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This study aims to investigate the mechanism of the influence of paradoxical thinking (PT), which characterizes the ability of college students to balance and integrate the conflict between hedonic and normative goals, on their campus low-carbon behaviors.

The conceptual model of “PT − Paradoxical salience (climate change concern, CCC) − Paradoxical acceptance (support for low-carbon behavioral norms, SN) − paradoxical resolution (campus low-carbon intentions and behaviors, CLCIs and CLCBs)” was developed. Then, it was tested by PLS-SEM using survey data obtained from 501 Chinese college students, and the relative importance of each factor of CLCBs was determined by the importance-performance map analysis method. Finally, a mechanistic difference analysis was conducted.

PT, CCC and SN have the potential to influence the CLCBs of college students, with each of the three factors showing approximately 40% room for improvement in their impact. There exists an influential pathway of “PT → CCC → SN → CLCIs → CLCBs.” Notably, PT exhibits a stronger direct influence on college students’ private-sphere CLCBs compared to the public-sphere CLCBs.

Colleges should integrate the development of PT into the foundational framework of the entire education for sustainable development curriculum, while emphasizing the provision of opportunities for training in PT through pedagogical methods, and PT training can be integrated across various social levels.

This study offers a paradox theoretical framework for comprehending and elucidating the decision-making process underlying personal low-carbon behaviors, and advances the quantitative research of microindividual paradox processing by effectively conceptualizing and measuring paradoxical salience and acceptance.

This study investigates how actual donations towards social causes within fashion supply chains can be increased in the face of negative country-of-origin effects.

Literature reports a lack of sustained consumer support for social causes within fashion supply chains. Driven by perceived psychological distance between the manufacturer and the fashion consumer, negative country-of-origin effects have an impact on donation behaviour. Using two online experiments, this study shows that including a garment worker’s image in swing tags mitigates negative country-of-origin effects on actual donations.

Fashion consumers’ actual donations towards worker rights increased with the presence of a garment worker’s image. In the higher psychological distance condition, exposure to the image reduced negative country-of-origin effects, increasing actual donations. This increase in actual donations is driven by pleasure-seeking, thus indicating that consumer support for social causes within fashion supply chains is underlined by hedonism.

This study focuses on a visual cue-based mechanism of promoting actual donations towards social causes and the role of pleasure-seeking in this process – two previously under-explored areas in the fashion marketing literature. The use of an incentive-compatible measure that required participants to donate real money allows the demonstration of actual donation behaviour, providing robust evidence of the impact of visual cues and their potential to be applied in the real-world.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the dynamic relationship between formal and non-formal processes of accountability in a public services context.

The paper presents a case study of the impact of the Health and Social Care Act (2012) on the practices of Health and Wellbeing Board (HWB) members. It draws upon multiple data sources, including in-depth interviews with the members, comprehensive archival data published by the HWB (2011–2019), and observations of HWB public meetings. We utilise the concept of dynamic duality (Li, 2008) to further theorise the relationship between formal and non-formal processes of accountability and how they mutually transform one another.

The case illustrates the role of formal and non-formal processes of accountability at a HWB in England. Moreover, the case study reveals the relationship and interaction between the formal and non-formal accountability processes and how they change and transform each other over time. We find that whilst non-formal accountability processes were strengthened by a historical legacy of partnership working, over time the dynamics at play led to the development of formal accountability processes through more sophisticated performance systems, which in turn transformed non-formal accountability processes.

The paper presents a more holistic conceptualisation than articulated in prior accountability literature, dynamic duality, on the relationship between formal and non-formal accountability processes. Through application of this conceptualisation to a HWB in England, the paper spotlights the inter-relationship between formal and non-formal processes of accountability, and how they have the potential to transform each over an extended time-period.

Today, the transition of retailers from multi-channel and cross-channel to omni-channel has become a necessity. Customers’ perceived shopping value is also one of the most important factors for retailers’ success. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to develop and validate the omni-channel shopping value scale.

Based on 40 interviews (X = 18, Y = 22) and a literature review, items were generated for shopping value dimensions (utilitarian, hedonic and social) at four touchpoints. Then exploratory factor analysis was performed for scale purification (n = 562). Confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) was performed (n = 528) for initial scale validation. A second CFA was conducted to validate the final scale (n = 302). To check the nomological validity of the scale, the effect of omni-channel shopping value on customer engagement (n = 455) was investigated in both generations.

According to the results of the qualitative study, 73 items were identified. Based on the results of exploratory and CFA, nine components (50 items) were extracted and confirmed: utilitarian, hedonic and social shopping values for offline touchpoint and utilitarian and hedonic shopping values for online, application and social networks touchpoints. The results of nomological validity of the scale confirmed the effect of omni-channel shopping value on customer engagement in both generations.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study is the first attempt to develop and validate an omni-channel shopping value scale based on customers’ shopping experiences with omni-channel brands. Therefore, this study provides a useful tool for researchers and marketing managers to measure omni-channel shopping value.

This study examines the role of online customer reviews through text mining and sentiment analysis to improve customer satisfaction across various services within the UK banking sector. Additionally, the study analyses sentiment trends over a five-year period.

Using DistilBERT and Support Vector Machine algorithms, customer sentiments were assessed through an analysis of 20,137 Trustpilot reviews of HSBC, Santander, and Tesco Bank from 2018 to 2023. Data pre-processing steps were implemented to ensure data integrity and minimize noise.

Both positive and negative sentiments provide valuable insights. The results indicate a high prevalence of negative sentiments related to customer service and communication, with HSBC and Santander receiving 90.8% and 89.7% negative feedback, respectively, compared to Tesco Bank’s 66.8%. Key areas for improvement include HSBC’s credit card services and call center efficiency, which experienced increased negative feedback during the COVID-19 pandemic. The findings also demonstrate that DistilBERT excelled in categorizing reviews, while the SVM model, when combined with customer ratings, achieved 96% accuracy in sentiment analysis.

This study focuses on UK bank consumers of HSBC, Santander, and Tesco Bank. A multi-country or cross-cultural study may further enhance our understanding of the approaches and findings.

Online customer reviews become more informative when categorised by service sector. To enhance customer satisfaction, bank managers should pay attention to both positive and negative reviews, and track trends over time.

The uniqueness of this study lies in its exploration of the importance of categorisation in text-mining-based sentiment analysis, its focus on the influence of both positive and negative sentiments, and its emphasis on tracking sentiment trends over time.

In today’s high-demand work environments, characterised by an expectation for individuals to possess resources to manage workloads effectively, workaholism poses a significant threat to employee well-being. This study aims to investigate the impact of work overload and psychological flexibility on compulsive work behaviours and well-being.

This study applies the Job Demands-Resources model and uses structural equation modelling to analyse data collected from 305 adult workers aged 19–65. Psychological flexibility and work overload are examined as antecedents of compulsive work behaviour, with flourishing and life satisfaction as outcomes.

The results indicate that compulsive work behaviour mediates the relationship between work overload and psychological flexibility on well-being outcomes. Psychological flexibility was found to be a crucial resource in reducing workaholic tendencies, leading to improved flourishing and life satisfaction.

The implications for human resources include practical strategies and targeted interventions to help individuals navigate organisational demands, prevent compulsive work behaviours and improve overall well-being.

This study offers new insights into the role of psychological flexibility as a personal resource in reducing compulsive work tendencies and enhancing both hedonic and eudaimonic well-being in high-demand work environments.

The purpose of this study is to examine firms' response to product market threats from foreign competitors, specifically whether they pursue a strategy of dispersion or herding with regards to their product space and executive-incentive plans.

This study applies a two-stage least squares instrumental variable (IV) approach to address endogeneity concerns. The analyses apply to a sample of 9,719 firm-pairs from 21 manufacturing industries over the period from 2006 to 2015.

Firms attempt to distance themselves from their fellow incumbent firms when facing greater foreign competition, specifically with regards to their product descriptions and the incentives they provide to CEOs. This effect becomes stronger when industry peers are more likely to serve as material threats themselves.

These results provide encouraging opportunities for future research about the long-run implications of dispersion in local industries. The survival rate tied to the observed strategies in this study, as well as general changes to industry structure are remaining questions of interest.

The observed responses by incumbent firms in this study offer insights for policymakers on tariff-setting, as tariff adjustments may influence the local product space. Additionally, the related shifts in CEO incentives inform shareholders' contracting decisions.

This study reveals that incumbents’ responses to foreign competition reshape local industry product spaces. Furthermore, this study sheds light on a new link between firms’ product spaces and management incentives.

Drawing upon affective events theory and regulatory focus theory, the current study examines the relationship between customer gratitude and customer-oriented organizational citizenship behavior (customer-oriented OCB), and the mediating role of positive affect and the moderating role of trait promotion focus.

Three-wave time-lagged data from 674 nurses nested within 125 department supervisors was collected. Multilevel modeling and Monte Carlo simulation were performed using Mplus 7.1 software to test all hypotheses.

Customer gratitude was positively associated with nurses’ customer-oriented OCB, and the relationship was mediated by positive affect. Nurse trait promotion focus strengthened the positive relationship between patient gratitude and positive affect, such that the relationship was stronger for those with a higher level of trait promotion focus.

This paper extends research on the effects of customer gratitude by extending our understanding of customer gratitude as a positive workplace event that can potentially promote employees’ positive behaviors toward customers, especially those with a stronger promotion focus.

This study is one of the first to examine the relationship between customer gratitude and employee customer-oriented OCB and uncover potential mechanisms to understand how this relationship unfolds and to whom this relationship is stronger. These findings can inform practices for service organizations.

The purpose of the study is to propose a new perspective to explain how China's rapid growth in patenting is partially driven by corporate strategic patenting to influence local governments. The authors highlight the role of strategic patenting and local government-business relations in creating the gap between the patent boom and underlying technological progress in China.

The authors investigate the relationship between local government-business relations and corporate strategic patenting behaviors, measured as a higher ratio of patent filings to patent awards, by collecting data from three successive NADS surveys of government-business relations in 292 Chinese municipalities, paired with detailed patenting and subsidy data of 3,756 publicly listed corporations obtained through text mining.

The authors find that, while R&D investment and patent subsidies do drive corporate patenting, firms in jurisdictions with lower-quality government-business relations are more likely to engage in strategic patenting. Moreover, the negative impact of government-business relations on strategic patenting is moderated by political connections, as the strategic patenting of firms without political connections is more sensitive to government-business relations. The authors further show that firms obtain significant benefits from patenting in the form of additional subsidies from local innovation and industrial policies in the years following.

Rolling back patent subsidies will reduce strategic patenting to a limited extent. The local governments in emerging markets need to increase the capacity to implement industrial policy and provide market-based opportunities for firms to access innovation inputs.

The authors provide an updated and fresh perspective to understand the phenomenon of China's patent boom by showing that patenting can be driven by corporate strategies to adapt to local institutions and influence government policy. The authors extend the analysis of strategic patenting to emerging markets.

Examining dominance in influencing leadership perceptions for men and women has received significant scholarly attention. The studies typically show that dominance is beneficial for men in attaining leadership positions but not for women. However, the studies were predominantly conducted more than two decades ago. Given the developments in gender research, this study extends the dominance line of inquiry by probing the impact of dominance need on leader emergence for men versus women in self-managed work teams. Furthermore, this study aims to examine if team dominance needs dispersion posits as a boundary condition for the combined impact of dominance needs and gender on leader emergence.

The authors conducted a longitudinal study that lasted one semester and involved 44 ad hoc self-managed work teams.

This study found that dominance needs facilitated leader emergence regardless of gender, and team dominance needs dispersion. Furthermore, men with high dominance needs were likelier to emerge as leaders than women with high dominance needs in high dominance needs dispersion teams. By contrast, women low in dominance needs received a harsher penalty in their leadership emergence than men low in dominance needs in low dominance needs dispersion teams

These results depart from the usual findings regarding the backlash effects that dominant women face and paint a rosy picture regarding the use of dominance in shaping leader emergence. However, the findings support the notion in gender stereotypes research that women are judged more critically than men in ascending to leadership positions.