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Marketing Management, Consumer Behavior.

This case is suitable to be used in advanced undergraduate and MBA/MSc level.

This case attempts to highlight the issues pertaining to Hirdaramani Mihila CKT apparel factory’s implementation of the “green space” concept. The concept of “green space” has been well accepted by the factory employees, and their participation in the “green process” is quite evident. Hirdaramani Mihila CKT is an apparel manufacturing company located in Agalawatte, Matugama, in the Kalutara District of Sri Lanka. The Mihila CKT factory was established in conformance with green building specifications and as an eco-friendly apparel industry. The administration of Mihila CKT has achieved success in three key areas after implementing this concept: cutting down energy consumption, enhancing water security, and reusing fabric waste. The factory also maintains a garden that manifests biodiversity. This case underlines the challenges and successes faced by Mihila CKT in adopting and implementing green space concept.

This case illustrates the following:

• the importance of having green technology in the apparel industry to embrace green concept;

• the effectiveness of the green space concept in relation to global green standards; and

• the potential benefits to the local residents from the green technology initiatives of an apparel factory like Hirdaramani Mihila CKT.

the importance of having green technology in the apparel industry to embrace green concept;

the effectiveness of the green space concept in relation to global green standards; and

the potential benefits to the local residents from the green technology initiatives of an apparel factory like Hirdaramani Mihila CKT.

This study investigated the crossover of work–family conflict (WFC) from supervisors to subordinates employed in conventional work settings. The authors hypothesized that the supervisor’s WFC would impact the subordinate’s level of WFC, and the level of crossover would vary with relationship quality or LMX.

The authors surveyed a matched set of 150 supervisors and 193 subordinates from several services organizations who were recruited using a snowballing technique. Data were analysed using hierarchical regression analyses and moderation testing.

Results confirmed a significant direct crossover path. Further, the crossover was found to be lowered in the event of higher LMX quality.

The findings provide significant insights into the conditions under which transmission of WFC takes place by broadening crossover research in the work–family area. Future studies must explore the crossover of work–family enrichment and the role of leadership styles, empathy and perspective taking of subordinates in the crossover.

Supervisors must endeavour to reduce the level of WFC of subordinates by trying to build high-quality LMX by regularly interacting with them and by providing them a supportive climate. Employees in turn must support supervisors in various means, which will help them gaining manager’s trust and support.

Examination of the potential mitigating effect of high-quality LMX in the crossover of WFC in supervisor–subordinate dyads has rarely been investigated in the past.

The purpose of this paper is to study the applicability of a crossover model of work–family conflict (WFC) in the work setting among supervisor–subordinate dyads. It examines the positive association between supervisor’s WFC and subordinate’s WFC and analyses the moderating effect of subordinate’s susceptibility to emotional contagion (SEC).

Data were gathered using a questionnaire survey method and tested in 193 matched supervisor–subordinate dyads from select organisations representing the services sector in India.

The authors found a significant direct crossover path from the supervisor to his/her subordinate’s WFC. The effect of supervisor reported WFC on subordinate reported WFC was found to be strong when the subordinate displayed higher SEC with his/her supervisor.

Examining the crossover of WFC contributes to theory by broadening crossover research to include transmission of negative experiences in the work context. This study significantly adds to emotional contagion theory by substantiating the existence of WFC contagion in supervisor–subordinate dyads. Given the constraints of cross-sectional research design, future research should replicate these findings using a larger sample in other cultural contexts as well to generalise the results. Future research should consider using longitudinal data and including information from both the supervisor and the subordinates collected at different points in time. Crossover of positive work–family experiences (e.g. work–family enrichment) and the role of other individual difference variables such as the personality of the subordinates, empathy, etc., could also be considered.

Supervisors should be advised of the potential adverse effects of their WFC and organisations should be made cognizance of the impact that the WFC of employees can have on their job outcomes. Organisations should provide the required formal and informal support to their employees to deal with their WFC efficiently.

This study has attempted to examine the crossover of WFC in supervisor–subordinate dyads and the potential effect of one of the individual difference variables namely SEC. To the best of the authors knowledge, it has rarely been examined earlier.

The present study compares the use of web citations as references in leading scholarly journals in Library and Information Science (LIS) and Communication and Media Studies (CMS). A total of 20 journals (each 10 from LIS and CMS) were selected based on the publishing history and reputation published between 2008 and 2017.

The present study compares the use of web citations as references in leading scholarly journals in LIS and CMS. A PHP script was used to crawl the Uniform Resource Locators (URLs) collected from the reference list. A total of 12,251 articles were downloaded and 555,428 references were extracted. Of the 555,428 references, 102,718 web citations were checked for their accessibility.

The research findings indicated that 76.90% URLs from LIS journals and 84.32% URLs from Communication and Media Studies journals were accessible and others were rotten. The majority of errors were due to HTTP 404 error code (not found) in both the disciplines. The study also tried to retrieve the rotten URLs through Time Travel, which revived 61.76% rotten URLs in LIS journal articles and 65.46% in CMS journal articles.

This is an in-depth and comprehensive comparative study on the availability of web citations in LIS and CMS journals articles spanning a period of 10 years. The findings of the study will be helpful to authors, publishers, and editorial staff to ensure that web citations will be accessible in the future.

Misconduct allegations have been found to not only affect the alleged firm but also other, unalleged firms in form of reputational and financial spillover effects. It has remained unexplored, however, how the number of prior allegations against other firms matters for an individual firm currently facing an allegation. Building on behavioral decision theory, we argue that the relationship between allegation prevalence among other firms and investor reaction to a focal allegation is inverted U-shaped. The inverted U-shaped effect is theorized to emerge from the combination of two effects: In the absence of prior allegations against other firms, investors fail to anticipate the focal allegation, and hence react particularly negatively (“anticipation effect”). In the case of many prior allegations against other firms, investors also react particularly negatively because investors perceive the focal allegation as more warranted (“evaluation effect”). The multi-industry, empirical analysis of 8,802 misconduct allegations against US firms between 2007 and 2017 provides support for our predicted, inverted U-shaped effect. Our study complements recent misconduct research on spillover effects by highlighting that not only a current allegation against an individual firm can “contaminate” other, unalleged firms but that also prior allegations against other firms can “contaminate” investor reaction to a focal allegation against an individual firm.

The rapid growth of digitalization is being used for the betterment of the banking and financial services sector and many other industries. Digital banking (DB) is transforming traditional banking activities into a digital environment. The benefits and conveniences that DB bring to consumers and financial institutions (FIs) have led FIs to adopt various DB innovations. However, to determine whether the demand for DB is at a healthy level, it is necessary to evaluate how DB innovations are accepted among consumers. This chapter is a “viewpoint” of the author that reviews the background of DB in Sri Lanka (SL) and evaluates the success of its diffusion.

The status of the DB diffusion in SL is discussed under DB ecosystem, and DB customer adoption. The DB ecosystem is discussed through the topics of the country’s digital infrastructure (DI), technological know-how within the banks, technology adoption of the market vendors, and consumer’s digital literacy. Then, the consumer use of the DB services is evaluated using the transactions that happened through DB systems against paper-based payments. Statistics presented by Central Bank of Sri Lanka (CBSL) are used as secondary data for the study.

According to the findings of this report, consumer DB adaption is still in its infancy compared to the development of the country’s DB ecosystem. Considering the causes that drives consumer innovation decisions, this chapter highlights the need for industry practitioners to revisit their DB marketing strategies based on consumers’ culture and innovativeness. To that end, further studies are necessary on how individuals’ culture influences DB adoption.

This conceptual paper diagnoses the fundamental tensions between the social temporality of sustainability and the individual temporality of marketing in the Dominant Social Paradigm. We propose the notion of ‘existentialized sustainability’ as a possible way forward.

We take the Heideggerian perspective that death may bring individual and societal time into a common framework. From here, we compare anthropological and consumer culture research on funerary rites in non-modern societies with contemporary societies of the DSP.

Funerary rites reveal important insights into how individuals relate to their respective societies. Individuals are viewed as important contributors to the maintenance and regeneration of the group in non-modern societies. In contrast, funerary rites for individuals in the DSP are private, increasingly informal, and unconnected to sustaining society at large. This analysis reveals clear parallels between the goals of sustainability and the values of non-modern funerary rites.

We propose the metaphor of a funerary rite for sustainability to promote consciousness towards societal futures. The idea is to improve ‘quality of death’ through sustainability – in other words, the ‘existentialization of sustainability’. This opens up a possible strategy for marketers to actively contribute to a societal shift towards a New Environmental Paradigm (NEP).

The Heideggerian approach is a novel way to identify and reconcile the epistemic contradictions between sustainability and marketing. This diagnosis suggests a way in which marketing can address the wicked problem of global sustainability challenges, perhaps allowing a new spirituality in consumption.

The purpose of this paper, focusing mainly on India – and a lesser extent on China – is to examine, broadly, two related issues concerning the rise of pharmaceutical industry in the emerging economies: the strategic response of the emerging‐country pharmaceutical firms to the new patent regime that recognizes and enforces product patents; and its implications for multinational enterprise (MNE) strategies.

The paper is based on extensive review of the relevant conceptual and empirical literature and secondary data.

The strategic response of pharmaceutical firms in the emerging economies (India and China, for example,) to the new patent regime is to develop multiple competencies and position themselves to simultaneously compete and collaborate globally with the MNEs – large firms rapidly moving towards discovery and development of new drugs, and medium and small firms engaged in the production of off‐patent generics and contract manufacturing, respectively.

The trend towards greater collaboration between the emerging‐country firms and the MNEs in the new patent regime raises serious concern about prescription drug prices in the developing as well as developed countries. Given the importance of the pharma industry to the health of nations, firms in rich and poor countries alike will continue to come under public pressure to develop and market the needed drugs at affordable prices.

The paper would be of value to practitioners and scholars interested in the implications – for MNE pricing, outsourcing and R&D strategies, for example – of the rapid rise of pharmaceutical industry in the developing countries such as India and China.

This paper aims to examine empirically the behaviour of the impact of intellectual capital (IC) on firm performance during financial crises, having observed that there was no prior research carried out to examine whether the theoretically expected sustainable firm performance created by IC holds during a financially unstable situation in the economy.

The Pulic’s value-added intellectual coefficient method is used to measure IC. Firm performance is measured through productivity, profitability and revenue growth. Structural stability tests and dynamic regression models for panel data are used for the data of 191 banking firms listed on the New York Stock Exchange during 2000-2011.

The paper reveals, contrary to theoretical expectations, that the impact of IC on firm performance is inconsistent during financial crises. This behaviour emerges mainly because of the incapability of human capital, the main component of IC, to create value for the sample firms during financial crises.

The findings of the study are confined to financial crises that existed in the US economy during the period 2000-2011. The findings provide evidence that heterogeneity in the resource base of a firm plays a very minor role in the value creation process during turbulent economic situations. The findings also question the practicality of investing in intangible assets, including IC, during periods of financial crises.

This paper could be the first attempt to evident empirically that the heterogeneity in the resource base of the firm has a very minor role to play in the value creation process when instability exists in the macroeconomic environment.