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This study investigates the implications and significance of immersive technologies (viz. metaverse, virtual reality, and extended reality) in organizational learning and development.

Employing a strategy map (using Biblioshiny) and network analysis (using VOSViewer), the study analyzed a total of 189 Scopus-indexed documents, spanning the period 1997 to 2023.

The findings revealed four thematic clusters, knowledge management, training, e-learning, and technology. Each cluster provided insights into the various facets of development and learning in respect to these technologies. The strategy map identified key themes, revealing core ideas, emerging trends, and foundational concepts within the domain.

Organizations can utilize this study to incorporate metaverse, virtual reality, and extended reality in organizational development, optimizing training and boosting employee experience and productivity.

While most literature delves into the technical side of immersive technologies, our study uncovers their impact on development and learning in organizations, addressing a critical research gap and offering a guiding framework.

The purpose of this paper is to understand the concept of graduate work readiness (GWR) from a stakeholder perspective. The research attempts to pull together the various multidisciplinary themes from the literature into a comprehensive analysis of the relationship between graduates and the labour market, considering the international dimension of what is a global phenomenon.

The critical review is divided into four distinct sections, the first is to contextualise the concept of GWR and graduate employability taking into account recent academic discussion, particularly in the EU and ASEAN; second, to explore the different perspectives of stakeholders in the “triple helix” of universities, governments and the corporate world; third, critically to assess the arguments that educational provision is poorly aligned with labour market needs; and finally, to investigate the implications of the fourth industrial revolution for graduate jobs and skills and propose an agenda for future research.

Despite the apparent consensus between stakeholders over the central importance of graduate employability, there is considerable diversity in how each imagines GWR is best assured.

Any review is limited by the extant literature and whilst it is not uncommon that most research has been done in North America, Western Europe and Australasia, this is a serious limitation. GWR is a global concern and this review shows the need for more research that extends beyond the dominant geographical focus and its attendant paradigms. The implication is that geography is important and local research is needed to develop solutions that fit specific cultural, economic and institutional contexts.

The paper highlights the need to reconcile different stakeholder perspectives on GWR and ensure that they work together on shared agendas to improve graduate transition to the labour market. At the same time, the profound changes being brought about by the fourth industrial revolution suggest that more attention should be paid to the employability of existing employees.

This review should prove useful to both academics and practitioners because it emphasises the need to treat GWR as a concept that varies according to context and stakeholder interests, rather than a homogeneous phenomenon.

The aim of the research is to identify the impact of the Tesco Clubcard on customer loyalty. The secondary aim is to contrast customer perceptions of the Clubcard, staff and “feeling valued” to identify which factor has the greater impact on customer loyalty to store.

Quantitative analysis was used based on 60 questionnaires conducted with randomly selected customers in Tesco Metro Dundee in 2005. Tesco were not involved in the research other than to provide approval at a store level for the research to take place outside their premises.

A positive moderate relationship was found r=0.388, p=0.01 between the owning of a Clubcard and loyalty to store. It was also found that there was a positive moderate relationship between the Clubcard returns and customer loyalty, with r=0.334, p=0.01. The research, however, found no relationship between loyalty and customers feeling more valued by Tesco, nor did the research reveal a significant relationship between Tesco staff and customer loyalty.

The research is restricted in so far as it only considers Tesco Clubcard in the grocery retail sector and as it is an exploratory study the research is limited in so far as the number of participants is only 60. A further limitation surrounds the issue of generalisability as only one Tesco retail outlet in Dundee was used. Further research needs to include other Tesco formats and contrast with grocery retailers who do not use loyalty cards.

It is suggested that Tesco consumers are influenced by having a loyalty card in so far as it contributes to making them loyal. However, other factors need to compliment such a card, with consumers seeing the Tesco “provision” as inter‐related.

The paper is useful to both practitioners and academics in the fields of relationship marketing and loyalty. The research provides some initial insight into consumer perspectives in the value of loyalty cards.

Explores, through semi‐structured interviews, participants’ perceptions of the “New Deal”. The paper draws on empirical data from research on the New Deal training scheme for unemployed young people aged between 18 and 24 years. It examines the ideology underpinning the New Deal training programme in terms of structure and its projected outcome. Under the New Deal training programme unemployed young people will be offered four “options” in the areas of training or work, with the elements of a personal adviser and quality assurances incorporated to achieve this. The government insists there will be “no fifth option of life on benefit”. This paper offers some evidence that there is disillusionment among participants regarding the programme and its four options. The accounts expressed question government rhetoric that the New Deal will prove to be “radically different from previous schemes” for getting the young unemployed “off benefits” and into employment.

Aims to investigate the influence parents perceive their children have on family food‐purchasing decisions and discuss the reasons why parents do not always purchase healthy food products.

Quantitative analysis was conducted, using 301 questionnaires which were distributed to parents through a local primary school in Dundee. From this sample 143 were returned.

Most parents acknowledge that their children do influence their purchasing decisions, with 86 (60 percent) agreeing or strongly agreeing that they gave in to their children's demands; however, parents feel that they do not give in to pester power. Parents were aware of health issues and state that they regularly purchase healthy food products for their children. However, many parents admit to buying unhealthy food products for their children as treats.

This was an exploratory study and carries the limitation of generalisability as it was conducted solely in Dundee. Any further research should contrast perspectives from other UK cities and develop research into the family dynamics and parents' rationale for “yielding” to their children with regard to junk food.

It is suggested that parents “give in” to their children, which demonstrates the importance of “getting” the message across to children to eat more healthily. Further, the paper provides insight into influencing factors, suggesting that advertising can play a prominent role in influencing children's eating habits.

This paper is helpful to both academics and practitioners in the field of healthy eating among children. The paper provides some insight into parental perspectives of healthy eating and their responses to pester power.

Aims to investigate parental perspectives of the influence of the media, peers and parents on a child's perceptions of healthy food products.

Quantitative analysis was conducted, using the results from 143 questionnaires, collected through a randomly selected primary school in Dundee.

A positive significant relationship was found (p=0.006) between parents being aware of the health impact of fatty foods and purchasing healthy food products both for themselves and for their children. With regard to the influence of the media the research found a positive significant relationship (p=0.004), between the influence of adverts on children and the pestering and giving in of parents in the supermarket. The aspects of the influence of peers found that 44 per cent of parents believed that peer pressure influenced a child's demands for healthy food with 60 per cent of parents stating the influence of peers on a child's demands for junk food. No significant relationship was found, however, on peer influence and parental yielding. In the final aspect, that of parental influence, no significant relationship was found between pester power and parental yielding.

This was an exploratory study and carries the limitation of generalisability as it was conducted solely in one primary school in Dundee. Any further research should contrast perspectives from other UK cities and develop research into the family dynamics and education.

It is suggested that the media have a significant influence on a child's demands for junk food, which emphasises the importance of using the media to encourage children to eat more healthily. Further the paper provides insight into influencing factors, suggesting that advertising can play a prominent role in influencing children's eating habits.

This paper is helpful to both academics and practitioners in the field of marketing and food marketing. The paper provides some insight into parental perspectives of the influence of the media, peers and parents themselves on a child's healthy eating habits.

This study analyses how media choices can be used in the construction of social identity.

We approach the topic through the analytical lens of identity work. We present a case study of a community of IT students during their first year of studies, including participant observation, focus groups, and surveys. We focus on what community means to the individuals located within a specific social context. This allows us to examine ICT use and adoption holistically as a key aspect of community formation and identity maintenance.

We depict everyday interactions in which the choice of an older information communication technology, Internet Relay Chat, serves participants in their quest for social belongingness in their community and in distinguishing the community positively from other social groups. This chapter describes how identity work is accomplished by adopting and valuing shared, social views about users versus non-users, including: (1) emphasizing the skills and efforts needed for using Internet Relay Chat (IRC), (2) undermining the use of other technologies, and (3) deploying and referencing IRC jargon and “insider humor” within the broader community.

By examining online and offline social interactions in a defined community over time, we expose the process of identity work in a holistic manner. Our analysis emphasizes the underlying process where media choices can be harnessed to fulfill the need to identify with groups and feel affirmed in one’s claims to both personal and social identity.

Purpose – In recent decades, some sociologists have turned to evolutionary biology, neuroscience, and cognitive science to support, modify, and reconfigure existing social psychological theory. In this chapter, we build on this momentum by considering the relevance of current work in affective and cognitive neuroscience for understanding emotions and the self. Our principal aim is to enlarge the range of phenomena currently considered by sociologists who study emotion while showing how affective dynamics play an important role across most outcomes and processes of interest to social scientists.

Approach – We focus on the ways external social objects become essential to, and emotionally significant for, the self. To that end, we draw on ideas from phenomenology, pragmatism, classic symbolic interactionism, and dramaturgy. We show how basic affective systems graft on, build from, and extend current social psychological usages of emotions as well as the important sociological work being done on self, from both symbolic interactionist (SI) and identity theory (IT) perspectives. Finally, we turn to the promising directions in studying emotional biographies and various aspects related to embodiment.

Findings – Affective systems consist of brain networks whose connections deepen when activated, with interesting variations observable at the neural, individual, and social levels in which one or more system is more salient than others. Affective systems may come to saturate the construction and maintenance of an autobiography or collective biography, with consequences for self-projection, self-other attunement, and embodied action. In turning to embodiment, however, we consider aspects of cognitive neuroscience that can contribute to ongoing work in neurosociology building on symbolic interactionism.

Practical Implications – The focus on affective systems suggests new research agendas in leveraging emerging neurosociological methods in the laboratory, while pushing for novel, naturalistic observational strategies. The latter, in particular, may be key to deepening sociology's contributions to neuroscience, better positioned to bring the full disciplinary toolkit to bear on these questions.

Social Implications – In considering the embodied and projective aspects of the self, we show how work examining convergence and divergence between embodied and linguistic pathways opens up new insights into how the self develops or acquires behavioral repertoires. As such, this chapter points to the need for holistic approach to understanding the social actor and, thereby, how political, economic, historical, and cultural factors shape self as much as biogenetic and psychological.

Originality of the Chapter – Sociologists think of emotions as either dependent or intervening variables: (1) signaling identity or situational incongruence, (2) states to be managed, and (3) structural dimensions of superordinate–subordinate relationships. Our integration of the theory of affective systems emphasizes the causal primacy emotions have over other behavioral and cognitive functions, clarifying how they play into the construction and maintenance of self and social experience.

Organizational approaches to racial inequality have provided contextual insight into a host of traditional stratification outcomes (e.g., hiring, earnings, authority). This chapter extends the organizational approach by drawing on the health-stress framework to explore how organizational context affects experiential and health-related outcomes – discrimination, social support, and psychological distress. Drawing on a sample of Black workers in the United States, we examine the relationship between workplace racial composition and psychological distress, as well as two potential mediators – racial discrimination and workplace social support. Our findings reveal that psychological distress is similar for Black workers in token (<25% Black coworkers), tilted other race (25–49.99% Black coworkers), and tilted same race (50–74.99% Black coworkers) job contexts. Workers in Black-dominated jobs (>75% Black coworkers), however, experience significantly less psychological distress than other compositional thresholds, net of individual, job, and workplace characteristics. This relationship is not explained by either racial discrimination experiences or supervisor and coworker social support. This finding suggests that researchers need to theorize and examine other protective factors stemming from coworker racial similarity.