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The symbolic presentation of products through images in online environments allows consumers to use or experience products only through imagination. Existing literature has demonstrated that providing sensory cues is an effective way to promote imaginative use or experience. However, such an approach seems to have been proposed for product that requires the use of body-related information (e.g. sensory information) for evaluation (high body-involving product). There is less literature on how to facilitate consumers’ imaginative use of product that requires relatively less bodily information (low body-involving product). Considering this, this research proposes a factor that influences the imaginative use of both high and low body-involving products, the character cues in the product image.

In this paper, two studies are conducted to verify the matching effect about presence or absence of character cues with product type (high body-involving vs. low body-involving) in facilitating imaginative use and the downstream effect.

The experimental results indicate that high (low) body-involving product display images are suitable for present (absent) character cues, which can promote the mental imagery of use the product, increase perceived image attractiveness and ultimately increase purchase intentions. The research also verified the influence of distance between the product and the character cues on the above effects.

We expand on the importance of character cues in product display images in an e-commerce environment and enrich the research about imaginative use in online environment.

Most businesses still think of the UN as an organization devoted primarily to peacekeeping. There is little awareness of the extent to which the UN has become an economic body involved in radically changing the performance and character of private economies throughout the world.

Disparities in learning opportunities endure. This paper aims to investigate whether the learning representative schemes in the UK and New Zealand (NZ) may redress disparate opportunities for learning.

An interview study of UK trade unions' educational officers and an interview study of representatives of bodies involved in designing the NZ learning representative scheme are used to consider each scheme's capability to address disparate learning opportunities.

The paper finds that the UK scheme allows trade unions to initiate vocational and non‐vocational learning opportunities locally. Legislative and financial support allows some redress of inequalities in learning opportunities. The NZ scheme was introduced through a tripartite alliance of central organizations, without legislative support, to provide vocational opportunities. This scheme may facilitate learning opportunities at companies where the constituents of the central organizations support the initiative.

The UK scheme is firmly established, while the NZ scheme has only been developed recently. The potential for further developments in the New Zealand scheme must be acknowledged.

Union‐backed learning representative schemes in different countries have been introduced to redress the unequal distribution of learning opportunities that exist at work. However, to date, there has been limited research into the potential for learning representative schemes to promote learning in different organizational contexts. There is a need for further research in this area.

The paper presents findings from the first comparative study of the learning representative schemes in the UK and NZ.

This paper aims to review the latest management developments across the globe and pinpoint practical implications from cutting-edge research and case studies.

This briefing is prepared by an independent writer who adds their own impartial comments and places the articles in context.

Use of personality tests to aid workplace training is gaining momentum. However, some tensions are evident between different bodies involved. For instance, psychologists are critical of the fact that tests can be implemented by non-psychologist practitioners. Tests are administered at individual or team level and can relate to exploration or development. Costs and ease of use are among factors that influence the choice of test, although some practitioners retain blind faith in past selections. Greater awareness of issues and challenges can enable human resource development (HRD) practitioners to more evidence-based insight into personality testing in this context.

The paper provides strategic insights and practical thinking that have influenced some of the world’s leading organizations.

The briefing saves busy executives and researchers hours of reading time by selecting only the very best, most pertinent information and presenting it in a condensed and easy-to-digest format.

The purpose of this paper is to analyse consumer behavior during the purchase of floral products in the Greek region and to reveal the socio‐economic characteristics that affect consumers' considerations concerning the selection of both cut flowers and pot plants.

The study is based on cross‐sectional data collected through a questionnaire survey with personal interviews. Respondents' reasons for purchasing floral products are examined. A principal component analysis with varimax rotation was applied in order to provide a more manageable set of variables relating to purchasing. The socio‐economic factors of these reasons were used for estimating the significant relation that exists between them.

People purchase cut flowers and pot plants as part of quality of life, as a convenient gift to other people, for religious and social occasions. Significant differences were revealed only in terms of gender and education level of the respondents with a proportion of females and educated people being higher during purchasing floral products.

The findings can improve the marketing mix strategy for floral products. Such information is important for the market bodies involved in the floral market and the results of this study are unique and can assist researchers and marketers with an understanding of significant reasons for purchasing floral products. Comparative insights are also provided in terms of the similarities being present between the purchasing of both floral and food products.

This paper provides consumer reasoning for buying floral products and illustrates the subsequent socio‐economic characteristics.

Briefly outlines the history and background of the Employee Retirement and Income Security Act (ERISA) and the key bodies involved. Provides details of the Savings are Vital to Everyone’s Act including the purpose and the choices for individuals. Discusses the healthcare issues and potential conflicts between federal and state responsibilities. Concludes that ERISA is too vague and open to dispute and needs to be refined over the coming decades.

The purpose of this chapter is to examine the genesis, operation, and effects of a dispute resolution body known as the National Implementation Body (NIB). The NIB was established by employers, unions, and the State in Ireland and was active between 2000 and 2009. It recorded significant success in resolving major disputes. A distinctive feature of the NIB was its networked character: the body involved key employer and union leaders and senior public servants, who exerted informal pressure on the parties in dispute to reach a settlement either within the NIB process itself or in the State’s mainstream dispute resolution agencies.

The research draws on case studies of disputes and interviews with key members of the NIB.

The findings reveal how the NIB mobilized networks to resolve a series of major disputes that threatened to derail national pay agreements or cause significant economic disruption.

The chapter examines the operation of networked dispute resolution in detail and considers the wider implications of networked dispute resolution in both Continental European and other Anglo-American countries.

The study explores the readiness of government agencies to adopt artificial intelligence (AI) to improve the efficiency of disaster relief operations (DRO). For understanding the behavior of state-level and national-level government agencies involved in DRO, this study grounds its theoretical arguments on the civic voluntarism model (CVM) and the unified theory of acceptance and use of technology (UTAUT).

We collected the primary data for this study from government agencies involved in DRO in India. To test the proposed theoretical model, we administered an online survey questionnaire to 184 government agency employees. To test the hypotheses, we employed partial least squares structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM).

Our findings confirm that resources (time, money and skills) significantly influence the behavioral intentions related to the adoption of AI tools for DRO. Additionally, we identified that the behavioral intentions positively translate into the actual adoption of AI tools.

Our study provides a unique viewpoint suited to understand the context of the adoption of AI in a governmental context. Companies often strive to invest in state-of-the-art technologies, but it is important to understand how government bodies involved in DRO strategize to adopt AI to improve efficiency.

Our study offers a fresh perspective in understanding how the organizational culture and perspectives of government officials influence their inclinations to adopt AI for DRO. Additionally, it offers a multidimensional perspective by integrating the theoretical frameworks of CVM and UTAUT for a greater understanding of the adoption and deployment of AI tools with organizational culture and voluntariness as critical moderators.

This paper aims to show that systemic methods and thinking can be used to develop useful tools to address problems open in traditional science, such as Newtonian physics, universal gravitation, planetary motions, and the three‐body problem.

Expanded on the yoyo model introduced earlier for general systems, a new figurative analysis method is introduced in this paper.

After establishing its theoretical and empirical foundations, this method is used to generalize Newton's laws of mechanics by addressing several unsettled problems in the history. Through the concept of equal quantitative effects, it is argued that this new method possesses some strength not found in pure quantitative methods. After studying the characteristics of whole evolutions of converging and diverging fluid motions, the concept of time is revisited using the new model. As further applications of the new method, one covers Kepler's laws of planetary motion, Newton's law of universal gravitation, and explains why planets travel along elliptical orbits, why no external forces are needed for systems to revolve about one another, and why binary star systems, tri‐nary star systems, and even n‐nary star systems can exist, for any natural number n≥2. By checking the study of the three‐body problem, a brand new method is provided to analyze the movement of three stars, visible or invisible. At the end, some open problems are cast for future research.

This paper shows for the first time in history that several well‐established laws in physics can be generalized using systemic thinking. Beyond that, an operative method of analysis is introduced to investigate problems that have been extremely difficult to handle in the scientific history. With adequate quantitative tools developed to accompany this method, it can be reasonably expected that an active systemic scientific era with a slightly different tilt from the contemporary science will follow shortly.

The objective of this exploratory research is to investigate the role of Twitter in crisis communication by analysing all the earthquake-related messages from local public authorities in four Italian regions (Abruzzo, Lazio, Marche and Umbria) during the seismic sequence that began on 24th August 2016 and finished at the end of January 2017.

The study is based on a manual data collection of earthquake-related tweets. Founded on a theoretical framework, the data analysis has been developed both through textual analysis and in-depth interpretation by two researchers to catalogue the messages according to identified categories.

It emerges that the affected Italian regions used Twitter only for information coverage without offering a complete and detailed picture of the disaster. Most of the tweets concerned daily statements by politicians or regional administrators engaged in crisis management, while an accurate selection of the topics and messages to be launched does not emerge, with significant implications on the effectiveness of the tweeting activity itself.

This paper aims to contribute to the literature on crisis communication and social media during a natural disaster, highlighting the criticalities shown by the Italian case studies. The originality of this study relates to the comparative examination of Twitter activities for four regional government bodies involved in the 2016 Italian earthquake.