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Clean and sustainable energy becomes an alternative to differentiate electricity suppliers, but it is necessary to have a better understanding of their behaviour to achieve green customer loyalty. This paper aims to deploy a behavioural model that helps explain loyalty of customers towards green electricity providers by including a series of antecedents such as trust, satisfaction, perceived environmental impact, propensity to trust and perceived risk.

The paper deploys a behavioural model that it is tested through structural equation modelling to a sample of 231 German electricity consumers with green contracts. The data analysis included two steps: first, the development and validation of the scales used to measure the constructs proposed in the model, and second, the model test.

Results demonstrate that trust and satisfaction directly influence loyalty, while satisfaction and the other variables included in the model have an indirect relationship with loyalty mediated by trust and satisfaction. As green characteristics of electricity are difficult to evaluate, managers should demonstrate in their communication the environmental effects of their activities while emphasising their capacity to attend to supply requirements for building long-term customer relationships.

The paper is focused on the understanding of those consumers who have signed a green electricity contract and the antecedents associated to their loyalty. The behavioural model helps identify how managers should apply marketing strategies to foster green consumers loyalty.

This paper aims to explore how value co-creation processes can influence the generation of dynamic capabilities and the retention of industrial customers. The authors explore this influence with the support of social exchange theory and resource-based view.

The methodology applied was qualitative research, based on 29 semi-structured in-depth interviews with owners, managing directors and technical managers with previous experience in co-creation processes. The research was performed in four different European countries and is focused on the mobile crane industry.

The findings suggest that co-creation processes promote the generation of dynamic capabilities linked to adaptation, knowledge, innovation and relationship management. In addition, the closer contact with customers and the availability of their expertise favour the development of solutions that better meet their needs, bridging the cognitive gap which often exists between partners. Regarding customer retention, the results show that co-creation processes foster customer predisposition to buy and cross-sell.

Although value co-creation is a topical subject, research in industrial marketing literature analysing the effects of co-creation processes has been scarce up to now. This paper aims to contribute to the debate by analysing how the co-creation of value can influence the generation of dynamic capabilities in companies and how it affects the retention of industrial customers. Based on social exchange theory and dynamic capabilities, the researchers have been able to address how value is developed and its influence in customer retention proxies.

Globalisation is generally defined as the “denationalisation of clusters of political, economic, and social activities” that destabilize the ability of the sovereign State to control activities on its territory, due to the rising need to find solutions for universal problems, like the pollution of the environment, on an international level. Globalisation is a complex, forceful legal and social process that take place within an integrated whole with out regard to geographical boundaries. Globalisation thus differs from international activities, which arise between and among States, and it differs from multinational activities that occur in more than one nation‐State. This does not mean that countries are not involved in the sociolegal dynamics that those transboundary process trigger. In a sense, the movements triggered by global processes promote greater economic interdependence among countries. Globalisation can be traced back to the depression preceding World War II and globalisation at that time included spreading of the capitalist economic system as a means of getting access to extended markets. The first step was to create sufficient export surplus to maintain full employment in the capitalist world and secondly establishing a globalized economy where the planet would be united in peace and wealth. The idea of interdependence among quite separate and distinct countries is a very important part of talks on globalisation and a significant side of today’s global political economy.

The purpose of this paper is to provide an outline of German corporate governance.

The history of the German Corporate Governance Code is highlighted. Then a short overview of the acceptance of the code by companies in practice is given which is based on an empirical survey. This is followed by the most recent changes as well as an overview of the developments of corporate governance in Europe. Finally, a summary of the current discussion of codetermination in terms of company management in Germany is provided.

This appraisal, accompanied by a high degree of approval of the code, shows that, on the one hand, its stipulations partly break with tradition and, on the other hand, have undergone frequent changes: in a period of four years, already four amendments have been made.

The paper offers insight into issues of corporate governance in Germany.

For the longest period of its history, the university was the guardian and transmitter – not the producer – of knowledge. This relatively recent change of transmitting canonical knowledge and generating new knowledge is normally associated with Wilhelm von Humboldt. Other highly influential university models were provided by France and Great Britain. The association of certain types of universities with particular countries is a strong indicator of the intricate link between nation-state and education. Hence, the history of tertiary education and its elite institutions, the research universities, must be considered in relation with a sea change in educational history – the gradual emergence of national education systems. Only under the conditions of the by now standard form of organizing modern societies as nation-states did education become a central institution (Meyer, Boli, Thomas, & Ramirez, 1997) collapsing individual perfectibility and national progress. The nationally redefined university was integrated into the education system as its keystone while also being considered the motor of societal development. From a social history perspective, the latter aspect in particular indicates the pragmatic (training professionals, imparting military and technical knowledge, etc.) and symbolic expectations, “myths” of the nation-state that have been so aptly described and analyzed in numerous macro-sociological neo-institutionalist studies (Meyer, Ramirez, & Soysal, 1992; Meyer et al., 1997; Ramirez & Boli, 1987). In a macro-phenomenological perspective, the term “myth” is used to denote a fundamental change in the self-description of European society which since the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries no longer views itself as consisting of separate collectivities divided from each other by social origin – as was the case under feudal conditions – with each collectivity providing itself the necessary education for its members or being provided for by others in the case of neediness. Instead, as a result of a number of material and immaterial changes, society now defines the individual as its key unit, with the nation being consequently the aggregate of individuals and not of collectivities and the state redefined as the guardian of the nation. This conception might be taken as a kind of overlapping area which includes different approaches, such as Michel Foucault's concept of the disciplinary society (Foucault, 1977), Balibar and Wallerstein's (1991) deliberations on the relation between race, class, and nation, and Benedict Anderson's (1991) description of nations as imagined communities. All these studies could be taken as sharing the notion of “constructedness” (cf. Berger & Luckmann, 1972) of modern society with the neo-institutionalist perspective. The concept of a “world polity” which encompasses the “myths” society is based on, the overall notion of a cognitive culture, which takes Max Weber's concept of rationality as a point of departure, is identified as the basis of isomorphic change in the organizational structure of modern education systems (cf. Baker & Wiseman, 2006). However, the strong emphasis on international, world system embeddedness of nation-states and their education systems is not to be taken as a unidirectional dependence on external forces. While modern nation-states originate from and remain tied to international dynamics and developments, they are conceived as unique entities. For most of their history, modern nation-states have been preoccupied with making themselves distinct from each other. Thus, while international competition has always been present, looking abroad traditionally meant reworking, adapting, and reshaping what was imported, or borrowed (Halpin & Troyna, 1995; Steiner-Khamsi, 2004). This is true for education as well as for other areas of society.