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Over 8 per cent of the Dutch nursing home population is bedfast, and this number is slowly increasing. The quality of life (QoL) of this population is lower than that of residents who are still mobile. Little research has been conducted on how to improve the QoL of this bedfast population, particularly through making technological adjustments to the bed and the direct surroundings. The purpose of this paper is to gain insight into the QoL of bedfast residents and how to improve this through technology.

A mixed-method multi-case study with thematic analysis was conducted in two nursing homes with seven participants based on semi-structured interviews and Short Form-12 questionnaire.

The major causes of the experienced low QoL were the limited opportunities for engaging in social contacts with others, and coping with the dependency on other people and having limited control. Participants suggested improvements of QoL through the application of modern communication technologies to engage in social contacts and to control the bed itself and environment around the bed.

The results may help improve the design of the bed and the direct environment in order to improve the QoL of bedfast nursing home residents.

The QoL of bedfast nursing home residents has not been studied before in relation to the bed itself and technological solutions that may help improve the QoL and level of control.

This study aims to offer insights into the embodied concerns that underpin men’s personal grooming practices through which they experience their body as the “existential ground of culture and self” and manage their everyday bodily presentation.

This study analyses 16 interviews with male consumers of age between 20 and 76. The interpretative analysis is informed by both Merleau-Ponty’s concept of the body-subject and the sociology of the body as discursively constituted.

This study proposes four bodily identity positions that link individual personal grooming practices to specific embodied concerns. These bodily identity positions underline the different ways the male body is called upon to carve out a meaningful existence.

The research findings are not intended to generalise or to be exhaustive. Rather, it is hoped that they may stimulate readers to think more deeply about the role of the body in aiding male consumers to seek maximum grip on their life-world.

The study findings provide marketers with rich narratives for brand positioning and image development beyond the traditional sexual and/or alpha male-themed marketing and advertising. They also offer preliminary insights for mental health practitioners into how the male body shapes men’s identity development and experiences of well-being.

The study identifies the different ways personal grooming can become assimilated into an individual’s system of beliefs and practices. It also offers empirical support for a definition of the body as active and acted upon, especially with respect to male grooming.

Purpose – This study examines the meaning of shopping for Taiwanese students visiting England. It asks how this activity takes place, what purposes it serves for the students, and how the resulting purchases make meaning for the students once they return to Taiwan.

Methodology/approach – The study is ethnographic, involving observation and interviews in England as well as visual elicitation and interviews with the students once they returned to Taiwan and also some time later.

Findings – Shopping for souvenirs in England is found to be part of the process by which young Taiwanese tourists come to understand cultural differences. It is also a part of the process by which these students fulfill social obligations to those family members who have largely funded their trips. It is also a way of engaging with locals through the medium and excuse of shopping. Both the items selected and the memories they encode form thesomewhat stereotypical condensations of the experience of going abroad to “The West.”

Research limitations/implications (if applicable) – Those studied represent a young group with limited prior travel experience. Their retrospective recollections are subject to some distortion, although this is a part of the normal process of remembering.

Practical implications (if applicable) – For those planning foreign educational exchange programs, the critical role of shopping in this process should not be neglected.

Originality/value of paper – The researcher accompanied the students on their trip to England and also followed up with them once they returned home to Taiwan. This produced a rare insight into the process of tourist meaning-making during and after their trip abroad.

The purpose of this paper is to review and discuss Luciano Floridi’s 2019 book The Logic of Information: A Theory of Philosophy as Conceptual Design, the latest instalment in his philosophy of information (PI) tetralogy, particularly with respect to its implications for library and information studies (LIS).

Nine scholars with research interests in philosophy and LIS read and responded to the book, raising critical and heuristic questions in the spirit of scholarly dialogue. Floridi responded to these questions.

Floridi’s PI, including this latest publication, is of interest to LIS scholars, and much insight can be gained by exploring this connection. It seems also that LIS has the potential to contribute to PI’s further development in some respects.

Floridi’s PI work is technical philosophy for which many LIS scholars do not have the training or patience to engage with, yet doing so is rewarding. This suggests a role for translational work between philosophy and LIS.

The book symposium format, not yet seen in LIS, provides forum for sustained, multifaceted and generative dialogue around ideas.

This paper aims to address the effective selection of customers for direct marketing campaigns. It introduces a new method to forecast campaign-related uplifts (also known as incremental response modeling or net scoring). By means of these uplifts, only the most responsive customers are targeted by a campaign. This paper also aims at calculating the financial impact of the new approach compared to the classical (gross) scoring methods.

First, gross and net scoring approaches to customer selection for direct marketing campaigns are compared. After that, it is shown how net scoring can be applied in practice with regard to different strategical objectives. Then, a new statistic for net scoring based on decision trees is developed. Finally, a business case based on real data from the financial sector is calculated to compare gross and net scoring approaches.

Whereas gross scoring focuses on customers with a high probability of purchase, regardless of being targeted by a campaign, net scoring identifies those customers who are most responsive to campaigns. A common scoring procedure – decision trees – can be enhanced by the new statistic to forecast those campaign-related uplifts. The business case shows that the selected scoring method has a relevant impact on economical indicators.

The contribution of net scoring to campaign effectiveness and efficiency is shown by the business case. Furthermore, this paper suggests a framework for customer selection, given strategical objectives, e.g. minimizing costs or maximizing (gross or lift)-added value, and presents a new statistic that can be applied to common scoring procedures.

Despite its lever on the effectiveness of marketing campaigns, only few contributions address net scores up to now. The new χ²-statistic is a straightforward approach to the enhancement of decision trees for net scoring. Furthermore, this paper is the first to the application of net scoring with regard to different strategical objectives.

The purpose of this paper is to consider the current status of strategic group theory in the light of developments over the last three decades. and then to discuss the continuing value of the concept, both to strategic management research and practising managers.

Critical review of the idea of strategic groups together with a practical strategic mapping illustration.

Strategic group theory still provides a useful approach for management research, which allows a detailed appraisal and comparison of company strategies within an industry.

Strategic group research would undoubtedly benefit from more directly comparable, industry‐specific studies, with a more careful focus on variable selection and the statistical methods used for validation. Future studies should aim to build sets of industry specific variables that describe strategic choice within that industry. The statistical methods used to identify strategic groupings need to be robust to ensure that strategic groups are not solely an artefact of method.

The paper looks specifically at an application of strategic group theory in the UK pharmaceutical industry. The practical benefits of strategic groups as a classification system and of strategic mapping as a strategy development and analysis tool are discussed.

The review of strategic group theory alongside alternative taxonomies and application of the concept to the UK pharmaceutical industry.

Justice rules are standards that serve as criteria for formulating fairness judgments. Though justice rules play a role in the organizational justice literature, they have seldom been the subject of analysis in their own right. To address this limitation, we first consider three meta-theoretical dualities that are highlighted by justice rules – the distinction between justice versus fairness, indirect versus direct measurement, and normative versus descriptive paradigms. Second, we review existing justice rules and organize them into four types of justice: distributive (e.g., equity, equality), procedural (e.g., voice, consistent treatment), interpersonal (e.g., politeness, respectfulness), and informational (e.g., candor, timeliness). We also emphasize emergent rules that have not received sufficient research attention. Third, we consider various computation models purporting to explain how justice rules are assessed and aggregated to form fairness judgments. Fourth and last, we conclude by reviewing research that enriches our understanding of justice rules by showing how they are cognitively processed. We observe that there are a number of influences on fairness judgments, and situations exist in which individuals do not systematically consider justice rules.

This chapter considers the place of responsibility in confronting ecological sustainability and social equity problems in the food system. We present two illustrations addressing the following question: In what ways does responsibility present a way to close the metabolic rift in line with the vision of the global food sovereignty movement? First, using the example of Metro-Vancouver in Canada, we consider the ways in which urban people claim responsibility for land protection through the concept of urban agrarianism, defined as an urban ethic of care for foodlands, with an associated responsibility to exercise solidarity with those who cultivate and harvest food. Second, we discuss how deepening relational responsibility in legal and regulatory frameworks might hold the corporate food regime accountable in the Canadian context to address their role in and responsibility for mitigating an increasingly risky world, as evidenced by the COVID-19 pandemic. We argue that the responsibility of urban people to mobilise in solidarity with food movements, and against the corporate food regime in particular, will play a critical role in supporting the transition to sustainable and just food systems. This applies both to finding new ways to claim responsibility for this transition and to hold those actors that have disproportionately benefitted from the corporate food regime responsible. Such a reworking of responsibility is especially necessary as the context for food systems change becomes increasingly urbanised and risky.

This chapter introduces the KontoSensor, a digital service offered by Deutsche Bank since September 2018, as an example of data processing using predictive analytics. We present the motivation behind this digital service, the use cases and methods currently implemented, the way they have been created, and measures to increase the usage of the KontoSensor. With KontoSensor, Deutsche Bank offers a digital service to its clients to analyze their transactions on their current accounts using methods from predictive analytics and to inform them when irregularities are found. Twelve months after the start, 90,000 clients are already using this service and experiencing the results of data science firsthand.