Co-construction and performancescapes

Although prior literature has emphasized marketplace participants' co-construction mostly in terms of symbolic, oral, or emotional aspects of a consumption experience, there has not been much attention paid to potential concerns around success, failure, strategies, risk, dependence, and competition involved. This article, by building on the existing body of research, introduces the notion of performancescapes to better understand these issues as they relate to participant performances in the co-construction of marketplace experiences. Performances have the character of being an accomplishment involving an interactive quality and an element of risk. Accordingly, highlighting competencies and effectiveness rather than just the meaning enables us to concentrate on issues of success, failure, and risk. Furthermore, it is not uncommon to examine the marketer side of marketplace performances, but the customer side is generally neglected or assumed to be more passive. In this paper, we explore some of the ways through which service providers and clients participate in a marketplace stage as a performancescape in order to have a successful co-constructed performance. We further maintain that the performative competencies of consumers can be as significant as that of marketers or service providers. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

APPROACH OR AVOIDANCE (OR BOTH?): INTEGRATING CORE SELF‐EVALUATIONS WITHIN AN APPROACH/AVOIDANCE FRAMEWORK

Core self‐evaluations (CSE) represent a new personality construct that, despite an accumulation of evidence regarding its predictive validity, provokes debate regarding the fundamental approach or avoidance nature of the construct. This set of studies sought to clarify the approach/avoidance nature of CSE by examining its relation with approach/avoidance personality traits and motivation constructs (Study 1); we subsequently examined approach/avoidance motivational mechanisms as mediators of the relation between CSE and job performance (Study 2). Overall, the studies demonstrate that CSE is best conceptualized as representing both (high) approach tendencies and (low) avoidance tendencies; implications of these findings for CSE theory are discussed.     

The Family Dance Around Drug Abuse

The article describes the interactivity of relationships and dynamics of a family with a chemically abusive member.     

Systemic Therapy: A New Brief Intervention Model

A brief psychotherapy model based on systems theory is presented. The model emphasizes the interactional context of clients' problems and represents an efficient intervention paradigm.