographical, financial, and social contexts.

These findings suggests that child feeding informational support should, rather than being prescriptive, take into account the complexities of YPs’ relationships and daily lives, as well as the social structures that shape their experiences as parents.

Child feeding practices are influenced by a host of physical, financial, and social factors, and are situated within familial and education environments, as well as broader social and policy discourses.

This research utilized McKenzie’s two-dimensional model of information practices with a sample of YPs. Evidence suggested that child feeding practices were informed by active seeking, active scanning, non-directed monitoring, and by proxy, but these manifested differently for YPs than for the older expectant mothers upon whom McKenzie’s original model was derived. Using ethnographic methods, the authors situated child feeding practices as complex information practices that are informed by conflicting information, physical, social, and financial factors and intensive parenting ideologies. This reinforces the need for information science researchers to understand contextual factors that influence practices.

This paper aims to investigate the influence of customer participation in services on the innovative behaviors of employees. Although previous studies have acknowledged the importance of customers in service innovation and investigated how customer participation in product development teams affect innovation, the effect of mandatory customer participation in services on the employee innovative behavior has not been examined. In addition to addressing such gap, this study proposed the mediating role of interpersonal trust in the relationship between customer participation and employee innovative behavior and then tested the hypotheses in a restaurant context.

A total of 514 valid questionnaires were collected from frontline employees or entry-level managers in 25 well-known restaurants (including 14 hotels and 11 freestanding restaurants) in Beijing, China. The relationships among customer participation, interpersonal trust and employee innovative behavior were examined using structural models analyzed in AMOS 20.0.

The structural equation modeling results indicate that customers’ information and emotional participation in services significantly influence the innovative behavior of employees, whereas behavioral participation does not. In addition, a high level of interpersonal trust between customers and employees may increase employee innovative behaviors. Moreover, unlike cognitive trust, affective trust mediates the relationship between customer information or emotional participation and employee innovative behavior.

Findings indicate that service firms can encourage customers to participate actively in service co-creation; their participation in terms of information is encouraged to foster employee innovative behaviors by training employees and establishing an appropriate climate for information exchange. Moreover, service firms must pay attention to the emotions of customers during the service processes. Furthermore, the affective trust between customers and employees is significant to service firms, which need to take measures for employees to manage their relationships with customers well.

Based on the concepts of service marketing and organizational behavior, this study contributes to the research on customer–employee co-production and employee innovative behavior from an interdisciplinary perspective. The study reveals the influencing mechanism of customer participation on employee innovative behavior and contributes to the research on customer–employee interpersonal trust. Previous studies emphasized the importance of trust among work group members in innovation, while this study supports the association between customer–employee interpersonal trust and employee innovative behaviors.