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The purpose of this paper is to present a framework to assist the selection of certification bodies in the implementation of quality management system (QMS) based on ISO 9001 taking into account a set of criteria organized in a multi-level hierarchical form. To deal with this complexity, the multi-criteria decision-making method (MCDM) analytic hierarchy process (AHP) was used in this research.

The research was conducted in small and medium-sized companies certified to ISO 9001. The MCDM method AHP was used as a method for developing the model to support the selection of certification bodies.

This paper provides a framework for companies seeking to hire certification bodies, mainly for ISO 9001 certification, which help identify the companies that best fit the certification objectives. Additionally, a ranking of the main criteria to select certification bodies for ISO 9001 was obtained.

The decision-making method was applied to Brazilian companies from different sectors. As the results can vary between regions and sectors, this is a limitation of the research. In addition, the number of ten respondents could be higher to increase the robustness of the results.

The model assists companies looking for certification, mainly ISO 9001, in the selection of certification bodies contributing in the search for deeper implementations of QMS.

This work has the originality of the application of a decision-making method in the final process of ISO 9001 certification, scarce in the literature. In addition, it defines weights for the criteria involved in the process of selecting certification bodies.

Once the domain of theologians, sociologists and (religion) anthropologists, we have seen more recently how consumer researchers have enriched the study of spirituality and religion. Researching the sacred can be fraught with challenges, in and out of the field. Russell Belk, Samuelson Appau and Diego Rinallo address key questions, issues and conceptualisations in the scholarship on sacred consumption, contemplating the past and mapping future research avenues. A reading list is also included for those interested in joining the authors in this collective discovery of the sacred.

Contributors answered the following four questions: How has the study of sacred consumption evolved since you started researching the field? What would be the critical methodological issues that researchers need to consider when approaching the “sacred”? What are some of the key authors that have influenced your thinking? What do you think will be the key questions that researchers will need to focus on?

Rinallo, Belk and Appau’s reflections on studying the sacred provide food for thought for both novice and weathered researchers alike. Researching the sacred both shapes and is shaped by our positionality: by our insider/outsider status, our gender and race and our cosmovisions as believers or sceptics. Researchers should be mindful and reflective of their subject positionings as they approach, enter and leave the field. Researching the sacred requires an open mind as we broaden our vision of what constitutes the sacred. Such research calls for scholarly as well as phenomenological curiosity. Reading widely and across disciplines to better familiarise ourselves with our sacred context helps to craft novel and meaningful research.

This paper provides a multivocal genealogy of consumer culture work on religion and spirituality, methodological advice and reading resources for researchers.

Hybrid flow shop with multiprocessor task (HFSMT) has received considerable attention in recent years. The purpose of this paper is to consider an HFSMT scheduling under the environment of a common time window. The window size and location are considered to be given parameters. The research deals with the criterion of total penalty cost minimization incurred by earliness and tardiness of jobs. In this research, a new memetic algorithm in which a global search algorithm is accompanied with the local search mechanism is developed to solve the HFSMT with jobs having a common time window. The operating parameters of memetic algorithm have an important role on the quality of solution. In this paper, a full factorial experimental design is used to determining the best parameters of memetic algorithm for each problem type. Memetic algorithm is tested using HFSMT problems.

First, hybrid flow shop scheduling system and hybrid flow shop scheduling with multiprocessor task are defined. The applications of the hybrid flow shop system are explained. Also the background of hybrid flow shop with multiprocessor is given in the introduction. The features of the proposed memetic algorithm are described in Section 2. The experiment results are presented in Section 3.

Computational experiments show that the proposed new memetic algorithm is an effective and efficient approach for solving the HFSMT under the environment of a common time window.

There is only one study about HFSMT scheduling with time window. This is the first study which added the windows to the jobs in HFSMT problems.

A long-established cultural norm of filial piety may cause ambivalent feelings for adult children who are considered the primary caregivers for their elderly parents in Turkish culture, and whose parents have been placed into nursing homes. The purpose of this paper is to provide an insight to the lived experiences of adult children of elderly people living in a nursing home in Turkey.

Drawing upon dramaturgical theory and phenomenological methodology, the authors conducted interviews with ten adult children whose elderly parents had been admitted to a nursing home in Izmir, Turkey. Multi-stage purposeful random sampling was used as the sampling scheme. Thematic analysis was performed to interpret the data.

Three themes emerged from the data: adult children’s coping strategies, the ways in which the adult children rationalize their decisions, and the ways in which the adult children manage the placement process. The interviews revealed that the adult children often feel like social outcasts and experience a wide range of difficulties, including social pressures, their own inner dilemmas, and negotiations with their elderly parents.

An exploration for the lived experiences of adult children relating to the nursing home placement of their elderly parents contributes an insight about the well-established cultural norms that produce feelings of ambivalence.

Selecting the most appropriate healthcare waste treatment technology (HCWTT) is an uncertain and complex decision-making problem because there exist more than one alternative and many conflicting qualitative and quantitative criteria. However, the use of fuzzy and comparative values, instead of specific crisp values, provides more accurate results, so that the alternatives may be evaluated in accordance with hesitant human nature. The purpose of this paper is to select the best HCWTT using a hesitant fuzzy linguistic term set (HFLTS).

Five main criteria were identified for HCWTT selection, such as economic, social, environmental, technical and ergonomic criteria. In total, 19 sub-criteria were examined, and the hierarchy of the criteria was formed. The criteria weights were determined using the multi-criteria hesitant fuzzy linguistic term set (MC-HFLTS). The selection processes of incineration (A₁), steam sterilization (A₂), microwave (A₃) and landfill (A₄) alternatives were carried out using the multi-attributive ideal-real comparative analysis (MAIRCA) and multi-attributive border approximation area comparison (MABAC) methods. In the comparative analyses, Vise Kriterijumska Optimizacija I Kompromisno Resenje (VIKOR) and technique for order preference by similarity to an ideal solution (TOPSIS) methods were used.

The comparison of the results of the MABAC and MAIRCA methods with the results of VIKOR and TOPSIS methods indicated that A₂ (steam sterilization) alternative was the best one and produced the same ranking of the technology alternatives (A₂ > A₃ > A₁ > A₄). As a result, the study concluded that these methods can be successfully used for HCWTT selection problems.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, MC-HFLTS has not been used to select HCWTT in the existing literature. For the first time, MC-HFLTS&MAIRCA and MC-HFLTS&MABAC approaches were used in order to choose the best treatment method for healthcare waste under the effect of multiple conflicting hierarchical criteria. It has been provided that MABAC and MAIRCA select alternative choices by taking into consideration the hierarchical criteria. Unlike other studies, this study also considered ergonomic criteria that are important for people working during the process of using the treatment technology.

Financial literacy has a strong influence on financial well-being, and it is a concept especially important for college students who start to develop their financial habits. The purpose of this paper is to examine the relationship between financial literacy, money attitudes and time preferences among Turkish university students.

Data were collected from 1,443 university students from 14 campuses in Turkey. Structural equation modeling methodology is employed to test the hypotheses.

The results suggest that students with higher financial knowledge scores have more favorable financial attitudes and exhibit more desirable financial behaviors. It is also demonstrated that financial attitude is positively related to financial behavior. Furthermore, a significant and negative relationship between the affective dimension of the money ethic construct and financial behavior is found. In contrast, the relationship between the behavioral dimension of money ethic and financial behavior is positive. It is further demonstrated that a present orientation leads to more negative financial attitudes.

This study will reveal the interrelationships among dimensions of financial literacy, money ethics and time preferences in an emerging economy with a relatively little experience with formal financial systems and unstable macroeconomic conditions.

In this study, it is aimed to examine do-it-yourself (DIY) practices from sustainable and entrepreneurship perspectives and to understand how transformation mechanism works in between altruistic and utilitarian tendencies in shared economy market conditions. Meaning, material and competency of practice theory will be indicative in explaining transformation of existing practices, how practice is transformed and diffused in market ecosystem through the introduction of new objects and opportunities to better understand how values and meanings change.

This study is a phenomenological research interested in explaining contingency of sustainability in between altruistic and market conditions in shared economy ecosystem through DIY practices. The sample of this study is made up of 15 participants actively carrying out DIY activities. Data is analysed with MAXQDA Analytics Pro 2018 program through grounded coding technique.

DIYers' relationship with market results them to create roles subject to their dependence on altruistic values of sustainability and their stance to anti-consumption in between alternative and mainstream economy. When they converge to the market, DIY activities turn into medium of marketing activities. When they diverge from the market, they become “transformers” embracing principles of shared economy. Contingency appears depending on three conditions: one is related with active participation in DIY or market practices. Second is related with occupation status that DIYers have. Third is related with competence that active DIYers have.

This study is aimed only at active participants. Therefore, it is possible to see the effects of altruistic and market behaviour more clearly. However, this group represents a minor group that will make it possible to comment on a small group. This is one of the limitations of this study.

In the study, proximity and distance to mainstream market condition are taken as the basis and market structure is taken as an agent. By this way, DIYers' activities evaluated not only from social and economical perspective but also their transformation compared to capitalist market conditions challenging altruistic values of DIY, sustainability and sharing economy. Thus, this study is evaluating sustainability, shared economy and DIY not as an entity but as a process.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate whether the information sharing in an online discussion forum, over an agricultural market characterized by a large number of small-scale farmers, has an impact on the market prices.

All the comments posted by farmers and traders on four storable items (potato, onion, lemon and apple) in an online discussion forum over 2013–2017 are collected. By using text mining techniques and regression analysis, words characterizing the actions and expectations of farmers and traders on the course of the market price are identified. Then, summary indicators pointing to positive and negative views on prices are calculated. Finally, the relation between these indicators and market prices is analyzed.

The results point to economically significant impacts, as one standard deviation increase in the share of net positive comments is associated with 20, 22, 13 and 10 percent increase in the consumer prices of potato, onion, lemon and apple, respectively within three months.

Overall, this study provides an evidence for the link between information sharing of farmers on online domain and their collaboration in the physical domain. Thus, the study implies that the information synthesized from online discussion forums may actually contain valuable information for researchers and policy makers regarding the behavior of agents even on traditional domains such as agriculture.

The purpose of this paper is to determine the relationships between promotion, development, and recognition opportunities at work and organizational commitment, and whether these relationships are moderated by the job opportunities employees have in other organizations.

An opportunity model of organizational commitment is developed based on social exchange theory and several streams of opportunity research. Factor analyses and hierarchical multiple regression analyses are carried out to test the hypotheses using data from 550 white-collar employees.

The results of the analyses show that opportunities for development and recognition are predictors of organizational commitment, that job opportunities employees have in other organizations negatively moderate the relationship between recognition opportunity at work and organizational commitment, and that promotion opportunity does not predict organizational commitment.

Future researchers could study the issue in the context of other cultures using data from multiple sources.

Employers who seek to increase their employees’ organizational commitment are advised to divert their energies from struggling to create promotion opportunities for their employees to creating opportunities for development and recognition.

The study explores the under-researched concept of opportunity at work and connects several streams of opportunity research by drawing on social exchange theory as a theoretical framework. The model is the first to address the effects of opportunity and alternative opportunities on organizational commitment.

This research aims to uncover consumers' deeply hidden thoughts and feelings about store scent and its effects on shopping experiences.

Following a qualitative approach, this research uses Zaltman metaphor elicitation technique (ZMET). All the steps of the ZMET have been performed, and important constructs and contents have been explored.

Ultimately, a hierarchical value map was presented. Accordingly, the naturalness and intensity of the scent played a prominent part in its effectiveness. The pleasantness and complexity of the scent, the malodor, congruity and incongruity of the scent, as well as nostalgia, were seen as the predominant originator constructs that resulted in approach or avoidance reactions.

These findings have practical implications for managers seeking to design a store atmospherics making way for consumers to engage with the store and the brand. The cultural milieu in which the study was performed could be seen as a possible limitation of the study. This cultural angle should also be taken into consideration while the findings were considered.

Using ZMET as an innovative research method makes the study significant. By doing so, the metaphors of consumption are extended to the sensory marketing field to provide a more comprehensive understanding on the effects of store scent. Moreover, the study contributes to the existing literature of smell marketing.