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The purpose of this study was to investigate the status of technology adoption (TA) among clothing manufacturers in Bangladesh and examine the influences of contextual factors on their TA level. Particularly, the authors examined the effects of export orientation, top management commitment (TMC), competitive pressure (CP), cost of capital (CC) and technical skills (TS).

The data were collected from Bangladeshi clothing manufacturer through an online survey. A firm was treated as a unit of analysis.

The results revealed that the most common technologies adopted were information technology and software related and the least common were automation related. Export orientation negatively influenced while TS and CP positively influenced the level of TA.

Due to the difficulty in obtaining firm level data, data collection did not utilize a random sampling. Only firms that agree to participate were included in the data.

The authors suggest the Bangladeshi clothing manufacturers to adopt selective technologies that complement the cost leadership strategy rather than immediate differentiation strategy or technology innovations.

Focused investment in human capitals and knowledge transfer in Bangladesh, one of the newly classified developing country, should sustain their competitiveness in the global market. Further discussions provide various stakeholders with insights related to trade policies, international aids and the UN's sustainable development agenda.

This study tackles a void that exists in TA research within the labor intensive clothing manufacturing sector, especially in a lower-middle income country, which surprisingly became the second largest clothing supplier today. Unique nature of the sector as an entry to economic development process in connection to the sustainable development concept is discussed to generate implications for practitioners as well as policy makers.

Public pressure has been recognized as one of the most forceful factors underlying change in sweat shop conditions in the industry. The purpose of this study is to investigate the level of public pressure perceived by top managers of US clothing and footwear firms and to examine effects of individual and organizational factors that may differentiate the level of perception.

Data were obtained through a mail survey, with a total of 96 cases included in the analyses.

Results of a series of t‐tests revealed statistically significant influence of firm size, tenure, and firm ownership type on perceived public pressure for fair labor practices, while gender, age, education, business type, and percentage of foreign‐sourced merchandise were not found to be statistically significantly related to perceptions of public pressure.

The findings warn that the current public pressure is toward certain types of firms and their managements. Small and private firms that form the majority of the clothing and footwear sector need to be exposed to the pressure. Data consisted of a portion from a larger scale survey and may not represent a random sample. Further investigations could identify top‐management's strategic actions and social performance of the firm as a response to such pressure.

Managerial perception of social pressure is likely to initiate social actions undertaken by the firms. The findings of the study produced valuable further discussions on the current states and directions of managerial reactions to the sweat shop issues.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the effects of motivational factors (suppliers and workers are important stakeholders and corporate image concern) on fair labor management (FLM) and the mediating role of top‐management commitment in the relationships.

Responses from sourcing managers of US clothing and footwear companies were gathered through a mail survey and analyzed using a mediated regression analysis and a structural equation modeling technique.

Both the norms in which suppliers and workers are important stakeholders and concern regarding corporate image were significantly related to FLM. The relationship between corporate image concern and FLM was mediated by top‐management commitment and that the relationship between the importance of suppliers and their workers as stakeholders and FLM was partially mediated by top‐management commitment.

Results suggest that changes in the norm, where suppliers and workers are accepted as important stakeholders of the firm, have a direct influence on FLM and that top‐management is requisite in executing FLM orientation and actions in the firms as a response to changing norms and growing pressure in the society regarding labor issues.

Organizational condition for the two commonly cited drivers of FLM to work was discovered.

The purpose of this study is to investigate the relationships between fashion innovativeness/opinion leadership and utilitarian/hedonic shopping motivations. This study seeks to develop a better understanding of fashion leadership and determine the primary shopping motivations associated with fashion leadership.

A survey was completed by a total of 150 students at a large university in the southeastern USA. Multiple regression analyses, MANCOVA, and ANCOVA were employed to test the research hypotheses.

The results indicated that fashion innovativeness was significantly related to various hedonic shopping motivations; fashion innovativeness was positively associated with adventure and idea shopping motivations, whereas it was negatively associated with value shopping motivation. Fashion opinion leadership was positively associated with utilitarian shopping motivation.

The results of the study help to suggest various marketing and retailing strategies to stimulate fashion innovative behaviors through adventurous, stimulating, and up‐to‐date new fashions. They also suggest that fashion opinion leadership could be activated by focusing proper shopping environments or advertising on information/features for cognitive stimulation.

The study investigated a direct relationship between fashion leadership and shopping motivations for the first time. The findings of the study strengthen academic research on fashion leadership by identifying pre‐positioned shopping motivations that trigger fashion leadership, as well as practical applications.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the status of technology adoption of Indian apparel manufacturing firms and the organizational factors that affect the level of technology adoption.

Fourteen technologies applicable to apparel manufacturing were examined. A survey with an online questionnaire to apparel manufacturers in India was conducted to collect the data.

The most frequently adopted technology was the internet. The least frequently adopted technologies found in this study were robot‐related. The level of a firm's technology adoption was found to be significantly related to firm size positively and its export orientation negatively. It was also moderately related to competitive advantage. The effects of top management commitment, cost of capital, and technical skills were not significant.

Generalizability of the results is cautioned because the data were from the firms in one industrial town. The results indicate that technology adoption is related to the recent, intensified trade competition. The relationships among export orientation, price competition, and technology adoption need to be studied further.

Given the importance of upgrading in today's competitive global trade environment, this study builds a knowledge base of the technology adoption in apparel manufacturing and influential factors in developing countries.

Promotional support, as a push strategy, that manufacturers use to encourage retailers to carry their products needs retailers' cooperation. This study investigates the effects of retailers' fashion and price orientations on manufacturers' offerings of and retailers' cooperation with promotional support. Twenty‐one promotional support items applicable to the apparel retailing were studied. Questionnaires completed by 137 US apparel retail buyers via a modified national mail survey were analyzed. A factor analysis determined four factors: sales support, ad/display materials, monetary support, and selling aid samples. MANCOVAs revealed that the effects of price orientation on both offering frequency and cooperation level were significant. The effects of fashion orientation were not significant. For sales support and selling aid samples, the differences in offering frequency and cooperation levels were found among the different levels of price orientation groups. Monetary support was found most favorably accepted by retailers, regardless of price orientation or fashion orientation.

Socially responsible buying/sourcing (SRB) has become a critical issue in many companies. The purpose of this study was to build an exploratory model to describe buying/sourcing professionals' SRB decision‐making process.

Adopting business ethics and attitude theories, the SRB process was hypothesized to be a composite of cognitive processing and affective reactions to personal sources of information (e.g. peers). The mail survey data obtained from buying/sourcing professionals in the US apparel/shoe companies were analyzed using a Structural Equation Modeling technique.

SRB generally followed a cognitive decision framework and was partly influenced by the decision maker's affective reaction to peer buying/sourcing professionals' behaviors. Emotional reaction to top‐management, however, was not significant.

The SRB scale created for this study is focused on the apparel/shoe buying context, which may limit its applicability to other industries. Also, SRB was measured through subjective perceptions of the respondents, which may be subject to some degree of social desirability bias.

The results suggest that changing the organizational environment where employees observe peers and providing standards of what is socially acceptable can improve SRB.

By employing individual decision makers as the unit of analysis, this study advances the field of ethical decision making by providing empirical evidence that SRB decisions are a product of both cognitive processing and emotional responses.

Previous studies as well as anecdotes have indicated that parental involvement in adult children’s marital conflicts is fairly common in Korea. This study attempts to explain how in-law conflicts – arguably a structural outcome of the traditional Confucian family – lead to marital disruption in contemporary families.

This study adopts the hypotheses of the corporate group, mother identity, and gendered-role expectations, which are instrumental to understanding the social context in which the legacy of the Confucian culture interacts with the knowledge-based neoliberal economy to revive in-law conflicts. Divorced-couple data are from in-depth interviews and court rulings, and their analysis illustrates the trajectories of marital breakdown.

The findings provide support for the hypotheses. Parents, especially mothers, who heavily invested time and money in their children’s education and career building meddle in their marriages in hopes to ensure the best returns to their investment. Normative prescriptions of gendered roles provide references for the parents regarding the roles of their children and children-in-law, and the gaps between their expectations and perceived reality trigger parental meddling and in-law conflicts. Adult children who are indebted to the parents for their status formation may acquiesce to the parental intervention.

In the traditional patriarchal family, in-law conflicts were restricted to mother- and daughter-in-law relationships, but are now extended to mother- and son-in-law relationships, reflecting a paradoxical twist in gender-role expectations. This chapter suggests that heavy parental investment in their children can have an unexpected consequence increasing the probability of adult children’s marital disruption.