From nutrients to food literacy

This paper is based on a webinar broadcast by the Home Economics Institute of Australia in 2015. I should make clear at the outset that I will be discussing the academic literature, particularly that relating to nutrition education and foodliteracy that reports studies with measured outcomes. This may seem ‘last century’ to many Australian home economics teachers who long ago moved from teaching about nutrients to education about dietary practices. However, in nutrition science there has long been a fascination with the possible effects of education about nutrition on disease risks and outcomes. There has been an expectation among health researchers and governments that education should reduce disease risks and promote wellbeing among young people. I think this view is too narrow and unrealistic in contrast to more holistic approaches such as those of home economics and the emerging area of food literacy. In this brief overview I will discuss four areas to dowith the emerging area of food literacy education. First, I will discuss the emergence of a broader view of food and dietary patterns in the nutrition sciences and the reasons for this. Secondly, I will explore the competing assumptions behind ‘education’ versus those of ‘health promotion’ and public health, followed by different disciplinary views of the emerging area of food literacy with its emphasis on competencies. Finally, I will explore some interesting new developments in food literacy education.

Legal marketing twelve "home truths"

Evaluating legal services marketing strategies.

Home truths about home detention

The Victorian Parliament has recently introduced a Bill which implements home detention as a sentencing option. Home detention is an intuitively appealing reform. The logic behind the proposal seems obvious. Prisons are expensive to run. There are too many offenders in prison. So let's take the cost out of prison by turning the homes of offenders into prisons: classic, user-pays, cost-shifting economics. The level of superficial appeal of the argument in favour of home detention is matched only by the depth of the fallacies underpinning some of the fundamental premises. The most basic of which is the assumption that offenders who are candidates for the new sanction should be in detention (of any kind) in the first place. Further, the narrow objective of reducing imprisonment is misguided. It should not be elevated to a cardinal sentencing objective?otherwise total success could be achieved by simply opening the prison gates. There are also other concerns about the appropriateness of home detention. The degree of pain it inflicts in many cases is questionable and it may also violate the principle that punishment should not be inflicted on the innocent. After examining the arguments for and against home detention, this article suggests the approach that should be adopted to achieve enlightened and meaningful sentencing reform.

Marketing across cultures : an investigation into place specific dimensions of service quality in sport

Abstract The purpose of this study was to identify place-specific dimensions of service quality in spectator sport settings and determine if the importance of these dimensions differed across cultures. The study was limited to the soccer industry and involved the collection of responses from identified soccer spectators to a range of items presented in a survey instrument. The survey was distributed to respondents face-to-face on a match day of the club they supported, or mailed to their home address. Responses were obtained from spectators from two clubs from Australia (n=277), one club from the USA (n=199), one club from the Netherlands (n=245) and one federation from Malaysia (n= 100). Based on the findings of a number of authors, six categories of potential place-specific dimensions of service quality in spectator sport settings were created and the research instrument contained a number of items that could be categorised under one of these headings. These categories were Home, Religion, Social facilitation, Sensory, Uncertainty of outcome, and Personal attention. In this thesis it was assumed that place-specific service quality issues are similar for sport spectators of different cultures, although differences in degree of importance of these dimensions (etic approach) were likely to emerge. In other words, although it was expected dimensions per country to be similar, differences in degree of importance of these dimensions were expected. Given the lack of confirmatory statistical evidence pertaining to the specific country samples, it was concluded that differences per country are likely to be more than just differences in degree. Both the overall structure and structures per country could not be confirmed, and hence the conclusion was drawn that differences in nature between the countries were present. In other words, what is a dimension of place-specific service quality in one country is not necessarily a dimension in another country. The results of a content analysis of ‘core component’ structures per country compared with a (full sample) core component structure delivered six components (referred to as place-specific dimensions of service quality) that were defined as Home, Hedonist, Religious follower, Safe atmosphere, Hospitality and Personal Attention. It was found that in most cases the cultural orientation of soccer spectators reflects the cultural orientation of the country as a whole as proposed by Hofstede (1991). However, in line with Huntington (1997), it was also argued that grouping people based on their country of origin as a proxy for their cultural orientation, will increasingly lead to flawed and incomplete research findings. As noted by Yoo etal. (1999), the identification of a person's cultural orientation is likely to deliver more direct results when measured at the individual level In that regard it is concluded that it may seem prudent to view Hofstede's dimensions of culture with increased conceptual scrutiny. Although having been replicated in multiple studies, it becomes increasingly unlikely that Hofstede's dimensions cover the complete spectrum of an individual person's cultural orientation. In conclusion, this study identified that soccer spectators (from a number of clubs) from Australia, the USA, the Netherlands and to a lesser extent Malaysia, perceive a range of place-specific service quality dimensions in spectator spoil settings to be important when visiting a soccer match. Before research into satisfaction with and value of place-specific dimensions of the spectator sport service product is initiated, it is pertinent the identified dimensions are further explored and confirmed in different country (culture) settings. The confusion that still exists about the place of the value concept (in relation to quality and satisfaction), where Holbrook (1994) defines quality as a type of value and Chelladurai and Chang (2000) argue that value is a type of quality, further underpins this necessity. It needs to be clear what are the targets of service quality before this information is integrated in larger holistic research frameworks. In the final section of the thesis a conceptual model for international services marketing research in the sport industry was presented as a first attempt to integrate the findings of this research and other researchers.

Book review: marketing and public relations for museums, galleries, cultural and heritage attractions

 The article reviews the book "Marketing and Public Relations for Museums, Galleries, Cultural and Heritage Attractions," by Ylva French and Sue Runyard.