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Consumption is a way of communication whereby consumers express, position or/and differentiate themselves within their society or affiliated groups. A great part of consumers’ lives are spent on various purchase activities, and many would be eager to understand the factors underlying those behaviours.

This chapter primarily deals with the cultural, social, psychological and personal factors that affect consumer behaviour. Each of these factors in relation to consumer behaviour is discussed in detail. The types of consumer buying behaviours and the consumer decision-making processes then provide the fundamentals of the topic along with their relevance to Turkish consumers.

Many studies, motivated by concerns for activity-based costing (ABC) implementation efforts being less than successful, have suggested that the lack of success in this area stems more from behavioral, as opposed to technical, factors. This concern for the behavioral aspects of systems implementation has also emerged from much of the more general information systems research examining determinants of implementation success. Accordingly, the purpose of this study is to determine if a popular process theory of motivation, expectancy theory, would be useful in explaining the motivation of managers to incorporate ABC information into their job. Data obtained from two experiments employing a judgment modeling methodology support the relevance of both the valence and force models of expectancy theory in this context. Further, the judgments provided by the subject managers suggest they perceive improved product cost accuracy as the most beneficial outcome of ABC use, followed by an equivalent appreciation for both an enhanced ability to communicate the underlying economics of the firm and to identify non-value-added activities. Additionally, subject managers exhibited a greater concern for the possibility that obtaining the data to maintain the ABC system would be difficult and costly than they did for concerns that the ABC information would increase the level of complexity of the information that they use.

We examine the interactive effects of organizational culture and structure on the success of implementing activity-based costing (ABC) in Chinese manufacturing firms.

We applied contingency theory of management accounting and used a questionnaire survey of 106 respondents.

The results indicate that a formalized organizational structure significantly affects the success of implementing ABC. The organizational culture factors, outcome orientation and attention to detail, were significantly associated with the success of implementing ABC. Further, interactions between centralization and outcome orientation and formalization and innovation were associated with success in implementing ABC.

While this study is constrained to Chinese manufacturing firms, its findings have ramifications for organizations in both developed and less-developed economies as the study demonstrated that organizational structure and culture interact with each other to affect the implementation success of a management accounting system.

This paper presents the first attempt to demonstrate the interactive effect of organizational culture and structure on the success of implementing ABC in organizations.

This chapter reports on a longitudinal quasi-experimental field study within an organizational design of a global consumer products manufacturer moving toward high-performance work systems (HPWSs) in North America by integrating business centers and self-directed work teams (SDWTs) coupled with 13 other action-levers within an integrated and bundled high-performance organizations (HPOs) re-design. The results of this organizational design effort are assessed using different types and levels of organizational outcomes (hard record data, behavioral, and attitudinal measures) along a 5-year temporal dimension punctuated by multiple time periods (baseline, during, and after). The organization, which was “built to change” (Lawler & Worley, 2006), in this research had already highly superior or “exemplar” (Collins, 2001) levels of organizational performance. Consequently, the real research question becomes: “What effect does state of the art organizational design and development have on an exemplar organization?” The study also calls into question the field's ability to truly assess exemplar organizations with existing measures of organizational change and development.

Multinational corporations (MNCs) are converging world cultures by creating common consumer lifestyles across countries through standardized products. However, little is known about how consumers’ exposure to foreign cultures affects their purchase experience from the country. This study explores this gap in the literature by investigating how consumers’ exposure to foreign cultural source (e.g., entertainment) shapes their attitude toward its country. This attitude is conceptualized to influence the perceived product quality and corporate ability of the country’s MNCs, which are further hypothesized to influence consumers’ purchase experience with products offered by the MNCs. Furthermore, the impact of product quality and corporate ability on consumer purchase experience is expected to be moderated by consumer ethnocentrism. The study framework is tested in the context of the Korean Wave (or “Hallyu”) using data consisting of 533 Indonesian consumers. The results support most of the study hypotheses. Theoretical and managerial implications of these findings are discussed.

Smart card-based E-payment systems are receiving increasing attention as the number of implementations is witnessed on the rise globally. Understanding of user adoption behavior of E-payment systems that employ smart card technology becomes a research area that is of particular value and interest to both IS researchers and professionals. However, research interest focuses mostly on why a smart card-based E-payment system results in a failure or how the system could have grown into a success. This signals the fact that researchers have not had much opportunity to critically review a smart card-based E-payment system that has gained wide support and overcome the hurdle of critical mass adoption. The Octopus in Hong Kong has provided a rare opportunity for investigating smart card-based E-payment system because of its unprecedented success. This research seeks to thoroughly analyze the Octopus from technology adoption behavior perspectives.

Cultural impacts on adoption behavior are one of the key areas that this research posits to investigate. Since the present research is conducted in Hong Kong where a majority of population is Chinese ethnicity and yet is westernized in a number of aspects, assuming that users in Hong Kong are characterized by eastern or western culture is less useful. Explicit cultural characteristics at individual level are tapped into here instead of applying generalization of cultural beliefs to users to more accurately reflect cultural bias. In this vein, the technology acceptance model (TAM) is adapted, extended, and tested for its applicability cross-culturally in Hong Kong on the Octopus. Four cultural dimensions developed by Hofstede are included in this study, namely uncertainty avoidance, masculinity, individualism, and Confucian Dynamism (long-term orientation), to explore their influence on usage behavior through the mediation of perceived usefulness.

TAM is also integrated with the innovation diffusion theory (IDT) to borrow two constructs in relation to innovative characteristics, namely relative advantage and compatibility, in order to enhance the explanatory power of the proposed research model. Besides, the normative accountability of the research model is strengthened by embracing two social influences, namely subjective norm and image. As the last antecedent to perceived usefulness, prior experience serves to bring in the time variation factor to allow level of prior experience to exert both direct and moderating effects on perceived usefulness.

The resulting research model is analyzed by partial least squares (PLS)-based Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) approach. The research findings reveal that all cultural dimensions demonstrate direct effect on perceived usefulness though the influence of uncertainty avoidance is found marginally significant. Other constructs on innovative characteristics and social influences are validated to be significant as hypothesized. Prior experience does indeed significantly moderate the two influences that perceived usefulness receives from relative advantage and compatibility, respectively. The research model has demonstrated convincing explanatory power and so may be employed for further studies in other contexts. In particular, cultural effects play a key role in contributing to the uniqueness of the model, enabling it to be an effective tool to help critically understand increasingly internationalized IS system development and implementation efforts. This research also suggests several practical implications in view of the findings that could better inform managerial decisions for designing, implementing, or promoting smart card-based E-payment system.

The purpose of this chapter is to explore the interaction between access-based consumption (ABC) and consumer culture in the specific context of baby products, and connect the two streams of consumer research and design theory, by associating ABC with product service systems (PSS) which are seen as desirable as they offer a promise of sustainability.

Within an action research approach consisting of the establishment of a pilot service provision, we conducted ethnographies including in-depth interviews and focus groups.

The adoption of access-based provisions is constrained by low compatibility with consumer culture. Consumers are concerned with the provision’s ability to satisfy their needs, what this mode of consumption says about them, and the extent to which it associates them with communities of practice.

The limitations are the typical ones of action research, which is linked to a unique, researcher-generated context where the researcher is also a participant, and therefore are difficult to generalize.

The large-scale implementation of PSS underpinning ABC is problematic as it challenges consumers’ needs for self-expression and affiliation; however, we found that consumers in this specific context are responsive to the environmental efficiency of PSS.

Our research explores the intersection between consumer research and design, and consumers’ response to sustainable business models which underpin ABC.

Behavioral economics poses a challenge for the welfare evaluation of choices, particularly those that involve risk. It demands that we recognize that the descriptive account of behavior toward those choices might not be the ones we were all taught, and still teach, and that subjective risk perceptions might not accord with expert assessments of probabilities. In addition to these challenges, we are faced with the need to jettison naive notions of revealed preferences, according to which every choice by a subject expresses her objective function, as behavioral evidence forces us to confront pervasive inconsistencies and noise in a typical individual’s choice data. A principled account of errant choice must be built into models used for identification and estimation. These challenges demand close attention to the methodological claims often used to justify policy interventions. They also require, we argue, closer attention by economists to relevant contributions from cognitive science. We propose that a quantitative application of the “intentional stance” of Dennett provides a coherent, attractive and general approach to behavioral welfare economics.