Robert Zimmermann, Daniel Mora, Douglas Cirqueira, Markus Helfert, Marija Bezbradica, Dirk Werth, Wolfgang Jonas Weitzl, René Riedl and Andreas Auinger
The transition to omnichannel retail is the recognized future of retail, which uses digital technologies (e.g. augmented reality shopping assistants) to enhance the customer…
Abstract
Purpose
The transition to omnichannel retail is the recognized future of retail, which uses digital technologies (e.g. augmented reality shopping assistants) to enhance the customer shopping experience. However, retailers struggle with the implementation of such technologies in brick-and-mortar stores. Against this background, the present study investigates the impact of a smartphone-based augmented reality shopping assistant application, which uses personalized recommendations and explainable artificial intelligence features on customer shopping experiences.
Design/methodology/approach
The authors follow a design science research approach to develop a shopping assistant application artifact, evaluated by means of an online experiment (n = 252), providing both qualitative and quantitative data.
Findings
Results indicate a positive impact of the augmented reality shopping assistant application on customers' perception of brick-and-mortar shopping experiences. Based on the empirical insights this study also identifies possible improvements of the artifact.
Research limitations/implications
This study's assessment is limited to an online evaluation approach. Therefore, future studies should test actual usage of the technology in brick-and-mortar stores. Contrary to the suggestions of established theories (i.e. technology acceptance model, uses and gratification theory), this study shows that an increase of shopping experience does not always convert into an increase in the intention to purchase or to visit a brick-and-mortar store. Additionally, this study provides novel design principles and ideas for crafting augmented reality shopping assistant applications that can be used by future researchers to create advanced versions of such applications.
Practical implications
This paper demonstrates that a shopping assistant artifact provides a good opportunity to enhance users' shopping experience on their path-to-purchase, as it can support customers by providing rich information (e.g. explainable recommendations) for decision-making along the customer shopping journey.
Originality/value
This paper shows that smartphone-based augmented reality shopping assistant applications have the potential to increase the competitive power of brick-and-mortar retailers.
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Keywords
The paper seeks to make a substantial contribution to the still controversial question of design foundations.
Abstract
Purpose
The paper seeks to make a substantial contribution to the still controversial question of design foundations.
Design/methodology/approach
A generic hypercyclic design process model is derived from basic notions of evolution and learning in different domains of knowing (and turns out to be not very different from existing ones). The second‐order cybernetics and evolutionary thinking provide theoretical support.
Findings
The paper presents a model of designerly knowledge production, which has the potential to serve as a genuine design research paradigm. It does not abandon the scientific or the hermeneutic or the arts & crafts paradigm but concludes that they have to be embedded into a design paradigm. “Design paradigm” means that “objects” are not essential, but are created in communication and language.
Research limitations/implications
Foundations cannot be found in the axiomatic statements of the formal sciences, nor in the empirical approaches of the natural sciences, nor in the hermeneutic techniques of the humanities. Designing explores and creates the new; it deals with the fit of artefacts and their human, social and natural contexts. Therefore foundations for design (if they exist at all) have to be based on the generative character of designing, which can be seen as the very activity which made and still makes primates into humans.
Practical implications
The hypercyclic model provides a cybernetic foundation (or rather substantiation) for design, which – at the same time – serves as a framework for design and design research practice. As long as the dynamic model is in action, i.e. stabilized in communication, it provides foundations; once it stops, they dissolve. The fluid circular phenomena of discourse and communication provide the only “eternal” essence of design.
Originality/value
“Design objects” as well as “theory objects” are transient materializations or eigenvalues in these circular processes. Designing objects and designing theories are equivalent. “Problems” and “solutions” as well as “foundations” are objects of this kind. This contributes to a conceptual integration of the acting and reflecting disciplines.
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The Reformation, as Wolfgang Schivelbusch maintains, which redefined the relationship between the individual and God as a personal one, “took pains to regulate the relationship of…
Abstract
The Reformation, as Wolfgang Schivelbusch maintains, which redefined the relationship between the individual and God as a personal one, “took pains to regulate the relationship of man to alcohol,” and in so doing laid “an essential foundation¦…¦for the development of capitalism.” In the earlier Rabelaisian world, the Church constituted the major site of popular culture. Virtually all work was seasonal in character punctuated by carnivalesque church feasts that numbered over one hundred yearly. Although generally accepted as a safe means to vent communal anxieties, drink comprised an essential element of these festivals, with drunkenness the socially acceptable outcome.16 However, as the Reformation progressed and new modes of aristocratic behavior developed, reformative efforts to separate the secular and the sacred within the church resulted in attempts to abandon the popular culture of the lower classes. A broad consensus emerged that too much drunkenness amounted to social evil, and that alehouses represented an “increasingly dangerous force in popular society.”17 As the influence of the Church declined in the early eighteenth century, Carnival resurfaced in the form of gregarious carnivalesque village and town feasts: “the grotesque body of carnival was being re-territorialized” and writers such as Swift and Pope “perpetually identif[ied] the scene of writing with the fairground and the carnival.”18 Conversely, in keeping with the symmetrical component inherent in the Carnival/Lent theme, Lent transmuted into organizations such as The Society for the Reformation of Manners, which attempted to reduce drunkenness, cursing, swearing and whoring – all tropes of carnivalesque gregariousness. So, during this period, a contradictory cultural dissonance was being enacted. On the one hand, we find a resurgence of Carnival, but on the other hand, we see “a conservative desire on the part of the upper classes to separate themselves more clearly and distinctly from these popular activities.”19
Wilhelm Kuntner and Wolfgang G. Weber
The purpose of this study is to contribute to the theoretical groundwork for socio-psychological investigations into the management of socially sustainable supply chains. It…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this study is to contribute to the theoretical groundwork for socio-psychological investigations into the management of socially sustainable supply chains. It proposes an analytical framework for the study of the psychological conflict potential between the fulfillment of core labor standards and cost efficiency requirements.
Design/methodology/approach
Theoretical considerations are illustrated using an explorative qualitative-empirical case study.
Findings
An activity-theoretical approach makes it possible to combine the subjective experience of tensions between conflicting requirements on sustainability management and the practical imperatives of the capitalist-market economic system in a coherent socio-psychological analytical framework.
Research limitations/implications
The proposed analytical framework serves as a starting point for theoretical considerations on socio-psychological determinants of the sustainability performance of the management of transnational supply chains.
Originality/value
This paper addresses the novel topic of how supply chain sustainability managers give sense to difficulties concerning the fulfillment of core labor standards while being constrained by cost efficiency requirements. To this end, in a hitherto unique way, concepts from activity theory, social cognitive theory of self-regulation and the theory of communicative action are combined into an analytical framework.
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Globalisation is generally defined as the “denationalisation of clusters of political, economic, and social activities” that destabilize the ability of the sovereign State to…
Abstract
Globalisation is generally defined as the “denationalisation of clusters of political, economic, and social activities” that destabilize the ability of the sovereign State to control activities on its territory, due to the rising need to find solutions for universal problems, like the pollution of the environment, on an international level. Globalisation is a complex, forceful legal and social process that take place within an integrated whole with out regard to geographical boundaries. Globalisation thus differs from international activities, which arise between and among States, and it differs from multinational activities that occur in more than one nation‐State. This does not mean that countries are not involved in the sociolegal dynamics that those transboundary process trigger. In a sense, the movements triggered by global processes promote greater economic interdependence among countries. Globalisation can be traced back to the depression preceding World War II and globalisation at that time included spreading of the capitalist economic system as a means of getting access to extended markets. The first step was to create sufficient export surplus to maintain full employment in the capitalist world and secondly establishing a globalized economy where the planet would be united in peace and wealth. The idea of interdependence among quite separate and distinct countries is a very important part of talks on globalisation and a significant side of today’s global political economy.