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The purpose of this paper is to investigate innovation resistance among mature consumers in the mobile banking context. The reasons inhibiting mature consumers' mobile banking adoption were compared to those of younger consumers.

Following Ram and Sheth, resistance was measured with five barriers namely Usage, Value, Risk, Tradition and Image barriers. An extensive internet survey was implemented and 1,525 usable responses were collected, of which 370 respondents (24.3 percent) represented the mature consumer segment (age over 55) and 1,155 respondents (75.7 percent) represented the younger consumers.

The empirical findings indicate that the value barrier is the most intense barrier to mobile banking adoption among both mature and younger consumers. However, aging appears to be related especially to the risk and image barriers; the most significant differences between mature and younger consumers' perceptions of mobile banking were related to input and output mechanisms of information, the battery life of a mobile phone, a fear that the list of PIN codes would be lost and end up in the wrong hands and the usefulness of new technology in general.

The study has practical implications to marketers in different fields in that strategies to overcome resistance to innovations like mobile banking are discussed.

Innovation resistance can be seen as a less developed concept in adoption research. While the majority of studies have focused on the success of innovations and reasons to adopt, this study empirically investigates the reasons preventing innovation adoption.

The purpose of this paper is to further the understanding of innovation resistance by dividing internet banking non‐adopters into three groups based on their intentions to use the innovation. Thereafter, the aim is to identify how the resistance differs in these customer groups.

This study identifies three groups of internet banking non‐adopters, namely postponers, opponents and rejectors. The data were collected by conducting an extensive postal survey among the retail banking customers in Finland who had not adopted internet banking. The measurement development was based on consumer resistance theory and the earlier literature on internet banking. Principal component analysis was used to classify the resistance items into five adoption barriers derived from the earlier literature. Thereafter, analysis of variance was used to analyse the statistical differences in resistance to internet banking between the three groups.

Significant differences were identified between the groups explored. The resistance of the rejectors is much more intense and diverse than that of the opponents, while the postponers show only slight resistance. The results also indicate that psychological barriers are even higher determinants of resistance than usage and value, which are constructs related to ease‐of‐use and usefulness determining acceptance in the traditional technology acceptance model. Moreover, the findings highlight the role of self‐efficacy in bank customers' risk perceptions to internet banking.

This study provides further understanding of what inhibits internet banking adoption by comparing three non‐adopter groups with respect to their resistance to internet banking. It also has implications for management in overcoming non‐adopters' resistance to the innovation.

The purpose of this paper is to focus on the associations of employees’ attitudes and human resource arrangements to sickness absence from the perspective of absence culture and work ability.

The study was conducted in one of the largest food industry companies in Finland. Sickness absence register data were obtained from the years 2003 to 2005 and a survey from 2005. This survey included single propositions about work arrangements (five propositions) and attitudes (three propositions) during sickness absence. These were analysed by absence days and short (1‐7 days) and long spells (>7 days).

The attitude of blue‐collar workers who agreed that it is a matter of course that someone is absent was statistically significant regarding sickness absence. They had increased risk for sickness absence days and for short spells. From work arrangements during absence the fact that jobs will wait returning to the workplace decreased the risk for short and long sickness absence spells in both groups. In addition, the fact that the employer will take a substitute during workmates’ absence increased the risk for all measured sickness absence rates among white‐collar workers.

These findings should be noted in enterprises’ human resource management and occupational health services to manage and understand sickness absence.

Although sickness absence has been widely studied, very little is known about sickness absence related work arrangements and attitudes associated with sickness absence. This study increases knowledge about these issues.

During the new millennium the Finnish educational system has faced a new challenge: how to explain glorious PISA results produced with only a small variance between schools, average national costs and, as regards the average duration of studies, relatively efficiently. Explanations for this issue can be searched for in many different ways. The purpose of the article is to show what kind of sustainable leadership in the educational governance can be seen behind the high level results in Finland.

The future‐oriented actions are discussed in the article alongside some relevant cultural prerequisites that have enabled effective changing processes. Finally, two cases of recent future‐oriented actions in the Finnish educational governance are given as examples.

Sustainable leadership can be seen as a long series of several future‐oriented decisions and actions, such as uniforming the system, offering highly demanding education to all, strategic decisions concerning the information society, as well as some other great political decisions concerning education.

It may not be easy to reproduce the same high‐level results as in Finland in any other country. However, several developing countries could benefit from the future‐oriented ethos of Finland.

This article gives hints what kinds of future‐oriented actions can be launched at a national level.

Future orientation leads to long‐term policies in education. This enables long‐term development in the educational sector which may enhance the social cohesion in the societies.

Though the Finnish experiences may be unique in the international settings, the future‐orientation is of uttermost importance when wanting to develop the educational systems in any country. Hence the results may give a valuable insight to understand a successful case of educational governance.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the role of cognitive diversity on strategic issue interpretation among the boards of directors making sense of sustainability management. The study also investigated the centrality of the corporate sustainability issues to identify common interpretative patterns in the shared cognitive maps among the companies. In addition, the aim was to advance quantitative methods for the analysis of decision-makers’ cognition.

The research was an exploratory study analyzing 43 individual cognitive maps collected through surveys from the boards of nine cleantech companies. For the elicitation of the cognitive maps, the study used the hybrid cognitive mapping technique. The diversity of the shared cognitive maps was analyzed using the distance ratio formula and the graph analysis method with eigenvector to measure the centrality of the strategic issue interpretation in the maps.

This study provides evidence through the analysis of distance ratios on the existence of cognitive diversity among companies within the same industry. Surprisingly, despite the cognitive diversity, the study identified strong common patterns on strategic issue interpretations among the companies. In addition, the study shows that the sustainability management issues have gained minor attention from the boards of directors.

The initial industry sample provided relatively restricted perspectives on managerial cognition, and to confirm the findings regarding the effects of industry on the shared cognitive maps of top decision-makers, wider industry-level data are needed.

This study provides an approach to facilitate the process of strategic decision-making for top decision-makers by identifying the shared beliefs of the selected strategic theme and to concentrate on the most central strategic issues in the company and industry. It reveals asymmetry between the significance of sustainability issues in an open agenda and the real position of sustainability concepts in the shared cognitive maps in the green industry. Also, the study advances cognitive mapping techniques for application in the board’s decision-making.

This paper contributes to brightening the black box of corporate governance by shedding light on the interaction of the concepts of corporate sustainability and other key strategic issues within the shared cognitive maps of the boards. It also provides new empirical knowledge on top decision-making processes and the effects of cognitive diversity on the strategic issue interpretations within the corporate boards of the green industry, and it further develops the methodology for the quantification of cognitive diversity and the content of cognitive maps.