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This paper aims to examine how a combination of legitimacy needs and actions (LNAs) can shed light on the legitimacy behaviour of private higher education institutions (PHEIs) operating in an institutional business environment that is witnessing significant public–private sector role reversal. The legitimacy process is promoted as an exemplar to inform the increasing number of public–private sector role reversals in the utility, transportation, health and telecommunication sectors.

Based on empirical evidence, this paper triangulates data from archival policy announcements, retrospective case studies and face-to-face interviews. A replication logic methodology was used to establish LNAs and categorized themes.

The findings show that market, relational, investment, alliance and social legitimacy needs are crucial drivers for PHEIs when hybridizing their legitimacy practices, especially during critical phases of institutional reform. The proposed conceptual framework demonstrates how the legitimacy construction process is the result of internal development and external validation.

In providing some empirical descriptions and generalizations, the model makes limited attempt to determine with any specificity how PHEIs interact with their institutional environment, beyond a process of data triangulation.

The proposed LNA framework is especially relevant in industries where the government has historically been a major institutional stakeholder, but where market liberalization is leading to increasingly active participation by the private sector. Findings can help PHEIs deal with reform policies by establishing deep and varied expertise inside their organizations and through links with international universities, industries and government agencies enable knowledge exchange, transfer, partnerships and the development of alliance capitalism.

This study provides a more comprehensive approach for theorizing the interrelatedness and embeddedness of organizations with common business and institutional demand factors and linkages and their changing roles, particularly the multi-scale impacts of LNAs on legitimacy sustainability.

The purpose of this paper is to answer the question how important are privacy and communication and self-expression needs in social networks on the internet, especially in the case of uploading photos. Therefore, the existing privacy calculus model of Dinev and Hart (2006) will be enlarged with new constructs and checked for validation.

For the application and verification of the proposed research model, an online survey was carried out. Within the data analysis phase, several methods, for example, exploratory factor analysis and confirmatory factor analysis, have been integrated, and the most important measures (e.g. Cronbach’s alpha and fit indices) have been calculated. This allows the existence of the requirements for important quality criteria for measurement models, for example, reliability, convergent validity, discriminant validity and model fit, to be checked.

The results confirm the fit of the proposed research model. The needs of all quality criteria are fulfilled. This indicates that the proposed research model helps to investigate the influence of privacy and communication factors on online behavior. In addition, the results show that the willingness to provide images on the internet is highly influenced by communication and self-presentation needs and the internet trust also has an influence on the willingness to provide images on the internet.

This paper is the first, to the best of the authors’ knowledge, which considers privacy concerns and communication needs when analyzing the behavior of users of social network services, exemplarily for the case of uploading photos. This will give the growing research field of online services a new tool to properly take these important factors into account.

Companies have to consider people as one of the most important resources. Especially, the combination of demanding work and academic workers requires activities with regard to employer branding. An employer brand is an intangible asset that allows companies to look for motivated and capable employees (Hillebrandt, 2013). Consequently, the concept of employer branding can be used (Brickson, 2005; Heilmann et al., 2013). The purpose of this paper is to supplement the first empirical investigations with students as new employees (e.g. Daniel et al., 2015) by the perceptions of potential employees in less powerful, i.e. more rural, regions.

This paper summarizes existing findings and enhances two empirical investigations of 431 students of a technical university in a medium-sized city and 211 students of a university of applied sciences in a rural region in Germany. The data collection and analysis will focus on different methodical alternatives of identifying important drivers and dimensions of employer branding, as well as identifying different groups of potential employees and gender differences.

The paper highlights the need of the underrepresented but successful consideration of group specific analyses and following strategies in case of employer branding. The existing approaches of the establishment of an employer branding concepts can be improved through more suitable strategy elements when the addressees are better known.

The findings allow new insights, especially to smaller regions and companies and the awareness of group-specific analyses in general and in case of the development of an employer branding concept.

The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate an approach to include the influence of design attributes (DA) into an early product development step. In general, the development of new products with market success is of high relevance for companies. Because of a relatively high-quality level in general, not the product quality itself but rather new issues as attributes with aesthetical values are becoming more and more important. However, the right consideration of these attributes is still one of the challenges.

The underlying investigation is based on an empirical data set resulting from a survey with motorcycles as research object. Motorcycles are a good example for a good with a certain relevance of DA for the buying decision of customers. The data collection and analysis will focus on a recommended presentation alternative of measuring perceptions and influences through customer evaluations, separating customer segments and identifying differences. Therefore, data analysis methods such as cluster analysis will be applied.

The findings are new for researchers from a theoretical and from a practical point of view. The results verify the use of pictorial stimulus presentation and emphasize the necessary integration of DA within the product development process.

Within the paper the usefulness of the consideration of design elements in case of gathering customer meanings is highlighted. Therefore, existing approaches of measuring design attribute influences and using pictorial instead of verbal descriptions of stimuli are adopted and enhanced through the use of additional information of the respondents.

The purpose of this paper is to develop an approach to measure and to evaluate product descriptors which have a high relevance from customers’ point of view. When developing new goods, i.e. products and services, decision makers have to include consumer evaluations within their decision-making process. These evaluations should analyze the product descriptors, which are really relevant from the customers’ point of view and which can be totally different from simple physical or technical attributes in the case of material goods. Besides these several types of product characteristics, the evaluations should consider external influencing factors like the involvement.

In this investigation, an empirical data set resulting from a complex technical product-related survey is used. The products analyzed are smartphones and can be seen as representative examples with both objective physical features and subjective design-related attributes. The data collection and analysis will focus on subjective attributes, identifying factors and separating customer segments, e.g. using cluster analysis. Additionally, the existence of influence factors such as the involvement of the customers will be tested.

The results show relevant differences from the customers’ point of view with regard to product descriptors which are different for every customer and hard to describe. The investigation leads to five different respondent groups. Additionally, other external (customer behavior-related) influence factors – especially the involvement – can be identified as relevant. The analyses point out that there is a need to analyze the customers on an individual level and to consider influencing factors.

The investigation illustrates consequences of the usage of customer individual subjective elements as product descriptors which are relevant from the customers’ viewpoint. The resulting insights are new for researchers from a theoretical and from a practical point of view. The results verify, among others, the needs to analyze the customers on an individual level and to consider external (customer behavior-related) influence factors.

Despite air travel having become a widely used means of transportation, the technological sophistication and human skill required for flying an aircraft remains a source of fascination and admiration. Aviation has been coined an ultra-safe system, coping with the duality of safety and efficiency by emphasizing expertise and learning, but also standardization and automation. Highly selected and continuously trained pilots have to work with increasingly complex and autonomous technology, which creates tensions between routinization and responsible action. Research on leadership and coordination in aircrews is reviewed in light of these tensions, pointing to the benefits of a functional approach to leadership which promotes optimal use of all resources in the team toward adaptive coordination. Furthermore, the leadership requirements arising from the fact that aircrews are ad hoc teams, usually only formed for a few flights, are discussed in terms of fast team-building coupled with the reliance on shared knowledge stemming from high levels of standardization. Due to the complex demands for leadership in aircrews, special training programs were developed early on, which have become a standard that many other high-risk industries are still striving for. The generalizability and need for further development of concepts embedded in successfully leading aircrews is scrutinized, focusing especially on leadership in ad hoc teams, the interplay of standardization and leadership, and the balance between shared and formal leadership.

Publicly-held companies collectively allocate tens of millions of dollars each year to investor relations, yet little research has been conducted into how investor relations officers (IROs) try to determine the effectiveness of this investment. The purpose of this paper is to discuss the above issues.

This exploratory study is based on a survey (n=384) of IROs who are members of the National Investor Relations Institute (NIRI), the world's largest professional investor relations association.

Respondents strongly rebuked using share price as a valid measure of investor relations performance. A factor analysis revealed that IROs use four factors to measure program success (listed in order of stated importance): first, international C-suite assessment; second, relationship assessment; third, outreach assessment; and fourth, external assessment. IROs at large-cap companies place significantly more importance on both C-suite assessment and relationship assessment than their peers at small-caps.

These results may not be generalizable to IROs who are non-NIRI members or investor relations consultants. Cross-cultural studies on this topic are needed.

The evaluative factors that emerged in this study may be used by IROs to develop and refine their evaluation metrics relative to their peers.

This is one of the first and largest studies to specifically examine program measurement and evaluation in the context of investor relations. These findings help set the stage for future work in this area.

This study conducts a systematic literature review to synthesize the extant literature primarily on “online shopping consumer behavior” and to gain insight into “What drives consumers toward online shopping”.

The authors followed guidelines for systematic literature reviews with stringent inclusion and exclusion criteria. The review is based on 79 research papers published from 2000 to 2020 in 21 reputed peer-reviewed international journals. The papers were analyzed and synthesized based on their defining characteristics, methodologies, major constructs and themes addressed.

The literature synthesis indicated that consumers have to make a trade-off between 11 perceived benefits and six perceived sacrifices to improve their net perceived value before making the final decision to adopt online shopping. It is important to decode these factors as they could improve both the functional and recreational value of the shopping experience for online consumers, resulting in an improvement in conversion rates from a prospect to the final purchase at e-stores. This could improve turnover as well as profits for the e-tailers.

This study pioneers to consolidate these factors through the lens of the value adoption model. This study also suggests insightful directions for further research perspectives in the online context from both consumers' and retailers' perspectives.