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The purpose of this study is to examine the predictors of product placement acceptance in social networking sites (SNSs) and the mediating role of consumer materialism in the relationship between SNSs usage frequency and product placement acceptance.

A survey was conducted with a structured questionnaire for a sample of 327 SNSs users in Sri Lanka. The collected data were analyzed using partial least squares–structural equation modeling with Smart PLS to test the hypotheses derived.

The results of this study revealed that SNSs usage frequency and consumer materialism positively predict the acceptance of product placement in SNSs and materialism partially mediates the relationship between SNSs usage frequency and product placement acceptance in SNSs.

This study fills the gap in the existing literature by finding the factors that predict the acceptance of product placement in SNSs and the mediation effect of consumer materialism in the relationship between SNSs usage frequency and acceptance of product placement in SNSs.

This chapter critically examines whether it may be possible to create an AI-based authentic leader, questioning the inherent contradiction between artificial and authentic. The authors pose central research questions: Does the application of AI – even just as a powerful resource – challenge the tenets of authentic leadership? What are the possibilities and limitations of the concept of authenticity in AI-based management systems? Moreover, with the help of three vignettes illustrating practical applications of AI-based systems in leadership and management tasks, the authors illustrate how technology may be used to either control or empower workers and leaders. The authors call for research to assess whether the search for authenticity in AI-based leadership could lead anywhere, warning that it could entrap us in unresolvable existential and conceptual ambiguity, ultimately diverting our focus from the essence of leadership altogether.

Since the development of the COVID-19 vaccinations, questions surrounding race have been prominent in the literature on vaccine uptake. Early in the vaccine rollout, public health officials were concerned with the relatively lower rates of uptake among certain racial/ethnic minority groups. We suggest that this may also be patterned by racial/ethnic residential segregation, which previous work has demonstrated to be an important factor for both health and access to health care.

In this study, we examine county-level vaccination rates, racial/ethnic composition, and residential segregation across the U.S. We compile data from several sources, including the American Community Survey (ACS) and Centers for Disease Control (CDC) measured at the county level.

We find that just looking at the associations between racial/ethnic composition and vaccination rates, both percent Black and percent White are significant and negative, meaning that higher percentages of these groups in a county are associated with lower vaccination rates, whereas the opposite is the case for percent Latino. When we factor in segregation, as measured by the index of dissimilarity, the patterns change somewhat. Dissimilarity itself was not significant in the models across all groups, but when interacted with race/ethnic composition, it moderates the association. For both percent Black and percent White, the interaction with the Black-White dissimilarity index is significant and negative, meaning that it deepens the negative association between composition and the vaccination rate.

The analysis is only limited to county-level measures of racial/ethnic composition and vaccination rates, so we are unable to see at the individual-level who is getting vaccinated.

We find that segregation moderates the association between racial/ethnic composition and vaccination rates, suggesting that local race relations in a county helps contextualize the compositional effects of race/ethnicity.

In this manuscript, the authors argue that those suffering from depressive symptoms are prone to experiencing bouts of unproductivity. The authors argue further that such conditions promote instances of self-disclosure regarding related symptoms in the interest of procuring workplace support, i.e. the effect of depressive symptomology on workplace support is mediated by both unproductivity and self-disclosure, in turn.

Two different online investigations were implemented to assess the accuracy of this prediction. Moreover, two different samples of organizational employees from numerous organizations were procured, such that one sample contained diagnosed individuals, whereas the other contained undiagnosed individuals (total N = 756). In general, the main analyses consisted of confirmatory factor analysis and path analysis.

Substantial statistical support was obtained for the authors' four-variable path model. Specifically, across two different investigations, a model was found in which those with depressive symptoms were unproductive, which prompted self-disclosure and thus subsequent manifestations of workplace support. Moreover, this was generally true for both diagnosed and undiagnosed individuals. Correlation coefficients and model fit indices are reported in the manuscript.

This work contributes substantially to the understanding of how depressive symptomology, self-disclosure and workplace support are interrelated within organizations. In addition, having examined these relationships using a sample of undiagnosed individuals, new insights were gained regarding a subset of the population that remains vastly understudied.

The figure of the femme fatale is attached to a range of contested meanings around femininity, sexuality and violence. Despite its ambiguity and its origins in art, myth and fiction, the term has proven popular in giving a name to violent articulations of female power in non-fictional settings by journalists. In this chapter, I outline the figure of the femme fatale as an archetype of women's violence that appears throughout Western popular culture, and provide an overview of the term's definitions and cultural meanings. In doing so, I trace the figure's movement across different forms and genres of popular culture. I identify a number of themes in the existing scholarship around the figure: feminist criticism of the figure; the value that feminist film scholars have found in the figure as a symbol of power and sexual transgression; the relationship between the femme fatale, race and the colonial imagination; and the way the idea of the femme fatale has been used in reporting of real-life women's violence.

Increasing focus on socially responsible investments (SRIs) and green projects in recent times, coupled with the arrival of COVID pandemic, are the main drivers of this study. The authors conduct a post-factum analysis of investor choice between sin and green investments before and through the COVID outbreak.

A passive investor is introduced who seeks maximum risk-adjusted return and/or investment variance. When presented an opportunity to add sin and/or green investments to her initial one-asset market-only investment position, she views and handles this issue as a portfolio problem (MPT). She estimates value-at-risk (VaR) and conditional-value-at-risk (CVaR) for portfolios to account for downside risk.

Green investments offer better overall risk-return optimization in spite of major inter-period differences in return-risk dynamics and substantial downside risk. Portfolios optimized for minimum variance perform just as well as the ones optimized for minimum downside risk. Return and risk have settled at higher levels since the onset of COVID, resulting in shifting the efficient frontier towards north-east in the return-risk space.

The study contributes to the literature in two ways: One, it examines investor choice between sin and green investments during a global health emergency and views this choice against the one made during normal times. Two, instead of using the principles of modern portfolio theory (MPT) explicitly for diversification, the study uses them to identify investor preference for one over the other investment type. This has not been widely done thus far.