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This paper examines the impact of celebrity endorsement on Malaysian consumers' behavioural intentions. Source attractiveness, source credibility and the fit between the endorser and the endorsed product are discussed and examined. An empirical study is carried out which uses stimulus materials that involve a sport shoe brand and a fitness centre. The dataset is analysed using a series of multivariate analyses and a model subsequently constructed using structural equation modelling. The findings indicated that source attractiveness and credibility are essential for celebrity endorsement effectiveness. However, the fit between the endorser and the product is not found to be significant. Nonetheless, this fit has an indirect effect on consumers' behavioural intentions, via the shared variances with source attractiveness and credibility.

This chapter explores queer theory as a “thought of a method” in educational ethnography by sharing stories of two third grade boys and situating them in a discussion of Britzman’s ideas about reading and Butler’s notion of fantasy. The stories are presented as a possible queer educational ethnography, in which the ethnographer writes the fantastic narrative of the boys as they read creatively to reveal and unsettle gender and reading as sites of constraint to which other constraints adhere. The boys’ reading itself is a queer reading of these constraints and as such makes alterity visible and possible. The study and the methodological framework suggest that educational ethnographers and other adults who work in schools should become attuned to the markers of constraint and alterity, so as to recognize, shelter, and maintain the alterity that children make possible. The chapter asserts children must be allowed to read for alterity, and shows how fantastic narratives that emerge from such readings are limited by the hushing of individuals who disallow alterity in classrooms. Ultimately, this chapter is relevant to ethnographers of education in that it suggests that queer theory not only is necessary to narrate and thus shelter the ways that gender can and should be unsettled in classrooms, but also allows us to narrate and shelter other queer urgencies related to fear, violence, and vulnerability that children experience or share in classrooms. Implications for the current climate of school reform based on standardization of curriculum are also discussed.

We study ceremonial adoption of voluntary standards, where participants adopt the standard in principle but do not change their practices. Ceremonial adoption can benefit individual participants, who may be able to reap the benefits of association with the standard at lower cost, but it can be problematic for overall levels of adoption. We conceive of ceremonial adoption as an interaction between strategic incentives of participants and social ties to their audiences, such that not all participants are likely to ceremonially adopt. Our setting is the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) certification for sustainable construction. We study the conditions under which projects register for LEED certification, allowing them to claim affiliation with LEED, but then do not actually finish certification. While our data are correlational in nature, our results suggest that studying the competition for audience members (in our case, occupants) can provide greater understanding of certification behavior as well as overall levels of adoption. Our findings have implications for organizations that design and maintain voluntary standards and for organization theorists who wish to understand field-level change. Thus, we provide more evidence that strategy and organizational theory interact in important and often unexamined ways.

This chapter presents a case study of the lesbian and gay rights movement following the Supreme Court's decision in Bowers v. Hardwick, which was a critical defeat in the campaign for sodomy repeal. Activists responded with a dramatic wave of mobilization by staging protests, successful appeals for organizational donations, building coalitions, and shifting institutional venues. This case provides a paradox for the dominant perspectives within social movement theory and legal mobilization literature, which often traces mobilization back to the expansion of political opportunities. The defeat in Bowers signaled a closing of political opportunities for activists. Drawing from a growing body of literature on political threats and heeding the call to specify the mechanisms of movement dynamics, I show how the defeat in Bowers was translated into proactive mobilization.

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This issue is a selected bibliography covering the subject of leadership.

This study investigated business-to-business (B2B) repeated purchase intent and its relationships with customer value and customer satisfaction. Additionally, it explored the link between willingness to purchase again, switching costs and product returns management. Modern customers are more likely to switch suppliers; however, previous research suggests that this behaviour can be attenuated by a robust returns management experience. The purpose of this study was to provide a revised model of B2B repeated purchase intent that integrates the concept of product returns management and switching costs with existing B2B customer repurchase intent models.

First, a qualitative inquiry based on semi-structured interviews was conducted to test and develop a quantitative survey. Then a survey was then sent to business owners operating in the audiology industry. Finally, there were 317 responses.

The authors reveal the complex relationship between returns management and repeated purchase intent. Specifically, the authors’ results indicate that the effect of product returns on repurchase intent is opposite to the effect of customer value, depending on the value of customer value. The authors’ findings indicate that even when switching costs are low, firms can positively impact the intent to purchase again in the future if they increase the level of customer satisfaction. In addition, the authors’ findings indicate that in the context of B2B a high/low level of customer satisfaction does not trigger a positive effect of managing product returns on repurchase intent.

This study was the first to introduce the concept of product returns management to research on B2B repurchase intent.

Increasing chances of firm survival requires enduring entrepreneurship or the ability to balance competing demands for exploration and exploitation. We developed how acquisitions can provide needed disruption to change a firm’s dominant orientation toward exploration or exploitation or enable a continued focus on a firm’s dominant orientation. The result is a new typology for acquisition integration associated with different pre- and post-acquisition characteristics. For example, a firm with an exploitation orientation faces different integration challenges in acquiring targets with an exploration or exploitation orientation. We also distinguished between human and task integration to enable more nuanced integration decisions that help to reconcile conflicting findings on acquisition integration decisions. Implications for management research and practice were discussed.

Organization culture and technology adoption are two of the most critical issues facing organizations in a global society. Increasingly, organizations operate in uncertain, networked, decentralized environments, where adoption and use of information technology has become central to fulfilling organizational missions. To examine the influence of organization culture on individual willingness to adopt technology, this work began by examining theories of behavioral intent, technology adoption, and organization culture and then proposed a model for examining technology adoption in public organizations. The research was based on the responses from an online survey of government, nonprofit, and social service workers from around the United States. The study found that there is a relationship between individual perception of organization culture and individual willingness to adopt technology. Finally, we addressed the limitations of the study design and propose future research.