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The Australian retail industry is facing skills shortages while mature and old-age workers are experiencing high unemployment rates. This study focuses on understanding organizational inclusion and turnover intentions in the context of employee age.

Survey data were collected from 502 retail supervisors and employees.

Drawing on socioemotional selectivity theory and social exchange theory, the findings indicate: no difference in inclusive supervisory behaviors perceptions for different age groups; a significantly higher workplace social inclusion perceptions among employees aged 55 plus than among employees aged 35–44; a significantly lower turnover intention among employees aged 55 plus and 45–54 years than other age groups; a positive relationship between inclusive supervisory behaviors and workplace social inclusion and a negative relationship between workplace social inclusion and turnover intention which was stronger for older employees than for younger employees.

The findings present a business case for hiring older employees and indicate that managers need to prioritize inclusion.

This study addresses the underexplored area of employee age differences in inclusion and turnover perceptions among retail employees. It links inclusive supervisory behaviors, social inclusion and turnover intention.

This study aims to explore the South Sulawesi traditional dances in wedding ceremonies as key instruments for social identity construction, cultural heritage preservation and community-based economic growth. By examining the interplay of these dances within wedding ceremonies, the study aims to illuminate how artistic performances uphold ancestral values while adapting to contemporary social dynamics.

Amidst the forces of globalization and technological advancement, this research uses qualitative case study research to capture the cultural essence of traditional dances. Using thematic analysis, the study reveals the dynamic interplay between tradition and modernity, highlighting the roles of cultural preservation and the construction of social identities. It discusses the implication of the potential of these dances as sustainable cultural tourism products, balancing economic benefits with the need for authentic representation.

The findings reveal that traditional wedding dances in South Sulawesi serve as powerful symbols of cultural identity, with distinct dances like Tari Paduppa and Tari Lalusu being performed during specific parts of the wedding ceremonies. These dances convey values such as gratitude, respect, unity, and social hierarchy. Furthermore, the findings highlight the role of these performances in sustaining the livelihood of artists and their potential as cultural tourism products. Additionally, parents, schools and government-led festivals jointly create a supportive ecosystem that encourages intergenerational participation. Despite challenges posed by global entertainment trends, stakeholders adapt performances through selective modernization, ensuring that authenticity and heritage value remain intact.

This study highlights the resilience and adaptability of traditional wedding dances as multifaceted cultural expressions that simultaneously foster social identity, economic viability and heritage continuity. By demonstrating how local communities integrate these dances into broader educational, familial and policy structures, the research contributes to discussions on intangible cultural heritage and offers practical insights for similar preservation efforts.

Prior work has shown that the board of directors can alleviate market imperfections that lead to capital investment inefficiency. The authors extend previous work by exploring how board characteristics influence the efficiency of human capital investment, a critical production factor that has remained insufficiently examined. Specifically, this study aims to investigate how board activity, size, the presence of a separate chairman, female directors and board independence affect firm labour investment efficiency in the European context.

The sample contains 4,331 firm-year observations traded on the STOXX® Europe 600 index from 2009 through 2022. This paper applies a lagged ordinary least squares (OLS) regression to test the proposed hypotheses. It also uses a dynamic panel generalised method of moments (GMM) regression to tackle potential endogeneity concerns.

The results show that board gender diversity and the level of independent directors are positively linked to labour investment efficiency, whereas board size and meeting frequency are negatively related to labour investment efficiency. Meanwhile, the presence of a separate chairman on the board does not appear to be significantly associated with labour investment efficiency. In additional subgroup analyses, the authors find that board gender diversity mitigates managers’ inclinations towards both overinvestment and underinvestment in labour. The authors also find that the level of independent directors helps greatly in reducing the underinvestment in labour, while it fails to attenuate the overinvestment in labour. Moreover, the authors find board size to be significantly associated with the tendency to make suboptimal labour decisions, manifesting as both overinvestment and underinvestment in labour. Finally, the results show that board meetings are significantly associated with overinvestment problems, while underinvestment problems seem to be unrelated to meeting frequency.

The empirical results have implications for policymakers and market participants in Europe. Firstly, firms may improve the efficiency of their labour investments by increasing directors’ independence and adding more female voices to corporate boards. Secondly, the evidence shows that some board attributes, such as board activity and size, do not necessarily have a beneficial impact on corporate decisions, particularly labour investment decisions. Finally, market participants are likely to benefit from this paper by understanding the role of board attributes in promoting the efficient allocation of firm resources.

This paper makes two significant contributions. Firstly, it extends the literature on the role of boards of directors in shaping corporate decision-making processes, particularly concerning human capital investment decisions within European firms. By doing so, the authors provide new evidence confirming that certain board attributes, such as board size, director independence and board gender diversity, are important for optimising firms’ resource allocation. Secondly, although numerous studies investigate boards’ role in capital investment decisions, relatively few empirical studies exist on the role of boards in labour investment decisions. This paper, therefore, tries to tackle this void in the literature by investigating firms’ decision-making concerning labour investments.

This research aims to investigate the motivations of adults for postgraduate studies in Hong Kong among general master, EMBA/MBA and doctorate students, focusing on the self-actualization need under Maslow’s model. The questionnaire surveying and related statistics methods are used. The Brief Index of Self-actualization (Sumerlin and Bundrick, 1996) is applied. The findings are: doctorate students have higher self-actualization motivation than Master students; age only slightly partially supported or largely refuted to covariate with self-actualization motivation; there are no direct results to show that females have higher self-actualization motivation than males. However, on Factor 3 curiosity (Sumerlin and Bundrick, 1996) females score higher than males. As this is a factor that measures self-actualization, we could argue that females show higher self-actualization needs than males indirectly in this analysis. Fourth, there is significant support to show that income covariates with self-actualization motivation.

This research investigates the motivations of adults for postgraduate studies in Hong Kong among general master, EMBA/MBA and doctorate students, focusing on the self-actualization need under Maslow’s model. The questionnaire surveying and related statistics methods are used. The Brief Index of Self-actualization (Sumerlin and Bundrick, 1996) is applied.

The findings are: doctorate students have higher self-actualization motivation than Master students; age only slightly partially supported or largely refuted to covariate with self-actualization motivation; there are no direct results to show that females have higher self-actualization motivation than males. However, on Factor 3 curiosity (Sumerlin and Bundrick, 1996), females score higher than males. As this is a factor that measures self-actualization, we could argue that females show higher self-actualization needs than males indirectly in this analysis. Fourth, there is significant support to show that income covariates with self-actualization motivation.

The major limitation of this study is the time period is too short to conduct thorough meaningful research within actually a few months. If there is more time a more thorough study could be conducted. The second difficulty or just another major difficulty is the availability of participants. It was not expected at the beginning of the research of the great difficulty to get participants particularly reliable participants. To my surprise, the academic institutions in Hong Kong are not cooperative at all including a number of my former alma maters. They either said it is not convenient or there may be privacy problems.

This would help academic institutions to fix their course strategies, and the government determine its education policies for full-time student and adult education facilities.

This could help to encourage Hong Kong adults to pursue more studies to enhance their ability for their woks and also for promotion of their interests in life.

This is an original research that hopefully would bring new light to the topic of the research.

This study aims to examine young social media users’ differential acceptance of data-driven ad personalization depending on the types of personal data used, and to propose and test the Privacy and Trust Equilibrium (PATE) model, a new conceptual model developed to explain the intertwined nature of the competing influences of platform-related factors (privacy concern, trust, and privacy fatigue) on acceptance of ad personalization.

A survey of 440 Instagram users aged 18–24 in Australia was conducted to examine the relationships between the three factors of the PATE model and acceptance of ad personalization utilizing overt vs covert data collection methods.

This study shows the highest level of acceptance for personalization using overtly collected data and the lowest for covert data. The results also support the PATE model, revealing the competing dynamics of how the platform-related factors shape consumers’ acceptance of data-driven ad personalization. Privacy concern discourages Instagram users from accepting personalized ads, while trust encourages them. When the pushing influence of privacy concern and the pulling influence of trust form equilibrium, generating cognitive dissonance, privacy fatigue seems to play a significant role in resolving the dissonance, leading to increased acceptance.

This study advances the understanding of how concurrent push–pull-resigning factors affect young consumers’ acceptance of data-driven ad personalization practices, expanding the scope of research on data-driven personalized advertising and privacy.

This study aims to examine the impact of customer experience of cannabis-infused food and beverage perception (sensory experience, novelty experience, health concerns and restaurant experience) on favouring these products and subsequent customer citizenship behaviour.

Using a purposive sampling approach, an onsite survey was administered to Thai Gen Z customers in consuming cannabis-infused foods and/or beverages. Subsequently, the sample consisted of 330 respondents. Partial least squares structural equation modelling was used for the analyses.

The results indicated that sensory experience, health concerns and restaurant experience had significant positive effects on favouring cannabis-infused foods and beverages. This favourability, in turn, positively affected customer citizenship behaviour. In addition, favouring cannabis-infused foods and beverages partially mediated the relationships between customer citizenship behaviour and sensory experience, health concerns and restaurant experience.

This study provides a new contribution to the literature with a first empirical examination showing positive favouring of cannabis-infused foods and beverages among young consumers in Thailand. It provides practical insights for managers in emerging markets to leverage cannabis-infused products as part of the enhancement of the global food and beverage industry. The study also offers an example of how to move forward through an unknown territory regarding perceptions of consumer experiences.

The current study investigates the reader demographics, appeals and reading motivations of Webtoon, a born-digital emerging multimedia reading platform that is widely available via mobile applications. This study aims to contribute to existing reader studies by exploring a novel reading platform in order to create future recommendation services.

An online survey was distributed, targeting Webtoon readers 18 years old or older. Descriptive and exploratory statistical analyses based on 1,117 valid survey responses were conducted to better understand the readers of Webtoon.

Seventy-six percent of Webtoon readers fall into the 18–33 age range, indicating the medium’s popularity among young adult readers. Among 14 appeal elements identified, Webtoon-specific appeals include visual/artistic style, sound and interactivity, time commitment, user-friendliness, and cost and price. Frequently selected Webtoon reading motivations include relaxation, changing one’s emotional state, escapism and achieving new experiences. Lastly, a cluster analysis yielded six distinctive Webtoon reader profiles: Habitual readers, emotionally-responsive readers, occasional readers, convenience-seeking readers, socially aware readers and Webtoon expert readers.

The current study adopts a persona concept from user experience research to suggest a way to understand Webtoon readers and improve recommendation services, a unique approach in reader studies. It aims to understand Webtoon readers from readers’ advisory and media studies perspectives, bridging two areas.

This study sits at the intersection of financial planning and FinTech, focusing on robo-advisory, an affordable and accessible digital financial advisory service. Individuals’ lack of trust has resulted in low adoption of robo-advice. This study aims to understand the psychological process of how individuals build trust in robo-advice, helping them engage with it more effectively and access affordable financial advice.

Using a trust transfer theory framework and 15 semi-structured interviews, this study identifies the sources people rely on to build trust in robo-advice.

The authors highlight four themes – social influence, psychological comfort, safeguarding and compliance and personal capacity – that shape individuals’ trust in robo-advice. In addition to direct trust in robo-advice, firm-specific trust and system trust can also transfer to trust in robo-advice. This study finds that financial literacy and risk tolerance moderate individuals’ trust in robo-advice, while psychological comfort first shapes trust and then drives adoption. The findings suggest that even young, tech-savvy individuals may not fully benefit from robo-advice due to low personal capability. They also prefer a hybrid model, where combining robo-advice with traditional advisory services could offer greater benefits.

This study details the concept of trust in the robo-advice context into three dimensions: technology trust, firm-specific trust and system trust. Existing research on robo-advice lacks quantitative tests on firm-specific and systemic trust; therefore, this qualitative exploratory study offers foundational theoretical insights.

Despite increasing awareness among fashion consumers about the positive environmental and societal impacts of sustainable fashion as a viable alternative to fast fashion, their actual adoption behavior often diverges. This study aims to empirically investigate consumers’ resistance barriers to sustainable fashion clothing.

This study utilizes innovation resistance theory to examine the barriers to consumer intention to buy sustainable clothing. The study collected a large sample (N = 745) of fashion consumers from the USA and India to test a research model.

The study finds that value, social risk, tradition and image barriers significantly reduce consumers’ intentions to buy sustainable fashion clothing. Additionally, the findings highlight that environmental concern moderates the relationship between social risk barriers and buying intentions.

The study findings contribute to the existing sustainable fashion literature by highlighting the main barriers for sustainable clothing consumption and emphasizing the crucial role of social elements, economic values and the image of sustainable fashion products in shaping consumer behavior within the fashion landscape.

The purpose of this study is to examine whether the use of videoconferencing for communication between the audit committee (AC) and auditors affects the quality of client firms’ audits.

This paper analyzes the mandatory disclosure information on AC–auditors communication using 1,065 Korean listed firm-years for the fiscal years 2020 and 2021. The details of AC–auditor communication (i.e. the extent of firms’ use of videoconferencing) are manually collected from audit reports.

This study finds that videoconferencing has a negative impact on audit quality, suggesting that it is not an effective communication medium between AC and auditors. The results are robust to alternative research designs (e.g. entropy-balanced sample, propensity score matching analysis and change analysis) that address endogeneity concerns. This study also finds that while the negative effect of videoconferencing is mitigated by holding more frequent AC meetings, neither AC independence nor expertise mitigates this effect.

This paper suggests that videoconferencing may affect audit quality by hurting the discussion between the AC and auditors.

The findings that videoconferencing impairs the effectiveness of ACs and thus lowers audit quality have practical implications as the COVID-19 pandemic has significantly changed how AC members and auditors interact. This study offers timely and valuable insights into the potential implications of these pandemic-induced changes on audit environments.

This study provides large-sample empirical evidence that directly examines the effect of videoconferencing on audit quality, enhancing the understanding of the communication dynamics between the AC and auditors. This study also contributes to the literature on the role of ACs in emerging markets by highlighting the information processing role of the AC.