Purpose: Drawing on theories of organisational identity, social exchange and stakeholder engagement, this study aims to investigate the processes and practices involved in the formation and shaping of identities of social enterprises (SEs) that operate in the Malawian hospitality and tourism industry. Design/methodology/approach: Drawing on an interpretive research paradigm, data collected from 22 semi-structured interviews with four founders of case SEs and stakeholders, and SEs’ reports and other publicly available documents were generated and analysed following a grounded theory approach. Findings: The authors show that the trajectory SEs followed and the exchanges that occurred with the external stakeholders allowed three out of four case SEs to swiftly re-evaluate their pre-existing identities and work towards the formation of their new identities. Practical implications: This study provides an opportunity for policymakers and other actors in developing countries to frame and place SEs in line with the wider societal realities in such contexts. This may in turn call for policymakers to increase actors’ engagement with SEs and provide the necessary support that can allow SEs to be an effective force for the public good. Originality/value: This paper highlights the role of exchanges with external stakeholders in identity formation and shaping within SEs in the hospitality and tourism sector in the context of institutional voids. By adopting the social exchange theory, this paper introduces a dynamic lens to identity formation and shaping and helps to explain how, across different tourism ventures, stakeholder engagement and different modes of exchange unfold in the inter-organisational and community domains. It further shows how the ventures’ value orientations on the one hand, and stakeholder engagement practices and the ensuing exchanges, on the other hand, are closely interwoven.
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This article discusses how professional identity, conceptualised as 'stories professionals tell about themselves at a specific moment in a specific context', can be portrayed to address its complexity as a dynamic, constructed, cognitive-emotional, multi-voiced, and dialogical concept. In order to construct a narrative-biographical method, eight teacher educators reflected on their professional development, using the self-confrontation method, resulting in self-narratives. The findings of the study indicate teacher educators' meaningful experiences can be portrayed in a systematic way using identity components such as job motivation, task perception, task-feeling, self-image and selffeeling. This method can reveal a personal or professional theme to further educators' development, focusing both on a content level as well as an emotional level. These results were illustrated by one teacher educator's story. Finally, suitability of this method was discussed for reflection purposes in teacher education and research goals.
Fashion has become inextricably linked with digital culture. Digital media have opened up new spaces of fashion consumption that are unprecedented in their levels of ubiquity, immersion, fluidity, and interactivity. The virtual realm continuously needs us to design and communicate our identity online. Unfortunately, the current landscape of digitised fashion practices seems to lack the type of self-governing attitude and urgency that is needed to move beyond commercially mandated platforms and systems that effectively diminish our digital agency. As transformative power seems to be the promise of the virtual, there is an inherent need to critically assess how digital representation of fashion manifests online, especially when these representations become key mediators within our collective and individual public construction of self. A number of collectives and practitioners that actively shape a counter movement, organized bottom up rather than through capital, are questioning this interdependence, applying inverted thinking and experimenting with alternative modes of engagement. Starting from the research question ‘How can critical fashion practitioners introduce and amplify digital agency within fashion’s virtual landscape through new strategies of aesthetic engagement?’, this project investigates the implications of fashion’s increasing shift towards the virtual realm and the ramifications created for digital agency. It centers on how identity is understood in the digital era, whether subjects have full agency while expected to construct multiple selves, and how online environments that enact as playgrounds for our identities might attribute to a distorted sense of self. By using the field of critical fashion as its site, and the rapidly expanding frontier of digital counter practices as a lens, the aim of this project is to contribute to larger changes within an increasingly global and digital society, such as new modes of consumerism, capital and cultural value.
In 2007 at Ropecon, a large Finnish roleplaying convention, Emily Care Boss coined the term bleed to refer to emotional transference that sometimes happened to players of roleplaying games. Bleed describes an effect where emotions and attitudes experienced while roleplaying a character continue on after the roleplaying session was over, or the other way around, where a player brings their own feelings into the character they are embodying. For example, a player would roleplay a romance with another player's character, and then develop feelings for said player after the game was over. Bleed can create powerful effects in a roleplaying session, both positive and negative, which has resulted in the development of various best practices and safety tools that analogue game designers can draw upon, and roleplaying games frequently have mechanics designed around inducing and maximizing particular types of bleed in their players. Bleed mechanics lend themselves particularly well to exploring queer and otherwise marginalized identities, generating empathy, and exploring acts of political resistance. They are a powerful tool in the analogue game designers’ toolbox. Digital games make comparatively far less use of bleed in their designs than analogue games—the concept of bleed is not well-known among digital game designers. Consequently, there is little guidance for designing digital bleed mechanics, and insufficient safety tools with which to do so. With how powerful these effects can be, the knowledge and tools gaps for digital games needs addressing. This research project will create primarily digital narrative games that are explicitly designed to invoke bleed, and seeks to provide designers with new frameworks and safety tools to create bleed effects for digital games. Games will be created with varying themes and approaches regarding identity and storytelling to explore how, in particular, narrative design influences bleed in digital games.
In the small village of Nuenen in the Netherlands, Vincent van Gogh, the legendary artist, resided with his parents for two years in the late 19th century. Today, visitors can literally walk in Vincent’s footsteps and hear stories about that period of his life. There is also a renovated indoor museum in the village showcasing many beautiful and inspiring objects.We carefully studied the visitor experience over two rounds of data collection: one in 2018 and another in 2023 after the museum's renovation. In the second round, 40 students from Breda University of Applied Sciences were invited to spend a day in Nuenen. The participants, aged mostly between 20 and 30 years, came from the Netherlands and 16 other countries. None of them had visited the previous museum setup in Nuenen, although two-thirds had visited at least one other Vincent-centered attraction or had researched Vincent and his life prior to the visit.During their visit, research participants were tracked using Bluetooth beacons (indoors) and GPS tracking (outdoors), while wearing wristbands that measured their level of emotional engagement in real time. They toured the museum and the village and provided feedback on their experience through questionnaires administered before and after the visit.The results of the research showed that visitors were emotionally touched at certain stops of the tour more than others, enjoyed interacting with specific elements in the museum, and spent more time in particular areas of the museum. Most participants could vividly imagine themselves back in the days (narrative transportation), felt closer to Nuenen residents as a result of the visit, and generally found the visit to be quite meaningful. Learning and self-expansion were high, with some visitors even finding the visit transformative, leading to changes in attitude, behavior, and identities. We also found a strong correlation between these measures and the Net Promoter Score (NPS). Recommendations and emotion maps were presented to the museum as they continue to refine their visitor experiences.Research carried out for Van Gogh Village Museum Nunen.
