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The present research aims to investigate the influence of organizational positioning by drawing upon moral foundations theory in relation to driving charitable giving, and the moderating role of recognition in this regard.

Two experimental studies were conducted to examine the interactive effect of organizational positioning emphasizing a binding (vs an individualizing) moral foundation and donation recognition on charitable giving. Study 1 was conducted in Indonesia, while Study 2 was conducted in the US.

This research demonstrates that individuals will give higher donations to an organization with a binding (vs an individualizing) moral foundation that provides donation recognition. Further, this effect is mediated by social identity signaling.

The findings of this research provide a novel perspective on how organizational positioning can influence whether donation recognition increases charitable giving. Moreover, the findings offer managerial implications to non-profit organizations developing effective charitable campaigns in terms of combining appropriate organizational positioning and donation recognition strategies.

This paper aims to investigate whether cues of morality can mitigate stock sell-offs in the face of earnings uncertainty prior to earnings conference calls and draws on moral foundations theory to study the effect of universal moral cues (harm/care and fairness/reciprocity rhetoric) and primarily conservative moral cues (ingroup/loyalty, authority/respect and purity/sanctity rhetoric) on market performance.

The study relies on a longitudinal data set of 1,920 firm-quarter observations corresponding to calls held by firms listed on the S&P 500 in 2015 and relies on computer-assisted-text-analysis and event-study methodology to test hypotheses.

The results suggest that cues of universal moral foundations have a mitigating effect on stock sell-offs and are able to create firm value; while cues primarily conservative moral foundations are not found to have an effect on market performance.

This investigation highlights why earnings conference calls may serve as a valuable tool for communicating a firm’s moral inclination and why universal morality may appeal to a wider range of shareholders than primarily conservative morality.

The purpose of this study is to assess the differences in individual purchasing and voting decisions for livestock products, produced with lower levels of antibiotic use or higher levels of environmental sustainability, by consumers with different degrees of agreement with moral foundation statements.

Data are collected from two national online surveys that were conducted in Canada in 2016 and 2017, including socio-demographic, attitude, belief and stated choice questions. Data are analysed using hierarchical cluster analysis and ordered probit regressions.

Respondents who strongly agree with the individualizing moral foundation statements are more likely to buy more environmentally sustainable milk/yogurt and pork from pigs that are raised with reduced antibiotic use, as compared to respondents who have weaker agreement with the statements. Respondents with stronger agreement with the moral foundation statements are also more likely to vote in favour of stricter livestock environmental standards and disease protocols.

Monitoring people’s moral concerns might help in predicting consumers’ responses to new or different production practices.

Although moral foundations have been linked to other purchase decisions, in this study, the focus is on specific aspects of environmental sustainability and antibiotic use in livestock production. Both of these challenging issues are controversial and facing either regulatory changes (antibiotic use in livestock) or significant livestock production changes (responding to concerns that livestock production is less sustainable than plant production) in most developed countries. Understanding the linkages between fundamental beliefs and probable consumer behaviour will assist in predicting negative or positive outcomes to the regulatory or industry-based changes to livestock production. Differences between an individual’s desire to be able to identify products with certain attributes for purchase vs an individual’s desire to have government regulate industries to higher standards, in both contexts, will also be linked to the individual’s level of moral foundation beliefs.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the extent to which personal values, moral foundations and gender-role identities affect, in sequence, consumers' constructions of their ethnocentric and cosmopolitan orientations. Achieving a better understanding of the psychological makeup of consumer ethnocentrism and cosmopolitanism should help managers better design international market segmentation and brand positioning strategies.

The study's conceptual framework is anchored in attitude and values theories, and focuses on the social categorizations that consumers make and how these contribute to the formation of their ethnocentric and cosmopolitan orientations. Drawing data from consumers living in five European countries, we test our theoretical conjectures through structural equation modeling approaches, including multigroup analysis at the country level, as well as the identification and scrutiny of potential pan-European consumer segments.

Findings show that personal values, moral foundations and gender-role identities do exert direct and indirect (partially mediated) effects on the formation of consumers' ethnocentric and cosmopolitan orientations. These provide numerous insights for managers in terms of how they can segment domestic and international markets, as well as how to position products and communicate brand strategies.

The study focused on consumers' personal and role identities and offers implications based on data gathered from a sample of five European countries. Future work should broaden this perspective by including other identity facets, such as religious and ethnic identities, as well as product-category and brand-specific outcomes, in order to help develop a more comprehensive picture of the psychology underpinning consumers' identity-related orientations, and their effects on consumer behavior. Future research should also study these issues in a broader geographical context, by including national markets that have culturally diverse populations as well as places with dissimilar cultural and economic profiles.

The study shows that individuals' personal values, moral foundations and gender roles have a strong effect on the formation of consumer ethnocentrism and consumer cosmopolitanism orientations. Consideration of how these antecedent constructs operate in concert to shape consumers' in- versus out-group orientations has been overlooked in the international marketing literature. Beyond the ramifications for theory, the study offers numerous substantive managerial implications in terms of how consumers are likely to respond to local and global/foreign products/brands based on these orientations.

Even though the definitions of morality may seem to provide straightforward criteria to assess the morality of individuals, moral judgments are challenging and less exact. This paper aims to advance extant work on morality and moral judgment by providing a conceptualization of boundary conditions in the relationship between moral judgments and consumer behavior.

An interdisciplinary literature review is conducted to integrate extant knowledge on morality, moral judgment and consumer behavior to identify and conceptualize boundary conditions affecting moral judgments and decision-making. The research draws on moral foundation theory and norm activation model, and the proposed factors and relationships are grounded in construal level theory and regulatory focus theory.

The research identifies cultural, individual and situational factors that influence moral judgments and decision-making and argues that moral judgments exhibit a similar pattern across types, but cultural factors determine the salience of each moral foundation type. Moreover, construal factors relevant to the situation (i.e. proximity vs distance) affect the extent and manner of moral judgments, and individual mindsets and their associated information processing styles (e.g. money vs time orientation and promotion vs prevention orientation) make moral judgments more malleable, adding a degree of variability to judgments within similar cultures and situations.

The research makes a rather unique contribution to consumer morality literature by identifying and discussing three different groups of factors with the potential to impact individuals’ judgments of, and reactions to, moral foundation violation information.

Consumers support local businesses as an ethical choice. However, consumer ethics researchers have not paid much attention to local consumption, limiting the understanding of why consumers believe local consumption is ethical. To address this research gap, this study aims to develop and test the theoretical model for local consumption decisions by integrating moral foundations theory and local–global identity literature.

An online survey of US adult consumers (n = 362) was conducted to test the theoretical model. A correlational structural equation model was used to analyze the data.

The results confirmed that consumers’ moral obligations to engage in local consumption are driven partially by pro-group moral foundations, and that this identity-based motivation is an intuitive predictor of local consumption behaviors. The findings of this study demonstrate that traditional ethical consumption frameworks that assume knowledge-based decision-making are not enough to explain local consumption, and provide arguments for the need to consider both moral intuitions and moral reasoning.

This study synthesizes two isolated streams of literature and presents an integrated model to holistically explain consumer motivations for local business support. Local consumption was rarely investigated and its unique characteristics were not fully understood in the context of ethical consumption. This study specifically focuses on local consumption, advancing our knowledge of this understudied consumer behavior.

This paper aims to develop a model that explains the moral bases of consumer ethnocentrism and consumer cosmopolitanism as purchase dispositions. The authors build their work on moral foundations theory and the social theories of Emile Durkheim.

Theory-building from general theories of motivation is grounded in cultural norms, and empirical research is conducted to test theoretical propositions.

The focus is on the theoretical implications of binding or individualism morals of consumers within social groups. Consequently, variables in the model relate to ethical themes of community, autonomy and divinity. This theory posits that, for a variety of considerations, loyalty has a direct and positive effect on consumer ethnocentrism and on consumer cosmopolitanism. Serendipitously, other moral foundations have negative effects. The authors theorize that negative relationships exist between authority and consumer cosmopolitanism, and between sanctity and consumer ethnocentrism. This model also illustrates that consumer ethnocentrism positively predisposes favorable domestic product judgments.

New ethical factors in consumer dispositions affecting product purchase decisions are explored. Hypotheses can be empirically replicated and moderated in future research.

Marketers can use the variables of personal values, moral foundations and gender role identity to fashion marketing communications and to target selective consumer segments.

The persuasion process of social marketing will be enhanced by understanding relevant motives.

The use of the fine-grained moral foundation antecedents to predict consumer predispositions of ethnocentrism and cosmopolitanism is without precedent.

Focusing on the sociological clarification based on structural pluralism, this study explores the degree to which social media users who comment on the news posts of local newspapers use uncivil remarks and words that reflect their moral foundations.

This computer-assisted data collection produces three types of datasets that include numerous social media comments. To explore the association between moral foundations and incivility, both quadratic association procedure (QAP) and multiple regression QAP (MRQAP) are implemented.

The findings suggest that social media users who comment on the news posts of urban-located newspapers tend to use more uncivil words compared to social media users who comment on the news posts of suburban and rural-based newspapers. Individuals who comment on the news posts of urban-based newspapers tend to show a wider range of moral foundation spectrums than those who comment on the posts of rural and suburban newspapers. Lastly, there are significant associations between moral-vice components and incivility in response to urban- and suburban-located newspapers' social media posts.

The employed bag-of-words may not completely capture incivility given that social media users can use nuanced and metaphoric terms instead of explicitly uncivil terms. Even though this study systematically selected local newspapers' social media accounts, the contextual factors of other newspapers in politically slanted communities could be different.

The findings of this study provide meaningful and practical implications for journalists and news reporters. The inherent rudeness and aggressiveness of social media users can drive them to use uncivil and moral-harm words against a particular person or group.

Under the circumstance that fake news and politically slanted news content are widely distributed in the United States, social media users may easily express negative emotions toward news stories or the journalists who post the stories.

Structural pluralism particularly specializes in explaining why and how the contextual factors of news stories differ depending on community complexity. Building on the reasoning of structural pluralism in the social media context, this study investigates the degree to which social media users who comment on the news posts of local newspapers employ uncivil remarks and moral foundation words.

The peer review history for this article is available at: https://publons.com/publon/10.1108/OIR-11-2020-0522.

This study aims to explore the extent to which Twitter users engaged in uncivil and morally questionable expressions in their comments about specific Asian countries and citizens. The integrated threat theory (ITT) was used to formulate questions surrounding incivility and moral foundations within Twitter discourses related to the COVID-19 pandemic.

The authors collected tweets and retweets posted by English-speaking Twitter users in the United States (US) across the following three phases: (1) initial discovery of COVID-19 in China, (2) high US mortality rate from COVID-19 and (3) the announcement that a vaccine would soon be available in the US.

The authors found a significant difference in uncivil tweets posted in cities with higher levels of reported hate crimes against Asians than cities with low levels. Lastly, English-speaking Twitter users tended to employ moral virtue words and moral vice words when discussing China and Chinese culture/populations.

The bags-of-words employed are limited in capturing nuanced and metaphorical terms. In addition, the analysis focused solely on Tweets composed in English and thus did not capture the thoughts and opinions of non-English speakers. Lastly, this study did not address all Asian countries. In this sense, the findings of this study might not be applicable to Tweets about other nations.

Given that many Twitter users tend to use terms of moral virtue in support of Asians and Asian communities, the authors suggest that non-governmental organization administrators provide morally supportive social media campaigns that encourage users to engage in civil discourse.

These findings have theoretical implications as the frameworks of integrated threats and moral foundations were used to offer group-level explanations for online behavior. Additional research is needed to explore whether these frameworks can be used to explain negativity in other communication environments.

This study expands the findings of prior studies that identified the extent to which Twitter users express hate speech, focusing on general Twitter discourse across three specific periods of the pandemic: degrees of incivility and moral foundations, and comparison of incivility based on the prevalence of reported hate crimes.

In today's volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous world, organizations deal with fragmented publics in contested public spheres. At the core, public opinion is not so much divided by issues per se but by deeply rooted moral concerns. Hence, while normative perspectives on morality prevail in strategic communication research, understanding the moral motives of stakeholders and publics from a descriptive standpoint becomes vital. In this light, the present conceptual paper discusses the implications of moral foundations theory (MFT), as an influential evolutionary-anthropological approach to morality, for strategic communication research and practice.

Adopting micro-, meso- and macro-perspectives, MFT's potential contribution to strategic communication research is explored regarding three foci: (1) moral framing, (2) narratives and (3) public discourse dynamics.

The paper concludes that frames and more complex narratives in strategic communication allude to MFT's five foundations – care, fairness, loyalty, authority and purity – in diverse ways and are given different readings by stakeholders and publics. Building on MFT, novel empirical tools are available to access and understand the complex web of moral meaning infused in public discourses.

For the first time, MFT is discussed systematically and in detail in the context of strategic communication research. The theory contributes to deepening the understanding of the conditions, e.g. for issues management and strategic mobilization. On broader view, this paper adds to the discussion on evolutionary perspectives in strategic communication research.