Search results

At perhaps all levels of education, strong leadership skills are often equated with the ability to engage in critical thinking, and effective oral and written communication. The purpose of this study was to identify the self-perceived expansion of animal health interns’ leadership, critical thinking and communication competencies using the University of Florida – Engagement, Cognitive Maturity, and Innovativeness (UF-EMI) and Leadership Skills Inventory (LSI) assessments. For the UF-EMI, the total mean score of the pre-critical thinking disposition of all interns was 104.73; post-critical thinking disposition was 114.46, an increase of 9.73. Results of the LSI indicate just 70% accept who they are and don’t see themselves as good listeners.

The purpose of this paper is to examine how legitimacy is gained, maintained or repaired through direct action with salient stakeholders and/or through external reporting, by using a number of empirical case vignettes within a single case study organisation.

The study investigates a foreign affiliate of a large multinational organisation involved in an environmentally sensitive industry. Data collection included semi-structured interviews with 26 participants, organisational reports and participation in the organisation’s annual environmental management seminar and a stakeholder engagement meeting.

Four vignettes featuring environmental issues illustrate the complexity of organisational responses. Issue visibility, stakeholder salience and stakeholder interconnectedness influence a company’s action to manage legitimacy. In the short-term, environmental issues which affected salient stakeholders resulted in swift and direct action to protect pragmatic legitimacy, but external reporting did not feature in legitimacy management efforts. Highly visible issues to the public, regulators and the media, however, resulted in direct action together with external reporting to manage wider stakeholder perceptions. External reporting was used superficially, along with a broad suite of communication strategies, to gain legitimacy in the long-term decision about the company’s future in New Zealand.

This paper outlines how episodic encounters to manage strategic legitimacy with salient stakeholders in the short-term are theoretically distinct, but nonetheless linked to continual efforts to maintain institutional legitimacy. Case vignettes highlight how pragmatic legitimacy via dispositional legitimacy can be managed with direct action in the short-term to influence a limited range of salient stakeholders. The way external reporting features in legitimacy management is limited, although this has predominantly been the focus of prior research. Only where an environmental incident damages legitimacy to a larger number of stakeholders is external reporting also used to buttress community support.

The concept of legitimacy is comprehensively applied, linking the strategic and institutional arms of legitimacy and illustrating how episodic actions are taken to manage legitimacy in the short-term with continual efforts to manage legitimacy in the long-term. Stakeholder salience and networks are brought in as novel theoretical extensions to provide a deeper understanding of the interrelationships between these key concepts with a unique case study.

This study aims to estimate the pass-through rate of the increases in the excise tax and TCF tax on tobacco in Vietnam. This study seeks to shed light on how the tax burden is split between consumers and producers and inform policy discussions in the country. Using panel micro-level data collected from three waves of a nationwide retailer's survey, this study provides an evidence-based pass-through estimation for tobacco tax in Vietnam and contributes to the understanding of tax policy on smoking and smoking-related issues.

Following increases in the excise tax and TCF tax on tobacco in 2019, the differential effect of the tax hike on the “treatment group” (domestic cigarettes) versus the “control group” (illicit cigarettes) using a difference-in-difference (DID) analysis has been studied. The study utilized unique longitudinal retailers’ data on cigarettes prices in Vietnam from 2018 to 2019 to estimate the tax pass-through rate for some of the most popular factory-made cigarette brands.

This study found evidence of an over-shifting of cigarette taxes on smokers. Specifically, it discovered that the tax increase is absorbed more by low-priced brand smokers compared to premium brand users due to (1) the limited increase in prices under a pure ad valorem system and (2) the way the Vietnamese currency is denominated. Additionally, there is evidence of cushioning to mitigate price shock on consumers as the real prices increase gradually over the period of one year after the tax change.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study is the first to collect and analyze a unique panel micro-level data from three waves of a nationwide retailers’ survey, which captures the changes in marketing and pricing strategies of the tobacco industry in Vietnam before and after an increase in excise tax in 2019. The results of this study could be used as a reference for future policymakers in considering increasing taxes on tobacco.

One potential lesson to be learned from the academic “culture wars” of the past few decades, regardless of which position one prefers, is that the humanities as a discipline continue to matter, perhaps more so than ever in a multi-cultural, globalized world. The systematic marginalization, even elimination, of the humanistic disciplines available represents a significant weakness for education in the Gulf; bolstering the study of the humanities – including literature, philosophy, and art history – offers a proven route towards achieving certain goals publicly avowed as priorities for education in the region. This paper proposes that engaging the humanities builds an awareness and appreciation of otherness; encourages abstract (critical) thinking; fosters language development; and, perhaps most importantly, asks students to be inspired by great ideas beautifully rendered. To become a knowledge-based society, a culture of reading deeply and independently needs to be cultivated. To empower students to become lifelong learners requires that they are, by default, lifelong readers. Furthermore, I propose that in an unsettling time of growth, change and challenges in the region, there is a reassuring possibility for humanistic inclusion that transcends the standard categories of identity politics. Students in the Gulf, just as readers everywhere else in this human world, can be shown that there is more to unite us than to divide us.

This paper presents comparative studies of modern transportation systems in the Bengal Delta and British Borneo. To meet the demands of the new modes of resource extraction, the British colonial rulers introduced a new transportation system in both regions and built roads, railways, and navigational routes connecting major commercial and political centers. There has been little research into the historical connections between modern transportation and environmental changes in colonial South Asia and Malaysia. When modern transportation was introduced, environmental consequences were rarely considered. As a result, significant ecological changes and declines were unintentionally caused. The environmental changes brought about by these transportation systems in these two regions were not the same one from the other. For example, railroad construction harmed the plains and waterways in the Bengal Delta, whereas, in British Borneo, rubber plantations for the global market harmed the rainforests.

Effective customer journey design (ECJD) is considered a key variable in customer experience management and an essential source of brand meaning and pro-brand behavior. Although previous research has confirmed its importance for driving brand attitudes and loyalty, the role of consumer-brand identification as a social identity-based influence in this relationship has not yet been discussed. Drawing on construal level and social identity theories, this paper aims to investigate whether effective journeys and the resulting overall journey experience are equally powerful in driving brand loyalty among customers with different levels of consumer-brand identification.

The present article develops and tests a research model using data from the European and US service sectors (N = 1,454) to investigate how and when ECJD affects service brand loyalty.

Across two cultural contexts, four service industries and 33 service brands, the results reveal that ECJD is a crucial driver of service brand loyalty for customers with low consumer-brand identification. Moreover, the findings show that different aspects of journey effectiveness positively impact the valence of customers’ experience related to those journeys – a process that is ultimately decisive for their brand loyalty.

This study is unique because it generates theoretical and practical knowledge by combining the literature streams of customer journey design, customer experience and branding. Furthermore, this work demonstrates that consumer-brand identification is a critical boundary condition to be considered in the relationship between ECJD and brand loyalty in services.

This study aims to investigate three relevant antecedents of digital transformation (digital orientation, digital intensity and digital maturity) and their influences on the financial success of companies.

Building on the strategic management and digital transformation literature, five hypotheses are developed to find the relationships between these antecedents and financial success.

Digital orientation and digital intensity alone do not contribute to the financial success of companies. Specifically, digital intensity serves as a negative moderator between digital orientation and financial success, meaning that it reduces the performance effects of digital orientation. Digital maturity acts as a mediator between digital orientation and the financial success of companies and between digital intensity and the financial success of companies.

This research contributes to the literature on strategic management and digital transformation by providing a further understanding of three relevant antecedents of digital transformation (digital orientation, digital intensity and digital maturity) and how they should be positioned alongside digital transformation settings to achieve financial success.

The purpose of the paper is to examine how media synchronicity facilitates the emergence of social exchange (i.e. trust and reciprocity) in organizations’ information and communication technology (ICT)-mediated interactions. A model of media synchronicity in organizational social exchange (MSiOSE) is proposed.

The paper has a design and review approach. The theoretical analysis is based on social exchange theory (SET) and media synchronicity theory (MST).

The authors propose that, in general, social exchange benefits from both asynchronous and synchronous communication processes. However, media synchronicity has different boundary conditions (i.e. pros and cons) in relation to the emergence of social exchange, determined in accordance with the mutually interacting patterns of trust and reciprocity predicted by SET. The authors provide testable theoretical propositions to support the analysis.

Social exchange is a critical business factor for organizations due to its well-known positive outcomes, such as the strengthening of social ties. The need for successful social exchange in remote work conditions is particularly emphasized. However, with regard to the communication and behavioral patterns that lead to social exchange via ICT, the theoretical understanding is limited. The study reveals previously unmapped heuristics between social exchange and physical media capabilities. Thus, the study's propositions can be used to study and analyze social exchange in the ever-changing media landscape. As a practical contribution, the study helps organizations to improve their communication strategies and use of ICT.

This paper aims to use Bayesian network (BN) methodology complemented by machine learning (ML) and what-if analysis to investigate the impact of digital technologies (DT) on logistics service quality (LSQ), employing the service quality (SERVQUAL) framework.

Using a sample of 244 Italian firms, this study estimates the probability distributions associated with both DT and SERVQUAL logistics, as well as their interrelationships. Additionally, BN technique enables the application of ML techniques to uncover hidden relationships, as well as a series of what-if analyses to extract more knowledge.

This study was funded by the European Union—NextGenerationEU, in the framework of the GRINS-Growing Resilient, INclusive and Sustainable project (GRINS PE00000018—CUP B43C22000760006). The views and opinions expressed are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union, nor can the European Union be held responsible for them.

This research delves into the influence of DTIE and DTA on SERVQUAL logistics, thereby filling a gap in the existing literature in which no study has explored the intricate relationships between these technologies and SERVQUAL dimensions. Methodologically, we pioneer the integration of BN with ML techniques and what-if analysis, thus exploring innovative techniques to be used in logistics and supply-chain studies.