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The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate the utility of systemic functional linguistics (SFL) as an underlying model to examine the similarities/differences between spoken and written peer-to-peer (P2P) communication.

An embedded mixed methods experimental design with linguistically standardized experimental stimuli was used to expose the basic linguistic differences between P2P communications that can be attributed to communication medium (spoken/written) and product type (hedonic/utilitarian).

The findings show, empirically, that consumer’s spoken language is not linguistically equivalent to that of written language. This confirms that the capability of language to convey semantic meaning in spoken communication differs from written communication. This study extends the characteristics that differentiate hedonic from utilitarian products to include lexical density (i.e. hedonic) vs lexical sparsity (i.e. utilitarian).

The findings of this study are not wholly relevant to other forms of consumer communication (e.g. viral marketing). This research used a few SFL resources.

This research shows that marketers should ideally apply a semantic approach to the analysis of communications, given that communication meaning can vary across channels. Marketers may also want to focus on specific feedback channels (e.g. review site vs telephone) depending on the depth of product’s details that need to be captured. This study also offers metrics that advertisers could use to classify media and to characterize consumer segments.

This research shows the relevance of SFL for understanding P2P communications and has potential applications to other marketing communications.

Safety precautions in the use of raw materials, in manufacturing and processing, marketing and enforcement of food and drug law on purity and quality may appear nowadays to be largely a matter of routine, with manufacturers as much involved and interested in maintaining a more or less settled equilibrium as the enforcement agencies. Occasionally the peace is shattered, eg, a search and recovery operation of canned goods of doubtful bacterial purity or containing excess metal contamination, seen very much as an isolated incident; or the recent very large enforcement enterprise in the marketing of horseflesh (and other substitutions) for beef. The nationwide sale and distribution of meat on such a vast scale, only possible by reason of marketing methods — frozen blocks of boneless meat, which even after thawing out is not easily distinguishable from the genuine even in the eye of the expert; this is in effect only a fraud always around in the long ago years built up into a massive illicit trade.

This study examines the determinants of idiosyncratic risk (IR) or unsystematic risk. The study also examines the determinants of IR by dividing the firms into different categories: beta-based firms, liquid and illiquid firms and financially constrained (FC) and unconstrained (FUC) firms.

The fixed effects static panel data model specifications are formulated based on Hausman (1978) test for BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa) member countries over the period 2000–2019. Moreover, the t-test is applied to see whether the returns of different types of portfolios are significantly different.

The portfolio analysis results show that, on average, high IR firms tend to be small in size, highly leveraged, have low competitiveness, low profitability, less dividend yield and low returns for all the sampled countries. The sample paired t-test also confirms that a significant difference exists between extreme portfolios: small and large size and low IR and high IR portfolios. The panel regression results show that firm size, market power, price-to-earnings ratio, return on equity (ROE) and dividend yield negatively relates to IR. Yet, both leverage and liquidity are positively related to IR. However, the sign of momentum returns is mostly positive for the entire sample. The coefficient values for high-beta, FC and illiquid firms are more significant and large than the firms' counterparts for all BRICS member countries. These results support the hypothesis of an under-diversified portfolio and suggest that the above-mentioned firm-specific variables are the significant determinants of unsystematic risk.

The securities exchange commission, as the supervisor of the public limited companies, needs to increase its role in investor protection related to the uncertainty of investment in the capital market. Accordingly, in making investment decisions in a stock exchange, investors can use the information that captures unsystematic risk for investment decision-making.

This study is the first to explore the determinants of IR in top emerging countries. Second, none of the existing studies has focused on the determinants of the IR based on different categories of firms.

This study provides new evidence on the nature of value creation in M&A activity based on a sample of giant pharmaceutical M&As and independent non‐M&A rival firms. Relying on multiple indicators of performance, their post‐M&A performance was compared with their pre‐M&A performance as well as with the performance of other major pharmaceutical firms that have not been involved in M&A activity. Based on three measures of operating M&A performance, it has been noted in general that no value creation was realized in the sample M&As in terms of research productivity, return on investment, and profit margin. The sample M&As had lower research productivity than that of both pre‐M&A and independent non‐M&Arival firms. In a similar vein, with regard to return on investment, M&As were not better than their pre‐M&A firms, but performed relatively better than their non‐M&A rivals. As far as the profit margin is concerned, the sample M&As, however, appeared to have better performance than pre‐M&Afirms and almost on par with the non‐M&A rivals.

The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate how upstream social marketing may benefit from social media citizensourcing and improve understanding of community preferences and attitudes to policy. Using the case of shark management in New South Wales, Australia, this paper aims to understand community attitudes toward shark management policy-making and policymakers.

In February 2017, more than 11,200 comments were sourced from Facebook and Twitter using Netvizz, a data extraction tool. To analyze these comments, the study used an abductive framework using social marketing, wildlife and coexistence and policy literature, to determine context, themes and sub-themes. This was combined with Appraisal, a systemic functional linguistics framework, advocating a social reference for coding and analyzing community attitudes and preference.

Preferences for non-lethal measures over lethal or potentially lethal measures were noted, with new technologies highly favored. The online communities wanted a policy that was respectful of human and marine life and focused on patrolled or popular beaches. The main negative comments made related to perceived knee-jerk reactions and poor communication surrounding decision-making. People held little confidence in politicians’ skills and abilities to solve complex and multi-faceted problems, demanding less top-down decision-making and greater community input into policy formation.

This approach could assist upstream social marketers better understand social and community attitudes and preferences toward policy.

The study demonstrated that listening to community through digital channels can assist upstream social marketing understand community preferences and attitudes to policies and the policy-making process. Using abduction further broadens the perspective of the researchers in assigning meaning to commentary.

As an essential component of Islamic governance for ensuring religious compliance, Shari’ah annual reports (SARs) play an important role in providing communication between Shari’ah board (SB) members and stakeholders. This paper aims to determine the ethical disclosure in SARs to identify how close the Shari’ah disclosure to the standards set by AAOIFI and also substantive morality of Islam. The research also aims to examine the factors determining disclosure performance.

Two disclosure indices are developed to generate data from the SARs: the AAOIFI standards for Shari’ah governance index for form related approach, an Islamic ethicality augmented index reflecting on substantive morality approach. The sample consists of 41 Islamic banks from 15 different countries for the period of 2007–2014. Sampled 305 SARs were examined through disclosure analysis in line with the two indices developed for this study. The econometric analysis was run to identify the factors determining disclosure performance.

The findings suggest that AAOIFI guidelines have an influence on the level of disclosure, even if Islamic banks have not adopted them. However, the level of disclosure for the ethically augmented index is found to be very limited with reliance on general statements in most of the cases. As part of determining factors, the popularity of Shari’ah scholars is significant for both indices, while the existence of an internal Shari’ah auditing department holds some explanatory power. The adoption of AAOIFI standards at the country level, the regulatory quality and the duration of Sharīʿah-compliance are particularly deterministic factors in terms of complying with AAOIFI standards for SARs.

Although SB is the most crucial division of corporate governance in Islamic banks in terms of securing the “Islamic” identity of these institutions, their most important communication instrument, namely, SAR, has not been explored sufficiently, alongside an insufficient attempt to constitute Islamic corporate governance. Initially, this study attempted to constitute an Islamic corporate governance framework as a theoretical construct, which provides context for the empirical part of the research and this should be considered a novel approach. Second, the empirical part of the research aims to fill the gap observed in the literature such as small sample size and index construction-related matters. This research is conducted with a larger sample size as compared to the available studies in the literature and it has developed two indices for disclosure analysis along with developing an Islamic morality-based index beside an index based on AAOIFI standards.

The purpose of this paper is to examine how upstream social marketing can benefit from using social media commentary to identify cognitive biases. Using reactions to leading media/news publications/articles related to climate and energy policy in Australia, this paper aims to understand underlying community cognitive biases and their reasonings.

Social listening was used to gather community commentary about climate and energy policy in Australia. This allowed the coding of natural language data to determine underlying cognitive biases inherent in the community. In all, 2,700 Facebook comments were collected from 27 news articles dated between January 2018 and March 2020 using exportcomments.com. Team coding was used to ensure consistency in interpretation.

Nine key cognitive bias were noted, including, pessimism, just-world, confirmation, optimum, curse of knowledge, Dunning–Kruger, self-serving, concision and converge biases. Additionally, the authors report on the interactive nature of these biases. Right-leaning audiences are perceived to be willfully uninformed and motivated by self-interest; centric audiences want solutions based on common-sense for the common good; and left-leaning supporters of progressive climate change policy are typically pessimistic about the future of climate and energy policy in Australia. Impacts of powerful media organization shaping biases are also explored.

Through a greater understanding of the types of cognitive biases, policy-makers are able to better design and execute influential upstream social marketing campaigns.

The study demonstrates that observing cognitive biases through social listening can assist upstream social marketing understand community biases and underlying reasonings towards climate and energy policy.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the intellectual structure of coopetition through utilizing a citation and co-citation analysis of scholarly articles focusing on coopetition.

The authors conducted bibliometric analyses of citation and co-citation analysis. The units of analysis were original research articles and research notes retrieved from journals indexed by well-known databases. Keywords used in the search were “co-opet, co-opet, coopetition, coopetition, simultaneous cooperation and competition, simultaneously cooperate and compete, coexistence of cooperation and competition, coexistence of cooperation and competition, cooperate and compete simultaneously, coopetitive relationships, coopetitive relationships, coopetitive networks, horizontal alliances, cooperate with competitors, cooperation with competitors, cooperative relationships with competitors, cooperative competition and competitive cooperation.” Regarding the time period for publication of the sample articles, the authors did not place any restrictions.

The research findings provide evidence that coopetition demonstrates multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary characteristics. Subfields of the coopetition field were identified based on the components of coopetition, which are relation, process and strategy. The component dealing with relationship management and innovation as strategy become prominent. Although coopetition literature has emerged as a relation view of strategy, it is still fragmented and diverse. Additionally, the robust subfields generated from the analysis were super-positioned with low degrees.

This is one of the few studies offering a critical review of coopetition research via quantitative research approach.

In a small, but insightful book, Civilization on Trial, written more than half a century ago, the great English historian, Arnold Toynbee, expressed great pessimism about the prospects of Western civilisation which he found to be Eurocentric (Toynbee, 1948). Toynbee's study of history was universalistic, reflecting a deep knowledge and respect for non‐Western cultures and civilisations. For Toynbee history was unified whole; it was a universal history of the entire humanity, not just of some Western people. In this sense, Toynbee is similar to the great Muslim scholar, Ibn Khaldun, the author of Muqaddimah, written almost six centuries ago, as an inquiry into the causes of the rise and decline of civilisations (Mehmet, 1990: 81–4).

The object of this research is the reconstruction of the existing legal response by European Union states to the phenomenon of immigration. It seeks to analyse the process of conferral of protection.

One main dimension is selected and discussed: the case law of the national courts. The study focuses on the legal status of immigrants resulting from the intervention of these national courts.

The research shows that although the courts have conferred an increasing protection on immigrants, this has not challenged the fundamental principle of the sovereignty of the states to decide, according to their discretionary prerogatives, which immigrants are allowed to enter and stay in their territories. Notwithstanding the differences in the general constitutional and legal structures, the research also shows that the courts of the three countries considered – France, Germany and Spain – have progressively moved towards converging solutions in protecting immigrants.

The research contributes to a better understanding of the different legal orders analysed.