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The purpose of this paper is to test the effect that anthropomorphic framing (i.e. robot vs automatic machine) has on consumers’ responses in case of service failure. Specifically, the authors hypothesize that consumers hold an unconscious association between the word “robot” and agency and that the higher agency attributed to self-service machines framed as robots (vs automatic machines) leads, in turn, to a more positive service evaluation in case of service failure.

The authors have conducted four experimental studies to test the framework presented in this paper. In Studies 1a and 1b, the authors used an Implicit Association Test to test for the unconscious association held by consumers about robots as being intelligent machines (i.e. agency). In Studies 2 and 3, the authors tested the effect that framing technology as robots (vs automatic machines) has on consumers’ responses to service failure using two online experiments across different consumption contexts (hotel, restaurant) and using different dependent variables (service evaluation, satisfaction and word-of-mouth).

The authors show that consumers evaluate more positively a service failure involving a self-service technology framed as a robot rather than one framed as an automatic machine. They provide evidence that this effect is driven by higher perceptions of agency and that the association between technology and agency held by consumers is an unconscious one.

This paper investigates a novel driver of consumers’ perception of agency of technology, namely, how the technology is framed. Moreover, this study sheds light on consumers’ responses to technology’s service failure.

Despite the recent increase in vegetarian food consumption, studies on this topic have focused on the product category. Based on the functional theory of attitude and the cognitive–affective–conative framework, this study investigates the impact of customer individuality (i.e. uniqueness and level of self-monitoring) on cognitive attitude (i.e. social-function attitudes), which leads to conative attitude (i.e. behavioral intentions) via affective attitudes toward vegetarian restaurants.

The sample (n = 176) comprises experienced vegetarian restaurant customers in the USA. Multi-group analysis is used to examine differences between vegetarian and non-vegetarian customers, as well as customers' low and high frequency in visiting vegetarian restaurants.

Using partial least squares structural equation modeling, this study finds the relative impact of customers' personal traits on self-expressive and social-adjustive functions. Results highlight the role of the social-adjustive function as an antecedent of affective attitudes leading to positive behavioral intentions. Last, the findings from a multi-group analysis show that customer self-monitoring is the only significant antecedent of a cognitive attitude among vegetarian customers.

The present study adds to the literature regarding trait attributes and corresponding cognitive, affective and conative attitudes in the context of the vegetarian food service industry.

The food industry is continuously developing its online services called food delivery applications (FDAs). This study aims to evaluate FDA's importance–performance and identify strategies to maximize its potential gains from a business partner's perspective.

Data are collected from 208 FDA partners in Indonesia. Importance–performance analysis (IPA) is applied to evaluate the FDA feature and extended the theory of potential gain in customer value (PGCV) to achieve potential gains from FDA business partners.

This study provides a clear and measurable direction for future research to develop FDA performance. Owning customer data, revenue sharing and competitive advantage are the most potential gains from joining the FDA from the business partner perspective.

The respondents are restaurants from the micro, small, and medium enterprises levels. Further research should involve middle to upper level restaurants to discover all business partners' perceptions. This will be very helpful for FDA providers interested in improving the best performance for all their partners.

FDA providers must focus on improving and maintaining the features of owning customer data, revenue sharing, competitive advantage, stable terms and conditions, customer interface, building customer loyalty, online presence, user credit rating, promotion and offers, delivery service and sales enhancement to increase consumer satisfaction and meet the expectations desired by business partners.

This research provides a meaningful theoretical foundation for future work. It extends the theory of PGCV using the value of a partner perspective as a substitute for customer value; hence, the authors call it a potential gain in partner value.

This study aims to investigate how the gratifications obtained through brand-related social media content affect brand intimacy and thereby influence customer extra-role behavior.

Using the uses and gratification theory, this study proposes information, entertainment and remuneration content that motivates customers to develop brand intimacy and thereby perform customer extra-role behavior. The study also tests the moderated moderation effect of self-congruence and customer experience using 704 observations from South India in the food industry context.

The study’s results reveal the influence of entertainment and remuneration content on brand intimacy, which further influences customer extra-role behavior (civic virtue, cocreation, sportsmanship and helping behaviors). The study confirms a moderated moderation effect in the relationship between brand intimacy and civic virtue and brand intimacy and sportsmanship behaviors.

The study suggests that brands may include entertainment and remuneration elements in their social media content to build intimate customer relationships, further influencing customers’ extra-role behaviors. Besides, brands should focus on customers’ self-concepts and experiences to encourage them to act voluntarily.

This study makes a unique contribution by investigating the influence of brand-related social media content on customer extra-role behavior through brand intimacy. It uses self-congruence and customer experience to test their moderated moderation effect in the relationship between brand intimacy and customer extra-role behavior.

The COVID-19 pandemic impacted the food and beverage sector very severely. The complete breakdown of the supply chain and lack of customers was particularly challenging for start-ups in the industry. Those that survived were the ones who made a timely and smooth transition in business models to become more technology driven. However, the issues faced and the ground realities of the extent of struggle that these start-ups went through are less understood in the scholarly literature, with most accounts being anecdotal. The purpose of this paper is to address these issues.

The present study attempts to bridge this gap by conducting a qualitative study to collect data from 35 owners/employees of food and beverage start-ups and using the grounded theory approach to code it and identify key themes.

Content analysis of the 35 responses revealed three main themes: the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on operations of food and beverage start-ups, challenges due to the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic and combating the pandemic, divided into seven subthemes: differences in operations pre- and post-COVID, key changes experienced in operations post-COVID, problems arising in operations due to the pandemic, problems in the use of digital marketing due to the pandemic, problems in the use of technological platforms due to the pandemic, using innovative approaches and technological innovations and using disruptive technologies.

The study contributes novel insights by investigating the changes experienced by food and beverage start-ups due to the pandemic, the innovations introduced by them and the perception about the role of disruptive technologies in their postpandemic operations of food and beverage start-ups.

This paper aims to analyze the implications of orality for management practices in a developing country such as Iran.

This paper relies on the seminal theory of Walter Ong (1982) and a leading line of anthropological research to analyze the implications of orality/literacy for management practices in Iran. The authors first define orality and literacy as distinct modes of communication and examine their conceptual properties. Then, the authors draw on the existing literature to analyze the five main management functions impacted by orality.

The analyses suggest that the predominance of orality in Iran is associated with a wide range of management practices, including short-term or unstructured planning, spontaneous decision-making, fluid organizational structure, the prevalence of interpersonal relations, authoritarian and traditional leadership and behavior-based controlling mechanisms.

While most studies have focused on the impacts of cultural dimensions and economic variables, this paper offers a novel approach to analyzing management practices. More specifically, the paper suggests that in addition to the implications of cultural dimensions and economic variables, the mode of communication, namely, orality/literacy, could have significant implications for management practices.

This study examines the use of dark humor in brand-to-brand communications on social media and its impact on consumers' brand perceptions. In particular, this study looks at roasting messages in which a brand humorously insults its peers.

The authors used a sampling method to recruit 286 participants from the United States. They employed an ANOVA and Tukey's post hoc analysis to test the hypotheses, as well as Hayes' PROCESS to test the mediation and moderation effects, including Johnson–Neyman procedure.

The authors found that not all customers find roasting messages funny. Rather, consumers' personality and age will influence their perceived humor of the messages and their brand evaluations. Customers who are young and extroverted are likely to believe roasting messages to be funny. They thus perceive the brand to be cooler and more sincere when using such a communication approach, compared to when the brand neutrally interacts with others. Meanwhile, brands may find less success with old and introverted customers.

This research sheds light on how the consumers' perception of humor in a roasting type of brand-to-brand communication has an impact on consumers' psychological perceptions of brand coolness and brand sincerity. To guide practitioners, it explored how the interaction between a consumer's personality and age moderates the aforementioned relationship.

This study, a conceptual paper, analyses the growth of curation in tourism and hospitality and the curator role in selecting and framing products and experiences. It considers the growth of expert, algorithmic, social and co-creative curation modes and their effects.

Narrative and integrative reviews of literature on curation and tourism and hospitality are used to develop a typology of curation and identify different curation modes.

Curational techniques are increasingly used to organise experience supply and distribution in mainstream fields, including media, retailing and fashion. In tourism and hospitality, curated tourism, curated hospitality brands and food offerings and place curation by destination marketing organisations are growing. Curation is undertaken by experts, algorithms and social groups and involves many of destination-related actors, producing a trend towards “hybrid curation” of places.

Research is needed on different forms of curation, their differential effects and the power roles of different curational modes.

Curation is a widespread intermediary function in tourism and hospitality, supporting better consumer choice. New curators influence experience supply and the distribution of consumer attention, shaping markets and co-creative activities. Increased curatorial activity should stimulate aesthetic and stylistic innovation and provide the basis for storytelling and narrative in tourism and hospitality.

This is the first study of curational strategies in tourism and hospitality, providing a definition and typology of curation, and linking micro and macro levels of analysis. It suggests the growth of choice-based logic alongside service-dominant logic in tourism and hospitality.

This study aims to examine how career commitment (CC) affects hospitality employees perceived subjective career success (SCS) using a serial mediation system that uses career resilience (CR) behaviour and self-efficacy (SE) as serial mediators.

To examine the proposed relationships, a comprehensive theoretical serial mediation model was constructed. The proposed hypotheses were tested on a sample of 316 hospitality employees from India using regression analysis (Process Macro Model 6) with 5,000 bootstrapping at 95% confidence interval.

The regression analysis confirmed a strong, positive relationship between CC and SCS. It also highlighted a significant indirect effect, involving a serial mediation through CR and SE, demonstrating how CC influences SCS.

Drawing from three prominent theories – career self-determination theory (CSDT), career construction theory (CCT) and the contextual action theory of career development (CATCD), this research underscores the importance of fostering career-committed behaviour among employees and advocating for strategic career development initiatives. Understanding CC elements may help firms retain and encourage individuals, which can boost job satisfaction and performance. Importantly, the results advocate for the implementation of targeted career development strategies and the promotion of career-committed behaviour within hospitality organisations. This, in turn, fosters resilience and competence, ultimately contributing to individual career success and organisational excellence.

A serial mediation model with CR and SE introduces a fresh perspective that, to the best of the authors’ knowledge, has not been extensively explored in previous research examining the relationship between CC and SCS.

People are more likely to participate in work-related events that might cause positive and negative affective reactions. Prior research linked coworker friendship with incivility; however, few studies investigated negative workplace gossip. Simultaneously, linking coworker friendship with incivility through positive/negative affective responses is lacking. As such, this paper aims to examine this relationship via the dual mediation effect of positive and negative workplace gossip.

A total of 398 subordinates at family restaurants in Greater Cairo were surveyed, and data was analyzed using SmartPLS4.

Coworker friendship significantly influences coworker incivility via positive and negative workplace gossip and other underlying mechanisms.

Managers should take the initiative to decrease gossip by sharing information promptly and thoroughly and establishing effective channels for information exchange. In the case of an informal plan, restaurant managers may seek to create a welcoming and motivating corporate atmosphere and cultivate social ties among subordinates to prevent the creation of negative gossip. Restaurant managers should give victims of negative gossip timely psychological counseling.

This paper contributes to the restaurant literature on affective emotional responses to coworkers’ judgment-driven behavior from new perspectives.