Search results

Grounded in dynamic capabilities theory, this study aims to examine how dynamic capabilities and a transactive memory system (TMS) can build the resilience of service organizations and improve their financial performance. Limited studies examine the link between a TMS and organizational resilience.

The authors test a theoretical model on a sample of 350 UK service firms that were impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic and analyze the data using partial least square structural equation modeling.

Results highlight the positive effects of a TMS and dynamic capabilities on organizational resilience. Only a TMS and organizational resilience have direct positive effects on financial performance.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study to ascertain the influence of a TMS on organizational resilience in service firms following adversity.

Using dynamic capabilities (DCs) theory, the authors assess whether micro, small and medium-sized enterprises (MSMEs) can leverage DCs to improve operational capabilities (OCs) during the COVID-19 pandemic. The authors also identify whether organizational learning (OL) affects the relationship between DCs and OCs.

The authors test these propositions on a sample of 419 MSMEs from Australia and New Zealand.

DCs have no direct effect on OCs, technological or marketing capabilities (TCs or MCs). OL moderates the effect of DCs on both TCs and MCs.

The study assesses only MCs and TCs as OCs and does not explicitly measure pandemic impacts on organizations. However, the results illustrate the importance of OL during crises for recovery purposes.

Managers can use the findings to improve structure, processes and knowledge management emanating from MCs and TCs within organizations impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic.

The authors use a multi-dimensional measure of OL and show that during the pandemic, OL is a critical factor that allows organizations to transform the benefits conferred by DCs into MCs and TCs.

Time banking is a form of alternative consumer market where members trade services, non-reciprocally creating a local marketplace for services. Time Banks facilitate dyadic exchanges, meeting members’ practical needs and building diverse skills. The purpose of this research was to determine the broad capabilities developed in the Time Bank economy, and to demonstrate how these capabilities were mobilised following a series of earthquakes, contributing to the larger community’s resiliency.

Taking an ethnographic approach, data were collected using a variety of methods including interviews, focus groups, participant observation and secondary research.

Over time, this alternative consumer market developed a significant communication and social network that members activated to solve diverse practical problems facing the community. Similar to other exchange communities, the Time Bank also fostered a strong sense of community based on reciprocity and egalitarian values. Although the Time Bank was created as a marketplace to exchange local services, during a series of devastating earthquakes, it galvanised adaptive capacities, increasing the resiliency of the local community during disaster relief and reconstruction.

The data were drawn from one alternative exchange system in New Zealand.

The study shows how grassroots alternative consumer markets like Time Banks build community capacities alongside the formal economy. During normal times, this system meets consumer needs, but in extraordinary times, this system provides community shock absorbers, thereby enhancing community resiliency.

The Time Bank was particularly adept at leveraging local knowledge to provide social support to those residents who were most vulnerable.

Data were collected before, during, and after the earthquakes, providing a rare opportunity to explore the process of community resiliency in action. This research extends existing theories of community resiliency explaining the development and activation of capacities by a local alternative consumer market.

This research employs a transformative service lens to examine the role of the supply chain ecosystem in ensuring the health and safety of employees and customers as a well-being outcome during the coronavirus disease of 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic.

This is a conceptual paper examining the response of the supply chain to the current food crisis caused by the pandemic.

Based on the service-dominant logic (SDL) paradigm, the COVID-19 examination of the supply chain ecosystem provides a foundation for further research employing a transformative lens.

The COVID-19 situation is primarily explored from a Western, educated, industrialised, rich and democratic (WEIRD) societies’ context. Future research should explore the applicability of the transformative service lens to other societies.

The conceptual discussion and research agenda provide direction for researchers, practitioners and policymakers towards a transformative supply chain ecosystem.

This research includes the well-being of employees and customers in the service supply chain outcome measures, draws supply chain management into the TSR domain, while also solidifies a service ecosystem perspective of supply chain management.

The purpose of this paper is to examine how consumer attitudes are affected by corporate brands that have newly adopted a sustainable brand image. Specifically, this paper examines consumer responses to ad–brand incongruity and tests whether two-sided messages yield greater acceptance of incongruence.

In total, 528 responses were collected via an online experiment using a 3×2 between-subjects factorial design which manipulated three levels of perceived ad–brand congruence (congruent, moderately incongruent and extremely incongruent) and two levels of message sidedness (one- and two-sided).

Results indicate that brand managers have to be careful not to create ad–brand incongruence after adopting new brand values and should avoid two-sided messages during this period.

This paper tests the use of two-sided messages as resolution hints for ad–brand incongruence and furthers the corporate branding literature incorporating sustainability.

This research aims to present an exploratory study of the consequences of environmental marketing strategies in New Zealand organisations. In general, empirical research on the impact of environmental practices on organisational outcomes is limited and inconclusive, thus a greater understanding of the consequences associated with successful corporate environmental (CE) organisations is needed.

Eight in‐depth interviews were conducted with leading and proactive CE organisations in New Zealand.

General consequences including innovation, strategic alliances, and improved public relations were found in addition to consequences specifically related to product/service, process‐, and project‐dominant environmental marketing strategies. Negative consequences were also identified.

Owing to the broad nature of the study, it is not possible to make substantial inferences between different industries or specific organisation types and environmental marketing strategies. The size of the sample further limits data generalisability.

Practically, it is anticipated the research will provide guidance for marketing and management leaders in organisations to gain a greater understanding of the consequences associated with environmental strategies. Managers need awareness of the potential impacts of choosing an environmental orientation and strategy.

This research provides the first empirical evidence regarding the consequences for CE organisations except those with previous support relating to organisation performance, brand attitude, employee attitude, and employee commitment and esprit de corps. Several new consequences not previously suggested in previous literature are identified.

Global industrialization and the subsequent dwindling of many natural resources have become elements for product differentiation in marketing. Environmental certification programs are increasingly being recognized as significant market‐based tools for linking manufacturing and consumer purchases. This research examines the relationships between intrinsic environmental motivations and the willingness‐to‐pay a premium for environmentally certified wood products. A conceptual model is proposed that captures the effects of perceptions, awareness and price on consumer willingness to purchase and pay a premium for environmentally certified forest products. The data suggest that there are positive correlations between the willingness‐to‐pay and the independent variables in the model, environmental consciousness, certification involvement and perceived importance of certification. A cluster of US consumers was identified that has a proclivity to purchase certified wood products and may be a logical target market.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the impact that several of these factors have on a consumer’s decision to hold a credit card, as well as those involved in determining the level of credit card limit.

Potential explanatory variables were identified in the literature, then used to build a binary logit model to test the impact of the card and consumer characteristics on credit card ownership. Data were collected via a structured interview of 409 consumers living in Hebei Province, China.

The results indicate that convenience in use, level of credit card interest rates, the application process, number of people in the household, a rewards programme, marital status, credit limit and age influence the likelihood of the respondent holding a credit card. Further, an anaylsis shows that the number of credit cards held, duration of holding a credit card, monthly credit card purchasing volume and having a degree at the tertiary level, are significantly and positively related to different levels of credit limit.

In summary, in order to attract more consumers to credit card use, the banks and credit card companies should consider making it more convenient for consumers to use their credit cards. Moreover, banks can increase their networking and degree of cooperation with merchants to increase the acceptance of payment by credit card. The most heavily used businesses such as supermarkets and smaller retailers, where consumers purchase goods frequently, would be good targets for banks’ attention. In addition, banks might also improve credit card reward programmes to make these more efficient and perhaps increase the size of the rewards customers can earn through card use.

This study aims to share the use of social marketing as pedagogy and provide a transformative social marketing pedagogy for social marketing educators. By this, the authors mean the same principles used by social marketers to improve the well-being of a person or group are used as a pedagogic tool to bolster students’ learning and understanding of social marketing. In the described course, students are asked to choose one area of their lives to try and change using concepts taught to them in class. They are then asked to reflect on their personal change journey and apply it to others in the form of a social marketing plan.

The authors share a conceptual journey using social marketing as pedagogy following the evolution of a marketing for behavioural change undergraduate course. Benchmark criteria for social marketing are used to discuss and conceptualise a transformative social marketing pedagogy. The authors take a reflexive approach to explore course development, motivations, assumptions and activities to expand on their approach.

Social marketing as pedagogy suggests that behaviour change is not just taught through course content but also embedded throughout the course as a learning tool and outcome. A social marketing course can encourage individual behaviour change by asking students to critically reflect on their own behaviour change journey to fully experience and understand the underpinnings and implications for social marketing. In this way, the authors adopt transformative learning as the outcome of social marketing AS pedagogy. The authors suggest through experiential learning, including active learning and reflexivity, students are able to change their frame of reference or how they interpret the world around them, in regard to complex social issues, which may encourage behaviour change.

As social marketers, the authors must reflect not only on what they teach students (Kelly, 2013) but also on how they teach them. Previous literature has not provided any unique pedagogy for how to teach social marketing. This article provides the first pedagogy for social marketing education – the Transformative social marketing pedagogy which views social marketing AS pedagogy. The authors present the value of experiential learning as a three-pronged approach incorporating Interpretive Experiences, Transformative Experiences and developing Praxis, which includes elements of feeding forward and authentic assessment. This approach provides a unique contribution to the area by providing a pedagogical approach that goes beyond mere knowledge acquisition to transformative learning.

This paper aims to explore consumers’ voluntary disposition practices through swapping events organised by community-based enterprises. The paper investigates consumers’ decision-making strategies and factors affecting voluntary clothing disposition via public swapping events across the UK.

This paper investigates UK swapping events, through conducting 18 semi-structured consumer interviews. Data were transcribed and analysed using the seven-step guide proposed by Easterby-Smith et al. (2018).

Findings indicate that within community-based enterprises an implicit social contract emerges between the enterprises and swappers which has an influence on the clothing brought to swaps, thereby impacting the competence and meaning elements of practice. This is linked to peer-pressure susceptibility which affects consumers’ participation in swapping. The findings further reveal an emerging consumer strategy aiding decision-making process regarding items brought to swaps. The use of a particular strategy is found to be linked with the respective level of swapping expertise.

Though the interviews provide a rich narrative, this paper is limited by its sample size meaning data cannot be generalised. Although the data is limited by singular country perspective, research participants were recruited from across the UK, thus, offering a broad picture of the swapping practice.

This paper contributes to and advances an understanding of swapping events organised by community-based enterprises. The theory of social practice lens offers a unique viewpoint on the elements influencing the consumers’ decision-making process with reference to voluntary disposition.