Anne-Maree O’Rourke, Alex Belli and Frank Mathmann
Academic research has supported the belief that consumers undertip minority race service workers due to implicit racial biases. However, there has been less focus in examining…
Abstract
Purpose
Academic research has supported the belief that consumers undertip minority race service workers due to implicit racial biases. However, there has been less focus in examining possible moderating factors. This paper aims to fill this gap by analyzing the role of direct and indirect experience in tipping frontline service workers from a minority background. Given the prominence of customer ratings on digital service platforms and the perception that African Americans are discriminated against, the authors look at the interplay of interaction length (direct experience) and customer ratings (indirect experience) on the relationship between race and tipping.
Design/methodology/approach
An expectancy disconfirmation framework was developed and tested with a sample of 360 US participants in an online experiment. The experiment followed a 2 × (race: African-American versus Caucasian) × 2 (direct experience: limited versus extensive) × 3 (indirect experience: absent versus positive versus negative customer rating) design.
Findings
The authors found consumers who have extended direct experience (longer service interaction) and no indirect experience (absent customer ratings) tipped African Americans more than Caucasians. Interestingly, this effect is reduced in the presence of indirect experience (customer ratings). Finally, where the consumer lacks direct experience (shorter service interaction) but is exposed to positive indirect experience (positive customer ratings), consumers tip African Americans more.
Originality/value
To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first paper that examines the role of direct and indirect experience in the relationship between race and tipping. Based on the authors’ findings, the authors provide several contributions, including recommendations to reduce inequalities arising from implicit racial bias on digital service platforms.
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Haseeb Shabbir, Michael R. Hyman and Alena Kostyk
This special issue explores how marketing thought and practice have contributed to systemic racism but could alleviate racially insensitive and biased practices. An introductory…
Abstract
Purpose
This special issue explores how marketing thought and practice have contributed to systemic racism but could alleviate racially insensitive and biased practices. An introductory historical overview briefly discusses coloniality, capitalism, eugenics, modernism, transhumanism, neo-liberalism, and liquid racism. Then, the special issue articles on colonial-based commodity racism, racial beauty imagery, implicit racial bias, linguistic racism and racial imagery in ads are introduced.
Design/methodology/approach
The historical introduction is grounded in a review of relevant literature.
Findings
Anti-racism efforts must tackle the intersection between neo-liberalism and racial injustice, the “raceless state” myth should be re-addressed, and cultural pedagogy’s role in normalizing racism should be investigated.
Practical implications
To stop perpetuating raced markets, educators should mainstream anti-racism and marketing. Commodity racism provides a historical and contemporary window into university-taught marketing skills.
Social implications
Anti-racism efforts must recognize neo-liberalism’s pervasive role in normalizing raced markets and reject conventional wisdom about a raceless cultural pedagogy, especially with the emergence of platform economies.
Originality/value
Little previous research has tackled the history of commodity racism, white privilege, white ideology, and instituting teaching practices sensitive to minority group experiences.
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Lachlan Schomburgk and Arvid Hoffmann
The purpose of this study is to examine how mindfulness reduces consumers’ buy-now-pay-later (BNPL) payment scheme usage and how that relates to their overall well-being.
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this study is to examine how mindfulness reduces consumers’ buy-now-pay-later (BNPL) payment scheme usage and how that relates to their overall well-being.
Design/methodology/approach
This study uses partial least squares structural equation modeling to test the hypotheses of a conceptual framework which is rooted in the extant literature, using an approximately representative sample of Australian consumers (N = 275).
Findings
This study finds empirical evidence for the ability of mindfulness to reduce BNPL usage through increasing consumers’ financial self-control and decreasing their impulse buying tendency. This study also obtains empirical evidence that greater BNPL usage is associated with lower subjective evaluations of consumers’ overall well-being by increasing their current money management stress and decreasing their expected future financial security.
Research limitations/implications
Future research could build on the effect of mindfulness that the authors find in this study and how it could be leveraged as a protective mechanism for consumers’ financial decision-making. Such research could involve mindfulness-based interventions, such as instant messaging within smartphone applications. Doing so would also help assess causality, thus addressing the limitation of the cross-sectional nature of this study.
Practical implications
The findings have implications for public policymakers and business practitioners. Financial counselors are encouraged to include the measurement of personality traits such as impulse buying tendency and financial self-control in intake meetings with clients and consider the benefits of offering short mindfulness training. Given the negative effect of BNPL usage on consumers’ financial and overall well-being, and the reputational risks this implies, BNPL providers are recommended to take more responsibility to ensure consumers do not fall into a debt trap, while retailers are advised to take steps to make payment processes more “mindful.”
Originality/value
Although mindfulness has established effects on consumer behavior, its beneficial influence on consumer financial decision-making has rarely been explored. This study also contributes to a better understanding of the antecedents and consequences of consumers’ BNPL payment scheme usage. Although its prominence is increasing in daily life, and despite the concerns of consumer advocates, policymakers and regulators regarding its risks, the topic of consumers’ BNPL usage has received little attention in academic research so far. Finally, this study extends the emerging financial well-being literature by demonstrating how BNPL usage can reduce consumers’ overall well-being through the mediating effect of increasing current money management stress and decreasing expected future financial security.
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The Alex Catalogue of Electronic Texts is a collection of digital documents. The scope of documents in the collection includes items from American literature, English literature…
Abstract
The Alex Catalogue of Electronic Texts is a collection of digital documents. The scope of documents in the collection includes items from American literature, English literature, and Western philosophy.
Alex Mason, Dmytro Romanov, L. Eduardo Cordova-Lopez, Steven Ross and Olga Korostynska
Modern meat processing requires automation and robotisation to remain sustainable and adapt to future challenges, including those brought by global infection events. Automation of…
Abstract
Purpose
Modern meat processing requires automation and robotisation to remain sustainable and adapt to future challenges, including those brought by global infection events. Automation of all or many processes is seen as the way forward, with robots performing various tasks instead of people. Meat cutting is one of these tasks. Smart novel solutions, including smart knives, are required, with the smart knife being able to analyse and predict the meat it cuts. This paper aims to review technologies with the potential to be used as a so-called “smart knife” The criteria for a smart knife are also defined.
Design/methodology/approach
This paper reviews various technologies that can be used, either alone or in combination, for developing a future smart knife for robotic meat cutting, with possibilities for their integration into automatic meat processing. Optical methods, Near Infra-Red spectroscopy, electrical impedance spectroscopy, force sensing and electromagnetic wave-based sensing approaches are assessed against the defined criteria for a smart knife.
Findings
Optical methods are well established for meat quality and composition characterisation but lack speed and robustness for real-time use as part of a cutting tool. Combining these methods with artificial intelligence (AI) could improve the performance. Methods, such as electrical impedance measurements and rapid evaporative ionisation mass spectrometry, are invasive and not suitable in meat processing since they damage the meat. One attractive option is using athermal electromagnetic waves, although no commercially developed solutions exist that are readily adaptable to produce a smart knife with proven functionality, robustness or reliability.
Originality/value
This paper critically reviews and assesses a range of sensing technologies with very specific requirements: to be compatible with robotic assisted cutting in the meat industry. The concept of a smart knife that can benefit from these technologies to provide a real-time “feeling feedback” to the robot is at the centre of the discussion.
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Matthew E. Brashears and Laura Aufderheide Brashears
Balance Theory has accumulated an impressive record of empirical confirmation at both the micro- and macro-levels. Yet, it is unclear why humans consistently prefer balanced…
Abstract
Purpose
Balance Theory has accumulated an impressive record of empirical confirmation at both the micro- and macro-levels. Yet, it is unclear why humans consistently prefer balanced relations when imbalance offers the opportunity to reap material rewards. We argue that balance is preferred because it functions as a “compression heuristic,” allowing networks to be more easily encoded in, and recalled from, memory.
Methodology/approach
We present the results of a novel randomized laboratory experiment using nearly 300 subjects. We evaluate the independent and joint effects of degree of balance/imbalance and presence/absence of kin compression heuristics on network recall.
Findings
We find that memory for relationship valence is more accurate for balanced, rather than imbalanced, networks and that relationship existence and relationship valence are separable cognitive elements. We also use comparisons between kin and non-kin networks to suggest that humans are implicitly aware of the conditions under which imbalanced networks will be most durable.
Research limitations/implications
We show that the tension/strain postulated to generate mental and behavioral responses to increase balance likely stems from cognitive limitations. More broadly, this connects balance theory to models of human cognition and evolution and suggests that human general processing ability may have evolved in response to social, rather than physical, challenges.
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Walter Fernando Balser, Steve Diasio and Taylor Kendal
This essay proposes the need to infuse open innovation (OI) and open source (OS) principles and technologies into schools as a means of tackling many of the most pervasive…
Abstract
This essay proposes the need to infuse open innovation (OI) and open source (OS) principles and technologies into schools as a means of tackling many of the most pervasive challenges in education, and by extension, society at large. It is argued that the principles of OI and OS, which are rooted in innovation management and software development, respectively, may be applied to the way we conceive of and approach organizational governance structures related to schooling, particularly in regard to harnessing innovation, updating management processes, and codifying new systems of trust. Whereas OI offers a novel approach to knowledge flow and the open exchange of ideas, communities rooted in OS principles breed tangible and generative effects through peer network democratization. These emergent, digitally defined networks have been proven to maximize innovation potential, expand collaboration, and enable the propagation of highly durable systems of trust and transparency, all catalytic and essential if we are to realize a future learning economy which favors equity, distributed systems, and common goods over profit, centralized decision-making, and proprietorship. It is within this framing that we articulate the core tenets of both OI and OS translationally as a means of stimulating thinking about how core principles of “openness” and the distributed technologies they enable may help to build common ground in an ever-evolving education and information ecosystem.
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This piece takes issue with the deployment of Trotsky’s idea of uneven and combined development (UCD) in the Anglophone discipline of International Relations (IR). It argues that…
Abstract
This piece takes issue with the deployment of Trotsky’s idea of uneven and combined development (UCD) in the Anglophone discipline of International Relations (IR). It argues that this strand of thought makes a theory out of what is really a theorem (a deduction from an axiom), whilst forgetting about the original, actual theory of which it was part, Leon Trotsky’s theory of permanent revolution. IR U&CD, marketed in the discipline as International Historical Sociology (IHS), posits ‘the international’ as the field to which ‘the theory’ must be applied in order to open it up to social theorisation. This is analogous to the late-19th-century subjective turn in social science in which reality is presented as unfathomable, and rationality is merely subjective, an attribute of individual ‘actors’. ‘The international’ in this sense may be compared to ‘the market’ in neoclassical economics. Although it presents itself as Marxist, the U&CD/IHS project was part of a regressive conjuncture in Anglo-American, mainstream IR, as transpires from its attempt to position itself close to the ‘English School’ in IR. I conclude with a variation on Trotsky’s original theory, applying it to the ‘permanent counterrevolution’, of which the current war on terror is the latest stage.