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This paper explores how platforms reconfigure versatile digital resources to achieve marketing agility in international markets.

We draw on a case study of a Chinese digital platform to explore the processes and mechanisms of reconfiguring during marketing agility development. Data from different sources are collected, including interviews, informal dialogue and archival data.

Versatile digital resources create productive applications for previously less amendable marketing and nonmarketing resources to be malleable, editable and reconfigurable in marketing agility development. This study identifies and clarifies three versatile digital resource-enabled reconfiguration activities in marketing agility building: recombining digital artifacts, repurposing human capital and cross-pollinating markets.

Since our study adopts a case study method, future research can extend our insights by using quantitative methods to test and verify our theoretical framework.

First, we provide insights into how organizations can reconfigure versatile digital resources to achieve the benefits of marketing agility in international markets. Second, while recruiting new employees during internationalization is vital, we suggest that assisted by digital artifacts, firms can repurpose the existing workforce, such as via multitasking, swift task-switching and flexible job redirecting to satisfy dynamic international business requirements with lower adjustment costs. Third, we offer two localization approaches in which firms can use digital artifacts as the enabler to remix sociocultural elements with local adaptations to develop glocal content and decentralize content production to generate inclusive local content.

We provide a process model that specifies how platforms reconfigure versatile digital resources to achieve marketing agility in international markets. Furthermore, we provide novel insights into the literature on marketing agility in international markets and localization.

This study aims to identify the political alignment and political activity of the 11 Presidents of Britain’s most important scientific organisation, the Royal Society of London, in its early years 1662–1703, to determine whether or not the institution was politically aligned.

There is almost no information addressing the political alignment of the Royal Society or its Presidents available in the institution’s archives, or in the writings of historians specialising in its administration. Even reliable biographical sources, such as the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography provide very limited information. However, as 10 Presidents were elected Member of Parliament (MP), The History of Parliament: British Political, Social and Local History provides a wealth of accurate, in-depth data, revealing the alignment of both.

All Presidents held senior government offices, the first was a Royalist aristocrat; of the remaining 10, 8 were Royalist or Tory MPs, 2 of whom were falsely imprisoned by the House of Commons, 2 were Whig MPs, while 4 were elevated to the Lords. The institution was Royalist aligned 1662–1680, Tory aligned 1680–1695 and Whig aligned 1695–1703, which reflects changes in Parliament and State.

This study establishes that the early Royal Society was not an apolitical institution and that the political alignment of Presidents and institution continued in later eras. Furthermore, it demonstrates how the election or appointment of an organisation’s most senior officer can be used to signal its political alignment with government and other organisations to serve various ends.

The purpose of this paper is to determine the relationship between employee empowerment (structural empowerment [SE] and psychological empowerment [PE]), employee commitment (EC) and organizational citizenship behavior (OCB) within the unique context of a learning organization in the Indian retail sector.

The investigation was conducted using a survey-based questionnaire approach. Data were gathered from 222 frontline employees working in different retail stores in India. The researcher used AMOS 22.0 version and SPSS 22.0 version for the data analysis.

This study concluded that SE and PE have a positive and significant influence on OCB and EC. In addition, EC is a mediator between employee empowerment (SE and PE) and OCB.

This research is built on cross-sectional data with a limited sample size, that is, 222 sample size. This study also offers some practical insights to managers of retail stores.

To the best of authors’ knowledge, this study is the first to empirically investigate the mediating role of EC between SE and OCB. By focusing on the interplay of these variables within a learning organization, this study sheds light on the mechanisms driving employee behavior and organizational dynamics in this rapidly evolving retail sector.

This study aims to examine the role of price discounts and how to communite such discounts for masstige brands. While a price discount might encourage potential (first time) customers seeking higher status to buy a masstige brand, it might deter existing (repeat) customers from purchasing the brand due to a decline in perceived status. Such paradoxical effect of price discounts on masstige brand’s purchase requires a detail investigation into whether masstige brands should offer price discounts and if so, how to communicate such discounts. Current research investigates this phenomenon.

Four experimental studies were executed. Study 1 investigated the impact of monetary discount (absent vs. present) on the purchase intention of masstige brands for different customer types (potential vs. existing). Study 2 investigated the mediating role of perceived status. Study 3 examined the effectiveness of metaphoric communication of monetary discounts (absent vs present) on masstige brand’s purchase. Study 4 tested the moderating effect of customers’ need for cognition.

Overall, monetary discounts positively affect purchase intention of masstige brand; however, the effect is negative for existing customers and positive for potential customers owing to differences in perceived status these customer groups experience (positive for potential and negative for existing customers). Metaphoric communications of monetary discounts restrict the declining purchase intention and status perception of existing customers besides keeping the potential customers’ purchase intention intact.

This research is confined to a particular country limiting the gneralisability of the study’s findings. Furthermore, this research is cross-sectional in nature.

The findings of this research provide valuable insights and actionable recommendations for masstige brands to effectively leverage price discounts, especially in the emerging markets.

To date, a question of whether or not masstige brands should offer price discounts and if so, how to communicate such discounts remain opaque. This is the pioneering study exploring this phenomenon.

This study aims to investigate magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) conjugate pure mixed convection considering interior heat production and resistive heating inside a square closed/open cavity featuring a rotating cylinder for aiding (clockwise) and opposing (counterclockwise) flow configurations. Moreover, the impacts of altering cylinder size and conductivity on the system’s overall performance to determine optimum conditions are examined in this investigation.

The closed chamber is differentially heated by keeping high and low temperatures at the vertical boundaries. In contrast, the open cavity has a heated left wall and an open right boundary. The Galerkin finite element method is used to solve the Navier–Stokes and the thermal energy equations, which construct the present study’s mathematical framework. Numerical simulations are conducted for the specified ranges of several controlling parameters: Reynolds (31.62 ≤ Re ≤ 1000), Grashof (10³ ≤ Gr ≤ 10⁶) and Hartmann numbers (0 ≤ Ha ≤ 31.62), and volumetric heat generation coefficient (Δ = 0, 3).

When Gr, Re and Ha simultaneously increase, the average Nusselt number along the warmed boundary rises accordingly. Conversely, interior heat production lowers heat transmission within the computational domain, which is also monitored regarding mean fluid temperature, overall entropy production and thermal performance criterion. Finally, the open cavity confirms better thermal performance than the closed cavity.

Comprehending the impacts of the magnetic field, Joule heating, internal heat generation and enclosed or open boundary on pure MHD combined free-forced convective flow offers valuable understandings of temperature fluctuations, velocity propagations, heat transport and irretrievable energy loss in numerous engineering applications.

Co-creation of services (CCOS) is a collaborative strategy that emphasises customer involvement and their expertise to increase the value of the service experience. In the service ecosystem, artificial intelligence (AI) plays a key role in value co-creation. Therefore, this study is undertaken to empirically uncover how AI can empower CCOS.

The source data were collected from 305 service provider respondents and quantitative methodology was applied for data analysis.

New service development augmented with AI provides tangible value to service providers while also providing intangible value to supportive customers. With AI, service providers adapt to new innovations and enrich additional information, which eventually outperforms human-created services.

AI adoption for CCOS empowerment in service businesses brings “service-market fit”, which represents the significant benefits wherein customers contribute to creativity, intuition, and contextual awareness of services, and AI contributes to large-scale service-related analysis by handling volumes of data, service personalisation, and more time to focus on challenging problems of the market.

This study presents theoretical concepts on AI-empowered CCOS, AI technological innovativeness, customer participation in human-AI interaction, AI-powered customer expertise, and perceived benefits in CCOS, and subsequently discusses the CCOS empowerment framework. Then, it proposes a novel conceptual model based on the theoretical concepts and empirically measures and validates the intention to adopt AI for CCOS empowerment. Overall, the study contributes to novel insight on empowering service co-creation with AI.

The sociology and history of sport have neglected Pacific swimming cultures and their impact on global recreational and sporting cultures. This chapter explores the potential for deeper analysis of Pacific contributions to aquatic recreational practices via Solomon Islands swimming. The focus is on the contributions and representations of Alick Wickham (1886–1967), a Solomon Islander who lived in Australia during the first three decades of the 20th century. Wickham, who was a champion swimmer and diver recognised nationally and internationally for his abilities, is popularly credited with introducing the crawl, or freestyle, stroke to swimming competition. While some commentators acknowledge that Wickham's crawl stroke was a practice called tapatapala in his home, Roviana, on New Georgia in the western Solomons, and that some of his other techniques and styles had Solomon Islands origins, little attention is paid to these Pacific cultural antecedents. This chapter examines Wickham's styles, reflects on their Roviana influences, and asks why these Pacific dimensions of his aquatic practices were, and continue to be, overlooked. This marginalisation of Pacific swimming cultures is analysed through the lenses of prevailing racial hierarchies and whiteness as a dominant discourse that continues to privilege white Australia development of the crawl stroke over its Solomons origins and elides other water practices that influenced Wickham.

A popular convention in the political-economy literature is that causality runs from democracy to economic growth. That thinking has continued to evoke significant debates among scholars. This study aims to propose a new research experiment by investigating whether macroeconomic variables cause democratisation.

The study uses a panel data set of 48 carefully selected economies in Sub-Saharan Africa spanning 1991 to 2020 and uses the PVAR system generalised method of moment (GMM) approach.

With the application of three macroeconomic indicators: economic growth, full employment and balance of payment equilibrium, the study suggests that economic growth has a negative implication on the democratisation process and that the incentives that increase national income provide in the global South enable autocratic rulers to impede democratic growth. The Granger causality test demonstrates a unidirectional effect from economic growth to democracy. The eigenvalue stability condition, impulse response function and forecast-error variance decomposition all confirmed the validity of the findings with the PVAR system GMM. Finally, the study proposed policy and theoretical implications for the political stakeholders.

Robust development of economic institutions (particularly the anti-corruption and rule of law) in the global South is required to tame the potential for the state actors to turn public resources into personal use to further their parochial political interest in the form of perpetuating themselves in office which negates the ideals of democracy and social norms. Strong institutions could prevent the misuse of national income and enhance a good quality of life for the citizenry, making them grow confidence in the democratisation process.

The research paper makes an insightful contributions from the methodological perspective and the sampling perspective. The author uses a new research method, the PVAR system GMM becoming the first attempt of such a method to be applied in determining the causal effects of macroeconomic variables on democracy in the literature. Another relevant contribution of the study relates to the sample technique of selecting economies from the Sub-Saharan Africa with notable weak or slow democratisation process.

The main aim of this paper is to investigate key challenges that hinder sustainable and resilient green supply chain (GSC) building in small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) with respect to how they interact after the COVID era.

Using a questionnaire, policymakers and industry managers from SMEs identify the main obstacles that will affect their resilience. These issues are then discussed with 50 experienced professionals from the top management field and further divided into sustainability and gresilience challenges. The Grey-DEMATEL (Grey sets and Decision-Making Trial and Evaluation Laboratory) has been employed to assess the significance of challenges to SMEs' development of green resilience. Overall, the paper aims to build up a novel decision-making technology for the interconnectedness of green and resilience in the post-pandemic supply chain world.

The 12 sustainability and gresilience challenges highlighted by experts in the sector were analyzed. Insufficient government assistance and the handling of resources are the most significant challenges to developing a sustainable and gresilient value chain system, according to the study. The study highlights supply chain restructuring, waste reduction management, shortages of skilled manpower and insufficient knowledge of digitalization as key challenges for SMEs to prioritize.

The outcomes of this research are crucial for SMEs building resilient supply networks through the green concept. Policymakers may utilize the data to pinpoint shortcomings in the supply chain for tactical as well as strategic development and improvement.

When it comes to building green resilience and sustainability in an unpredictable business climate, the outcomes of this research will be significant for SMEs.