Lida Fan, Keith Brownlee, Nazim N. Habibov and Raymond Neckoway
The purpose of this paper is twofold. First, drawing on a unique data set, the authors estimate the returns to education for Canadian Aboriginal people. Second, the authors…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is twofold. First, drawing on a unique data set, the authors estimate the returns to education for Canadian Aboriginal people. Second, the authors explore the relationship between occupation and the economic well-being, measured as income, of Aboriginal people in an effort to provide a better understanding of the causes of income gaps for Aboriginal people.
Design/methodology/approach
The data used in this study is the Public Use Microdata File of Aboriginal People’s Survey, 2012. An ordered logit model is used to estimate the key determinants for income groups. Then the marginal effects of each variable, for the probability of being in each category of the outcomes, are derived.
Findings
All the explanatory variables, including demographic, educational and occupational variables, appeared statistically significant with predicted signs. These results confirmed relationships between income level and education and occupations.
Research limitations/implications
The data limitation of income, as a categorical variable prevents the precise estimation of the contributions of the dependent variables in dollar amount.
Social implications
In order to substantially improve the Aboriginal people’s market performance, it is important to emphasise the quality of their education and whether their areas of study could lead them to high-skilled occupations.
Originality/value
Attention is paid to the types of human capital rather than the general term of education.
Details
Keywords
Nazim Habibov, Alena Auchynnikava, Rong Luo and Lida Fan
The purpose of this paper is to focus on the effects of interpersonal and institutional trust on welfare state support in the countries of Eastern Europe and the former Soviet…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to focus on the effects of interpersonal and institutional trust on welfare state support in the countries of Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union (FSU).
Design/methodology/approach
The authors use micro-data from two rounds of a multinational survey conducted in these countries in 2010 and 2016. The outcome variable of interest is the willingness to pay more taxes to support the welfare state. The authors define the welfare state broadly, and focus on support for three main domains of the welfare state, namely, support for the needy, public healthcare and public education. Binomial regression is used to establish influence of interpersonal and institutional trust on welfare state support.
Findings
The authors find that both interpersonal and institutional trust have positive influences on strengthening support for the welfare state against a number of alternative explanations for public support for the welfare state. These positive effects remain the same for all three domains under investigation, namely, helping the needy, public healthcare and public education. Furthermore, these positive effects were observed both in the relatively less developed countries of the FSU and in the more developed Eastern European countries. Moreover, the positive effects of interpersonal and institutional trust on support for the needy, public healthcare and public education were found to grow over time.
Research limitations/implications
The findings indicate that the benefits of nurturing social capital will likely be substantial. Decision-makers, politicians, welfare state administrators and multinational founders (e.g. the UN and World Bank) should acknowledge the role played by trust in influencing the citizenry’s support for the allocation of financial resources toward the development and maintenance of the welfare state. The findings imply that welfare state reforms could prove be more effective within a social context where levels of trust are high. Thus, special attention should be paid to initiatives aimed at developing strategies to build trust.
Practical implications
Social welfare reforms in post-communist transitional countries may fail without active strategies aimed at nurturing institutional trust. One way to nurture institutional trust is through making additional efforts at enhancing the levels of accountability and transparency within a society as well as through increasing citizen engagement. Another way to build increased levels of trust is to take part in a variety of initiatives in good governance put forth by multinational initiatives.
Originality/value
As far as the authors know, this is the first paper which studies effect of interpersonal and institutional trust on support of the welfare state using a large and diverse sample of 27 countries over the period of five years. This is the first study which focuses on post-communist countries where trust is inherently low.
Details
Keywords
This paper aims to explore the relationship between the characteristics of social media health information and its adoption. The purpose is to identify information characteristics…
Abstract
Purpose
This paper aims to explore the relationship between the characteristics of social media health information and its adoption. The purpose is to identify information characteristics that can be used to estimate the level of health information adoption in advance.
Design/methodology/approach
According to the Information Adoption Model (IAM), the study extracted ten information characteristics from the aspects of information quality and information source credibility. The sample data was collected from the top ten influential health accounts based on the Impact List of Sina Weibo to test the effectiveness of these characteristics in distinguishing information at different levels of adoption. The forecasting of information adoption level is regarded as a binary classification question in the study and support vector machine (SVM) is used to do the research.
Findings
The results indicate that ten information characteristics chosen in this study are related to information adoption. Based on these information characteristics, it is feasible to estimate the level of health information adoption, and the estimation accuracy is relatively high.
Originality/value
A lot of work has been done in previous researches to reveal the factors that influence information adoption. The theoretical contribution of this work is to further discuss how to use the influencing factors to do some predictive work for information adoption. In practice, it will help health information publishers to disseminate high-quality health information more effectively as well as promote the adoption of health information.
Details
Keywords
Matthew Tingchi Liu, Yongdan Liu and Lida L. Zhang
The purpose of this paper is to investigate the marketing results of video blogging (vlogging). In particular, the authors are interested in understanding which video bloggers…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to investigate the marketing results of video blogging (vlogging). In particular, the authors are interested in understanding which video bloggers (vloggers) can better help marketers develop their brand image, which vlog viewers tend to evaluate vlogger-endorsed brands more positively, and how these effects occur.
Design/methodology/approach
A questionnaire survey was conducted with a convenience sample online. A total of 401 valid responses were collected. Regression analyses and bootstrapping were used to test the hypotheses.
Findings
The authors found that vloggers’ physical and social attractiveness and the audience’s viewing motives (entertainment motive and relationship-building motive) and behavior (time spent on the media) increased the audience’s evaluations of the brands endorsed by the vloggers (perceived brand quality, brand affect and brand preference). The authors also found that these relationships were mediated by the parasocial interaction (PSI) between the vloggers and the audience.
Practical implications
The findings of this study suggest that marketers can develop relationships with consumers and enhance their brand evaluations via vloggers. This strategy is more effective when brand managers use more attractive vloggers and target viewers who spend a lot of time on vlogs seeking entertainment or hoping to build relationships.
Originality/value
This study contributes to the literature by showing that vlogging can affect brand evaluations through the development of PSI between vloggers and viewers. The authors extended the focus of vlog marketing research from consumers’ watching and sharing behaviors and their perception of vloggers to brand evaluations, from vloggers’ characteristics to viewers’ characteristics and from the Western to the Eastern context.
Details
Keywords
Ting Nie, Lida Xie, Caijun Gong, Yiying Huang and Qiao Yan
In line with the theory of planned behavior, this study aims to examine the mediating effect of cultural identity and role identity between relational capital and adaptive…
Abstract
Purpose
In line with the theory of planned behavior, this study aims to examine the mediating effect of cultural identity and role identity between relational capital and adaptive behavior, and the moderating effect of willingness to learn.
Design/methodology/approach
Data were collected from 241 Chinese expatriates in Latin America through a two-wave survey.
Findings
The findings indicate that expatriates’ perceived relational capital can promote adaptive behaviors by enhancing their cultural identity and role identity. Willingness to learn positively moderates the indirect effects of relational capital on adaptive behaviors through cultural identity and role identity. For expatriates with a high willingness to learn, the impact of relational capital on their adaptive behaviors through cultural identity and role identity is stronger.
Originality/value
This study extends empirical research on expatriate adaptation. Organizations should promote the accumulation of expatriates’ relational capital while they are working abroad. Meanwhile, willingness to learn should be considered as a criterion when selecting expatriates.
Details
Keywords
Lei Shen, Qing Liu, Zhebin Xue and Li Zhang
With the application and development of intelligent clothing and wearable technology, the term “micro-interaction” has gradually entered people’s lives. The paper aims to discuss…
Abstract
Purpose
With the application and development of intelligent clothing and wearable technology, the term “micro-interaction” has gradually entered people’s lives. The paper aims to discuss this issue.
Design/methodology/approach
The paper takes the concept of “micro-interaction” as the design principle, starting from the consumer demand, combing the realization mode of the intelligent safety clothing in recent years, and finds out the existing problems in the design of the intelligent safety clothing.
Findings
Under the concept of micro-interaction, a new theoretical model has been proposed to study intelligent safety clothing. Finally, the paper also emphasizes the importance of the industrialization of the proposed model.
Originality/value
The paper proposes a new research and development mode for intelligent clothing in safety protection area which is a pioneering study and can be valuable for safety clothing manufacturers to produce more functional and attractive products.
Details
Keywords
Despite the plethora of scholarship outputs on masculinity showing it as a fertile research domain, there are noteworthy lacunae on the topic especially in relation to its…
Abstract
Purpose
Despite the plethora of scholarship outputs on masculinity showing it as a fertile research domain, there are noteworthy lacunae on the topic especially in relation to its dynamics among ethnic minority groups. Accordingly, this paper aims to address masculinity and symbolic consumption among Black African consumers in the UK.
Design/methodology/approach
The study is interpretive in nature with the use of in-depth interviews conducted with 20 participants in London and the data analysis follows the grounded theory orientation.
Findings
It shows masculinity-oriented categorisations of market offerings but with an incidence of cultural tension. It suggests the prevalence of symbolic consumption among participants as demonstrated in their quest for admiration and commendation about their consumption and how masculinity is communicated. A new masculinity typology emerged from the study which depicts men in this context as falling into four categories of gay, conservative, contemporary and men on acme.
Originality/value
The study unpacks issues around masculinity, and multiculturalism, and proposes a novel typology on the topic vis-à-vis the discourse on segmentation, targeting and positioning strategy.
Details
Keywords
Jeffrey E. Nash and Dina C. Nash
This paper depicts barbershop singing as a masculine social form, and compares and contrasts the original masculine form with the ways the form is feminized. Two organizations…
Abstract
This paper depicts barbershop singing as a masculine social form, and compares and contrasts the original masculine form with the ways the form is feminized. Two organizations, Sweet Adelines International (SAI) and The Barbershop Harmony Society (BHS) perform and promote barbershop singing. We document the devices used to feminize the form (naming, song selection, choreography, fashion, and organizational style), and argue that an interaction between form and content takes place in the women’s organization that genders the form in spite of its original masculine meanings. Theoretically significant is the description of how feminizing a masculine form reinforces the conservative ethos of, and hence senses of membership in, the barbershop form. Demonstrating that forms can accommodate even culturally distinctive content has implications for understanding the interaction between form and content.