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This research examines cultural differences between Thais and Americans in recipients' attitudes and behaviors throughout all three stages of Sherry's (1983) gift-giving model and the moderating effect of relationship closeness on the gift-giving process.

Three experiments tested recipients' attitudes and behaviors across cultures in each gift-giving stage. Study 1 explored the gestation stage (gift search and purchase). Study 2 tested recipients in the prestation stage (actual exchange), and Study 3 examined the reformulation stage (gift disposition and realignment of the relationship).

Results show that relationship closeness between the giver and the recipient plays a role among interdependent self-construals. Thais (interdependent self-construals) are more likely to give a hint or make a request for a gift to close friends than distant friends and are also more likely to accept, keep and use gifts from close friends than from distant friends. Moreover, for interdependent self-construals, a gift from a close friend improved the relationship more than a gift from a distant friend. In contrast, Americans (independent self-construals) present no differences between close and distant friends.

This research provides a comprehensive picture of the recipient's perspective in cross-cultural gift-giving and expands the notion of relationship closeness as a moderator.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the effects of cultural differences and the types of relationship closeness involved in recipients’ emotional and behavioral reactions after receiving disliked gifts.

Collecting data from Thailand and the USA, two experiments were conducted in a 2 (self-construal: independent/interdependent) × 2 (relationship closeness: close/distant) between-subjects design. Study 1 explores the recipients’ feelings and reactions upon receipt of a disliked gift. Study 2 explores the disposition process for a disliked gift.

The results show that a recipient’s emotions, reaction and disposition process can be affected by cultural differences and relationship closeness: specifically that close and distant relationships moderate the relationship between self-construal and gift-receiving attitudes and behaviors.

Future research can investigate representative groups from other countries to broaden the generalizability of the findings.

This understanding can guide gift-givers when selecting gifts for close or distant recipients across cultures. Additionally, it can help retailers develop and introduce new marketing strategies by applying self-construal as a marketing segmentation tool for gift purchase and disposition.

This research is among the first studies to offer insights into how individuals in different cultures manage disliked gifts they receive from people in either close or distant relationships.

This paper aims to investigate whether close auditor-client relationships affect audit quality over the tenure of the audit partner and the potential role of partner rotation in mitigating this effect.

Using the Chinese mandatory audit partner rotation setting, the authors identify the existence of a close auditor-client relationship if the audit partner tenure with a client is larger than the audit firm tenure with that client. The sample period (1998–2009) is divided into voluntary and mandatory rotation periods when examining the effects of audit partner tenure on audit quality for the normal and close auditor-client relationship subsamples, respectively. The authors also conduct a propensity score matching analysis to address a selection issue.

The paper finds that under the voluntary partner rotation regime, audit quality decreases with audit partner tenure for the subsample with close auditor-client relationships, whereas this effect is not shown in the normal relationship subsample. However, audit quality no longer declines with audit partner tenure under the mandatory partner rotation regime.

This is the first study that directly examines the effect of audit partner tenure on audit quality associated with close auditor-client relationships under the voluntary and mandatory partner rotation regimes.

This study aims to examine the effect of the auditor-client relationship (ACR) on related party transaction (RPT) types of disclosure, either RPT-efficient or RPT-conflict. This study also examines whether family controlling shareholders (FCS) negatively affect the ACR in RPT types of disclosure.

This study uses multivariate regression on 2,203 year-observations of companies listed in Malaysia during the period 2014–2017.

This study finds weak evidence that auditors can mitigate companies’ RPT type (RPT-efficient and RPT-conflict) disclosure while maintaining a close ACR. However, an interaction between FCS and ACR reduces the RPT-conflict disclosure. Additionally, the Big 4 auditors slightly increase the RPT-conflict disclosure, however, the relationships are inversed if the close ACR involves the FCS. The Big 4 auditors also increase RPT-efficient disclosure although in a close ACR with FCS. Meanwhile, an interaction between non-Big 4 auditors and FCS in close ACR reduces both types of RPT disclosures.

The findings suggest that a close relationship between auditors and clients in firms with significant family control could compromise auditor’s skepticism. The FCS can easily influence the auditors to agree with the ways they treat the RPT disclosure. Therefore, policymakers may have to revisit auditors’ rotation policies in Malaysia, especially those involving FCS.

Trust, familiarity and future fee dependency are significant threats to auditor independence in a close ACR. This study contributes to the literature by examining the effect of a close ACR on RPT types of disclosure from a network theory perspective.

Interpersonal networks and quality of women and men’s close work friendships in three work settings were investigated to assess potential impact of gender socialization and organizational structure factors on patterns of interaction within same‐sex and opposite‐sex work friendships, and to examine whether friendship quality would predict salary and job satisfaction and if this would differ as a function of the sex of the employee or the friend. Findings indicate that homophilous ties are stronger than opposite sex ties, which support previous research on relationships in the work environment. Work context influenced the nature of relationships among women and men. In contrast to research on friendships outside the workplace, work friendships involving women were not consistently rated as more satisfying and ratings varied across work settings. Quality of close male friendships was more associated with career success and job satisfaction than quality of close female friendships.

This paper argues for the following sensitizing proposition. At its core, much of consumer behavior that involves brand meanings is an attempt to influence, or symbolically mark, interpersonal relationships.

This paper presents a conceptual argument based on a literature review.

First, I argue that our pervasive concern with other people is a basic genetic component of human beings, and discuss some possible evolutionary pressures that may have led to this result. Then I discuss how this pervasive concern influences consumer behavior related to brand meanings. This discussion is structured around two aspects of social relationships: interpersonal closeness and social status. Relationship closeness is discussed with regard to brand communities, gifts, special possessions and brand love, and the often hidden ways that social relationships permeate everyday consumer behavior. Social status is discussed with reference to materialism. Materialism is sometimes misunderstood as an obsession with physical object, or as occurring when people care more about products than they do about people. In contrast, I argue that materialism is better understood as a style of relating to people.

This paper integrates a range of disparate findings in support of a broadly applicable generalization that nothing matters more to people than other people. This generalization can function as a sensitizing proposition that managers and researchers can bear in mind as they seek to interpret and understand how brand meaning influences consumer behavior.

In order to decrease patient waiting time and improve efficiency, healthcare systems in some countries have recently begun to shift away from decentralized systems of patient referral from general practitioners (GPs) to specialists toward centralized ones. From a queueing theory perspective, centralized referral systems can decrease waiting time by reducing the variation in the referral process. However, from a social psychological perspective, a close relationship between referring physician and specialist, which is characteristic of decentralized referral systems, may safeguard against high referral rates; since GPs refer patients directly to the specialists whom they know, they may be reluctant to damage that relationship with an inappropriate referral. The purpose of this paper is to examine the effect upon referral behavior of a relationship between physicians, as is found in a decentralized referral system, vs a centralized referral system, which is characterized by an anonymous GP-specialist relationship. In a controlled experiment where family practice residents made decisions concerning referral to specialists, physicians displaying high confidence referred significantly fewer patients in a close relationship condition than in a centralized referral system, suggesting that for some physicians, referral behavior can be affected by the design of the service system and will, in turn, affect system performance.

The authors used a controlled experiment to test the research hypotheses.

Physicians displaying high confidence referred significantly fewer patients in a close relationship condition than in a centralized referral system, suggesting that for some physicians, referral behavior can be affected by system attributes and will, in turn, affect system performance.

The current study has some limitations, however. First, the sample consisted only of family practice residents and did not have the knowledge and experience of GPs regarding the referral process. Second, the authors used hypothetical patient case descriptions instead of real-world patients. Repeating this experiment with primary care physicians in real setting would be beneficial.

The study indicates that decentralized referral systems may act (rightly or wrongly) as a restraint on the rate of referrals to specialists. Thus, an implementation of a centralized referral system should be expected to produce an increase in referrals simply due to the change in the operational system setup. Even if centralized referral systems are more efficient and can facilitate the referral process by creating a central queue rather than multiple single queues for patients, the removal of social ties such as long-term social relationships that are developed between GPs and specialists in decentralized referral systems may act to counterbalance these theoretical gains.

This study provide support for the idea that non-clinical factors play an important role in referrals to specialists and hence in the quality of provided care, as was suggested by previous studies in this area (Hajjaj et al., 2010; Reid et al., 1999). The design of the service system may inadvertently influence some doctors to refer too many patients to specialists when there is no need for a specialist visit. In high-utilization health systems, this may cause some patients to be delayed (or even denied) in obtaining specialist access. Healthcare systems may be able to implement behavioral-based techniques in order to mitigate the negative consequences of a shift to centralized referral systems. One approach would be to try to create a feeling of close relationship among doctors in centralized referral systems. High communication and frequent interaction among GPs and specialists can boost the feelings of teamwork and personal efficacy through social comparison (Schunk, 1989, 1991) and vicarious learning (Zimmerman, 2000), which can in turn motivate GPs to take control of the patient care process when appropriate, instead of referring patients to specialists.

The authors’ study is the first examining the effect of social relationships between GPs and specialists on the referral patterns. Considering the significant implications of referral decisions on patients, doctors, and the healthcare systems, the study can shed light into a better understanding of the social and behavioral aspects of the referral process.

Stepgrandparent-stepgrandchild relationships are increasingly common as a result of relatively high rates of divorce and remarriage and increased longevity. When relationships are close, stepgrandparents may be valuable resources for stepgrandchildren, but the relational processes salient to the development of these ties remain largely unknown. The purposes of our research were: (1) to explore the complexity of stepgrandparent-stepgrandchild relationships, and (2) to examine processes that affected stepgrandparent-stepgrandchild relationship development.

We present results from four grounded theory projects, which were based on semistructured interviews with 58 stepgrandchildren who provided data about 165 relationships with stepgrandparents. Collectively, these studies highlighted key processes of stepgrandparent-stepgrandchild relationship development operating within four distinct pathways to stepgrandparenthood – long-term, later life, skip-generation, and inherited pathways.

Stepgrandchildren’s closeness to stepgrandparents was influenced by factors such as timing (the child’s age and when in their life courses intergenerational relationships began), stepgrandparents’ roles in the life of the middle-generation parent and the quality of those relationships, whether or not the stepfamily defined the stepgrandparent as kin (e.g., through the use of claiming language), intergenerational contact frequency, and stepgrandparents’ affinity-building.

Our study furthers understanding of stepgrandparent-stepgrandchild by attending to the importance of context in examining the processes that affect intergenerational steprelationship development. Exploring processes related to intergenerational steprelationships strengthens our understanding of the benefits and challenges associated with steprelationship development. Our study also sheds light on the “new look at kinship” and the processes that inform the social construction of family in a changing familial landscape.

Investigates how large UK multinational firms evaluate individual and multiple banking relationships, and how they exercise control over their portfolios of banks. The identification and description of how firms do this is important for those banks marketing a wide range of financial services to the corporate sector. Between 1986 and 1990, 15 confidential corporate case studies were developed from interviews with UK firms. The case firms were a sample of 15 large UK‐based multinational companies (MNCs) drawn from the FT100. Senior finance personnel were interviewed during 1986‐90 in all 15 firms using a semi‐structured questionnaire. Uses a theoretical perspective to interpret this decision behaviour and explores the nature and function of these decision rules.

This paper aims to develop the existing theoretical concept of a triad by informing it with the activity-resource-actor (ARA) model in a new empirical context of lean management (LM).

This conceptual paper draws on the industrial marketing and purchasing (IMP) school of thought and the ARA model as theoretical lenses to inform research on triads in an LM context.

The authors find that closed buyer-supplier-supplier (BSS) and buyer-supplier-logistics service provider (BSL) triads, which we call “lean triads,” had a positive impact on LM. The authors display the drivers for closure – LM improvements (Table 2) and the properties of these “lean triads” (Figure 3).

The paper focuses only on closed triads and is based on previous empirical studies.

The authors demonstrate to lean managers the drivers for connecting their partners in BSS and BSL triads and show the importance of developing relationships on three layers between all three actors in both triads to improve a firm’s lean performance.

The authors contribute to the discussion within the IMP school of thought on the value of triads by enriching the understanding of a triad concept with the ARA model, which compounds a concept of a multilayered triad in an LM context.