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Emotions play a significant role in the workplace, and considerable attention has been given to the study of employee emotions. Customers also play a central function in organizations, but much less is known about customer emotions. This chapter reviews the growing literature on customer emotions in employee–customer interfaces with a focus on service failure and recovery encounters, where emotions are heightened. It highlights emerging themes and key findings, addresses the measurement, modeling, and management of customer emotions, and identifies future research streams. Attention is given to emotional contagion, relationships between affective and cognitive processes, customer anger, customer rage, and individual differences.

To assess how an indigenous community in Guatemala, displaced by a mining project, has collaborated with international human rights advocacy organizations to address chronic insecurity and vulnerability resulting from the violence of their displacement.

The research for this case study was gathered using unstructured interviews with Lote Ocho community members and human rights advocates as well as textual analysis of social media documents, press releases, and reports. Participant observation was conducted during a community forum. Human rights theory, post-conflict theory, disaster theory, and narrative economy frameworks informed the research.

As international human rights organizations collaborate with Lote Ocho to address the community’s displacement, intensive focus on a lawsuit between the community and a Canadian mining corporation HudBay Minerals, Inc., contributes to homogenization of the community, reinforcement of destructive power relationships, and lack of focus on long-term security.

Analysis of the potential harms of singular focus on legal action in the examined collaborations identifies areas for improvement for future collaborations in both Lote Ocho and other displaced communities.

Caal v. HudBay is the first case of its kind. Thus, the analysis presented here provides critical insight for international and community actors regarding the successes and shortcomings of collaboration in cases of development-forced displacement, identifying areas for improvement for future collaborations with displaced communities.

This chapter provides the foundation for the book. The objective of this chapter is to outline the theme of the book and to provide the context for the chapters that follow. Disaster recovery is a challenge for governments and for affected communities, families, and individuals. It is a challenge, because recovery from catastrophic disasters can be much more complicated and elusive than what can be addressed by national and international aid organizations given the time and other resources. The short literature review provides the research context, and the overview of the book describes each of the chapters briefly.

Uncertainty and unpredictability in the lives and livelihoods of informal microentrepreneurs in Quito, Ecuador, increase their vulnerability and make the challenges of life at the social and economic margins of society more difficult to overcome. Through their small informal microenterprises, they work to maintain their everyday survival and sustain their hopes for a better future. Some turn to microfinance to support their microenterprises. Worldwide, microfinance is promoted as a powerful instrument for social and cultural change, creating a narrative of microfinance that contains promises of transformative effects. Over 16 months of research, interviews with 120 informal sector microentrepreneurs revealed these promises and the limitations of microfinance in their lives and the individualization of social problems present within the narrative of microfinance. The strength and flexibility of this narrative of microfinance has been built, interpreted, and reinterpreted in ways that allows it to be applied, and accepted, in various global social and political contexts. Informal microenterprises and microfinance are ways that people cope with economic uncertainty and social instability in Quito. Although people turn to microfinance in an effort to cope with their vulnerability, microfinance can increase their everyday vulnerabilities and place the responsibility for overcoming social problems upon the individuals who suffer them the most. Microfinance, therefore, becomes well-intentioned debt, creating new subjects and selfhoods that shift the social problems of poverty and inequality to individual problems that should be overcome by self-reliance.

The Hellenic Open University (HOU) has recently ‘crossed the Rubicon’ into the e-learning era, offering learners the opportunity to attend online classes. For the teaching personnel, the specific change initiative involved stress-generating issues, associated with the ability to use new technologies and tools, and apply online active learning methods and techniques, as well as with issues related to e-learning effectiveness and self-efficacy. On these grounds, a qualitative study was conducted seeking to investigate academics’ views about the challenges they faced, influencing the implementation and effectiveness of online classes. Fifteen semi-structured interviews were conducted with randomly selected academics who taught online classes. The data of the interviews underwent a three-level qualitative analysis, following the ‘grounded theory’ methodology. Besides the limitations inherent in the study, the important point was that it enabled important aspects of issues related to design and delivery of effective online courses to be highlighted. The findings of this study clearly depicted the need to support academic staff on multiple levels in their endeavour to implement online courses.

This article examines how smallholders in Oaxaca, Mexico, experienced and responded to the recent coffee rust disaster, asking whether fair trade coffee producer organizations helped smallholders develop coping mechanisms to offset their vulnerability. It demonstrates how Oaxacan coffee producers were especially vulnerable during the recent rust outbreak due to long-term trends including a decline in governmental support for the sector dating back to the 1990s which resulted in a decline in producer incomes and a concomitant rise in the number of aging and poorly managed coffee plots that were more susceptible to coffee rust. The ongoing price volatility within coffee commodity markets and the continued restructuring of the specialty coffee market also increases the uncertainty producers face when determining how to best respond to the rust disaster. The article details the concrete ways in which fair trade coffee producer organizations help bolster the adaptive capacity of their members, while also noting areas for improvement.

This chapter embraces a rhythmanalytic approach to address the complexities of a city recovering from a disaster. Bridging Henri Lefebvre's work on everyday life with his later work on rhythms this chapter engages his theory to analyse the case of L'Aquila, a city in central Italy that was destroyed by an earthquake in 2009. To this day, the city's skyline is dominated by cranes, while life unfolds along with sounds of the ongoing reconstruction. While the city is still recovering from the earthquake, the landscape of ruins co-exists with a landscape of construction. More than 10 years after the earthquake stripped away life from its historical centre, the city continues to live in a temporal in-between the disaster and its future ‘rebirth’. While most of the current research on the city neglects the city's everyday experience, my research decentres the debate by analysing the everyday rhythms of L'Aquila's historical centre. Additionally, drawing from walking interviews this chapter highlights the perplexing aspects of everyday life in the city emphasising how the city is negotiated and learned from the locals. This chapter highlights the way different temporalities blur in the everyday practices of reconstruction, emphasising how the city is lived and created in the here-and-now.

This introductory chapter provides an overview of the ways that refugee and forced im/migrant (RFI) youth move across time and context in their educational experiences. In particular, the contextual characteristics of determinism, duration, and mobility are explained, and the factors most often associated with RFI youth educational experiences (i.e., trauma, identity, and language) are discussed in reference to the ways that educational infrastructure, capacity, and sustainability are typically established and maintained in educational situations worldwide. This chapter also provides a brief overview of the volume’s chapters and the ways that each chapter addresses one or more of these themes or topics.

In this article, I analyze constructions of and responses to vulnerability in the US government and a now-prominent evangelical aid organization, World Vision, during the 1950s and 1960s in Korea and Vietnam. World Vision was founded as the “development discourse,” Cold War rhetoric, and the neo-evangelical movement were all rising to prominence in the United States. World Vision’s early understandings of vulnerability resonated with Cold War and modernization theory rhetoric in certain ways; however, its approaches to remake vulnerable Asians were often distinct. World Vision evangelical Christians looked to private voluntary organizations and individual conversions in a free society to remake individuals and nations, notions not so different from neoliberal development approaches today. US foreign aid approaches were rooted in nation-building for centralized, planned government institutions and economies to modernize “traditional” people. This article examines the complex relationships between missionaries, evangelists, US foreign aid experts and the military in American constructions of vulnerable traditional Asians and interventions to modernize and Christianize them. In examining roots of faith-based development models through the case of World Vision and notions of vulnerability, historical threads and lineages emerge for understanding the relationship of religion and the state in modernizing projects, and faith-based and neoliberal development models.