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Against the background of increasing infrastructure loss in many rural areas, this study aims to contribute conceptually and empirically towards better understanding of rural innovation processes related to provision of public goods.

The nationally focused understanding of innovation processes leads the debate on rural development into a dilemma that this study seeks to sidestep via the concept of social innovation. Community cooperatives – a type of social enterprise that has increasingly emerged in rural areas of Germany in the past decade – offer the opportunity to examine social innovation processes. This cross-case study reveals the broad range of activities in which such cooperatives are active and analyses their social innovation processes.

The study shows that the social innovation governance framework enables examination of social innovation processes. Although macro-level policy has appeared to be an important instrument for financing social innovation, public actors at the micro-level seem barely able to initiate social innovation processes unless they are also private actors and, therefore, can pursue additional incentives. The social innovations studied here seem to differ in terms of their actor constellations and resource-allocation patterns, depending on whether they are concerned with the establishment or maintenance of local infrastructure. What they have in common, however, is the initiation of formalised collective-action processes that serve to legitimise social innovation.

By applying an analytical framework that is new to the literature on social innovation, the study provides insight into the activities and decision-making processes of actors involved in social innovation in rural areas. In this context, community cooperatives have rarely been studied as an interface between public, private and civil society actors or as a platform for mobilising human, social and financial capital.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the moderating influence of idiocentrism and allocentrism on person-organization fit, person-job fit and work attitudes relationship.

The survey data were collected from 426 employees of a holding company.

The results reveal that allocentrism makes a difference in fitting the particular aspect of work environment for the individual. Results showed that allocentrism positively moderates person-organization fit and job satisfaction and organizational commitment and turnover relationship. However, no moderating influence of idiocentrism was found on person-organization fit and employee attitude relationship. Furthermore, it was also found that neither idiocentrism nor allocentrism moderated the relationship between the person-job fit and employee attitudes relationship.

This research adds a cultural component to the person-environment fit research.

Literature on European and national identities displays a tension between occasional observations of an emerging ‘banal Europeanism’ (Cram, 2009) and a dominant strand (e.g. Guibernau, 2007; Toplak & Šumi, 2012) that questions the viability of European identifications vis-à-vis historically entrenched nationalisms, particularly in the context of the debt crisis and the resulting (re)nationalization of European politics. This chapter builds on recent work on Austrian European Union (EU) scepticism and its contestation (Karner, 2013) to examine instances – in diverse media coverage, readers’ letters to the editor of Austria’s most widely read newspaper, internet platforms, political essays and party political positions – of national identity negotiations in relation to the EU and as articulated in the context of successive European crises and the most recent elections to the European Parliament. The qualitative, thematic analysis of these wide-ranging materials developed here draws on two key concepts in critical discourse analysis, the notions of deixis (Billig, 1995) or ‘rhetorical pointing’ and of the topos or ‘structure of argument’ (e.g. Reisigl & Wodak, 2001), which are complemented by a third theoretical tool, namely the anthropological concept of ‘grammars of identity’ (Baumann & Gingrich, 2004). The resulting discussion reveals the uneasy coexistence of (critical) Europeanisms and various national reassertions in Austria’s public sphere and their respective discursive features. Further, the theoretical approaches synthesized cast light on internal diversities within political positions that are often too monolithicly classified as being ‘simply’ pro- or anti-European respectively. Instead, the analysis presented here reveals a spectrum of (at least five) competing positions.

The study aims to address the limited understanding on the role of cognitive mechanisms in workplace ostracism (WO) and negative workplace behaviours (such as counterproductive workplace behaviours (CWBs)) relation. Although the affective routes of this relationship have been extensively studied, the role of cognitive routes remains largely unexplored.

A parallel mediation model was developed to study the affective (emotional exhaustion) and the cognitive (felt accountability) mechanisms within the WO and CWBs relation. Regulatory focus theory was used to explain how these routes may influence CWB. Data for the study were gathered cross-sectionally, with common method bias checks. We analysed through Smart PLS for the measurement model and SPSS Hayes PROCESS macros for the structural model.

Study results corroborated the proposed model on the salience of the newly proposed cognitive pathway in relation to the affective route of the WO–CWB model.

This research underscores a novel cognitive pathway, felt accountability, in the WO–WB relation, expanding upon the predominantly affective-focused extant literature. Furthermore, the study outlines both theoretical and practical implications, along with highlighting limitations and potential directions for future inquiries.

Blockchain-based traceability labels is increasingly adopted in supply chain, yet there is little empirical research to examine effectiveness from consumer perspective. Can blockchain technology motivate consumers to purchase sustainable products? Drawing on signaling theory, this paper answers this question by comparing the effect of blockchain-based traceability labels with certification-based labels on consumer purchase intention of sustainable products. We further investigate consumers’ perception of sustainability level as a mediating variable and social enterprise as a boundary condition.

This study uses three online between-subject experiments with a total of 750 participants. The proposed hypotheses are tested using analysis of covariance (ANCOVA) as well as mediation analysis based on PROCESS macro.

The results suggest that (1) blockchain-based traceability labels lead to greater consumer purchase intention of sustainable products than certification-based labels; (2) such a positive effect of blockchain-based traceability labels occurs as consumers perceive a higher sustainability level; (3) however, the effect is attenuated when the company is a social enterprise.

This study contributes to the operations and supply chain management (OSCM) literature by studying the effectiveness of blockchain-based traceability labels from the overlooked yet emerging perspective of consumers. We provide a theoretical explanation and empirical evidence of how blockchain-based traceability labels influence consumer purchase intention during sustainable consumption compared with certification-based labels. We thus additionally contribute to the extant research on the intersection of blockchain and sustainability. Moreover, the incorporation of social enterprise as a moderator enriches the application of signaling theory on the context of sustainability signaling.

Although service researchers have long suggested that customer mistreatment adversely impacts service employees' outcomes, statistical integration of current empirical findings has been lacking. This meta-analysis aims to review and statistically synthesize the state of research on the relationship between customer mistreatment and service employees' affective, attitudinal and behavioral outcomes.

The authors included 221 effect sizes of 135 independent samples from 119 primary studies (N = 47,964). The authors used a meta-analytic approach to quantitatively review the relationship between customer mistreatment and service employees' affective, attitudinal and behavioral outcomes. Meta-analysis structural equation modeling was used to explore the mediation mechanism of service employees' affective outcomes on the relationships between customer mistreatment and employees' attitudinal and behavioral outcomes. Meta-regression was applied to explore the impact of contextual-level moderators (i.e. service provider type and service delivery mode) on these relationships. Furthermore, we compared the effects of customer mistreatment with the effects of other organizational-related factors on some commonly measured employee outcomes.

The results show that customer mistreatment has a significant negative impact on service employees' affective outcomes (i.e. negative emotions), attitudinal outcomes (i.e. job satisfaction, organizational commitment, work engagement and turnover intention) and behavioral outcomes (i.e. job performance, surface acting and emotional labor). Additionally, service employees' negative emotions mediate the association between customer mistreatment and employees' job satisfaction, turnover intention, surface acting and emotional labor. Furthermore, the relationships between customer mistreatment and service employees' negative emotions and job performance are influenced by a contextual-level moderator (i.e. service delivery mode).

The authors contribute to the literature by providing robust meta-analytic estimates of the effects of customer mistreatment on a variety of service employees' affective, attitudinal and behavioral outcomes, as well as the different magnitudes of the effect sizes between customer mistreatment and other job-related and personality-related factors by quantifying the true variability of the effect sizes. The authors draw on current theories underpinning customer mistreatment to test a theoretical model of the mediation mechanism of service employees' affective outcomes (i.e. service employees' negative emotions) on the relationships between customer mistreatment and employees' attitudinal and behavioral outcomes. The authors explore the effects of two contextual-level factors (i.e. service provider types and service delivery mode) related to the service delivery context that may account for the variability of effect sizes across empirical studies.

The main focus of the requirements engineering (RE) literature has been on the technical aspects related to the RE projects. Research has largely focused on the specific methods for collecting the requirements for an information system. Much less research has been conducted on the social and collaboration aspects of RE. To fill this gap, this paper aims to study the contribution of social factors, such as social ties, knowledge sharing and flexibility, for successful collaboration in RE teams.

The research followed the case study methodology. Data were collected from a successful RE and development project in a public sector company in Finland. The model for social collaboration by Kotlarsky and Oshri (2005) was applied as a starting point for analysis, but new concepts emerged during the coding process.

The results suggest that human-related aspects, such as flexibility, collective knowledge and transactive memory, were important for successful collaborative work in the RE team studied. The results show a clear connection between the collaboration factors in the RE process and the success of the end product.

The article fills a clear gap in the RE literature. It shows that human-related aspects are important in the RE process. This opens up new research avenues, such as investigating the effect of human-related factors on the whole lifecycle of a project.

As Chinese companies move to the world stage of business, they must leverage a more knowledgeable and collaborative workforce to meet new challenges. The purpose of this paper is to investigate how two prominent individual attributes, education, and allocentrism, create work tension for human capital practices in Chinese companies.

Surveying nearly 500 workers in four Chinese companies and using multi-level methodology.

The authors found that higher levels of education work to the detriment of employees’ affective organizational commitment (AOC) and positively influence seeking-to-leave behavior. In addition, this study suggests a positive relation between allocentrism and AOC. Personalized leadership, a common leadership style in high-power distance cultures such as China, further exacerbates the problems with higher levels of education and diminishes the commitment benefits of allocentrism. Conversely, regardless of leadership style, if supervisors involve workers in decision-making activities, those workers who are more educated will become more committed to the organization and less likely to leave.

The data were collected using self-reported questionnaires, which may cause common method variance. The reliability for personalized leadership was slightly below 0.70. This may be due to the multiple dimensions that are reflected in leadership styles. Another limitation of this study is its focus on allocentrism without considering other personal expression of cultural values. This approach could be too narrow (Gelfand et al., 2007).

This study suggests that members who endorse allocentrism might be more likely to have high-affective commitment. If managers can select individuals high on the allocentrism scale, there is a higher likelihood these individuals will attach emotionally to the organization. Managers should not simply conclude that idiocentrics are “worse” employees than allocentrics. Instead, managers may utilize effective management tactics to cultivate more socialized leadership visions among their supervisors. Finally, the authors find that independent of whether leadership is more or less personalized, managers can retain valued educated workers by including them in decision-making activities.

The authors have found that education may serve as a double edged sword for employers. As hypothesized, the findings suggested that employees’ level of education negatively relates to their affective commitment for their organizations. This study also contributes to the knowledge on the role of culture at the individual level (i.e. allocentrism) and how it affects employees’ attitudes and behavior. The authors found that workers who more highly value the group that they function within (allocentrics) tend to be more affectively committed to their organization.

It is one of the first studies to examine educational level and cultural orientation as antecedents to affective commitment, especially in Chinese businesses where workers’ education level is a growing phenomenon and allocentrism is a traditional characteristic of Chinese workers. Also, understanding the dynamics of group-individual linkages is generally most helpful to understanding organizational phenomenon (House et al., 1995). This meso framework is a hallmark feature of the study, given the hierarchical nature of the research inquiry and data set.

The ongoing impact of COVID-19 and the subsequent perception of threat have shifted consumer perceptions and evaluations of service experiences. This paper aims to investigate how customers’ service evaluation is shared as customer reviews following the pandemic and the heightened perception of threat. In doing so, this research particularly investigates the shifts in the textual contents of online reviews.

This study used the textual contents in the online reviews posted on Hotels.com for 1,497 hotels in New York City for empirical analysis. In total, 109,190 observations were used for the analysis.

By analyzing actual online review data from an online review platform for hotel services, this study finds that the text reviews generated after the pandemic outbreak tend to contain words with stronger negative emotions. In terms of the pronoun choice, this study further finds that the use of “I” increases while the use of “we” decreases.

This research adds to the existing literature on service evaluation and online customer reviews by showing that there are shifts in the expressions used to communicate service evaluation through online text reviews, including the degree of emotionality and pronoun usage. Because potential customers are likely to rely on online reviews for their own decisions, the findings suggest that it is important for practitioners to be aware of such shifts and respond accordingly.

This paper introduces the notion of knowledge outsourcing (KO) where external knowledge providers (KP), rather than internal experts, are contracted to provide knowledge services. The purpose of this paper is to examine the role of KO in knowledge management (KM) and the circumstances under which KO is most likely to be successful.

Using the case study approach, the fieldwork is done at Eduware, an organization that develops and markets e‐learning courseware. Apart from conducting semi‐structured interviews with diverse stakeholders in the organization, archival data from Eduware are collected for triangulation purposes.

On the basis of the case data, two distinct types of KO relationships have been identified in Eduware. Furthermore, the risks of KO included both product‐related and process‐related ones. Three conditions under which KO are most likely to be successful were: first, a lack of in‐house expertise; second, the availability of suitable external KP; and finally, a favourable business case.

A general process model of KO comprising the following steps is proposed: knowledge needs identification; knowledge sourcing; knowledge services negotiation; knowledge delivery; knowledge services monitoring; and knowledge utilization.

The dawning of a fast‐growing knowledge services industry raises new opportunities for organizations to support their KM initiatives through KO. Hitherto, there have been few works that examine the role of KO. This paper therefore serves to fill this research gap.