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The purpose of this paper is to report on the development and validation of a consumer power scale comprising a personal and a social power dimension. Personal power refers to consumers’ perceived ability to resist and ignore a firm’s marketing efforts. Social power refers to consumers’ perceived ability to influence a firm’s actions.

Following established scale development procedures, the construct definition and item generation preceded five studies that establish the scale’s dimensionality, psychometric properties and external, predictive and nomological validity.

Consumer power was modeled as a reflective first-order, formative second-order latent construct. The consumer power scale is psychometrically sound and possesses external and discriminant validity with regard to other power-related measures. Consumer power mediates the relation between consumers’ cognitive control and consumer satisfaction and between perceived choice and emotional responses.

This research uses episodic recall tasks to elicit power perceptions in various contexts. Results suggest that the scale is useful in comparative and longitudinal tracking of consumers’ perceptions of power in relation to a firm.

Building on a comprehensive literature review and rigorous scale development, this paper introduces a scale of consumer power that comprises a personal and a social power dimension. A critical analysis of and a predictive validity test of the scale against existing power scales highlight its unique contribution. The scale lends itself to further theory tests regarding antecedents, consequences and moderators of consumer power.

The authors aim to examine how macro, meso and micro territorial boundaries influence the loan repayment performance of female clients of mega microfinance institutions (MFIs) operating in a polarized Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC).

The study uses panel data (random effect analysis) comprising seven years and 407 MFIs of LAC.

The repayment performance of MFIs' female clients in LAC is meso and micro territorially bounded. It is positively influenced by the urbanization and gender inequality levels of the LAC countries, and by the number of loans per MFI loan officer.

Data concerning the risk of the businesses women invested in, or data related to women's access to credit, were not included; high heterogeneity in large countries must be taken into account. The authors' findings expand the understanding of territorial boundary conditions concerning female clients' repayment performance and extend the prior literature on the subject.

The authors' findings suggest that the MFIs operating in LAC should increase their number of loan officers. The MFIs of the Mexico-led cluster may also seek a better balance between female and male clients, since hiring more loan officers may be impracticable for them.

The authors empirically challenge the widely accepted assumption that female clients are always the best choice for MFIs. They also unfold territorial boundaries conditioning these clients' performance.

Increasingly, scholars and analysts are urging firms to transition from a model in which marketing is a discrete function to a diffused approach in which marketing is everyone’s job. Prior research has examined differences in firm level performance. However, this firm level focus has overlooked what effects this transition might have on the managers who perform the marketing role. The purpose of this paper is to investigate manager level consequences of transitioning between these approaches by evaluating differences in person-environment (P-E) fit between marketers and non-marketers.

The authors identify core marketing functions and relevant personality traits of marketing managers, based on the marketing literature. The authors then compare personality and career satisfaction data from 465 marketing managers against a larger, general employment sample of 3,100 employees. Finally, the authors examine the relationship of career satisfaction to each of these traits and investigate how these relationships differ across the two groups.

The authors find important differences between marketers and non-marketers. Most importantly, the authors found that the relationships between personality and career satisfaction were significantly different for traits suggested by the research literature as important to the marketing function. In particular, customer orientation, visionary leadership, optimism, and assertiveness were all associated with higher career satisfaction for the marketing sample than for the general sample.

This paper is among the first to examine manager level differences relevant to transitioning between firm level marketing approaches. For firms considering adopting the “everyone is a marketer” diffused approach, the findings reveal pitfalls that can lead to reduced career satisfaction, reduced manager performance, and increased turnover. As a result, the performance of firms that have already adopted a diffused approach may be misleading for those firms who have not. At a minimum, firms contemplating a transition to a diffused approach should conduct an assessment of P-E fit similar to that illustrated in this paper to assess the potential risks.

The purpose of this paper, building on the media richness theory (MRT), is to propose that while communicating product information via streaming video should enhance outcome measures, such an enhancement will be evident mainly for users with equivocal, latent goals (i.e. recreational browsing) rather than for those with less equivocal, concrete goals (i.e. the search of a specific product).

The experiment involved 337 potential online consumers in Canada, and had full factorial design with four conditions (two methods to communicate product information: textual vs streaming video, and two goals: product searching vs recreational browsing). Analysis of covariance was used to test the hypotheses.

The results lent support to the hypotheses. The perceived information quality, trusting competence, and arousal for participants with recreational browsing goals were significantly affected when product information where communicated using streaming video. For participants with concrete goals (product searchers), the traditional textual method was as effective as the streaming video method.

The findings entice practitioners to use rich media such as the streaming video method to communicate online information predominantly for users with experiential browsing goals, and to use lean media for users with less equivocal, concrete goals.

The results contribute to the sparse literature that underscores the key role of user goal in shaping the effectiveness of online information. The results provide empirical support to the prediction of MRT that the use of rich media to communicate information is advantageous for users with latent, equivocal goals.

China has invested massively in higher education, reaching a mass system, envisaging, as a next step, reaching a universal system. Brazil is still an elite system but needs to create adequate public policies to migrate to a mass system. The purpose of this article is to analyze the paradigms for a mass educational system, with regard to the quality of education offered, and the prospects for achieving a universal system, with Brazil and China as a reference.

The author applied an exploratory and qualitative method, through categorical content analysis. The data were collected through nine interviews with government managers, 15 unstructured (open) questionnaires to specialists in higher education and four student leadership.

The results indicate that the change from an elite system to a mass system impacts quality, as there is an inevitable change in experience. However, this modification does not testify against the mass system, as it is necessary for a nation to pass through it and structure itself adequately in order to reach the universal system, a path desired by both countries.

The study presented the reflections observed by the migration from the elite system to the mass system from the main stakeholders of the system in China and the prospects for Brazil to become a mass system. Additionally, it presented the perspectives for both countries to achieve the desired universal system.