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This paper aims to study the automotive 4.0 context to understand the consumers’ propensity towards high-tech automated cars. The paper analyses the antecedents that lead to the use of innovative vehicles. Theory of planned behaviour (TPB) is adopted and extended by including further constructs, such as environmental aspects and inhibitors.

The advent of smart technologies and the internet of things has given rise to several contributions that look at consumers’ intention towards innovation adoption in the automotive industry. Furthermore, this study rises from the growing interest that sustainable mobility achieved. Based on the previous technology acceptance models and particularly TPB, this paper develops a structured questionnaire. After a pilot survey, the final questionnaire was administered online through email and social media in the Italian context. Structural equation modelling technique has been used for analysing data and testing the conceptual model.

The number of questionnaires filled out was 310, with a sample composed of young adults, characterised by different addiction levels towards technology. The results explain the drivers that lead to accept and adopt high-tech automated vehicles. This topic is still under investigation and offers potential research opportunities, considering the evolution of the market and the consumers’ habits and needs. Future research studies in this area should focus on generalising the present findings in other countries. Moreover, once this technology starts to be adopted, other constructs could be discovered, investigated and included in the model.

Mobility has raised a growing interest with the fast increasing demand for sustainability and growth of innovative solutions embedded in mobility. This research explores the TPB model’s application and the relation between its constructs, environmental aspects, inhibitors and intention to adopt automated vehicles. On this strength, it is possible to identify each construct’s relevance for obtaining social consensus on the market.

The purpose of this paper is to explore why innovative service ecosystems scale up, using a service-dominant logic lens. The focus is on identifying the key drivers of the scaling-up process as the basis for a new conceptual framework on the scaling up of service innovations.

An inductive research design is used to zoom in on two innovative service ecosystems, Eataly and KidZania, to identify the key drivers that can explain why innovations scale up. For both companies, the triangulation of semi-structured interviews, archival sources and in-store observations is used as complementary data sets. Multiple investigators and multiple coders have been involved in the data collection, coding process and analysis.

An extended conceptualization of service innovation is obtained, grounded in a framework of four drivers of scaling up: effectuation as the basis for creating the value proposition; sensing and adapting to local contexts; the reconfiguration and alignment of resources and forms for collaboration between actors; and values’ resonance.

This study represents one of the first empirical investigations of the key drivers of the scaling up process of service innovations. The paper contributes with a conceptualization of service innovation and why scaling-up processes emerge, emphasizing the existence of multiple constellations of four drivers.

Sustainable mobility and collaborative consumption are debated issues in the literature. In this field, car sharing (CS) represents a growing tendency that attracts interest by academicians for its potential positive impact on sustainability. This study aims to understand the main drivers of CS usage, unveiling the role of service quality and the possible inhibitors.

Based on theoretical assumptions in the literature, the authors developed a theoretical framework that aims at understanding the main antecedents of CS usage. An empirical investigation involving the city of Rome (Italy) was performed. The study presents a qualitative and quantitative survey, while the proposed theoretical model has been tested through structural equation modelling statistical techniques.

The findings show that usefulness positively affects the intention to use CS services. Moreover, the green attitude and expected service quality indirectly influence the intention to use CS services impacting perceived usefulness. The results show that the expected service quality has a strong influence on usefulness, whereas green attitude has a weaker influence on usefulness. The intention to use CS services is directly influenced by the usefulness and inhibitors that affect it negatively.

The originality of this paper lies in the fact that this study discloses the main antecedents of the intention to use CS services, emphasizing the role of service quality. This study provides fruitful insights to policy and decision-makers to understand how to improve the CS usage in the urban transport system of the city of Rome. It suggests developing a higher level of service quality in the vehicles, suitable technological applications and effective communication as well as on overcoming its main inhibitors.

Bike sharing (BS) is a phenomenon of growing interest in the sustainable mobility field. In recent years, many governments have implemented concrete actions to diffuse the services in cities, trying to encourage citizens' sustainable behavior. Several mobile applications (apps) related to the mobility sector have embedded gamification mechanics applied in non-gaming contexts, able to create and increase user engagement and to manage users' behavior (Deterding et al., 2011). The main purpose of this study is to understand whether app perception influences gamification, and how gamification improves service quality and user loyalty in BS systems.

To examine the impact of gamification on service quality and loyalty, the study performed secondary data collection and qualitative analysis with in-depth interviews. Thereafter, a quantitative analysis was conducted, and the theoretical model was analyzed through structural equation modeling (SEM).

findings showed that the use of gamification mechanics in BS services improves users' loyalty and directly influences service quality. The gamification tool improves users' engagement, transferring rules, facilitating the achievement of goals and quality standards and enhancing the BS usage.

This study uniquely contributes an understanding of the effect of gamification on service quality and loyalty in BS usage. It also provides some insight for companies and policymakers into implementing gamification mechanics in order to address new challenges for quality management.

The linkage between internal and external satisfaction is an understudied topic in the service field. This study aims to address this gap by proposing an original research model, the service excellence chain (SEC), that connects the internal and external perspectives by conjoining performance-excellence models and the service-profit-chain approach. Theoretical assumptions and quantitative measures are proposed by using advanced statistical techniques.

The SEC is investigated through an empirical study in the healthcare sector, focusing on an Italian hospital and involving two of its core units. Qualitative and quantitative approaches were used. First, internal and external customer satisfaction were separately tested through structural equation modeling. The linkage between internal and external satisfaction is then proposed by mathematically defining a synthetic index, the internal and external customer satisfaction index (IEGSI), modeled through Bayesian networks (BNs) and object-oriented BNs to provide an overall measure able to predict organizational improvement.

The distinct measured models show good internal validity and adequate fit both for patients' and employees' perspectives. The IEGSI allows rigorously connecting internal and external satisfaction by developing conjoint scenarios for organizational improvement.

This study proposes the SEC model as an innovative way to connect internal and external satisfaction. The findings can be useful both for private and public organizations and may provide several useful insights for healthcare managers as well as for policy-makers in relation to developing strategies for improving service quality.

Of all the major, global professional sports where women have made inroads, striving toward equality in terms of status, earnings and media attention, tennis stands at the forefront. This chapter traces this historical development, outlining the sport's earliest socio-cultural features that afforded the inclusion of female players and charting the progress of notable women who thrust tennis into the limelight and turned themselves into commodities – the essence of professionalisation. Suzanne Lenglen blazed the trail by becoming, in 1926, the principal attraction in the sport's inaugural professional tour. Female players were encouraged to cast aside the shackles of restrained femininity and chart their own courses in a sport still dominated by men and played according to male standards. The rise of ‘Open Tennis’ in 1968 removed the playing restrictions and stigma of professionalism, but by opening up to the male-dominated corporate world, unsurprisingly it was the male players who initially competed for the lion's share of new money. Billie Jean King's efforts to galvanise her fellow female professionals to compete on a rogue tour sponsored by Virginia Slims left them ousted by the sport's main officials, but the tour's commercial success propelled them toward equality in terms of prize money and status. Still more or less a white, middle-class-dominated pursuit, the arrival of Venus and Serena Williams in the late 1990s turned tennis toward new markets, and the sport's significance for women remains apparent in the fact that its leading players are the most recognisable and well-paid of all professional female athletes.

This chapter examines the history and process of research participants producing and working with data. The experience of working with researcher-produced and/or analysed data shows how social research is a set of practices which can be shared with research participants, and which in key ways draw on everyday habits and performances. Participant-produced data has come to the fore with the popularity of crowdsourced, citizen science research and Games with a Purpose. These address practical problems and potentially open up the research process to large scale democratic involvement. However at the same time the process can become fragmented and proletarianised. Mass research has a long history, an exemplar of which is the Mass Observation studies. Our research involved participants collecting video data on their intoxication practices. We discuss how their experience altered their own subject position in relation to these regular social activities, and explore how our understanding of their data collection converged and differed from theirs. Crowdsourced research raises a challenge to the research binary as the work is done by participants rather than the research team; however it also reaffirms it, unless further work is done to involve participants in commenting and reflecting on the research process itself.

The purpose of this paper is to encourage understanding of the practical value to managers and communication practitioners of the positive lessons from issue and crisis management cases.

Unlike many other areas of management writing, which focus on new approaches and best practice, issue and crisis management cases often highlight “PR disasters” where other managers may simply count themselves lucky that it happened to someone else. This paper uses well known examples to explore the reasons for this focus on failure and proposes ways for managers to move beyond schadenfreude to secure genuine learning and competitive advantage from the adverse experiences of others.

Whereas many industry “award winning” cases are self‐serving and prone to wisdom after the event, there is a growing body of authoritative case‐books and other material which can provide useful evaluation and benchmarking for an organization's own activity, both internal and external.

While academics and their students are familiar with the use of communication case analysis, this paper explores the range of published case study resources for practitioners and other managers who may be less aware of what is currently available and how independent analysis and insight can help facilitate effective performance against accountability.

The purpose of this paper is to provide an overview of the main contents of the 18th BOBCATSSS Symposium, held in Parma, Italy in January 2010, dedicated to the main theme “Bridging the digital divide: libraries providing access for all?”

The report provides a concise presentation of the main themes discussed during the conference.

The topics presented focused mainly on the fields of access and delivery, community support and collections, with some others focusing on leadership and management.

This symposium is one of the few conferences in the world where students are the main characters and participate as organisers, reviewers and presenters of the contributions. Reports on such conferences are of interest to both students and to teachers and professionals.