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Despite brands’ growing use of social media, most research has overlooked the impact of brand perceptions, particularly that of a family brand identity and perceptions of authenticity. Often the purpose of a social media post is to positively change or enhance these perceptions and, consequently, increase a consumer’s purchase intentions. However, how a post influences purchase intentions, that is, the post-to-purchase journey, is not well understood. This study aims to investigate how characteristics of social media post influence purchase intentions through the mediated effects of social media engagement and perceptions of brand authenticity and how a family brand identity enhances this post-to-purchase journey.

Drawing on signalling theory, a sequential mediation model is devised, reflecting the post-to-purchase journey. Starting with identifying desirable characteristics of social media content, the sequential roles of social media engagement and brand authenticity and ending with purchase intentions – with the impact of family brand identity overlayed at each step. This model is analysed using partial least squares structural equation modelling and data from 227 UK consumers.

Four desirable characteristics of social media posts are affirmed – creativity, information, persuasion and inspiration. Each was theoretically justified as costly signals and captured different aspects of effective content, indicating their relative importance. The proposed post-to-purchase journey is supported, with family brand perceptions enhancing each step.

Addressing a need to look beyond current conceptualisations and theoretical underpinnings, this paper puts forward a post-to-purchase journey, incorporating brand-related perceptions, resulting in a deeper understanding of how social media builds purchase intentions.

There can be few personnel techniques so lowly regarded as the recruitment interview. Yet we persevere with the use of the technique despite the overwhelming evidence of its deficiencies. The accountancy and auditing professions are as guilty as most in this regard, and suffer from rates of attrition and job turnover, which should be an embarrassment. But there are alternatives available, and this paper reports on the development of revolutionary techniques which might have a significant impact on recruitment to the accounting and auditing professions in the UK.

Drawing on variables cited in the turnaround literature, this study aims to explore whether information contained within annual reports is useful in distinguishing between distressed companies that enact a turnaround and those that fail.

This study develops a discriminant model to identify distressed companies that have turnaround potential.

Analysis of the results reveals that successful turnarounds are associated with the severity of the distressed state, its determinants, with the extent of change in the distressed state since the previous year, and firm size.

This article is of use in identifying what information is useful in annual reports.

Artificial intelligence and machine learning have spread rapidly across every aspect of business and social activity. The purpose of this paper is to examine how this rapidly growing field of analytics might be put to use in the area of reputation risk management.

The approach taken was to examine in detail the primary and emerging applications of artificial intelligence to determine how they could be applied to preventing and mitigating reputation risk by using machine learning to identify early signs of behaviors that could lead to reputation damage.

This review confirmed that there were at least two areas in which artificial intelligence could be applied to reputation risk management – the use of machine learning to analyze employee emails in real time to detect early signs of aberrant behavior and the use of algorithmic game theory to stress test business decisions to determine whether they contained perverse incentives leading to potential fraud.

Because of the fact that this viewpoint is by its nature a thought experiment, the authors have not yet tested the practicality or feasibility of the uses of artificial intelligence it describes.

Should the concepts described be viable in real-world application, they would create extraordinarily powerful tools for companies to identify risky behaviors in development long before they had run far enough to create major reputation risk.

By identifying risky behaviors at an early stage and preventing them from turning into reputation risks, the methods described could help restore and maintain trust in the relationship between companies and their stakeholders.

To the best of the author’s knowledge, artificial intelligence has never been described as a potential tool in reputation risk management.

Our regular educational contributor, a former Staff HMI in Business Studies, discusses four books which describe, sequentially, the wide‐ranging implications of the Education Reform Act 1988 which has undoubtedly provided — as it was no doubt intended to — the biggest academic shake‐up since the former Education Act 1944.

This paper aims to explore how resilience is evident in healthcare supply chains in the public sector when faced with pandemic disruption and to identify any learnings to inform recovery and future-readiness phases.

An exploratory case study was conducted, consisting of seven semi-structured interviews with public sector supply chain actors in the healthcare personal protective equipment supply chain. The data included document analysis.

Key findings show how specific resilience strategies such as agility, collaboration, flexibility and redundancy, contributed to supply chain resilience during the COVID-19 pandemic response. Collaboration is identified as a key mechanism for resilience with public sector networks viewed as facilitating this. Established collaborative relationships with suppliers pre-pandemic did not support increased visibility of tiers within the supply chain.

This is one of the first papers to provide in-depth resilience insights through an example of healthcare supply chains during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Schein (1985) defines a career anchor as a person's perceived area of competence, values, and motives that he or she would not want to forfeit when faced with a career decision that might prevent him or her from fulfilling it. Hardin, Stocks and Graves (2001) utilized Schein's Career Orientation Inventory to determine the predominant career anchors of Certified Public Accountants (CPAs) and to investigate the relationship of CPA career anchor and job setting. This chapter builds on the Hardin et al. study and focuses on the younger professional accountant. This younger generation of accountants are part of the millennial generation, which prior research has indicated vary significantly in their wants, values, and desires for an employment situation. Based on the survey results, 46.1% of the millennials possess a Lifestyle career anchor, 18.0% possess a Security career anchor, and 12.4% possess a Service career anchor. Each of the other five career anchors were selected by fewer than 8.0% of the respondents. The results suggest the career anchors of today's millennial professional accountants differ from those of professional accountants some 15 years ago. In particular, the Security career anchor is far more prevalent than in the past, which suggests millennial accountants have an increased interest in job security. This research provides important information to organizations seeking to recruit and retain young accounting professionals. Similarly, young professionals should be aware of their career anchor, so they can manage their career choices, rather than conform to choices that others make for them.

To outline and present a generalised scheme for using “layered methods” in foresight work.

A number of different approaches to “layering” in futures studies and foresight work are examined and synthesised into a generalised scheme. The place of layered methods in foresight work is also examined, and the role of perceptual filters in interpretation is discussed.

A schema of four major “strata”, each potentially containing multiple sub‐layers, is developed. The strata range from, for example, short‐term trends in the shallowest level, through to long‐term macrohistorical forces at the deepest level.

The generalised scheme enables the practitioner to progressively move to greater levels of understanding as new layers of meaning are uncovered or constructed, as appropriate to the specific nature of the particular foresight engagement. The scheme also represents a template from which purpose‐built interpretive frameworks can be constructed, as needed, in foresight processes and work.

This paper provides a new, generalised and integrated approach to the use of interpretive frameworks in foresight work.

A growing body of literature has begun to recognise that in the era of supply chain management it is important to look beyond the flexible factory to the flexible supply chain. This paper seeks to further our understanding of supply chain flexibility and provide a comprehensive review of the available literature.

Published literature on supply chain flexibility has been considered. Where appropriate, additional insights have been obtained from related streams such as manufacturing flexibility, agility and supply chain responsiveness.

Much of the existing research has a limited definition of supply chain flexibility and describes flexibility simply as a reactive means to cope with uncertainty. Supply chain flexibility has emerged from the manufacturing flexibility literature and hence to date is largely confined to a manufacturing context (neglecting the role of services). Empirical research often takes the form of a cross‐sectional postal questionnaire conducted at the firm‐level that fails to explore the inter‐organisational components of supply chain flexibility.

The paper presents a timely review of the available literature and provides a more complete definition of flexibility in the context of supply chains. It is argued that future empirical research should approach research design from a network perspective, treating the supply chain as the unit of analysis, in order to develop a more complete understanding of the effects of flexibility across the whole supply chain. The paper also explores combining a flexible supply chain strategy with proactive means of reducing unwanted supply chain uncertainty, focusing on the roles of supply chain design, supply chain collaboration and inter‐organisational information systems.