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The purpose of this study is to explore how fashion clothing is perceived and consumed by young males, what their attitudes are toward fashion and how fashion is used in the construction of a social identity by these men.

An exploratory approach is used in this research, with the fashion consumption behaviours and perceptions of males aged between 19 and 25 explored.

Results note the positive role of social comparison amongst young men in their fashion-seeking behaviour, with fashion consumption playing a large role in the emotional well-being of young men in a social context.

This research was exploratory in nature and used a small sample of males from a specific age cohort. As such, the results cannot be generalized but do offer analytical insights into male attitudes and behaviour toward fashion that can be extended in future research.

While the act of shopping for clothing was traditionally seen as a female recreation, fragmentation of the traditional male/female dichotomy has seen men become active in the social consumption ethic surrounding fashion. The current study examines the emergence of fashion-aware males and offers insight into the key motivations for young males to seek out fashion products.

In a society where fashion seeking is a popular recreational activity across genders and changing notions of masculinity allow for more appearance focused men, shopping for clothes is no longer considered an exclusively female activity.

Where research has previously examined fashion items and their integral role in product-self extension from a female perspective, very little studies focus on males’ relationships with fashion. Whilst prior research has examined men’s self-image and self-modification via exercise or plastic surgery, there is little that focuses on the role of clothing in men’s identity creation.

What insights might attending to the cyclical history of colonially imposed environmental change experienced by Indigenous peoples offer to critical intellectual projects concerned with race? How might our understanding of race shift if we took Indigenous peoples' concerns with the usurpation and transformation of land seriously? Motivated by these broader questions, in this chapter, I deploy an approach to the critical inquiry of race that I have tentatively been calling anticolonial environmental sociology. As a single iteration of the anticolonial environmental sociology of race, this chapter focuses on Native (American) perspectives on land and experiences with colonialism. I argue that thinking with Native conceptualizations of land forces us to confront the ecomateriality of race that so often escapes sight in conventional analyses. The chapter proceeds by first theorizing the ecomateriality of race by thinking with recent critical theorizing on colonial racialization, alongside Native conceptualizations of land. To further explicate this theoretical argument, I then turn to an historical excavation of the relations between settlers, Natives, and the land in Rhode Island that is organized according to spatiotemporal distinctions that punctuate Native land relations in this particular global region: the Reservation, the Plantation, and the Narragansett.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the perception, readiness and change involved in the implementation of Education 4.0 within the region of Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) among policymakers, enablers (lecturers) and receivers (students), within globalisation, referred here as the Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR).

This study used a mixed method research design using quantitative data from a Likert scale of 1–5, involving: (1) Not Ready; (2) Ready; (3) No Sure; (4) Quite Ready and (5) Extremely Ready. Open-ended questions formed the qualitative approach taken by the researchers to uncover the richness of the respondents' perceptions of Education 4.0. The test items reliability index of 0.744 drew quantitative data from the perspective of the educational policymakers, enablers and receivers to reveal their collective definition of each construct (knowledge, industry and humanity).

This study has exposed the importance of knowing and capturing the interrelated components of an educational ecosystem that exists in higher education (HE) within the ASEAN region. The personal readiness of respondents towards Education 4.0 is very high; yet concern was raised about the financial and managerial readiness of institutions across the region.

This study highlighted the dynamic nature of the HE ecosystem and the connectivity between the elements of Education 4.0 – knowledge, industry and humanity within the ASEAN region.

This paper seeks to explore the question of how to investigate the contribution of the operational network (comprising sales service, logistics, planning, production, etc.) to operational performance. In doing so, the paper aims to link concepts from organisational and social psychology to production planning and control.

The paper introduces the concept “operational network”, e.g. the network of people involved in customer and production order processing. Members of the operational network need some autonomy, but this autonomy may also lead to dysfunctional behaviour, due to conflicts of interest, ambiguities and individual preferences. The contribution of the operational network seems difficult to investigate. This is illustrated by an empirical study of the role of operational people in a semi‐process industry. This study shows that concepts of organisational psychology are very applicable here. However, most results relate perceived behaviour to perceived performance; it appeared to be difficult to relate actual organisation characteristics to actual performance. This paper discusses the research approach that is necessary to be able to fill the gap between “perceived” and “actual”.

To fill the gap between “perceived” and “actual” behaviour, it is necessary to formalize the behaviour of the members of the operational network by adopting an adequate planning and control framework. In most situations such a planning and control framework is not available. Therefore, a study of the role of the operational network needs to be accompanied by a participative design of the planning and control framework.

This paper conducts a convincing investigation into the contribution of the operational network to operational performance, a subject which hitherto has been only marginally addressed.

American choral music of the present day reflects the variety of styles found in vocal and instrumental music throughout the Western world during the twentieth century. However, the majority of choral music is more conservative in form and tonality than is instrumental music, due probably to the heritage of American choral music. Approximately the first two hundred years of choral singing in America were based on religious texts and simple tunes. Choral music in America did not “flower” until the nineteenth century, when composers began to write in a variety of styles, using secular as well as sacred texts.

This research updates and expands upon Decker’s article “Citizen attitudes toward the police: a review of past findings and suggestions for future policy” by summarizing the findings from more than 100 articles on perceptions of and attitudes toward the police. Initially, the value of research on attitudes toward the police is discussed. Then the research pertaining to the impact of individual level variables (e.g. race) and contextual level variables (e.g. neighborhood) on perceptions of the police is reviewed. Studies of juveniles’ attitudes toward the police, perceptions of police policies and practices, methodological issues and conceptual issues are also discussed. This review of the literature indicates that only four variables (age, contact with police, neighborhood, and race) have consistently been proven to affect attitudes toward the police. However, there are interactive effects between these and other variables which are not yet understood; a finding which indicates that theoretical generalizations about attitudes toward police should be made with caution.

Informed by the social disorganization theory (SDT), the study intends to identify the ecological factors most likely to predict assaults against the police recorded over five years in a southern American state, which has a relatively large rural population.

The study uses aggregated county-level data on non-lethal assault against the police recorded in Kentucky between 2012 and 2016. We anticipated that structural conditions would affect directly and indirectly assaults against the police. Because predictors of social disorganization generally correlate with crimes police respond to, we hypothesized that the effects of SDT predictors on police victimization will be mediated by violent crime rates and domestic violence rates.

The study found partial empirical support for the social disorganization theory. Assaults against the police were more common in counties that had a higher proportion of female-headed households, higher rates of domestic violence citations and higher violent crime rates. Conversely, police victimization was less common in densely populated areas and in counties with higher poverty rates. While family disruption had significant direct and indirect positive effects on police victimization, the significant positive effect of ethnic heterogeneity (percent Black population) was only indirect. Residential instability did not predict significant variations in police victimization.

To our knowledge, no prior research attempted to determine if SDT is a valid theoretical framework when non-lethal assaults on police are examined beyond metropolitan areas. This analysis extends to counties research assessing the effects of structural conditions on nonfatal assaults against the police. Additionally, by including domestic violence among the correlates of police victimization, the current macro-level study addresses an apparent gap in the literature.

Addressing stigmatized identity threat cues customers experience, this study aimed to uncover the effects of frontline employees' ethnic and body-size diversity which lead to customer self-objectification and negative store attitude.

The researchers conducted two studies: Study 1 utilized a one-way ANOVA and a PROCESS mediation model to test the effect of Western beauty-ideal stereotypes on stigmatized identity threat and self-objectification. Study 2 utilized a 2 × 2 experimental design to examine the effects of body-size diversity and ethnic diversity on perceived warmth of sales associates and store attitude.

Results demonstrate that retail store environments which present Western beauty-ideal stereotypes among sales associates cultivate higher levels of stigmatized identity threat cues with their customers, which leads to self-objectification. Also, our findings demonstrated that a lack of ethnic and body-size diversity (i.e. thin and White) among sales associates decreased the perceived sales associate warmth and in turn lowered store attitude.

Participants of the first study were limited by the White participants. The implications highlight the integral need for retailers to hire sales associates who fall outside the parameters of typical Western beauty standards because today's customers desire inclusive brands who do not discriminate based on ethnicity, body size and other characteristics.

This research utilized social identity theory to uncover the effect of retail sales associate stereotype on customer perception of employees, which has not to our knowledge been previously studied.