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23 pages, 1406 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Harnessing Community Value Co-Creation: Reactivating an External Operant Actor’s Sense of Self-Improvement

by Peter R. J. Trim and Yang-Im Lee

Businesses 2025, 5(1), 14; https://doi.org/10.3390/businesses5010014 - 19 Mar 2025

Viewed by 844

Since COVID-19, there has been an increase in the utilization of food banks owing to a number of factors, including a reduction in household income due to job losses and an increase in the cost of living, which has affected people on low incomes. In this paper, we explain how people that are in need of assistance and have limited knowledge of service provision can be remotivated through regaining their self-esteem. This is achieved through various forms of intervention. By adopting a metaphorical approach, we conceptually explore how intervention provided by a social inclusion community center stimulates recipients to re-ignite their desire for self-improvement. This is achieved through an analogy made, comparing a Formula 1 motor racing team servicing a car during a pit-stop and a person (recipient) in need of food visiting a food bank to collect a food parcel. Based on a conceptual analysis, we propose a framework outlining the interactional process involving the social inclusion community center staff and a recipient, whereby the recipient becomes, through empowerment, an external operant actor and resource integrator for the social inclusion community center. This is achieved through a circular value co-creation process. Through the circular motion of the value co-creation, an external operant actor regains self-confidence due to gaining a sense of belonging and feeling inspired to contribute to the community they are associated with. Full article

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18 pages, 281 KiB

Open AccessArticle

How a Metaphor Inspired by Formula 1 Motor Racing Can Help Enhance the Work of a Social Inclusion Community Center

by Peter R. J. Trim and Yang-Im Lee

Businesses 2024, 4(4), 865-882; https://doi.org/10.3390/businesses4040047 - 10 Dec 2024

Cited by 1 | Viewed by 1159

Abstract

Not-for-profit organizations provide a range of services that satisfy the needs of individuals and help a community to be sustainable. To explain how staff based at a social inclusion community center contribute to social impact, we undertake a case study and incorporate the stakeholder approach that draws on the activities of Pembroke House in south London. Pembroke House engages in social action and provides a number of services considered beneficial to the local community it serves. By adopting this approach, we place emphasis on how the value co-creation concept, which is reinforced by the social marketing approach, helps staff to provide different forms of intervention that ultimately give rise to trust-based relationships involving those providing the service and those receiving the service. To explain this, we make an analogy between a Formula 1 motor racing team servicing a car during a pit-stop while competing in a grand prix and a vulnerable person who visits a food bank seeking assistance in the form of a food parcel. Through the process of drawing on the use of metaphors and making a link with Formula 1 motor racing, we elucidate the value co-creation process and reveal how the social impact provision provided by Pembroke House can be intensified through the deployment of the stakeholder approach, which gives rise to a social inclusion community center partnership framework. Full article

15 pages, 285 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Eating the [M]Other: Exploring Swedish Adoption Consumption Fantasies

by Richey Wyver

Genealogy 2019, 3(3), 47; https://doi.org/10.3390/genealogy3030047 - 4 Sep 2019

Cited by 7 | Viewed by 9420

Abstract

Drawing on bell hooks’ classic essay Eating the Other: Desire and Resistance, this article discusses ethnic consumption fantasies of white Swedish international adopters. The article uses deconstructive narrative analysis techniques to explore racial desires concealed and revealed in adopters’ descriptions of international transracial adoptee bodies in published Swedish adoption texts. Taking the use of food race metaphors (for example, almond eyes, chocolate skin) as a “positive” means of describing race differences in a supposedly post-race, colour-blind discourse as a starting point, the article discusses how ethnic consumption desires are reflective of white adopter fantasies of becoming something more than white Swedish, and even a bit “Other” themselves. The symbolic consumption of both the adoptee and the first mother enable the adopter to imagine internalising a spirit of primordial Otherness, which can fundamentally change them and enable them to step outside the confines of Swedish whiteness. It also gives them a claim to a connection with the adoptee that goes beyond biology. While the desire to consume the adoptee-Other body is imagined as progressive and anti-racist, this paper argues that such fantasies are dependent on maintaining and reinforcing the status quo of the white supremacist patriarchal structures that enable international adoption in the first place. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Genealogies of Inequality: Transnational Adoption and Kinship in the Era of Globalisation)

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