Search results

To investigate the influence of logistics and transportation workers’ perceptions of their management’s simultaneous safety and operations focus (or lack thereof) on related worker safety and operational perceptions and behaviors.

This multi-method research consisted of two studies. Study 1 aimed to establish correlational relationships by evaluating the impact of individual-level worker perceptions of operationally focused routines (as a moderator) on the relationship between worker perceptions of safety-related routines and workers’ self-reported safety and in-role operational behaviors using a survey. Study 2 aimed to establish causal relationships by evaluating the same conceptual relationships in a behavioral-type experiment utilizing vehicle simulators. After receiving one of four pre-task briefings, participants completed a driving task scenario in a driving simulator.

In Study 1, the relationship between perceived safety focus and safety behavior/in-role operational behavior was strengthened at higher levels of perceived operations focus. In Study 2, participants who received the balanced pre-task briefing committed significantly fewer safety violations than the other 3 treatment groups. However, in-role driving deviations were not impacted as hypothesized.

This research is conducted at the individual (worker) level of analysis to capture the little-known perspectives of logistics and transportation workers and explore the influence of balanced safety and operational routines from a more micro perspective, thus contributing to a deeper understanding of how balanced routines might influence worker behavior when conducting dynamic tasks to ensure safe, effective outcomes.

This paper aims to contribute to this special issue on interpretivist research methodologies and the phygital consumerist landscape by exploring some underlying issues within the specific context of luxury consumption. The paper starts with a critique of current research, drawing particular attention to problems of reductionism, poor representativeness and weak contextualisation in research that adopts a positivist epistemology. The paper then highlights some of the contributions that interpretivist scholarship is making, and can potentially make, to our understanding of the experiential and humanistic aspects of luxury consumption, presented in a nuanced, discursive and deeply contextualised manner.

This commentary is informed by an in-depth examination of the methodology and approach adopted in the 327 most-recently published academic articles on luxury (from late-2021).

This opinion piece suggests the need for a sea-change in the way that scholars approach luxury research in online, offline and hybrid phygital settings to capture and convey its true complexity, diversity, contingency and contextuality and its emotional and symbolic character, and to help ensure that it delivers findings that are of relevance and value to luxury industry practitioners.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first paper to look comprehensively and critically at the methodological approaches adopted by academics writing in the field of luxury consumption.

This study empirically examines the nonlinear effects of mimicking peer firms' cash holdings on shareholder value, with consideration of macroeconomic conditions.

An instrumental variable approach for nonlinear models is estimated for a large sample of US firms over the period 1991–2019. This approach addresses the reflection problem in examining peer effects, whereby it is impossible to separate the individual's effects on the group, or vice versa, if both are simultaneously determined.

The authors find an inverted U-shaped association between shareholder value and mimicking intensity of peer firms' cash holdings. This result suggests that mimicking peer firms' cash holdings is subject to diminishing returns. It is more beneficial at lower levels of mimicking intensity but less so or suboptimal at higher levels. Further evidence indicates that this inverted U-shaped shareholder value-mimicking intensity nexus is asymmetric. Specifically, it is salient for decreases relative to increases in cash holdings and, more importantly, in good relative to bad macroeconomic states. The findings are robust to several concerns and have important implications for liquidity management policies.

The authors provide new empirical evidence of the nonlinear effects of mimicking peer firms' cash holdings on shareholder value, which varies with macroeconomic conditions.

In the absence of new funding dedicated to cold case investigation, innovation is required.

The number of unresolved homicides in the USA has surpassed a quarter million, and the figure grows by thousands every year. Homicides that do not yield a quick arrest are time and labor intensive. This creates a staffing and resource dilemma for law enforcement administrators, as allocating time for older cases comes at the expense of investigating current ones, and vice versa.

Universities offer the enthusiastic labor of college students to “defrost” cold cases. One such partnership has been in place for nearly three years in an unusual collaboration between a state police agency and a regional state university. Small groups of students systematically organize, review and present case files. They create investigative recommendations and prioritize cases by solvability. Investigators can then select a case that may be relatively close to an arrest, access the case details very quickly and have the investigative recommendations as a place to begin a renewed investigation. Additionally, cases that are appropriate for new forensic testing or new forensic tools are identified and advanced.

Partnerships such the one described here are rare but lucrative. We recommend new collaborations like ours to reduce the number of unresolved homicide cases.

The COVID-19 pandemic has presented small-to-medium size enterprises (SMEs) with a massive and unexpected challenge that has caused many to adjust their operational standards. Perhaps the biggest change has been the shift to remote work and away from traditional office spaces. Thus, this study aims to explore the implications of this shift within the context of customer participation in the new product development (NPD) process.

Our study surveys 218 small-to-medium size business-to-business firms in the USA on a variety of questions revolving around their NPD processes, customer collaboration and the shift to remote work. The authors use structural equation modeling in the AMOS program to analyze the data.

The findings indicate that both customer participation breadth and customer participation depth positively impact new product performance. Furthermore, these relationships are found to be contingent upon whether firms rely on remote work during the collaboration process. The results show that accessing a broader variety of explicit customer insights (i.e., breadth) has become easier in the increasingly remote collaboration environment. However, as face-to-face customer participation in NPD has decreased, the prospect of gaining deep, tacit customer knowledge relevant to product development (i.e., depth) has become more challenging.

This study contributes to the knowledge-based view of the firm and the customer participation literature, and it also has implications for managers adjusting to the shift to remote work following the COVID-19 pandemic. The findings provide additional evidence that customer participation is an effective strategy for SMEs (Morgan et al., 2018), but remote work has both positive and negative implications regarding the type of external knowledge that is acquired during customer participation in NPD.

What kinds of support do interstate rivals provide to domestic actors in ongoing civil wars? And how do domestic actors utilize the support they receive? This chapter answers these questions by comparing Iranian and Saudi military and non-military (mediation, foreign aid and religious soft-power promotion) support to the Houthis and to the Government of Yemen (GoY) during the Saada wars (2004–2010) and the internationalized civil war (2015–2018). It also focuses on the processes through which the GoY and the Houthis have utilized this support for their own strategic purposes. This chapter applies a structured, focused comparison methodology and relies on data from a review of both primary and secondary sources complemented by 14 interviews. This chapter finds that there were less external interventions in the conflict in Saada than in the internationalized civil war. During the latter, a broader set of intervention strategies enabled further instrumentalization by domestic actors, which in turn contributed to the protracted nature of the conflict. This chapter contributes to the literature on interstate rivalry and third-party intervention. The framework of analysis is applicable to civil wars that experience intervention by rivals, such as Syria or Libya.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the association between company reputation and dividend policy.

In this study, sample of 98,809 firm-year observations from 22 countries covering 2005–2016 were used.

Firm reputation concerns are associated with higher propensities to pay dividends and payout ratios. Further, this positive effect is more pronounced for firms with high free cash flows, high information asymmetry and low institutional monitoring. The results are robust to an instrumental variable approach, propensity score matching and the Heckman two-stage correction approach while addressing endogeneity concerns.

These findings have significant implications for various stakeholders, such as existing and potential investors, managers, policymakers and regulators, by providing insights into the relationship between corporate reputation and firm dividend payout decisions. Corporate reputation is highlighted as crucial for accessing finance, emphasizing the role of national regulators and policymakers in facilitating firms' efforts to improve their reputation. The study highlights the dynamics of corporate reputation and dividend payout, calling for proactive engagement from regulators and policymakers. Crafting policies conducive to reputation-building can enhance firms' financial prospects, indicating the need for strategic interventions at managerial, regulatory and policy levels. Understanding the influence of economic context is crucial for firms to tailor reputation management strategies and optimize funding opportunities in different economic environments.

Overall, results suggest that reputation serves as a disciplining mechanism, where firms will pay dividends to maintain their reputations.

The evolving dynamics of the labour market make graduates’ future employability an important issue for higher education (HE) institutions, prompting universities to complement the conventional graduate skills approach with a wider focus on graduate forms of capital that may enhance their sense of employability. This study, adopting a capital perspective, explores whether and how teachers in HE, when acknowledged as knowledgeable trustworthy actors, may affect graduates’ employability. It investigates how they can mobilise undergraduate cultural capital through socialisation, and shape their pre-professional identity, paving the way for university-to-work transition.

To test the hypothesised model, a self-report online questionnaire was administered to a sample of 616 undergraduates attending different Italian universities. Multiple mediating models were tested using the SEM framework.

Results supported the tested model and showed that trust in knowledgeable HE teachers was associated with undergraduates’ perceived employability both directly and through both mediators (i.e. academic socialisation and identification with future professionality).

This research explores a capital conceptualisation of graduate employability, identifying possible processes for implementing graduates’ capital across their academic experience and providing initial evidence of their interplay and contribution to transition into the labour market.

These findings provide empirical support to possible forms of capital that HE institutions may fulfil to enhance their undergraduate employability throughout their academic career, which serves as a liminal space allowing undergraduates to begin building a tentative professional identity.

The study investigates the role of e-commerce adoption on Ghana’s small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) business performance.

A sample of 309 owner-managers of entrepreneurial SMEs was employed using LISREL to determine the nature of the underlying relationships among the study constructs.

The findings show that adopting e-commerce significantly improves SMEs' performance. The study also found that trust effectively mediates the relationship between e-commerce adoption and SME business performance. Finally, the study found that firm agility moderates the relationship between e-commerce adoption and business performance.

The study recommends SMEs in Ghana seeking to grow their businesses capitalize on e-commerce capabilities to enhance their business performances while ensuring trusting relationships, especially in the delivery of e-commerce services consistently, to improve their contribution to overall business performance.

The findings would help managers of SMEs in Ghana to deliver optimum value in their e-commerce operations to improve their business performances in an uncertain world.