For the eigth time the NRWC was arranged by the Nordic Retail and Wholesale Association, this time at Tampere University. NRWC is a science conference with focus on retail and this year was attended by over 100 researchers presenting 80 different submissions. The aim for this years conference was ”Retail Metamorphosis – How Retailing Reconfigures Itself for the Future”.
Kristina Bäckström, senior lecturer at the department of service management and service studies was granted the Best paper award for her ”New technology and in-store service encounters: An analysis of work experiences and coping behaviors among frontline employees.”
– The paper is focused on new technology and service encounters, exploring how frontline employees cope with and experience the challenges which new in-store technology may involve, Kristina Bäckström said.
Christian Fuentes, Emma Samsioe and Carin Rehncrona also attended the conference to present their research. The whole group is a part of the research group Consumption, Marketing and Retail, which studies how consumers and trade deal with the challenges posed by a constantly changing environment.
About NRWA and NRWC
The Nordic Retail and Wholesale Association, NRWA, is an academic research network initiated and funded by the Swedish Retail and Wholesale Council and the Hakon Swenson Foundation. Every other year the NRWA together with local organizers arrange a research conference, NRWC, to create a broad meeting point for researchers within retail and wholesale to exchange ideas and inspire each other. NRWC 2022 took place at Tempere University in Finland, 8th to 10th of November.
About the research theme Consumption, Marketing and Retail
Trade and consumption play an essential role in many people’s lives. They stand for both identity and self-realisation, but also lay the foundation for many people’s livelihood. To understand the role of retail in society – and give it the opportunity to grow in a sustainable way – requires an understanding of how consumption shapes the individual and vice versa. Green consumption, digital consumption culture and the role of physical stores for the consumers of tomorrow are some examples of the research areas at the Department of Service Management and Service Studies. Here, there is collaboration between researchers from a variety of disciplines such as business administration, ethnology and cultural geography. In the research, sustainability issues are a common thread and the flow of goods, services and new technologies are the starting point.
