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Games are rapidly becoming a site where cultural ideas are explored and consumed and have recently become an arena for debate around representations of gender. This chapter draws attention to key debates occurring in the field of video games that are also applicable to film studies. This interdisciplinary approach demonstrates the relevance to game studies of a rich vein of scholarship on the gendered action body in film studies. Drawing on research by Yvonne Tasker (1993, 2015), Lisa Purse (2011) and Jeffrey Brown (2011), this chapter seeks to unpick the tensions around gender and violence in the reception of The Last of Us Part II (Naughty Dog, 2020), particularly regarding the surprisingly vehement backlash against the unconventionally muscular deuteragonist Abby.

This chapter asks what happens when the ‘spectacular’ and ‘hard’ bodies of the action heroine enter the soft virtual world of the video game. A focus on whether Abby's body is realistic in the reception of the game leads to a discussion of the ontological status of games as a virtual medium. I argue that the process of motion capture and the real-world reference of CrossFit athlete Colleen Fotsch trouble the conventional dichotomy that understands the medium of games as virtual and film as indexical. Throughout, I use the more ambiguous and ambivalent historical reception of the body of Lara Croft as a useful point of contrast. I argue that the obsessive, hysterical response to Abby's muscular body is indicative of larger tensions between conservative ‘hardcore’ fandoms and the industry's recent drive for progressive change. By denying Abby's authenticity such players also deny female access to traditional masculine pursuits and identities, whether that be bodybuilding or gaming. This is because virtual female action stars, just as much as their real-world counterparts such as Linda Hamilton, trouble the gendered norms that underpin both second-wave feminist accounts of muscular women and the audience of hardcore video game players. As Fron, Fullerton, Morie, and Pearce (2007) critique in their article ‘The Hegemony of Play’, a double standard therefore exists in which such women must justify the reality of their musculature through a kind of ‘proof of process’. Ultimately, I conclude that a similar demand is made of the emergent female audience of gamers, who are continuously made to justify their right to play in a traditionally male space.

The purpose of this paper is to critique the adequacy of efforts to capture the complexities of customer experience in a business-to-business (B2B) context using input–output measures. The paper introduces a strategic customer experience management framework to capture the complexity of B2B service interactions and discusses the value of outcomes-based measurement.

This is a theoretical paper that reviews extant literature related to B2B customer experience and asks fresh questions regarding B2B customer experience at a more strategic network level.

The paper offers a reconceptualisation of B2B customer experience, proposes a strategic customer experience management framework and outlines a future research agenda.

This paper is conceptual and seeks to raise questions surrounding the under-examined area of B2B customer experience. As a consequence, it has inevitable limitations resulting from the lack of empirical evidence to support the reconceptualisation.

Existing measures of customer experience are problematic when applied in a B2B (services) context. Rather than adopting input- and output-based measures, widely used in a business-to-consumer (B2C) context, a B2B context requires a more strategic approach to capturing and managing customer experience. Focussing on strategically important issues should generate opportunities for value co-creation and are more likely to involve outcomes-based measures.

Improving the understanding of customer experience in a B2B context should allow organisations to design better services and consequently enhance the experiences of their employees, their customers and other connected actors.

This paper critiques the current approach to measuring customer experience in a B2B context, drawing on contemporary ideas of value-in-use, outcomes-based measures and “Big Data” to offer potential solutions to the measurement problems identified.

Discusses the plant‐based alternatives to meat. Looks at the production and uses of a range of meat alternatives from different sources including: soya beans; wheat protein; pea and wheat protein; and myco‐protein. Compares the nutrient profiles with those of meat. Concludes that the way forward is to create new products based on plant proteins and to veganise existing vegetarian meat alternatives.

This paper aims to explore 15 UK adult social care workers’ experiences during the COVID-19 pandemic.

This paper’s 15 open-ended interviews with adult social care workers are complemented by digital ethnography in COVID-19 social media forums. This data set is taken from a global mixed-methods study, involving over 2,000 participants from 59 different countries.

Workers reported a lack of planning, guidance and basic provisions including personal protective equipment. Work intensification brought stress, workload pressure and mental health problems. Family difficulties and challenges of living through the pandemic, often related to government restrictions, intensified these working conditions with precarious living arrangements. The workers also relayed a myriad of challenges for their residents in which, the circumstances appear to have exacerbated dementia and general health problems including dehydration, delirium and loneliness. Whilst COVID-19 was seen as partially responsible for resident deaths, the sudden disruptions to daily life and prohibitions on family visits were identified as additional contributing factors in rapid and sudden decline.

Whilst the paper’s sample cohort is small, given the significance of COVID-19 at this present time the findings shed important light on the care home experience as well as act as a baseline for future study.

Care homes bore the brunt of illness and death during the first and second COVID-19 waves in the UK, and many of the problems identified here have still yet to be actioned by the government. As people approach the summer months, an urgent review is required of what happened in care homes and this paper could act as some part of that evidence gathering.

This paper offers revealing insights from frontline care home workers and thus provides an empirical snapshot during this unique phase in recent history. It also builds upon the preliminary/emerging qualitative research evidence on how the COVID-19 pandemic impacted care homes, care workers and the residents.

The librarian and researcher have to be able to uncover specific articles in their areas of interest. This Bibliography is designed to help. Volume IV, like Volume III, contains features to help the reader to retrieve relevant literature from MCB University Press' considerable output. Each entry within has been indexed according to author(s) and the Fifth Edition of the SCIMP/SCAMP Thesaurus. The latter thus provides a full subject index to facilitate rapid retrieval. Each article or book is assigned its own unique number and this is used in both the subject and author index. This Volume indexes 29 journals indicating the depth, coverage and expansion of MCB's portfolio.

This paper explores four works of contemporary fiction to illuminate formal and informal regulation of sex. The paper’s co-authors frame analysis with the story of their creation of a transdisciplinary course, entitled “Regulating Sex: Historical and Cultural Encounters,” in which students mined literature for social critique, became immersed in the study of law and its limits, and developed increased sensitivity to power, its uses, and abuses. The paper demonstrates the value theoretically and pedagogically of third-wave feminisms, wild zones, and contact zones as analytic constructs and contends that including sex and sexualities in conversations transforms personal experience, education, society, and culture, including law.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the information that manufacturing companies have available when competitively bidding for service contracts.

A semi-structured interview study was undertaken with industrialists in various sectors, which are currently facing the issue of servitisation.

One of the main findings was that, despite the novelty of the process, the decision makers at the competitive bidding stage have an understanding of the involved uncertainties. In particular, the uncertainty arising from the customer as the user of the product and evaluator of the competitive bids in addition to the uncertainty connected to the competitors were identified as the main influences on the pricing decision.

The research implications show the influences and considerations during the decision-making process at the competitive bidding stage for service contracts. These include the customer and the competitors.

Shortcomings in the current industrial practice were identified such as the approaches used to communicate the cost estimate for the service contract. The approaches currently used contradict research findings in the area of communicating uncertainty information, which means that further research is to be done to identify optimal approaches to displaying the uncertainty connected to the communicated information.

This paper offers a basis for research to understand the challenges industry faces when competitively bidding for service contracts. This can be used to develop novel approaches in supporting the decision maker such as a model that presents the probability of winning in comparison to the probability of making a profit.