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A person's optimum stimulation level (OSL) reflects one's desired level of environmental stimulation and predisposition to act in the presence of environments. The purpose of this paper is to propose a comprehensive model, which illustrates that consumers with different levels of OSL have differing evaluations of retail store elements, shopping value and subsequent shopping behaviours.

To examine the relationship between OSL and consumer perceptions and behaviours, interviews were conducted with retail shoppers in Taiwan (n=147).

Taiwanese shoppers with a high OSL were found to have more favourable evaluations of a store's ambient, design, layout and density elements than did consumers with a low OSL. Additionally, the high OSL shoppers reported higher hedonic and utilitarian values from their shopping. Most importantly, the shoppers with a high OSL spent more time and money in stores.

With this research, hopefully retailers will pay even more attention to the ambient, design and layout elements of their stores. In doing so, they might be able to attract more consumers with a high OSL and entice them to spend more money.

The paper contributes to the growing body of international retailing research by examining the effects of shoppers' optimum stimulation levels on their perceptions toward store elements, perceived shopping value, and purchase behaviours. Moreover, a comprehensive framework is put forth to assist future research.

This essay employs a visual approach to explore some of the ways that spatial practices become markers of a globalising and glocalizing world. Images are offered that reflect some of the symbolic competition created by more and less recent migrants as they lay claim to ‘contested terrains’ by changing what they look like. Although often dismissed as mere “marking” of territory, such ordinary practices by migrants of symbolic home or community building are crucial to understanding global cities. One indicator of their importance is the, often hostile reactions by the dominant society to them. A brief review of some of the most important theoretical perspectives on these interrelated phenomena, such as those of Saskia Sassen, David Harvey, and Manuel Castells, isolates common expectations about the visibility of resulting competing spatial practices in shared multiethnic residential and commercial environments. It is argued that many of the contradictions created by the concentration of global capital can be seen in the neighborhood streetscapes of global cities. From Georg Simmel, through Henri Lefebvre, and Lyn H. Lofland, the visible, and the symbolic, have been central to urban analysis. Therefore, the ubiquitous aspects of what Jackson called ‘vernacular landscapes,’ such as commercial signs and graffiti in Berlin, Frankfurt am Main, London, New York, and Rome are addressed.

This article presents four basic innovation leadership styles: charismatic, instrumental, strategic and interactive innovation leadership. The leadership styles and their characteristsics relate to process and product innovations in construction projects. A theoretical framework – which synthesizes these relations – enables explorative research into the effects of leadership on organizational innovativeness. Four case studies, observing the same manager in four comparable projects, explore the effects of each leadership style on a construction project’s innovativeness in ecological terms. On an analytical level the case study explorations indicate that a manager’s consistent performance of a leadership style stimulates the project’s ecological innovativeness when the manager also injects the project with ecological information, knowledge and competence. It also indicates that a manager’s consistent performance of a leadership style, without an injection of information, knowledge and competence in the project, does not stimulate the project’s ecological innovativeness.

Gives an in depth view of the strategies pursued by the world’s leading chief executive officers in an attempt to provide guidance to new chief executives of today. Considers the marketing strategies employed, together with the organizational structures used and looks at the universal concepts that can be applied to any product. Uses anecdotal evidence to formulate a number of theories which can be used to compare your company with the best in the world. Presents initial survival strategies and then looks at ways companies can broaden their boundaries through manipulation and choice. Covers a huge variety of case studies and examples together with a substantial question and answer section.

While many business schools use large classes for the sake of efficiency, faculty and students tend to perceive large classes as an impediment to learning. Although class size is a contested issue, research on its impact is inconclusive, mainly focusing on academic performance outcomes such as test scores and does not address classroom dynamics. This study aims to expand the focus of class size research to include classroom dynamics and subjective educational outcomes (e.g. student learning outcomes and satisfaction).

Using Finn et al.’s (2003) theoretical framework and research conducted in introductory business classes, this study investigates how student academic and social engagement influence educational outcomes in different class sizes.

Results highlight the critical role that student involvement and teacher interaction play on student success and student satisfaction regardless of class sizes. In addition, the results indicate that students perceive lower levels of teacher interaction and satisfaction in larger classes.

This study applies Finn’s framework of student engagement in the classroom to understand the dynamics of class size in business education. The results reveal the influential roles of academic and social engagements on educational outcomes. Practical strategies are offered to improve learning outcomes and student satisfaction in large classes.

Man has been seeking an ideal existence for a very long time. In this existence, justice, love, and peace are no longer words, but actual experiences. How ever, with the American preemptive invasion and occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq and the subsequent prisoner abuse, such an existence seems to be farther and farther away from reality. The purpose of this work is to stop this dangerous trend by promoting justice, love, and peace through a change of the paradigm that is inconsistent with justice, love, and peace. The strong paradigm that created the strong nation like the U.S. and the strong man like George W. Bush have been the culprit, rather than the contributor, of the above three universal ideals. Thus, rather than justice, love, and peace, the strong paradigm resulted in in justice, hatred, and violence. In order to remove these three and related evils, what the world needs in the beginning of the third millenium is the weak paradigm. Through the acceptance of the latter paradigm, the golden mean or middle paradigm can be formulated, which is a synergy of the weak and the strong paradigm. In order to understand properly the meaning of these paradigms, however, some digression appears necessary.

This study aims to present the climate change effect on soil moisture regimes in Mexico in a global 1.5°C warming scenario.

The soil moisture regimes were determined using the Newhall simulation model with the database of mean monthly precipitation and temperature at a scale of 1: 250,000 for the current scenario and with the climate change scenarios associated with a mean global temperature increase of 1.5°C, considering two Representative Concentration Pathways, 4.5 and 8.5 W/m² and three general models of atmospheric circulation, namely, GFDL, HADGEM and MPI. The different vegetation types of the country were related to the soil moisture regimes for current conditions and for climate change.

According to the HADGEM and MPI models, almost the entire country is predicted to undergo a considerable increase in soil moisture deficit, and part of the areas of each moisture regime will shift to the next drier regime. The GFDL model also predicts this trend but at smaller proportions.

The changes in soil moisture at the regional scale that reveal the impacts of climate change and indicate where these changes will occur are important elements of the knowledge concerning the vulnerability of soils to climate change. New cartography is available in Mexico.

Since stock return and volatility matters to investors, this study proposes to incorporate the textual sentiment of annual reports in stock price crash risk prediction.

Specific sentences gathered from management discussions and their subsequent analyses are tokenized and transformed into numeric vectors using textual mining techniques, and then the Naïve Bayes method is applied to score the sentiment, which is used as an input variable for crash risk prediction. The results are compared between a collection of predictive models, including linear regression (LR) and machine learning techniques.

The experimental results find that those predictive models that incorporate textual sentiment significantly outperform the baseline models with only accounting and market variables included. These conclusions hold when crash risk is proxied by either the negative skewness of the return distribution or down-to-up volatility (DUVOL).

It should be noted that the authors' study focuses on examining the predictive power of textual sentiment in crash risk prediction, while other dimensions of textual features such as readability and thematic contents are not considered. More analysis is needed to explore the predictive power of textual features from various dimensions, with the most recent sample data included in future studies.

The authors' study provides implications for the information value of textual data in financial analysis and risk management. It suggests that the soft information contained within annual reports may prove informative in crash risk prediction, and the incorporation of textual sentiment provides an incremental improvement in overall predictive performance.

Although a significant body of work has amassed that explores the antecedents, correlates, and consequences of employee turnover in organizations, little is known about how employees go about quitting once they have made the decision to leave. That is, after the decision to voluntarily quit their job is made, employees must then navigate through the process of planning for their exit, announcing their resignation, and potentially working at their company for weeks after their plans to resign have been made public. Our lack of understanding of the resignation process is important as how employees quit their jobs has the potential to impact the performance and turnover intentions of other organizational members, as well as to harm or benefit the reputation of the organization, overall. Moreover, voluntary turnover is likely to increase in the coming decades. In this chapter, we unpack the resignation process. Specifically, drawing from the communication literature and prior work on employee socialization, we develop a three-stage model of the resignation process that captures the activities and decisions employees face as they quit their jobs, and how individual differences may influence how they behave in each of these three stages. In doing so, we develop a foundation upon which researchers can begin to build a better understanding of what employees go through after they have decided to quit but before they have exited their organization for the final time.