John G. Knight and Hongzhi Gao
The purpose of this study is to investigate perceptions of food distribution gatekeepers in China regarding likely acceptance of genetically modified (GM) foods by Chinese…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this study is to investigate perceptions of food distribution gatekeepers in China regarding likely acceptance of genetically modified (GM) foods by Chinese consumers. It also aims to consider policy implications for food exporting countries.
Design/methodology/approach
An exploratory approach using in‐depth interviews was adopted. Key informants of a sample of 20 companies in five main commercial centres in the People's Republic of China and in the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region were interviewed. In addition, two interviews were conducted with a key government official and a professor at a leading agricultural university in order to provide details of Chinese Government policy.
Findings
According to gatekeepers, Chinese consumers currently have ambiguous views of GM food products. It is concluded that Chinese consumers are likely to accept GM foods provided there are consumer benefits, a price advantage, and credible governmental information concerning safety of GM foods.
Research limitations/implications
Chinese Government policy is to take advantage of a window of opportunity provided by markets such as Japan and Europe, which presently prefer to import non‐GM food; at the same time China is developing full potential to grow GM crops just as soon as external market conditions change. Current barriers to export of GM food products to China are likely to be short‐term.
Originality/value
This paper provides an insight into how gatekeepers in the food distribution channel in China view GM foods, and how they believe Chinese consumers will react to the introduction of such foods.
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Hongxia Zhang, Jin Sun, Fang Liu and John G. Knight
This research aims to examine the use of emotional and rational advertising appeal regarding service options that differ in terms of their experience and credence properties and…
Abstract
Purpose
This research aims to examine the use of emotional and rational advertising appeal regarding service options that differ in terms of their experience and credence properties and exploring the moderating role of individual difference in affect intensity on the consumers’ varying reliance on rational vs emotional appeals.
Design/methodology/approach
Study 1 is a 2 (service type: restaurant vs dentist) × 2 (advertising appeal: emotional vs rational) between-subjects design. In total, 137 undergraduate students took part in this study. Study 2 is a 2 (service type: airline vs hospital) × 2 (advertising appeal: emotional vs rational) between-subjects design. In total, 84 MBA students were randomly assigned to each of the experimental conditions. Study 3 is a 2 (service type: airline vs hospital) × 2 (advertising appeal: rational vs emotional appeal) × 2 (affect intensity: high vs low) between-subjects design. The sample size was 170 undergraduates.
Findings
The results of the first two studies provided support that an emotional advertising appeal led to a higher purchase intention in the experience service condition, while a rational message generated higher purchase intention in the credence service condition. Study 3 showed the moderating role of individual difference in affect intensity. High affect intensity individuals reported higher levels of brand favorability than did their low affect intensity counterparts when exposed to ads using emotional appeal. Conversely, subjects showed no significant differences in the intensity of their emotional responses when exposed to rational appeals.
Practical implications
Our results suggest a strong need to tailor ads to fit different service categories. An emotional appeal would be more effective for experience services, and a rational appeal would be more effective for credence services. Besides, individual traits may also need to be considered when matching the appeal to the service type.
Originality/value
This study makes an important contribution to the limited existing research by providing a more comprehensive understanding of the relationship between advertising appeal and the type of service across different sub-categories, themes, individual trait and effectiveness measures. Specifically, the present research seeks to illuminate the relative effectiveness of emotional vs rational appeals in services advertising. In addition, the current research reveals new knowledge about the role that affect intensity plays in determining consumer responses to advertising.
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Hongzhi Gao, John G. Knight and David Ballantyne
This article aims to identify critical aspects of Chinese‐Western intercultural guanxi relationships that have largely been ignored as a domain for study in international business…
Abstract
Purpose
This article aims to identify critical aspects of Chinese‐Western intercultural guanxi relationships that have largely been ignored as a domain for study in international business and industrial marketing, and to suggest a way forward.
Design/methodology/approach
A theme analysis across a range of academic and business journal articles is undertaken to capture major themes involving China‐focused research that relates to international business and industrial marketing, and also to locate critical themes that may have been overlooked.
Findings
Intercultural interaction at a personal level is both unavoidable and critical for successfully doing business with China. This study introduces the term guanxi gateway ties to highlight a special class of facilitating relationships that can emerge through interactions between guanxi insiders and guanxi outsiders. Insiders and outsiders can meet and work together in this middle‐cultural territory for the instrumental purpose of obtaining passage through the “gateway”.
Research limitations/implications
Inevitably some journal articles of interest may have been missed in the review due to the chosen scanning boundary. Nevertheless the search method provides a sufficient base to reveal recurrent research themes, and also overlooked themes of potential significance.
Practical implications
Guanxi gateway ties assist companies and individual business actors to find a path through the cumbersome Chinese bureaucracy and hierarchical levels by activating personal relationships.
Originality/value
This study reveals a commonly overlooked perspective of guanxi, that is, as a facilitator of culture‐bridging ties. The conventional business perspective of guanxi can be viewed as evolving from a gated community into an intercultural facilitating mechanism.
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John G. Knight, Damien W. Mather and David K. Holdsworth
Many countries have held back from planting genetically modified (GM) food crops due to perceived negative reaction in export and domestic markets. Three lines of research have…
Abstract
Purpose
Many countries have held back from planting genetically modified (GM) food crops due to perceived negative reaction in export and domestic markets. Three lines of research have tested the reality of this fear.
Design/methodology/approach
In‐depth interviews were conducted in European countries with key companies and organisations in the European food sector. Supermarket intercepts were used to ascertain purchasing intent for products from countries that do or do not produce GM crops. A purchasing experiment was conducted, where cherries labelled as GM, organic or conventional were on sale in a roadside stall.
Findings
Food distribution channel members expressed concern about possibility of contamination or mix‐up between GM and non‐GM food. However, presence of GM crops in a country does not cause negative perception of food in general from that country. Approximately 30 per cent of consumers in the purchasing experiment proved willing to purchase GM cherries when there was a defined consumer benefit – either lower price or spray‐free.
Practical implications
Countries that have not yet planted GM food crops need to be cautious about possible negative impacts on channel member perceptions of non‐GM versions of the same crop from the same country. However, planting GM crops does not appear likely to damage the overall reputation of a food‐supplying country. GM applications in non‐food areas seem unlikely to damage perceptions of country image in relation to supply of food products from that country.
Originality/value
Provides useful information for those planning to plant GM food crops.
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The experimental parliamentary subsidy on knights' fees and freehold incomes from lands and rents of 1431 was the only English direct lay tax of the Middle Ages which broke down…
Abstract
The experimental parliamentary subsidy on knights' fees and freehold incomes from lands and rents of 1431 was the only English direct lay tax of the Middle Ages which broke down. As such, this subsidy has a clear historiographical significance, yet previous scholars have tended to overlook it on the grounds that parliament's annulment act of 1432 mandated the destruction of all fiscal administrative evidence. Many county assessments from 1431–1432 do, however, survive and are examined for the first time in this article as part of a detailed assessment of the fiscal and administrative context of the knights' fees and incomes tax. This impost constituted a royal response to excess expenditures associated with Henry VI's “Coronation Expedition” of 1429–1431, the scale of which marked a decisive break from the fiscal-military strategy of the 1420s. Widespread confusion regarding whether taxpayers ought to pay the feudal or the non-feudal component of the 1431 subsidy characterized its botched administration. Industrial scale under-assessment, moreover, emerged as a serious problem. Officials' attempts to provide a measure of fiscal compensation by unlawfully double-assessing many taxpayers served to increase administrative confusion and resulted in parliament's annulment act of 1432. This had serious consequences for the crown's finances, since the regime was saddled with budgetary and debt problems which would ultimately undermine the solvency of the Lancastrian state.
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This note offers new archival insight into a 1925 polemical exchange between Frank Knight and John Maurice Clark that was hosted in the pages of Journal of Political Economy…
Abstract
This note offers new archival insight into a 1925 polemical exchange between Frank Knight and John Maurice Clark that was hosted in the pages of Journal of Political Economy. Although the exchange centered on the effects of overhead costs on marginal productivity theory and the so-called adding-up theorem, it also provided significant elements to assess the methodological differences between two of the most representative American economists of the interwar years.
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In 1933, Lionel Robbins asked Frank Knight if he could republish Knight’s Risk, Uncertainty and Profit (RUP) in order for students at the London School of Economics to continue to…
Abstract
In 1933, Lionel Robbins asked Frank Knight if he could republish Knight’s Risk, Uncertainty and Profit (RUP) in order for students at the London School of Economics to continue to have access to the book. He also asked Knight to write a preface to provide an update on Knight’s changing economic views. Between 1933 and 1957, Knight wrote four new prefaces for reprint editions of RUP outlining changes in his views. In the prefaces, he identified four aspects of the theory expounded in RUP that he came to reject: (a) the method of successive approximation; (b) the separation of production from distribution; (c) the tri-partite division of the factors of production; and (d) any notion of a period of production. These rejections placed him squarely in opposition to F. A. Hayek’s theoretical work. He also identified the key features he had sought to develop in a monetary theory that would oppose J. M. Keynes and John Hicks. At the same time, he sought to identify the new theoretical ideas he was developing, including an enterprise-based theory of market exchange, and the adoption of a unitary resource, called capital. He also pointed to the work in social philosophy that he had begun in the 1940s, especially the need for a combined approach to social science using economic theory, ethics and social philosophy. The prefaces came to serve as a bridge between Knight’s original theory and what he would argue at the conclusion of his career.
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In the early 1930s, Nicholas Kaldor could be classified as an Austrian economist. The author reconstructs the intertwined paths of Kaldor and Friedrich A. Hayek to disequilibrium…
Abstract
Purpose
In the early 1930s, Nicholas Kaldor could be classified as an Austrian economist. The author reconstructs the intertwined paths of Kaldor and Friedrich A. Hayek to disequilibrium economics through the theoretical deficiencies exposed by the Austrian theory of capital and its consequences on equilibrium analysis.
Design/methodology/approach
The author approaches the discussion using a theoretical and historical reconstruction based on published and unpublished materials.
Findings
The integration of capital theory into a business cycle theory by the Austrians and its shortcomings – e.g. criticized by Piero Sraffa and Gunnar Myrdal – called attention to the limitation of the theoretical apparatus of equilibrium analysis in dynamic contexts. This was a central element to Kaldor’s emancipation in 1934 and his subsequent conversion to John Maynard Keynes’ The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money (1936). In addition, it was pivotal to Hayek’s reformulation of equilibrium as a social coordination problem in “Economics and Knowledge” (1937). It also had implications for Kaldor’s mature developments, such as the construction of the post-Keynesian models of growth and distribution, the Cambridge capital controversy, and his critique of neoclassical equilibrium economics.
Originality/value
The close encounter between Kaldor and Hayek in the early 1930s, the developments during that decade and its mature consequences are unexplored in the secondary literature. The author attempts to construct a coherent historical narrative that integrates many intertwined elements and personas (e.g. the reception of Knut Wicksell in the English-speaking world; Piero Sraffa’s critique of Hayek; Gunnar Myrdal’s critique of Wicksell, Hayek, and Keynes; the Hayek-Knight-Kaldor debate; the Kaldor-Hayek debate, etc.) that were not connected until now by previous commentators.