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Despite the significance of online communication and interactions, previous research has not systematically compared all features on a single platform from the users' perspective. This study aims to fill this gap by extensively reviewing the current literature on social media affordances and proposes and tests a feature-centric and affordance-based conceptualization of social media platforms (SMPs) between users, features, the audience and content.

This research surveys users on Facebook, one of the largest SMPs, and asks them to assess 20 features of Facebook on six relational affordances between users, features, audience and content. The data in this study were collected on Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk) with participants from the US Correspondence analysis was employed to examine the relationship between affordances and the ties among affordances, features and outcomes.

Results of the study indicate that users perceive features differently, and employing features as the unit of analysis captures users' interactions effectively. The findings support the presence of user-oriented affordances, such as presentation flexibility, association and content association. These three affordances can be summarized in two higher-level ones: self-expression and connection (SEC) and persona-linked content (PLC). Our findings of the two dimensions, SEC and PLC, highlight the importance of targets and their connections in understanding social media interactions' dynamic nature.

By proposing to shift the focus from platforms to features, this study suggests that companies should focus on understanding the features they use for their users to interact with their brand, rather than merely ensuring that their company is omnipresent on all platforms. This study underlines the need to focus on features that will help managers influence interpersonal and user-brand communications and interactions on social media.

This research is the first to put features at the center of its investigation and quantitatively examine the relationship between social media features and affordances in a social media context. In all, this research provides a new unit of analysis that is more suitable for researchers to build a robust conceptual foundation for affordances. We believe that conceptualizing audience and content as outcomes, distinguishing it from features and creating connections between them as affordances is the unique aspect of our conceptualization.

The paper seeks to propose the concept of sustainable enterprise simulation models. The social, environmental and economic models are developed and simulated using iThink in the context of a warehousing and distribution company.

The paper has leveraged the systems dynamic paradigm to conduct sustainable enterprise modelling and iThink™ system to implement the models. It uses the design science research methodology for the proof of concept of the models and modelling processes. The models have been developed for a logistics management company and tested in the business settings. These models were finalised through a number of revisions and iterations of the design, develop, simulate and test and evaluate.

The paper addresses the interconnectivity between disparate sustainability dimensions for developing the models. The validity and usefulness of the sustainability models for the day‐to‐day decision making has been authenticated by the management of the warehousing organisation.

The paper implements system dynamics concepts of sustainability modelling and produces models of various sustainability dimensions which are original in nature and evolution. While the domain in which sustainable enterprise modelling was carried out was warehousing, the concepts and principles that were explored, developed and validated is applicable across most enterprises.

Interviews in South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, and India indicate net present value (NPV) is not widely employed in making capital investment decisions in these newly industrialized and developing countries. It is not from lack of knowledge about net present value: rather, it is due to (1) widespread violation of the assumptions underlying NPV, (2) the high risk/high return nature of the capital investments, and (3) the decision‐making process employed in making capital investment decisions. These same three conditions exist for many capital investment decisions made by firms in developed countries. Only by abandoning the static NPV approach, building in real options, and understanding and building in the decision‐making process will further advances be made in capital budgeting decision‐making. One of the key paradigms in finance is net present value (NPV). In order to maximize value, managers should accept all positive NPV investment projects, and reject all negative NPV projects. The issue becomes more complex when uncertainty is introduced, or, as in recent years, when real options to defer, abandon, expand, etc. are incorporated into the decision‐making process [e.g., Dixit and Pindyck (1994) and Trigeorgis (1995 and 1996)]. However, with these exceptions, the state of the art in capital investment decision‐making revolves around the simple statement—take all positive NPV projects. In practice, evidence from surveys and discussions with corporate executives indicates the message taught for the last 30 years in business schools has been heard and, to a large extent, acted upon by larger U.S., Canadian, and British‐based firms. While larger firms in North America, and to a lesser extent Western Europe, generally employ the static, or traditional, NPV framework for making, or assisting in making, capital investment decisions, less is known about the decision‐making process employed by firms in other parts of the world. The question addressed in this study is: “Do firms in other parts of the world, especially in newly industrialized or developing countries in the Asia Pacific region, employ NPV for making capital investment decisions?” The purposes of this study are threefold: (1) to report the results of a series of open‐ended interviews conducted in South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, and India about the capital investment decision‐making process employed; (2) to understand why NPV is not widely employed in making capital investment decisions in these newly industrialized and developing countries; and, most important, (3) to indicate that NPV and the capital budgeting decision‐making process need rethinking and refocusing to make them more effective—in all countries, whether developed, newly industrialized, or developing. The paper proceeds in the following manner. Section I provides an introduction to the study. In Section II the results of the interviews are presented. In Section III patterns that emerged during the interview process are presented, along with a number of specific examples of the types of capital investment decisions being considered. In Section IV the assumptions underlying NPV are examined, and then risk/return and the decision‐making process are considered. Section V contains the discussion and conclusions.

The purpose of this study is to investigate motives for engaging in electronic word of mouth (eWOM) about organizations on social media sites. This study explores motives for posting positive eWOM and motives for posting negative eWOM. It also investigates whether existing WOM frameworks adequately capture consumers’ motives for spreading eWOM within the context of social media. This study seeks to confirm established motives in literature while also identifying new motives specific to social media.

A qualitative study was conducted using the critical incident technique. In all, 64 positive incidents and 60 negative incidents were analyzed.

This study provides a typology for understanding consumers’ motivations for engaging in positive and negative WOM within the context of social media. Four new motives for sharing eWOM are identified; eight established WOM motives are re-confirmed; and new subcategories for eWOM motives are proposed. The study also finds that further refinement of WOM motives and scales within a social media context is needed.

An integrated conceptual framework of both positive and negative motives is developed to illustrate a more comprehensive model of motives of eWOM within social media. Managerial implications for managing negative eWOM and amplifying positive eWOM are discussed. A limitation is that the study is exploratory in nature.

This study identifies new motives for sharing eWOM, re-labels existing WOM and eWOM motives with more descriptive and comprehensive titles and confirms established WOM and eWOM motives within the context of social media. This study is conducted across multiple firms and industries, leading to more generalizable results.

The purpose of this paper is to propose future directions for research into stories and metaphors as concise communication tools that are particularly salient for the fast pace of today’s retail sales environment.

A cross disciplinary approach is taken to propose new avenues for sales communication research.

This work highlights research possibilities into the contextually sensitive constructs of stories and metaphors with associated theoretical approaches. This could improve research into stories and metaphors as communication techniques for retail selling.

The findings indicate that stories and metaphors are highly engaging sensemaking tools that salespeople can use in retail sales encounters. The lack of existing literature within the sales domain suggests a significant learning curve in demarcating the use of these tools.

Stories and metaphors are presently used by salespeople but without the benefit of extensive scientific understanding. This paper builds a foundation for research that could bring clarity to the use of these tools in retail selling.

Researchers will benefit from a finer grained conceptualization with which to examine sales communication. The proposed research should get sales practitioners a clearer understanding of using stories and metaphors in sales encounters.

Although conformable devices are commonly designed to couple with the human body for personalized and localized medicine, their applications are expanding rapidly. This paper aims to delineate this expansion and predict greater implications in diverse fields.

Today’s device technologies continue to face fundamental obstacles preventing their seamless integration with target objects to effectively access, evaluate and alter self-specific physical patterns, while still providing physical comfort and enabling continuous data collection. Due to their extreme mechanical compliance, conformable devices permit the query of signals occurring at interfaces so as to decode and encode biological, chemical and mechanical patterns with high resolution, precision and accuracy. These unique and versatile capabilities allow for a marked change in the approach to tackling scientific questions, with the ability to address societal challenges at large.

Here, this study highlights the current state of these devices in a wide range of fields, such as interactive teaching, textiles, robotics, buildings and infrastructure, agriculture, climate and space, and further forecasts essential features of these devices in the near future.

This study justifies conformable devices’ growing utility through a novel quantitative analysis methodology that indexes peer-reviewed journal articles based on specific keywords, whereby this study tracks keyword frequency over time across specific fields in conjunction with conformability-like topics. The resulting trends’ trajectories provide the foundation for this study’s future projections. This study concludes with a perspective on the possible challenges concomitant with a ubiquitous presence of these technologies, including manufacturing, wireless communication, storage, compression, privacy and sharing of data, environmental sustainability, avoidance of inequality and bias and collaboration between stakeholders at all levels of impact.

The keys to effective service recovery are familiar to many throughout industry and academia. Nevertheless, overall customer satisfaction after a failure has not improved, and many managers claim their organizations cannot respond to and fix recurring problems quickly enough. Why does service recovery so often fail and what can managers do about it? This paper aims to address these issues.

The objective is to produce an interdisciplinary summary of the growing literature on service recovery, bringing together what each of the author's domain – management, marketing, and human resources management – has to offer. By contrasting those three perspectives using 141 academic sources, nine tensions between customer, process, and employee recovery are discovered.

It is argued that service recovery often fails due to the unresolved tensions found between the conflicting perspectives of customer recovery, process recovery, and employee recovery. Therefore, successful service recovery requires the integration of these different perspectives. This is summarized in the following definition: “Service recovery are the integrative actions a company takes to re‐establish customer satisfaction and loyalty after a service failure (customer recovery), to ensure that failure incidents encourage learning and process improvement (process recovery) and to train and reward employees for this purpose (employee recovery).”

Managers are not advised to directly address and solve the nine tensions between customer recovery, process recovery, and employee recovery. Instead, concentrating on the underlying cause of these tensions is recommended. That is, managers should strive to integrate service recovery efforts based upon a “service logic”; a balance of functional subcultures; strategy‐driven resolution of functional differences; data‐based decision making from the seamless collection and sharing of information; recovery metrics and rewards; and development of “T‐shaped” employees with a service, not just functional, mindset.

This paper provides an interdisciplinary view of the difficulties to implement a successful service recovery management. The contribution is twofold. First, specific tensions between customer, process and employee recovery are identified. Second, managers are offered recommendations of how to integrate the diverging perspectives.