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Recent years have seen an increasing emphasis placed upon the development of transferable skills within PhD degree programmes. This paper reports on steps taken to evaluate a programme of transferable skills development at a research intensive university in the UK, focussing on the views of late stage PhD students in the science, engineering and medical disciplines. It shows that most students report a positive impact from having taken part in transferable skills initiatives and that they have a positive attitude towards them. Participants report an enduring positive impact on their behaviour and consider that the training meets their perceived needs as they progress as researchers. However, amongst the population as a whole, there were differences in views. For example, it was found that females, overseas students and those mainly motivated to do the PhD by career‐related reasons attach the greatest importance to such opportunities to develop transferable skills.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the mediating role of the marketing strategy process in the relationship between innovativeness and organizational performance in SMEs.

The partial least squares-structural equation modeling technique was used to analyze data from Brazilian SMEs that belong to the software sector. Innovativeness was considered as a cultural aspect of the firm, which is related to being open to new ideas. The marketing strategy process was analyzed considering its two dimensions, i.e., formulation and implementation of marketing strategies. Organizational performance included variables of market, financial and innovation performance.

The results show that innovativeness positively influences organizational performance through the marketing strategy process. Specifically, the formulation of marketing strategies mediates the relationship between innovativeness and organizational performance. Implementation by itself does not mediate this relationship. When considering the path formulation→implementation as mediator, the influence is positive, i.e., formulation positively influences the implementation of marketing strategies and this path mediates the relationship between innovativeness and organizational performance. Therefore, the mediating role is stronger when considering the formulation-implementation path than when taking into account the activities of the formulation and implementation of marketing strategies separately.

This study contributes to the literature by discussing how innovativeness influences SMEs’ performance through subsequent stages of the marketing strategy process. This is one of the first studies to consider activities in the marketing strategy process as a mediator in the innovativeness-performance relationship and explore its sequence.

This chapter examines the case of threshold concepts, as an example of a theory being developed and applied within higher education research. It traces the origins and meaning of the term, reviews its application by higher education researchers and discusses the issues it raises and the critiques it has attracted. This case is of particular interest, as the idea of threshold concepts is little more than a decade old, yet in that time it has attracted considerable attention.

The issue of environmental regulation and productivity has received increasing attention among academics, but little research has focused on Chinese firms despite the serious state of pollution in China. This study aimed to fill that gap. Analyzing a sample of firms from 12 Chinese cities, we found that environmental regulation could improve firm productivity, but the responses to environmental regulation differed across industry sectors, firm sizes, and locations. In this paper, we discuss the implications of these responses toward the environmental policy in China.

Most demand studies have concentrated on the estimation of expenditure elasticities for single commodity at a time thereby not being able to reveal the details of the relationships among various food items demanded by households. The purpose of this paper is to simultaneously estimate the demand equations for a number of food items and to estimate cross-price elasticities which are necessary for studying consumer behaviours, marketing, production planning and policy making.

Relevant data were collected from 320 randomly selected households in a multistage sampling procedure. The normalized data were analysed in a system of equation with symmetry, adding-up and homogeneity restrictions imposed on the model.

Expenditure elasticities show that gaari and palm oil were inferior food items while others could be classified as normal. Own-price elasticities showed that beans, plantain, yam flour and rice were luxuries while others were necessities. Cross-price elasticities revealed that some were substitutes of one another while others were compliments and some were not related.

The data were collected using a month recall approach and generalizing its findings beyond such months of a year may be misleading. Therefore, other researchers should repeat the study across months and locations.

The study recommended that food policies should be broad based to encompass majority of the food items consumed in the study area given the intrinsic relationship inherent among them as their demands were interrelated and consumer behaviours as revealed by various elasticities be considered in formulating food-related policies.

The paper emphasized the need to model food demand in a system of equations as against single equation modelling.

The purpose of this study is to examine the impact of female portrayal in advertisements on Palestinian female consumers’ purchasing decisions. TV and online media were selected as the medium for the study. Specifically, the researchers examine the one-dimensional sexualized female portrayal in advertisements.

Culture is used as the lens through which the study examines the relationship between independent and dependent variables concerning the topic of this study. The study collected primary data from 395 Palestinian participants through a survey questionnaire.

The findings of the study revealed that there is a relationship between the independent variable (the sexualized female portrayal in foreign advertisements – advertisements originating in foreign countries) and the dependent variable (Palestinian female consumers’ purchase decision). Additionally, the study found that the cultural differences between Palestine and other foreign countries have a negative impact on the Palestinian female consumers’ perception of the product being advertised.

Although traditional marketing procedures would allow companies to filter and adapt particular adverts to suit various cultural, social and political environments, the advent of the open web and satellite TV channels extend the advertisements reach to audiences beyond their intended demographic.

This is the first study set in the Arab context (including Palestine) to explore the impact of sexualized female portrayal in advertisements on Palestinian female consumers’ purchasing decision.

This study examines the differences in corporate transparency between subsidiaries of multinational corporations (MNCs), and domestic corporations (DCs) in India.

Performance of the multinational firm in the special conditions of emerging market economies has become a critical issue in business research. This is because the special conditions of these economies, such as dynamism coupled with uncertainty, rapid change in the structures of firms and economic institutions along with firm and government inertia, and spells of economic growth often simultaneous with phases of deterioration, have all made the measurement of firm performance next to impossible. This chapter develops a conceptual framework and measures that might be used in such performance assessment. It also reports findings from research conducted on multinational companies operating in Turkey. These findings indicate interesting conceptual and managerial implications about competitive marketing, organizational values, and strategy formulation in emerging economy contexts such as Turkey.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the type of personalisation services satisfying the needs of cancer websites’ target users, and the influence of their emotional states on website usage intentions.

Three data collection methods were employed. Survey questionnaires were distributed to online health users. Interviews with representatives of the cancer-affected population further explored emotions as stimuli for online cancer-related activities. Finally, availability of personalisation features was evaluated on existing health websites in Bosnia and Herzegovina and the UK.

A clear preference emerged for personalisation on cancer-related websites. There are specific personalisation features the cancer-affected population desires. Interestingly, certain emotions were found to stimulate visits to health websites.

Fighting cancer implies constant support, including from cancer-related websites. It is thus vital to understand the required personalisation, stemming from target users’ actual needs, including the neglected user characteristics, as are emotions for cancer-affected people. This supports emotion-based personalisation.

The paper focusses on the cancer-affected population, and developing a comprehensive understanding of their personalisation needs in online health services. It further shows which emotions influence intentions to use cancer websites. The three concepts combined have not yet been studied, to the best of the authors’ knowledge.

In this paper the authors seek to compare lay (consumer) and professional (physician) discourse structures in answers to diabetes‐related questions in a public consumer health information website.

Ten consumer and ten physician question threads were aligned. They generated 26 consumer and ten physician answers, constituting a total dataset of 717 discourse units (in sentences or sentence fragments). The authors depart from previous LIS health information behaviour research by utilizing a computational linguistics‐based theoretical framework of rhetorical structure theory, which enables research at the pragmatics level of linguistics in terms of the goals and effects of human communication.

The authors reveal differences in discourse organization by identifying prevalent rhetorical relations in each type of discourse. Consumer answers included predominately (66 per cent) presentational rhetorical structure relations, those intended to motivate or otherwise help a user do something (e.g. motivation, concession, and enablement). Physician answers included mainly subject matter relations (64 per cent), intended to inform, or simply transfer information to a user (e.g. elaboration, condition, and interpretation).

The findings suggest different communicative goals expressed in lay and professional health information sharing. Consumers appear to be more motivating, or activating, and more polite (linguistically) than physicians in how they share information with consumers online in similar topics in diabetes management. The authors consider whether one source of information encourages adherence to healthy behaviour more effectively than another.

Analysing discourse structure – using rhetorical structure theory – is a novel and promising approach in information behaviour research, and one that traverses the lexico‐semantic level of linguistic analysis towards pragmatics of language use.