Unintended Consequences in Transformative Service Research: Helping Without Harming

Even as transformative service initiatives promote greater well-being, they may also create unintentionally negative consequences. Research investigates boundary conditions and boomerang effects that wash out or reverse the intended effects of service initiatives. However, such research generally advances greater depth of insight about unintended consequences in a particular stream rather than bridging this knowledge across service domains. Thus, service research lacks integrative frameworks, theory, and empirical insight to advance more generalizable knowledge about unintended consequences. The purpose of this editorial is to clarify the importance of investigating unintended consequences across service contexts and propose pathways as a catalyst for research. Using theory on unintended consequences, we delineate the types of unintended consequences and discuss the underlying mechanisms. We identify themes that span papers in the special issue and illuminate negative spillover consequences. The editorial concludes with an overview of future research avenues with potential to accelerate important transformative service research.

Chinese EFL Teachers’ Perception and Practice of Phonics Instruction

Phonics was introduced to Chinese mainland two decades ago. To gain an empirical insight into teachers’ perception in teaching phonics to EFL students, this study draws upon data from a survey among 213 primary school EFL teachers in two Chinese provinces. The findings indicate that most teachers hold positive attitudes towards phonics, regarding it more as a word-attack skill. The improvement of teachers’ educational background predicts better phonics teaching effect, yet they need systematic phonics knowledge. Besides, teaching material and teaching strategies are greatly correlated with the teaching effect. It concludes that phonics should be integrated into regular textbooks and effective teacher training is significant for better improvement of phonics instruction.

COVID-19 and Second Home Prices in Switzerland: An Empirical Insight

During the COVID-19 pandemic, second home ownership created several owner benefits. This paper analyses price changes of second homes during the pandemic. It derives propositions for the impact of the pandemic on the value of second homes for its owners. The contribution draws on panel data of transaction prices for second homes from Switzerland, a country with traditionally strong second home ownership, provided by Wüest Partner. The results show that there is a significant price increase for second homes – especially compared to apartments – after the start of the COVID-19 crisis. They also show that prices even in certain second-class destinations have risen significantly during the pandemic. Different research propositions are derived like that buyers might look for less crowded places in the pandemic, and the reduced benefits of intensive infrastructures during a pandemic.

Working the urban assemblage: A transnational study of transforming practices

This article places those working for change in urban neighbourhoods at the centre of debates on urban transformation, directing attention to the importance of human agency in the work of assembling urban transformation. Drawing on cross-national qualitative fieldwork undertaken over 30 months shadowing 40 urban practitioners in neighbourhoods across four European cities – Amsterdam, Birmingham, Copenhagen and Glasgow – our research revealed the catalytic, embodied roles of situated agents in this assembling. Through exemplar vignettes, we present practices in a diverse range of socio-material assemblages aimed to address complex problems and unmet needs in the urban environment. The practices we studied were not those of daily routines, but were instead a purposeful assembling that included nurturing and developing of heterogeneous resources such as relationships, knowledges and materials, framed through an emerging vision to inform, mobilise and channel action. This article brings together assemblage-theoretical and practice-theoretical ideas, with rich empirical insight to advance our understanding of how the city may be re-made.

Socialization of Youth in Natural And Virtual Context

With the development of technologies, virtual interaction contributes to the stronger virtual socialization of young people. This paper aims to examine how the virtual world influences the identity of young people. In the introduction, we reviewed the studies that dealt with virtual socialization, and then we presented a brief empirical insight into today’s socialization of young people from 14 to 21 years of age. With the questionnaire, we tried to examine the “quality” of virtual socialization in the lives of young people. The tasks of our research are focused on questioning the values that young people adopt through virtual socialization, an assessment of the “image of their own” that is in the virtual world, and the compatibility of the virtual identity with the one built in the family and peer environment. Respondents expressed views that their lives matched a life that points to social networks, while they felt that their peers did not live a life that they sought to portray on social networks. The results showed that they feel more secure in online communication than in life. Also, opinions are that the values they adopt are influenced by public opinion, etc. We can conclude that educating youths about the virtual world should be in several directions: actuality, truthfulness, privacy, and freedom.

The Diverse Landscape of Negative Polarity Items: On the Use of German NPIs as Experimental Diagnostics

The goal of this study is to provide better empirical insight into the licensing conditions of a large set of NPIs in German so that they can be used as reliable diagnostics in future research on negation-related phenomena. Experiment 1 tests the acceptability of 60 NPIs under semantic operators that are expected to license superstrong, strong, weak, and nonveridicality-licensed NPIs, respectively: antimorphic (not), anti-additive (no), downward entailing (hardly), nonveridical (maybe, question). Controls were positive assertions. Cluster analysis revealed seven clusters of NPIs, some of which confirm the licensing categorization from the literature (superstrong and weak NPIs). Other clusters show unclear patterns (overall high or medium ratings) and require further scrutiny in future research. One cluster showed high acceptability ratings only with the antimorphic and the question operator. Experiment 2 tested whether the source of this unexpected distribution was a rhetorical interpretation of the questions. Results suggest that rhetoricity was not the sole source. Overall, the results show gradual rather than categorical differences in acceptability, with higher acceptability corresponding to stronger negativity. The paper provides the detailed results for the individual NPIs as a preliminary normed acceptability index.