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- Aagerup, Ulf, 1969-
(author)
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The Impact of User Weight on Brands and Business Practices in Mass Market Fashion
- 2010
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Licentiate thesis (other academic/artistic)abstract
- Overweight people claim to be mistreated by the fashion industry. If they were, it would be in line with branding theory supporting the idea of rejecting fat consumers to improve user imagery for fashion brands. However, fashion companies do not confess to such practices.To shed some light on the subject, I have conducted two studies.The first attempts to illustrate what effect, if any, user imagery has on fashion brands. It is an experiment designed to show how the weight of users affects consumers’ perceptions of mass market fashion brands. The findings show that consumers’ impressions of mass market fashion brands are significantly affected by the weight of its users. The effect of male user imagery is ambiguous. For women’s fashion on the other hand, slender users are to be preferred.In the second study I examine what effects these effects have on assortments. I compare the sizes of mass market clothes to the body sizes of the population. No evidence of discrimination of overweight or obese consumers was found -quite the contrary.The reasons for these unexpected findings may be explained by the requirements a brand must fulfil to make management of the customer base for user imagery purposes viable. The brand must be sensitive to user imagery; a requirement that mass market fashion fulfils. However, it must also be feasible for a company to exclude customers, and while garment sizes can be restricted to achieve this, the high volume sales strategy of mass market fashion apparently cannot.
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| 3. |
- Aagerup, Ulf, 1969-
(author)
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To sell or not to sell: overweight users’ effect on fashion assortments
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Other publication (other academic/artistic)abstract
- Overweight people claim to be mistreated by the fashion industry. Fashion companies disagree. Despite the controversy, actual research has been scarce. This study compares the sizes of clothes the four leading mass marketing fashion retailers in Sweden offer to the body sizes of the population. Although branding theory would support the idea of rejecting fat consumers to improve user imagery for fashion brands, such practices were not evident. The main contribution of this paper is that it provides the first quantified empirical evidence on the theory of typical user imagery.In the discussion, it is posited that although mass market fashion brands should be susceptible to negative user imagery related to overweight and obese users, the companies avoid such problems by making garments that are not directly attributable to a specific brand, thus mitigating the negative effect of overweight and obese user imagery.
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| 4. |
- Aagerup, Ulf, 1969-
(author)
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User BMI effects on mass market fashion brands
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Other publication (other academic/artistic)abstract
- Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to investigate how the weight of users affects the perception of mass market fashion brands.Design/methodology/approach: This study attempts to show effects of typical - as well as ideal user imagery on fashion brands. An experiment was carried out in which 1848 university students replied to a web survey, rating the brand personality of jeans and shirts according to Aaker’s Big Five construct. The garments were worn by digitally manipulated versions of one person as thin, overweight, and obese.Findings: The findings show that consumers’ impressions of mass market fashion brands are significantly affected by the weight of its users. The effect of male user imagery is ambiguous. For women’s fashion on the other hand, slender users are to be preferred.Research limitations/implications: It is possible, even probable, that high fashion would suffer more from negative typical user imagery than would mass market fashion. It would therefore be interesting to replicate this experiment using clothes of higher fashion grade and price.Practical implications: The demonstrated effects of user imagery support the industry practice of slim ideal female imagery. However, excluding customers to boost brand perception should not be an option for these brands.Social implications: The results inform the debate over skinny models vs. “real women” in advertising as well as the debate over discrimination of overweight consumers through assortment decisions.Originality/value: This is the first time typical user imagery effects are included in a study of this type, and it is the first study to test user imagery effects on fashion.
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| 5. |
- Abalo, Ernesto, 1982-, et al.
(author)
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Digitalisering och social exklusion : Om medborgares användning av och attityder till Arbetsförmedlingens digitala tjänster
- 2008
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Book (other academic/artistic)abstract
- This research report focuses on the users of e-government in a social science perspective. Our aim is to study how different social groups, registered at the Swedish Public Employment Service, relate to the internet, the agency and the services offered on its website (www.ams.se). The field of e-government research is dominated by studies that centre attention on the supply side (videlicet research investigating the entrance of IT in organizations and the implications that new technology have to these), while usercentred research (demand side) is still scarce. Our study, focusing on how citizens relate to the internet in general and e-government in particular, therefore helps to bridge a knowledge gap within the field. Our survey is based on a questionnaire sent to 2 000 randomly selected persons, all registered at the Swedish Public Employment Service. Of these, 762 job seekers responded, which gives us a frequency rate of 40 percent. The questions asked were related to the job seekers’ usage of and attitudes towards the internet in general and the agency’s webpage in particular, but also to their attitudes to the Swedish Public Employment Service. The main results show that social factors, particularly education, play a major role for the job seekers’ ability to use the web based services offered by the agency. People with a lower educational level are less inclined to use the agency’s website, and at the same time they experience the site as more complicated to use. We also found a strong link between the relations to the internet (access, usage, experience and attitudes) and the relations to the agency’s website. Those with advantaged internet relations – mostly well educated people, white collars and people living in bigger cities – also use the agency’s website more diligently and tend to have more positive attitudes towards it (and vice versa). Thus, its necessary to talk in terms of digitally well equipped and less well equipped groups. The unequal relations to the internet in general and the agency’s website in particular not only indicate that e-government is more suitable for the digitally well equipped, but that it in fact exclude those with less digital resources. This new kind of exclusion has great implications for the job seekers’ possibilities to enter the labour market, and to act their role as citizens. If e government also means a reformation of the citizen role – in the sense of increased individual responsibility towards the government - not bridging the digital divide will carry even more exclusion to those that’s already excluded.
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| 7. |
- Abalo, Ernesto, 1982-, et al.
(author)
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Olika publiker, olika livsstilar : Om idrott, kultur och regional utveckling
- 2008
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Book (other academic/artistic)abstract
- I föreliggande rapport studeras vilka sociala värden som elitidrotten och kulturen genererar för invånarna i landsortspräglade län som Blekinge, Halland, Kalmar och Kronoberg. Studien syftar till att lämna ett bidrag till den samhällsvetenskapliga idrottsforskningen, och ge ökad kunskap om idrottens och kulturens betydelse för den regionala utvecklingen. Studiens material vilar på en postenkät skickad till 1500 slumpmässigt utvalda personer i respektive län. Det sammanlagda antalet besvarade enkäter uppgick till 3181 stycken, vilket ger en nettosvarsfrekvens på 54 procent. Rapporten visar bland annat att både idrott och kultur värderas relativt högt och konsumeras i relativt stor utsträckning. Beträffande idrott konsumeras främst breddidrottsliga evenemang, och vad gäller kultur besöks bibliotek och biografer oftare än exempelvis teatrar. Studien visar också att de kultur- respektive idrottsintresserade skiljer sig åt vad gäller demografi, men även vad gäller livsstil. De idrottsintresserade har en mer folklig och lantlig prägel, medan de kulturintresserade är att betrakta som en välutbildad kosmopolitisk grupp. Med tanke på de sistnämndas ökade rörlighet är satsningar på kultur ej att förringa. Denna typ av satsningar kan få denna resursstarka grupp att dels stanna kvar i landsorten, dels flytta in till densamma.
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| 8. |
- Abdeljaber, Osama, et al.
(author)
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Dynamic Testing of a Laboratory Stadium Structure
- 2016
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In: Geotechnical and Structural Engineering Congress 2016. - Reston, VA : American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE). - 9780784479742 ; , s. 1719-1728
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Conference paper (other academic/artistic)abstract
- Studies with large physical models are a vital link between the theoretical work and field applications provided that these models are designed to represent real structures where various types and levels of uncertainties can be incorporated. While comprehensive analytical and laboratory joint studies are ongoing at Qatar University, University of Central Florida and University of Alberta, this paper presents the initial findings of dynamic testing at Qatar University. A laboratory stadium structure (grandstand simulator) has been constructed at Qatar University. Capable of housing thirty spectators, Qatar University grandstand simulator is arguably the largest laboratory stadium in the world. The structure is designed in a way that several different structural configurations can be tested in laboratory conditions to enable researchers to test newly developed damage detection algorithms. The study presented in this paper covers the finite element modeling and modal testing of the test structure.
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| 9. |
- Aceto, Luca, et al.
(author)
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A Rule Format for Unit Elements
- 2009
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Reports (other academic/artistic)abstract
- This paper offers a meta-theorem for languages with a Structural Operational Semantics (SOS) in the style of Plotkin. Namely, it proposes a generic rule format for SOS guaranteeing that certain constants act as left- or right-unit elements for a set of binary operators. We show the generality of our format by applying it to a wide range of operators from the literature on process calculi.
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| 10. |
- Aceto, Luca, et al.
(author)
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Decompositional Reasoning about the History of Parallel Processes
- 2010
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Reports (other academic/artistic)abstract
- Decompositional reasoning aims at automatically decomposing a global property of a composite system into local properties of (possibly unknown) components. In concurrency theory, decompositional reasoning techniques date back to the seminal work of Larsen and Liu in the late 1980s and early 1990s. However, we are not aware of any such decomposition technique that applies to reasoning about the "past". In this paper, we address this problem and present a decomposition technique for Hennessy-Milner logic with past and its extension with recursively defined formulae. As a language for processes, we use a subset of Milner's CCS with parallel composition, non-deterministic choice, action prefixing and the inaction constant. We focus on developing decompositional reasoning techniques for parallel contexts in that language.
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