Search results

This chapter on anti-racism struggles applies an anti-racist activist framing, both critically examining and recognising the milestones achieved through centuries of pro-justice and anti-racism struggles. It delves into the arduous journey that the global fight for racial equity has undergone and highlights the significant progress as well as setbacks experienced during this lengthy struggle. The earliest history of the fight against racial oppression and domination goes back to anti-slavery and anti-colonial movements. Scholars have analysed the emergence, development and state of global anti-racism struggles in a variety of ways. I approach this subject from a sociological perspective, highlighting the role of social structures, groups and institutions that have contributed to shaping the outcomes of anti-racist initiatives. While recognising the role of individuals and leading political activists, this chapter emphasises anti-racism as a collective social justice struggle. To do this, I explore various local and global anti-racism endeavours and examine how they may influence discussions on race, racism and racial equity and their evolving trajectories across different societies.

The purpose of the study is to analyse the impact of COVID-19 on the hospitality industry during the rise of worldwide pandemic crises using Twitter analysis. The study is based on 57,794 English-language tweets mined from Twitter from 1 April 2020 to 15 October 2020. Based on thematic and sentiment analysis, the study found that overall sentiments expressed on Twitter were negative. This chapter contributes to existing knowledge about the COVID-19 crisis and broadens the respondents’ understanding of the potential impacts of the crisis on the most vulnerable tourism and hospitality industry. This research emphasises the sustainable revival of the hospitality industry.

This study aims to examine the role of mindfulness in promoting customers’ purchase intentions, especially with the mediation effects of perceived ease of use and perceived usefulness toward online ride-hailing services. As such, several recommendations for ride-hailing service providers and researchers are suggested for better implementation in a practical and theoretical context.

The data collection process is carried out online during the period of February 2022 to March 2022, with a sample of 237 respondents being analyzed by the covariance-based structural equation modeling approach.

First of all, mindfulness had a direct influence on perceived ease of use and perceived usefulness, as well as an indirect influence on purchase intention through the mediation role of perceived usefulness. Besides, perceived usefulness is found to have a positive influence on the customer’s purchase intention, while perceived ease of use positively affects both perceived usefulness and intention.

This study just ends with customers’ intentions to adopt ride-hailing services; nevertheless, the actual behavior has not been examined. Further research might consider actual usage as a dependent factor when investigating the topic of ride-hailing services.

This study is notably different from the existing literature by filling the literature gap on the role of mindfulness in promoting customers’ purchase intentions toward ride-hailing services.

Este estudio tiene como objetivo examinar el papel del mindfulness en la promoción de las intenciones de compra de los clientes, especialmente con los efectos de mediación de la facilidad de uso percibida y la utilidad percibida hacia los servicios de transporte en línea. De este modo, se sugieren varias recomendaciones para los proveedores de servicios de transporte en coche y los investigadores para una mejor aplicación en un contexto práctico y teórico.

El proceso de recopilación de datos se lleva a cabo en línea durante el período de febrero de 2022 a marzo de 2022, con una muestra de 237 encuestados que se analizan mediante el enfoque CB-SEM.

En primer lugar, mindfulness tuvo una influencia directa sobre la facilidad de uso percibida y la utilidad percibida, así como una influencia indirecta sobre la intención de compra a través del papel de mediación de la utilidad percibida. Además, se observa que la utilidad percibida influye positivamente en la intención de compra del cliente, mientras que la facilidad de uso percibida afecta positivamente tanto a la utilidad percibida como a la intención.

Este estudio se limita a analizar la intención de los clientes de adoptar los servicios de transporte rápido; sin embargo, no se ha examinado el comportamiento real. En futuras investigaciones se podría considerar el uso real como un factor dependiente a la hora de investigar el tema de los servicios de transporte rápido.

Este estudio es notablemente diferente de la literatura existente al llenar el vacío bibliográfico sobre el papel de mindfulness en la promoción de las intenciones de compra de los clientes hacia los servicios de ride-hailing.

本研究旨在探讨 “正念 “在促进顾客购买意向方面的作用, 尤其是在感知易用性和感知有用性对在线叫车服务的中介效应方面。因此, 本研究为叫车服务提供商和研究人员提出了若干建议, 以便在实践和理论背景下更好地实施这些建议。

数据收集过程于 2022 年 2 月至 2022 年 3 月期间在线进行, 采用 CB-SEM 方法对 237 个受访者样本进行分析。

首先, 正念对感知易用性和感知有用性有直接影响, 并通过感知有用性的中介作用对购买意向产生间接影响。此外, 还发现感知有用性对顾客的购买意向有积极影响, 而感知易用性对感知有用性和购买意向都有积极影响。

本研究仅对顾客采用打车服务的意向进行了分析, 但并未对实际行为进行研究。在研究叫车服务时, 进一步的研究可能会将实际使用情况作为一个因果因素。

独创性 本研究填补了关于正念在促进顾客乘车服务购买意向方面作用的文献空白, 与现有文献有明显不同。

Racism occurs in many ways and varies across countries, evolving and adapting to sociocultural history, as well as contemporary economic, political and technological changes. This chapter discusses the multilevel dimensions of racism and its diverse manifestations across multiracial societies. It examines how different aspects of racism are mediated interpersonally, and embedded in institutions, social structures and processes, that produce and sustain racial inequities in power, resources and lived experiences. Furthermore, this chapter explores the direct and indirect ways racism is expressed in online and offline platforms and details its impacts on various groups based on their intersecting social and cultural identities. Targets of racism are those who primarily bear the adverse effects. However, racism also affects its perpetrators in many ways, including by limiting their social relations and attachments, and by imposing social and economic costs. This chapter thus analyses the many aspects of racism both from targets and perpetrators' perspectives.

This research sought to examine the differential effect of chatbot banking artificial intelligence (AI) on consumer experience in the banking industry. A positivist paradigm was adopted to sample 389 consumers who were previously exposed to chatbot banking in Zimbabwe. A causal research design was employed whilst a quantitative approach was followed. In analysing data, the research study applied the structural equation modelling (SEM) technique. The authors found that chatbot banking significantly improves customer experience (CX) in the banking industry. Reliability and responsiveness of the chatbot need to be enhanced for effective improvements in CX. A need was also identified to enhance CX through the development of an ease-to-use chatbot which is embedded in everyday messaging applications of consumers. A significant association was also found between perceived benefits of chatbot banking and CX. This study informs the development of competitive advantage by banks and other related companies through AI-based CX management strategies. In times of pandemics and beyond, chatbot banking can be very instrumental in improving CX.

In this study, to empirically test the relationship between ethical organizational climate, inner life (IL) and life satisfaction (LS) of employees, a field study was conducted on white-collar personnel working in the service sector in the Istanbul region. The main purpose was to extract an approach that could be applied to simultaneously boost LS and customer orientation for effective service delivery by organizations.

A two-wave time-lagged survey design was used to collect the data over a period of three months. Two sets of self-administrated survey questionnaires were developed for both waves, containing the details of the study and items for measuring variables. The questionnaires were developed in such a manner that the anonymity of the respondents and ethical considerations remained intact. In the first wave, data were collected for two variables, i.e. organizational ethical climate and IL. The measurement scale for organizational ethical climate was adapted from the study of DeBode et al. (2013) and for IL from the study of Fry et al. (2017). In the second wave, data on the remaining two variables (LS and organizational customer orientation) were collected. Direct effects and indirect effects in the hypotheses were tested by structural equation modeling (SEM).

This study has found that the organizational ethical climate strengthens the inner lives of employees, which is vital for the organizations from two angles: one, strong IL of an employee enhances his/her own LS and two, stronger IL accentuates customer orientation.

The fact that the context of this study is limited to Turkey and that the participants are selected from among white-collar personnel working in the service sector reduces the representativeness of the research result. In this sense, in the next stages, the model of the research can be retested in different industries or cross-cultural studies can be designed by comparing the study results with samples from different geographies, so that the validity of these relations for different cultures can be seen.

The implications of this study revealed that employees will enjoy their lives more when authorities in organizations adopt organizational policies supporting the inner lives of employees, feel respect for their private areas and make the organizational climate more ethical. Hence, with practices such as workplace spirituality or spiritual leadership that support the inner lives of employees, the motivation and satisfaction of employees can be increased.

This study revealed that inner life strength makes people comparative more ethical in their dealings, which gives them a sense of achievement and enhances work meaningfulness, boosting LS and customer-orientation. The findings of this study are vital for leaders, as they can achieve a conjoint elevation of the LS of their employees and enhance customer orientation for higher organizational performance.

This study is original in emphasizing the positive effect of spiritually powerful inner-life customer-orientedness in employees with empirical proof.

To develop a fuzzy causal model of enterprise flexibility dimensions in a case study of Indian pharmaceutical industry.

The eight dimensions of enterprise flexibility were identified based on literature review. Fermatean fuzzy decision-making trail and evaluation laboratory (FF-DEMATEL) technique is applied to develop the cause-and-effect interrelationship model among various enterprise flexibility dimensions.

The information technology flexibility, supply chain flexibility, technical flexibility and marketing flexibility are found to be causing/influencing other flexibilities and contributing to overall enterprise flexibilities. Therefore, more attention needs to be paid to develop and sustain them for competitive advantage.

Fermatean fuzzy sets offer more flexibility and more accurate handling complex uncertain group decision making. FF-DEMATEL is a more accurate method to develop inter-dependencies and causal model than ISM, TISM. Ratings from the limited number of decision experts (DEs) from few pharmaceutical firms were done. Future study should take bigger sample of firms and more number of DEs to generalize the findings.

The model will help managers in pharmaceutical industry to prioritize the dimensions of enterprise flexibility to achieve agility, responsiveness, resilience and competitive advantage.

To the best knowledge of the authors, causal modeling enterprise flexibility dimensions using FF-DEMATEL has been studied for the first time in a developing economy context.

During the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic, ubiquitous social media has become a primary channel for information dissemination, social interactions and recreational activities. However, it remains unclear how social media usage influences nonpharmaceutical preventive behavior of individuals in response to the pandemic. This paper aims to explore the impacts of social media on COVID-19 preventive behaviors based on the theoretical lens of empowerment.

In this paper, survey data has been collected from 739 social media users in China to conduct structural equation modeling (SEM) analysis.

The results indicate that social media empowers individuals in terms of knowledge seeking, knowledge sharing, socializing and entertainment to promote preventive behaviors at the individual level by increasing each person's perception of collective efficacy and social cohesion. Meanwhile, social cohesion negatively impacts the relationship between collective efficacy and individual preventive behavior.

This study provides insights regarding the role of social media in crisis response and examines the role of collective beliefs in the influencing mechanism of social media. The results presented herein can be used to guide government agencies seeking to control the COVID-19 pandemic.

This paper examines how manufacturing firms impacted by the nitrogen oxides (NO_x) Budget Trading Program (NBP) strategically managed working capital to release funds for increased costs and mitigate the negative impact on firm performance.

The study uses a panel data set including 11,302 manufacturing firm-year observations listed on the US exchanges during the period 2000–2008. The authors use Tobin's Q to proxy for firm performance, and cash holding, cash conversion cycle (CCC), days sales outstanding (DSO), days sales inventory (DSI) and days payable outstanding (DPO) for working capital management (WCM). The empirical analysis is conducted using both ordinary least squares (OLS) and propensity score matching (PSM) regressions.

The authors find that firms respond to the higher utility costs imposed by the NBP by decreasing CCC, DSO and DSI. This active WCM response partially mitigated the impact of increased compliance costs on performance for firms affected by the NBP. Results are robust in PSM regressions.

Climate change is a global issue that has attracted increasing attention in recent years. This study shows how firms can adjust short-term financing strategies to address the costs of compliance with climate change regulation.

The paper contributes to the emerging literature on corporate finance and climate policy actions. The authors use the unique experimental setting of the NBP to examine the regulatory impact on corporate financial management. The authors demonstrate how firms used active WCM to mitigate the negative performance impact of regulatory compliance with the NBP, providing novel insight on the implication of compliance with climate change legislation.