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Manufacturers face increasing demands to address inefficiencies and improve environmental performance across their supply chains. However, there remains a significant gap in empirical research examining how collaboration in the supply chain affects various environmental practices and their consequent impacts on performance. This study aims to address the gap by examining how shared goals and vision drives compliance-oriented and prevention-oriented practices, subsequently affecting environmental performance and operational costs—critical for fostering antifragility and resilience in today’s environment.

An empirical study has been performed based on a sample of survey data from 279 manufacturers from fifteen countries and regions. Applying structural equation modeling analysis to the sample dataset, this study examines the mediating role of two distinct types of environmental practices between shared goals and visions and manufacturers’ environmental performance and operational cost.

This study delineates distinct pathways through which shared goals and vision affect various types of environmental practices, and consequently lead to different performance outcomes: (1) environmental impact of manufacturing activities depends on the collective efforts of the manufacturers and their supply chain partners; (2) shared goals and vision among supply chain partners facilitates both environmental performance and operational cost through prevention-oriented practice; (3) shared goals and vision in supply chain benefits operational cost performance primarily through prevention-oriented practice, but less likely through compliance-oriented practice.

This study reveals two distinct pathways through which the shared goals and vision impact various performance outcomes, providing valuable guidance to businesses aiming to balance operational cost and environmental performance — crucial for resilience in today's turbulent environment.

This study not only corroborates existing theories of the Natural Resource-Based View and collaborative networks but also provides a detailed depiction of how collaboration across the supply chain promotes a diverse range of environmental practices and yields varied performance outcomes. It offers vital insights for supply chain participants to effectively navigate environmental challenges, enabling them to cultivate resilience and proactively address environmental issues.

The purpose of this paper is to undertake research on the relationship of firm heterogeneity and innovation diffusion performance, and the role of absorptive capacity in this relationship.

Based on the diffusion of innovation theory, enterprise heterogeneity directly affects the evaluation stage (considering whether to adopt it) and the experimental stage (observing whether it is suitable for one’s own situation) of the diffusion process. Therefore, the paper uses a structural equation model to construct the influencing factors model of enterprise heterogeneity on technology diffusion. Furthermore, questionnaires were distributed to 236 enterprises with different scales, nature and location to explore the impact of heterogeneity on technology diffusion with scientific, objective and comprehensive data.

Firm heterogeneity has a positive effect on absorptive capacity and absorptive capacity has a positive effect on technological innovation diffusion performance. Thus, absorptive capacity plays an intermediary role in the effect on enterprise heterogeneity and technological innovation diffusion performance. More interestingly, the authors get some results that are not entirely consistent with the theoretical assumptions.

Firm heterogeneity plays a central role in the process of innovation diffusion. Enterprises should build internal management platforms to enhance cooperation among employees, and establish links with other enterprises for opportunities for win-win cooperation. In addition, enterprises should control the frequency of internal activities, which will undermine the enthusiasm of enterprise members to participate in technology sharing.

This paper explores the interaction between technology potential, cooperation frequency and absorptive capacity from the perspective of systems theory. The findings enrich the theory of innovation diffusion, and explore the inherent reasons why enterprise heterogeneity affects innovation diffusion. Furthermore, the theory that intra-firm cooperation promotes innovation diffusion is not always correct.

Given the disruption of the COIVD-19 pandemic in higher education, this study seeks to understand possible changes in students’ ratings and textual reviews of higher education institutions posted on Niche College Rankings (niche.com) prior to and after the COVID-19 pandemic.

This study utilized a text analytics technique to identify the positive and negative keywords of students’ sentiments expressed in their textual reviews provided on niche.com. After identifying the positive and negative sentimental keywords, this study performed ordinal logistic regressions and analyzed the statistical effects of these positive and negative sentimental keywords on the types of student ratings of a higher education institution.

Results from 15,666 online reviews provided by students on niche.com indicate the following. First, eight positive sentimental keywords such as “outstanding” and “love” have a significant impact on students’ positive ratings of a higher education institution prior to COVID-19, whereas eight positive sentimental keywords such as “amazing” and helpful” have a significant impact on students’ positive ratings of a higher education institution after COVID-19. Second, twenty-eight negative sentimental keywords such as “difficult” and “frustrating” have a significant impact on students’ negative ratings of a higher education institution prior to COVID-19, whereas thirty negative sentimental keywords such as “complex” and “hate” have a significant impact on student negative ratings of a higher education institution after COVID-19.

This study is one of the first few studies investigating higher education institution ratings and reviews provided by students. Additionally, this study provides an understanding of student positive and negative sentiments expressed in textual reviews posted prior to and after the COVID-19 pandemic. By doing so, this study provides a basis for future research seeking to understand student textual reviews of higher education institutions. Additionally, this study offers higher education administrators some recommendations that may foster student positive campus experience while minimizing negative sentiments.

The purpose of this study is to examine student sentiments regarding high-quality vs low-quality teaching.

This study uses a text mining technique to identify the positive and negative patterns of student sentiments from student evaluations of teaching (SET) provided on Ratemyprofessors.com. After identifying the key positive and negative sentiments, this study performs generalized linear regressions and calculates cumulative logits to analyze the impact of key sentiments on high- and low-quality teaching.

Results from 6,705 SET provided on Ratemyprofessors.com indicated that students express different sets of sentiments regarding high- vs low-quality teaching. In particular, the authors found positive sentiments such as passionate, straightforward, accessible, hilarious, sweet, inspiring and clear to be predictive of high-quality teaching. Additionally, negative sentiments such as disorganized, rude, difficult, confusing and boring were significantly related to low-quality teaching.

This study is one of the first few studies confirming that high- and low-quality teaching are not completely opposite to each other from the student’s perspective. That is, the presence of high-quality teaching does not necessarily mean the absence of low-quality teaching. As such, this study provides an important theoretical base for future researchers who wish to explore approaches for improving faculty teaching in the higher education setting. Additionally, this study offers educators some recommendations that may help students experience positive sentiments while minimizing negative sentiments.

This study examines whether auditors’ pricing decisions on managerial ability are affected by auditor litigation risk (financial distress or financial crisis), auditor’s familiarity with their client or regulatory changes in the post-Sarbanes–Oxley Act of 2002 (SOX) era.

Building on the extant audit fee literature, this study constructs an audit fee determinants model to examine how context affects auditors’ pricing of managerial ability.

Auditors offer a larger fee discount to more able client management teams when auditors face lower litigation risks or are more familiar with the client. Furthermore, managerial ability has a more pronounced effect on audit fees in the post-SOX era when managers are mandated to play more active roles in financial reporting (i.e. certification of financial statements required by SOX 302).

Based on the audit risk model (Simunic, 1980), Krishnan and Wang (2015) show that the managerial ability of an audit client is relevant and important to auditors’ pricing decisions. This study demonstrates that managerial ability exhibits a non-linear relationship with audit fees and contextual factors, such as litigation risk, and that auditors’ familiarity with managers can alter the negative association between audit fees and managerial ability. This study extends Krishnan and Wang’s study by offering additional insights into auditors’ use of soft information such as managerial ability. Furthermore, the findings add to the literature on the impact of SOX on audit fees by suggesting that SOX has not only increased overall audit fees (Ghosh and Pawlewicz, 2009; Huang et al., 2009), it has also increased auditors’ price sensitivity to soft information (e.g. managerial ability).

This study provides insights for audit firms and client companies who are interested in understanding audit fee-pricing decisions. The findings also suggest that auditors need to be sensitive and responsive to various contextual factors when making pricing decisions.

Previous studies have not addressed the non-linear relationship between audit fees and soft information about managerial ability.

The purpose of this study is to examine how auditors would react when there are exogenous negative shocks to their client portfolios.

Using a sample of 31,256 firm-year observations (2001–2016), the authors investigate whether industry shocks to a subset of an auditor’s clients distract the auditor and affect the professional skepticism applied in the audits of other clients.

The authors find that clients of distracted auditors are more likely to meet or beat analyst consensus forecasts, suggesting that auditors’ professional skepticism is compromised by distractive events. The cross-sectional analyses reveal that the negative impact of the distractive events on audit quality is more pronounced when the distracted auditors audit less important clients, face lower third-party legal liabilities and experience higher growth. Using an alternative measure of audit quality, the additional analysis shows that clients of distracted auditors exhibit a higher probability of restating their earnings in subsequent years. Overall, the empirical evidence suggests that when distracted, auditors render lower quality audit.

The study complements recent work by Cassell et al. (2019), which shows that the 2008–2009 financial crisis affected the quality of the audits of nonbank clients of bank-specialized auditors. While Cassell et al. (2019) focus on one shock (financial crisis) to one industry (i.e. the financial services industry), the study examines more frequent shocks over a wide range of industries to identify the potential effects of distractive events, improving the generalizability of the findings to all industries and all auditors (specialist and nonspecialist) in nonrecession periods.

The purpose of this study is to present a systematic review of the online service failure (OSF) literature and conduct an exhaustive analysis of academic research on this emerging research area.

The current study has adopted a structured systematic literature review approach to synthesize and assess the OSF literature. Further, the study uses the Theory-Context-Characteristics-Methodology (TCCM) framework to propose future research directions in the OSF domain.

This systematic review shows that OSF research is still developing and remains mainly incoherent. Further, the study develops a conceptual framework integrating the frequently reported antecedents, mediators, moderator and consequences in the extant literature. This review also synthesizes the theoretical perspectives adopted for this domain.

The study followed specific inclusion and exclusion criteria to shortlist articles. Further, articles published only in the English language were considered. Hence, the findings of this review cannot be generalized to all OSF literature.

This systematic review has classified antecedents into customers' and service providers' roles which will enable online service providers to understand all sets of factors driving OSF. It also synthesizes and presents service recovery strategies and emphasizes the role of online customer support to fix OSF.

The OSF literature is still developing and remains highly incoherent, suggesting that a synthesized review is needed. This study has systematically reviewed and synthesized the OSF literature to study its development over time and proposes a framework which provides a comprehensive understanding of OSF.

Purpose – Marketers are under increasing pressure to demonstrate the financial return associated with marketing expenditures. Concurrently, more attempts at measuring return on investment from marketing as well as achieving other long-term goals such as building brand equity and increasing shareholder value have been made. As a result of this emphasis, the degree to which advertising budgets are spent efficiently and the impact of these expenditures on the bottom line are an important topic to study.

Methodology/approach – This study applies data envelopment analysis (DEA) to a group of large firms to assess the degree to which companies spend advertising dollars efficiently and to examine the impact of advertising efficiency on investor behavior and, ultimately, stock prices.

Findings – The analysis reveals that firms that advertise more efficiently are rewarded by investors by positive stock returns.

Research limitations/implications (if applicable) – The study is limited to large enterprises with strong brands within a time frame of only four years.

Practical implications (if applicable) – The results imply that it is advisable for marketing managers not to limit their focus to increasing market-based assets at any cost. The efficiency of their efforts can send a positive signal to investors and contribute to shareholder value enhancement.

Originality/value of the chapter – The chapter finds investors to pay attention not only to the effectiveness of advertising activities but also to their efficiency. The study also demonstrates how DEA and stock return response modeling can be combined to investigate the link between advertising efficiency and investor behavior.

Mutual understanding and cross‐border synergy in international organizations largely depend on the efficiency of the language(s) used between employees in home and foreign markets. This study aims to provide insights in how language(s) can be applied efficiently in international companies.

The study reports on a cross‐cultural employee survey that was conducted in a Dutch international company intending to improve internal communications between Dutch‐based and German‐based employees.

The study shows that although English is a popular language in internal contacts with foreign colleagues, it is not perceived to be equally effective across borders. The results indicate that language background affects experiences with passive as well as active language skills. This suggests that an English language policy can be feasible, but that promotion and facilitation of language use is needed for specific language groups.

The study indicates that quantitative academic research can help international companies in formulating a relevant corporate language policy tailored to the needs of the organization.

The study uses insights from existing qualitative studies on corporate language in established multinationals to create a quantitative research instrument employed within a company with a relatively young internationalization strategy. As such, it contributes to substantiating previous research findings.