Search results

Purchase intention of consumers depends on their perception of the extent to which his expectations will be met through the product. This issue, in the context of the products that are immediately purchased by consumer, depends on the extent of relationship in the point of sale. Packaging is one of the most significant factors influencing purchase decision in the point of sale. In this research, the purpose is evaluating the impact of using Islamic symbols in food packaging on the purchase intention of Muslim consumers.

The authors surveyed Muslim consumers through a questionnaire and analyzed the gathered data through partial least squares (PLS).

The findings reveal the positive impact of Islamic symbols in food packaging on purchase intention of Muslim consumers. However, this effect was confirmed regarding people with high religiosity. The findings show that religious symbol in packaging increases perceived religious symbolic-value of the product among the customers with high religiosity.

Findings of this paper help marketers that are seeking to promote their products in Islamic markets identify the importance of religious symbols and understand when and how to use these symbols in packaging.

This paper aims to study the symbolic categorisations management accountants produce. It examines the categories they use to describe their work and analyses the meanings they attach to such categories. This aims at explaining how management accountants can follow a common occupational orientation despite the need to adjust their practices to the specificities of their local and organisational context. The author’s argument is that management accountants build symbolic categories to create a bridge between what they do and who they are. The author further argues that symbolic categories are needed to make sense of a practice in tension between a common aspirational orientation and heterogeneous local contexts.

This paper draws on a multiple case field study conducted by observation and interviews in a range of organisations.

This paper examines the empirical diversity of management accountants’ practices and perceptions through the symbolic categories they produce. The author finds that categorisation work constitutes a central mechanism to build a shared narrative despite heterogeneous situations. The author further shows that through symbolic categorisation work, a variety of activities ranging from bookkeeping through managerial support to hierarchical surveillance and challenge in the name of the shareholder are subsumed under stable labels. This, he argues, serves to mask financial accountability, shareholder orientation and hierarchical control behind a narrative of “support” and “partnership”.

This paper contributes to literature on management accountants’ identity by showing the central role played by symbolic categorisations. It also contributes to literature in accounting more generally by showing how symbolic categorisation work blurs the lines between “operational support” and “shareholder value creation”. The same words are used to refer to activities that managers consider helpful to make operational decisions and other activities that increase shareholder control and surveillance and encourage managers to internalise the frames and objectives of shareholder value creation. Symbolic categories that include hierarchical financial accountability within a narrative of “support” and “partnership” masks “financialisation” behind a rhetoric of “business orientation”.

The “first generation” (Lammers, 1978, p. 486) of comparative analysis of organizations in sociology (e.g., Blau, 1965; Stinchcombe, 1959) focused on the “nuts and bolts” of organizational structure as the key criterion with which to derive organizational typologies (Perrow, 1967; Pugh, Hickson, & Hinings, 1969). This initial cohort of analysts saw the intrinsic features – or “organizational attributes” (Blau, 1965, p. 326) – constitutive of the “technical core” of the organization, such as features related to the organization of the production process (Perrow, 1967) or the structure of allocation of discretion and authority (e.g., Etzioni, 1961), as the royal road to the development of a cogent approach to comparative analysis of organizations.

It has been suggested that “space and artifacts constitute systems of communication which organizations build up within themselves” (Gagliardi, 1992a, b, p. vi) and reflect the cultural life within that organization. This is a study of how the “landscape” of a public library (“Library X”), as an information retrieval system, relates to the values of the people who created it. The efforts here are geared towards understanding the physical instantiation of institutional culture and, more specifically, institutional values as they are reflected through the artifact.

This research explores the impact of classical aesthetics (e.g. order and symmetry) and expressive aesthetics (e.g. creativity and distinctiveness) on consumer green consumption.

This research conducted three studies. Study 1 explored the main effect of appearance aesthetics (appearance: plain vs classical vs expressive) on green products purchase intention through a one-factor between-subjects design. Study 2 verified the mediating role of perceived naturalness through two types of appearance aesthetics (appearance: classical vs expressive) between-subjects design. Study 3 verified the moderating role of product identity-symbolic attributes through a 2 (product identity-symbolic attributes: non-identity-symbolic vs identity-symbolic attributes) × 2 (appearance: classical aesthetics vs expressive aesthetics) between-subjects design.

Consumers will be more likely to purchase a green product that has classical aesthetics appearance (vs expressive aesthetics). Perceived naturalness mediates the effect of aesthetic appearance on consumer green consumption. Product identity symbol attributes moderate this effect. Specifically, for non-identity-symbolic green products, classical aesthetics can effectively enhance consumer purchase intention. For identity-symbolic green products, expressive aesthetics can effectively enhance consumer purchase intention.

Existing research suggests that aesthetic appearance can increase consumers’ evaluation of electronic products, beauty products and food, but the difference between aesthetics has not yet been explored. This research compares two aesthetics, contributing to the literature on aesthetic appearance in green products and offering valuable insights for managers’ green products marketing.

Scholars have primarily focused on how language represents categories. We move beyond this conception to develop a discursive perspective of market categorization focused on how categories are constructed through communicative exchanges. The discursive perspective points to three under-researched mechanisms of category evolution: (1) the interaction between market participants, (2) the power dynamics among market participants and within the discourse, and (3) the cultural and material context in which categories are constructed. In this theoretical paper, we discuss how each of these mechanisms shed light on different phases of category evolution and the methods that could be used to study them.

The symbolic value of wine is a relevant research topic and raises the interest in studies in both the enological and market areas. In this context, this study aims to understand the role of the symbolic value of wine and its relationship to the product purchase intention.

The study is based on a survey of 269 wine consumers from Brazil. The basic theoretical framework includes three latent constructs (symbolic value, consumer attitude and product-norm experience) and three moderators (consumer involvement, willingness to pay and consumer preference). Relations between these are analyzed using the confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) and the moderated mediation analyses using Haye’s process.

This research identified that the symbolic value is totally mediated by consumers’ attitudes and product-norm experiences. However, such a relationship occurs directly for consumers with higher involvement with the product, higher willingness to pay, and who assume that wine is their preferred alcoholic beverage.

One of the contributions is to emphasize the symbolic value of wine and highlight how the relationship with different factors can interfere and explain consumer purchase intention and can influence the strategies, actions and investments of companies in the sector.

The purpose of this study is to investigate how combined nutrition labelling influences consumer attitudes, subjective norms, perceived behavioural control and purchase intention for sugar-sweetened beverages (SSBs).

This study adopted a mixed method research, quasi-experimental design with 406 valid Taiwanese samples to evaluate the possible effects of combined nutrition labelling on SSB purchase intention; two focus group interviews with four nutritional experts and 12 students were conducted to explain how and why consumers perceived different types of combined nutritional labels.

Combined labels including sugar type/gram with the guideline daily amounts and traffic light display were perceived by consumers as high-quality and reliable, which improved consumer attitude and SSB purchase intention. Consumers perceived the traffic light display and warning claim as a sugar over-consumption message, which reduced SSB purchase intention through subject norms.

Governments should be aware that concrete nutritional information (NIP) leads to the worst SSB consumption. Moreover, the authors suggest that policymakers emphasise the effectiveness of warning claims on SSB products with “sufficient” sugar information to trigger consumers' concern, remind SSB manufacturers of their moral obligation to consumers.

This study identified that the combined effects of nutritional attributes and parts of meanings might be enhanced, eliminated or even separated from their original meaning. Although the label messages were delivered simultaneously, the consumer's psychological perceptions proved to be more complicated than a single attribute and sequentially affected consumer attitudes, subject norms and SSB purchase intention.