| 1. |
- Feng, Songming
(författare)
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Craft production in the Kingdom of Crystal (Glasriket) and its visual representation : Constructing authenticity in cultural/marketing production
- 2020
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Authenticity is a core concept and phenomenon in contemporary marketing, as both marketers and consumers seek the authentic. Individuals, companies, and industries all work to establish and accomplish authenticity for themselves and related stakeholders. As a marketing point for creating differentiation and singularity, authenticity has the potential to augment the value of a product above and beyond its promising functional, esthetic, or experiential significance. However, authenticity is a concept with heavily debated characteristics, and it is not well understood in its market manifestations. Academic work on authenticity remains vague in terms of both its definition and its marketing relevance. There has been limited empirical understanding of and theorizing about what is meant by authenticity and how it is manifested in production and consumption in the marketplace. In practice, the nature and use of authenticity in the field of marketing is still full of ambiguity and confusion. For marketers, brand authenticity is easy to recognize but hard to manufacture. How producers and marketers manage the development, positioning, and communication of authentic offerings and how they engineer, fabricate, or construct authenticity remain unanswered questions.This dissertation answers the call of Jones, Anand, and Alvarez (2005, p. 894) to determine which strategies are used for creating and defining authenticity and how these strategies shape our understanding of what is authentic and the call of Beverland (2005a) to find out how brands and marketers create and develop images of authenticity. The purpose of this dissertation is to investigate how authenticity of market offerings is constructed in two cultural/marketing production sites—the craft production of glass objects and commercial photographers’ image production as visual representation of the former—to understand the mechanisms behind the authentication of market offerings and the paradoxes within the construction work.This purpose was fulfilled by pairing the two theoretical domains of cultural/marketing production and authenticity for the investigation of an empirical site—the Kingdom of Crystal (“Glasriket” in Swedish)—located in southern Sweden. As a traditional craft-producing industrial region and a tourist destination, the site has been dedicated to making consumer glass products, maintaining its production mode and ethos as a handmade craft, for more than one hundred years. Being producer focused, the craft sector and craft production offer a strong empirical instantiation of authenticity and can serve as a fertile field to explore and problematize the issue of authenticity at the intersection with cultural/marketing production. The research was conducted over a three-year period with an interpretive and ethnographic approach tapping into multiple sources of data.This dissertation finds that the glass producers in Glasriket substantively construct five categories of authenticity (technique, material, geographical, temporal, and original) of market offerings via craft production and that commercial photographers communicate and authenticate the craft production world via their image-making practices, which are dimensionalized into a typology consisting of five categories of practice: reproducing, documenting, participating, estheticizing, and indexing. Illuminating the two-step micro process of cultural/marketing production—the concurrent practices of the product makers and the promoters, this dissertation theorizes about how authenticity operates vis-à-vis two types of production (substantive product making and communicative image making), yielding a number of contributions to authenticity scholarship and the literature on cultural/marketing production. It provides managerial implications for marketers/producers in Glasriket regarding how they can leverage cultural resources to conduct retro marketing as well as suggestions for marketers beyond this context about visual marketing and authenticity-based marketing.
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| 2. |
- Arshad, Nadia
(författare)
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Backers’ crowdfunding journey – An engagement perspective
- 2021
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Crowdfunding refers to accumulating small sums of money from the general public through the Internet for a collective larger amount to fund small or medium-sized ventures in exchange for some benefit. The contribution can be as a donation (for no material reward), a purchase (for getting a reward in return), debt (to get money returned), or equity (for sharing future profit). The three main actors in crowdfunding are the initiators (the venturers), the backers (the crowd members who fund), and the crowdfunding platforms (the intermediaries). The crowdfunding campaign’s survival and success depends on engagement from the crowd. Using a qualitative research method, this dissertation aimed to understand the backers’ engagement with four crowdfunding campaigns selected from the leading crowdfunding platform, Kickstarter, through processual analysis. Buildingon the integrative framework of service-dominant logic, engagement, and customer journey, the underlying mechanism of the backers’ engagement at the personal (micro) and interpersonal (meso) levels were explored. Based on the motivation and contribution pattern, the backers were segmented into four engagement roles: benefactors, patrons, shoppers, and utilisers. A deeper analysis showed how the engagement intensity, duration, valence, and engagement properties shaped over time across these roles. The insights from the findings in the dissertation carry managerial and policy implications.
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| 3. |
- Angelakis, Angelos, et al.
(författare)
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Gender differences in leaders’ crisis communication : a sentiment-based analysis of German higher education leaderships’ online posts
- 2024
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Ingår i: Studies in Higher Education. - : Taylor & Francis Group. - 0307-5079 .- 1470-174X. ; 49:4, s. 609-622
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- This study examined the communication styles of rectors and vice-rectors of German public universities during the COVID-19 pandemic to explore the influence of gender on leadership communication. We collected data from social media and university websites; and analysed the language used to identify transformational, transactional, and servant leadership styles. Our results showed that female leaders demonstrated more positive communication than men and a stronger preference for transformational leadership, while male leaders tended to use a transactional style. Additionally, we found that both male and female leaders exhibited a high degree of empathetic concern for their stakeholders, contributing to the overall positive tone of communication. These findings suggest that gender may play a role in how university leaders communicate during times of crisis, highlighting the importance of inclusive and compassionate leadership in higher education.
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