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This paper aims to analyze different brand clarity levels (BCLs) of local, global and glocal types of brands in fast-moving consumer goods from the consumer's perspective. The study also intends to identify whether the consumer's previous experience with such brands may impact BCL.

Twenty-eight global and local brands were used to test the hypotheses by conducting a survey with 400 consumers in the emerging economy of Iran. The authors applied a quantitative technique of brand classification, previously proposed in the literature. After categorizing the brands as local, global or glocal, one-way ANOVA, Tukey post hoc and t-test analyses were performed to identify whether the different types of brands had different BCLs.

The results showed that brand clarity was significantly higher for local bands than for global or glocal brands and that it was higher for glocal bands than for global brands. Furthermore, the consumer's prior experience with a brand had no impact on BCL for different types of brands.

For global brand managers, it is essential to know that local brands in Middle Eastern emerging markets may have more brand clarity than global brands. Therefore, if global brands intend to enter these markets, adopting a glocal positioning appears to be a helpful strategy. Besides, the results suggest that managers should analyze brand categorization from the consumer's perspective, i.e. from a subjective instead of an objective perspective.

This was the first study analyzing the BCL of local, global and glocal brands and identifying significant differences in their BCL.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate possible improvements in the pursuit of the sustainable development goals (SDGs) by multinational enterprises (MNEs) through an analysis of the literature.

A critical framework based on Gleicher’s formula for change is provided after conducting a systematic literature review.

The best way to pursue the SDGs is through an integrated approach that recognises the importance of MNEs in terms of possibilities and power of action. Working towards the SDGs appears to be largely limited by three aspects of the problem: its complexity and wickedness, the genuine interest in reaching some SDGs, at the expense of profit and low foresight.

A fundamental limitation of the study concerns, as in most of the literature on the matter, the impossibility of providing an optimal solution to the problem of meeting the SDGs, given their nature. However, formulating the best definition of the problem and its characteristics can contribute to making its management better.

This study has social implications due to the extreme importance that many SDGs have with regard to democracy and social equity, beyond their environmental and economic aspects.

The claimed contribution is the value brought by the synthesis of several points of view, through the interdisciplinary analysis of the research question. The novelty consists in organising the literature according to the formula for change.

The purpose of this paper is to carry out a review of the academic literature about corporate social irresponsibility (CSIR) highlighting aspects that help us to define socially irresponsible behaviour and its relationship with socially responsible behaviour.

Through a Boolean search of studies related to terms of irresponsibility undertaken from 1956 to October 2016, the authors develop a review of the literature focussing on the main perspectives used for defining the term of CSIR.

The paper provides a framework of three main dimensions for understanding the differences in the literature that defines CSIR: who defines irresponsible behaviour, an impartial observer or a specific group of stakeholders, whether it is a firm strategy or a punctual action and which is the relationship between corporate social responsibility (CSR) and CSIR, continuity vs orthogonal relationship.

The paper provides and extensive and original review of a key construct, CSIR, and develops some insights about its antecedents and consequences. The authors try to provide light to the contradictory situation where a growing interest in CSR and the increase in voluntary commitments adopted by company leaders incorporating CSR into their strategies are, paradoxically, increasingly associated with CSIR.

Learning styles based education is becoming influential at higher education institutions around the world. Learning styles are characteristics of how students prefer to learn; they draw their origin from both biological and experiential conditions that make each student unique in the way he/she learns. An important first step in improving learning is to identify or assess students’ learning styles, and there are several instruments that can be used for this purpose. This is necessary for teachers and students who wish to improve learning and study strategies. Students who perform poorly in a conventional educational setting may suffer from a mismatch of learning and teaching styles; for example kinesthetic learners may not adapt to learning by listening or by reading. When we teach tactual and/or kinesthetic students by talking, they focus for only a brief amount of time and then wander off into their own thoughts and quickly forget (Burke & Dunn, 2002). We can improve students’ academic performance by providing them with alternative strategies and activities that respond to their learning style needs (Dunn & Dunn, 1993). In spring 2008, the learning styles of over 700 Zayed University students were assessed using the BE (Building Excellence) survey developed by Rundle & Dunn. The data collected is being analyzed with a view to making recommendations for teachers, students and parents to improve students’ learning. This paper represents the first in a series of publications on this subject; it reviews the survey process, and focuses on the nature and learning preferences of ZU students in perceptual elements (e.g. visual, auditory) and cognitive elements (e.g. Analytic-sequential (left-brain) vs. Global-simultaneous (right-brain) preferences).

Supply chain (SC) configuration has gained increased acceptance as an important issue when evaluating new customization possibilities and this evidence has contributed to the strengthening of the debate between global vs local production locations. This work contributes in enrichment of this topic by studying how local or global SC location decisions influence performances by considering a SC point of view, in terms of cost and time, in traditional and customized productions.

A discrete event simulation approach, based on experimentation through executable configurations, was used to evaluate different SC scenarios for customized as well as traditional products within the footwear industry.

The results indicated that to identify proper SC locations, existing trade-offs between the time and cost performances should be studied, avoiding the evaluation of a single performance independently and, instead, adopting a complete SC point of view while considering these performances.

This evidence has contributed to the reinforcement of the discussion between far-shore destinations vs near-shore production locations. Further studies are encouraged to adopt the present model, in which addition of other variables such as specific manufacturing competences to differentiate suppliers, both local and global suppliers, or the possibility of realizing special types of product customization required by final consumers can be done.

The paper contributes to the academic and practitioners' debate by proposing a systemic approach to assess SCs’ performances in customized contexts and to compare them to traditional collections. Results indicate that cost and time performance must find a balance that does not necessarily correspond to an exclusively local or global production.

This work contributes to the SC configuration issue by considering the trade-off between efficiency and effectiveness (i.e. SC costs and SC times) for customized productions by reviving and enriching it with an SC perspective in customization contexts.

Over the last decade, investments in green energy companies have witnessed noticeable growth rates. However, the glacial pace of the world economic restoration due to COVID-19 pandemic placed a high degree of uncertainty over this market. Therefore, this study investigates the short- and long-term relationships between COVID-19 new cases and WilderHill New Energy Global Innovation Index (NEX) using daily data over the period from January 23, 2020 to February 1, 2023.

The authors utilize an autoregressive distributed lag bounds testing estimation technique.

The results show a significant positive impact of COVID-19 new cases on the returns of NEX index in the short run, whereas it has a significant negative impact in the long run. It is also found that the S&P Global Clean Energy Index has a significant positive impact on the returns of NEX index. Although oil has an influential effect on stock returns, the results show insignificant impact.

Governments have the chance to flip this trend by including investment in green energy in their economic growth stimulation policies. Governments should highlight the fundamental advantages of investing in this type of energy such as creating job vacancies while reducing emissions and promoting innovation.

First, as far as the authors are aware, the authors are the first to examine the effect of oil prices on clean energy stocks during COVID-19. Second, the authors contribute to studies on the relationship between oil prices and renewable energy. Third, the authors add to the emerging strand of literature on the impact of COVID-19 on various sectors of the economy. Fourth, the findings of the paper can add to the growing literature on sustainable development goals, in specific the papers related to energy sustainability.

This paper aims at investigating the contemporary trend toward regional consumption from the perspective of consumers’ search for brand authenticity. In particular, the paper joins literature on brand authenticity from the marketing literature and literature on the local food movement to investigate consumers’ response to authenticity claims in the competition of local and global food brands.

The paper engages in a series of three experimental studies; one of which uses a Becker–DeGroot–Marschak lottery to assess individuals’ willingness to pay for authenticity claims of (non)global brands.

Findings show that authenticity perceptions lead to higher brand value independent of brand globalness; while global brands can mitigate competitive disadvantages in localized consumer markets by actively authenticating their brand image.

This paper reveals the usefulness of authentic brand positioning for global beverage brands when competing with local beverage brands to overcome the liability of globalness. To sustainably benefit from the local food movement, local brands thus will require to build up brand images beyond associations of mere authenticity.

This paper aims to identify the changes in the share of large public interest entities (PIEs) in European Union (EU) Member States providing Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) reporting prior to (2017) and after (2019) the implementation of Directive 2014/95/EU and the factors that influence their decisions to provide SDG reporting in 2019.

The authors use the multilevel theory of social change in organizations as the theoretical background. The sample consists of 341 PIEs based in the EU Member States, for which reports published in 2017 and 2019 are available in the global reporting initiative sustainability disclosure database. The authors analyzed the data using the statistical significance test of equal proportions and the logistic regression model.

The study findings allow to identify a significant positive change in the share of companies providing a reference to SDGs in 2019 compared with 2017. The research confirms that companies’ engagement in United Nations Global Compact and previous experience in sustainability reporting positively influences the decision to report on SDGs in 2019. Contrary to the expectations, industry, size, SDG implementation score, future orientation of government and corporate governance score do not seem to be relevant factors influencing PIEs’ disclosures.

The paper adds to the understanding of the differences in SDG reporting within the EU, which is seen as a frontrunner in implementing the 2030 Agenda and the SDGs.

This study aims to examine the potential effect that business ethics (BE) in general and corporate social responsibility (CSR) more specifically can exert on the voluntary disclosure (VD) of intellectual capital (IC) for the ethically most engaged firms in the world.

The research design is based on an inductive approach. As part of the global quantitative investigation, the authors have analyzed the impact of BE and CSR on the transparent communication of the IC. The data under analysis have been investigated using multiple linear regression.

Based on a sample of 83 enterprises emerging as the most ethical companies in the world, the results have revealed that the adoption of ethical and socially responsible approach is positively associated with the extent of VD about IC. This finding may help attenuating the asymmetry of information and the conflict of interest potentially arising with corporate partners. Hence, IC-VD may stand as an evidence of ethical and socially responsible behaviors.

Global and national regulators and policymakers can be involved by these results when setting social reporting standards because they suggest that institutional and/or cultural factors affect top management's social reporting behavior in the publication of the IC information.

Direct and indirect stakeholders, if supported by ethical and socially responsible behaviors of the company, could assess more in detail the quality of the disclosed information concerning the IC.

Most of the studies that have been conducted in this field have examined the effect of BE and CSR on the firm's overall transparency, neglecting their potential effect on IC disclosure. This study is designed to fill in this gap through testing the impact of ethical and socially responsible approaches specifically on IC-VD.

This study investigates information flow of market constituents and global indices at multi-frequencies.

The study’s findings were obtained using the Improved Complete Ensemble Empirical Mode Decomposition with Adaptive Noise (I-CEEMDAN)-based cluster analysis executed for Rényi effective transfer entropy (RETE).

The authors find that significant negative information flows among sustainability equities (SEs) and conventional equities (CEs) at most multi-frequencies, which exacerbates diversification benefits. The information flows are mostly bi-directional, highlighting the importance of stock markets' constituents and their global indices in portfolio construction.

The authors advocate that both SE and CE markets are mostly heterogeneous, revealing some levels of markets inefficiencies.

The empirical literature on CEs is replete with several dynamics, revealing their returns behaviour for diversification purposes, leaving very little to know about the returns behaviour of SE. Wherein, an avalanche of several initiatives on Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) enjoin firms to operate socially responsible, but investors need to have a clear reason to remain sustainable into the foreseeable future period. Accordingly, the humble desire of investors is the formation of a well-diversified portfolio and would highly demand stocks to the extent that they form a reliable portfolio, especially, amid SEs and/or CEs.

本研究擬審查多頻率的及為市場成份的信息流和全球指數。

研究人員使用基於改良完全集合經驗模態分解自適應噪聲(Improved Complete Ensemble Empirical Mode Decomposition with Adaptive Noise)的聚類分析法,取得Rényi有效轉移熵,藉此得到研究結果。

我們發現、於大部份多頻率,在持續性股票和傳統股票間有顯著的負信息流動,這會增加多樣化的益處。這些信息流大部份是雙向的,這強調了股票市場成份及其全球指數在構建投資組合上的重要性。

我們認為持續性股票市場和傳統股票市場大多為異質市場,這顯示了市場的低效率,而且這低效率的程度頗大。

關於傳統股票的實證性文獻裡是充滿了變革動力的,這顯示了它們以多樣化為目的的回報行為。這使我們對關於持續性股票的回報行為、認識變得實在太少了。於此,大量的企業社會責任的新措施不斷提醒各公司、要本著企業社會責任的理念去營運;但投資者需清晰明白他們為何需在可見的將來保持可持續性。因此,他們卑微的願望是一個較好的多樣化投資組合得以形成,故此他們高度要求股票要有組成可靠投資組合的性質和能力,特別是在持續性股票和/或傳統股票當中。