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Methodological pluralism in consumer research is usually confined to post‐positivist interpretive approaches. Argues, however, that a positivistic stance, radical behaviourism, can enrich epistemological debate among researchers with the recognition of radical behaviourism′s ultimate reliance on interpretation as well as science. Although radical behaviourist explanation was initially founded on Machian positivism, its account of complex social behaviours such as purchase and consumption is necessarily interpretive, inviting comparison with the hermeneutical approaches currently emerging in consumer research. Radical behaviourist interpretation attributes meaning to behaviour by identifying its environmental determinants, especially the learning history of the individual in relation to the consequences similar prior behaviour has effected. The nature of such interpretation is demonstrated for purchase and consumption responses by means of a critique of radical behaviourism as applied to complex human activity. In the process, develops and applies a framework for radical behaviourist interpretation of purchase and consumption to four operant equifinality classes of consumer behaviour: accomplishment, pleasure, accumulation and maintenance. Some epistemological implications of this framework, the behavioural perspective model (BPM) of purchase and consumption, are discussed in the context of the relativity and incommensurability of research paradigms. Finally, evaluates the interpretive approach, particularly in terms of its relevance to the nature and understanding of managerial marketing.

The assumption of free will in contemporary economics is an important starting point for socio‐economic analysis in contrast to methodologies which assume that human action is pre‐determined by forces beyond individual control. However, contemporary economic theory is devoid of choice in critical domains with important implication for economic analyses and public policy, given the ancillary assumption of the importance of market forces in determining choice behavior. The purpose of this paper is to argue that freedom of choice exists given traditional constraints such as relative prices and income.

This is a theoretical paper examining the assumption of free will in choice behaviour in economic theory. It makes reference to literature in economics and philosophy that shed light on this critical working assumption in economics.

Conventional analysis pays little heed to non economic constraints on human action that affect and delimit but do not preclude free choice or free will. Of vital importance to free will in choice behavior are institutions which delimit the extent of coercion in the decision‐making process.

An important implication for research is the determination of the necessary and sufficient conditions for the existence of free will in choice behaviour. Given the existence of free will and free choice, individuals are morally responsible for their choices. It is therefore important to determine the extent which free will exists and that which constrains free will in choice behaviour.

This paper challenges the extremes of the free will debate in economics and suggests the boundaries within which free will exists in economic behaviour. It also suggests the welfare implications of limitations on free will where no negative externalities exist.

This paper aims to survey literature on behavioral economics and finance, with particular emphasis on a selection of models, methods and tools that this strand of thought uses to approach and explain observable phenomena.

After a brief discussion on the meaning and context of behavioral economics, the manuscript identifies five topics of special interest: time preference, heuristics, emotions, finance and macro behavior. For each of these topics, relevant models, methods and tools are identified and scrutinized.

Behavioral economics and finance establish an effective bridge between orthodox economic thinking and new and revolutionary methods of analysis. Exploring the intricacies of human behavior can frequently be done by adapting the trivial and conventional intertemporal utility maximization models that economists insistently resort to, but to fully grasp such intricacies, a step forward is required. Agent-based models and other tools from complexity sciences constitute the analytical arsenal that is needed to improve our understanding of how behavioral issues attach to heterogeneity, local interaction, path-dependence, out-of-equilibrium dynamics and emergence.

Although surveys on behavioral economics and finance abound in the specialized literature, this study has the peculiarity of emphasizing five relevant topics that are particularly illustrative of the pivotal role of behavioral science in promoting the transition from the strict neoclassical perspective to a less mechanic and more organic view of economics and finance.

Offices have always been complex social systems. With the growth of office automation they will have to be recognized as socio‐technical systems. The problems of prediction of consequences of change — in particular, technological change — in such systems are examined in some length and the limitations of causal analysis noted. A distinction between causal and hermeneutic modes of prediction is drawn. Hermeneutic modes of prediction are advocated as necessary in addition to predictions based on causal models in order to overcome the shortcomings of the latter. The results of a hermeneutic predictive exercise are reported which shed some light on the possible impact of future technological change in the office.

The latest developments in Data Science and in advanced Scientometrics set a very challenging context for the analysis and the understanding of human behavior toward the design of value adding library services and sophisticated information systems. The purpose of this paper is to present an innovative research that integrates the creation and the consumption of scientific knowledge across regions. From a human behavior point of view, this is significant since it provides an advanced decision-making layer for bringing together researchers from all over the world.

More specific in this paper, the authors analyze the production and consumption of scientific knowledge across the regions in an important field of sustainable and renewable energy – using publications and citations data indexed in Scopus. As a case study, the authors select the USA a major producer of scientific publications in the field. At first, the authors identify the topics produced by the USA. Further topics produced by the scientific communities outside the USA that consume the knowledge produced by the USA are identified. The authors generate topics by employing the proposed topic model with distance matrix – an extension of classic latent Dirichlet allocation model.

The results show that research topics produced by the USA are consumed in different international contexts, interestingly. Consuming the knowledge produced by the USA, Chinese scientific community heavily produces topics related to biomass – to produce renewable energy. In contrast, Japanese scientific community produces topics related to fuel cell – used for the production of hybrid and electronic vehicles. Whereas the Taiwanese scientific community shows remarkable competency in solar cells. Among the European nations, while the German scientific community produces topics related to photovoltaic, the French scientific community covers topics related to Energy Storage and Green Chemistry. The authors believe that such analyses may be helpful in establishing more effective multi-national research collaborations by understating the actual consumption of produced knowledge.

Overall, the study provides a new dimension to comprehensively understand production and consumption of knowledge using scientific literature. From a human behavior analysis view in the context of sophisticated library systems, this is a significant contribution.

The use of advanced Data Mining and computing methods for deriving critical insights for the use of scientific knowledge is a bold action toward the global knowledge society vision.

Leadership educators seek to understand how they can better develop leadership among their students through formal and informal course experiences. The purpose of this study was to understand how undergraduate students perceive reasons for changes in their leadership practices, after completing a personal leadership education course. The course focused on the five exemplary practices of college students. As part of the course, students completed the Student Leadership Practices Inventory (S-LPI) as a pre and post assessment. A qualitative content analysis of 107 undergraduate student reflections from multiple sections of a leadership course was conducted to examine students’ perceptions of what influenced their change in scores on the S-LPI assessment. Students perceived that the curricular, co-curricular, and extracurricular activities of the course (including the high-impact service-learning project) affected their change in score for the leadership behavior(s) they intended to focus on throughout the semester. Students whose scores did not increase for the leadership behavior they chose to focus on still experienced leadership growth and development but attributed their growth to different items: their growth was in a different leadership behavior than intended or they developed a greater understanding of the five practices which affected their self-assessed score.

The main purpose of this research is to achieve the evacuation strategy of people in high-rise office buildings. This purpose is achieved by identifying the individuals' behaviors during a fire accident and the relationship between these behaviors and their risk perception.

The method of this study is mixed-methods type. The first stage was carried out using the qualitative method and descriptive phenomenology and the analyses were done using the Colaizzi method, and the second stage was carried out using the quantitative method of field descriptive survey type whose analyses were conducted through SPSS software.

The results reveal that the individuals attempting evacuation from the upper floors above the fire level were mostly injured and the ones who remained in the building and got help from fire fighters were rescued. At the end, the study goes on to suggest the stay-in-place approach with regards to the behaviors formed in individuals, closed plan of architectural design, lack of suitable fire extinguishers as well as inappropriate individual trainings.

Lack of similar research in the field of fire in Iran caused bottlenecks such as lack of cooperation of relevant organizations in the path of the research. Another factor that limited the present research was the determination of people trapped in fire. In this case, those who were present in the incident had to be chosen and the questionnaire was completed based on their opinions. This limited the research for reasons such as the relocation of some people from buildings or their death.

The practical results of this research can be used in reviewing the rules and regulations of high-rise building fire code. By properly compiling the regulations of high-rise building codes based on this research, human injuries in fire hazards can be greatly prevented. Due to the collapse of the Plasco building in Iran and the creation of inappropriate memories in the minds of people of high-rise buildings, with the construction of buildings based on the rules and regulations in accordance with the fire code, the construction market as well as the sale and purchase of such buildings will flourish and numerous financial and job turnovers are created in the field of this type of buildings.

This study is innovative in determining appropriate evacuation strategy that are related to the individuals' risk perception in high-rise buildings, as well as achieving results to review the rules and regulations of high-rise office buildings based on the high-rise building fire code.

The most significant event for the School has been the announcement of the creation of the National Centre for Management Research and Development. The Centre is due to open in 1986 and will provide research facilities for up to 20 major projects designed to improve the competitiveness of Canadian business practices.

In the domain of information science, affordance is a relatively new concept that deserves further exploration. It may serve as a bridge to narrow the research-practice gap that has persisted in information studies. Building upon previous research, we call for a broader concept of affordance that would help researchers understand information practices from an ecological perspective.

The study focuses on conceptualizing affordances for information practices in order to theorize engagement among people, technology, and sociocultural environments. We develop a hierarchical model and a component model to illustrate how key tenets of affordances can be linked with the decomposition of activities and its mechanism. Following this, we describe an illustrative case of a popular Chinese cloud-based music platform to demonstrate the utility of our conceptual frameworks in guiding studies of information practices.

The study proposes to shift the focus of technology affordances, which highlights the features and functions of particular technologies, to the affordances for practices that are enacted through technology and social construction within a sociocultural environment. The illustrative case of the cloud-based music platform shows that the proposed models can provide a structured view of operations, actions and motives for music information practices. The processes of internalization and externalization offer insight into the decomposition of information practice as a chain of activity-action-operation.

This study contributes to the literature on theorizing engagement among people, technology and sociocultural environments through the theoretical lens of affordances and sheds new light on the challenges of information practice.

Explicates and analyses selected economic methodologies: praxeology, positivism and institutionalism. Praxeology is a rationalistic methodology which utilizes deductive logic to deduce conclusions concerning economic behavior from postulates, which are self‐evident truths, but praxeologists deny that empirical verification is either necessary or desirable. Positivism is a methodology which combines deductive rationalism as a method of deriving substantive hypotheses and inductive empiricism as a method of verifying these hypotheses. Institutionalism is a pragmatic methodology which is based on an empirical epistemology and which utilizes inductive logic to formulate economic policy and to solve practical problems. Concludes that institutionalism is more empirically relevant than either praxeology or positivism, and that, therefore, institutionalism is superior to the other methodologies.