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This study aims to examine the multidimensional nature of institutional distance as a driver of acquisition decisions in emerging markets. Then, this study aims to offer a nuanced perspective on the role of its various formal and informal dimensions by taking into account the potential contingency role played by a firm’s context experience.

Building on institutional economics and organizational institutionalism, this study explores the heterogeneity of institutional distance and its effects on the decision to enter emerging versus advanced markets through cross-border acquisitions. Thus, institutional distance is disentangled into its formal and informal dimensions, the former being captured by regulatory efficiency, country governance and financial development. Furthermore, our framework examines the moderating effect of an acquiring firm’s experience in institutionally similar environments, defined as context experience. The hypotheses are analyzed on a sample of 496 cross-border acquisitions by Italian companies in 41 countries from 2008 to 2018.

Findings indicate that at an increasing distance in terms of regulatory efficiency and financial development, acquiring firms are less likely to enter emerging markets, while informal institutional distance is positively associated with such acquisitions. Context experience mitigates the negative effect of formal distance and enhances the positive effect of informal distance.

This study contributes to institutional distance literature in multiple ways. First, by bridging institutional economics and organizational institutionalism and second, by examining the heterogeneity of formal and informal dimensions of distance, this study offers a finer-grained perspective on how institutional distance affects acquisition decisions. Finally, it offers a contingency perspective on the role of context experience.

Distances between contexts that a multinational enterprise (MNE) is familiar with and those that it is not familiar with do not hinder the MNE from becoming global. In this sense, distance serves as a barrier between an MNE’s global intentions and its regional realizations. (Multi)regional strategies are a possible expression of an MNE’s inability to approach distances. Considering the managerially relevant distances is essential to analyze the internationalization and the resulting (multi)regional strategies. A deeper understanding of how distance works requires linking distance to micro-foundations. Besides bounded rationality, bounded reliability opens the conceptual pathway toward a deeper understanding of internationalization and (multi)regional strategies.

COVID-19 and its measures such as physical distancing have shifted consumer payment behaviors toward cashless payment. Physical distancing is likely to remain a norm for some time to come and will be relevant in any future pandemics. This study aims to examine the impact of consumers’ perceived value of cashless payment on their use intention in the physical distancing context, with the mediating role of psychological safety and the moderating role of trust propensity.

This study used a survey method to obtain data from 690 consumers in an Asian emerging market, i.e. Vietnam. The data were analyzed using different statistical methods, including structural equation modeling.

Results show that perceived value of cashless payment positively affects use intention, and this effect is mediated by psychological safety. Furthermore, trust propensity has a positive moderating effect on the link between perceived value and psychological safety.

This study’s findings provide implications for retailers and other stakeholders in implementing and promoting cashless payment systems, especially in the physical distancing context.

This study is among the first attempt to explain the relationships between consumers’ perceptions, feelings of psychological safety and use intention toward cashless payment in the physical distancing context. The study’s findings may also be relevant to any future pandemics.

The authors proposed a conceptual model by examining the influence of threats to their freedom on tourists’ psychological distance including social distance, spatial distance, and temporal distance, which effect psychological reactance and the consequent online Airbnb booking intentions. Furthermore, media intrusiveness as a moderator determines the boundary conditions between perceived threats to their freedom and social distance, spatial distance, and temporal distance.

Data was gathered from 491 Chinese travelers to provide empirical evidence. The authors performed data analysis in Amos 26.0 using structural equation modeling (SEM) and Hayes (2013) PROCESS macro.

The findings positively reinforced all the structural relationships of the study. Notably, media intrusiveness significantly moderates the association between perceived threats to their freedom and psychological distance (i.e. social distance, spatial distance, and temporal distance).

The findings contribute significantly to the field of social psychology, advertising, and consumer behavior derive prolific implications for policymakers and sharing economy platforms. Lastly, by identifying limitations, this research opens doors for future scholars.

Governments' acute precautionary measures in response to the COVID-19 outbreak have confined individual freedom across the globe. This study illuminates how tourists conceive these preventative measures as perceived threats to their freedom, and subsequently engage psychological reactance.

The COVID-19 outbreak reached a critical stage when it became imperative for public health systems to act decisively and design potential behavioral operational strategies aimed at containing the pandemic. Isolation through social distancing played a key role in achieving this objective. This research study examines the factors affecting the intention of individuals toward social distancing in India.

A correlation study was conducted on residents from across Indian states (N = 499). Online questionnaires were floated, consisting of health belief model and theory of planned behavior model, with respect to social distancing behavior initially. Finally, structural equation modeling was used to test the hypotheses.

The results show that perceived susceptibility (PS), facilitating conditions (FC) and subjective norms are the major predictors of attitude toward social distancing, with the effect size of 0.277, 0.132 and 0.551, respectively. The result also confirms that the attitude toward social distancing, perceived usefulness of social distancing and subjective norms significantly predict the Intention of individuals to use social distancing with the effect size of 0.355, 0.197 and 0.385, respectively. The nonsignificant association of PS with social distancing intention (IN) (H1b) is rendering the fact that attitude (AT) mediates the relationship between PS and IN; similarly, the nonsignificant association of FC with IN (H5) renders the fact that AT mediates the relationship between FC and IN.

The results of the study are helpful to policymakers to handle operations management of nudges like social distancing.

The research is one of its kind that explores the behavioral aspects of handling social nudges through FC.

This study aims to explore the relationship between the content characteristics of destination online reviews and travel intention under three individual circumstances: temporal distance, social distance and experiential distance.

Based on construal-level theory (CLT), this study divides online travel reviews into concrete and abstract reviews. Three experiments were conducted to test the moderating effects of temporal distance, social distance and experiential distance on the influence of review content characteristics on tourists' travel intentions.

The results show that abstract reviews would lead to higher travel intentions than concrete reviews. Furthermore, tourists' travel intentions differed depending on social distance and were significantly affected by reviews posted by reviewers similar to review recipients. In addition, the study contributes by discovering that the moderating effects of temporal distance, social distance and experiential distance were not significant, which differs from most of the previous research conclusions.

This study focused on review content characteristics, which provided a novel perspective for constructing online travel reviews. Furthermore, this research defined the concept of experiential distance in the context of online travel and expanded the research on psychological distance.

This study aims to investigate the impact of managerial power distance on the corporate sustainability performance of Chinese firms and to explore the regulatory role of corporate digitalization in the Chinese capital market.

The study collects data from 2,632 A-share Chinese non-financial firms listed on Shanghai and Shenzhen stock exchanges during the period from 2010 to 2020. The authors apply different panel data regression techniques (fixed effects, GMM-System) to investigate the impact of managerial power distance on corporate sustainability performance and to explore the regulatory role of corporate digitalization in the Chinese capital market.

The results of the study show a positive relationship between high managerial power distance and the sustainability performance of Chinese non-financial firms. This positive relationship is particularly pronounced in Chinese state-owned enterprises (SOEs). The results also show that corporate digitalization increases the sustainability performance of Chinese firms. Further, corporate digitalization weakens the positive relationship between high-power distance and the sustainability performance of Chinese firms. These results are robust to alternate sustainability performance measures and various regression techniques.

To the best of the authors' knowledge, this is the first study that investigates the regulating impact of corporate digitalization on the relationship between managerial power distance and corporate sustainability performance in China.

This study uses a mixed methods approach to investigate the pedagogical approaches and teaching practices that the English Department at a private Lebanese university implemented to rectify the deteriorating speaking skills of their students during the first few months of the lockdown in Lebanon between March and June 2020. The data consisted of semi-structured interviews with English instructors, the speaking assessment scores, and the English peer support program (PSP) enrollment records. Qualitative analysis of the interviews identified the main challenges that the English instructors faced during their transition from face-to-face (FTF) to distance education. The analysis also identified the intervention strategies that were implemented to overcome these barriers to learning and adapt to and even benefit from computer-mediated communication (CMC) instruction and other technological resources to develop and improve the oral proficiency and fluency of tertiary English as a Foreign Language (EFL) students. The quantitative analysis referred to the average percentage variation of the pre-test and post-test scores of the speaking assessment to track the improvement (or lack thereof) of the students’ speaking skills across four semesters, prior to and after the intervention. A one-way ANOVA test was also conducted for the enrollment records of the English PSP and speaking assessment scores that showed that the program was an effective form of intervention that helped struggling students to at least prevent the further deterioration of their speaking capabilities in English. These findings show that for students to develop and enhance their speaking skills in English in a distance education context and during emergency times, efforts need to be made to reduce the hindering psychological factors and address all technology-related barriers that disrupt the online language learning environment and process.

This paper engages Olaf Zawacki-Richter and Insung Jung in a frank and penetrating conversation that seeks to ground, frame, and problematise research in the field conceptualised as “open, distance and digital education” (ODDE). Taking as starting point the recent publication of the landmark Handbook of Open, Distance, and Digital Education (2022), it segues into a broad critique of the shortcomings of ODDE research, the importance of knowledge production on the meso- and macro-levels, the autonomy of ODDE as a field coming into its own, the place of postfoundationalism in ODDE discourse, and related topics that are pivotal in ODDE today.

The semi-structured interview was employed as the primary qualitative research method.

The research imperative of the relatively young but complex field of ODDE today is not the incessant reiteration of the same but rather a strategic reorientation that, first, circumvents the well-documented yet too-often-overlooked shortcomings of ODDE research and, second, promotes transboundary collaborations with the potential for system-wide impact.

This novel interview-based critique of ODDE research demonstrates that extending the scholarly discourse beyond the conventional report format is a productive method for enriching conversations on ODDE and vitalising the field itself.

COVID-19 disrupted the lives of consumers across the globe, and the retail sector has been one of the hardest hits. The impact of COVID-19 on consumers' retail choice behaviour and retailers' responses has been studied in detail through multiple lenses. Now that the effect of COVID-19 is abating, there is a need to consolidate the learnings during the lifecycle of COVID-19 and set the agenda for research post-COVID-19.

Scopus database was searched to cull out academic papers published between March 2020 and June 6, 2022, using keywords; shopping behaviour, retailing, consumer behaviour, and retail channel choice along with COVID-19 (171 journals, 357 articles). Bibliometric analysis followed by selective content analysis was conducted.

COVID-19 was a black swan event that impacted consumers' psychology, leading to reversible and irreversible changes in retail consumer behaviour worldwide. Research on changes in consumer behaviour and consumption patterns has been mapped to the different stages of the COVID-19 lifecycle. Relevant research questions and potential theoretical lenses have been proposed for further studies.

This paper collates, classifies and organizes the extant research in retail from the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. It identifies three retail consumption themes: short-term, long-term reversible and long-term irreversible changes. Research agenda related to the retailer and consumer behaviour is identified; for each of the three categories, facilitating the extraction of pertinent research questions for post-COVID-19 studies.