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The purpose of this paper is to describe a collaborative study on supervision with health and social care practitioners in Scotland. The study attempted to gain a better understanding about the use and benefit of supervision from a multiprofessional perspective.

Consultation events with health and social care staff and 12 informant interviews were undertaken. Data analysis was via the Framework Method.

Managers were more likely to conceive of supervision as a positive intervention than those in lower pay bands. The practice of supervision was variable. Not all staff appeared to take part in regular supervisory activities even when it was mandated. A lack of professional, organisational or local commitment to implement robust supervisory structures and processes was seen as the major barrier to effective supervision.

This was a small study, thus findings would need to be confirmed by health and social care staff working across a wider spectrum of disciplines and regions across Scotland.

A combination of factors would seem to determine effective supervisory practice. Supervision was perceived to be of benefit when individuals were willing to participate fully, when there was reflection and planned action, constructive challenge, respectful relationships, regular and protected sessions and processes were appropriate to an employee’s circumstances.

This study situates supervision in the current context of health and social care and finds it to be an irregular practice. The findings confirm the existing literature about the importance of supervisor-supervisee relationships but explain differing perceptions of supervision in terms of staff seniority.

Inaccurate product information on retail websites lead to dissatisfied customers and profit losses. Yet, the effects of product information failures (PIFs) remain under-explored, with the mobile commerce channel commonly overlooked. This paper aims (1) to investigate the negative effects of PIFs on shoppers' attitudes and behaviours in a mobile context. The authors further (2) evaluate the impacts of the cause and duration of a PIF, changes of expectations towards the retailer after a PIF occurred and how previous mobile shopping experience in general decreases the effects of PIFs.

The authors conducted a scenario-based experiment with a one-factorial between-subjects design. The six most common PIFs of an international leading online fashion retailer are operationalized and tested against a control group. The final sample consists out of 758 mobile shoppers from the UK.

The results demonstrate that the perceived severity of PIFs based on showing customers incorrect information is higher when key information is lacking. Further, when the cause of a PIF is attributed to the retailer, it results in higher recovery expectations towards them. The results also reveal that respondents who have shopped mobile before perceive PIFs as less severe than inexperienced ones.

This research expands the online service failure literature by examining PIFs and its effects in the specific context of mobile commerce. The authors also provide recommendations for a better management of PIFs like the incorporation of PIFs information into reporting packs.

This paper aims to explore why consumers absorb ethical habits into their daily consumption, despite having little interest or understanding of the ethics they are buying into, by looking at the motivation behind mainstream ethical consumption.

Fifty in-depth field interviews at point of purchase capture actual ethical consumption behavior, tied with a progressive-laddering interview technique yields over 400 consumption units of analysis.

Ethical attitudes, values and rational information processing have limited veracity for mainstream ethical consumption. Habit and constrained choice, as well as self-gratification, peer influence and an interpretivist understanding of what ethics are being purchased provide the primary drivers for consumption.

Use of qualitative sampling and analysis limits the generalizability of this paper. However, the quantitative representation of data demonstrates the strength with which motivations were perceived to influence consumption choice.

Ethical brands which focus on explicit altruistic ethical messaging at the expense of hedonistic messaging, or ambiguous pseudo ethics-as-quality messaging, limit their appeal to mainstream consumers. Retailers, however, benefit from the halo effect of ethical brands in store.

The paper highlights the importance of retailer engagement with ethical products as a precursor to normalizing ethical consumption, and the importance of normative messaging in changing habits.

The paper provides original robust critique of the current field of ethical consumption and an insight into new theoretical themes of urgent general interest to the field.

This paper aims to examine the role of personality in how people respond to sexual appeals in advertising. The impact of three traits (extraversion, neuroticism and openness) was tested.

A mixed‐factor experimental design was used. Gender, level of sexual appeal (manipulated over two levels) and participants' standing on each of the three personality trait scales were the between‐subjects factors. Relevance of the product to the appeal, which was also manipulated over two levels, was the within‐subjects factor. The sample comprised 156 undergraduate students, and each student was randomly assigned to either a mild appeals or an overt appeals condition.

The results show that levels of extraversion and openness directly affect responses to advertisements as measured with attitude towards the advertisement.

Recommendations are made, including that overt sexual appeals should not be used on a target audience of “introverts”, or people who are characterised as quiet, shy and reserved.

This research extends existing work on the effect of individual differences on consumers' reactions to advertising and is the first to show that personality traits affect responses to sexual appeals.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the hidden social worlds of competent clandestine users of drugs controlled within the confines of the UK Misuse of Drugs Act 1971, which now includes NPS substances. The authors explore how and in what way socially competent drug users differ from others who are visible to the authorities as criminals by criminal justice bureaucracies and known to treatment agencies as defined problem drug users.

This qualitative research utilises a bricoleur ethnographic methodology considered as a critical, multi-perspectival, multi-theoretical and multi-methodological approach to inquiry.

This paper challenges addiction discourses and, drawing upon empirical evidence, argues the user of controlled drugs should not be homogenised. Using several key strategies of identity management, drug takers employ a range of risk awareness and risk neutralisation techniques to protect self-esteem, avoid social affronts and in maintaining untainted identities. The authors present illicit drug use as one activity amongst other social activities that (some) people, conventionally, pursue. The findings from this study suggest that punitive drug policy, which links drug use with addiction, crime and antisocial behaviour, is inconsistent with the experience of the participants.

Due to the small sample size (n=24) employed, the possibility that findings can be generalised is rendered difficult. However, generalisation was never an objective of the research; the experiences of this hidden population are deeply subjective and generalising findings and applying them to other populations would be an unproductive endeavour. While the research attempted to recruit an equal number of males and females to this research, gendered analysis was not a primary objective of this research. However, it is acknowledged that future research would greatly benefit from such a gendered focus.

The insights from the study may be useful in helping to inform future policy discourse on issues of drug use. In particular, the insights suggest that a more nuanced perspective should be adopted. This perspective should recognise the non-deviant identities of many drug users in the contemporary era, and challenge the use of a universally stigmatising discourse and dominance of prohibition narratives.

It is envisaged that this paper will contribute to knowledge on how socially competent users of controlled drugs identify and manage the risks of moral, medical and legal censure.

The evidence in this paper indicates that drug use is an activity often associated with non-deviant, productive members of the population. However, the continuing dominance of stigmatising policy discourses often leads to drug users engaging in identity concealment within the context of a deeply capitalist Western landscape.