Home Confined Consumers’ Freedom through Surrogate Activities: the Role of Personal Communities

This article explores the nature of surrogate consumption activity with three cases of non-institutionalised home confined consumers. The role played by personal communities in their daily lives is explored from the constrained rural contexts in which they consume. Despite the barriers to achieving normalcy in the marketplace, home confined consumers are able to realise freedom and agency, and express identity through engagement in surrogate consumption activity. Surrogate consumption activity also provides home confined consumers with opportunities to reinforce and challenge traditional family practices (discourses of care) through the ability for relationship culture development and social capital creation. Findings in this study show that home confined consumers, labeled as 'limited-choice' (Gabel, 2005) have the ability to display power, make choices, and find their voice despite non-interaction in the marketplace.

Low Insertion Loss Substrate Integrated Waveguide Quasi–Elliptic Filters for V- Band Wireless Personal Area Network Applications

Novel V-band substrate integrated waveguide (SIW) filters have been presented. Design procedures for the filters synthesis and mechanisms providing quasi-elliptic response have been explained. The insertion loss of the filters has been measured below 2 dB with microstrip-to-SIW transitions being included.

Effects of the Interaction Between Reaction Component of Personal Need for Structure and Role Perceptions on Employee Attitudes in Long-Term Care for Elderly People

This study examined the interaction of reaction component of personal need for structure (reaction to lack of structure, RLS) and role perceptions in predicting job satisfaction, job involvement, affective commitment, and occupational identity among employees working in long-term care for elderly people. High-RLS employees experienced more role conflict, had less job satisfaction, and experienced lower levels of occupational identity than did low-RLS employees. We found individual differences in how problems in roles affected employees' job attitudes. High-RLS employees experienced lower levels of job satisfaction, job involvement, and affective commitment, irrespective of role-conflict levels. Low-RLS employees experienced detrimental job attitudes only if role-conflict levels were high. Our results suggest that high-RLS people benefit less from low levels of experienced role conflicts.