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The aim of this paper is to study the opportunities and challenges of the government workplace concepting process. Several Finnish government administrations have created nationwide workplace concepts for their network of agencies. These concepts give guidelines for designing workplaces for modern knowledge workers as well as service channels for the customers.

This paper discusses five Finnish government workplace concepts that include guidelines and recommendations for workplace design. The five workplace concept manuals were studied using content analysis. Additionally, seven interviews were conducted with participants involved in the concepting process.

The opportunities and challenges of the governmental workplace concepting process were studied using a six-step process framework. Each step has its own unique opportunities and challenges, which affect the outcome and the progress in implementing the concepts. Studying the opportunities and challenges helps to improve the concepting process and thus improve the potential for effectively implementing the concepts.

Creating office concepts in the public sector is at an immature phase both in Finland and in other countries. This paper helps take steps towards creating public offices that are cost efficient and at the same time support modern work activities. This allows governmental actors to rationalise and make the best possible use of their extensive stock of real estate.

Public offices have been little studied and office work in this context is also a less studied topic. The findings of this paper offer a novel way to look at government office concepts.

The purpose of this paper is to enhance the understanding about the determinants of consumer food leftovers in out-of-home settings by taking a decomposed perspective on attitudes.

Data on 307 guests in a university canteen composing of stated measures for 12 beliefs, general attitude and behavioral intention and of visually estimated food leftovers are analyzed using exploratory factor and path analyses.

A factor analysis for belief statements derives three distinctive and potentially conflicting attitude dimensions: “Environment,” “Self-Interest” and “Resources.” Path analyses on their interrelation with general attitude, intention and behavior indicate that the dimensions have distinctive effects. Moreover, “Self-Interest” in contrast to the other two dimensions is correlated with situational perceptions about portion size and taste when these are included as direct determinants of leftovers.

It is recommended to consider different dimensions of attitude when addressing food leftover behavior since these dimensions may not be well represented in a classical summary construct and since their relevance may differ depending on situational factors. Additional research is recommended to validate the results for more representative samples of consumers and to elaborate on the interaction of different attitude dimensions as potential source of attitude ambivalence which cannot clearly be determined from the existing data.

Past research on consumer food waste behavior models attitudes exclusively as a summary construct. This contradicts qualitative findings that individuals may hold conflicting beliefs about food leftovers.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the domain relevance of a comprehensive yet almost overlooked theoretical framework for studying organic food purchase behavior in a global context. This conceptual paper argues that there exists an apparently powerful model in health behavior domain that may readily be brought into organic food purchase behavior research. The paper argues for domain relevance and proposes that Montano and Kasprzyk’s integrated behavior model may readily be used in organic food behavior studies with some relevant modification.

The paper follows an exploratory approach and shows how variables used in the past may be aggregated to the model in question. The challenge is addressed by following both the inductive and the deductive reasoning. Deductive reasoning calls for investigating whether such behavior may be classified as health behavior. Inductive reasoning calls for proving relevance of all the variables in the aforesaid model to the organic food research context.

The paper concludes that the Montano and Kasprzyk’s model is theoretically relevant to the organic food behavior domain. However, it is observed that the domain-specific operationalization is necessary for further empirical studies.

Since the model was rarely tested empirically in predicting organic food purchase intention, the variable-specific relevance may not warrant the relevance of the whole model with intertwined relationships at the same time.

The paper may pave a way toward further empirical research and may also explain the apparent intention-behavior gap as often reported in literature.

The paper may provide a useful direction in future organic food purchase behavior studies by showing the domain relevance of an apparently powerful model, along with addition of some newer variables that may enrich the existing model.

The first chapter by Pieter Pauwels, Paul G. Patterson, Ko de Ruyter, and Martin Wetzels is entitled “The Propensity to Continue Internationalization: A Study of Australian Service Firms”. The authors build on the process theory of internationalization and the theory of planned behavior and investigate a firm's propensity to continue internationalization. They develop a theoretical model and test this using structural equation modeling using a sample of international service providers using partial least square (PLS). Their model confirms the pivotal role of attitudes towards internationalization, relevant behavioral norms, and behavioral control factors as contributors to the propensity to continue internationalization.

The purpose of this paper is to ascertain how today’s international marketers can perform better on the global scene by harnessing spontaneity.

The authors draw on contingency theory to develop a model of the spontaneity – international marketing performance relationship, and identify three potential moderators, namely, strategic planning, centralization, and market dynamism. The authors test the model via structural equation modeling with survey data from 197 UK exporters.

The results indicate that spontaneity is beneficial to exporters in terms of enhancing profit performance. In addition, greater centralization and strategic planning strengthen the positive effects of spontaneity. However, market dynamism mitigates the positive effect of spontaneity on export performance (when customer needs are volatile, spontaneous decisions do not function as well in terms of ensuring success).

Learning to be spontaneous when making export decisions appears to result in favorable outcomes for the export function. To harness spontaneity, export managers should look to develop company heuristics (increase centralization and strategic planning). Finally, if operating in dynamic export market environments, the role of spontaneity is weaker, so more conventional decision-making approaches should be adopted.

The international marketing environment typically requires decisions to be flexible and fast. In this context, spontaneity could enable accelerated and responsive decision-making, allowing international marketers to realize superior performance. Yet, there is a lack of research on decision-making spontaneity and its potential for international marketing performance enhancement.

The purpose of this paper is to introduce the variable of halal food knowledge (HFK) into the theory of planned behavior framework to investigate Malaysian non-Muslim consumers’ decision-making process in purchasing halal food.

Data were collected through 350 distributed questionnaires toward non-Muslim consumers on five most visited grocery stores (hypermarket-based) in Kuala Lumpur and Selangor. The collected data was analyzed by using Statistical Package for Social Sciences and SmartPLS.

Purchasing halal food remain an uneasy task for the non-Muslim consumers, thus rely on their personal evaluation and closest relative’s approval.

This study is focusing only on two halal food credence attributes namely health attribute and animal-friendly attributes.

Both health and animal friendly credence attributes of halal food should be the main message to be conveyed to the non-Muslim consumers. In addition, the inclusion of non-Muslim consumers within the Malaysian halal ecosystem might provide a solution to tackle the resistance of halal food from foreign countries.

The value of this study is the finding of halal food credence attributes of health and animal friendly, which are the dimensions of HFK.