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The present study, by using signaling perspective aims to investigate short-term valuation impact of rebranding announcements (with name change) on stock performance of 160 service firms listed on NSE NIFTY-500 over the period of 2000–2019.

An event study methodology is used to estimate the cumulative abnormal returns (CARs) and its statistical significance is tested with both parametric and non-parametric test-statistics. Separate analysis has been conducted for firms with “major vs minor” and “restructuring vs non-restructuring” name change.

Findings of the study suggest that rebranding decisions are negatively associated with abnormal returns around the announcement period indicating strong disapproval of name change event. In addition, investors formed strong adverse opinion for major name change firms as compared to minor name change firms. Further, restructured name change sample document larger negative drift than non-restructured sample.

Findings offer substantial repercussions for shareholders who can make informed judgments about name change as a signal of reinventing brand identity. Managers should announce detailed rationale behind name change decision to market for enhancing corporate reputation.

This study contributes to marketing-finance interface literature and is first to examine market reaction to name change of Indian service firms and moreover, made a distinction between major vs minor and restructured vs non-restructured name change events for these firms.

Purpose: The prominence of quality education for building sustainable development is undeniable and is distinctly pointed out in 1 of the 14 sustainable development goals (SDGs). In the same context, this study intends to investigate the role of university commitment, perceived organisational prestige, student satisfaction, and perceived employability in enhancing sustainability in higher education.

Need of the Study: To evaluate how student satisfaction mediates the relationship between university commitment, perceived organisational prestige, and perceived employability with sustainable university institutes.

Methodology: An adapted questionnaire was used in this study to capture the perception of 458 management graduates selected through the purposive sampling method. Partial least squares structural equation modelling (PLS-SEM) technique was used to analyse the data with the help of Smart PLS software.

Findings: The results of this study show that student satisfaction is the strongest predictor of sustainable university institutes. University commitment was found to lead to student satisfaction significantly. Furthermore, student satisfaction wasn’t found to play the role of mediator in the proposed model.

Practical Implications: This study aims to fulfil theoretical, research, and management implications for students, higher education institutes (HEIs), and policymakers. HEIs are recommended to instil university commitment, perceived organisational prestige and student satisfaction via various practices and amendments in their curriculum. Students are recommended to enhance their perceived employability to achieve career sustainability.

To examine the employer brand attributes that attract students to various organisations. This paper studies the perceived importance levels of students in the context of employer brand dimensions.

This paper is based on a well-administered and structured questionnaire with survey results to test the effectiveness of the employer brand model. The researcher received a convenience sample of 416 filled questionnaires out of the 550 distributed questionnaires. Independent sample and paired sample t-tests were run to test the hypotheses.

Development value emerged as the most potent factor, whereas interest value emerged as the least favoured characteristic of an employer brand. Further analyses revealed no significant differences regarding the perceived levels of importance for dimensions of employer brand in relation to gender. Distinct significance levels are associated with various dimensions of employer brand, so companies should carefully emphasise and facilitate those dimensions. The managers could design their job advertisements to attract skilled employees based on the essential values depicted in this study.

The study contributes valuable suggestions for organisations to formulate an effective employer brand for successful recruitment strategies.

The purpose of this study is to test a model of healthcare professionals’ well-being seen as a consequence of a process of motivated professional identity construction, a variable that mediates the influence of the organizational identity (utilitarian or normative) and the perceived reputation of the profession on well-being.

Cross-sectional design, based on a survey of 384 healthcare professionals. Structural equation modeling with latent variables was used to test the model.

The data provide empirical evidence supporting the proposed model. We find that organizational identity (utilitarian and normative) and perceived professional reputation positively relate to professional identity, a variable that positively relates to well-being. Professional identity mediates the relationship between organizational identity (normative and utilitarian) and perceived professional reputation and well-being. Utilitarian organizational identity and perceived professional reputation are also directly related to well-being.

This research significantly departs from the current focus of explaining the well-being of healthcare professionals by resorting mainly to individual factors and introduces organizational and institutional determinants.

This manuscript explores the evolving roles of HR professionals amidst global megatrends and organizational transitions, focusing on the Italian context, which has experienced disruptive adoption of new forms of work such as remote and hybrid work. In this challenging scenario, our research aims to uncover if and how HR professionals are transforming their roles or maintaining the status quo in navigating organizational changes, dealing with the upcoming working scenario, and challenging conventional perceptions of HR practitioners.

The study employs the social-symbolic work lens, that contributes to a deeper understanding of how HR professionals work to construct organizational life, the identities of employees, and the societal norms and assumptions that provide the context for organizational action. This perspective highlights HR professionals’ personal efforts, consisting of the emotional labor entailed in steering organizational transformations and, eventually, maintenance in a context where remote work has become prevalent. Data was collected through 16 online focus groups involving 76 HR professionals from Italian organizations.

Our research offers two interrelated contributions to HR literature. First, we provide pieces of evidence on how HR practitioners act as agents of change in two emerging roles: the “Wannabe Hero” and the “Ordinary Hero”. This challenges the prevailing rhetorical discourse about the so-called HR business partner. Secondly, we delve into the persistent obstacles that hinder HR professionals from making a substantial impact in addressing radical changes. These findings will provide useful insights into effectively engaging HR practitioners as agents of change in organizational transformation, shedding light on praxis, structures, and their emotional work.

The paper analyzes HR professionals’ social-symbolic work, which offers an original contribution to the comprehension of the activities they carry on in practice and the emotions they have been experiencing. These influence both the way HR professionals play their role and the organizational and institutional environment.

Enterprise social media (ESM) are expressive spaces where users exchange emotional workplace communication. While some studies have explored how positive emotions may be contagious, little research explored the notion that negative communication may accumulate on enterprise social media. This study explores perceived negativity bias and its correlates in the context of ESM.

This study relies on survey data collected from 599 employees of a global organization. The response rate was 18.7%. Structural equation modeling was used to test the hypotheses.

The results contribute to research on ESM by demonstrating that perceived negativity bias is positively related to feelings of accountability and negatively associated with social support. Furthermore, the results indicate that unmet communication expectations on ESM can have implications for perceived social support beyond online contexts and accountability through perceived negativity bias.

The findings demonstrate how employees' unmet expectations about ESM use increase feelings that a digital environment is disproportionately negative, which may create an “unsafe” space for employees and a fear of being held accountable for their contributions. This study highlights how the Expectation-Disconfirmation Theory provides a fruitful framework for studying enterprise social technologies.

This study suggests that work is not merely a rational endeavor, and that emotions and personal feelings (including negative ones) may shape workplace communication on ESM. We contribute to research on ESM use by using the Expectation-Disconfirmation Theory as a lens to study antecedents and implications of perceived negativity bias.

Two-sided messages in advertising, which contain both negative and positive information, can have varying effects on persuasion. Thus, it is crucial to understand the conditions under which such messages are more or less effective compared to one-sided messages that only contain positive information. This research investigates the moderating role of the visual angle (close-up vs. long shot) of an image by drawing upon construal level theory.

This research reports two experimental studies employing a 2 (message: two-sided [positive and negative information], one-sided [positive information as a control condition]) × 2 (visual angle: near [close-up], distant [long shot]) between-subjects design.

The results demonstrate that two-sided messages paired with a close-up image decrease positive electronic word of mouth (eWOM) due to increased feelings of ambivalence, while two-sided messages paired with a long-shot image increase positive eWOM due to increased perceived authenticity.

These findings provide insight into the impact of two-sided messages on advertising persuasion and provide guidance for marketers in developing effective communication strategies to leverage positive eWOM.

Contributions to this volume showcase the current state of gender research as it relates to the embodiment and representation of beauty. In particular, the authors highlight a more open-ended concept of beauty that goes beyond esthetics. The authors call our attention to the fact that beauty definitions and standards in any given society closely reflect the distribution of power in it. For this purpose, the authors in this volume share findings of research and conducted in multiple sites in the United States (i.e., Southern California, the Midwest, the Northwest, New York City, Salt Lake City, Houston, Boston, and Washington, DC), El Salvador, and the Dominican Republic. Contributors also use a variety of qualitative and quantitative methodologies to expand notions of beauty and its embodiment across diverse areas and experiences. The authors ask and invite us to ask ourselves how race, class, disability, gender identity or sexual orientation, and other dimensions of inequality inform our definitions of what beauty is and is not. They exhort us to interrogate who defines who and what is beautiful and why. Finally, rather than being problem-oriented, the premise of each study is to effect collective change in the ways we construe, see, represent, and embody beauty.

This paper explores the way in which industrial pollution has been expressed in the narrative accounts of nature, landscape and industry by William Gilpin in his 18th-century picturesque travel writings. A positive description of pollution is generally outdated and unacceptable in the current society. The authors contrast his “picturesque” view with the contemporary perception of industrial pollution, reflect on these early accounts of industrial impacts as representing the roots of impression management and use the analysis to inform current accounting.

The research uses an interpretive content analysis of the text to draw out themes and features of impression management. Goffman's impression management is the theoretical lens through which Gilpin's travel accounts are interpreted, considering this microhistory through a thematic research approach. The picturesque accounts are explored with reference to the context of impression management.

Gilpin's travel writings and the “Picturesque” aesthetic movement, it appears, constructed a social reality around negative industrial externalities such as air pollution and indeed around humans' impact on nature, through a lens which described pollution as adding aesthetically to the natural landscape. The lens through which the picturesque tourist viewed and expressed negative externalities involved quite literally the tourists' tricks of the trade, Claude glass, called also Gray's glass, a tinted lens to frame the view.

The paper adds to the wealth of literature in accounting and business pertaining to the ways in which companies socially construct reality through their accounts and links closely to the impression management literature in accounting. There is also a body of literature relating to the use of images and photographs in published corporate reports, which again is linked to impression management as well as to a growing literature exploring the potential for the aesthetic influence in accounting and corporate communication. Further, this paper contributes to the growing body of research into the historical roots of environmental reporting.

This paper aims to provide insights into the potential of digital technologies-based innovations for more inclusive healthcare by alleviating the affordability, accessibility and availability barriers to utilization of healthcare services. Also, it aims to provide insights into the potential of digital technologies-based innovations for more inclusive services, broadly.

A conceptual framework is inductively developed by analyzing real-world examples of digital technologies-based innovations for more inclusive healthcare through the lenses of economics of information in digital form and certain characteristics of services.

Concurrent implementation of digital technologies-based healthcare innovations with innovations and/or modifications in service processes can enable greater inclusivity by alleviating the affordability, accessibility and availability barriers to utilization of healthcare services.

Issues relating to inequities in healthcare, as a social problem, are the focus of research at multiple levels (e.g. global, national, regional and local) in several academic disciplines. In relation to the scope of the problems and challenges pertaining to providing quality healthcare to the unserved and underserved segments of society, worldwide, the contribution of the proposed framework to practice is modest. However, by highlighting the promise and potential of digital technologies-based innovations as solutions for alleviating barriers to affordability, accessibility and availability of healthcare services during various stages (prevention, detection, diagnosis, treatment and post-treatment follow-up) with illustrative vignettes and developing a framework, the article offers insights for future research. For instance, in reference to mission-driven social enterprises that operate in the product-market space for inclusive innovations under resource constraints, a resourcefulness-based view of the social enterprise constitutes a potential avenue for theory development and research.

Given the conceptual nature of the article, the implications for practice are limited to cognitive implications. Action implications (instrumental implications or implications for practice) are outside of the scope of the article.

Innovations that are economically viable, environmentally sustainable and socially impactful is one of the important issues of our times.

The proposed framework provides insights into the potential of digital technologies-based innovations for more inclusive healthcare by alleviating the affordability, accessibility and availability barriers in the context of emerging and less developed country markets and base of the pyramid segments of society in these markets.