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The purpose of this paper is to explore the relationships between self‐construals and decision‐making styles of Korean college students.

A total of 872 Korean college students from three different Korean university campuses completed three‐part questionnaires (self‐construal, decision making styles and demographic information).

It was found that Korean college students' decision‐making styles can vary according to their self‐construals.

Although data were collected from three different universities located in different geographic locations, the study was conducted using a convenience sample rather than a random sample. Therefore, a randomly selected, diverse and geographical sampling is recommended to be able to generalize results from such a study to the total Korean college student population.

Findings suggest that high‐end luxury imported goods might appeal to Korean college students with Independent self‐construals. Even though there is an emerging new group of students with an independent self‐construal, the majority of Korean college students still hold a higher interdependent self‐construal than independent self‐construal. Therefore, different marketing strategies should be developed according to the different market segments among the Korean college students based on the different clothing product categories and quality.

Despite the growing global market and importance of studying cultural differences, little information about the influence of culture on consumer behaviour is available. The findings of the dual‐self concept within the Korean culture and their close relationship with decision‐making styles contribute to the theoretical knowledge base of contemporary consumer behaviour.

Co‐ordinated by their scholarly association, textile/apparel faculty from multiple universities have succeeded in establishing a World Wide Web server dedicated to providing information from across their disciplines to enhance instruction. The process of server establishment and Web‐site creation including funding, determination of information for posting, problems encountered, and future plans are reviewed. Other faculty could use this as a guide in establishing servers and Web sites for their own disciplines.

The research purpose was to identify whether changes occurred between 2000 and 2003 in the retail channel use of rural consumers for searching product information and for purchasing food and fiber products and to investigate whether differences existed between channel use groups (i.e. store only shoppers, store and catalog shoppers, and multi‐channel shoppers) concerning perceived time property, satisfaction with local offerings, community attachment, shopping criteria, and financial security.

Survey methodology was used. Questionnaires were mailed to participants living in non‐metropolitan statistical areas of the USA with populations less than 12,500. In 2000, 2,198 participants returned the questionnaire. Follow‐up questionnaires were mailed to the same participants during 2003 and returned by 847 participants. The analysis is based on the responses of the 847 participants.

To search for information on apparel, food, or home furnishing products, internet use increased slightly as did use of the internet to purchase apparel and home furnishings. Multi‐channel shoppers rated themselves as time‐pressed, dissatisfied with local offerings, unattached to their community, and unconcerned with financial security while shopping.

Rural consumers are slowly increasing their use of internet even as they report their satisfaction with shopping with local brick and mortar stores increased during the time period studied. The time is right for rural retailers to enhance both personal and professional relationships with their customers. Rural retailers can capitalize on consumer satisfaction and provide outstanding value and service to keep local customers in local markets.

The paper provides information on new and different retailing practices that satisfy rural consumers in the USA.

The aim of this paper is to offer a comprehensive overview of the field of international human resource management (IHRM) research by tracing its evolutionary development over a 24-year period. The study seeks to understand how the field has progressed by considering historical research themes and their subsequent integration into more recent scholarly work, thereby identifying current and emerging research trends.

This paper employs bibliometric analysis to examine the evolutionary path of IHRM research from 1995 to 2019. A dataset of 1,507 articles from journals specializing in IHRM, international business and general management was created. Analysis at the keyword, thematic and network levels was conducted to identify trends, historical context and the interrelatedness of research themes.

The analysis reveals that IHRM research has gone through several phases of thematic focus, from initial emphasis on cultural differences and expatriate management to more recent topics like global talent management and digital transformation. Earlier research themes continue to be incorporated and re-contextualized in modern scholarship, highlighting the field’s dynamic nature.

This paper is one of the first to use a bibliometric approach to systematically examine the evolution of IHRM research. It not only provides a historical perspective but also outlines future research trends, incorporating the institutional logic perspective. The findings offer deep insights that are valuable for researchers, practitioners and policymakers interested in the development of IHRM research and its practical implications.

There is a growing trend in online shopping in developing and underdeveloped economies. Measuring web retail service quality is vital to enhance and retain online customers for higher profits. As a result, it is essential to understand e-service quality and its relationship with other e-commerce-related variables identified as customer satisfaction, word-of-mouth (WOM), loyalty and repurchase intention. The main objective of this research is to validate the psychometric properties of E-TailQ and ES-Qual scales to measure e-service quality in the context of an emerging economy.

The study was administered by surveying online customers through a convenience sampling approach. The sample data consisted of 329 valid responses. The data were analyzed using confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) and structural equation modeling (SEM).

The results suggest that both the scales are valid, reliable and adequate and confirm the psychometric properties of E-TailQ and ES-Qual scales in an emerging economy context. There is a positive and significant relationship between latent variables (E-TailQ and ES-Qual) and customer outcome variables like satisfaction, loyalty, WOM and repurchase intention. Additionally, the coefficients of the E-TailQ scale have higher values than ES-Qual scales in all dimensions. The perceived quality proved to be a precedent of satisfaction to a lesser extent than other scales' constructs, and it proved to be a superior predictor of WOM for the E-TailQ scale and loyalty for the ES-Qual scale. Overall, when measured by the ES-Qual scale, perceived quality could explain much of the sample's satisfaction, loyalty and repurchase intention compared to E-TailQ.

One of the significant limitations of this study is related to the data collection, as individual responses were collected at one particular point in time. Thus, it is impossible to verify the development of perceived service quality outcomes over a specific time. Another possible limitation is the selection of only two widely used scales, although other options are available in the literature. Finally, developing a new scale to address future challenges might be another alternative.

The results obtained in the study will help managers assess customer satisfaction, the reputation of the business through WOM, and customer intentions for the repurchase that will lead to loyalty by emphasizing e-service quality. It will enable them to design strategies for improving business performance. The developed instrument will assist in identifying the gaps and describing how service quality can achieve higher levels of customer satisfaction.

Several studies in the literature have used E-TailQ and ES-Qual scales to measure e-service quality in developed countries. Only a few studies addressed the validity of these widely used competing scales in an emerging economy like Pakistan. This study addresses the literature gap by addressing the reliability and validity of these scales and assesses the impact of e-commerce-related variables. Besides, the study reveals insights into the literature by addressing multiple dimensions of e-service quality and summarizes a deep understanding of each scale item that affects the perceived quality in a developing economy like Pakistan.

The ongoing impact of COVID-19 and the subsequent perception of threat have shifted consumer perceptions and evaluations of service experiences. This paper aims to investigate how customers’ service evaluation is shared as customer reviews following the pandemic and the heightened perception of threat. In doing so, this research particularly investigates the shifts in the textual contents of online reviews.

This study used the textual contents in the online reviews posted on Hotels.com for 1,497 hotels in New York City for empirical analysis. In total, 109,190 observations were used for the analysis.

By analyzing actual online review data from an online review platform for hotel services, this study finds that the text reviews generated after the pandemic outbreak tend to contain words with stronger negative emotions. In terms of the pronoun choice, this study further finds that the use of “I” increases while the use of “we” decreases.

This research adds to the existing literature on service evaluation and online customer reviews by showing that there are shifts in the expressions used to communicate service evaluation through online text reviews, including the degree of emotionality and pronoun usage. Because potential customers are likely to rely on online reviews for their own decisions, the findings suggest that it is important for practitioners to be aware of such shifts and respond accordingly.

Vast volumes of rich online consumer-generated content (CGC) can be used effectively to gain important insights for decision-making, product improvement and brand management. Recently, many studies have proposed semi-supervised aspect-based sentiment classification of unstructured CGC. However, most of the existing CGC mining methods rely on explicitly detecting aspect-based sentiments and overlooking the context of sentiment-bearing words. Therefore, this study aims to extract implicit context-sensitive sentiment, and handle slangs, ambiguous, informal and special words used in CGC.

A novel text mining framework is proposed to detect and evaluate implicit semantic word relations and context. First, POS (part of speech) tagging is used for detecting aspect descriptions and sentiment-bearing words. Then, LDA (latent Dirichlet allocation) is used to group similar aspects together and to form an attribute. Semantically and contextually similar words are found using the skip-gram model for distributed word vectorisation. Finally, to find context-sensitive sentiment of each attribute, cosine similarity is used along with a set of positive and negative seed words.

Experimental results using more than 400,000 Amazon mobile phone reviews showed that the proposed method efficiently found product attributes and corresponding context-aware sentiments. This method also outperforms the classification accuracy of the baseline model and state-of-the-art techniques using context-sensitive information on data sets from two different domains.

Extracted attributes can be easily classified into consumer issues and brand merits. A brand-based comparative study is presented to demonstrate the practical significance of the proposed approach.

This paper presents a novel method for context-sensitive attribute-based sentiment analysis of CGC, which is useful for both brand and product improvement.

In every country, specific cultures exist. In comparison most businesses have a variety of different cultures because there are different people working within the company. People with the same religion, language, beliefs and values share a culture. This, in turn, is shared with all types of people in the same cultural system. Here the author examines the art of managing people who are from different cultures, taking into account their different set of values, traditions, and ways of achieving various goals. It exposes some of the problems inherent in the host (local) country where a home (parent company) manager refuses or is incapable of internalizing the local culture in which the expatriate operates. Business tactics are enforced and implemented differently depending on the culture the decision‐maker is from. Therefore, one should always think globally and act locally.

IF THE Guinness book of records is still watching these columns, I can now tell them that, after all, Mrs Carole Bignell's hope (NLW February p30) that she had established a record by registering her daughter as a library member at the tender age of two weeks must be dashed. Ken Bowden, District Librarian at Bacup, Lanes (where he gets his copy of NLW a little late), writes that not only did one of his neighbours enrol his daughter when she was five days old some years ago, but that Ken's own son entered the world in February 1977 and was enrolled at Bacup on his third day. Any advance on three days?

COVID-19 played a crucial role in the development and enlargement of learning via electronic media. Still, the recent fourth industrial revolution [Industry 4.0 (I4.0)] paved the road toward Education 4.0. In this regard, several research challenges arise, involving the preparation of gamification strategies in online learning environments. In this sense, this paper aims to investigate the relationship between technologies of I4.0 and gamification practices in online learning around the world. Specifically, to categorize the studies of the scientific literature in the area into knowledge domains and the mention of I4.0 technologies and to verify the relationship of these technologies with the different educational levels.

The preferred reporting items for systematic reviews and meta-analysis protocol was used as a research method with 130 papers included for full content analysis and obtained from the Web of Science.

The leading I4.0 technologies mentioned in the analyzed papers were simulation, Internet of Things and augmented/virtual reality, in this order. Although there are more mentioned technologies, the domain of knowledge to be applied and the educational level interfere in choosing these pillars. With this, the main findings of this relationship were exposed in a singular, modern, active, realist, technological framework to demonstrate how I4.0 relates to the practice of gamification in online educational environments.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study that brings together the relationship of gamification applied in e-learning with I4.0 technologies.