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Individuals, organizations, firms, and governments have been making strenuous effort to promote sustainable and green consumption. However, it is noticeable that a large amount of unattractive produce is ruthlessly discarded and wasted around the globe, resulting in unsustainable consumption behavior, harming long-term business development, and breaking the harmonious relationship between humans and nature. Therefore, to increase consumer literacy toward unaesthetic produce, this research investigates the pivotal role of “natural” labeling in increasing purchase intention toward visually unattractive fruits and vegetables.

By recruiting participants from one of the largest online crowdsourcing platforms (the Credamo), this research conducts three online experimental studies (with two pilot studies) to test three hypotheses based on the cue utilization theory and the lay belief theory.

The results show that unattractive produce with the “natural” label could significantly increase consumers' purchase intention compared with those without specific labels. The results also reveal that consumers' lay beliefs that natural foods are perceived to be tastier and healthier mediate the positive effects of “natural” labeling (vs no specific labeling) on willingness to purchase.

This research explores competing lay beliefs about unattractive produce. It identifies the positive effects of lay beliefs “natural = tasty and healthy” through “natural” labeling appeal, thus attenuating the misapplication of lay beliefs “unattractive = tasteless and unhealthy” and broadening the application scope of consumer lay belief theory. The findings also contribute to the cue literature by manifesting the positive consequences of the “natural” label playing as a cognitive cue in priming lay beliefs about naturalness. In addition, it also paves a positive way for business practitioners and marketers to develop the produce industry sustainably.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the causes and consequences of job stress in Malaysia and make a comparison between Western and Eastern perspectives.

A grounded theory approach was used to develop a lay representation of Malay people's descriptions of their experiences at work, including job stress. Interviews were conducted with 48 employees in Malaysia, using six semi‐structured interview questions adopted from Kinman and Jones and translated into the Malay language, as a guide.

Although most respondents perceived that individual factors play an important role in work stress, organizational factors seemed to be the dominant factor identified that contributes to work stress. Respondents also perceived the individual as key to stress reduction rather than management interventions. A new concept emerged in this study that was related to external factors impinging on work (such as globalization).

Organizations should formulate strategies to prevent job stress among employees. They must also be alert to the impact of external factors that are now common in the Malay workplace.

Research of job stress in employees in Eastern cultures is rare. The paper provides in‐depth preliminary research which will lead to further investigations of job stress in Eastern workplace settings.

Historically, research on perceptions of health either converged upon the meanings created and proposed by specialists in the healthcare industry or focused on people who have medical conditions. This approach has failed to capture how the meanings and notions of health have been evolving as medicine extends into non-medical spheres and has left gaps in the exploration of how the meanings surrounding health and well-being are constructed, negotiated and reproduced in lay discourse. This paper aims to fill this gap in the understanding of the perceptions surrounding health by investigating consumers’ digitized visual accounts on social media.

Textual network and visual content analyses of posts extracted from Instagram are used to derive conclusions on definitions of health and well-being as perceived by healthy lay individuals.

Research demonstrates that digital discourse of health is clustered around four F’s, namely, food, fitness, fashion and feelings, which can be categorized with respect to their degrees of representation on a commodification/communification versus bodily/spiritual well-being map.

Our knowledge about the meanings of health as constructed and reflected by healthy lay people is very limited and even more so about how these meaning-making processes is realized through digital media. This paper contributes to theory by integrating consumers’ meaning-making literature into health perceptions, as well as investigating the role of social networks in enabling a consumptionscape of well-being. Besides a methodological contribution of using social network analysis on textual data, this paper also provides valuable insights for policy-makers, communicators and professionals of health.

This paper comments on “Global implications of the indigenous epistemological system from the east” (Li, 2016), which provides an indigenous Chinese perspective on organizational paradox. Li introduces Yin-Yang balancing as an epistemological system that can help scholars examine and practitioners manage paradoxes. In this commentary, the purpose of this paper is to discuss the merits of Yin-Yang balancing and how this approach and other indigenous theories might enrich organizational paradox theory.

The authors provide a commentary and suggestions for future research. The authors distinguish between Yin-Yang balancing as a normative theory, a meta-theory and a lay theory. The authors encourage both geocentrism and polycentrism as goals for future paradox research, enabling attention to the diversity of ideas across and within varied cultures.

The commentary connects Yin-Ying balancing with extant research on organizational paradox.

Nobody concerned with political economy can neglect the history of economic doctrines. Structural changes in the economy and society influence economic thinking and, conversely, innovative thought structures and attitudes have almost always forced economic institutions and modes of behaviour to adjust. We learn from the history of economic doctrines how a particular theory emerged and whether, and in which environment, it could take root. We can see how a school evolves out of a common methodological perception and similar techniques of analysis, and how it has to establish itself. The interaction between unresolved problems on the one hand, and the search for better solutions or explanations on the other, leads to a change in paradigma and to the formation of new lines of reasoning. As long as the real world is subject to progress and change scientific search for explanation must out of necessity continue.

People believe that they know who they are and that who they are matters for what they do. These core beliefs seem so inherent to conceptualizations of what it means to have a self as to require no empirical support. After all, what is the point of a concept of self if there is no stable thing to have a concept about and who would care if that concept was stable if it was not useful in making it through the day? Yet the evidence for action-relevance and stability are surprisingly sparse.

This paper outlines the identity-based motivation theory, a theoretical approach that takes a new look at these assumptions and makes three core predictions as to when an accessible self-concept influences behavior. These are termed “dynamic construction”, “action-readiness”, and “interpretation of difficulty”. That is, rather than being stable, which identities come to mind and what they mean are dynamically constructed in context.

People interpret situations and difficulties in ways that are congruent with the currently active identities and prefer identity-congruent to identity-incongruent actions. When action feels identity-congruent, experienced difficulty highlights that the behavior is important and meaningful. When action feels identity-incongruent, the same difficulty suggests that the behavior is pointless and “not for people like me.”

This study develops the use of “practical theory”, as a resource in entrepreneurial learning. Practical theory emerges from the implicit, intuitive, tacit and situated resource of practice, whereas academic theory is abstract, generalised, explicit and seeks to be provable. The study develops practical theories from the life story accounts provided by interviewing entrepreneurs. The study demonstrates a framework and example for interpreting entrepreneurial learning and developing practical theory from these accounts. Thirty practising entrepreneurs were interviewed, in a wide range of industries and at different stages of life and career experience, from first venture to experienced serial entrepreneur. Practical theories of entrepreneurial working have been developed, using the framework of “what, how, why, who and in what conditions” the practices identified are effective. The practical theories arising from the study are presented using this structured framework, based on a sense making perspective. Discourse material is used to support and illustrate the practical theories, which relate to personal learning and development; identifying and developing innovative opportunities; creating new ventures; and managing growing businesses.

Complex systems adapt to survive, but little comparative literature exists on various approaches. Adaptive complex systems are generic, this referring to propositions concerning their bounded instability, adaptability and viability. Two classes of adaptive complex system theories exist: hard and soft. Hard complexity theories include Complex Adaptive Systems (CAS) and Viability Theory, and softer theories, which we refer to as Viable Systems Theories (VSTs), that include Management Cybernetics at one extreme and Humanism at the other. This paper has a dual purpose distributed across two parts. In Part 1, the purpose of this paper is to identify the conditions for the complementarity of the two classes of theory. In Part 2, the purpose is to explore (in part using Agency Theory) the two classes of theory and their proposed complexity continuum.

A detailed analysis of the literature permits a distinction between hard and softer approaches towards modelling complex social systems. Hard theories are human-incommensurable, while soft ones are human-commensurable, therefore more closely related to the human condition. The characteristics that differentiate between hard and soft approaches are identified.

Hard theories are more restrictive than the softer theories. The latter can embrace degrees of “softness” and it is explained how hard and soft approaches can be mixed, sometimes creating Harmony.

There are very few explorations of the relationship between hard and soft approaches to complexity theory, and even fewer that draw in the notion of harmony.

The hospitality industry has recently witnessed explosive growth in robotization with the replacement of robots in many areas. Yet, a key consideration in this robotics wave is whether competition (i.e. robots take over all human tasks) or collaboration (i.e. humans collaborate closely with robots to perform work better) will define the future of the hospitality workspace. The purpose of this paper is to shed light on this controversial issue by taking a collaborative perspective to address the future human–robot relationship in hospitality workplace (i.e. cobotic team).

Drawing upon relevant theories and extant robotics literature, this paper will develop a critical reflection on the management of future cobotic team as a new phenomenon in hospitality industry.

The successful management of cobotics in hospitality lies in three interrelated key domains: feeling intelligence training for frontline employees, ethics governance for cobotics and trust building toward robot partners.

How to manage this cobotic team efficiently will be a focus for hospitality managers in the coming years. This paper offers several managerial insights for hospitality managers and practitioners regarding effectively managing the future collaboration between humans and robots within a dynamic work environment.

This study addresses cobotics as a critical yet unaddressed shift in the contemporary hospitality sector and proposes a framework highlighting three key domains for managing this cobotic team effectively. This framework also sets the direction to encourage more future empirical research exploring cobotic workforce in hospitality.

In the past decade internal communication began to take on a new identity as it supports the many change efforts underway in organizations today. Change communication – how internal messaging effects individual behavior change – is a key element for an organization undergoing transformation. Although research points to the need to communicate during change, very little information is available on what the outcomes are of an internal communication strategy that can positively influence individual behavior change during transformation. This chapter enhances current knowledge on this topic by investigating the relationship of awareness and understanding of change messages to individual behavior change through the case study examination of the intentional organizational transformation experienced in a large, consumer packaged goods (CPG) company.