This study elaborates on the concept of loyalty. Strategic work to increase loyalty such as loyalty programs is increasingly being questioned. Using a relational perspective, viewing loyalty as an ongoing process of social exchanges, the paradoxical relationship between loyalty strategies and customer loyalty is underlined. The empirical data comprised qualitative interviews with eight key managers in Swedish retail companies. The result shows that loyalty programs foster rational shopping behaviours, misinterpreted by the retailers as loyalty. Thus, the concrete nature of loyalty pro-grams make the customers less loyal only returning the concrete resources given. Particular resources will not be given by customers if none are offered by retailers. From the perspective of social exchanges, a shift from tangible rewards to forming meaningful emotional bonds is needed in order to achieve customer loyalty.

When the corona pandemic began in early 2020, universities as well as other sectors in society, were profoundly affected. Higher education was expected to continue to work as usual, except that everything should be conducted digitally. In this crisis, teachers received a “carte blanche” from management to handle the situation in any way they found appropriate (Hjelm-Lidholm, Mauléon, Müllern & Solli, 2021). However, the support functions at the universities (student support, administrators, university management) did not show the same ability to adapt to the crisis. Our study (Hjelm-Lidholm, Mauléon, Müllern & Solli, 2021) shows that although teachers acknowledged how they were the ones who had the know-how of handling the dramatic shift from on-site teaching to off-site teaching they felt they weren’t provided with appropriate support in order to being able to conduct this transformation in an efficient way (Hjelm-Lidholm, Mauléon, Müllern & Solli, 2021). The lack of appropriate support from management and other support functions made the dramatic shift in many cases challenging for the teachers. One teacher described it as laying out the rails whilst the train was moving (Hjelm-Lidholm, Mauléon, Müllern & Solli, 2021). In these occasions teachers turned to their closest colleagues to find support in the often chaotic situation. What is interesting here is how we found that the strong bureaucratic governance of universities (as well as other public institutions) were either not prepared or appropriate for handling the crisis. The bureaucratic governance system, we found, rather obstructed than supported the crisis driven digital transformation of teaching from on-site to off-site.

This paper allows for broader reflections on how professionals interact with managers in times of crisis, but also on the role of digitalization in the continued change and development of universities. It is our hope that this paper will spark a debate on the role of university teachers (professionals) in the strategic management of universities, considering the clear trend towards increased centralization and bureaucratization.

Sveriges universitet och högskolor har sakta men säkert utvecklat en byråkratisk linjestyrning, där den professionsstyrda, kollegiala styrningen har fått stryka på foten. Här följer lärosätena en större managementtrend som är både synlig och bekymmersam.

In the fast moving consumer goods (FMCG) market much of the customer loyalty operations are carried out with a short-term perspective, which often result in weak customer loyalty. Besides this, the one-sided view of customer loyalty and how to work with customer relationships, further adds to the challenges and there is a need to promote new insights and practices into customer loyalty in FMCG markets. In an attempt to broaden the view of customer loyalty, the authors take an organizational human resource perspective and present a conceptual framework and model built on human resource literature. Many companies face the exact challenge with high employee turnover, as it is associated with costs of recruiting and training, suggesting that customer loyalty becomes a question of organizing the customer as an external human resource. A practical contribution with the conceptual model is the suggestion to learn from the experiences of successful employee recruitment, and employee motivation, when viewing and working with customer loyalty.

This paper presents a Swedish case study focusing on online shopping and impulse purchases of fashion. The paper contributes by bringing new light on the bored-state-of-mind's importance in impulse shopping, and provides insights for further research to examine the topic on a greater scale. Results reveal that young con- sumers’ impulse purchases of fashion items online are often motivated by boredom, and described in two di- mensions: 1) Consumers are often responding to triggers that can break monotony and 2) Boredom occurs in a contextualized totality. When consumers are bored they are easily triggered by stimulus like price, easy access, and free delivery, and it is perceived as easy to click the boredom away. It is suggested that retailers choose a strategy based on customer value and satisfaction, as there is a lot to win by stepping away from price com- petition and instead satisfy customers by providing an opportunity to become less bored.

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We are witnessing the beginning of a seismic shift in retail due to digitalization. However, what is meant by digitalization is less clear. Sometimes it is understood as means for automatization and sometimes it is regarded as equal to e-commerce. Sometimes digitalization is considered being both automatization and e-commerce trough new technology. In recent years there has been an increase in Internet and mobile devise usage within the retail sector and e-commerce is growing, encompassing both large and small retailers. Digital tools such as, new applications are developing rapidly in order to search for information about products based on price, health, environmental and ethical considerations, and also to facilitate payments. Also the fixed store settings are changing due to digitalization and at an overall level; digitalization will lead to existing business models being reviewed, challenged and ultimately changed. More specifically, digitalization has consequences for all parts of the physical stores including customer interface, knowledge creation, sustainability performance and logistics. As with all major shifts, digitalization comprises both opportunities and challenges for retail firms and employees, and these needs to be empirically studied and systematically analysed. The Swedish Institute for Innovative Retailing at University of Borås is a research centre with the aim of identifying and analysing emerging trends that digitalization brings for the retail industry.

The subject of this thesis is the implementation of e-commerce as a technical and commercial strategy of a mail order company. The study is longitudinal and mainly performed with interviews and observations during 2001 and 2009. I have analyzed the material with the help of translation theory and with an emphasis on Callon (1986). The study revealed that the mail order company over time changed the way e-commerce was looked upon and thereby also the way that the company should organize. I identified six different definitions of e-commerce which sequentially replaced one another as the idea that was to be translated in the company. In the beginning of the translating process the idea with e-commerce was identified as mainly technical, but that changed over time and thereafter mainly became a commercial idea about trade. This meant that focus shifted and that the persons involved in translating e-commerce also became more closely linked to the market and the customers. The e-commerce site was then defined as a shop or a warehouse and thereby became connected with familiar physical places and not with abstract digital and technical places such as cyberspace where sites are offline or online. At the end of the study e-commerce tended to be defined as an opportunity for customers to shop together and thereby being social on an interactive media. This meant that the customers contributed in defining new boundaries for the company, boundaries that included the customers since they now could interact with each other as well as with the company on the web site. The idea with e-commerce was thereby translated several times in the company during the time of the study. The translation process was bewildering for the company and meant at the end of the study that it identified itself as an e-commerce company and not as a mail order company, partly due to that 60% of the customer orders were then laid over the Internet. Another reason was that mail order was considered out of date and that e-commerce was and is the main channel for distance shopping today at the studied company.