Search results

The purpose of this paper is to propose an effective method to perform off‐line signature verification and identification by applying a local shape descriptor pyramid histogram of oriented gradients (PHOGs), which represents local shape of an image by a histogram of edge orientations computed for each image sub‐region, quantized into a number of bins. Each bin in the PHOG histogram represents the number of edges that have orientations within a certain angular range.

Automatic signature verification and identification are then studied in the general binary and multi‐class pattern classification framework, with five different common applied classifiers thoroughly compared.

Simulation experiments show that PHOG has obvious advantages in the extraction of discriminating information from handwriting signature images compared with many previously proposed signature feature extraction approaches. The experiments also demonstrate that several classifiers, including k‐nearest neighbour, multiple layer perceptron and support vector machine (SVM) can all give very satisfactory performance with regard to false acceptance rate (FAR) and false rejection rate (FRR). On a public benchmarking signature database “Grupo de Procesado Digital de Senales” (GPDS), experiments demonstrate an FRR of 4.0 percent and an FAR 3.25 percent from SVM for skillful forgery, which compares sharply with the latest published results of FRR 16.4 percent and FAR 14.2 percent on the same dataset. Experiments on a second DAVAB off‐line signature database also illustrate the superiority of the proposed method. The related issue, off‐line signature recognition, which is to find the identification of the signature owner from a given signature database, is also investigated based on the PHOG features, showing superb classification accuracies of 99 and 96 percent for GPDS and DAVAB datasets, respectively.

The proposed method for off‐line signature verification and recognition has a promising potential of designing a real‐world system for many applications, particularly in forensics and biometrics.

This paper aims to identify the effect of environmental management systems (EMSs), commitment to stakeholders and gender diversity on corporate environmental performance (CEP) and the extent to which an economic crisis moderates these relationships.

A regression analysis was conducted on a sample of 14,217 observations from 1,933 firms from 26 countries from 2002 to 2010. The estimator used is ordinary least squares with heteroscedastic panel-corrected standard errors (PCSEs), which allows us to obtain consistent results in the presence of heteroscedasticity and autocorrelation.

The results show that EMSs and stakeholder engagement are mechanisms that drive CEP but lose their effectiveness in times of crisis. However, the presence of women on boards has a positive effect on CEP that is not affected by an economic crisis.

The study has some limitations that could be addressed in the future. We present board gender diversity as a governance mechanism because its role is strongly related to non-financial performance. Future studies could focus on other corporate governance mechanisms, such as the presence of institutional or long-term investors. In addition, other mechanisms could be found that can counteract poor environmental performance in times of crisis. Finally, it might be useful to contrast these results with the crisis generated by the coronavirus pandemic.

The results obtained have important practical implications at the corporate and institutional levels. At the corporate level, they highlight, as essential contributions, that environmental management systems and stakeholder orientation are not effective in times of economic crisis, except for with the presence of women on the board.

Following the crisis, the European Commission has promoted gender diversity on boards as a mechanism to improve the governance of entities – improving, among other aspects, sustainability. In this sense, another one of the practical implications of the study is support for the policies that the European Union has implemented over the last two decades.

The paper analyses how a crisis affects the moral and cultural institutional mechanisms that promote CEP. Gender diversity on the board of directors not only promotes environmental performance but also appears to be a governance mechanism that ensures this performance in times of crisis when the other mechanisms lose their effectiveness. The study proposes specific policies that help maintain environmental performance in an economic crisis.

The present paper uses Twitter to analyze the current state of the worldwide, Spanish-language, independent publishing market. The main purposes are to determine whether certain Latin American Spanish-language independent publishers function as gatekeepers of world literature and to analyze the geopolitical structure of this global market, addressing both the Europe-America dialectic and neocolonial practices.

After selecting the sample of publishers, the authors conducted a search for their Twitter profiles and located 131; they then downloaded data from the corresponding Twitter APIs. Finally, they applied social network analysis to study the presence of and interaction between the sample of independent publishers on this social media.

The results provide data-based evidence supporting the hypothesis of some literary critics who suggest that in Latin America, certain publishers act as gatekeepers to the mainstream book market. Therefore, Twitter could be considered a valid source of information to address the independent book market in Spanish. By extension, this approach could be applied to other cultural industries in which small and medium-sized agents develop a digital presence in social media.

This paper combines social network analysis and literary criticism to provide new evidence about the Spanish-language book market. It helps validate the aforementioned hypothesis proposed by literary critics and opens up new paths along which to pursue an interpretative, comparative analysis.

The purpose of this study is to examine the influence of characteristics of the institutional environment on the disclosure of corporate social responsibility (CSR).

This is a quantitative and descriptive research. The dependent variables used were environmental dimension (ED) and social dimension (SD) that together compose the corporate social performance (CSP). The independent variables that will be used are the characteristics of the institutional environments of Brazil and the UK. Thus, for this end, variables of the national business system of both countries will be used: corruption transparency, access to credit by countries, quality of the education system and labor relations. After their collection, the data were submitted to descriptive and inferential statistics and hierarchical regression.

Data show that UK companies make more disclosure in CSR than Brazilian companies. Through linear regression, it can be seen that the institutional environment affects disclosure in CSR. In the UK, a country with better educational, labor, political and financial indicators than Brazil, it presented better CSR practices. The findings reveal that the better an institutional environment, the more firms act in CSR. The findings of the research confirm the premise of institutional theory: different institutional fields can modify business performance.

The study analyzed only the disclosure practices of companies in the public sector. Thus, the results should be carefully analyzed, without generalizations for all industry sectors. Therefore, it is suggested that future research looks at other industry sectors as well as other institutional contexts, i.e. other countries.

Multinational companies may have different CSR practices according to the institutional environment in which they operate. For example, companies in developed countries, such as the UK, have greater stakeholder pressure. Given this, managers must adapt their environmental strategies according to the institutional environment in which they operate.

This research contributes to CSR studies in various institutional contexts. There is a consensus in the literature that institutional environments affect firms' CSR practices. However, few empirical studies show results between the national business system and CSR. Thus, the present study intends to fill this research gap.

With the gradual decline of the small retail sector in the past recent years, few researchers have been addressing the issue from a motivational approach. This paper aimed to examine the role of utilitarian, hedonic and ethical motives in the process of forming consumer loyalty in a retail setting.

A total of 213 surveys were carried out among regular fashion and accessories shoppers in Spanish small-sized retailers. A two-step methodology proposed by Anderson and Gerbing (1988) was applied to test the model.

Ethical shopping motivation was found to have the most relevant impact on its perceived quality and on its reassurance to a small-sized retailer, as it represented a strategic asset. Although the most appropriate approach would not be focused mainly on ethical aspects in order to be competitive in the new retailing landscape, consumers should recognize that they are contributing to a worthy cause while enjoying the shopping experience.

Small-sized retailers should provide consumers with good reasons for shopping in their businesses rather than their competitors’. Moreover, it is key to differentiate and build customer loyalty with the purpose of becoming more competitive. As a consequence, in this paper, we propose a measurement scale that can be used to evaluate abstract and complex consumers’ shopping motivations.

The pursuit of more precise knowledge of factors that lead consumers to shop for a specific product is vital for small-sized retailers, toward sustainable competitiveness. Here we analyzed the impact of the three innovative dimensions in shopping motivation on consumers’ perceived quality and their influence on repurchase intention.

This issue includes six articles from ten universities in Chile, Colombia and Spain. The subjects are on entrepreneurship, public administration, management of intellectual capital marketing and also the immediate rejection policies of the journal's editor. The first study identifies different models of support programs in creating technology-based companies (spin‐offs) in universities from Spain and Great Britain, and the factors that determine their efficiency. The second one is on that factors that lead a person to entrepreneurship, particularly the impact of gender and the sociocultural aspects in regional entrepreneurships of Chile. The third studies the continuity of the entrepreneurial spirit in university students many years after graduating. The fourth makes an evaluation of the service portals available to the citizens of 19 countries in Latin America. The fifth is a study of the nets of scientific collaboration of the most prestigious Latin American business schools. The sixth is a study on the market orientation and obtained results in the business of rural tourism. An Editorial also deals with the criteria for immediate rejection of articles received by the journal. We plan a special issue on culture and art management, associated with the EURAM conference.

Este número incluye seis artículos provenientes de diez universidades de Chile, Colombia y España, sobre emprendimiento, administración pública, gestión del capital intelectual y mercadeo, así como la política de rechazo inmediato del editor de la revista. El primer estudio identifica diferentes modelos de programas de apoyo a la creación de empresas con base tecnológica (spin‐offs) en universidades de España y Gran Bretaña, y los factores que determinan su eficacia. El segundo sobre factores que llevan a una persona a emprender, en particular el impacto del género y aspectos socioculturales en los emprendimientos regionales en Chile. El tercero estudia la continuidad del espíritu empresarial de los universitarios varios años después de graduarse. El cuarto realiza una evaluación de los portales de servicio al ciudadano en 19 países de América Latina. El quinto es un estudio de las redes de colaboración científica de las escuelas de negocios más prestigiosas de América Latina. El sexto es un estudio sobre la orientación al mercado y los resultados obtenidos en el negocio de pequeñas firmas de servicios de turismo rural. Un Editorial trata sobre los criterios para rechazo inmediato de artículos recibidos en la revista. Planeamos un número especial sobre la gestión cultural y de arte, asociada a la conferencia de EURAM.

The primary aim of this study is to detail the use of soft computing techniques in business and management research. Its objectives are as follows: to conduct a comprehensive scientometric analysis of publications in the field of soft computing, to explore the evolution of keywords, to identify key research themes and latent topics and to map the intellectual structure of soft computing in the business literature.

This research offers a comprehensive overview of the field by synthesising 43 years (1980–2022) of soft computing research from the Scopus database. It employs descriptive analysis, topic modelling (TM) and scientometric analysis.

This study's co-citation analysis identifies three primary categories of research in the field: the components, the techniques and the benefits of soft computing. Additionally, this study identifies 16 key study themes in the soft computing literature using TM, including decision-making under uncertainty, multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM), the application of deep learning in object detection and fault diagnosis, circular economy and sustainable development and a few others.

This analysis offers a valuable understanding of soft computing for researchers and industry experts and highlights potential areas for future research.

This study uses scientific mapping and performance indicators to analyse a large corpus of 4,512 articles in the field of soft computing. It makes significant contributions to the intellectual and conceptual framework of soft computing research by providing a comprehensive overview of the literature on soft computing literature covering a period of four decades and identifying significant trends and topics to direct future research.

This study aims to examine the impact of the servitization on the performance of small and medium enterprises (SMEs) in Brazil.

The study uses data from Brazilian SMEs and applies partial least squares structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM) to test the research hypotheses.

The findings suggest a positive relationship between servitization and SME performance. It is found that the strategy of offering base services does impact SME performance. Furthermore, servitization aims to promote a fit between environmental pressures and SME performance.

SMEs can use servitization to increase their performance in spite of their resources restrictions, size limitation and low level of service revenue. However, the adoption of servitization should be accompanied by managerial adjustments in servitization practices.

This paper is dedicated to investigating the servitization-performance relationship in the context of SMEs, which is not a usual research publication. Moreover, it adds to the servitization theory by demonstrating that it is not necessary to reach a critical mass of services to be profitable and base services may be also a source of revenues and profits.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the validity of extended technology acceptance model (TAM) in explaining pre-service teachers’ Edmodo acceptance and the variation of variables related to TAM among pre-service teachers having different cognitive styles.

Structural equation modeling approach was used to analyze an extended TAM that represents the relationship between the eight constructs and cognitive style. Group Embedded Figures Test and technology acceptance measure were used as data collection tools. The study was conducted with 129 pre-service teachers.

The results indicate that perceived ease of use (PEU) influences behavioral intention (BI) to use Edmodo indirectly through attitude toward Edmodo use and perceived usefulness (PU). Technological complexity and facilitating conditions influence BI to use indirectly through PU and PEU, respectively. Thus, the extended TAM is a parsimonious model explaining 75, 72, and 82 percent of the endogenous variable (BI) for the whole sample, for the field dependent sample, and for the field independent sample, respectively.

This paper addresses to determine the BI of pre-service teachers regarding Edmodo, which is an innovative tool, based on cognitive styles.