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Food marketing has long been recognized to influence food preferences, consumption and health, yet little is known about the nature and extent of food marketing to young adults – especially with respect to their real-world encounters with food marketing and the appeals they find persuasive. This study aims to engage young adults to explore the persuasive power of food marketing and its platforms of exposure.

Participatory research with 45 young adults, who used a specially designed mobile app to capture the food marketing they encountered for seven days, including information on brand, product, platform and “power” (i.e. the specific techniques that made the advertisement persuasive).

A total of 618 ads were captured for analysis. Results revealed the dominance of digital platforms (especially Instagram, comprising 43% of ads), fast food and beverage brands (48% of ads) and the top persuasive techniques of visual style, special offer and theme.

This study uniquely draws from framing theory to advance the notions of selection and salience to understand food marketing power. It is the first study of its kind to provide a comprehensive look at the platforms and persuasive techniques of food marketing to adults as selected, captured and tagged by participants. It provides timely insights into young adults and food marketing to adults, including where it is encountered, the (generally unhealthy) brands and products promoted and how it is made meaningful.

The purpose of this research is to examine the nature of consumers' relationships with branded spokescharacters by drawing upon brand personality theory and reader‐response theory, focusing specifically on food trade characters. We aim to show that the persuasive power of these characters resides not only in their appearance, but also in the complex narratives consumers project (sometimes unwittingly) onto the spokescharacter.

The paper reports the results of a survey – blending quantitative and qualitative methodologies – designed to document consumer perceptions, affective responses and spontaneous associations to different characters (i.e. Aunt Jemima, Robin Hood, Betty Crocker, Uncle Ben, Poppin' Fresh the Pillsbury's Doughboy, and M. Felix and Mr Norton, characters created by a Montreal‐based cookie company).

The results revealed that consumers associate spokescharacters with distinct personality profiles. Also, a connection was found between spokescharacters and narrative: a relationship where the characters become part of a larger narrative paradigm and more importantly, a relationship where the consumer is cast in a specific role vis‐à‐vis the spokescharacter.

These results should invite brand managers to stay current with the variety of associations that consumers form and how these associations influence the perception of their brand's personality. The results further underscore the need to understand the role into which consumers are cast vis‐à‐vis a branded character. Future research should examine cross cultural differences in the perception and narratives of branded characters, especially since many multinational companies use branded characters across cultural divides.

The paper shows how consumers play an active role in rendering a spokescharacter likeable, credible, and even memorable and documents the narratives that engage consumers and are both constructed collaboratively with them and propagated by them.

The importance of consumer involvement is well recognized in marketing theory, but has been absent from past inquiries in consumers' processing of DTC advertisements. The authors believe it is necessary to account for varying levels of involvement between consumers in order to better appreciate their responses to DTC advertisement claims. The present study aims to shed additional insight into the relationship between consumer involvement and the processing of risk information in DTC advertising.

The study was a between‐subject factorial design and consisted of 156 students from a North American university. It used an instructional manipulation designed to compare how low and highly involved consumers perceive DTC drug advertisements and more specifically the benefit and risk information contained in such advertisements.

Findings indicate that consumers' perception and processing of DTC advertisements resembles consumers' reaction to fear appeals. Furthermore, consistent with previous studies, consumers react negatively to DTC advertisements containing a high content of risk information. Findings indicate that greater differences in consumer processing of risk information is observed when the sample is categorized as high versus low involved, rather than sufferer versus non‐sufferer, and that this consumer characteristic is important enough to include when examining consumer reactions to DTC advertisements.

The relationship between amount of risk information and consumer responses has not been empirically examined while controlling for the potential role of involvement. This study is a first step in addressing this gap.

Persistent change has placed considerable pressure on organizations to keep up or fade into obscurity. Firms that remain viable, or even thrive, are staffed with decision-makers who capably steer organizations toward opportunities and away from threats. Accordingly, leadership development has never been more critical. In this chapter, the authors propose that leader development is an inherently dyadic process initiated to communicate formal and informal expectations. The authors focus on the informal component, in the form of organizational politics, as an element of leadership that is critical to employee and company success. The authors advocate that superiors represent the most salient information source for leader development, especially as it relates to political dynamics embedded in work systems. The authors discuss research associated with our conceptualization of dyadic political leader development (DPLD). Specifically, the authors develop DPLD by exploring its conceptual underpinnings as they relate to sensemaking, identity, and social learning theories. Once established, the authors provide a refined discussion of the construct, illustrating its scholarly mechanisms that better explain leader development processes and outcomes. The authors then expand research in the areas of political skill, political will, political knowledge, and political phronesis by embedding our conceptualization of DPLD into a political leadership model. The authors conclude by discussing methodological issues and avenues of future research stemming from the development of DPLD.

Organizational behavior scholars have long recognized the importance of a variety of emotion-related phenomena in everyday work life. Indeed, after three decades, the span of research on emotions in the workplace encompasses a wide variety of affective variables such as emotional climate, emotional labor, emotion regulation, positive and negative affect, empathy, and more recently, specific emotions. Emotions operate in complex ways across multiple levels of analysis (i.e., within-person, between-person, interpersonal, group, and organizational) to exert influence on work behavior and outcomes, but their linkages to human resource management (HRM) policies and practices have not always been explicit or well understood. This chapter offers a review and integration of the bourgeoning research on discrete positive and negative emotions, offering insights about why these emotions are relevant to HRM policies and practices. We review some of the dominant theories that have emerged out of functionalist perspectives on emotions, connecting these to a strategic HRM framework. We then define and describe four discrete positive and negative emotions (fear, pride, guilt, and interest) highlighting how they relate to five HRM practices: (1) selection, (2) training/learning, (3) performance management, (4) incentives/rewards, and (5) employee voice. Following this, we discuss the emotion perception and regulation implications of these and other discrete emotions for leaders and HRM managers. We conclude with some challenges associated with understanding discrete emotions in organizations as well as some opportunities and future directions for improving our appreciation and understanding of the role of discrete emotional experiences in HRM.

The purpose of this research is to understand the overall consumer experience, while highlighting the means through which consumers live and take possession of what they consume.

Holt’s typology serves as the theoretical background. Choosing a netnographic framework, we analyze the coffee experiential universe of 41 Canadian consumers of Tim Hortons' coffee by studying their personal stories posted on the company’s website.

Individuals predominantly associate the consumption of coffee with ritual, happiness, joy, travel companion and extended relationship. These categories relate to mystique (ritual); pleasure (happiness and joy); travel (travel companion); and love (family-like relationship).

We acknowledge that there is a danger of bias in our data considering that we used the narratives that recorded the highest hits. However, these narratives represent a socially constructed reality which was validated by Tim Hortons’ fans themselves.

To maintain a strong market position, it is no longer sufficient to understand the associations linked to the overall experience of a product’s consumption. The company must also have ways of accessing or appropriating the consumer experience.

The study shows that it is possible for today’s consumer products to become symbolic representations in the minds of consumers, provided that the consumer has a strong attachment to the brand. It is essential to understand the appropriation practices of consumers’ experiences, as these hold significant theoretical and managerial implications.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the practice of celebrity athletes’ product endorsement in the context of social media, guided by meaning transfer model.

The study adopted a content analysis method based on data gathered from the official Twitter account of 17 of the highest-paid athletes over a period of five months.

Results outline the state, involvement level, roles, modes, preferred content types, discernible differences, shared features, and best practices employed in endorsement tweets. A framework of athletes’ product endorsement on Twitter is presented.

The study presented theoretical and practical implications, and limitations and impetus for future research.

The study investigated professional athletes’ use of their own media channel for the purpose of endorsement, presented a framework that illustrates the practice of celebrity athletes’ product endorsement on social media, and identified a best practice and an exemplary reference.

The chapter Technological Advances in Special Education provides information on advances of technology and how such technological advances have influenced students with disabilities and special education across the globe. The chapter presents technological advances that benefited students with disabilities in developed countries as well as potential technologies to support students with disabilities in developing countries. The scant exiting literature on developing countries suggests some universal themes regarding technology for students with disabilities including access and training. Additional attention and research is needed on assistive technology to support students with disabilities in both developed and developing countries, with recognition that what works is developed counties may not work in developing.

Workplace voice is well-established and encompasses behaviors such as prosocial voice, informal complaints, grievance filing, and whistleblowing, and it focuses on interactions between the employee and supervisor or the employee and the organizational collective. In contrast, our chapter focuses on employee prosocial advocacy voice (PAV), which the authors define as prosocial voice behaviors aimed at preventing harm or promoting constructive changes by advocating on behalf of others. In the context of a healthcare organization, low quality and unsafe patient care are salient and objectionable states in which voice can motivate actions on behalf of the patient to improve information exchanges, governance, and outreach activities for safer outcomes. The authors draw from the theory and research on responsibility to intersect with theories on information processing, accountability, and stakeholders that operate through voice between the employee-patient, employee-coworker, and employee-profession, respectively, to propose a model of PAV in patient-centered healthcare. The authors complete the model by suggesting intervening influences and barriers to PAV that may affect patient-centered outcomes.

Amid concerns regarding prisoner well-being, growing evidence indicates that prison animal programmes (PAPs), most commonly involving dogs, have significant therapeutic potential. Published research on this topic from the UK remains sparse, and more is needed to determine the type of programmes which work best and for whom. This study aims to explore the perceived benefits of a short-term PAP on the well-being of a sample of individuals assessed as at risk of self-harm.

Participants with complex mental health needs in a category B prison took part in a four-week programme where two dogs were brought in for interactions once a week. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with eight participants at the end of the programme.

Three themes were identified through thematic analysis: “A Safe Space for Emotional Experience”, “An Opportunity to Connect” and “Being Human”. The narratives offered a range of perceived benefits which illustrated the potential of dog based PAPs for enhancing well-being and consistency with desistance goals.

The findings illustrate that even short-term interactions with dogs can be impactful and provide evidence for other practitioners about how this approach may be used with individuals with complex mental health needs.

The study highlights the therapeutic potential of the presence of animals in prisons. The research contributes to the limited literature about PAPS in the UK.