This essay reflects the shared experiences of four college faculty members (a biologist, a psychologist, a computer scientist, and a feminist literary scholar) working together with K-12 teachers to explore a new perspective on educational practice. It offers a novel rationale for independent thinking and learning, one that derives from rapidly developing interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary inquiries in the sciences and social sciences into what are known as ''complex'' or ''emergent'' systems. Using emergent systems as a model of teaching and learning makes at least three significant contributions to our thinking bout teaching, in three very different dimensions. It invites us into an awareness that the brains of individual students and teachers operate as emergent systems that are neither possible nor desirable to control fully. It invites us to appreciate as well that the activities and benefits of a classroom are not all individual interactions between teacher and student. Interactions among students and teachers are collectively contributing to a somewhat unpredictable project with an insistently social dimension, which is in turn crucial to the individual achievements of all involved. Finally, emergent pedagogy encourages us to consider more carefully the relations between the individual classroom and the larger educational community of which it is a component, including a challenge to rethink the matter of assessment.

No abstract

This paper explores the reasons for the continuing 'gap' between UK retail academic research and practice. A Relationship Marketing (RM) lens, focusing on relationship antecedents, is used to develop a deeper understanding of the barriers to collaboration and propose new solutions to close the gap. Design: The paper adopts a qualitative methodology to compile the evidence, using multiple data sources to identify the dynamics of the retail academic-practitioner divide. Findings: The research illustrates a marked absence of the majority of the customerfocused, seller focused and dyadic antecedents, essential for effective relational exchanges, and highlights that at the heart of the problem lies a lack of shared understanding of mutual relationship benefits with academics currently neither motivated nor incentivised to develop such relationships. Research implications: Further research is needed to explore what characterises a successful sustainable research relationship. There is also a pressing need to understand the experience, skills and knowledge of 'boundary spanners' who operate successfully in both academic and business cultures.

The 'High Street' has traditionally played a key role in the health of towns worldwide. It is instrumental as a community hub, supporting local independent retail businesses and incubating entrepreneurship and innovation. Since 2009, thousands of stores have closed with record levels of shop vacancies. Reasons for the decline include a failure to respond to multi-channel retailing, wider demographic and economic changes and problems coordinating the network of actors who hold competing ideas about High Street regeneration. This paper evaluates the contribution of a value co-creation perspective in exploring strategy making in a complex retail high street ecosystem. It draws on Service-Dominant Logic and its service ecosystems perspective, institutional theory and data from a depth case study of strategy development in a UK High Street. The study illustrates how the value co-creation perspective, underpinned by institutional theory offers a rich appreciation of how actors in the ecosystem participate in shaping strategy. It identifies seven norms shared by the multiple actors, which serve as a point of reference for more sustainable strategy development. The normative analysis highlights the potential of operant resources amongst actors to shape strategy implementation. The study provides empirical evidence to support the role of institutions and institutional arrangements in effective value co-creation.

Cocreation of value is a key construct in service science and the service-dominant logic. Little is known about how practicing managers perceive their own value cocreating activities. The paper is one of the first to gather manager perceptions of value cocreation activities and categorize them in terms of marketing logics. The paper offers insights on how marketing managers perceive value cocreation based on an analysis of examples of its application in practice. It responds to pleas for studies on how organizations can manage the cocreation process. Fifty-one managers of public and private sector organizations in Albania, Kosovo, Serbia, Greece, Romania, Bulgaria, and Macedonia were asked to provide examples of how their organizations cocreate value with customers through marketing activities. The resulting 99 examples were classified according to perspectives contrasting the goods- and service-dominant logics. Many examples concerned marketing communications, market research, or new product development, which fit more closely with goods-dominant logic. The examples incorporating cocreation of value as espoused in the service-dominant logic involved reciprocity, high levels of trust, and knowledge sharing. Managers who are keen to adopt the notion of cocreation of value are advised to focus on the metacompetencies of education, knowledge sharing, and capacity building.