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This research reviews numerous studies of the relationship between consumer knowledge and external search in conventional marketing channels to investigate differences among these studies that have produced conflicting results. The findings provide a benchmark for future researchers and practitioners seeking to gain insight into consumer information search processes unfolding in the new environment of online, mobile, and social networking channels.

A meta-analysis of an extensive array of empirical studies of the relationship between consumer knowledge and external information search was conducted. Regression analysis was used to test whether certain characteristics in the studies can explain variability in the effect sizes in which effect sizes are entered as dependent variables and moderators as independent variables.

Objective and subjective knowledge tend to increase search, while direct experience tends to reduce search. Consumers with higher objective knowledge search more when pursuing credence products. However, they search relatively less when pursuing search products. Consumers with higher subjective knowledge are much more likely to search in the context of experience products, but as is the case for objective knowledge having little effect on search for experience products, subjective knowledge has no significant effect on information seeking for search products. In addition, objective knowledge facilitates more information search in a complex decision-making context while higher subjective knowledge fosters more external information search in a simple decision-marketing context. Finally, the findings indicate that the knowledge search relationship reflects strong linkage in the pre-Internet era.

Relatively little is known about how the relationship between knowledge and information search varies across different types of products in simple or complex decision-making contexts. This study begins to fill this gap by providing insight into the relative importance of objective knowledge, subjective knowledge, and direct experience in influencing consumer information search activities for search, experience, and credence products in simple or complex decision-making contexts.

In this chapter, we examine employee prosocial rule breaking as a response to organizations’ unfair treatment of customers. Drawing on the deontic perspective and research on third-party reactions to unfairness, we suggest employees engage in customer-directed prosocial rule breaking when they believe their organizations’ policies treat customers unfairly. Additionally, we consider employee, customer, and situational characteristics that enhance or inhibit the relationship between employees’ perceptions of organizational policy unfairness and customer-directed prosocial rule breaking.

Research in strategic human resource management (SHRM) has evolved over the past 30 years to become more theory based and to exhibit greater empirical rigor. However, much has changed in the external environment that makes the existing theories, approaches, and methodologies inappropriate for addressing the questions that organizations face in managing their human resources today. In this chapter we discuss a number of environmental changes impacting organizations and identify tensions that researchers have faced in exploring how firms seek to manage their people as a source of competitive advantage. We argue that past research has focused on only one side of the tension at a time, thus limiting the usefulness of the answers that research provides. We advocate for research that simultaneously addresses both sides of the tensions in a way that can revolutionize research in SHRM.

This chapter seeks to optimize HR shared services performance by highlighting the potential for service fragmentation that can arise out of in the so-called Ulrich (structure or service delivery) model.

The evidence used in this chapter principally comes from the author’s own work, especially research for the UK’s Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD), and draws upon academic literature where possible.

This chapter argues that HR directors should guard against three sets of fragmentation risks. Firstly, HR shared services should be properly connected to the rest of HR to offer customers an integrated service to avoid the structure’s division of labor inducing incoherence. Second, to guard against this risk, HR directors should exercise care in outsourcing/offshoring beyond individual, discrete services because contractually or spatially separating services risks exacerbating this tendency to fragmentation. Outsourcing/offshoring may focus too much on cost savings and insufficiently on quality. So, third, HR should argue for the distinctiveness of its activities and fight commoditization that is also implied in the creation of cross-functional shared service centers.

The arguments in this chapter could be better supported by academic research. In-depth case studies of management decision making and shared services operation would help support or challenge the chapter’s conclusion, as could quantitative evidence on the benefits/disbenefits of outsourcing/offshoring/cross-functional shared services centers.

We have highlighted a number of reported problems with HR shared services operation, besides the three principal risks noted above, but we have suggested possible solutions that could be adopted by practitioners.

HR managers may find this chapter helpful in designing new HR structures or in assessing the effectiveness of shared services that goes beyond the typical key performance indicator measures.

In this paper, the main objective will be to discuss the factors which can influence the usage of risk reducing strategies found in the literature over the past 30 years. Some of the factors which have relatively consistent effects include age, socio‐economic group, education while other factors show complex effect e.g. self‐confidence, loss‐type and product risk. On the whole, the literature on risk reduction and how it is affected is unable to provide would‐be researchers with clear guidance for questionnaire construction and research design.

Proposes that, in large measure, chronic low back pain is a result of inappropriate information given to acute low back pain patients. This information leads patients into an avoidance pattern of behaviour which has psychological and physiological consequences. Suggests that chronic low back pain can be in part prevented if correct information is provided, maybe in the workplace, at the acute stage.

The purpose of this chapter is to introduce the capability map that addresses the potential of transactional Shared Service Centers (SSCs). The mapping approach represents a heuristic logic that provides means for analyzing SSC operation, connects SSCs capabilities with their value, and supports academics and practitioners in developing a transactional SSC that is of strategic importance.

This chapter reports on findings from a longitudinal case study within an organization that has implemented a transactional Human Resource (HR) SSC. Over a period of three years, several formal and informal meetings were attended, more than 20 interviews were conducted with SSC MT and customers, over 500 pages of project documentation and memos were studied, which allowed after integration for an in-depth analysis of how resources are bundled to build different types of capabilities.

We uncovered and mapped the operational and dynamic capabilities of a transactional SSC, their role in value creation, and their interdependencies. While the operational capabilities enable the HR SSC to provide day-to-day services to take care of individual end-users and support the business, the dynamic capabilities enable transformation of HR delivery throughout the organization and increase HR’s strategic contribution.

One limitation of this study is the extent to which the capabilities and their role in value creation are generalizable to transactional non-HR SSCs. SSCs providing services that cover other business functions might develop and deploy different capabilities. The use of a capability map is not limited to the capabilities uncovered in this study, however.

In the literature, the primary focus regarding transactional services is limited to cost savings and efficiency. This chapter addresses the potential of the transactional SSC and introduces the capability map as a tool to leverage its potential.