Search results

The purpose of this study is to assess the validity and predictability of insights from the investment model (IM) in the context of strategic manufacturer–industrial supplier relationships. IM is a theoretical model in social psychology pertaining to interpersonal relationship discontinuity. This formal empirical test of IM in a different context supports vertical theory borrowing and minimizes the risk of committing atomistic fallacy.

Data collected from 256 sourcing professionals participating in a scenario-based role-playing experiment were analyzed via structural equation modeling. The authors also performed bootstrapping to assess indirect effects.

The IM is generally applicable to the context of interfirm relationship dissolution. Relative to the original context of interpersonal relationship dissolution, three nuances are detected: investment size as an antecedent has lowered prominence in influencing commitment; satisfaction level, quality of alternatives and investment size have non-orthogonal effects on commitment; and satisfaction level influences relationship continuity through and beyond commitment.

The empirical findings broaden boundary conditions for IM insights. Beyond interpersonal relationship dissolution, the IM appears to also describe, explain and predict interfirm relationship dissolution.

Keeping the manufacturer satisfied is critical. Moreover, suppliers should be cautious when entering joint product development agreements.

This study appears to be among the first to formally validate the applicability of IM insights as they pertain to the dissolution of strategic manufacturer–industrial supplier relationships.

In the case of Poiret & Anor v Seychelles Pension Fund & Anor (2022), the Court of Appeal, the highest court in Seychelles, took judicial notice of the fact that “[c]ommon law relationships are more prevalent in our society than those between married persons.” In this chapter, the author discusses the law relating to common law marriages in Seychelles by focusing on the following issues: the right to form a family (as a background to understanding common law marriages); requirements for a valid common law marriage; and the rights of parties in a common law marriage. These rights include “court granted” rights and “statutory rights” such as property rights (parties invoking the claim of unjust enrichment in the 1979 Civil Code and property orders and succession under the 2021 Civil Code at the dissolution of common law marriages). I also deal with the remedy of unjust enrichment in the context of the 2021 Civil Code; marital privilege (in case where one of the parties in a common law relationship is accused of committing an offence); and termination of a common law marriage. The author demonstrates the measures taken by courts and the legislators to protect some of the rights of people in common law marriages. The author suggests ways in which courts can interpret the relevant provisions of the 2021 Civil Code. Where necessary, the author highlights how courts or legislators in some African countries such as Kenya, Mauritius, Malawi, Tanzania, Sierra Leone, Ghana, Zambia, South Africa, Namibia, Rwanda, and Uganda have approached some of the issues above.

This study which is positioned in the ambit of control research investigates the impact of ex ante contractual completeness on opportunistic behaviors and ex post transaction costs, while assessing how these affect relationship termination intention. This study aims to examine alternative attractiveness as a necessary moderator of the nexus between transaction cost and relationship termination intention.

Data gathered from 211 companies in South Korea that have installed and run outsourced vending machines are analyzed and used to validate the study’s theoretical and empirical contributions.

The findings, which rely only on data from companies that outsource and those that run outsourced vending machines, show that contractual completeness negatively affects both active and passive opportunism. The study also discovers that active opportunism positively affects both bargaining costs and monitoring costs, whereas passive opportunism has a positive and direct effect on maladaptation costs but a negative effect on monitoring costs. It further finds that both bargaining and maladaptation costs have positive and direct effects on relationship termination intention, while monitoring costs have a negative effect on the same. Furthermore, it is observed that alternative attractiveness moderates the relationships between bargaining costs and relationship termination intention, as well as maladaptation costs and relationship termination intention.

This study demonstrates that contractual completeness can serve as an important ex ante control mechanism, whereas the two types of opportunism can raise transaction costs. Furthermore, alternative attractiveness is identified as a driver of the impact of transaction costs on relationship termination intention.

A key point of the departure of this study is that it examines the moderating role of alternative attractiveness in the relationship between transaction cost and relationship termination intention. The paper also advances the control literature by emphasizing the critical role that contractual completeness plays in reducing the occurrence of (both active and passive) opportunism in business relationships (especially companies that outsource).

A robust body of scholarship has attached unintended childbearing, cohabitation, and stepfamily living arrangements to a greater risk of union instability in the United States. These aspects of family life, which often co-occur, are overrepresented among disadvantaged populations, who also have an independently higher risk of union instability. Existing scholarship has modeled these family experiences as correlated events to better understand family and union instability, yet the authors assert a direct effort to test whether or how unintended childbearing differs across marital and stepfamily statuses makes important contributions to established research on relationship stability. Drawing on the 2006–2017 National Survey of Family Growth (NSFG), the authors test potential moderating effects to better understand the linkages between unintended childbearing and union dissolution among 7,864 recent, higher-order births to partnered mothers via discrete-time, event history logistic regression models. Findings confirm that unintended childbearing, cohabitation, and stepfamily status are all linked with a greater risk of dissolution. However, unintended childbearing is differentially linked to instability by marital status, with unintended childbearing being associated with a higher risk of dissolution for married couples relative to cohabiting couples. Unintended fertility does not seem to increase the risk of instability across stepfamily status. Findings provide more evidence in support of selection, rather than causation, in explaining the association between unintended childbearing and union instability among higher-order births. Results suggest that among higher-order births, unintended childbearing may reflect underlying relationship issues.

In business-to-business interactions, conflicts are inevitable, and conflict-handling strategies that consider different variables improve the decision-making process of actors. This study aims to reveal the role of power and criticality in conflict-handling research in logistics service networks.

A 2 × 2 between-subject experimental design with four different scenarios was used. One hundred sixty logistics service actors completed an online questionnaire. Data were analyzed with ANOVA and paired sample t-tests using the SPSS 28.0 program.

In comparative scenarios involving high and low power dynamics, individuals with high power and high criticality situations are more inclined to favor the dominating strategy compared to low-power and low-criticality contexts. However, when faced with specific circumstances characterized by both high power and high criticality, actors tend to prioritize the integrating strategy initially, followed by the dominating and obliging strategies in that order. Notably, the statistical analysis revealed no significant interaction effect between criticality and power concerning the integrating, obliging and dominating conflict-handling strategies.

This study used an experimental approach to investigate criticality and power as contextual elements in determining conflict-handling strategies in an inter-firm environment within logistics service networks. This study is particularly groundbreaking in its knowledge of the relationship among power dynamics, conflict criticality and conflict-handling strategies.

This study aims to understand what primary relationship problem mechanisms can exist in the franchise channel and how exchange partners respond to them. This study demonstrates how the franchisor’s relationship problem mechanisms (threat, contract enforcement) affect the franchisee’s negative active responses (venting, threatened withdrawal).

This study tested hypotheses through multiple regression analysis using data from 200 franchisees in Korea-based food franchise systems.

The results indicated that threat increases venting and threatened withdrawal, while contract enforcement only increases venting. Venting increases threatened withdrawal. In addition, the results indicated that the franchisor’s behavior monitoring positively moderates the relationship between relationship problem mechanisms and negative active responses.

This study helps strategically manage responses to relationship problems by categorizing ‘relationship problem mechanisms’ into intentional relationship problem mechanisms based on communication (threat) and unintentional relationship problem mechanisms based on action (contract enforcement). This study finds that both relationship problem mechanisms, intentional or unintentional, eventually cause threatened withdrawal directly or indirectly. Even if the threat is merely communication, not action, it is more likely to cause relationship dissolution than contract enforcement by directly triggering any negative active response. This study also finds that behavior monitoring can affect exchange partners through interaction with other management mechanisms rather than directly affecting them.

High divorce rates have coincided with higher rates of remarriage. Although remarriages are more susceptible to dissolution than first-order marriages, less research has focused on factors that promote vulnerabilities among remarried couples. In the current study, the authors focused on whether predictors of divorce differ by the number of times someone has been married. The authors examined some of the most common reasons for divorce, as identified by parents who completed a state-mandated divorce education course (n = 8,364), while also controlling for participant sociodemographic characteristics. Participants going through their first divorce were more likely to identify growing apart and infidelity as reasons for seeking a divorce. Conversely, those going through a subsequent divorce were more likely to list problems with alcohol/drug abuse, childrearing differences, emotional/psychological/verbal mistreatment, money problems, physical violence, and arguing. Multivariate analyses indicated that sociodemographic factors were stronger predictors of divorce number than commonly listed reasons for divorce for both male and female participants. Implications for remarital and stepfamily stability and directions for future research are discussed.

For many emerging adults, committed romantic relationships are perceived as offering the ideal context for sexual exploration and companionship. However, these relationships are often short-term and breakups between committed partners can be emotionally intense and create a significant amount of distress. While casual sex relationships appear to be an increasingly popular alternative, providing many of the same benefits of committed relationships without the emotional involvement, they are also consistently associated with sexual regret. Previous research indicates that both emotional reactions are reported at higher levels by women, but the extent to which breakup distress and sexual regret differ by relationship type remains unclear. The current study examined differences in breakup distress and sexual regret as a function of sex and type of sexual relationship (committed vs casual) among a sample of 230 undergraduate college students. As expected, women reported more breakup distress and sexual regret as compared to men, and men and women in committed relationships reported more breakup distress than those in casual relationships. Contrary to previous findings, there was no significant difference in sexual regret between committed and casual relationships, and this was consistent for both men and women. In addition, participants reported relatively low levels of both breakup distress and sexual regret overall. The results suggest that, in general, breakups may not pose a severe emotional threat to young adults, who seem to be confident in their sexual decision making regardless of relationship type.

The majority of emerging adults in the United States spend time in cohabiting unions. Prior research has suggested that higher levels of sexual non-exclusivity may exist among those in cohabiting relationships compared to marital unions. Although these basic patterns have been explored in prior work, research examining the potential reasons why levels of sexual non-exclusivity differ by union status has been limited. Drawing on a relational perspective and using the fifth wave of data from the Toledo Adolescent Relationships Study (TARS), the present study found that higher levels of sexual non-exclusivity in cohabiting relationships were explained by intimate relationship characteristics and sexual histories rather than sociodemographic factors, partner heterogamy, or partner- and couple-level drug use. These findings highlighted that understanding the higher rates of sexually non-exclusive experiences in cohabiting relationships, compared to marital relationships, requires attention to specific dynamics of the intimate partnership and prior relational experiences of both partners. The study concluded that cohabitation has a unique place in emerging adults’ relationship landscape and may set the groundwork for future relationship functioning.