Consumer purchasing behaviour towards fish and seafood products: patterns and insights from a sample of international studies

The present systematic review was performed to assess consumer purchasing behaviour towards fish and seafood products in the wide context of developed countries. Web of Science, Scopus, ScienceDirect and Google Scholar engines were used to search the existing literature and a total of 49 studies were identified for inclusion. These studies investigated consumer purchasing behaviour towards a variety of fish and seafood products, in different countries and by means of different methodological approaches. In particular, the review identifies and discusses the main drivers and barriers of fish consumption as well as consumers’ preferences about the most relevant attributes of fish and seafood products providing useful insights for both practitioners and policy makers. Finally, main gaps of the existing literature and possible trajectories for future research are also discussed.

‘Scripture its own interpreter’: Mary Martha Sherwood, the Bible and female autobiography

This is a reading of the work of Mary Martha Sherwood, the Victorian Evangelist and Children’s Author (and pupil at the Abbey School, Reading). Based upon research on Sherwood’s private correspondences and diary conducted at UCLA with the aid of a Mitzi Myers (this before my arrival at Reading), the essay offers a radical reinterpretation of her work. Previously understood in terms of a rigid, if self-contradictory and ‘anxious’, Evangelism, the essay reads the diary through Sherwood’s little known Biblical scholarship. Through this I argue that Sherwood grants her own writing the status of Biblical truth precisely because of its contradictions and ‘anxiety’.

Automatic ability attribution after failure: a dual process view of achievement attribution

Causal attribution has been one of the most influential frameworks in the literature of achievement motivation, but previous studies considered achievement attribution as relatively deliberate and effortful processes. In the current study, we tested the hypothesis that people automatically attribute their achievement failure to their ability, but reduce the ability attribution in a controlled manner. To address this hypothesis, we measured participants’ causal attribution belief for their task failure either under the cognitive load (load condition) or with full attention (no-load condition). Across two studies, participants attributed task performance to their ability more in the load than in the no-load condition. The increased ability attribution under cognitive load further affected intrinsic motivation. These results indicate that cognitive resources available after feedback play crucial roles in determining causal attribution belief, as well as achievement motivations. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2013 APA, all rights reserved)(journal abstract)

Does connectivity add value to commercial real estate? The case of managed and conventional offices

This research is a preliminary study which examines the impact of connectivity on value in the managed office and conventional office sectors. The research is based on an extensive literature review, online survey and case studies carried out during 2005. The research shows, for the first time in the UK, how connectivity can increase value in office buildings, and how technology is priced in the market place.

Do Cognitive Models of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder Apply to Children and Adolescents?

Cognitive models of obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD) have been influential in understanding and treating the disorder in adults. Cognitive models may also be applicable to children and adolescents and would have important implications for treatment. The aim of this systematic review was to evaluate research that examined the applicability of the cognitive model of OCD to children and adolescents. Inclusion criteria were set broadly but most studies identified included data regarding responsibility appraisals, thought-action fusion or meta-cognitive models of OCD in children or adolescents. Eleven studies were identified in a systematic literature search. Seven studies were with non clinical samples, and 10 studies were cross-sectional. Only one study did not support cognitive models of OCD in children and adolescents and this was with a clinical sample and was the only experimental study. Overall, the results strongly supported the applicability of cognitive models of OCD to children and young people. There were, however, clear gaps in the literature. Future research should include experimental studies, clinical groups, and should test which of the different models provide more explanatory power.

Quinine, mosquitoes and empire: reassembling malaria in British India, 1890-1910

The drug quinine figured as an object of enforced consumption in British India between the late 1890s and the 1910s, when the corresponding diagnostic category malaria itself was redefined as a mosquito-borne fever disease. This article details an overlapping milieu in which quinine, mosquitoes and malaria emerged as intrinsic components of shared and symbiotic histories. It combines insights from new imperial histories, constructivism in the histories of medicine and literature about non-humans in science studies to examine the ways in which histories of insects, drugs, disease and empire interacted and shaped one another. Firstly, it locates the production of historical intimacies between quinine, malaria and mosquitoes within the exigencies and apparatuses of imperial rule. In so doing, it explores the intersections between the worlds of colonial governance, medical knowledge, vernacular markets and pharmaceutical business. Secondly, it outlines ways to narrate characteristics and enabling properties of non-humans (such as quinines and mosquitoes) while retaining a constructivist critique of scientism and empire. Thirdly, it shows how empire itself was reshaped and reinforced while occasioning the proliferation of categories and entities like malaria, quinine and mosquitoes.

B2B service brand identity: scale development and validation

Several brand identity frameworks have been published in the B2C and the B2B brand marketing literature. A reliable, valid and parsimonious service brand identity scale that empirically establishes the construct's dimensionality in a B2B market has yet to be developed. This paper reports the findings of a study conducted amongst 421 senior executives working in the UK IT Service sector to develop and validate a B2B Service Brand Identity Scale. Following established scale development procedures support is provided for a B2B Service Brand Identity Scale comprising five dimensions; employee and client focus, visual identity, brand personality, consistent communications and human resource initiatives. Concluding remarks discuss theoretical and managerial implications with limitations and directions for future research.

'Eden Cinema' by Marguerite Duras

Duras’s theatre work has been profoundly neglected by UK theatre academics and practitioners, and Eden Cinema has almost no performance history in Britain. My project asked three interconnected research questions: how developing the performance contributes to understanding Duras’s theatre and specifically Eden Cinema’s problems of performability; how multimedia performance emphasising mediated sound and the live body reconfigures memory, autobiography, storytelling, gender and racial identity; how to locate a performance style appropriate for Durasian narratives of displacement and death which reflect the discontinuous and mutable form of Duras’s ‘texte/film/théâtre’. Drawing on my research interests in gender, post-colonial hybridity and performed deconstruction, I focused my staging decisions on the discontinuities and ambivalences of the text. I addressed performability by avoiding the temptation to resolve the strange ellipses in the text and instead evoked the text’s imperfect and fragmented memories, and its uncertain spatial and temporal locations, by means of a fluid theatrical form. The mise-en-scène represented imagined and remembered spaces simultaneously, and co-existing historical moments. The performance style counterpointed live and mediated action and audio-visual forms. A complex through-composed soundscape, comprising voice-over, sound and music, became a key means for evoking overlapping temporalities, interconnected narratives and fragmented memories that were dispersed across the performance. The disempowerment of the mother figure and the silent indigenous servant in the text was demonstrated through their spatial centrality but physical stillness. The servant’s colonial subaltern identity was paralleled and linked with the mother’s disenfranchisement through their proxemic relationships. I elicited a performance style which evoked ‘characters’, whose being was deferred across different regimes of reality and who ‘haunted’ the stage rather than inhabited it. I developed the project further in the additional written outcomes and presentations, and the subsequent performance of Savannah Bay where problems of performability intensify until embodiment is almost erased except via voice.

Gender, childhood and children’s literature: the CIRCL approach

This paper explores the unique approach to childhood and children’s literature of the research and teaching of the ‘Graduate Centre for International Research in Childhood: Literature, Culture, Media (CIRCL)’. CIRCL follows in its work the arguments of UK critical theorist Jacqueline Rose in her seminal 1984 book The case of Peter Pan or the impossibility of children’s fiction. Rose’s work has been widely and routinely referenced in Children’s Literature studies particularly, but CIRCL interprets her arguments as having quite different implications than those usually assumed. Rose is generally attributed with having pointed out that ‘childhood’ is not one, homogenous category, but that childhood is divided by gender, race, and ethnic, political and religious (and so on) identities. But for CIRCL this is only a first step in Rose’s arguments and certainly one not unique to her work anyway: the perception of various cultural and historical childhoods is widely held. Instead, my paper explores how Rose’s arguments are centrally about how ‘childhood’ itself cannot be maintained in the face of division, a division, moreover, which operates inevitably at every level, and which derives from Rose’s interpretation of psychoanalysis as formulated by Sigmund Freud, which Rose derives in turn from her readings of the interpretations of Freud by French analyst Jacques Lacan and French critical theorist Jacques Derrida. Finally, my paper argues how Rose’s position is about any ‘identity’, including gender and that this allies her work closely to that of the famous gender theorist Judith Butler, whose arguments are often (mis) understood in the same ways as those of Rose.

Children’s literature: sexual identity, gender and childhood

On the twenty-third of May 2015, Ireland became the first country to legalise same-sex marriage by popular vote. This event reversed a large part, if not all, of Ireland’s reputation for a Catholic-led conservatism concerning sexual and gender identities. I argue in this article that we can see a parallel-in-miniature to this momentous shift in something of a reversal of children’s literature’s views in this respect too, and I will concentrate on exploring what is at stake in the ways that childhood, sexual and gender identities are constructed in some recent children’s literature criticism in the light of these shifts. My interest is to consider: what is the ever-burgeoning interest in the gay, queer, cross-dressing, transsexual or transgender child precisely about? I ask this question on the grounds of not assuming that this interest in these identities arises necessarily simply out of a self-evident, progressive, liberatory impulse, and, alongside this, I also do not assume that ‘identities’ are essential, self-organised traits awaiting revelation and liberation.

Structures and relationships: women partners' careers in Germany and the UK

Purpose – This paper aims to highlight differences in women's experiences of advancement to partnership in accountancy firms in Germany and the UK and consider the ways in which such differences may be constituted by the institutional context in which they occurred. Design/methodology/approach – This research is based on 60 semi-structured interviews with women partners in Germany and the UK. Techniques adopted from grounded theory were applied. Research limitations/implications – This qualitative research is context-specific and given its cross-national, interdisciplinary nature is limited to the extent that findings cannot be generalised beyond the studied scope. Practical implications – The study points to cross-national differences in women's career advancement in accountancy firms. The findings support extant research suggesting that structured performance evaluation and hiring systems – while not without flaws – are likely more gender-neutral. In addition, the study highlights the potential of headhunters and recruitment agents as an important tool for women to navigate their way out of career culs-de-sac. Originality/value – This research provides unique insights into women partners' experiences of career advancement and, through its interdisciplinary nature, demonstrates the usefulness of employing institutional frameworks in qualitative in-depth studies of this kind

Sex/gender differences and autism: setting the scene for future research

Objective The relationship between sex/gender differences and autism has attracted a variety of research ranging from clinical, neurobiological to etiological, stimulated by the male bias in autism prevalence. Findings are complex and do not always relate to each other in a straightforward manner. Distinct but interlinked questions on the relationship between sex/gender differences and autism remain under addressed. To better understand the implications from existing research and to help design future studies, we propose a four-level conceptual framework to clarify the embedded themes. Method We searched PubMed for publications before September 2014 using search terms “‘sex OR gender OR females’ AND autism.” 1,906 citations were screened for relevance, along with publications identified via additional literature reviews, resulting in 329 reports that were reviewed. Results Level 1 “Nosological and diagnostic challenges” concerns the question “How should autism be defined and diagnosed in males and females?” Level 2 “Sex/gender-independent and sex/gender-dependent characteristics” addresses the question “What are the similarities and differences between males and females with autism?” Level 3 “General models of etiology: liability and threshold” asks the question “How is the liability for developing autism linked to sex/gender?” Level 4 “Specific etiological-developmental mechanisms” focuses on the question “What etiological-developmental mechanisms of autism are implicated by sex/gender and/or sexual/gender differentiation?” Conclusions Using this conceptual framework, findings can be more clearly summarized, and the implications of the links between findings from different levels can become clearer. Based on this four-level framework, we suggest future research directions, methodology, and specific topics in sex/gender differences and autism.