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Trade-offs that involve secular values of money and sacred human values are often seen as taboo. This paper aims to examine how consumers avoid making taboo trade-offs with anthropomorphized products, by choosing options that ensure the well-being of the humanized products, even at a financial cost to themselves.

The authors conducted five experiments, across different marketplace contexts (i.e. repairing, buying and selling), to test the broad generalizability of the extent to which consumers are willing to incur a financial cost due to concern for the well-being of anthropomorphized products.

The results reveal that consumers are willing to accept financially inferior options to protect the humanness endowed upon anthropomorphized products. The effect is mediated by consumers’ concern for the treatment of the anthropomorphized product. The effect is moderated by consumers’ trait empathy level, such that those low in empathy are willing to sacrifice human value for the sake of greater financial gain.

Future research could examine, in the context of anthropomorphized products, if there are types of human values that are less inviolable, leading consumers to be more willing to trade them off for monetary gains.

The findings have direct implications for second-hand markets. For potential buyers of anthropomorphized products, they should signal concern for the product; for sellers, anthropomorphizing their products can reduce haggling behavior. From a sustainability perspective, consumers may be more motivated to repair or recycle their products if it is framed as “infusing new life” into their products.

This work highlights a novel effect of anthropomorphism: when marketplace decisions are involved, anthropomorphizing a product can introduce a tension between secular monetary values and sacred human values. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this work is the first to show that consumers are willing to incur a monetary loss to protect the humanness of anthropomorphized product, driven by their concern for the proper treatment of such humanized products.

The purpose of this paper is to elucidate the moral dimensions of accounting by examining the case of Gross National Happiness (GNH) in Bhutan, and to propose a new approach to accounting that is grounded in the Buddhist principle of the Middle Path. This approach aims to promote well-being and happiness, contrasting with traditional accounting practices.

The paper outlines the core concepts of the Middle Path theory and GNH. The authors first problematise the role of traditional accounting in the well-being and happiness project. The authors explore accountability from the Middle Path perspective, which is a key aspect of Buddhist philosophy. Using the concept of Middle Path accountability and GNH in practice, the authors then examine accounting in terms of the four “immeasurable moral virtues” (tshad med bzhi) of the Middle Path. The authors conclude by highlighting the value of the Middle Path for conceptualising accountability and emancipating contemporary accounting from its ethical and theoretical constraints.

This paper compares the application of traditional accounting and accountability with the Middle Path and GNH practices. The authors find that ethical discourses in traditional accounting and accountability are not compatible with the values of the Middle Path, thereby limiting the scope of accounting and accountability. This constraint is overcome by introducing four “immeasurable moral virtues” (tshad med bzhi) of Buddhism, which promote spiritual development (wisdom) to replace the existing ethical strands of traditional accounting and accountability to support the well-being and happiness project.

The study is limited to the review of concepts in GNH and Buddhist philosophy. More empirical studies in different contextual settings could increase understanding of how the practice of Middle Path and GNH could drive the project of well-being and happiness through accounting.

The paper seeks to contribute to the operationalisation of GNH in organisation by framing social and well-being accounting grounded in the Middle Path theory. The authors also seek to clarify the role of accounting as a social and moral practice.

Situated within the fields of social and moral accounting, the paper seeks to elevate the potential role of accounting in the promotion of well-being and happiness of people and other sentient beings. By applying four moral virtues of love, compassion, appreciative joy and equanimity in accounting, the authors seek to enhance the role of accounting that could potentially reduce poverty, social inequity, corruption and promote harmony and cultural well-being.

This study undertakes a conceptual integration of the GNH and Middle Path philosophy to understand the theoretical and ethical implications of traditional accounting and accountability. This contribution to the literature expands the possibilities of accounting and accountability on social and well-being accounting by introducing the Middle Path and GNH concepts.

This chapter presents three Chinese teachers' narrative accounts about how they live in dilemmatic spaces due to excessive entitlement. Still, the teachers move forward with transformative agency. The thick description of the three teacher participants has been reported elsewhere as the narratives of Lee – a math teacher, Ping – a Chinese language teacher and Wang – a school principal. In this chapter, however, ‘excessive teacher entitlement’ is used as a new lens to assist me in revisiting their stories of living in dilemmatic spaces. Narrative inquiry as a method unpacks the three teachers' life experiences. Although Lee, Ping and Wang encounter different entitlements and various dilemmas, their transformative agency in transitioning from a survival mode to thriving human beings brings out the similarities in their experiences. Using Vygotskian philosophy and cultural-historical activity theory (CHAT), this chapter focuses on the teachers' transformative agency as breaking away from given boundaries in their professional lives and taking up initiatives that confront the tacit excessive entitlement in and around them. Furthermore, transformative agency is promising in that it helps develop new practices in teacher education. Finally, the new understanding emanating by viewing the three subjects' experiences from the angle of excessive entitlement has the potential to inspire teachers in other contexts to become conscious of manifestations of excessive entitlement not only in themselves or others they interact with but also in the macro context we live in. This consciousness also increases the likelihood of the urge to find ways to ameliorate excessive entitlement and to move closer to one's cherished professional values.

The paper aims to elaborate on the potential for regeneration of Bagamoyo (Tanzania) through adaptive reuse of its heritage sites. The town was the most important harbour for ivory and slaves of the East-African mainland during the 19th and early 20th century and the colonial capital of German East-Africa between 1885 and 1890. Today, it has 85,000 inhabitants who mainly live in informal settlements while stone town closer to the coast is largely abandoned with its historical buildings in a poor state of conservation.

The first part of the paper describes the history and heritage of the old stone town Bagamoyo, and how it impacts its identity. Additionally, it summarises the critical reception of the town's role in the application to UNESCO World Heritage for “The Central Slave and Ivory Trade Route”. This, in order to consider the reuse of its heritage sites more as part of a layered regeneration process than of a singular narrative for preservation. The second part presents research-by-design proposals investigating the economic, social and cultural potentialities of three spatial layers: the main street, the coastal strip and the shoreline.

The identity and therefore also urban regeneration of post-colonial towns such as Bagamoyo is the result of a complex combination of different narratives rather than of a singular one.

Bagamoyo's heritage has been studied as a driver for international tourism linked to slavery but without successful implementation. This study proposes an alternative perspective by investigating its potential for urban regeneration in line with local needs. Developed in the context of a master studio of architectural design, it presents an innovative didactic approach. Moreover, the methodology of research-by-design can be inspirational for other historical towns.

Environmental philosophies have guided cultures throughout history and continue to do so. This paper uses a framework of environmental philosophies drawn from history and the present, to analyse contemporary corporate environmental reporting. The purpose of this paper is to interrogate the philosophical underpinnings of corporate reporting allows for a nuanced understanding of the relationship between corporate activities and nature, and in so doing demonstrates the moral practices of accounting for nature.

Three themes are extracted from a historical review of western environmental philosophy: dualism, transcendence and interconnectivity. These themes are applied to a sample of corporate environmental reports through discourse analysis, enabling the illustration of otherwise obscured moral characteristics of the corporate relationship with the natural environment.

This paper uses environmental philosophies to better understand some of the implicit messaging of corporate environmental reporting. Evidence of each of the three themes is found in a sample of environmental reports, predominantly dualism and interconnectivity.

Understanding that accounting is not just a technical, but also a social and moral practice expands the way the authors can interpret the outcomes of accounting. By presenting an exemplar of how accounting practice such as the corporate sustainability report can be analysed through a moral lens, this paper offers new insights intentioned to inform a more meaningful approach to environmental reporting.

A novel framework to explore the corporate sector’s relationship with the natural environment is presented. In light of current and predicted environmental changes, much of which has been attributed to the impact of corporate activities, the importance of a detailed explication of this relationship – such as the one proposed here – becomes imperative.

This paper aims to identify the effectiveness, student perceptions and impacts of integrating comics into the English as a foreign language (EFL) writing curriculum for undergraduate Ecuadorian polytechnic students.

This research followed a mixed method design to obtain quantitative information through a researcher-made survey and paired T-test, which would be corroborated by the qualitative data obtained from semistructured interviews.

From the descriptive and T-test results and the interview answers, it is concluded that students have a favorable view of the effectiveness of using comics to improve their writing skills. They also expressed their engagement and motivation to work with comics.

First, the research sample, comprised of 109 students, may restrict the generalizability of the findings beyond the specific context of this study. This constraint suggests caution in extrapolating these findings to broader student cohorts, emphasizing the need for larger-scale studies to validate the robustness and applicability of the outcomes. Second, the study’s focus solely on students from a polytechnic state university introduces a potential limitation concerning the diversity and representativeness of the participant pool. Consequently, the findings might be limited in their applicability and may not fully encompass students’ varied responses and attitudes from other educational backgrounds.

The scaffolding afforded by comics aligns with genre-based literacy perspectives, valuing instruction in textual genres and social purposes. From a practical pedagogical point of view, this paper’s results suggest the potential of comic narratives and storyboarding. Comics writing could be added to classroom activities to vibrantly aboard brainstorming, drafting and peer reviewing before dealing with higher-stakes assignments. Legitimizing alternative mediums like comics for academic writing tasks has social implications for promoting literacies in a multimedia world.

Writing comics nurtures multiliteracies aligned with participatory digital cultures by expanding traditional linguistic-centric norms. This multimodal composing can potentially increase access and representation and amplify voices across identities and cultures.

Although the paper addresses a topic that is not entirely novel in research, its originality lies in its focus on data originating from Ecuador, where specific cultural nuances and educational contexts may influence the effectiveness of using comics to enhance EFL writing skills. Thus, it fills a gap in the existing literature on this subject.

Despite the plethora of scholarship outputs on masculinity showing it as a fertile research domain, there are noteworthy lacunae on the topic especially in relation to its dynamics among ethnic minority groups. Accordingly, this paper aims to address masculinity and symbolic consumption among Black African consumers in the UK.

The study is interpretive in nature with the use of in-depth interviews conducted with 20 participants in London and the data analysis follows the grounded theory orientation.

It shows masculinity-oriented categorisations of market offerings but with an incidence of cultural tension. It suggests the prevalence of symbolic consumption among participants as demonstrated in their quest for admiration and commendation about their consumption and how masculinity is communicated. A new masculinity typology emerged from the study which depicts men in this context as falling into four categories of gay, conservative, contemporary and men on acme.

The study unpacks issues around masculinity, and multiculturalism, and proposes a novel typology on the topic vis-à-vis the discourse on segmentation, targeting and positioning strategy.

Despite the growing popularity of SHVL fashion, there is little empirical focus on the antecedent factors that influence consumers’ intention to purchase and recommend SHVL fashion. Drawing on insights from the stimulus–organism–response framework, this paper aims to investigate the motivational factors influencing the consumers’ attitudes and their intention to purchase and recommend SHVL fashion.

Primary data was gathered from 232 present customers of SHVL fashion products and analysed using the partial least square structural equation modelling.

Research findings show that eco-consciousness, treasure hunting, status consumption and the need for uniqueness were positively linked to intentions to purchase SHVL fashion through the intervening role of attitude. Attitude was positively linked with purchase intentions, which also positively influenced intention to recommend SHVL fashion.

The study findings assist brand managers in understanding how they can cater to the diverse needs of SHVL fashion consumers.

This research contributes significantly to the SHVL domain by examining core antecedents that motivate consumers’ intention to purchase and recommend SHVL fashion.

A pesar de la creciente popularidad de la moda de lujo vintage de segunda mano (SHVL), hay poco enfoque empírico en los factores antecedentes que influyen en la intención de los consumidores de comprar y recomendar moda de lujo vintage de segunda mano. Basándose en ideas del marco S-O-R, este documento investiga los factores motivacionales que influyen en las actitudes de los consumidores y su intención de comprar y recomendar moda de lujo vintage de segunda mano.

Se recopilaron datos primarios de 232 clientes actuales de productos de moda de lujo vintage de segunda mano y se analizaron utilizando el modelado de ecuaciones estructurales de mínimos cuadrados parciales.

Los hallazgos de la investigación muestran que la conciencia ecológica, la búsqueda de tesoros, el consumo de estatus y la necesidad de unicidad están vinculados positivamente con las intenciones de comprar moda de lujo vintage de segunda mano a través del papel intermediario de la actitud. La actitud se vinculó positivamente con las intenciones de compra, lo que también influyó positivamente en la intención de recomendar moda de lujo vintage de segunda mano.

Los hallazgos del estudio ayudan a los gerentes de marca a entender cómo pueden atender las diversas necesidades de los consumidores de moda de lujo vintage de segunda mano.

Esta investigación contribuye significativamente al dominio de la moda de lujo vintage de segunda mano al examinar los antecedentes clave que motivan la intención de los consumidores de comprar y recomendar moda de lujo vintage de segunda mano.

尽管二手复古奢侈品时尚（SHVL）日益流行, 但关于影响消费者购买和推荐二手复古奢侈品意图的前因因素的实证研究却很少。基于S-O-R框架的洞察, 本研究探讨了影响消费者态度及其购买和推荐二手复古奢侈品时尚意图的动机因素。

从232名现有二手复古奢侈品时尚产品的顾客中收集了主要数据, 并使用偏最小二乘结构方程模型（PLS-SEM）进行了分析。

研究发现, 环保意识、寻宝乐趣、地位消费和独特性需求通过态度的中介作用, 与购买二手复古奢侈品的意图正相关。态度与购买意图正相关, 购买意图也正向影响推荐二手复古奢侈品的意图。

研究结果帮助品牌经理了解如何满足二手复古奢侈品消费者的多样化需求。

本研究通过考察核心前因因素对消费者购买和推荐二手复古奢侈品时尚意图的动机的影响, 为二手复古奢侈品领域做出了重要贡献。