Search results

In August, 2015, Serena Williams, one of the most successful female athletes of all time, was body shamed in a New York Times article. The incident highlights the issue of unequal treatment of male and female athletes – while a muscular frame enhances masculinity for male athletes, a muscular physique invites body shaming for female athletes. In this study, symbolic interactionist theories regarding the generalized other are called into question. While George Mead's theorizing exhibits a nonproblematic role taking of the generalized other in a cooperative manner, this study reports the presence of paradoxical generalized others, and consequently, the incongruent role taking of a latent generalized other by individuals. This study investigates if the issue of body image exists among college female athletes, if college female athletes experience the dilemma of choosing between outstanding performance with a muscular frame or maintaining traditional female appearance. To provide answers to the question, female athletes in a midwest university were invited to fill out a survey. The survey results confirm the existence of a paradox between performance and appearance among some college female athletes.

This study explores how various officer and event-level factors influence Milwaukee Police Department officers’ decision to activate their body-worn cameras (BWCs) across both community member-initiated services and officer-initiated activities.

Across the 1,052 officers and 1,066,112 officer-events in the sample, we use descriptive and logistical regressions to assess differences in BWC activations across calls for service and officer-initiated activities.

We found similar activation rates between calls for service (41.5%) and officer-initiated activities (44.1%). However, our logistic regression analysis results suggest the explanatory power of the event and officer-level variables was substantially better in models examining officer-initiated activities. Among calls for service, officers were more likely to activate BWCs during calls involving crimes against persons compared to other crimes or non-criminal incidents. Activation was more frequent during traffic stops than other self-initiated activities. Activation increased when the event resulted in an advisement, citation, detention or arrest.

The success of police BWC programs hinges on whether officers activate their cameras when interacting with community members. Findings suggest that officers are more likely to activate their BWCs during activities that involve direct interactions with community members, especially in situations with a higher potential for volatility or serious criminal implications.

Due to ginger holds a special and indispensable place in Chinese cuisine, understanding consumers’ preferences for organic ginger is of significance, especially given the growing interest in organic food products and sustainable agriculture. This study thus examines Chinese consumers’ preference for fresh ginger and the sources of their preferences heterogeneity for organic ginger consumption.

The study is using choice experiment (CE) method and mixed logit (MXL) modeling with 1,312 valid samples. The participants are regular consumers who are 18 years old or above and had bought fresh ginger within the past 12 months.

The results show that consumers prefer organic product certification labeling ginger to conventional ginger, preferred to purchase ginger at wet markets to at supermarkets or online, and preferred either ginger with regional public brand or private brand to unbranded ginger. Results also indicate that age, education level, income, purchasing experience of organic and branded ginger, and cognition of ginger health benefits are the sources of heterogeneity in consumer preferences for organic ginger.

This study contributes to ginger growers, marketers and policy makers. This study tracks how consumers' preferences change under different attribute combinations, capture the complex preference structure of consumers, and help reveal the motivations behind consumers' preferences for organic ginger. These findings will be crucial for developing marketing strategies, promoting organic products, and meeting consumer needs.

This paper aimed to examine the impacts of agricultural services on welfare of rural farmers in Ghana.

Using data from 1431 rural maize farmers, we employ multinomial endogenous switching regression and multivalued inverse probability weighted regression adjustment to assess the impacts.

Results show that 19.8%, 9.7% and 3.42% of farmers adopted solely irrigation, extension and mechanization, respectively. Furthermore, utilizing a range of agricultural services significantly improves maize yields, gross income and per capita food consumption.

This study recommends strategies that target the adoption of combinations of agricultural services to enhance rural farmers’ welfare in Ghana and other developing countries.

While agricultural services are claimed to improve agricultural production and peasants’ welfare, their impacts are not studied exhaustively. This paper contributes by providing empirical evidence of the impacts of agricultural services on farmers’ welfare.

The peer review history for this article is available at: https://publons.com/publon/10.1108/IJSE-11-2022-0745.

Women working in public relations (PR) in the 1990s developed the power of metamodern pragmatism to avoid being constrained in this decade of contradictions.

This was a time of promise for female empowerment and careers. The PR industry in Britain had quadrupled in size, yet increased feminisation and professionalisation did not resolve gender inequity. Indeed, alongside the existence of ‘old boys clubs’ and hedonistic macho agencies in the industry, the 1990s offered a lad's mag culture and an AbFab image of PR.

An original collaborative historical ‘Café Delphi’ method was developed using three themes (sex, sexuality and sexism) to explore women's careers and contributions in the expanding and increasingly powerful field of PR in the United Kingdom during the 1990s. It built on feminist critique of the industry and paradoxical portrayals of women resulting from significant changes in media, popular culture and a pluralistic marketplace.

Individual and collective experiences of women working in PR at the time reveal the power of attitudes to affect their ability to achieve equality and empowerment. Women navigated tensions between the benefits of accelerated pluralism and the patriarchal resistance in the workplace through performative choices and a deep sense of pragmatism.

The insidious proliferation of online misinformation represents a significant societal problem. With a wealth of research dedicated to the topic, it is still unclear what determines fake news sharing. This paper comparatively examines fake and accurate news sharing in a novel experimental setting that manipulates news about terrorism.

The authors follow an extended version of the uses-and-gratification framework for news sharing, complemented by variables commonly employed in fake news rebuttal studies.

Logistic regression and classification trees revealed worry about the topic, media literacy, information-seeking and conservatism as significant predictors of willingness to share news online. No significant association was found for general analytical thinking, journalism skepticism, conspiracy ideation, uses-and-gratification motives or pass-time coping strategies.

The current results broaden and expand the literature examining beliefs in and sharing of misinformation, highlighting the role of media literacy in protecting the public against the spread of fake news.

This is, to the authors’ knowledge, the first study to integrate a breadth of theoretically and empirically driven predictors of fake news sharing within a single experimental framework.

The peer review history for this article is available at: https://publons.com/publon/10.1108/OIR-12-2022-0693

Although growing Internet penetration in the hinterlands has attracted agribusinesses to promote digital platforms, farmers are sceptical about using them. The literature discusses agricultural platforms from the theoretical perspective of technological determinism, where the platforms are developed and promoted by firms in a top-down manner to be accepted by farmers. However, this approach results in poorly configured platforms with limited utility for farmers. It is evident from the existing literature that the mere creation of a platform business is not sufficient to guarantee adoption by users. Hence, this study explores how to make the agricultural platform more attractive for farmers.

The present study is based on a discrete choice experiment performed on 126 Indian farmers using agricultural platforms. The data were analysed using the conditional logistic regression method.

The study suggests that farmers expect government and cooperative entities to be also embedded with the platforms. Complementary features such as prompt service, competitive pricing and farm credit were identified as essential attributes. Further, the platforms should enable smallholders to trade farm produce by providing a mechanism for real-time online nudging and bargaining with buyers.

The study is based on the applications of random utility theory. The research has utility for Agtech managers, cooperative institutions and agricultural policymakers.

This is one of the first studies focussing on agricultural platform design from the farmers' perspective. The study implies that incorporating preferred attributes can help practitioners configure platforms to benefit farmers with prospects concerning farm management decisions.

This study aims to analyse how cultural and religious values shape individual attitudes towards responsible consumption (RC), with a particular emphasis on contrasting Abrahamic and non-Abrahamic countries. The objective was to find out how adherence to religious beliefs could drive sustainable behaviours as a sure way to achieve sustainable development goals, among them RC and production.

The research classifies countries into Abrahamic and non-Abrahamic based on data derived from World Values Surveys from 1980 to 2020. To find out the effect of religious and cultural values on RC behaviours, the authors use a logistic regression model by controlling the sociodemographic variables country, denomination and town size.

The findings determined that in Abrahamic countries, high adherence to religious teachings is strongly correlated with positive RC behaviours. In most non-Abrahamic countries, however, while the strength of the effect of cultural values on RC is somewhat diminished, there is potential for a positive shift insofar as the central doctrines of the respective faiths will be adopted more actively by their adherents.

While this study provides valuable insights into the influence of cultural and religious values on RC, it is limited by its reliance on cross-sectional data, which restricts the ability to infer causality. Future research could benefit from longitudinal studies to track changes over time or experimental designs to test causality more directly. Additionally, the study’s focus on broad religious categories may overlook the nuanced differences within each religious group, suggesting a need for more detailed subgroup analyses.

The practical implications of such findings lie in the fact that marketers have to design campaigns that relate to the cultural and religious ethos of their target audiences. Therefore, marketing strategies locally practised bring effectiveness in running initiatives meant to be taken for sustainable consumption practices, to develop brand loyalty and to support corporate environmental and social responsibility.

By aligning consumption practices with religious teachings, communities can foster a collective sense of purpose and ethical responsibility. This alignment not only enhances social cohesion but also supports broader social goals such as environmental sustainability and economic moderation. Moreover, by encouraging values like thrift and stewardship, societies can mitigate the adverse effects of consumerism, such as waste and environmental degradation, thus improving the quality of life and fostering a more sustainable future.

This paper is going to add to the existing literature by identifying how religious teachings can be pivotal for the sustainability of modern times. Its findings provide new insight for policymakers and marketers who are seeking to encourage RC in cultures.