Changing the business narrative: a guide to successful experience offerings

Purpose In this article, we aim to increase understanding of the unique nature of experiences in comparison to services and explain how narrative change can enable organizations to fully participate in the experience economy. Design/methodology/approach Drawing upon relevant experience design and experience economy literatures the paper outlines key differences between experiences and services. The narrative change process is then employed to provide managers specific guidelines for strategically reframing their value production paradigm to become more experience-centric. Findings rticulating key elements of an organization’s narrative such as characters and intended outcomes allows an organization to more intentionally change their narrative to align with the experience economy. Practical/implications The essential outcome of an experience is that participants do something for themselves ? for example, learn a new skill. Participation is integral to every experience transaction. Originality/value Although Pine, Gilmore, and others have detailed the differences between experiences and services, definitional disagreements and oversimplifications of these concepts still exist. This paper further differentiates these economic offerings. Additionally, this paper is the first to integrate the narrative change process into a discussion about experience strategy.

Hackathons as affective circuits: Technology, organizationality and affect

Technology invites a re-consideration of organization and organizing by calling attention to mediated forms of value production among loose social collectives outside formal organizational boundaries. While the nascent concept of organizationality holds potential for such a re-conceptualization, the processes through which loose social members become invested in co-orientation and collective effort require further empirical and theoretical exploration. In this paper, we link organizationality research with critical media studies on affect and technology to theorize how affect holds provisional collectives together while promoting new modes of value extraction. Empirically, we draw from an ethnographic study of hackathons – transdigital innovation spaces where participants act with and through technology – and suggest three intertwined processes as part of an affective circuit that stokes and directs affect. The paper’s contribution is threefold. First, by analyzing how affective circuits bind, integrate and co-orient action among loose members, we contribute to understanding organizationality as affectively constituted. Second, by showing how hackathons leverage desire for community, we offer a critical perspective on affective capture and argue that organizationality involves novel modes of value production. Third, we complement theorizing of hackathons by exploring them as sites of organizationality, focusing on the provisional, relational and affect-rich nature of new forms of organizing in the digital age.

Qualitative and value production of tree species in mixed spruce-fir-beech stands under the conditions of the Western Carpathians

Value production is one of the most important information for comparing different tree species composition and management strategies in forestry. Although the value production of forest stands is affected by various factors thinning can be considered as one of the most important one. This paper aims at the evaluation of qualitative and value production in mixed Norway spruce (Picea abies [L.] Karst.), silver fir (Abies alba Mill.) and European beech (Fagus sylvatica L.) stands, which were managed by crown thinning for a period of 44 to 50 years and/or left to self-development. More than 1,500 individual trees aged from 61 to 132 years from 15 subplots established in western part of the Low Tatras Mts. and the Great Fatra Mts. in Slovakia were assessed. The proportion of stems in the highest quality A (stem quality classes) reached a low percentage, i.e. 12% in beech, 28% in spruce and 13% in fir out of the number of evaluated trees. The percentage of the highest quality log classes (assortments I + II) of beech ranged from 0 to 23% and of coniferous ones from 2 to 12%. Regarding the management method used, this percentage accounted for 0.1 to 23% for plot with self-development, whereas in plots with tending it was from 1 to 23%. Value production of coniferous tree species was always higher compared to beech, regardless of the management method. Regarding individual tree species, we found the highest value production in fir (81.4 € m−3) and the lowest in beech (46.5 € m−3).

Swyngedouw’s puzzle: Surplus-value production in socionature

This article engages with Swyngedouw’s puzzle, that is, how is surplus-value production under capitalism conceptualised given the entanglement of humans and non-human entities. It identifies how Swyngedouw’s socionature – a concept/way to express the oneness of human and non-human under capitalism – posed a critique to the tendency of labour-centred analysis in Marxist thought such as Neil Smith’s concept of ‘production of nature’ but did not engage with how surplus-value is produced. This article makes visible the role of non-wage-labour in surplus-value production through reference to Moore’s concept of value-relations and oikeios.

Bounded Communities

This article explores the works of Philippine author Macario Pineda through the lens of Walter Benjamin’s “The Storyteller.” Following Benjamin, Pineda’s short stories present experience as containing a dialectic “frozen” in time and sutured in narrative. In Pineda’s stories, embodied social interactions in the rural Philippines are mapped spatially and temporally. By portraying the conditions of possibility of these social maps, Pineda demonstrates the forces of value production and exchange within the imperial field. His stories thus provide us with a sense of how values are produced, concentrated, and accumulated as well as how persons and communities might negotiate the imperial field. As such, these works engage the question of dialectical ethics in narrative. Reading Pineda, we see how individual experience may yield, through a specifically utopian impulse in narratives, transmittable counsel as described by Walter Benjamin. Pineda’s works therefore reveal that dialectical ethics, through a narratological articulation between the different notions of experience as Erlebnis and Erfahrung, can aid us in considering the type of community formation we might prefer.

Institution-monopoly rent and competition amongst China's local governments: a Marxist analytical framework

PurposeAs a crucial institutional form established since the Chinese economic reform, the system of competitive local governments has been shaping the characteristics of China's socialist market economy to a considerable degree.Design/methodology/approachThis study not only adopts the view of existing studies that attribute the economic motive of local governments to rent and consider land public finance as a means through which local governments carry out strategic investment but also attempts to further develop the view within a Marxist analytical framework.FindingsAs a result, the local governments have helped to maintain an incredibly high investment rate over a considerable period of time, facilitating the continuous, rapid growth of the Chinese economy.Originality/valueThis study concludes that China's local governments function as the productive allocator and user of rent in the strategic investment based on land public finance and thereby embed themselves in the relative surplus-value production initially arising from competition amongst enterprises, forming the dual structure of relative surplus-value production unique to China's economy.