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The purpose of this article is to (1) map the most important topics in the domain of sustainable business practices for entrepreneurial firms in emerging countries, (2) identify important terms in the various dimensions of sustainability in business and (3) identify the important practices and prioritize the practices.

This study has adopted a unique methodology that combines state-of-art scientometric analysis with the fuzzy nominal group technique (NGT) and fuzzy decision-making trial and evaluation laboratory (DEMATEL). Results obtained from the co-occurrence analysis in scientometrics were further mapped through NGT to obtain the list of the most important topics in the domain. The factors affecting sustainable business practices obtained through topic mapping were analyzed through fuzzy DEMATEL to obtain the cause-and-effect relation of variables.

The scale of firms, leadership, uncertainty, gender, country/location, education and tourism were found to be the factors affecting the sustainable business practices of entrepreneurial firms. The sustainable business practices for entrepreneurial firms were (1) innovation, (2) resilience, (3) policy, (4) business ethics and virtue ethics, (5) business model, (6) upcycling and value creation, (7) collaboration and (8) triple bottom line.

Policymakers in entrepreneurial firms, as well as other organizations, can implement the identified sustainable business practices to obtain optimum results and smooth functioning of the companies. The research framework obtained can be tested using exploratory methods.

Very few researchers have used the technique of scientometric analysis to identify the sustainable business practices of entrepreneurial firms, and to the best of the knowledge of the authors, no earlier researcher has attempted to use the technique of topic mapping, fuzzy NGT and fuzzy DEMATEL in combination.

The purpose of this paper is to develop an integrated model to represent how service experience (core, employee and service scale), customer satisfaction (transaction-specific and cumulative) and brand affinity influence brand equity in financial services, taking into account the moderating influence of financial service providers.

Data were collected from 751 customers in three types of financial service providers (banks, insurance companies and credit unions), and analyzed with structural equation modeling and multi-group analysis.

The findings confirm the significant and positive influence of service experience, customer satisfaction and brand affinity on brand equity. Employee service experience has the strongest influence, but its impact is mediated by customer satisfaction. Brand affinity has the lowest influence on brand equity. The type of financial service provider moderates the influence of customer satisfaction on brand equity; transactional satisfaction is more important for credit unions and insurance companies, but cumulative satisfaction is higher for banks.

The study is significant for three reasons. First, it reconciles branding strategies across different types of financial service providers. Second, it will help financial managers to develop and implement a more integrated approach toward building brand equity for financial service brands. Finally, it will identify specific service-related areas financial providers can target to increase customers’ preferential value.

The paper addresses previous concerns within brand equity studies by examining the drivers of brand equity formation in multiple financial institutions. It shows how different aspects of service experience and customer satisfaction affect brand affinity and preferential attitudes toward financial brands.

This study aims to investigate how the social identity theory and emotional attachment theory influence the willingness of consumers to buy foreign cosmetic products. Specifically, this study examines the relationship between consumer ethnocentrism, foreign product judgment and willingness to buy foreign products. Furthermore, the interaction effect of consumer affinity and patriotism are tested in the model.

An online survey of 208 millennial Muslim women consumers was used to collect the data. The structural equation modeling test was used to assess the six hypotheses. Moreover, the two-step estimation approach was used to test the interaction moderation of consumer affinity and patriotism.

The results indicate that consumer ethnocentrism has a positive and significant relationship with foreign product judgment. Foreign product judgment was also found to have a positive and significant relationship with willingness to buy. In addition, this study concludes that affinity was found to moderate the relationship between consumer ethnocentrism and foreign product judgment and strengthen the positive and significant effect of foreign product judgment on the willingness to buy. Finally, patriotism did not moderate the relationship between consumer ethnocentrism and foreign product judgment. However, patriotism moderated the relationship between foreign product judgment and willingness to buy.

This study only focused on one category (i.e. low involvement product), and the authors recommend future studies to examine a high involvement product. Other individual orientation constructs, such as xenocentrism, need to be examined in future studies. Moreover, only intentional measures were investigated. Thus, further research could correlate intentional measures with product ownership. Finally, future research could examine how consumers behave differently across nations. Thus, the present model would require cross-cultural research.

Marketers focusing on global branding and international marketing can benefit from the findings of this paper by understanding the antecedents of consumers’ willingness to buy in the foreign cosmetic products setting. Additionally, foreign cosmetic marketers could focus on consumer affinity to strengthen the communication with and arouse the affinity of Muslim millennials women consumers in Indonesia. Finally, marketers can incorporate messages and signals of patriotism in their marketing communications to increase Muslim millennial women consumers’ love and pride.

The growing obsession with beauty among women has led to the immense growth of the cosmetics industry. This phenomenon has spawned an abundance of cosmetic products on the market. The advancement of information technology has further increased competition for cosmetic products as more products can be quickly brought to market. Muslim millennials consumers must be aware and careful about raw materials, impacts on long-term health, impacts on the national economy, environmental impacts and halal certification when using various kinds of cosmetics.

This study contributes to the literature on international marketing research by incorporating the interactive effect of consumer affinity and patriotism in the acceptance of foreign cosmetic products.

This forwards a new version of a tool long used in planned change and organizational development efforts – force field analysis. Existing applications of this technique are critiqued in light of cognitive heuristics known to erode judgment and analytical performance in plan development. A cognitive prompting template is combined with the existing the force field analysis technique to mitigate these problems. As such, the revised technique represents a significant improvement over the traditional application of the force field tool as used by the OD practitioner. Following an overview of the theoretical underpinnings of the revised technique, a case example is offered to illustrate the technique as it was used in a real organization. Finally, practical facilitation guidelines are offered to help leaders and planners conduct force field analysis sessions in multi‐stakeholder change efforts.

The purpose of this paper is to add to the analytic toolkit of public sector practitioners by outlining a framework called Public Value Process Mapping (PVPM). This approach is designed to be more comprehensive than extant frameworks in either the private or public sectors, encapsulating multiple dimensions of productive processes.

This paper explores the public administration and management literature to identify the major frameworks for visualising complex systems or processes, and a series of dimensions against which they can be compared. It then puts forward a more comprehensive framework – PVPM – and demonstrates its possible use with the example of Indigenous child nutrition in remote Australia. The benefits and limitations of the technique are then considered.

First, extant process mapping frameworks each have some but not all of the features necessary to encompass certain dimensions of generic or public sector processes, such as: service-dominant logic; external as well internal providers; public and private value; and state coercive power. Second, PVPM can encompass the various dimensions more comprehensively, enabling visualisation of both the big picture and the fine detail of public value-creating processes. Third, PVPM has benefits – such as helping unearth opportunities or culprits affecting processes – as well as limitations – such as demonstrating causation and delineating the boundaries of maps.

PVPM has a number of uses for policy analysts and public managers: it keeps the focus on outcomes; it can unearth a variety of processes and actors, some of them not immediately obvious; it can help to identify key processes and actors; it can help to identify the “real” culprits behind negative outcomes; and it highlights situations where multiple causes are at work.

This approach, which draws on a number of precursors but constitutes a novel technique in the public sector context, enables the identification and to some extent the comprehension of a broader range of causal factors and actors. This heightens the possibility of imagining innovative solutions to difficult public policy issues, and alternative ways of delivering public services.

For many years the analysis of contaminant residues on PWB surfaces has been of major importance to the industry. While the identification of residues left on metallic surfaces has proven to be relatively straightforward, the analysis of organic contamination of similar composition to that of the underlying board surface has not been as successful. Through the use of modern XPS instrumentation, the non‐ionic component of water soluble flux has been identified and differentiated from the chemically similar FR‐4 and soldermask substrates. This paper presents the XPS results for a series of experiments aimed at determining the location and relative concentration of water soluble flux residues on standard surface insulation resistance (SIR) comb patterns. The data show that the water soluble flux residue is not present as a uniform coating on the board surface but appears in localised sites in high concentrations while being absent in other locations. Through more aggressive cleaning procedures the sites of high residue concentration can be significantly reduced.

This paper aims to ascertain Indian consumers’ corporate social responsibility (CSR) perceptions; an affinity for stipulated causes and perceived fit between cause and industry in the current mandatory CSR era in India.

Primary data was collected through an online survey from 1,251 consumers via quota sampling and snowballing, across 36 Indian cities.

The findings indicate no skepticism, positive CSR support and company evaluation. Indian consumers have the greatest affinity for environmental protection. Segments of socially, environmentally and culturally conscious consumers were found. Under quasi-experimental conditions of CSR fit and cause-affinity, positive purchase intention is exhibited across fast-moving-consumer-goods sectors; in which case CSR perceptions cease to have a significant impact on purchase intention.

This result contributes to understanding Indian consumers’ perspective in the mandatory CSR era and adds to the literature on strategic CSR and communication by segmenting consumers by cause affinity.

CSR practitioners could align with consumer-relevant causes that fit with their company’s core business, as controllable initiatives, instead of depending on positive, but less controllable, CSR perceptions of consumers. Implications of the findings on CSR policymaking by the government are also discussed.

The mandatory CSR law has been viewed as a burden by corporate India. This research implies that it may be possible to look at it as an opportunity for strategic CSR, to create a win-win situation for both business and society.

One of the first studies on cause-affinity and CSR fit among Indian consumers using the government stipulated list of causes.

Public sector projects still fail to meet delivery expectations, and the lack of significant project management experience in the Australian public service (APS) has been identified as a contributing factor. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the importance of competencies required for delivering public sector projects, as well as challenges faced by the project managers when operating in a public context.

Qualitative semi-structured interviews were used to enlighten the social and operating construct in APS. In parallel, a quantitative survey was used to determine the relative importance of various competencies to effective project delivery.

The research concludes that communication, accountability, business alignment, scope and deliverables, change, and project and program orientation are the most important competencies in APS project delivery. Furthermore, there is evidence that the operating environment acts as a barrier to successful project delivery, noting that it does not let project management practice deploy its full potential for increased effectiveness and efficiency.

The research findings noted that the specific needs, values and functions of project management in the APS are not well defined, and therefore there were limited criteria against which public sector project management competencies could be designed and measured.

This empirical research contributes to the open dialogue of improving efficiency in project management within the APS context. The findings point to the conflict between the operational nature of APS agencies and their project activities, and how they struggle to define themselves as project organizations rather than lack of appreciation to individual competencies.

The purpose of this paper is to propose a way of implementing data mining (DM) techniques and algorithms to apply quality improvement (QI) approaches in order to resolve quality issues (Rokach and Maimon, 2006; Köksal et al., 2011; Kahraman and Yanik, 2016). The effectiveness of the proposed methodologies is demonstrated through their application results. The goal of this paper is to develop a DM system based on the seven new QI tools in order to discover useful knowledge, in the form of rules, that are hidden in a vast amount of data and to propose solutions and actions that will lead an organization to improve its quality through the evaluation of the results.

Four popular data-mining approaches (rough sets, association rules, classification rules and Bayesian networks) are applied on a set of 12,477 case records concerning vehicle damages. The set of rules and patterns that is produced by each algorithm is used as an input in order to dynamically form each of the seven new quality tools (QTs).

The proposed approach enables the creation of the QTs starting from the raw data and passing through the DM process.

The present paper proposes an innovative work concerning the formation of the seven new QTs of quality management using DM popular algorithms. The resulted seven DM QTs were used to identify patterns and understand, so they can lead even non-experts to draw useful conclusions and make decisions.