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This paper claims to identify the behavioral and cultural features that push to use, or not, cryptocurrencies for electronic commerce. Indeed, despite the use of cryptocurrencies for electronic commerce spreading worldwide at a fast and growing pace, there are supporters and detractors among their users. The analysis of what distinguish these two groups of users is fundamental for understanding their different intention to use cryptocurrencies for electronic commerce.

A survey has been administered to 2,532 cryptocurrencies’ users across the USA and China, collecting data on their behavioral predispositions and cultural features. Results were then analyzed through structured equation modeling.

Results showed that while attitude, subjective norms, perceived behavioral control and herding behavior have a positive impact on the intention to use cryptocurrencies for electronic commerce, financial literacy has no influence. Cultural dimensions amplified or reduced the discovered relationships and caused different effects: positive for the USA and negative for China when considering illegal attitude and perceived risk.

Theory of planned behavior, financial behavior and cultural factors can, all together, represent a useful framework for envisioning the behavior of users in adopting cryptocurrencies for electronic commerce purposes through a test of all its elements. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study considering behavior and cultural variables on the intention to use cryptocurrencies for electronic commerce as well as being the largest carried out, in terms of sample, on the cryptocurrency topic.

Constructive deviance is a behavior that can contribute to the effectiveness of an organization despite its problematic nature. Too few studies have examined the correlates of this behavior. The purpose of this study is to examine variables that represent exchange and organizational culture and their relationship to supervisor-reported and self-reported constructive deviance.

The survey data were collected from 602 employees (a response rate of 67 per cent) in a large municipality in central Israel. Hierarchical linear modeling (HLM) analyses were performed for each of the dependent variables (three self-reported constructive deviances and three supervisor-reported constructive deviance) controlling for divisions and departments.

The findings showed that self-reported constructive deviance was explained much better by the independent variables than supervisor-reported deviance. Organizational justice and moral identity had a strong direct effect on constructive deviance (self-reported). The mediation effect showed that an organizational climate for innovation had the strongest mediation effect among the mediators. Psychological contract breach was found to have a limited effect on constructive deviance.

Organizations should encourage procedural justice to encourage their employees to act in support of the organization, whether openly (formal performance) or more secretly (constructive deviance). Also, organizations should support innovation climate if they want to increase constructive deviance of their employees.

In a time when innovation and creativity are gaining increasing importance as behaviors that contribute to organizational success, more research on constructive deviance is expected. This study increases our understanding of this important concept stimulates additional studies of it.

This study investigates theoretical relationships among personality characteristics, preferences for different types of rewards and the propensity to choose a job in auditing by management-related higher education students. Specifically, the authors consider motivation, locus of control (internal and external) and self-efficacy (SE) as personality characteristics and financial, extrinsic, support and intrinsic as types of rewards.

Data were collected through a questionnaire targeted at management-related higher education students in Portugal. Partial least squares structural equation modelling was used to analyse the data.

The full sample results show that different types of motivation, locus of control and SE are related to different reward preferences. The authors also find a positive association between a preference for extrinsic rewards and the propensity to choose a job in auditing. Moreover, when the authors consider the role of working experience in the model, the authors find that the reward preferences that drive the choice of an auditing job differ according to that experience.

This study enriches the literature by assessing preferences for different types of rewards, considering multiple personality characteristics and a comprehensive set of rewards. Furthermore, the authors identify the reward preferences that drive the choice of an auditing career. This knowledge empowers auditing firms to devise recruitment strategies that resonate with candidates’ preferences, which boosts the capacity of these companies to attract new auditors.

Health-care systems around the globe share several pressing challenges – including increasing costs and patient outcomes. Innovative arrangements, such as public–private partnerships (PPP) can be adopted to help address these challenges. Although the promise of PPPs is great, so are its peril if the arrangements are not managed and regulated adequately through the contracting process. Yet, PPP arrangements can introduce their own unique set of problems. This paper aims to analyze how PPPs contracting accounts for three major problems identified reviewing the: performance measurement and audit; determination of compensation and risk management–related issues.

The authors used a case study approach to analyze contracting among health-care PPPs in two countries: Italy and the USA. With a structured review performed on Scopus database using a keywords Boolean research, the authors identified three recurring major issues to investigate in two selected cases, one per country. For each major issue, the authors defined several sub-issues retrieved from a widely used institutional framework. In each sub-issue, a documental analysis on all published information related to the signed contract has been performed identifying the approaches used by the two organizations.

The authors find that PPP contracting in the USA case seems to be oriented more toward managing institutional change as well as more flexibility in the deductibility and compensation determination for organizations and providers, suggesting this organization is more oriented to change in general. The authors find that PPP contracting in Italy more clearly delineate the allocation of risk between organizations that engage in PPPs, suggesting a more practical approach.

PPP is complex. Contracting helps manage the complexity of these arrangements. This case study approach to PPP contracting highlights the variation in contracting approaches across two different countries. Policymakers and health-care managers need to ensure that PPP contracting clearly delineates auditing and performance measurement, compensation and risk management.

The authors’ analysis sheds light on the different approaches to arranging health-care PPPs in two different country settings. More research should be done to connect these different approaches to important outcomes, such as patient and organizational finances, as well as expanding the scope of countries adopting PPP in health care.

This study aims to focus on the connection between digital business strategy and performance measurement and management (PMM).

The implications of digital business strategy and its dimensions with regard to PMM were investigated through a survey. The survey questionnaire provided 202 valid cases with a focus on senior management of small- and medium-sized enterprises. Strategic dimensions were identified from the literature on management in the context of digitalization to build a theoretical framework that highlights the mechanisms that companies should focus on when managing and implementing digital technologies successfully.

The aspects that comprise digital business strategy are grouped into five major dimensions: technological understanding, goals, resources, management and responsibilities. The study reveals a direct and positive relationship between goals and management related to digital business strategy and PMM.

The study contributes to the existing PMM literature in the context of digitalization.

The results indicate that if a company has excellent goals and management with regard to its digital business strategy, it uses PMM in a more successful and effective way.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study is among the first to examine PMM in terms of managing digital business strategy by trying to determine the extent to which the elements of digital business strategy can be integrated effectively into PMM.

Research management and administration (RMA) is a globally emerging field, but it is not yet established in Romania. The chapter analyses what are the formal expectations regarding RMA in the Romanian research system, and how these tasks are resolved on the ground. First, policy documents and informational packages of the major research funding calls are examined. Second, interviews are conducted with research project leaders, who undertook projects in different research organisations (state financed or private universities, state financed research institutions, or private foundations) in Romania. The interviews focussed on the challenges project leaders experienced in the grant seeking and implementation process, and on how they see the institutional and policy environment they work in.

In the concluding parts of the chapter, concrete policy recommendations are formulated that could help in resolving the research management related challenges, and in establishing RMA as a profession in the country.

This paper aims to present the Difference-in-Differences (DiD) method in an accessible language to a broad research audience from a variety of management-related fields.

The paper describes the DiD method, starting with an intuitive explanation, goes through the main assumptions and the regression specification and covers the use of several robustness methods. Recurrent examples from the literature are used to illustrate the different concepts.

By providing an overview of the method, the authors cover the main issues involved when conducting DiD studies, including the fundamentals as well as some recent developments.

The paper can hopefully be of value to a broad range of management scholars interested in applying impact evaluation methods.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate aspects related to difficulty to retain nursing assistants at nursing homes in Sweden related to perceived work environment characteristics.

To reveal aspects related to difficulty to retain nursing assistants, the paper uses the BIKVA model, sense of coherence and New Public Management (NPM). In total, three focus groups with nursing assistants at three nursing homes are interviewed with corresponding individual interviews with their senior managers and users. The purpose is to analyze the situation from the affected group of nursing assistants. The focus of this study is how nursing assistants discuss related to recruit and retain nursing assistants at nursing homes and elderly care and the response from senior management related to those aspects.

The main conclusions are that nursing assistants consider their job as meaningful, but limited latitude and direct involvement in managing their daily tasks in a continuous communication with management affect negatively. Furthermore and combined with wage levels, aspects related to scheduling, working hours, shift work, split shifts and understaffing generate a burdensome and stressful environment affecting the possibility to retain staff in a negative direction.

The research uses a new approach utilizing the BIKVA model, sense of coherence and NPM. The study shows that central in retaining nursing assistants at nursing homes relates to aspects such as wages, staffing, shift work and split shifts and continuous communication between nursing assistants and management.

While remanufactured products represent an increasingly researched phenomenon in the literature, not much is known about consumers' understanding and acceptance of such products. This study explores this issue in the context of the theory of perceived risk (TPR), investigating return policy leniency and distribution channel choice as potential factors to foster remanufactured products' sales.

This research utilizes an experimental design composed of a pre-test and a scenario-based main experiment to explore how return policy leniency might mitigate consumers' perceived risk and how their related purchase intention differs across two types of retail distribution channel structures (i.e. brick-and-mortar vs. online).

The investigation into the efficacy of return policy leniency within two retail distribution channel settings (i.e. brick-and-mortar vs. online) illustrates that providing a lenient return policy is an effective “cue” in increasing consumer purchase intention for remanufactured products. While prior literature has established that consumers value return policy leniency for new products, the authors provide empirical evidence that this preference also applies to remanufactured products. Notably, that return policy preference holds true in both channel settings (i.e. brick-and-mortar vs. online) under consideration. Additionally, and contrary to the authors’ predictions, consumers perceived remanufactured products sold via both channel settings as equally risky, thus highlighting that both are appropriate distribution channels for remanufactured products. Finally, while research on new products provides some initial guidance on consumer perceptions of quality and risk, the study provides empirical evidence into the difference of perceived risk with regard to new versus remanufactured products.

By employing the TPR, this research explored the role played by two supply chain management related factors (returns policy and channel structure) in reducing consumer's perceived risk and increasing purchase intention. In doing so, this study answers the call for more consumer-based supply chain management research in a controlled experimental research setting.

With the context of changing global and local populations and, for example, their composition and distribution, this paper offers insight to food shopping in later life with a focus on Nottingham and Nottinghamshire in the East Midlands. The work is relevant and important due to the specific population makeup of this area and the challenges in achieving the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) as a result of population changes/challenges.

The work takes an interdisciplinary view and draws on literature from both social policy and social care and business and marketing. Using this work as a grounding, and insights to primary research from a wider study in this area, the paper offers discussion and comment on:

• the importance of food and food shopping in later life;

• issues of, and concerns for, health, well-being, identity and community maintenance and resilience (as a direct result of the challenge to SDG achievement); and

• the role(s) and responsibility of business from a core business and wider business/corporate responsibility perspective as a reflection of the above and findings of the work.

the importance of food and food shopping in later life;

issues of, and concerns for, health, well-being, identity and community maintenance and resilience (as a direct result of the challenge to SDG achievement); and

the role(s) and responsibility of business from a core business and wider business/corporate responsibility perspective as a reflection of the above and findings of the work.

Using primary research undertaken by the authors, the paper supports findings from existing work from across social policy and care and business and management – related to the practicalities, challenges and the role of and approaches to food shopping in later life. It specifically offers insight to the efforts made by older food shoppers to maintain their independence and support their choices in a context of interdependence (e.g. within a family, community and environment). The importance social aspects of food shopping (as a counter to isolation and loneliness for example) are also identified and how, for example, the actions of business(es) may undermine the efforts (and resilience) of individuals and communities. “Better” understanding of food shoppers by business and other stakeholders is promoted.