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Rural China has been undergoing the “religion fever” since the Reform and Opening-up. By comparing the intergenerational lock-in effects of religious belief with that of non-religious belief, the purpose of this paper is to explain why more and more peasants convert to religion especially Christianity in China.

Data used in this paper comes from a field survey conducted in villages, Funan county. The samples were obtained by the two-stage cluster probability proportional sampling method. Based on the collected survey data, econometric model on the intergenerational lock-in effects of belief was constructed and used for analysis.

Compared with non-religious believers, religious believers can transmit their beliefs more successfully. In addition, the intergenerational lock-in effects of religious beliefs is weakened by oblique socialization in contemporary rural China.

This is the first paper focussing on intergenerational transmission of belief in rural China; although many researchers did careful analyses on effects of parents’ belief or religiosity on children’s belief or religiosity in the West, few of them compared the success of intergenerational transmission between different beliefs. This paper fills this gap; as an interdisciplinary study, this paper tries to study religion in economics analysis approaches. This attempt extends research field in Economics and at the same time enriches analysis tools in Religion.

There is a perception that non-religious consumers are less ethical than religious consumers. Studies found prejudices against atheists around the world and assumed that those who committed unethical behavior were more likely to be atheists. Hence, first, the purpose of this study is to investigate the effect of consumers’ intrinsic religiosity, extrinsic religiosity and atheism on consumers’ ethical beliefs. Second, this study attempts to segment consumers and identify differences between these segments.

Using data from 235 study participants in the USA and 531 in Vietnam. Subsequently, a two-step cluster approach was used to identify segments within these samples.

The study results show consumers’ intrinsic religiosity negatively influences all consumers’ unethical beliefs. Similarly, atheism also negatively influences all consumers’ unethical beliefs. This study also complements other studies exploring consumer ethics in developing countries. In addition, the segmentation analysis produced unique segments. The results from both samples (USA and Vietnam) indicated that non-religious consumers are less likely to accept various unethical behaviors compared to religious consumers. Religious consumers are not necessarily more ethical and atheism consumers are not necessarily less ethical. In the end, are implications for business ethics, religious and non-religious leaders on how to view the impact of beliefs on consumer ethical behaviors.

This is one of the first few studies investigating the impact of atheism on consumer ethics. The results of this study further extend the knowledge of study in consumer ethics by comparing consumers’ religiosity and atheism.

This paper aims to offer a systematic view of religious consumption and its iterative influences on consumers, as well as their differences in attitudes, values and behaviors.

Using a mixed-method approach – both qualitative and quantitative – the study develops religious self-transformation and self-categorization scales to empirically evaluate the hypotheses.

The convergence of consumption, self-identification and religious attitudes and behaviors proffer an essentially subjective concept useful in understanding the existential reflection and supernatural orientation that individuals may seek through consumption. Cluster analysis (based on product, services, media and practices) reveals four quadrants. The non-religious (religious) group has low (high) consumption in all four consumption categories Self-categorization (self-transformation) group has high (low) level of product consumption, but low (high) in all three other categories. This research presented four invisible identities that are visibly different in terms of life satisfaction, religious brand preference, dollars spending on religious products and monetary donation.

This research only considers one medium-size city as opposed to all types of cities. All religious affiliated and nonaffiliated respondents are included in the total sample.

The study offers new insights into the triadic relationship between religious self-identification, religious consumption, and the marketplace that can be used in branding, segmentation, targeting, positioning, and persuasive advertising, public relation and social media, and services marketing.

Religion addresses the nature of existence. In this religion–consumer–brand nexus, consumption is a way for consumers to experience and immense themselves in the sacred to solidify, communicate, transform, improve and transport who they are capitalizing on religious self-identification can affectively promote positive social change.

This work proposes four invisible identities that are different in consumption of religious products and services in terms of patterns and purposes. These groups of consumers shape the marketplace through the derived utility of their religious consumption based on their self-identification, which in turn influences their religious brand preference.

In a constantly changing and increasingly globalized world, religion still plays a significant role in influencing social and consumer behavior. This study will analyze what influence religion and intensity of belief has on attitudes towards the advertising of particular controversial products and services. A questionnaire was distributed to 1,393 people across six different countries and resulting in samples of four main religious groups. The results indicated some statistically significant differences between the groups, which can have important implications for global marketers.

The purpose of this paper is to determine whether there were differences in students' ethical perceptions based on gender, academic major and religiosity.

A self‐administered survey was conducted of 132 students at a university in Barbados, to determine ethical perceptions on five moral constructs: justice, relativism, utilitarianism, deontology and egoism.

The study found that females displayed higher ethical values compared to males, non‐accounting students (majoring in management and economics) were more ethical than accounting students, and students who perceived themselves as being religious were more ethical than non‐religious students. Both female accounting and non‐accounting students, as well as religious and non‐religious females, held higher ethical perceptions than their male counterparts.

The sample was small, thus limiting the generalisability of the results to the wider student population.

The results should be useful for educational institutions to implement more ethical courses into the curriculum.

The paper demonstrates that ethical perceptions are important among undergraduate students, and that there needs to be remedies to improve the low ethical perceptions among accounting students. The paper also contributes to the sparse literature on ethics in the Caribbean.

The paper aims at identifying the underlying factors that differentiate the local people's demographic and socio-economic characteristics, which influence their sense of place (SoP) toward different types of cultural heritage sites in different urban regions.

The paper draws on the sequential explanatory design, using quantitative and qualitative methods, respectively, to investigate the research themes in-depth. A total of 201, 207 and 228 questionnaires were collected on religious, non-religious/memorial and historic commercial buildings, respectively, at two different quarters in Historic Cairo, followed by 20 semi-structured interviews with a representative sample of local people in each quarter.

The authors found an apparent similarity in the significant characteristics that influence the local people's SoP levels toward the different historic buildings at the same quarter and a notable variation between both quarters. Also, many factors determine the local people's influential characteristics on their SoP toward the different cultural heritage sites (e.g. the sites’ distance from the person's residence/workplace, economic value, people's awareness about its history, type of activities and targeted gender, feeling of stability and regions' characteristics)

Identifying these underlying factors and priority local groups can assist policymakers in ensuring a sustainable management/conservation of the different cultural heritage sites.

The paper demonstrates the causality of a significant correlation between local people's characteristics and their SoP levels toward the different types of historic buildings, apart from their religious symbolism or historical value, using the sequential explanatory design.

We are beginning to observe the growth of Islamic finance beyond the borders of traditionally Islamic markets such as the Middle East and the Far East. The proliferation of such religious financial institutions in non-Islamic and more secular markets has raised some pertinent questions about how these quasi-religious institutions brand themselves in light of the need to balance the conflation of Islamic theology with that of financial economic principles.

The study adopts a process-based qualitative methodology proceeded with an initial data reduction-theoretical conceptualization of the extant literature. This is followed by data display via quote research of participants’ precepts and concludes with a synthesis the extant academic conceptualizations with empirical perspectives.

The findings highlight a framework explaining the interface between Islamic and non-Islamic participation on the branding of Islamic financial institutions in the UK. The findings also set forth a need for consideration of non-religious and purely economic participation in the Islamic financial system in light of branding.

This study derives its incremental contribution by extending the extant academic literature on the branding and consumption of Islamic financial products and services within non-Islamic and secular markets. Furthermore, by adopting a multi-disciplinary, qualitative lens and engaging pertinent individuals within the field, the study provides a rich framework from which to explore the branding of these quasi-religious institutions and the interface between religious and non-religious consumption. This framework puts forth to the leaders of Islamic financial institutions of the between- and within-group interactions in terms of religio-financial consumption and branding.

The purpose of this paper is to examine social issue proxy filings by shareholders of US corporations in a period commonly referred to as the “shareholder spring” to understand who the filers are, what issues are typically the focus of the filings, what the dominant strategy is of various filers and the success rate of proxy-based shareholder social activism.

Using the shareholder-filed proxy as the unit of analysis, the study parsed the data from 410 proxies to gain insight into the process of shareholder social activism.

Religious groups, in contrast to large pension and mutual funds, use a small shareholding approach to form coalitions with other stakeholders to gain voting support. Proxies that call for disclosure elicit greater support than those that demand a change in a company’s business practices. If the goal of shareholder social activism is to keep the proxy issue alive from one shareholder meeting to the next, then non-individual proxy filers can be considered successful.

While the study only considered proxies for 250 of the Fortune 500 companies, there is evidence that social activism can succeed if a coalition strategy is used and the shareholder’s motives appear to be legitimately altruistic.

It is important for corporate managers to consider the prevailing shareholder sentiment on social issues because such sentiments largely echo general societal concerns.

While the debate is still unsettled on the shareholder versus the stakeholder argument, there is a high level of scrutiny on how a company operates in the larger societal context.

Propelled by the Dodd–Frank law and the shareholder spring movement, certain types of shareholders (primarily religious groups) are quite adept at eliciting support for social issues because of both their legitimacy and by the strategy that they follow.

The purpose of this paper is to measure how three components of social representations (SRs) of new foods, Adherence to technology, Adherence to natural food, and Food as enjoyment, relate to Finnish and Italian university students’ religiousness, country of origin, sex, and field of study.

Italian and Finnish university students (n=564) completed a 27-item scale of SRs of new foods. A series of analysis of covariance was used to test the hypotheses.

As expected, technology students scored higher on Adherence to technology than social science students, and women and religious persons scored higher on Adherence to natural food than men and non-religious persons. Unexpectedly, Finns scored higher on Food as an enjoyment than Italians.

This study illustrates the usefulness of SR theory for studying food-related thinking, and throws more light on how religiousness, professional field, and sex are connected to the three components of SR of new foods in two European countries and food cultures.