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This article explores the cultural politics of civic pride through Hull's year as UK City of Culture (UKCoC) in 2017. It unpicks some of the socio-political meanings and values of civic pride in Hull and critiques the ways in which pride, as an indicator of identity and belonging, was mobilised by UKCoC organisers, funders and city leaders. It argues for more nuanced and critical approaches to the consideration and evaluation of pride through cultural mega events (CMEs) that can take account of pride's multiple forms, meanings and temporalities.

A multidimensional, mixed methods approach is taken, incorporating the critical analysis of Hull2017 promotional materials and events and original interviews with a range of stakeholders.

The desire for socio-economic change and renewed identity has dominated Hull's post-industrial sense of self and is often expressed through the language of pride. This article argues that UKCoC organisers, cognisant of this, crafted and tightly controlled a singular pride narrative to create the feeling of change and legitimise the entrepreneurial re-branding of the city. At the same time, UKCoC organisers overlooked the opportunity to engage with and potentially reactivate the political culture of Hull, which like other “left behind” or “structurally disadvantaged” places, is becoming increasingly anti-political.

Through the case study of a relatively unresearched and under-represented city, this paper contributes to cultural policy literatures concerned with critically assessing the benefits and shortcomings of Cultural Mega Events and to a more specific field concerning Cities of Culture and the political cultures of their host cities. This paper also contributes to an emerging literature on the centrality of pride through the UK's post-Brexit Levelling Up agenda, suggesting that pride in place is becoming figured as a “universal theme” of the neoliberal city script.

The various opportunities and strategies afforded to commercial banks by the advent of the Single Market in 1992 are identified and assessed. Proposed European financial legislation is outlined and the implications for commercial banks are examined. Particular emphasis is focused on the banker‐customer relationship, considered to be the single most important barrier to entry confronting commercial banks in Europe. Empirical evidence is analysed, both in terms of the emerging strategies of individual institutions and the developments in selected European countries to support the findings.

This paper aims to highlight the importance of the study of emotions in the successful implementation of information systems projects in developing countries. This paper studies one emotion, namely, anger, and discusses its detrimental impact on information system interventions. This paper suggests that controls are necessary for the management of anger emotion.

This research study explores the case of an Indian agricultural marketing board that implemented an information systems project on the integration of agricultural markets. The data was collected through semistructured interviews from four stakeholder groups. This paper uses a qualitative approach and analyzes the data using thematic analysis. Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of practice is used to study emotions in the case.

This paper finds that anger is the prominent emotion displayed at public sector organizations in India. This paper permeates all aspects of public organizations and has a detrimental impact on successfully implementing the information systems projects. Successful implementation of the information systems (IS) projects in India will need to have a framework for managing the anger emotion.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first paper within the information systems discipline that focuses on anger and its detrimental impact on successful IS interventions. A unique contribution of this paper is a framework for the study of emotions. This paper also introduces the idea of controls for emotional management.

The study here responds to the view that the crucial problem in strategic management (research) is firm heterogeneity – why firms adopt different strategies and structures, why heterogeneity persists, and why competitors perform differently. The present study applies complexity theory tenets and a “neo-configurational perspective” of Misangyi et al. (2016) in proposing complex antecedent conditions affecting complex outcome conditions. Rather than examining variable directional relationships using null hypotheses statistical tests, the study examines case-based conditions using somewhat precise outcome tests (SPOT). The complex outcome conditions include firms with high financial performances in declining markets and firms with low financial performances in growing markets – the study focuses on seemingly paradoxical outcomes. The study here examines firm strategies and outcomes for separate samples of cross-sectional data of manufacturing firms with headquarters in one of two nations: Finland (n = 820) and Hungary (n = 300). The study includes examining the predictive validities of the models. The study contributes conceptual advances of complex firm orientation configurations and complex firm performance capabilities configurations as mediating conditions between firmographics, firm resources, and the two final complex outcome conditions (high performance in declining markets and low performance in growing markets). The study contributes by showing how fuzzy-logic computing with words (Zadeh, 1966) advances strategic management research toward achieving requisite variety to overcome the theory-analytic mismatch pervasive currently in the discipline (Fiss, 2007, 2011) – thus, this study is a useful step toward solving the crucial problem of how to explain firm heterogeneity.

Given the resources being spent on corporate identity development, it is disappointing that the mainstream marketing texts and journals afford it little space. Development of an understanding of corporate identity and image is sought. Corporate identity is projected by organisations and services to shape the image held of the organisation by its publics. In the absence of tangibility, as is the case in service marketing, corporate image has a powerful role. For these reasons, financial services marketers need to treat corporate identity as a strategic marketing issue. How this may be done is theorised and a case study of Allied Irish Bank plc is used as an illustration of corporate identity development in practice. Given the company‐specific and industrywide changes that have occurred in financial services, the corporate identity issues raised will apply to many businesses within that industry.

In this chapter, we theorize about online freelancers’ approaches to work flexibility. Drawing from an ongoing digital ethnography of US-based online freelancers pursuing work on digital platforms, our data question the common conceptualizations around the flexibility of online freelancing. We posit that the flexibility of where to work, not when to work, is the most important attribute of their work arrangement. Our data show (1) the online freelancers in our study prefer the stability and sustainability of full-time work over freelancing when both are offered as remote options; (2) full-time remote employment increases these workers’ freelancing control / flexibility; (3) these workers keep freelance work options open even as they transition to more permanent full-time work arrangements. We discuss how these findings relate to workplace culture shifts and what this means for contemporary working arrangements. Our insights contribute to the discourses on knowledge-based gig work and for what it means to study individuals online.

The image that a bank has in the consumer's mind is the most important type of branding that it can offer and should be the central component within any marketing strategy. Consumer attitudes have been modified by two principal factors — the wider range of services offered means that banks are in the public eye more often, and have changed perceptions about money and financial institutions, and the process of social change is contributing to changed perceptions and expectations from service organisations. There are four interconnecting aspects in developing a corporate image that will make the bank more recognisable and stronger and communicate with the public — corporate identity, public relations, advertising and delivery systems (promotion).

The purpose of this research is to develop and test a sense of consumption community measurement scale. The concept is examined in an exploratory study in the context of the perceptions of customers of financial services firms.

This research consults the marketing, banking, psychology, and public policy literature. A sense of consumption community scale is tested for validity via exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis. Scale reliability analysis is also conducted.

The result is a second‐order construct composed of the first‐order constructs, camaraderie and communality, and social capital. The construct is found to be a means of measuring the strength of consumers' perceptions of consumption community. Additional evidence of its practical value is demonstrated in four findings. First, partial support is found that men perceive a greater sense of community than women. Second, there is a positive relationship between age and perceived sense of community. Third, no significant relationship was found between the various types of financial institutions and customers' sense of consumption community. Fourth, an identical finding was obtained for the relationship between sense of community and longevity. And fifth, this research also documents limitations of the Sense of Consumption Community Construct due to the exploratory nature of this research effort.

The scale formulated in this research is the first to measure a sense of community among the customers of financial institutions.