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Outlines the role of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) and covers the Civil Rights Act 1964 before briefly mentioning the Age discrimination in Employment Act 1967, equal pay Act 1963, Americans with Disabilities Act 1990 and other laws. Provides statistics from the EEOC website and also looks at affirmative action. Considers recent developments affecting Manufacturers in relation to race, sex age and disabilities, citing case law examples. Discusses reverse discrimination and concludes that companies need to keep pace with developments.

This research paper aims to investigate reinforced concrete (RC) walls' behaviour under fire and identify the thermal and mechanical factors that affect their performance.

A three-dimensional (3D) finite element (FE) model is developed to predict the response of RC walls under fire and is validated through experimental tests on RC wall specimens subjected to fire conditions. The numerical model incorporates temperature-dependent properties of the constituent materials. Moreover, the validated model was used in a parametric study to inspect the effect of the fire scenario, reinforcement concrete cover, reinforcement ratio and configuration, and wall thickness on the thermal and structural behaviour of the walls subjected to fire.

The developed 3D FE model successfully predicted the response of experimentally tested RC walls under fire conditions. Results showed that the fire resistance of the walls was highly compromised under hydrocarbon fire. In addition, the minimum wall thickness specified by EC2 may not be sufficient to achieve the desired fire resistance under considered fire scenarios.

There is limited research on the performance of RC walls exposed to fire scenarios. The study contributed to the current state-of-the-art research on the behaviour of RC walls of different concrete types exposed to fire loading, and it also identified the factors affecting the fire resistance of RC walls. This guides the consideration and optimisation of design parameters to improve RC walls performance in the event of a fire.

A first objective is to add insight into how constructs of ethnocentrism, xenocentrism and cosmopolitanism relate to each other. Knowledge of how these constructs overlap or work together in affecting consumer preferences will offer global marketers insights for designing appropriate marketing strategies. The second objective is to extend this knowledge by examining the correspondence of these three constructs to a nomological network of dispositional concepts pertinent for product positioning and market segmentation. The third objective is to empirically examine the extent to which the measures, construct structure and associative relationships are robust in different national research settings. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

Surveying British and American consumers, this study examines and analyzes the correspondence of these identity-relevant constructs within a nomological net of pertinent concepts: consciousness-of-kind, global consumption orientation, materialism and natural environment concern.

The hypothesized negative links between CET-XEN and CET-COS, and the predicted positive connection between XEN-COS were all confirmed on the latent factor results for the combined data set. The negative correlation between CET-XEN was of a considerably lower magnitude than that for CET-COS.

To date, no research has used an identity theory framework and simultaneously examined in a cross-cultural context the interrelationships of consumer ethnocentrism consumer xenocentrism and cosmopolitanism – and their differentiating linkages to a multiplicity of consumer dispositions.

Today, newly founded businesses are inevitably driven to start in a digital form from day 1. Moreover, most existing businesses conceive digitalization as an important part of their strategic orientation by developing and improving their digital assets and digitalizing their processes. By taking account of this development, this chapter investigates how entrepreneurial orientation (EO) affects a small firm’s proclivity to both digitization and internationalization and their performance that comes from it. Internationalization has been a key topic for many small- and medium-sized companies (SMEs) over the past decades. As digitization is currently taking over the helm from internationalization as the most pressing topic affecting business, we carried out research among SMEs to understand the interplay of these factors influencing business performance. The focus of the research was on the precursory factors inducing firm performance as well as on their interrelationships. Using a sample of 357 SMEs, EO is found to be significantly closely associated with an SME’s degree of digitization as well as with its overall performance. In contrast, EO does not affect the SME’s level of internationalization. This result is surprising considering that proactive and risk-taking firms tend to be more inclined to enter foreign and distant markets.

Luxury branding, in the context of tangible luxury consumables, has received academic attention. But the notion remained inconclusive in the context of consumption of luxury intangibles. The travel setting provides an excellent backdrop to explore the complex cognitive process of assigning meaning to the relationship between travellers and luxury travel brands. The shifting image of luxury consumption from elitism to mass aspirational, too, needs to be studied for its transformative implications. The chapter focused on developing a brand relationship scale, namely, TraveLux, in the context of luxury travel consumption and tested its robustness to explain the shared sentiments and emotions of travellers, engaged in luxury travel, across social media. The chapter identifies a four construct instruments capturing the essence of immersive experience, ethnocultural acculturation, passion and excitement and self-congruence as a seedbed of luxury brand affinity for travellers. TraveLux was also found to capture the shared experience of travellers consuming luxury travel brands, thereby establishing a synch between the instrument constructs and manifested human cognition in real-life situations. The study expanded on the volume of literature pertaining to luxury branding in the context of product-oriented industry and addresses the existing void in understanding traveller–brand relationships in luxury travel contexts. The study implicates a theoretical change in branding concept in perceiving luxury brands as price-based exclusivity to a transformative cultural experience. Further extrapolations of the study could be made by incorporating subtle behavioural patterns of travellers in perceiving luxury and subsequent evocation and predisposition towards decision-making.

This study aims to develop a proprietary indicator to measure the digital presence of the institutions: the digital presence index.

This research delves into how nonprofit institutions, specifically business interest associations (BIAs), have developed their internet presence by applying essential digital marketing techniques. To this end, and using big data mining tools, this study analyzes the tracking by internet users of 102 BIAs, with their respective websites in 36 countries in Europe and the USA. In addition, the presence and activity of the institutions included in this study on social networks are considered.

This research serves as a basis for discussing the current gap between social reality and the digitalization of institutions. In this sense, conclusions are drawn on the importance of managerial profiles in decision-making on digitization and the necessary knowledge that, together with Web and social network managers, they must have to articulate the means and techniques that promote the internet presence of the organizations they manage.

Conclusions are drawn according to the geographical scope of the BIAs, and an argument is made about the difficulties of connection and loss of prominence of this type of institutions among their different target audiences, especially among the youngest and most digitized.

Today, businesses, organizations and governments attach great importance to digital transformation to meet the needs of their customers, business partners, and employees to adapt to the developing technology in recent years. Digital transformation, which is a challenging and mandatory process, has been and continues to be passed by institutions today. However, the successful management of this transformation without conflict can be realized by accurately detecting new communication technologies and examining, understanding, and implementing the transformation process in detail. This process will be painful, where radical changes will take place in the structure, processes, functions, and business models of the organization. Different challenges may be encountered in each of the startup, execution, and governance subprocesses examined in the digital transformation process. Many conflicts such as time and budget shortages, inadequate digital skills and lack of vision for digital customer processes, cybersecurity threats, human resource shortages, difficulty in managing technology, failure to achieve cloud structure integration, vision, and culture differences are the reasons why this process cannot be managed fluently and accurately. For businesses that focus on this goal, regardless of scale, digital transformation has become a necessity, not an alternative to choose. In this study, the digital transformation process and maturity model were discussed, and technological and digital conflicts were emphasized. It seeks to shed light on the work they will do by making recommendations for institutions to manage this process in the best way.

We conjecture that there are five stages to academic entrepreneurship: motivation, governance, selection, competition, and performance. The process of academic entrepreneurship originates with the motivation of faculty, universities, industry, and government to commercialize knowledge that originates within the university setting. The model conceptualizes that the governance and competitiveness of the commercialized knowledge moderate the mode selection and ultimately the performance of academic entrepreneurship. The conceptual and empirical support for the model are derived from a theory-driven synthesis of articles related to academic entrepreneurship.

The purpose of this paper is to introduce a new perspective on ambidextrous innovation orientation looking at how the current digital transformation is accepted in the fashion industry in Italy. Precisely, the objective of the paper is to test whether the use of social media platforms positively influences ambidextrous innovation orientation in fashion companies.

Empirical quantitative research was carried out on a sample of 853 small- to medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) operating in the fashion industry in Italy. Using a logistic regression methodology, four hypotheses were tested to verify the correlation of four dimensions of social media platforms with an ambidextrous innovation orientation among fashion firms.

The four hypotheses were validated: the structural dimension, the relational behaviour dimension, the cognitive dimension and knowledge transfer practices of social media platforms were proven to positively influence ambidextrous innovation orientation in fashion firms.

Though this is one of the few research studies that offers a quantitative analysis in this field, it could be further developed, for instance by extending the sample of firms to SMEs operating in other countries or by comparing multinationals with SMEs.

This paper provides an original contribution to studies on the use of social media to promote ambidexterity in firms, which has only been studied to a limited extent in the extant literature. From this perspective, the originality of the study is further strengthened by the unique context of analysis, namely, the fashion industry in Italy.