In e-commerce, trust becomes an essential prerequisite for customer relationship building. Drawn from established theoretical work on trust and relationship marketing, a model is proposed aiming to help in highlighting the differences between traditional and e-commerce and to facilitate thinking as to how trust can be built in virtual environments. Conceptualized in the context of an electronic servicescape, the model helps to demonstrate how agent and virtual reality technologies can facilitate the expressiveness required for the formation of trust through iterative interaction with promises being made, enabled and fulfilled.

in e-commerce, the role of trust becomes vitaI for establishing and maintaining customer relationships. Drawing from established theoretical work on trust and relationship marketing, this paper synthesises a series of trust constructs, determinant variables and trust building processes, and proposes a framework for the formation of trust in customerbusiness relationships. The framework is conceptualised in the context of an electronic servicescape, where trust is formed through iterative interactions with promises being made, enabled and fulfilled. Based on this framework, the paper illustrates how the application of agent and virtual reality technologies can provide the environment and facilitate the expressiveness demanded by such a servicescape.

The purpose of this study is to investigate ways to identify the challenges of integration of minority groups, such as migrants, ethnic/racial minorities, and refugees in Swedish-speaking Ostrobothnia by using the Structured Democratic Dialogue (SDD) as a participatory methodology. This particular method was selected for this study with the purpose to bring all identified stakeholders in the society together to collaboratively and collectively identify and further discuss the challenges and obstacles they face. The Co-laboratory brought together twelve participants with a diverse socio-economical and educational background in Vasa, Finland. Based on the influence map generated by the participants as a result of the workshop, social inclusion was revealed to be one of the most important indicators hindering the integration of minority groups at the local level. In particular, silent acceptance of racism or racist comments were according to the participants the most influential factor preventing the successful integration of ethnic minorities in Swedish-speaking Ostrobothnia.

In a previous study on integrating minority groups in Ostrobothnia in 2019, one of the most influential challenges was that Finland was not including native Finns in the integration process. This finding was made using the structured democratic dialogue (SDD). For the present study, the same participatory methodology was applied, wherein 12 participants from diverse socio-economical, cultural, and educational background who reside in Ostrobothnia were brought together to explore feasible action plans to facilitate the inclusion of Finns in the integration process in the city of Vaasa in this region of Finland. The participants generated 66 action plans categorized under eight clusters. Based on the influence map generated by participants, Action #62 stated that the most influential one was “All projects are inclusive”. Action #55 stated, “Balanced representation of all the people (Finns, minorities and foreigners) in the political parties” and Action #49 stated, “Social-emotional education curriculum” were perceived as having great influence on other actions. Thus, drawing from the results of this SDD Co-Lab, these action plans should be considered priorities in order to successfully include Finns in the integration process. The low number of participants and the narrow representation of some minority groups are limitations of this study.

The article discusses the outcomes of two Structured Democratic Dialogues (SDD) held in Padua, Italy and Vaasa, Finland respectively, with the aim of exploring how to mitigate the negative attitudes and atmosphere toward the LGBTQ+ community in these two regions. The participants identified key areas for altering the negative attitudes and creating a positive atmosphere toward the LGBTQ+ community and suggested 77 action plans in Padua, Italy and 31 in Vaasa, Finland. The study reveals that both groups of participants emphasized the importance of education, media representation, and legal protection to combat negative attitudes and promote acceptance of the LGBTQ+ community. However, due to the differences in the national legal systems, the Padua participants placed more emphasis on legal reforms, whereas the Vaasa participants focused more on cultural and educational action plans.