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During a brand crisis, consumers construct attributions to understand the cause of the crisis and to assign blame, with attributions of blame to firms consequently lowering brand attitudes. The purpose of this paper is to explore attributions of blame in performance- versus values-related brand crisis. Do consumers assign different levels of blame to values- versus performance-related brand crises?

The authors conducted three experimental studies, plus one pilot study, with American, British and Australian participants in which they manipulated the type of brand crisis as values- or performance-related to determine the extent to which consumers attribute blame to the firm and the effects of those attributions on consumers’ brand attitudes.

Findings indicated that consumers assign more blame to firms for a values-related brand crisis than for a performance-related brand crisis.

The findings of this study explain how consumers are harsher towards firms that violate some moral or social standards than those that exhibit product defects.

For branding and public relations officials, finding greater internal attribution for values-related brand crises offers implications for how and what information about such crises ought to be conveyed to manage consumer response and brand reputation.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, the findings are the first to explore attributions in blame toward values- and performance-related brand crises.

Online privacy pertains to an individual’s capacity to regulate and oversee the gathering and distribution of online information. Conversely, online privacy concern (OPC) pertains to the protection of personal information, along with the worries or convictions concerning potential risks and unfavorable outcomes associated with its collection, utilization and distribution. With a holistic approach to these relationships, this study aims to model the relationships between digital literacy (DL), digital data security awareness (DDSA) and OPC and how these relationships vary by gender.

The participants of this study are 2,835 university students. Data collection tools in the study consist of personal information form and three different scales. Partial least squares (PLS), structural equation modeling (SEM) and multi-group analysis (MGA) were used to test the framework determined in the context of the research purpose and to validate the proposed hypotheses.

DL has a direct and positive effect on digital data security awareness (DDSA), and DDSA has a positive effect on OPC. According to the MGA results, the hypothesis put forward in both male and female sub-samples was supported. The effect of DDSA on OPC is higher for males.

This study highlights the positive role of DL and perception of data security on OPC. In addition, MGA findings by gender reveal some differences between men and women.

The peer review history for this article is available at: https://publons.com/publon/10.1108/OIR-03-2023-0122

Recent studies have observed rise in consumer’s ethical concerns about the online retailers while making a purchase decision. The impetus for businesses to use corporate social responsibility (CSR) is evident, but the effects of CSR motives on corresponding processes underlying cause-related marketing (CRM) patronage intention have not been thoroughly examined. This study, anchored on attribution theory, established a research model that better explains the influence of CSR motives on patronage intentions toward CRM-oriented online retailers. Additionally, this study aims to examine the moderating role of spirituality (SPT) on CSR motives and CRM patronage intention (CPI).

Primary data has been collected from 722 respondents and analyzed by using deep neural-network architecture by using the innovative PLS-SEM-ANN method to predict/rank the factors impacting CPI.

The results revealed the normalized importance of the predictors of CPI and found that value-driven motive was the strongest predictor, followed by strategic motive, SPT, age and stakeholder-driven motive. In contrast, egoistic motive, education and income were found insignificant.

The pandemic has transformed the way consumers shop and fortified the online economy, thereby resulting in a paradigm shift toward usage of e-commerce platforms. The results offer valuable insights to online retailers and practitioners for predicting patronage intentions by CSR motives and, thus, effectively engage CRM consumers by designing promotions in a way that would deeply resonate with them. This study assessed and predicted the factors influencing the CPI s, thereby guiding the online retailers to design CSR strategies and manage crucial CRM decisions.

Based upon the broaden-and-build theory of positive emotions, this study aims to assess the role of perceived social responsibility (PSR) in mediating the relationship between gratitude and environmentally responsible behaviour (ERB) among teachers.

Data were collected, following a correlational design, from a total of 292 school teachers in Kerala state, India. In total, 256 data were taken for final analysis. Out of the total participants, 63.3% were female and the remaining 36.7% were male. Confirmatory factor analysis was carried out to verify the factor structure and discriminant as well as convergent validity of the study variables. The relationship between gratitude and ERB with mediating role of PSR was tested.

The mediation analysis output revealed that PSR fully mediates the effect of gratitude on ERB, and it is concluded from the findings of the study that ERB can be enhanced by humanizing the citizens to integrate social responsibility in their acts and promoting the significance of having positive emotions like gratitude to widen their thought–action repertoires.

In line with the broaden-and-build theory, a positive state of mental faculty can be a prime facilitator to increase concern for green environments as an outcome of an expanded thought–action repertoire. The findings imply the importance of inculcating enduring personal resources like the sense of gratefulness as it weighs the effect of producing altruistic acts like ERB along with many other benefits associated with having a positive emotion which is obviously considered to be a fair contribution to serve social resources in the community.

The study findings can be an inspiration for the formation of policies to encourage pro-environmental behaviour and to further expansion of policies like national education policy of India. As teachers being the facilitators of knowledge and wisdom, they are potential sources to inspire students to practice healthy behaviours, they can be better models by practicing ERB.

The authors have verified the application of broaden-and-build theory of positive emotion in the context of ERB along with identifying its relationship with gratitude and PSR.

This chapter locates our book in social science debates and critiques challenging ontological and epistemological assumptions underpinning researching approaches emanating from the global north. This is an important contextualising move, given that these debates have surfaced crucial understandings about the dangers of unquestioned assumptions underpinning researching approaches in intercultural and cross-cultural contexts. The chapter outlines how practice architectures, the key theoretical lens employed in this book, have attempted to counter these exclusions. It focusses on the theory’s emergence from the relational (political and material) work of the pedagogy, education, and praxis (PEP) network. This historicising move is part of our shared authorial commitment to rendering visible the taken-for-granted assumptions underpinning researching approaches, including those, such as practice architectures theory, that have a shared commitment to critical educational praxis. The final section of the chapter considers the possibilities and limitations of practice architectures theory as a means of challenging taken-for-granted ontological and epistemological assumptions of research and researching practices.

This paper aims to conceptually extend the religious aspect of consumption beyond the intrinsic motivation, i.e. religiosity, to a broader consideration of its social and cultural surroundings by highlighting the concept of “religiocentrism”.

The paper is conceptual and qualitative. It explores the concept of religiocentrism in several disciplines, including theology, politics, sociology, marketing and consumption.

The paper introduces the concept of religiocentrism in understanding religious consumption and marketing among consumers within a religious context. This paper further discusses the origin of the term religiocentrism; religiocentrism as looking beyond the intrinsic motivation, i.e. religiosity, religiocentrism from the social identity theory; past research on religiocentrism in theology, politics, sociology, education, marketing and consumption, as well as suggesting potential future research in religiocentrism within marketing and consumption studies.

The lack of research relating to religiocentrism in marketing makes the depth of the discussion rather limited. This paper, however, does not discuss the term religiocentrism from the theology roots but focuses more on the marketing and consumption aspects of religiocentrism.

Several research papers exist within the different disciplines about religiocentrism. However, to the best of the authors’ knowledge, it can be argued that this paper is one of its kind to highlight the concept of “religiocentrism” in consumption and marketing that considers the social and cultural surroundings.

Young people in rural areas often face barriers when accessing participation opportunities in their municipalities. This affects their voices being heard and their ability to create change. Even though almost half the world’s population lives in rural areas, rural young people’s activism is often overlooked in the literature. In addition, when young people’s activism is explored in empirical research, conceptualisations of activism and methods are often not tailored to rural areas. This chapter, thus, adds to our understanding of young people’s activism in rural municipalities by drawing on a mixed methods case study including thirteen focus groups (FGs; n = 35) and a questionnaire (n = 106) with young people aged 13–17, and semi-structured interviews (n = 11) with teachers from one secondary school in a rural municipality in Germany. Five of the FGs were conducted and analysed by Year 10 students, adding unique insights into participants’ experience of activism. In this chapter, activism is conceptualised as one of the multiple dimensions of citizenship. Activism includes demanding systemic change, individually or collectively, which may include refusing to do things, aiming to prevent laws, raising awareness, and making consumer choices. Rather than being full-time activists, the young people in this study were engaged in only a few forms of activism, often carried out ad-hoc, part-time and in connection with other citizenship activities such as volunteering. Spaces for activism included online, the local municipality, everyday spaces such as the supermarket, and school. Participants experienced multiple barriers when engaging in activism including narratives of non-activist young people, age restrictions, power imbalances and few opportunities for creating change, particularly at participants’ school and in their municipalities.

This paper investigates the development of moralised business ideologies (MBIs) amongst sustainable banks as they navigate social and environmental business prospects.

Empirical evidence is drawn from top-management-level interviews with 16 UK-based small and medium-sized banks that specialise in financing social and environmental projects.

MBIs have emerged in the literature review and empirical data analysis as a new concept taken on by sustainable banks with roots closer to sustainability such as ethical practices, moralised values, sustainable business models and ecological standards. The results confirm that MBIs help banking institutions create a more sustained positive impact in terms of social and environmental business opportunities.

This paper offers novel evidence on the intersection between banking and MBIs, with a focus on social, sustainability and environmental considerations.

Drawing from emotional geography framework promoted by Hargreaves (2000), our research sought to depict the emotional geography of two faculty members who engaged in a virtual teacher professional development (VTPD) sessions during the COVID-19 pandemic. This study aimed to focus on capturing participants’ emotional closeness or distance while they were engaging in VTPD.

This study employed narrative inquiry by exploring three-dimensional narrative inquiry space: temporality, personal-social interaction and place (Clandinin and Connelly, 2000). Following this step, the participants were interviewed online through Zoom meetings and WhatsApp to capture critical incidents of their emotional experience. All collected data were transcribed, and some data from Bahasa Indonesia were translated into English. Member checking was also done several times to ensure the accuracy of the data as well as to avoid misinterpretation. The data were analysed inductively to generate coding categories using systemic functional linguistics (SFL) language appraisal (Martin and White, 2007) and emotional geography parameter (Hargreaves, 2001b).

The findings of the study revealed that both participants experienced greater positive feeling than negative ones. The participants experienced positive feelings such as seriousness, happiness, successfulness and satisfaction. They also experienced negative feelings such as insecurity, unhappiness, dissatisfaction and impatience. Such positive and negative feelings create closeness and distance among participants, mentor and workshop organiser. This study indicates that maintaining positive feelings is a passport to succeed in VTPD.

The study has two limitations. First, its findings cannot be overgeneralised since the analysis was restricted to data gathered from a small number of participants. Second, the scope of investigation was limited in virtual situations.

The present study empirically showed that faculty members need to engage in constructing or maintaining positive emotional bond with the mentor and other participants and create conducive situations to understand their own and others’ emotions (Mayer, 2011). Practically, a mentor in VTPD may ask faculty members to voice and share their emotional experience as an evaluation tool to make VTPD programmes more successful. Future participants can benefit from these findings by engaging in emotional understanding and building a conducive situation during VTPD to develop their academic competence, agency and identity.

While previous research into VTPD in the context of higher education mainly focused on designs, attention to pedagogy of online teacher learning environments, trends toward innovation in teacher collaboration and communities of practice in online settings, the present study specifically looked into how participants emotionally engaged in VTPD, which is inevitably linked to physical, moral, sociocultural, professional and political geographies.

This study aims to examine the current state of academic research pertaining to the role played by artificial intelligence (AI) in the achievement of a critical sustainable development goal (SDG) – poverty alleviation and describe the field’s development by identifying themes, trends, roadblocks and promising areas for the future.

The authors analysed a corpus of 253 studies collected from the Scopus database to examine the current state of the academic literature using bibliometric methods.

This paper identifies and analyses key trends in the evolution of this domain. Further, the paper distils the extant literature to unpack the intermediary mechanisms through which AI and related technologies help tackle the critical global issue of poverty.

The corpus of literature used for the analysis is limited to English language studies from the Scopus database. The paper contributes to the extant research on AI for social good, and more broadly to the research on the value of emerging technologies such as AI.

Policymakers and government agencies will get an understanding of how technological interventions such as AI can help achieve critical SDGs such as poverty alleviation (SDG-1).

The primary focus of this paper is on the role of AI-related technological interventions to achieve a significant social objective – poverty alleviation.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study to conduct a comprehensive bibliometric analysis of a critical research domain such as AI and poverty alleviation.