Search

The 'High Street' has traditionally played a key role in the health of towns worldwide. It is instrumental as a community hub, supporting local independent retail businesses and incubating entrepreneurship and innovation. Since 2009, thousands of stores have closed with record levels of shop vacancies. Reasons for the decline include a failure to respond to multi-channel retailing, wider demographic and economic changes and problems co-ordinating the network of actors who hold competing ideas about High Street regeneration. This paper evaluates the contribution of a value co-creation perspective in exploring strategy making in a complex retail high street ecosystem. It draws on Service-Dominant Logic and its service ecosystems perspective, institutional theory and data from a depth case study of strategy development in a UK High Street. The study illustrates how the value co-creation perspective, underpinned by institutional theory offers a rich appreciation of how actors in the ecosystem participate in shaping strategy. It identifies seven norms shared by the multiple actors, which serve as a point of reference for more sustainable strategy development. The normative analysis highlights the potential of operant resources amongst actors to shape strategy implementation. The study provides empirical evidence to support the role of institutions and institutional arrangements in effective value co-creation.

Despite steadily increasing tuition fees, higher education is still perceived as a positive experience. Research to date has focused on whether burgeoning costs influence the student application decision, but little research has focused on value-related perceptions of students already attending university; and nor how such perceptions might change over the lifecycle of an undergraduate degree course. This working paper summarises a research programme comprising four linked/related research projects that focus on this specifically. One study is published, two are complete with writing up required, and another is presently at the planning stage. Iteratively, the first project addressed value perspectives of final year students generally and the second has focused on changing perceptions for final year students over a twelve-year period that covers three different fee regimes. The third is purely conceptual and has caused us to consider how we name the value construct we are most interested in, whilst the fourth is a return to empirical work and will address how value-related drivers might change over the duration of a conventional undergraduate degree course. Collectively we believe this research programme will contribute to a deep understanding of value-related concerns in higher education and, particularly, assess the impact of a newly marketised environment on these perceptions. Our research programme is case-based and focuses on Business School students in one UK institution.

Improving the customer experience has recently gained the attention of both scholars and practitioners. However, \ud there has been limited research to date identifying how different touchpoints throughout the customer journey contribute to the overall experience and generate brand loyalty. Using a retail setting and adopting a mixed method research approach, this study will explore this journey and measure the impact of the touchpoints. The research is structured into two phases. Phase 1 involves focus group discussions, which will explore the customer touchpoints across a retailer's in-store and online channels and identify how the experiences along the touchpoints influence customer loyalty to the retailer brand. The second phase will measure the importance of the touchpoints. The initial findings from Phase 1 revealed that in an in-store setting, characteristics such as atmospherics, staff, and store signposting create a positive customer experience, while coherent content and navigation create experience online. These early findings suggest that a seamless shopping experience, both from channel to channel and within the specific channel, is key to driving customer loyalty.

Neuroimaging studies have shown that the association between mobility and cognition with aging is based on a shared neuropathology and can be explained in part by fitness maintenance. However, the temporal sequence between fitness, neuropathological changes, and mobility loss have not been fully evaluated. 332 participants of the BLSA aged 60 and older, initially free of cognitive and mobility impairments, with repeated measures of fitness (400m time), mobility (6m gait speed), and global and regional neuroimaging markers over 4 years. Neuroimaging markers included volumes of total brain, ventricle, as well as major regions from frontal, parietal, medial temporal, subcortical motor areas, and corpus callosum. Autoregressive models were used to examine the temporal sequence between fitness, volumes in each ROI, and mobility performance, after adjustment for baseline age, sex, race, body mass index, height, education, intracranial volume, and APOE ɛ4 status. After adjustment, greater volumes of total brain and selected frontal and parietal areas, entorhinal cortex, and corpus callosum were unidirectionally associated with future faster gait speed over and beyond cross-sectional and autoregressive associations. Faster gait speed predicted future greater hippocampus and precuneus. Higher fitness was unidirectionally associated with future greater parahippocampal gyrus, and not with volumes in other areas. Smaller ventricle predicted future higher fitness. Volumes of selected cortical areas and corpus callosum may be early predictors of future mobility, and mobility performance also indicates future hippocampus and precuneus. Maintaining fit may preserve future parahippocampal gyrus, while ventricle may determine future fitness level.

© Article author(s) (or their employer(s) unless otherwise stated in the text of the article) 2017. All rights reserved. Objective To determine the accuracy of the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) calculator in predicting death and neurodevelopmental impairment in Australian and New Zealand infants. Design Population-based cohort study. setting Australia and New Zealand. Patients Preterm infants 22–25 completed weeks gestation. Interventions Comparison of NICHD calculator predicted rates of death and death or neurodevelopmental impairment, with actual rates recorded in the Australian and New Zealand Neonatal Network cohort. Main outcome measures Infant death and death or neurodevelopmental impairment rates. results A total of 714 infants were included in the study. Of these infants, 100 (14.0%) were

Through exploring flow within the Stimulus-Organism-Response paradigm, this paper aims to add a new dimension to the existing online SOR model and thereby extend the theoretical and conceptual understanding of flow and the impact of web atmospherics, namely music, in an online fashion retail setting.\ud \ud A conceptual framework was developed based on prior literature, and an online survey was generated to test four hypotheses. The result to date suggests the presence of music is negatively associated with arousal/pleasure and arousal/flow. The full analysis is yet to be carried out, and this paper reports on the initial findings from the pilot study.