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The purpose of this research is to explore how experienced scarcity affects home country consumers' attitudes toward the firm engaging in cross-border philanthropy by analyzing perceived distributive justice as a mediating variable. This research also investigates the moderating factor of this effect to identify practical strategies for managers.

This research conducted one survey (Study 1) and three experiments (Studies 2–4) by manipulating scarcity to provide robust evidence for the influence of experienced scarcity on consumer perception of the company conducting cross-border philanthropy.

This paper provides empirical insights about the significant negative effect of experienced scarcity on consumer attitudes toward the firm engaging in cross-border philanthropy. It proposes that home country consumers with high versus low experienced scarcity show lower perceived distributive justice for cross-border philanthropy, which generates less favorable attitudes toward the firm. To alleviate the negative impact of experienced scarcity on consumers' perceptions of corporate reputation, providing donation amount comparisons between home and foreign countries has a significant moderating effect.

This paper provides several suggestions for marketers seeking cross-border philanthropy to improve consumers' attitudes toward the firm.

This paper enriches the literature on corporate social responsibility in the domain of cross-border philanthropy and explains contradictory findings on consumers' attitudes toward corporate cross-border philanthropy. Moreover, this study makes meaningful contributions to the scarcity and justice literature.

This study assesses consumer awareness of National Football League (NFL) stadium names and examines consumers' familiarity with sponsoring companies' industries and products. It explores whether consumers are more likely to purchase from a company or switch to products offered by a company that has paid to put its name on an NFL stadium. It attempts to understand consumers' overall perceptions of companies that put their names on stadiums. The results show that the naming of an NFL stadium has a minimal effect on consumers' perceptions towards the companies that buy naming rights or the likelihood of buying products from these companies.

Extant research presents firms’ purpose as a consensual and positive attribute. This paper introduces an alternative perspective, which sees firms’ purposefulness as defined in relation to specific audiences. A firm’s purposefulness to a focal audience can be either positive or negative. Audiences find firms with which they share a common prioritization of issues more purposeful in absolute terms. Audiences find firms with which they share a common understanding of issues positively purposeful. Conversely, audiences find firms with an opposite understanding of issues negatively purposeful. Audiences harness specific resources to support firms they find positively purposeful and to oppose firms they find negatively purposeful. This paper introduces topic modeling and word embeddings as two techniques to operationalize this audience-based approach to purposefulness.

Many manufacturing firms (e.g. Apple and Nike) now outsource some or all of their manufacturing activities to independent suppliers rather than continuing to undertake them in-house. Clearly these firms perceive this externalisation of production to be a performance-enhancing strategy, but what are the performance consequences in practice? In this chapter, we review and critique the extant academic literature on the performance consequences of manufacturing outsourcing, and note that the empirical findings have yielded mixed results. We argue that outsourcing has potential impacts upon a number of ‘performance’ outcomes, including inter alia financial performance, productivity/efficiency, sales/market share, costs of production, business performance and innovation. We further argue that many of the empirical studies have flawed designs, and make a series of methodological recommendations to guide future empirical work.

Multiple forces that shape the identities of adolescents and young adults also influence their subsequent career choices. Early work experiences are key among these forces. Recognizing this, youth service programs have emerged worldwide with the hope of shaping participants’ future trajectories through boosting engagement in civically oriented activities and work. Despite these goals, past research on these programs’ impact has yielded mixed outcomes. Our goal is to understand why this might be the case.

We rely on interview, archival, and longitudinal survey data to examine young adults’ experiences of a European youth service program.

A core feature of youth service programs, namely their dual identity of helping others (i.e., service beneficiaries) and helping oneself (i.e., participants), might partly explain the program’s mixed outcomes. We find that participants focus on one of the organization’s identities largely to the exclusion of the other, creating a dynamic in which their interactions with members who focus on the other identity create challenges and dominate their program experience, to the detriment of a focus on the organization and its goals. This suggests that a previously overlooked feature of youth service programs (i.e., their dual identity) might prove both a blessing for attracting many diverse members and a curse for achieving desired outcomes.

More broadly, our results suggest that dual identity organizations might attract members focused on a select identity, but fail to imbue them with a blended identity; thus, limiting the extent to which such organizations can truly “redirect” future career choices.

By recognizing the decisive role of top managers (TMs) of small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), this study attempts to explicate the microfoundation of pro-environmental operations of SMEs by examining the influence of institutional pressure on managerial cognition and subsequent SME pro-environmental operations. This study highlights the personal ethics of TMs, so as to examine the moderating effect of TMs' place attachment on SMEs' pro-environmental operations.

Empirical data are collected from a questionnaire survey of 509 SMEs in China. Hierarchical regression results are subject to cross-validation using secondary public data.

This study demonstrates that coercive and mimetic pressures have inverted U-shaped effects, whilst normative pressure has a U-shaped effect on the threat cognition of TMs. The results also show that TMs' threat cognition (as opposed to opportunity cognition) positively influences SMEs' pro-environmental operations. Moreover, both the emotional (place identity) and functional (place dependence) dimensions of place attachment have positive moderating effects on the relationship between threat cognition and SMEs' pro-environmental operations.

Findings of this study lead to important implications for practitioners such as regulators, policy makers and trade associations. Enabling better understanding of the nature of SMEs' pro-environmental operations, they allow for more targeted development and the provision of optimal institutional tools to promote such operations.

This study allows some important factors that differentiate SMEs from large firms to surface. These factors (i.e. institutional pressures, managerial cognition and place attachment) and the interactions between them form important constituents of the microfoundations of SMEs' pro-environmental operations.

This paper aims to examine the enforcement practices of the Investment Dealers Association of Canada (IDA) and argue that self-regulation simply does not work in the financial sector, as the sanctions available are neither applied with sufficient severity nor are the responsibilities for enforcement adequately divided between self-regulation, provincial securities commissions and the police.

The core compliance data for the study came from the IDA’s tribunal cases that were heard between 1984 and June 2008. The theoretical approach involves the invocation of classic articles by the likes of Stigler, Posner and Becker, the essence of whose conclusions is that institutions will act in their own best interests and cannot be expected to act in the public interest.

The findings show that over the period from 1984 to 2008, the severity of the sanctions increased consistently over the period. When penalty ceilings were increased, penalties increased. When in the latter phase of the period, public members (i.e. non-members of the industry) chaired the tribunals, penalties also increased.

Researchers can use the data to write a paper which asks “Why did the IDA tribunal penalties increase so consistently with time?” Future research could canvass various possible explanations, including the one presented in this paper, to focus sustained attention on the issue of self-regulation.

This study is the first to systematically examine the enforcement performance of the IDA.

The purpose of this paper is to present the results of a classroom assessment aimed at determining the extent to which five key sustainability competencies develop in students during an introductory transdisciplinary sustainability course. University sustainability programs intend to provide integrated education that fosters the key competencies students need to solve real-world sustainability problems. Translating sustainability competencies into effective pedagogical practice in integrated academic programs is not straightforward. This work builds on a previous study by both expanding the competencies evaluated and considering additional demographic characteristics.

The paper summarizes previously identified key sustainability competencies and describes teaching methodologies used to foster these competencies in students. Development of competencies in students during a semester-long course is assessed using a pre-/post-test based on two case studies. The implications of the findings for teaching practice and overall program structure are discussed.

Based on the assessment methods used here, four of the five sustainability competencies evaluated in this study developed differently in students according to gender, disciplinary affiliation and age. Females improved interpersonal competence more than males. Systems thinking competence improved for students associated with the three disciplinary affiliations considered in this study: sustainability major, sustainability minor and business major. Anticipatory competence improved for sustainability and business majors only, but not for students minoring in sustainability and majoring in other disciplines. Finally, normative competence improved for younger students only.

Insights for teaching practice and overall program structure are based on assessment of one introductory transdisciplinary sustainability course. Much additional work is needed to draw strong conclusions about general teaching practices and program structure for sustainability education. This study provides a flexible and field-tested rubric for further evaluative work in other sustainability courses or degree programs.

Universities incorporate sustainability into their undergraduate curricula in many ways, ranging from certificates to entire degree programs focused on sustainability. The results of this study suggest that educators pay attention to gender diversity, classroom teaching practices, disciplinary perspectives and student attitudes and developmental stages as they figure out how to make sustainability part of undergraduate education. This information may help create more effective sustainability courses and academic programs, which may maintain the viability of current sustainability programs and promote the institutionalization of sustainability in higher education.

This research contributes to undergraduate sustainability education by providing insight into how sustainability education might thoughtfully be integrated into academic programs. It also offers an assessment approach for use by other sustainability educators to evaluate effectiveness of teaching practice and overall program structure based on five key sustainability competencies commonly cited in the literature.