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To create and sustain a resource-based competitive advantage, managers acquire and develop specialized resources as they grow their firms. The authors argue that an important part of committing to a resource-based strategy is a willingness to keep spending on specialized resources during periods when sales and profits are down. The authors seek to validate this conjecture by examining whether such resource-based commitment to a customer-centered strategy results in improved customer satisfaction. The authors use the stickiness of selling, general, and administrative (SG&A) expenses to capture this commitment empirically. The authors first document that future customer satisfaction is positively associated with SG&A cost stickiness, consistent with the premise that the retention of specialized SG&A resources during low demand periods helps firms to build and maintain relationships with customers over time. Next, the authors test whether expected future benefits of customer satisfaction are enhanced when SG&A cost stickiness is higher. The authors find that the positive relation between Tobin’s Q and customer satisfaction is positively moderated by SG&A cost stickiness. Finally, the authors test whether earnings persistence, a quality of earnings associated with sustained performance over time, is positively associated with the interaction between customer satisfaction and SG&A cost stickiness. The authors find that it is. Their evidence supporting these predictions is consistent with the conjecture that resource-based commitment reflected in cost stickiness is an important dimension of creating and sustaining a resource-based competitive advantage.

Past research has established a relationship between the perceptions of fairness in the division of household labor and relationship satisfaction. Varying according to gender and time, this relationship has been found with differing outcomes, including relationship satisfaction, relationship happiness, divorce, and sexual frequency. Although this relationship has been well studied, little research has focused on how this relationship is moderated by relationship status. According to the Second Demographic Transition Theory (SDT), as societies become more “modern,” cohabitation will become more prevalent, eventually becoming socially and culturally equivalent to marriage. As such, it is vital to ask how cohabitation and marriage differ, or if they differ at all. Therefore, this gap is explored by asking, “How do perceptions of the division of household labor affect married and cohabitating heterosexual couples’ relationship happiness and chance of separation?” In order to answer this question, the National Survey of Families and Households (Wave III) is analyzed, with outcomes focusing on relationship happiness and chance of separation. Results indicate that when married and cohabitating individuals experience similar levels of happiness with their partner’s housework, they also experience similar levels of relationship happiness and chance of separation, with relationship status not affecting the impact happiness with partner’s housework has on these relationship outcomes. This suggests that cohabitation and marriage may continue to become more similar overall.

Purpose: The prominence of quality education for building sustainable development is undeniable and is distinctly pointed out in 1 of the 14 sustainable development goals (SDGs). In the same context, this study intends to investigate the role of university commitment, perceived organisational prestige, student satisfaction, and perceived employability in enhancing sustainability in higher education.

Need of the Study: To evaluate how student satisfaction mediates the relationship between university commitment, perceived organisational prestige, and perceived employability with sustainable university institutes.

Methodology: An adapted questionnaire was used in this study to capture the perception of 458 management graduates selected through the purposive sampling method. Partial least squares structural equation modelling (PLS-SEM) technique was used to analyse the data with the help of Smart PLS software.

Findings: The results of this study show that student satisfaction is the strongest predictor of sustainable university institutes. University commitment was found to lead to student satisfaction significantly. Furthermore, student satisfaction wasn’t found to play the role of mediator in the proposed model.

Practical Implications: This study aims to fulfil theoretical, research, and management implications for students, higher education institutes (HEIs), and policymakers. HEIs are recommended to instil university commitment, perceived organisational prestige and student satisfaction via various practices and amendments in their curriculum. Students are recommended to enhance their perceived employability to achieve career sustainability.

Using the American and the French time-use surveys, we examine whether people have a preference for a more diversified mix of activities, in the sense that they experience greater well-being when their time schedule contains many different activities rather than is concentrated on a very small number. This could be due to decreasing marginal utility, as is assumed for goods consumption, if each episode of time is conceived as yielding a certain level of utility per se. With returns to specialization, people would then face a trade-off between efficiency and diversity in choosing how to allocate time. We examine these issues and investigate potential gender differences, considering both instantaneous feelings and life satisfaction.

Recent research suggests positive links between adolescents' participation in sports and the quality of their relationships with their fathers. It is unclear, however, the degree to which the gendered nature of sports, and in particular the ways sports have been used to define and express masculinity, mean that these important links between sports participation and parent–child relationships might or might not extend to relationships with mothers. Recent scholarship connects joint recreational activities to mother–child relationships, but here we extend these ideas in connection to adolescents' formal sports participation. We use the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health from the United States to evaluate potential connections between adolescent sports participation and maternal relationships, focusing on the adolescent's perspective on joint activities with mother, closeness to and warmth and communication with mother, and satisfaction with the relationship with mother. We also examine whether these associations differ for boys and girls. We found that adolescents' sports participation was good for relationships with their mothers, but also that there were gender differences in how sport paid off for boys and girls. We discuss our findings in terms of contemporary shifts in gendered norms and conclude that gender may remain salient to how sports participation can promote mother–child relationships.

This study examines the relationship between food experience, emotion, place attachment, and tourists' revisit behavioral intention. A survey questionnaire is conducted on-site in Lukang and distributed to 408 tourists. The dimensions of food experience are established through factor analysis, and a hypothesized model of the relationships between the constructs is tested using structural equation modeling (SEM). The results indicate that tourists' food experiences included local flavor, media recommendation, local learning, life transfer, and interpersonal sharing. In addition, food experience has a significant impact on emotion and place attachment, and emotion has a substantial effect on place attachment. Finally, place attachment significantly impacts tourists' revisit behavioral intention. The study makes a significant theoretical contribution by identifying food experience, emotion, and place attachment as the salient predictors of heritage tourists' revisit intention. Furthermore, the study suggests that food experiences enhance effective bonding at tourism destinations.

In an era where health professionals are increasingly demanding, and communicative skills are one of the keys to improve the relationship with the patient. The communicative competencies of assertiveness, clarity in verbal and non-verbal language, and positivity, based on the positive construction of the patient’s health path, improve the therapeutic relationship, as well as the relationship between professionals in the world of health complexity. The ACP Model is validated with extensive application by hundreds of professionals in Portugal who use it daily. Active learning is one of the most effective means of raising awareness and involving the professionals who are learning and implementing the ACP Model.

In this chapter, we discuss menopause transition in the workplace and its implications for workplace well-being. This is an important work-life interface topic, given the increasing number of women who will work during transition. It is also a topic that we currently know relatively little about, particularly in relation to well-being. We present findings that demonstrate both that many women experience symptoms that are bothersome at work and that these frequently have negative effects for two elements of workplace well-being, job satisfaction and health well-being. We evidence that individual/job characteristics and workplace context can either improve or worsen experiences of transition symptoms and make recommendations on how organization and HR practice can be designed to support women in menopause transition. We argue that working with line managers to create a more supportive context is one of the most important strategies to implement. Our research is situated in the UK police service and has wider relevance across the Global North, where similar demographic patterns are experienced, and in other male-dominated organizations and sectors.

The COVID-19 pandemic, in addition to causing a very serious economic crisis, has slowed the path taken toward achieving gender equality. For example, the closure of third sector activities by governments has meant the loss of many jobs in this female-dominated sector (ILO, 2020; UN, 2020) slowing and hindering the professional careers of many women (Carli, 2020).

The objective of this work is to identify gender differences by analyzing the levels of sustainable development achieved by Italian regions. The Italian case in fact is very peculiar due to its historical territorial gap between the regions of the North (among the most developed) and those of the Center-South, which still show high gender inequalities. A Gender Sustainable Development Index (GSDI) will be constructed through the use of 50 indicators from the Benessere Equo e Sostenibile survey of Istat. The technique used is the stacking method (Landi, Ivaldi, & Testi, 2017; Norman, 2010), which was chosen for its high replicability of results. The results show that only 40% of Italian regions have higher levels of female sustainable development than male sustainable development. Moreover, the regions with the worst levels of both female and male sustainable development are located in the Center-South of the country, confirming the strong territorial gap present within the Italian Peninsula.

The 2019 coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic has profoundly affected family and school life. Evidence demonstrates how pandemic-induced online learning and home confinement can influence family dynamics and, consequently, students’ mental health and quality of life. This chapter extends the literature by building upon the perspective of family systems theory and focusing the analysis on graduate students who are underrepresented in COVID-19 research. Drawing from an online survey among 337 graduate students enrolled in a state university in the Philippines during the second year of the pandemic, this study examines the three family relationship domains (cohesion, expressiveness, and conflict), their predictive relationships with life satisfaction, and the mediating role of mental well-being on these relationships. Findings indicate favorable levels of cohesion, expressiveness, and conflict in the family. Respondents’ age, sex assigned at birth, and marital status were significantly correlated with at least one domain of family relationship. Cohesion and expressiveness yielded significant positive predictive relationships on mental well-being and life satisfaction. Furthermore, findings indicate the partial mediation of mental well-being on the relationship between cohesion and life satisfaction and full mediation on expressiveness and life satisfaction.