In this study, data and information publicly available on the Internet were analysed to examine the self-reported experiences of people with COPD. Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD) is a chronic progressive disease that may exist with and worsen many other conditions of ageing. The theoretical basis for analysis draws on the social model of disability that stresses the disabling aspects of the environment, as opposed to the individual’s medical condition. This allows the voices and stories of people living life with COPD to be the focus of this research. In this study, I found that people with COPD who post their stories to the Internet display a wide range of emotions and experiences of living with COPD. The people with COPD discuss, amongst other things, how COPD has affected their home life and activities of daily living, their work and finances, their spouse or carer, and especially appreciate the friendships and support found at pulmonary rehabilitation and through belonging to a support group. These people appear to be very open and authentic in their writings, wishing to reach out to others with the condition to offer hope, support and advice, in adapting to changing circumstances as the condition progresses. People expressed gratitude at being part of a community of fellow people with COPD. This collection of stories shows that, despite having a disabling condition, people with COPD can demonstrate resilience and resourcefulness to successfully adjust the landscape of their lives, and the realities of living with a disability, to maintain a good quality of life for as long as possible.

In this study, data and information publicly available on the Internet were analysed to examine the self-reported experiences of people with COPD. Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD) is a chronic progressive disease that may exist with and worsen many other conditions of ageing. The theoretical basis for analysis draws on the social model of disability that stresses the disabling aspects of the environment, as opposed to the individual’s medical condition. This allows the voices and stories of people living life with COPD to be the focus of this research. In this study, I found that people with COPD who post their stories to the Internet display a wide range of emotions and experiences of living with COPD. The people with COPD discuss, amongst other things, how COPD has affected their home life and activities of daily living, their work and finances, their spouse or carer, and especially appreciate the friendships and support found at pulmonary rehabilitation and through belonging to a support group. These people appear to be very open and authentic in their writings, wishing to reach out to others with the condition to offer hope, support and advice, in adapting to changing circumstances as the condition progresses. People expressed gratitude at being part of a community of fellow people with COPD. This collection of stories shows that, despite having a disabling condition, people with COPD can demonstrate resilience and resourcefulness to successfully adjust the landscape of their lives, and the realities of living with a disability, to maintain a good quality of life for as long as possible.

Using a sociocultural approach, we explore an illicit consumption community online. There are several thriving consumption communities that exist online that exchange illicit commodities without scrutiny from regulatory structures. Despite the large sums of money spent on this practice and the potential problems associated with illicit commoditizing, the online environment remains loosely regulated. A netnography of one such community, online poker players, is the central focus of this research. We propose a dramaturgical model that explains the macro-environmental factors of illicit consumption communities and the individual motives of online poker players. The online poker forum selected for this study is vibrant, rich with data and frequented often by online poker community members. By examining discussions held within this online community, we uncover insights on the illicit consumption of online poker players and their motives. We explore these varying factors and motives and discuss the public policy implications of our findings.

Using a sociocultural approach, we explore an illicit consumption community online. There are several thriving consumption communities that exist online that exchange illicit commodities without scrutiny from regulatory structures. Despite the large sums of money spent on this practice and the potential problems associated with illicit commoditizing, the online environment remains loosely regulated. A netnography of one such community, online poker players, is the central focus of this research. We propose a dramaturgical model that explains the macro-environmental factors of illicit consumption communities and the individual motives of online poker players. The online poker forum selected for this study is vibrant, rich with data and frequented often by online poker community members. By examining discussions held within this online community, we uncover insights on the illicit consumption of online poker players and their motives. We explore these varying factors and motives and discuss the public policy implications of our findings.

As millions of baby boomers approach retirement, they will face one of the most significant and potentially life-altering decisions they’ve ever made – the pursuit of a travel-based retirement lifestyle. When people make such high-stakes decisions it is inevitable that their salient desires are engaged and likely that goal conflicts will arise. An extensive literature has focused on understanding travelers’ motivations, but this research has rarely examined how people cope with the conflicts that are inherent in travel decisions. Retirement provides a perfect natural context to study such decisions. In this study we use netnography – a method of observing online consumer-to-consumer communications – to discern the tensions that arise when aspiring travelers’ goals are in conflict. Furthermore, we investigate how experienced travelers in the online community offer aspiring travelers moral support, advice and referrals that help to resolve these goal conflicts, thus easing decision-making tension and moving the decision-maker closer to the choice of a travel-based lifestyle. The findings offer a better understanding of multiple goal pursuit in retirement travel, where (1) desires serve as superordinate goals that are engaged in travel planning, (2) retiree travelers juggle multiple goals that often result in goal conflicts and (3) the importance of online community in providing advice as proposed solutions to achieve goals and resolve goal conflicts. Lastly, implications and limitations of this study are discussed.

This study is a netnography of an online gluten-free community through the scope of the Facebook group "Gluten Free." The objective of this qualitative inquiry is to investigate the key characteristics of this online gluten-free community and gain a deeper understanding of member purposes for participation. Employing the method of netnography allows for an unobtrusive exploration of the community by discreetly utilizing anthropological techniques in an online setting. Despite growing awareness, no academic research has yet been conducted on the social aspects of the online gluten-free community. The thematic findings that emerged from this study were two-fold. First, this investigation revealed three key characteristic themes in the content of community posts: suspiciousness and distrust, defensiveness and frustration, and passion and determination. Second, this analysis discovered three purposive themes for member participation: validation, friendship, and education. The findings of this study render a thick description of the unique culture of the online gluten-free community, sharpen the academic understanding of online communities, and strengthen the valuable method of netnography.

The concept of ‘customer experience’ has evolved as an imperative area of study within the marketing discipline. Despite its importance and the positive attention this concept has received during the last few years, the explanation of customer experiences have remained vague and lack a thorough theoretical foundation. Furthermore, practitioners across many industries claim that there is a connection between customer experience and loyalty, yet there is a paucity of research to validate this theoretical assumption. This study aims to address this gap in the literature and to facilitate better understanding of the concept of 'customer experience' and its antecedents and focus on brand loyalty as consequence from the consumer perspective. Accordingly, a mixed-method research design was adopted that consisted of two phases. The first phase involved a netnography study to gain better understanding of the notion of customer experience and refine a conceptual framework that has been developed on the basis of the existing literature. In the second phase this framework was tested by means of a survey of British customers to examine their experience with resort-hotel brands in Sharm El Sheikh, Egypt. Structural equation modeling was used to analyze the survey responses. The structural model showed a very good fit to the data and good convergent, nomological and discriminant validity and reliability stability. The findings of this study identified four aspects of customer experience in the resort-hotels in Egypt; i.e. educational, aesthetics, relational and novelty. Those aspects are congruent with prior work in the tourism literature. Additionally, the study found that customers rely on some service cues such as: price, core service and WOM to predict and assess their experiences. The findings also indicated that perceived service quality has a mediating role in the relationship between customer-contact employees and core service and customer experience. A key contribution of this research is offering a robust model that explains the nascent phenomenon of customer experience and demonstrating that experience has a definite positive impact on brand loyalty. The use of netnography to identify customer experience dimension is also considered as a methodological contribution in the area of marketing research. Moreover, the present study adds novel perspective to the growing body of brand literature (particularly service brand) and suggests directions for future research. Finally, the study provides managerial implications for service managers to identify the experiential needs of their customer and properly design the customer experience.

The purpose of this study was to observe weblogs in their natural setting and to investigate the nature of collective learning within the debt blogging community. How individuals who blog their experiences with getting out of debt use their weblogs as well as the role of the commenter in the debt blogging process were also researched. Four distinct literature pools were used to frame this study including the theory of social constructivism, the context of communities of practice, the problem of consumer debt, and the medium of blogging. Utilizing observational netnography, six weblogs were researched which were comprised of individuals or couples trying to get out of debt or who have recently achieved that goal. The primary data included weblog entries and comments from the inception of the weblog to the date of the IRB approval. In addition, “About Me” pages, blogrolls, personal widgets, hypertext links, static text, and the visual context of the weblogs were also included as part of the data. The findings are as follows: First, the analysis of the data revealed six main themes in regard to the nature of collective learning within the debt blogging community. These weblogs (1) distinguish levels of participation, (2) unify and commit participants, (3) remove barriers, (4) contribute to personal growth, (5) allow for personal navigation, and (6) inspire/help others. Many of these themes are founded in the communities of practice literature, but were expanded in this study to illustrate understanding in the context of a weblog as a virtual community of practice. Second, research findings indicate the main uses of debt blogs were to (1) document financial life, (2) articulate opinions, (3) reach out, (4) express self, (5) build communities, and (6) promote accountability. Each of these findings with the exception of promoting accountability has been found in the literature. Accountability has two distinct components – internal and external. The debt bloggers feel obligated to post due to their own internal sense of responsibility as well as external obligation to post due to their duty to the community. This may be unique to debt bloggers or to those who blog about a specific problem. Finally, the analysis of the data provided seven distinct roles of the commenter: (1) supporter, (2) challenger, (3) confirmer/mirror, (4) admirer, (5) seeker of information/advice, (6) provider of information/advice, and (7) connector of community. The research findings revealed insights to the complex interaction of bloggers and commenters and the technical difficulty with capturing the dynamic nature of weblogs.

A problem of non-acceptance of new information technologies becomes a predominant obstacle that results in companies’ losses and represents an arena of avid debate for researchers. Hereof this netnographic study explores changes in the individual beliefs that contribute to new information system acceptance such as autopilot in the light of the Technology Acceptance model (TAM). The research takes place within three automobile communities related to Tesla Motors and uses content analysis for its collected data. Based on the findings new influencers on individual beliefs emerge hence the research proposes to incorporate these determinants into the adopted TAM model. This study has theoretical, practical and methodological contributions.

In the #metoo movement some men were named in accusations of sexual harassment or sexual abuse. Some people compared the naming to a mob society and that was the inspiration behind this essay. The aim of this essay is to compare the namings linked to #metoo with shame punishment when it was used as a punishment method by the Swedish judicial system. The theoretical perspectives used in this study are Chantal Mouffe and Ernesto Laclau’s discourse theory and Michel Foucault’s theories about punishment and discipline. The methods used to collect the empirical material are netnography, where some discussion threads have been studied, archive studies and a survey. The intention was that there should have been more material from archives used, but since it turned out to be difficult within this time frame, the information was instead mostly found in previous studies and other literature. The material showed that there are some similarities between the naming and shame punishment, but there are also aspects that make them differ. The similarities are that they both can be seen as punishment, the shame punishment was also much about sexual offenses, shame is an aim and they have both received critic by those who think it is a cruel thing to do to someone. The differences are that the body is not a part of the namings, the shame punishments were practiced by the juridical system and that it was easier to get out of a shame punishment if a person was rich. In addition men who broke the law against any sexual intercourse outside of marriage had it easier to avoid getting caught since they were not the ones getting pregnant. In #metoo money or gender was/is not a guarantee to escape being named and/or identified as a sex-offender.