Purpose: This research explores the application of Aaker’s brand personality scale on human brands in surf sports. It investigates the potential for detecting differences in the brand personality profile used on human brands. Aaker (1997) developed a brand personality framework consisting out of five dimensions of brand personality and fifteen brand personality attributes. This framework has been used in several studies; however, it has been criticized by researchers for its lack of applicability as a general scale. This paper addresses this issue by testing all forty-two original brand personality attributes, used by Aaker, on professional surfers as human brands. A second objective was to establish an ultra-short scale for practical reasons since brand personality is often only one of several measures in a questionnaire.

Methodology: In order to determine what attributes were the most appropriate when describing a professional surfer, a web survey with a 7-point Likert scale was conducted, which resulted in a convenience sample of n=219 respondents. In this study, the author conducted principle factor analysis and compared the results of an oblique rotation with Aaker’s results in order to investigate whether Aaker’s brand personality scale provides similar results on human brands as it does on product brands.

Findings: This paper concludes that partially different facets than Aaker’s (1997) brand personality framework apply to human brands in the surf context. The more appropriate facets for human brands in the surf context include: real, wholesome, good-looking, secure, Western, and up-to-date.

Research Limitations/Implications: Further research on specific athletes in different contexts is needed. It could incorporate other brand personality scales e.g. Geuens et al. (2009), Braunstein and Ross (2010) and Tsiotsou (2012) scales.

Practical Implications: The findings of this study are useful for sports marketers to better understand athletes as human brands as well as their facets, in order to develop target positioning with specific marketing strategies.

Purpose: The article critically reflects on the issue of age in workforces in human resource management and related fields. Age is widely used by scholars to denote the entire workforce of a company. The vast remit of this concept has resulted in many ongoing debates, such as young vs. old employees, mature employees, the aging workforce, as well as various stereotypes pertaining to age in academic research.

Methodology: The paper reviews recent academic literature: articles from peer-reviewed journals, written in English, and published in 2000–2018. Keywords and elimination criteria are explained in the corresponding section.

Findings: Research in this field shows the use of inhomogeneous groups in accordance to their age, which ultimately threatens to hinder the comparability of undertaken studies in this domain.

Research implications: There exists no clear consensus regarding the age-markers or barriers used to distinguish the workforce of an organization or to form groups of employees of a given age-cluster.

Originality: This text is the first review of studies in the field, in which age has been the main criterion to distinguish workforce. The review encourages dialog among scholars from various disciplines as a way to lessen discrepant categorizations.

Purpose: This article seeks to identify the similarities and differences in the narratives of corporate histories published in different periods of time.

Methodology: This study is based on a comparative content analysis of corporate histories of three pharmaceutical plants operating under the “Polfa” Union of the Pharmaceutical Industry based in Poland.

Findings: Corporate histories change depending on the period in which a given history is published. The study reveals that corporate history depends on the nature of the state authority in power at a given time.

Research limitations and implications: This exploratory study concentrates on examination of four corporate histories and contributes to the research on the “uses of the past” in organization studies. Nevertheless, it has several limitations, including a limited number of companies included in the analysis and the adoption of a qualitative approach only.

Originality and value: This is the first article that focuses on a comparative content analysis of corporate histories published at different times in search of the similarities and differences in the domain of corporate narrative.

Purpose: The paper explores the online dialog of firms and consumers through corporate websites and social networks. The objective is to investigate the state of this dialog, its mechanisms, and outcomes in four export-oriented manufacturing companies that represent a wide spectrum of industries, including FMCG and durable goods, low-priced and expensive products, purchased with high and low involvement.

Methodology: A multiple-case study was used as the research method, with data sourced from in-depth interviews, observations, and published documents.

Findings: The findings show all managers agree that dialog with consumers is useful, they allocate resources to support it, but its intensity is underwhelming. Dialog effects were reported as positive but only as anecdotal evidence without validation in reliable data, which underscores measuring difficulties. It seems that dialog is the easiest to implement in and brings the most substantial benefits for high-involvement products but, even there, the feedback from consumers is not effectively used for developing product innovations. The major obstacle that restricts rich dialog is not technology but the intensity, speed, and quality of personal contact between employees and consumers.

Originality: The empirical material presented here offers original insights that foster a better understanding of online dialog between consumers and manufacturing companies.