| 1. |
- Radón, Anita, 1980-
(author)
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The Rise of Luxury Brands Online : A study of how a sense of luxury brand is created in an online environment
- 2010
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Doctoral thesis (other academic/artistic)abstract
- Luxury brands have only recently tapped into the online market in an attempt to increase revenues and expand their businesses. This leap onto the online world has resulted in several new challenges, including the luxury brand paradox. The luxury brand paradox concerns the inherent difficulty for luxury brands to increase sales and expand their customer base while simultaneously maintaining an aura of mystery and exclusivity. The openness and accessibility of the Internet are believed to pose an extra challenging environment for luxury brands. This research explores how a sense of luxury brand is created in an online environment. Using methodology comprised of different online methods to comprehend what is taking place online, this study primarily concentrates on visual imagery and online communication. The online world of luxury brands is conceptualized into three distinct categories: brand websites, counterfeit websites and community websites. Using these three categories, the thesis demonstrates what role they each play in the creation of a sense of luxury brand. From this analysis, four themes emerge on the sense of a luxury brand (luxury history, authenticity, community and paradox). The concept of an online fair is used to illustrate the environment of luxury brands on the Internet. The online fair consists of a confluence of people involved in it as well as the various activities they perform. In addition, the fairground where the people participate and the activities that take place are described. In conclusion, this thesis proposes a move from the identity-image construct toward a view of handling and co-creation of sense of brand.
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| 2. |
- Lundberg, Christine, 1972-
(author)
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Challenges in Delivering Services: The Front-Line Hospitality and Tourism Employee Perspective
- 2010
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Doctoral thesis (other academic/artistic)abstract
- Significant challenges are faced by front-line hospitality and tourism employees interacting with customers on a daily basis. These challenges and the ways they are dealt with form the focus of this thesis. As they interact, a range of incidents may arise from highly satisfactory encounters to service failures. It has been argued that in order to achieve satisfactory service encounters, employees need to feel in control, satisfied and motivated as well as being given appropriate assistance, information and training. Front-line employees in hospitality and tourism are focused on here due to the complex nature of the industry. It is commonly agreed that it is characterised by poor working conditions such as anti-social working hours, part-time and/or seasonal work, minimal on-the-job training and low levels of pay. These are all factors which may affect employee work satisfaction and motivation as well as recruitment and retention. The thesis is comprised of four studies. In Study I, hospitality and tourism employee work motivation is analysed. Study II examines front-line hotel restaurant employees’ experiences of service encounters. How the skills utilised by employees during these service encounters are acquired and developed is then explored in Study III. Study IV concludes by examining employee informal information sharing activities, which offer one way of developing these skills. The thesis’ findings paint a more positive picture of work and workers in hospitality and tourism than suggested in some of the earlier published research. This could be explained by the fact that the thesis utilises an employee perspective in its truest sense. The findings of the thesis show that employees are motivated (to large extent by factors that have been pointed out in earlier published work motivation research) and that they are active in the pursuit of developing skills necessary to create satisfactory service encounters. Another conclusion of the thesis’ findings is that the interaction between workers and guests in the service encounter provides an important opportunity for workers to feel satisfied at work.
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| 3. |
- Fuentes, Christian
(author)
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Green Retailing : A socio-material analysis
- 2011
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Doctoral thesis (other academic/artistic)abstract
- The marketing and consumption of green products has grown significantly in recent years. As mediators between producers and consumers, retailing sites play an important role for the distribution of green products. It is through stores and other retail sites that green products are marketed and made available to consumers. But how does retailing work to circulate green products? How are green products made part of specific consumption worlds and practices? And does green retailing facilitate the development of more environmentally sustainable patterns of production and consumption? Green retailing: a socio-material analysis offers a critical account of green retailing. Using practice theory and drawing on an ethnographic study of an outdoors retail chain, this book argues that the understanding of green retailing benefit from the acknowledgement of the complexities involved in retail practices. The book analyses the work done by the Nordic Nature Shop to make their green outdoors products meaningful and functional to consumers. It shows how the retail chain uses its outlets to create a world in where their products are become necessary while simultaneously giving the products the qualities needed to function in this world. Green outdoors products are through the Nordic Nature Shops marketing work framed as tools and problem solvers that mediate between society and nature and protect fragile environments. Through their marketing of green products, the Nordic Nature Shop promises that it is possible to consume the outdoors in a greener way. However, in offering consumers products that resolve the contradiction between wanting to enjoy and wanting to protect the outdoors, the Shop also makes a number of resource intensive outdoors consumption practices possible. This means that while the Nordic Nature Shop contribute to the greening of contemporary consumption practices it simultaneously reproduces consumer culture and discourages the emergence of more reflexive and critical forms of consumption.
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| 4. |
- Löfström, Mikael
(author)
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Samverkan och gränser : studier av samverkansprojekt i offentlig sektor
- 2010
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Doctoral thesis (other academic/artistic)abstract
- The collaboration projects studied in this thesis originate from national experiments that took place from the late 1990s to the early 2000s. In those experiments, attempts were made to determine whether collaboration could, as part of the organization of the public sector, generate welfare gains for both the individual user and society as a whole. Other forms of political governance of public organizations were also tested in these experiments. Activities were very often carried out in the form of collaboration projects involving joint evaluation groups and through co-localization. The collaboration projects are about in which actors bring their different v rules, values and preconceptions, from their regular activities into a meeting with other activities with different boundaries in order to organize new boundaries. The purpose of the thesis is to achieve an understanding of why collaboration projects encounter difficulties in contributing to lasting integration between government organizations, and the importance of boundaries in the organizing of collaboration projects. The thesis is based on four articles. The first article elucidates the ways in which different boundaries are constructed when inter-organizational collaborations are being carried out. The second article develops a model for analyzing uncertainty factors in the interaction environment of the project. The third article addresses the problem of implementing, within the public sector, results from development projects in the home organization. The fourth article analyzes the ways in which collaboration projects can help to increase integration between government organizations. The results from the studies show that the collaboration projects do provide opportunities for trying out new forms of collaboration, but also that the actors in collaboration projects have to deal with multiple boundary-related problems. The construction of boundaries must, on the one hand, regulate the activities being carried out in the collaboration projects, in that the boundaries enable the actors to come together in a common activity. On the other hand, the boundaries in collaboration projects must be part of the home organizations’ activities and their boundary constructions. This leads to a complex spatial construction in which different boundaries entail different distinctions and regulations of the relationship to the outside world. In turn, this leads to problems involving the home organizations in the collaboration, resulting in the collaboration becoming confined to only the collaboration projects.
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| 5. |
- Hjelm Lidholm, Sara
(author)
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Re-creating processes : when Internet came to the mail order company
- 2011
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Doctoral thesis (other academic/artistic)abstract
- The subject of this thesis is the implementation of e-commerce as a technical and commercial strategy of a mail order company. The study is longitudinal and mainly performed with interviews and observations during 2001 and 2009. I have analyzed the material with the help of translation theory and with an emphasis on Callon (1986). The study revealed that the mail order company over time changed the way e-commerce was looked upon and thereby also the way that the company should organize. I identified six different definitions of e-commerce which sequentially replaced one another as the idea that was to be translated in the company. In the beginning of the translating process the idea with e-commerce was identified as mainly technical, but that changed over time and thereafter mainly became a commercial idea about trade. This meant that focus shifted and that the persons involved in translating e-commerce also became more closely linked to the market and the customers. The e-commerce site was then defined as a shop or a warehouse and thereby became connected with familiar physical places and not with abstract digital and technical places such as cyberspace where sites are offline or online. At the end of the study e-commerce tended to be defined as an opportunity for customers to shop together and thereby being social on an interactive media. This meant that the customers contributed in defining new boundaries for the company, boundaries that included the customers since they now could interact with each other as well as with the company on the web site. The idea with e-commerce was thereby translated several times in the company during the time of the study. The translation process was bewildering for the company and meant at the end of the study that it identified itself as an e-commerce company and not as a mail order company, partly due to that 60% of the customer orders were then laid over the Internet. Another reason was that mail order was considered out of date and that e-commerce was and is the main channel for distance shopping today at the studied company.
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