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Swedish society has systematically worked to improve children's health and well-being since the early twentieth century and is considered a leading figure globally in battling violence against children. Awareness of violence against children and its detrimental effects on development and health is generally high in Sweden. Violence is also broadly recognised as a violation of human rights. A ban on corporal punishment was enacted in 1948 in social childcare institutions, in 1958 in schools, and in 1979 at home. The more recent landmark was the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, established as law on 1 January 2020. In line with convention's Article 12, stating that a child has the right to express their views in all matters affecting them, more attention to child participation has been paid since 2020. This chapter provides several recent examples of strategic measures that have been used to enhance child participation in governmental assignments and enquiries and state-funded research. We discuss the examples considering the United Nations convention and child participation methods and pinpoint opportunities and obstacles to further develop and consolidate child participation as a norm in publicly funded societal activities.

This study aims to examine humans’ reactions to service robots’ display of warmth in robot-to-robot interactions – a setting in which humans’ impressions of a service robot will not only be based on what this robot does in relation to humans, but also on what it does to other robots.

Service robot display of warmth was manipulated in an experimental setting in such a way that a service robot A expressed low versus high levels of warmth in relation to another service robot B.

The results indicate that a high level of warmth expressed by robot A vis-à-vis robot B boosted humans’ overall evaluations of A, and that this influence was mediated by the perceived humanness and the perceived happiness of A.

Numerous studies have examined humans’ reactions when they interact with a service robot or other synthetic agents that provide service. Future service encounters, however, will comprise also multi-robot systems, which means that there will be many opportunities for humans to be exposed to robot-to-robot interactions. Yet, this setting has hitherto rarely been examined in the service literature.

The purpose of this paper is to provide a comprehensive survey of the literature about the use of agent-based simulation (ABS) in the study of organizational behavior, decision making, and problem-solving. It aims at contributing to the consolidation of ABS as a field of applied research in management and organizational studies.

The authors carried out a non-systematic search in literature published between 2000 and 2016, by using the keyword “agent-based” to search through Scopus’ business, management and accounting database. Additional search criteria were devised using the papers’ keywords and the categories defined by the divisions and interest groups of the Academy of Management. The authors found 181 articles for this survey.

The survey shows that ABS provides a robust and rigorous framework to elaborate descriptions, explanations, predictions and theories about organizations and their processes as well as develop tools that support strategic and operational decision making and problem-solving. The authors show that the areas that report the highest number of applications are operations and logistics (37 percent), marketing (17 percent) and organizational behavior (14 percent).

The paper illustrates the increasingly prominent role of ABS in fields such as organizational behavior, strategy, human resources, marketing and logistics. To-date, this is the most complete survey about ABS in all management areas.

Drawing on the stereotype content model (SCM), the authors investigate the stereotype content transfer (in terms of warmth and competence) from country to brand and the simultaneous impact of these two stereotypes on consumer responses toward brands.

The authors test a structural equation model conceptualizing brand stereotypes as full mediators between country stereotypes and consumer outcomes. In addition, in a moderated mediation analysis, the authors investigate the role of brand typicality and utilitarianism/hedonism in potentially moderating the country to brand stereotype content transfer.

Country warmth and competence, respectively, impact brand warmth and competence, thus confirming the hypothesized stereotype content transfer. This transfer is found to be robust and not contingent on brands' perceived typicality of their country of origin. However, brands' utilitarian nature amplifies the positive impact of country competence on brand competence. Finally, brand stereotypes fully mediate the impact of country stereotypes on consumers' brand attitudes and behavioral intentions.

The authors provide the first empirical attempt that (1) explicitly differentiates between consumers' stereotypical perceptions of countries and stereotypical perceptions of brands from these countries, (2) empirically examines the transfer of stereotypical dimensions of different targets (i.e. country to brand), (3) explores boundary conditions for such transfer and (4) simultaneously considers the impact of both kinds of stereotypes on managerially relevant consumer outcomes.

Drawing on upper echelons theory (UET) and arguments from behavioral theory of the firm, this paper aims to contribute to the debate on family involvement-performance relationship, by considering the mediating role of the propensity towards merger and acquisition (M&A) and the moderating role of performance feedback.

The hypotheses are tested by applying a moderated mediation analysis on a sample of 111 German family firms. First, a mediation model is run to verify the mediation role of the propensity towards M&A; then, to evaluate the magnitude of the mediation at different values of the moderator (performance feedback), conditional indirect effects are tested using normal-theory standard errors and bootstrapping procedure.

The main findings suggest that a higher percentage of family members sitting in TMT is related to better performance and that this effect is mediated by the propensity towards M&A. Furthermore, findings also show that a higher percentage of family managers is positively related to the propensity towards M&A and, in turn, exerts a positive effect of firm performance, especially when performance feedback is negative.

The paper suggests to family firms' managers that when performance feedback is negative, a riskier behavior, such as M&A, could represent a way to improve firm performance.

The paper provides a full application of UET to the context of family firms, offers the point of view of TMT, instead of that of ownership, to study the propensity towards M&A in family firms and goes beyond the rational view to explain family managers' risk-taking behaviors.