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To use the theory of planned behavior (TPB) as a theoretical framework to explore in depth the range of beliefs held by consumers about internet shopping in general and internet grocery shopping in particular.

Seven focus group interviews, four in the United Kingdom and three in Denmark, were conducted among consumers with different degrees of experience with internet grocery shopping. This diversification of respondents was chosen to capture a broad range of the consumer beliefs that predict intentions to buy groceries online or not. The TPB framework was used to construct the interview guide that was followed in all focus groups.

An unexpected result of the explorative study was that the seven groups consisting of more or less experienced internet shoppers differed only little in their pool of beliefs (outcome and control beliefs). Beliefs about internet grocery shopping, positive as well as negative, were remarkably congruent across groups. In the minds of consumers, internet grocery shopping is an advantage compared with conventional grocery shopping in terms of convenience, product range and price. Disadvantages, which could act as mental barriers, are, for instance, the risk of receiving inferior quality groceries and the loss of the recreational aspect of grocery shopping.

An important potential limitation of this research is the choice of focus groups as research methodology, which can prevent the elicitation of certain types of beliefs. If important beliefs concern issues of a more sensitive, personal character they are not likely to be mentioned in a focus group. Another limitation is the explorative nature of the research, which makes it impossible to attach weights to the importance of the elicited beliefs in predicting internet shopping behavior.

The findings could be used to direct attention to consumer beliefs about internet grocery shopping which have the potential of acting as barriers to this line of e‐commerce.

To shed some light on the role of consumers in an underperforming and understudied branch of internet retailing. Barriers in the consumers' minds to shop for groceries online are identified using an established theoretical framework.

The purpose of this paper is to review literature on factors that may have an impact on consumers’ probability to buy food over the internet, and to suggest a model that can guide future research.

Determinants of consumer intention to buy food via the internet are sorted into the categories medium, product, consumer, firm, and environment. In order to draw the various results together and provide a coherent framework for future research, a model is proposed that combines the theory of planned behaviour and the lifestyle construct.

While a lot of scattered evidence is available, there is a need for a coherent, operational, theory‐based model that can summarize findings and guide future research.

The proposed model is operational and can be used in future empirical research on consumers’ food shopping via the internet.

The literature review suggests that concepts combining convenience and an emphasis on information intensive food products will be most successful, and that consumers having a “wired lifestyle” are the most likely users. However, much more detailed insights will be possible by using the proposed model.

The paper is the first comprehensive summary of evidence on consumer food shopping via the internet. It will be useful basis for future research on this topic.

With the rapid development of integrated circuits, verification of SOC chips has become a great challenge due to its integration and complexity. Traditional software‐based simulation methodology cannot meet verification needs. Therefore, FPGA‐based hardware acceleration technologies are requested in SOC verification. The classic methodology of hardware acceleration downloads the DUT (Device under Test) to the FPGA, while part of RTL codes and test bench is still run on the simulator in the workstation. Research found that the speed bottleneck of this methodology is mostly caused by the ping‐pong mode of data transmission between workstation software and the FPGA emulator, thus resulting in that channel transmission time takes too much proportion of total time. The purpose of this paper is to present a vector mode based hardware/software co‐emulation methodology, which leverages a pipeline structure to transmit, receive and buffer data. This methodology reduces the communication overhead by carrying out a parallel mechanism in that while user's design is under test in the emulator, signal data are transmitting in the channel simultaneously, thus increasing the speed of hardware acceleration and emulation.

The methodology of hardware acceleration proposed by this paper intercepts data for once from the emulation process of a traditional platform as test bench and utilizes direct memory access (DMA) channel to speed up data transfer, as well as increasing reasonable data caching mechanism, which reduces the ratio of channel transmission time in the entire emulation time, achieving accelerating emulation.

The proposed methodology and traditional hardware acceleration approach were tested on a quasi‐cyclic low‐density parity‐check (LDPC) decoder. Experiment results indicate that the proposed method can increase communication throughput 140 times compared with the traditional approach.

A vector mode based hardware/software co‐emulation methodology is presented in the paper. Higher communication throughput can be achieved by carrying out a parallel mechanism, as well as leveraging a pipeline structure to transmit, receive and buffer data.

Drawing on the “substitute for leadership” theory, this study investigates the mediating role of employee attitude between supervisory support and employee’s organisational citizenship behaviour for the environment. It also explicates the role of environmental management practices, as substitute for supervisory support in this relationship.

Time-lagged data (n = 235) were collected from middle- and upper-level management employees working in manufacturing and service sector organisations in Pakistan. Hypotheses were tested using structural equation modelling and regression analysis.

The findings reveal that supervisory support enhances employee attitudes towards pro-environmental behaviour, which in turn increases employees’ tendency to involve in organisational citizenship behaviour for the environment. However, the formal environmental management practices of the organisation serve as a substitute for the supervisory support because, if such formal practices are followed, the role of supervisory support becomes less significant.

This study is the maiden attempt to apply the “substitute for leadership” theory to the study of organisation citizenship behaviour for the environment. Moreover, it adds to the largely overlooked dimension of the research area concerning the inter-relationships between employees’, supervisory and organisational level antecedents of organisational citizenship behaviour for the environment.

Successfully fostering employee ecological behaviors can reduce the environmental impacts of an organization while boosting performance. This paper aims to investigate the factors and organizational strategies for employees to engage in ecological behaviors.

The study uses a qualitative method. Academicians from four top-ranked research universities from Malaysia participated in semi-structured interviews.

The in-depth analysis of the interviews identified several factors (environmental attitude, feedback, green self-efficacy, leadership role, organizational culture and employee empowerment) and strategies (incentives; top management support; creating environmental knowledge and awareness; rules and regulations; and sustainability advocates) for promoting ecological behavior in the workplace.

This study was limited to Malaysian public research universities. Future research could investigate additional variables that might influence employee ecological behavior. Implications include policymaking, which emphasizes boosting environmental factors among academicians.

Research studies on employee ecological behavior are minimal. This research contributes to the literature by discussing how different stimuli and strategies are used in the top four-ranked green universities of Malaysia for ecological behavior in the workplace.

The risk-return relationship is one of the most widely investigated topics in finance, yet this relationship remains one of the most controversial topics. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the asymmetric volatility and the risk-return tradeoff at the sector level in the emerging stock market of Jordan.

Data consist of daily prices for 22 sub-sectors spanning from August 1, 2006, to September 30, 2015, covering the periods of pre, during, and after the global financial crisis. The EGARCH-M model is used to document the patterns of asymmetric volatility of sub-sector returns and the risk-return tradeoff during the non-overlapping three sub-sample periods.

The major findings of this study are as follows. In the pre-crisis period, the results suggest some evidence of a positive relationship between risk and return. The results also reveal that good news has more effect than bad news during the same period. In the crisis period, there is a negative but insignificant risk-return relationship and negative shocks have more impact than positive ones. In the post-crisis period, the authors find positive but insignificant risk-return tradeoff with weak evidence of volatility asymmetry.

The results have major implications for investors willing to engage their investment decisions in the Amman Stock Exchange (ASE) and for policymakers who seek to attract and retain regional and international investors. Since the empirical investigation is conducted at the sector level, the study may aid investors to target specific sub-sectors with positive and significant risk-return tradeoff. In addition, investors need to monitor the asymmetric patterns which make the level of risk-aversion more susceptible to coming news. For policymakers, the latest infrastructure reforms are crucial to achieving the potential for growth but the ASE market authority needs to undergo further reforms and provide various promotional incentives.

Although there are numerous studies on asymmetric volatility and risk-return tradeoff, there is a lack of parallel studies at the sector level for both developed and emerging stock markets. Such assessment at the sector level is crucial for international investors after their choice of countries or markets for better choice of portfolio diversification and allocation of financial resources.

This study aims to examine the influence of the quality of voluntary disclosure (QVD) on earnings management (EM) amongst a sample of commercial banks in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region.

Using a sample of 1,060 bank-year observations for the period 2006–2015, this paper developed a three-dimensional framework to measure the QVD, which considers the quantity, spread and usefulness of the information. Furthermore, this study examines the QVD-EM nexus using an ordinary least squares regression model. This technique is supplemented with conducting an instrumental variable regression model and a two-stage least squares model to overcome the potential occurrence of endogeneity problems.

The findings suggest that QVD is negatively attributed to EM in the context of MENA banks. The findings also confirm that the quality of financial reporting is enhanced by QVD dimensions that were considered in the framework, leading banks to less engagement in EM practices. In contrast, the influence of the quantity dimension (level) of the disclosed information has an insignificant impact on EM, while the spread and usefulness dimensions of VD are negatively and significantly associated with EM in the region.

Although the results are robust to various measurements and to the possible occurrence of endogeneity problems, there are a few limitations should be acknowledged, which provides opportunities for future research. For example, the sample size is relatively small due to data accessibility issues. Likewise, the findings of the research might not be appropriate for non-financial sectors. These limitations provide a good opportunity for future studies to expand on the research by covering other developing economies and, thereby, enriching the understanding offered by this study.

This study offers several implications for bank managers, academics and policymakers. Firstly, it may help managers to appreciate the function and the importance of QVD in mitigating EM. Secondly, for academics, the study provides suggestive evidence on the impact of QVD on EM; however, future research may need to consider the role of morality and ethical behaviour across different environments in reducing excessive risk-taking and constraining earnings manipulation. Finally, it provides insights for policymakers and regulators to develop a framework or guidance that can help banks in providing high-QVD in the context of developing economies.

The study distinctively develops an innovative measurement for QVD using a new multi-dimensional model. This paper also bring new evidence on QVD complexity and its impact on EM practice from an under-researched developing context, namely, the MENA region.

This chapter aims to contribute to the literature on sustainability in the public sector by discussing how human resource and human resource management can help to integrate environmental management into organizations and improve environmental performance. Public sector scholars have neglected the study of Green Human Resource Management (GHRM) until now. Nevertheless, implementing such practices could lead to positive outcomes regarding awareness of environmental issues, organizational reputation and attractiveness, job satisfaction and organizational performance. The authors discuss the relevance and the necessity of developing a field of research on GHRM in public organizations. Starting from a conceptual review of the main literature on GHRM, this chapter provided some directions for future research.

Building upon institutional pressures on firms to deal with corruption, this study aims to investigate the association between a firm's engagement with anti-corruption disclosure quality (ACD_Q) and earnings management (EM). Also, this study examines the moderating role of audit quality in the association between ACD_Q and EM.

The authors constructed an ACD_Q index based on the 2010 UK Bribery Act and taking into account a wide range of rules on corruption and bribery, including those of the OECD, World Bank, UNCTAD, UNGC, UNCAC and GRI. Generalized method of moments and panel regression were used to examine the association between ACD_Q and EM.

Using a sample of 2,695 firm‐year observations of the UK’s FTSE-350 from 2008 to 2018, this study finds ACD_Q is negatively associated with EM. In addition, this negative relationship is contingent on audit committee independence and audit committee expertise. This finding is supported by additional robustness and sensitivity analysis.

The empirical evidence reiterates the crucial need for more concerted efforts to ensure corporate engagement in anti-corruption practices with a view to reducing earnings manipulations.

This study contributes to the limited evidence that investigates how ACD Q influences EM in the UK after the introduction of the UK Bribery Act in 2010. Furthermore, by considering the period from 2008 to 2019, this study investigates the potential moderating role of UK corporate governance reforms in EM reduction. In particular, to the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study assesses for the first time the moderating effect of audit committee mechanisms on the ACD Q and EM nexus.

A key challenge for hybrid organizations is managing to recombine the different institutional logics they incorporate while navigating complex, fast-changing environments. To examine how hybrids address this issue, the authors analyze the evolution of the Italian fiscal police – the Guardia di Finanza – from its foundation in 1862. Building on this unique case of a fiscal law enforcement agency that incorporates public fiscal and military logics, the authors propose that hybrid organizations can integrate the different logics they incorporate on the basis of four mechanisms. The mechanisms of upward and downward vertical integration trigger the integration of different logics throughout the entire organization. Integrated horizontal task extension and integrated horizontal competency extension enable an organization to manage a broader range of tasks while it develops the competencies that environmental complexity demands. These four mechanisms interact and, when properly managed, reinforce each other. With this chapter, the authors contribute to research on the processual nature of organizational hybridity and to broader research on the role of structures and competencies in dealing with environmental complexity.