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This study focuses on the use of export marketing information in small and medium‐sized enterprises (SMEs), an area that has previously attracted little academic research attention. It reports on the application of scales measuring instrumental/conceptual and symbolic export information use, using a random sample of UK exporters, to SME exporters of engineering and IT products. The results show that the scales are applicable within the specific context of the industrial SMEs surveyed and that levels of symbolic export information use are higher in these SMEs than in UK exporting companies as a whole. The latter is explained as a function of a shortfall in two areas: first, in available export marketing information, leading to greater dependence on “guesswork” and intuition; and second, in specialist marketing information‐processing skills on the part of SME export decision makers. The article concludes by appealing for an extension of export support for SMEs, to include the use of export information as well as simply its acquisition. It suggests that the scales tested here could be used both to diagnose the need for such SME support and to measure its effectiveness.

To draw together the diverse and diffuse elements of previous research into the determinants of success in export marketing by SMEs.

Groups of export marketing activities derived from the literature and preliminary qualitative fieldwork were incorporated in a questionnaire‐based survey of a purposive sample of small exporters in one region of the UK, measuring the frequency of their use against levels of export commitment, involvement, and experience.

Results contradict the traditional view that the longer a company has been exporting, the more likely it is to do well. The study provides evidence to encourage ambitious exporting SMEs to develop active and on‐going marketing and information‐gathering activities, and to dedicate specific financial and human resources to exporting.

The highly focused approach to measuring the relationships between export marketing activities and company characteristics should ideally be further extended, in the context of a wide range of studies relating other organizational, managerial and environmental variables to export success.

The findings and conclusions alert marketing intelligence‐gatherers to the dangers of conventional assumptions about marketing practice, provide practical guidelines for planners of export marketing strategy, and could form the basis of an easily administered diagnostic tool, all in the SME context.

Focusing on behaviour rather than attitudes, the research provides a practical set of criteria against which SME activities can be measured.

While job insecurity generally impedes performance, there may be circumstances under which it can prompt performance. The purpose of this paper is to examine a specific situation (reorganization) in which job insecurity may prompt task and contextual performance. The authors propose that performance can represent a job preservation strategy, to which employees may only resort when supervisor-issued ratings of performance are instrumental toward securing one’s job. The authors hypothesize that because of this instrumentality, job insecurity will motivate employees’ performance only when they have low intrinsic motivation, and only when they perceive high distributive justice.

In a survey study among 103 permanent employees of a company in reorganization, the authors assessed perceived job insecurity, intrinsic motivation and perceived distributive justice. Supervisors rated employees’ overall performance (task performance and organizational citizenship behaviors).

Multilevel analyses showed that job insecurity was only positively related to supervisor-rated overall performance among employees with low intrinsic motivation and, unexpectedly, among employees who experienced low distributive justice. Results were cross-validated using employees’ self-rated performance, replicating the findings on distributive justice but not the findings on intrinsic motivation.

The results can inform future research on the specific situations in which job insecurity may prompt job preservation efforts, and call for research to uncover the mechanisms underlying employees’ negative and positive responses to job insecurity. The results and associated implications of this study are largely based on conceptual evidence. In addition, the cross-sectional design warrants precaution about drawing causal inferences from the data.

By combining insights from coping responses and threat foci, this study advances the understanding of when and why job insecurity may prompt performance.

This study used a critical incidents methodology to examine the influence of accounts on perceived social loafing and evaluations of team member, and to investigate the face management and responsibility explanations of account‐giving. The results of this study suggest that communicative acts such as accounts may reduce perceived loafing. In addition, perceived loafing and evaluations of the team member were influenced by the type of account provided; concessions were more effective in decreasing perceptions of social loafing and increasing evaluations of the team member than excuses and justifications which, in turn, were more effective than refusals. These findings indicate tentative support for the face management explanation of account effectiveness.

Purpose – This chapter discusses youth participation in a Social Justice Literacy Workshop (SJLW). Participants were predominantly Black youth residing in an urban community with a rich history and important community resources such as libraries and churches. The SJLW used a variety of print texts, videos, artwork, documents, and other texts to explore the topic of police brutality and other justice-related topics.

Design/Methodology/Approach – This chapter uses the gradual release of responsibility (GRR) model as a lens to revisit the SJLW as designed and implemented by the first author Tiffany Nyachae. Nyachae designed and implemented the SJLW as space to inspire students to engage in critical thinking and analysis of authentic texts, and to use these textual interactions as an impetus for activism in their community. With the help of her co-authors, Nyachae reflects on the SJLW through a GRR lens to describe how students were scaffolded and supported as they moved toward activism.

Findings – Students brought their own understandings of police brutality and awareness of activism to the SJLW. These prior understandings were shaped both by their own lived experiences but also by their awareness of and interaction with social media. During the SJLW, youth read and discussed the novels All American Boys by Jason Reynolds and Brendan Kiely (2015) and Hush by Jacqueline Woodson (2002). The youth engaged in activities and discussions about how prevalent issues in each novel connected to larger social and political concerns. Students discussed the current events, engaged in reflective writing, read short pieces, and analyzed documents and videos. The SJLW was successful in such a way that all students felt comfortable voicing their opinions, even when opinions differed from their peers. Students demonstrated critical thinking about issues related to justice. All students completed an action plan to address injustice in their community. While applying the GRR to this context and reflecting, first author Nyachae began to consider the other scaffolds for youth that could have been included, particularly one youth, JaQuan, who was skeptical about what his community had done to support him. Nyachae revisits the SJLW to consider how the GRR helped to reveal the need for additional scaffolding that JaQuan or other youth may have needed from leaders in the SJLW. A literature review also revealed that very few literacy practices have brought together the GRR and social justice teaching or learning.

Research Limitations/Implications – This chapter demonstrates that the GRR framework can be effectively applied to a justice-centered teaching and learning context as a reflective tool. Since very little research exists on using the GRR framework with justice-centered teaching, there is a need for additional research in this area as the GRR model offers many affordances for researchers and teachers. There is also a need for literacy researchers to consider elements of justice even when applying the GRR framework to any classroom or out-of-school context with children and youth.

Practical Implications – The GRR can be a useful tool for reflecting the practices of literacy and justice-centered teaching. Just as the GRR can be a useful framework to help teachers think about teaching reading comprehension, it can be an effective tool to help teachers think about supporting students to grow from awareness to activism in justice-centered teaching and learning.

Originality/Value of Paper – This chapter is one of only a handful of published works that brings together a social justice perspective with the GRR.

Despite growing awareness of ethical and social responsibility (E&SR) issues in academia and industry, investigation of their influence on consumers' buying decisions has been limited. To help fill this gap, this paper reports the findings of a preliminary investigation to establish the key E&SR factors affecting grocery shopping behaviour.

The study drew upon existing literature in the areas of ethics, social responsibility, shopping and store image to identify the individual elements of E&SR. An exploratory qualitative study of E&SR consumers (E&SRC) was then conducted, using seven focus groups, and a typology of key factors of concern to these consumers was derived from analysis.

The findings identify seven core categories, containing seventy‐one sub‐categories. These interlink to form three main clusters: food quality and safety, human rights and ethical trading, and environmental (green) issues. Shoppers trade off these E&SR factors against standard retail purchasing factors, in particular convenience, price and merchandise range when deciding which shops to use and what products to buy.

The typology derived from this exploratory research may be used alongside conventional store image factors in future research, to help predict those factors that influence purchasing behaviour. Similarly, it may assist brand and retail managers in profiling, and meeting the needs of, E&SRC.

The research distinguishes differences in how shopper types vary in their behaviour, and proposes a set of implications for managers of the research and areas for further investigation.

Numerous studies have provided evidence that interracial interaction can contribute to the development of leadership skills and behaviors for university students. Yet, little empirical research has been dedicated to understanding the effects of structural (compositional) racial diversity within leadership programs on program participant outcomes. This study examined the impact of the structural racial diversity of 50 leadership program sessions on student leadership capacity gains over time. A total of 667 participants in sessions coded as either “High,” “Moderate,” or “Low” with regard to racial diversity within the session served as the sample. Results from data collected immediately prior to, directly after, and 3-4 months after program participation suggest the training effects of a leadership initiative may be augmented by the recruitment of racially diverse participants.

This study reports on a four-month ethnographic project conducted among young Catholic women in Mumbai, India. Here, the author examines how the media consumption of participants is implicated in reconstituting Indian national identity. Because Hinduism is closely tied to conceptualizations of Indianness and because women continue to be marginalized in Indian society, Catholic women in India are viewed as second-class citizens or “not Indian enough” or “appropriately Indian” by virtue of their gender and religious affiliation. However, through media consumption that emphasizes hybridity, participants destabilize narrow definitions of Indian identity. Specifically, participants cultivate hybridity as central to an Indian identity that is viable in an increasingly global society. Within this formulation of hybridity, markers of their marginalization are reframed as markers of distinction. By centering hybridity in their media consumption, young, middle-class Catholic women (re)imagine their national identity in translocal cosmopolitan terms that subverts marginalization experienced by virtue of their religion and leverages privileges they enjoy by virtue of their middle-class status. Importantly, this version of Indian identity remains elitist in that it remains inaccessible to poor women, including poor women of minority groups.

This chapter aims to explore how emotional language construing experiences of UK COVID-19 lockdown in the present frames expectations for future behaviours and intended memories. We analyse 102 responses collected through an online narrative survey during the first lockdown in the United Kingdom. The survey asked participants to articulate ‘an image to remember lockdown by’. Taking a positive discourse analysis approach, using corpus linguistics and systemic functional linguistics tools, we challenge the primarily negative mainstream discourses of COVID-19 and lockdown experiences and explore how language choices evaluating different aspects of life in lockdown evoke emotion to construe a desired projected future. Findings indicate that respondents actively and selectively articulate primarily positive intended memories based on kinship peace and nature that contrast with normal life experiences. Such choices are framed within emotional states enacted through language choices. We argue that these projected memories act as a ‘time capsule’ whereby decisions to retain positive memories help to promote adaptive well-being in the face of potentially overwhelmingly negative circumstances.

The purpose of this paper was to examine the intention to adopt mobile banking services among Generation Y consumers using the unified theory of acceptance and use of technology Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology (UTAUT) model.

The paper investigated responses from a particular sub-group of Generation Y consumers that is college or university students. The final sample collected was 347 cases, representing a response rate of 90.4 per cent. Two sets of analyses were performed: multiple regression analyses testing the extended UTAUT model and a mediated regression analysis testing the intervening effect of performance expectancy (PE) on the relationship between effort expectancy (EE) and behavioural intention.

Multiple regression analysis revealed PE as the strongest predictor, followed by EE, perceived risk and social influence. The prediction model explained 68.3 per cent of the variance in intention to adopt mobile banking. Mediation analysis supported a partial mediation effect of PE on the relationship between EE and intention to adopt mobile banking.

This study examined respondents’ intention to adopt mobile banking instead of their actual behaviour. Understanding behavioural intention is essential, but it may not accurately represent actual behaviour. In addition, results from this study may not be generalisable to the whole population of Generation Y college or university students due to selection bias and a lack of information concerning the sampling frame.

This research identifies the factors that affect the intention to adopt mobile banking among the Generation Y college or university students. Bank operators can use the findings to improve their marketing strategies and services offered to make them more attractive and competitive to students to speed up the mobile banking adoption rate.

This study is one of the few local studies that introduce a practical model of extended UTAUT by including perceived risk to understand the mobile banking adoption intention among millennial generation.