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A surge in demand for ethical products, including cruelty-free products, has been well documented in recent years, with direct ramifications for businesses. This trend towards ethical consumption seemed to be swiftly replicated in Eastern countries, especially in South Asian nations, as a result of westernisation. Based on the theory of planned behaviour and the concept of the attitude-behaviour gap, this study aims to investigate the impact of westernisation on the purchase intention of cruelty-free cosmetic products.

A positivist research paradigm was utilised in this study. Accordingly, an online self-administered questionnaire was shared among 242 consumers of cosmetic products in Sri Lanka in order to collect responses. The statistical techniques of correlation analysis, the Sobel test and moderator regression analysis have been utilised in this study.

It was found that there seems to be a positive impact of westernisation and the cruelty-free purchase intention of consumers. Moreover, consumer empowerment appears to mediate this relationship, while the attitude behaviour gap tends to further impact the relationship between consumer empowerment and the purchase intention of cruelty-free products.

This study seems to shed light upon the impact of westernisation on the purchase intention of consumers, especially from an ethical dimension and this study is likely to extend existing studies which have focussed on consumer empowerment, attitude-behaviour gap as well as the theory of planned behaviour, especially in the context of South Asia, where there seems to be a dearth of such investigations. Moreover, this study has attempted to contextualise the construct of “Westernisation” to the South Asian region in line with the tone set by an editorial article Dewasiri et al. (2021).

This paper investigates the deterrence effect of development on crime against women in India. Specifically, the authors examine the deterrence effect of the composite development index, i.e. Human Development Index (HDI), along with other variables acting as development indicators such as women’s employment, the relative strength of women in the police force, urbanization, etc., on crimes against women.

This study adopts a fixed effect within-group (WG) panel regression model and pooled regression model on the data of 28 states over 20 years from 2000 to 2019. For checking the robustness of the results, the authors use the estimation from the system generalized method of moments.

The results confirm the deterrence effect of development as measured by the HDI and female labor force participation on various crimes against women. In addition, female feticide representing the socio-cultural attitude toward women turned out to be another significant determinant of almost all types of crime against women. Further, the study also finds the deterrence effect of variables such as police expenditure, the relative strength of women in the police force, urbanization and arrest rate on various crimes against women.

This research paper is unique because it tries to examine the deterrence hypothesis of development by taking a composite index of development, i.e. HDI and other variables at the state level in the Indian union.

The purpose of this study is to identify sociodemographic factors that are predictive of the level of everyday sadism (SAD) in the business area.

A survey was conducted on 424 graduate and postgraduate students from business schools in Brazil and the USA. SAD was quantified by the assessment of sadistic personality proposed by Plouffe Saklofske and Smith (2017). The variables included age, gender, managing experience, education and nationality.

The average level of SAD was low. SAD was negatively associated with gender, age and nationality and positively associated with managing experience and education.

As individuals ascend professionally and academically, they display higher levels of everyday sadism. Depending on the context, dark personalities can cause either benefit or harm to the company's business and to society. However, the literature shows that seeking pleasure and dominance with no regard for consequences affects the business area directly or indirectly.

Very few studies have addressed everyday sadism in the business area, let alone evaluated predictive factors and discussed possible implications.

Broadly understood as repeated, intentional, and aggressive behaviors facilitated by digital technologies, cyberbullying has been identified as a significant public health concern in Australia. However, there have been critical debates about the theoretical and methodological assumptions of cyberbullying research. On the whole, this research has demonstrated an aversion to accounting for context, difference, and complexity. This insensitivity to difference is evident in the absence of nuanced accounts of Indigenous people's experiences of cyberbullying. In this chapter, we extend recent critiques of dominant approaches to cyberbullying research and argue for novel theoretical and methodological engagements with Indigenous people's experiences of cyberbullying. We review a range of literature that unpacks the many ways that social, cultural, and political life is different for Indigenous peoples. More specifically, we demonstrate there are good reasons to assume that online conflict is different for Indigenous peoples, due to diverse cultural practices and the broader political context of settler-colonialism. We argue that the standardization of scholarly approaches to cyberbullying is delimiting its ability to attend to social difference in online conflict, and we join calls for more theoretically rigorous, targeted, difference-sensitive studies into bullying.