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The recent announcement that Tesco has sold its Irish outlets has been received with little surprise, since rumours to this effect have been rumbling away for some months now. What is a surprise, however, is the identity of the buyer, and the sum involved. A J Parker charts Tesco's period in Ireland, describes the new owner of the stores, and finally wonders what the eventual future of the outlets will be.

The purpose of this mixed-methods study is to examine the motivational determinants and contextual antecedents of individual job crafting behaviors.

The current research uses the mixed-methods design to elucidate the relationship between career outcome expectations and different forms of job crafting through external regulation. In Study 1, surveys were collected and analyzed from 151 employees across occupations and ranks using purposeful sampling approach. In Study 2, interview data were thematically analyzed to add complementarity and completeness to the findings.

In Study 1 (n = 151), a direct relationship between career outcome expectations and different forms of job crafting was established. Mediation analysis indicated an indirect relationship between career outcome expectations and approach crafting through external-social regulation. The authors found support for the accentuating role of turnover intentions on career outcome expectations and external social and material regulations. In Study 2 (n = 25), a thematic analysis of semi-structured interviews confirmed that when employees experience unfulfilled career expectations, employees attempt to realign the work situations. Such expectations may be tied to various forms of work-related external regulations and may lead to job crafting behaviors. The individuals depicted these behaviors while experiencing turnover intentions.

The current study brings together literature from job design, motivation and careers to consider the role of career expectations and external regulation in predicting job crafting behaviors. Taken together, the findings unearth the cognitive and contextual antecedents of job crafting.

Mr and Mrs Martin, the claimants, received financial advice from Mr Sherman, a representative of the Life Association of Scotland in 1991. The long‐term insurance business of the Life Association for Scotland was transferred to Britannia Life Ltd. in 1994, hence their position as Defendant to this claim. The financial advice the Martins received involved, in brief, a remortgage of their house, the surrender of a number of existing life policies which were collateral security for an existing mortgage on the house, the taking out of a new endowment policy and a pension policy with the new endowment policy being charged as collateral security on the mortgage. The judge described Mr Sherman as being, at the material time, a self‐employed financial consultant but he was actually for the purposes of the Financial Services Act 1986 a company representative of the Life Association for Scotland (LAS) authorised only to advise, market and sell that group's products. Mr Sherman was therefore a company representative of LAS within the meaning of rule 1.2 of the then applicable rules of the Life Assurance Unit Trust and Regulatory Organisation (LAUTRO).

This article provides a review and conceptual comparison between self‐report and performance‐based measures of emotional intelligence. Analyses of reliability, psychometric properties, and various forms of validity lead to the conclusion that self‐report techniques measure a dispositional construct, that may have some predictive validity, but which is highly correlated with personality and independent of intelligence. Although seemingly more valid, performance‐based measures have certain limitations, especially when scored with reference to consensual norms, which leads to problems of skew and restriction of range. Scaling procedures may partially ameliorate these scoring weaknesses. Alternative approaches to scoring, such as expert judgement, also suffer problems since the nature of the requisite expertise is unclear. Use of experimental paradigms for studying individual differences in information‐processing may, however, inform expertise. Other difficulties for performance‐based measures include limited predictive and operational validity, restricting practical utility in organizational settings. Further research appears necessary before tests of E1 are suitable for making real‐life decisions about individuals.

Globalisation as a competitive marketing strategy can only offer a limited explanation for the behaviour of organisations. This is particularly applicable in the case of business and marketing strategies for small and medium‐sized organisations in the retail sector. Terms such as “localisation” have been coined by researchers but the concept is yet to receive a valid interpretation as a marketing strategy from the perspective of the small retailer. This paper seeks first, to understand how “localisation” impacts on the business practices and marketing strategy of small retailers in Spain and Scotland. Second, the results should help lessen the gap between the concepts of globalisation and the localisation.

This explorative, comparative qualitative paper explores business practices and marketing strategies by small retail business owners in Seville (Spain) and Perth (UK) and the role of localisation, using three key themes – place, people and promotion.

This paper suggests that place attractiveness, word‐of‐mouth customer‐to‐customer marketing, customer service beyond simple product advice, community embeddedness and informal but meaningful interpersonal relations between shop owner and customers are some of the key pillars of the “localisation” strategic marketing approach pursued by small retailers in Perth and Seville. This indicates a counterbalance to globalisation.

The pursuit of a deliberate localisation approach by small retailers may be key to their sustainable competitiveness in the knowledge that these elements would not be easily replicated by larger or global retailers.

The purpose of this paper is to document the results and the impact of the ESRC-funded High Street UK 2020 (HSUK2020), a project designed to take the existing academic knowledge relating to retail and high street change directly to UK High Streets, to improve local decision-making and, ultimately, their vitality and viability.

Through a systematic literature review, and by following the tenets of engaged scholarship, the authors identified 201 factors that influence the vitality and viability of town centres. Through the consensus-building Delphi technique, a panel of 20 retail experts identified the top 25 priorities for action.

Taking a place management approach led to the development of a more strategic framework for regeneration, which consisted of repositioning, reinventing, rebranding and restructuring strategies (4R’s of regeneration). Collaboration with the project towns resulted in identification of the strategy area that would add the most value, and the impact of the 4R’s and the top 25 priorities is demonstrated via numerous town examples.

Knowledge exchange projects, such as High Street UK2020, have an important contribution to make, not by developing even more theory that is unlikely to get utilised, instead their contribution is to bring existing theory into practical use.

The study investigated the relationships of the five dimensions of emotional intelligence: self‐awareness, self‐regulation, motivation, empathy, and social skills of supervisors to subordinates' strategies of handling conflict: problem solving and bargaining. Data (N = 1,395) for this study were collected with questionnaires from MBA students in seven countries (U.S., Greece, China, Bangladesh, Hong Kong and Macau, South Africa, and Portugal). Psychometric properties of the measures were tested and improved with exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis and analysis of indicator and internal consistency reliabilities, and the hypotheses were tested with a structural equations model for each country. Results in the U.S. and in the combined sample provided support for the model which suggests that self‐awareness is positively associated with self‐regulation, empathy, and social skills; self regulation is positively associated with empathy and social skills; empathy and social skills are positively associated with motivation; which in turn, is positively associated with problem solving strategy and negatively associated with bargaining strategy. Differences among countries in these relationships are noted and implications for organizations discussed.

Social media has created a new level of interconnected communication. However, the use of online platforms brings about various ways in which a user’s personal data can be put at risk. This study aims to investigate what drives the disclosure of personal information online and whether an increase in awareness of the value of personal information motivates users to safeguard their information.

Fourteen university students participated in a mixed-methods experiment, where responses to Likert-type scale items were combined with responses to interview questions to provide insight into the cost–benefit analysis users conduct when disclosing information online.

Overall, the findings indicate that users are able to disregard their concerns due to a resigned and apathetic attitude towards privacy. Furthermore, subjective norms enhanced by fear of missing out (FOMO) further allows users to overlook potential risks to their information in order to avoid social isolation and sanction. Alternatively, an increased awareness of the personal value of information and having experienced a previous privacy violation encourage the protection of information and limited disclosure.

This study provides insight into privacy and information disclosure on social media in South Africa. To the knowledge of the researchers, this is the first study to include a combination of the theory of planned behaviour and the privacy calculus model, together with the antecedent factors of personal valuation of information, trust in the social media provider, FOMO.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the motivations of consumers engage with fashion retail applications (apps) from a consumer motivation perspective to inform the design for fashion retail apps. This is an area with increasing economic significance, yet of limited academic research to date.

Through 18 in-depth qualitative interviews, utilitarian stimuli was identified as primary motivating factor to attract customers to shop for fashion garments through m-commerce retail apps.

Results from thematic analysis identified that the utilitarian elements of “efficiency” and “convenience” were two of the most important motivators for engagement, with “personalized services”, and “convenient operation process” also dominant functions to attract customers to shop on m-commerce retail apps. While “Social” shopping was shown to be a motivating factor for consumer behaviour, participants showed greater preference to interpersonal communications channels than to social media.

Findings from this study reveal the utilitarian focus of fashion retail apps within an industry often focussed on experiential interactions, and provide a focus for fashion retail m-commerce app designers to tailor their products for higher consumer engagement. Future apps should be designed specifically with this in mind to increase the chance of consumer engagement.

This paper provides original insight into the hedonic and utilitarian value motivations most prevalent to users of m-commerce fashion retail apps. This is distinct from previous research that has focussed on physical retail environments or general e-commerce interactions (e.g. non-fashion web stores accessed through a PC/laptop).

The overseas library consultant is not a new phenomenon on the world library scene, but has become increasingly familiar in recent years. Whilst there are earlier isolated examples of the employment of foreign librarians as consultants or advisers, their use on anything like a regular basis was first undertaken in the years between the two world wars by the Carnegie Corporation of New York, which sent a number of leading British and American librarians on advisory missions to East, West and Southern Africa, to the West Indies and to Australia and New Zealand in connection with its programme of aid to overseas library development. This programme continued, on a somewhat reduced scale, after the Second World War, when it was gradually overtaken in importance by the work of other agencies such as the British Council, the United States government aid agencies and the Specialised Agencies of the United Nations — in particular, by Unesco.