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This paper discusses the Duke University Medical Center Library’s experience in supporting the use of mobile technology. Over the past several years, the library contributed to the formation of a mobile technology infrastructure through surveys, organization of information sharing events, and the development and review of medical center wide proposals and reports.

This study aims to propose and test a parsimonious framework for self-congruity, albeit in the context of luxury branding. This paper is the first to propose an integrated model focusing on the drivers and consequences of self-congruity. The model is further applied to explain how self-congruity may motivate future experiences with the luxury brand, mainly by influencing self-perception. Although a substantive marketing literature on self-congruity currently exists, there is a lack of an integrated framework, a gap that the current work addresses.

A paper and pencil survey was conducted among female subjects only, and structural path relationships were tested using AMOS.

Consumers’ self-congruity with a luxury brand (non-luxury brand) is positively (negatively) influenced by its antecedents: social desirability, need for uniqueness and status consumption. Self-congruity with a luxury (non-luxury) brand is found to enhance (undermine) consumers’ self-perceptions. This, in turn, is found to have a stronger (weaker) positive impact on consumers’ motivation to re-use a shopping bag from luxury brand (non-luxury brand) for hedonic purpose. Mediation analyses show that self-congruity has a positive (negative) indirect effect on hedonic use via self-perception for luxury (non-luxury) brand.

Future studies may involve actual shoppers, causal design and additional variables like “utilitarian usage “of shopping bags to extend the proposed framework.

A better understanding of the findings has implications for brand positioning, advertising and packaging.

Till date, no research has examined a parsimonious model for self-congruity complete with its antecedents and consequences and tested it in the context of a luxury versus non-luxury brand.

Dr Tiffany McDowell, a consultant with Deloitte Consulting, uses growing evidence and her experience working with a range of clients to suggest that there’s a tangible bonus in “doing the right thing” when it comes to business activities. Here, she explains how paying attention to ethical issues leads to higher employee satisfaction and performance.

The purpose of this paper is to accelerate research related to the employee-facets of service management by summarizing current developments in multiple research streams, providing propositions, and articulating new directions for theory and empirical inquiry.

Seven scholars provide short reviews of the core topics and findings from four employee-related research streams – collective turnover, service climate, emotional labor, and occupational stress; and generate propositions to guide future theoretical and empirical work. Four distinguished service scholars – David Bowen, Ray Fisk, Christian Grönroos, and Jochen Wirtz comment upon these research streams and provide future directions for accelerating employee-related research in service management.

All four research-streams yield insights that have the potential to advance service management research. Commentaries from the distinguished scholars further integrate this work with key concerns within service management including technology-enablement, transformative services, and service strategy.

This paper is unique in its scope of coverage of management topics related to service and its aim to promote interdisciplinary dialog between service management scholars and researchers conducting employee-related research relevant to services.

International students commonly need to adjust to an unfamiliar environment while at the same time juggling with their education without traditional family support. Intercultural adjustment is often stressful for these students, thus contributing to a higher risk of a vulnerable mental and emotional state. The relocation to a foreign country presents a case of temporary migration during the time that they are away. This chapter looks at the challenges international students faced during relocation and adaptation. The study will also discuss how international students cope with mental health issues and the important role educational institutions have in mental health care. Interview data will be drawn on to present the perspectives of a group of international Singaporean university students in Melbourne, Australia, aged between 20 and 25 years old. However, the discussion about mental health issues cannot be assumed to be directly related to the challenges of relocation. Interview data will only represent the perspective of a group of international students and cannot be made generalisable to all international students. Similar to other studies, findings from this chapter reinforced the challenges international students face from their migration. While they acknowledged the importance of mental health care services, there are still barriers to seeking professional help. Future studies could look into how universities can continue to bridge this gap.

This paper, an exploration into Black women cultural consumers of Tyler Perry Productions, examines the ways cultural consumption practices contribute to transformative ideologies and behaviors.

This regionally diverse ethnography using yo-yo fieldwork in Los Angeles, Atlanta, New York, and New Orleans, is based upon the author’s experiences over the course of five years engaging theater attendees and the casts and crew members of multiple Perry productions.

The author first discusses the dichotomous and provocative responses to Perry’s work by scholars, critics, and consumers of Tyler Perry Productions. After an ethnographically rich discussion of the setting surrounding a performance of the stage play Madea’s Big Happy Family, the author discusses how Black women report Perry’s work as a site of resistance to, and resources for responding to, microaggressions and other structures of oppression.

Building on the work of black feminist theory (Bobo, 2001, B. Smith, 1998) and black feminist theater aesthetic (Anderson, 2008), this paper, by crafting a Black Women’s Theatre Aesthetic that, for the first time, engages with and gives primacy to the consumers of theatrical productions, opens a portal for understanding the creative ways Black women call into play cultural consumption practices as tools and devices for transformative praxis.

The purpose of this paper is to examine how youth from varied cultural and socioeconomic backgrounds came together to collaboratively analyze data they collected across two research projects in a community-based Youth Participatory Action Research (YPAR) initiative, a less understood aspect of YPAR. Specifically, this study discusses how youth enacted collaborative data analysis to foreground lived experience and experiential knowledge while enacting critical literacy practices and building toward an open and reflective form of relationality.

The examination of youths’ data analysis practices is situated in a larger qualitative research study of the Central City Youth Participatory Action Research initiative, a six-month, community-based, out-of-school program. This study discusses the relational and humanizing practices of youth through collaborative data analysis practices.

This study focuses on two small-group research teams, examining how youth enacted critical literacy practices and humanizing modes of learning through relational practices as data analysis. This study discusses two themes in the findings: making sense of data through personal experience and negotiating researcher roles as stancetaking in collaborative data analysis

In analyzing students’ collaborative data analysis practices across the small-group YPAR projects they enacted, this study contributes new understandings about how youth analyzed data to examine aspects of educational equity important to them.