Purpose
Actors who participate in co-created service experiences typically assume that they will experience improved well-being. However, a growing body of literature demonstrates that the reverse is ...also likely to be true, with one or more actors experiencing value co-destruction (VCD), rather than value co-creation, in the service system. Building on the notion of resource misintegration as a trigger of the VCD process, this paper offers a typology of resource misintegration manifestations and to present a dynamic conceptualization of the VCD process.
Design/methodology/approach
A systematic, iterative VCD literature review was conducted with a priori aims to uncover the manifestations of resource misintegration and illustrate its connection to VCD for an actor or actors.
Findings
Ten distinct manifestations of resource misintegration are identified that provide evidence or an early warning sign of the potential for negative well-being for one or more actors in the service system. Furthermore, a dynamic framework illustrates how an affected actor uses proactive and reactive coping and support resources to prevent VCD or restore well-being.
Originality/value
The study presents a typology of manifestations of resource misintegration that signal or warn of the potential for VCD, thus providing an opportunity to prevent or curtail the VCD process.
Customer churn is an ever-growing issue in the relational services sector (e.g., retail banking, telecommunications), where business models ultimately depend upon long-term relationships with ...customers as the basis for profitability. Businesses in this sector have tended to view satisfaction and service quality as the key tools for increasing customer retention. The present study investigates the important additional role of the brand in managing the churn of current customers of relational services. Based on information economics, we propose specifically that the credibility of the brand underlies the role that the brand can play in this process. This research leads to the enhanced understanding that the brand has a significant role to play in managing long-term customer relationships, and details how the usual tools of customer relationship management, satisfaction and service quality, relate to brand credibility. Results from samples of retail bank and long distance telephone company customers indicate that brand credibility serves in a defensive role: it significantly enhances word-of-mouth and reduces switching behaviors among customers; these relationships are mediated by customer satisfaction and commitment. Implications of the study for theory and practice are discussed.
The city is increasingly recognised as a complex more‐than‐human space where the lives of humans and non‐humans entwine in consequential ways. Human–animal encounters constitute sometimes convivial ...and sometimes challenging relations that reflect wider pleasures and tensions in urban society. This paper grapples with concerns about the place of dogs in Australian urban public space and urban life more broadly. Adopting a relational political ecology approach, we ask what pet dogs tell us about the political, emotional, and material struggles that surround multispecies urban cohabitation. Following two human–dog urban waste streams – one concerned with dog waste, the other with dogs as waste – we consider how human–animal relations of both attachment and disposability shape the material flows that constitute urban political ecologies. In particular, by focusing on the ‘shadow ecologies’ of dog waste and disposal, we uncover the dynamic practices of care, disgust, violence, and love through which dogs, their waste, and their bodies are sanitised, controlled, and ultimately concealed from our everyday urban spaces.
Purpose
– This study aims to examine the effects interpersonal, service product and message factors has on positive and negative word of mouth's (WOM) influence. The study also sought to address the ...impact WOM had on changes in people's willingness to use a service provider.
Design/methodology/approach
– A total of 495 consumers who had received positive WOM and 505 who had received negative WOM in the prior 12 months completed an online survey. The sample was recruited through a national online consumer panel provider.
Findings
– Positive WOM was more effective and positive WOM messages had a greater effect on people's willingness to use a service than did negative WOM. Paradoxically, the strength of WOM and interpersonal factors had more impact on the influence of negative WOM, while brand equity enhanced positive WOM and acted as a buffer to negative WOM.
Research limitations/implications
– The study was conducted in a services context and may not necessarily be generalizable to product contexts. Further, the factors enhancing WOM in online contexts need to be examined, although the present model's constructs (e.g. homophily) are not equivalent in this context.
Practical implications
– Different circumstances may enhance or detract from the influence of positive and negative WOM. Managers should maximise the verbal strength of positive WOM messages and generate positive brand equity perceptions, as this offers a buffer to negative WOM. Recommendations also include addressing customer education and socialisation to enhance WOM message influence.
Originality/value
– The study extended prior WOM research by addressing interpersonal, service product and message factors, as well as the change in intended behaviour for positive and negative WOM.
Study models are frequently used in orthodontics and are a key part of both initial assessment and treatment planning. They are an important part of comprehensive orthodontic records; furthermore, ...study models are an essential diagnostic aid that can be studied in detail without the patient being present. We present a case of a 14-year-old boy with an abnormal palatal swelling detected by his specialist orthodontist after review of study models taken at the initial appointment. At the assessment alone, the significance of the abnormality was not recognised and without the help of study models, diagnosis and treatment of his fibrous dysplasia may have been significantly delayed.
Placemaking is increasingly drawn upon by planners, city authorities and citizens as a means of reclaiming, remaking and regenerating urban space. Yet understandings of placemaking and the work it ...may entail can vary markedly. Often, planning discourse and placemaking literature conceive of placemaking as a singular material change to a landscape, a project that is complete once installation has finished. In contrast, we see placemaking as an open-ended achievement, constituted through diverse and dynamic assemblages and realised through a multiplicity of post-installation labours. We draw on a case study of Newcastle, Australia, to highlight these labours, the affective, contingent work which brings together the human and non-human, the material and social, and the enduring and ephemeral, to make place. Through three citizen-led placemaking projects in Newcastle, we elucidate the importance of these assembling labours and argue for a more nuanced understanding of placemaking, its multiple and sometimes transient outcomes, and the role diverse placemaking efforts may play in regenerating the city.
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