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This study aims to examine the concept of brand equity and willingness to buy second-hand products in the automobile context. The customer-based brand equity model is used as a theoretical lens to examine after-sales services, brand credibility and brand loyalty as drivers of brand equity and willingness to buy the second-hand product.

A survey questionnaire based on convenience sampling is used to collect the data from the car owners. A total of 433 survey responses were used to empirically test the measures and propositions by using structural equation modeling (SEM).

The findings suggest that after-sales services are a key factor in developing brand credibility and brand loyalty. Results are also in support of the positive and significant impact of brand credibility and brand loyalty on brand equity and willingness to buy second-hand products.

Brand equity represents a differential response and preference to marketing efforts that a product obtains as a result of its brand identification. Although practitioners are actively engaged to position themselves as a unique, attractive and strong brand, little is known about the equity of the brand in the case of second-hand products. This study provides an alternate branding view to the academic scholars and to the marketing manager as this study explicitly probes into the effect of after-sales services in developing brand credibility, brand loyalty, brand equity and wiliness to buy second-hand product as an outcome.

The issue of exploitative labour practices has been a persistent and recurring problem in the textile and garment industry. Despite increased media, policy and practitioners attention the evidence base remains unexplored. The International Labour Organization (ILO) has acknowledged the presence of labour exploitation in global supply chains because of private sectors’ employment practices. The purpose of this study is to apprehend views of multilevel stakeholders to explore the nature and driving mechanisms of exploitation.

Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 76 respondents from 25 factories from 3 cities of Pakistan i.e. Faisalabad, Lahore and Gujranwala. Convenient and snowball sampling techniques were used because of the complexity of research settings. Transcribed data was analysed with the help of NVivo.

Drawing on qualitative evidence, the study reveals that workers experience a range of exploitation at the workplace, which is unlikely to fall within the scope of severe exploitation. The findings reveal that three types of exploitation exist in Pakistan’s textile and garment industry such as financial, physiological and psychological. Power inequality is the foundation and a fundamental cause of the endurance of exploitation. The study found three mechanisms that facilitate the endurance of exploitation, i.e. distance, profit and oppression.

The study contributes to supply chain literature by exemplifying power inequality. It is crucial for the government to step up efforts to stipulate a minimum wage rate in the textile and garment industry to alleviate labour exploitation. The findings provide motivation for policy and decision-makers to implement incremental changes to global supply chains to protect the rights and welfare of workers, according to the standards of social accountability 8000, the ILO and other world trade stakeholders.

This study argues that the international and local instruments do not specifically address the severe labour exploitation in Pakistan textile and garment industry. Therefore, the need arises to develop a specific instrument to address the problem. In the absence of such an instrument, there is a piecemeal approach by international and local bodies towards the regulation of labour exploitation.

The purpose of this paper is to improve the safety of construction workers by understanding their behaviors on construction sites using spatio-temporal (ST) trajectories.

A review of construction safety management literature and international occupational health and safety statistics shows that the major reasons for fatalities on construction sites are mobility-related issues, such as unsafe human behaviors, difficult site conditions, and workers falling from heights and striking against or being struck by moving objects. Consequently, literature has been reviewed to find possible technological solutions to track the mobility of construction workers to reduce fatalities. This examination has suggested that location acquisition systems, such as Global Positioning System (GPS), have been widely used for real-time monitoring and tracking of workers on construction sites for hazard prevention. However, the raw data captured from GPS devices are generally available as discrete points and do not hold enough information to understand the workers’ mobility. As a solution, an application to transform raw GPS data into ST trajectories using different preprocessing algorithms is proposed for enhancing worker safety on construction sites.

The proposed system preprocesses raw GPS data for stay point detection, trajectory segmentation and intersection of multiple trajectories to find significant places and movements of workers on a construction site to enhance the information available to H&S managers for decision-making processes. In addition, it reduces the size of trajectory data for future analyses.

Application of location acquisition systems for construction safety management is very well addressed in the existing literature. However, a significant gap has been found: the usage of preprocessed ST trajectories is still missing in workers’ safety monitoring scenarios in the area of construction management. To address this research gap, the proposed system uses preprocessed ST trajectories to monitor workers’ movements on a construction site to identify potentially unsafe behaviors.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the impact of corporate governance, with particular reference to the role of independent directors on boards and audit committees, and media coverage on corporate transparency and disclosure. In addition, the paper also investigates the role of the media on independent directors’ behaviours towards corporate transparency and disclosure.

The paper uses the well-developed two-step system generalised method of moments approach on a sample of 99 Pakistan stock exchange (PSX) listed financial firms over the period 2007-2012.

The empirical analysis shows that media and independent directors on audit committees play a significant positive role in line with agenda setting and agency theories in promoting corporate transparency and disclosure. On the contrary, the boards’ independent directors are risk-averse and hold the information to protect their reputation. Nevertheless, the study does not find any significant influence of media coverage on independent directors’ behaviours in promoting corporate transparency and disclosure.

The findings provide some useful insight into cost benefits analysis of media coverage towards an understanding of independent directors’ behaviours for promoting transparency and disclosure in financial sector. Moreover, the study findings can be useful for both shareholders and stakeholders in taking decisions about firm activities.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study that proposed and tested a multi-level framework for corporate transparency and disclosure practices. In addition, this study is also among the very few studies that use financial sectors as a sample, in particular, and media coverage, specifically, thus adding some value to the limited literature.

Effective management of highways requires management of diverse data sets including traffic volume data, roadway, and road edge and road-side data. Like all major infrastructure clients, highways administration authorities are under pressure to use such platforms for better management of data that, in addition to creating other opportunities, allows improved life cycle management of asset data and predictive analytics. This paper aims to review such opportunities and the value that can be generated through integrated life cycle data management by leveraging Big Data and building information modelling (BIM).

A literature review is initially performed to systematically gather information to identify and understand BIM as a collaborative platform. Data management applications in other industries are also reviewed. Interviews were conducted and two industry workshops were organised to understand BIM implementation challenges within highways development projects and the role BIM can play in bridging inefficiencies resulting from loss of information at handover phases. The overall understanding lead to drawing up user needs, gathering system requirements and eventually a system architecture design to promote efficient information management throughout the asset lifecycle.

It is observed that data from the design and construction phases of projects can be used to inform asset registers from an earlier stage. This information can be used to plan maintenance schedules. Moreover, it can also be integrated with data generated from numerous other sensors to develop a better picture of network operations and support key decision-making. Effective road network management involves collection and analysis of huge data from a variety of sources including sensors, mobiles, assets and Open Data. Recent growth in Big Data analytics and data integration technologies provides new opportunities to optimise operations of highways infrastructure.

The system architecture designed for this research is translated into a prototype system as a proof of concept. However, it needs to be tested and validated by end users to be transformed into a useful solution for the industry.

This paper provides an enhanced understanding of new opportunities created to optimise operations of highways infrastructure using the recent growth in Big Data analytics and data integration technologies.

Organizational cynicism is a growing trend in contemporary organizations. However, its impact on employee performance remains understudied. The purpose of this study is to address this gap by investigating the effect of three dimensions of organizational cynicism (cognitive, affective and behavioral cynicisms) on employee performance. The study also investigates the moderating effect of employee engagement on the relationship between three types of organizational cynicism and employee performance.

Primary data are collected through questionnaire from employees (N = 200) of various health organizations in Pakistan by using a convenient sampling technique. Hierarchal multiple regression models are used by using SPSS.

The findings reveal that all three types of organizational cynicism (i.e. cognitive cynicism, affective cynicism and behavioral cynicism) have a significant negative relationship with employee performance, while employee engagement moderates this relationship. Moreover, the findings indicate that the majority of respondents are not happy with their organizations. They have the feeling that their organizations are not fulfilling their promises, in fact, are betraying them in different ways. This breach of contract becomes the reason for organizational cynicism among employees and negatively affects their performance at work.

The study has a large population size and it is quite difficult to address the whole population and collect data from a large sample because of time and limited budget.

The organizational culture can mitigate the negative effect of organizational cynicism and enhance performance by promoting employee engagement. The study helps psychologists to understand employees’ attitudes and improve personnel selection to ensure they recruit the right people. Openness, honesty and early communication can increase predictability and controllability of future events.

The job insecurity and lack of adequate compensation are assertive factors towards low productivity and negative attitude toward organization.

According to the researchers’ best knowledge, only few studies tried to investigate the relationship between organizational cynicism and employee performance by using the moderating effect of employee engagement. Therefore, it will be a good contribution in existing literature to understand consequences of cynicisms.

This research aims to investigate the integration of real-time monitoring of thermal conditions within confined work environments through wireless sensor network (WSN) technology when integrated with building information modelling (BIM). A prototype system entitled confined space monitoring system (CoSMoS), which provides an opportunity to incorporate sensor data for improved visualization through new add-ins to BIM software, was then developed.

An empirical study was undertaken to compare and contrast between the performances (over a time series) of various database models to find a back-end database storage configuration that best suits the needs of CoSMoS.

Fusing BIM data with information streams derived from wireless sensors challenges traditional approaches to data management. These challenges encountered in the prototype system are reported upon and include issues such as hardware/software selection and optimization. Consequently, various database models are explored and tested to find a database storage that best suits the specific needs of this BIM-wireless sensor technology integration.

This work represents the first tranche of research that seeks to deliver a fully integrated and advanced digital built environment solution for automating the management of health and safety issues on construction sites.

A limited number of empirical studies have indicated that individuals who experience workplace ostracism tend to engage in subtle and retaliatory behaviors as a means of seeking inner peace. However, research on organizational behavior and employee psychology in relation to ostracism is still in its nascent stages. Specifically, further investigation is warranted to explore how supervisor ostracism influences task procrastination (TP) through psychological processes such as self-efficacy, self-esteem and motivation. Notably, a significant gap exists in the ostracism literature, as it has yet to thoroughly examine employee behaviors related to knowledge hiding (KH) and TP in the context of individual or team-based work (Zhao et al., 2016; Brouwer and Jansen, 2019). Therefore, the present study aims to address this gap and expand the research stream within the education sector by introducing “threat to self-esteem” (TSE) as a mediating factor in the outcomes of ostracism.

The study employed a quantitative approach, using questionnaires to collect data and mainly focused on statistics and standards. The authors used SPSS and Smart-PLS to employ numerical values developed from questionnaire surveys. Likewise, we employed primary data collection tools, including mixed survey analysis (self-reported and peer-reported). The data were collected from middle-level managers working in three public sector universities. By using a three-wave research design with a two-week interval in each phase, we were able to separate the measurement of the predictor and moderator factor [supervisor ostracism (SO) and individual resilience (IR)], mediator (TSE) and outcome variables (KH and TP).

The study has discovered a substantial relationship between variables, and all hypotheses are accepted according to the data results and findings. The study measures the effects of supervisor ostracism on knowledge hiding and task procrastination through mediating effect of threat to self-esteem, which individual resilience moderates. This study adds a few contributions to the current literature, following the goals stated above. First, this attempts to highlight employee KH behavior and TP behavior by identifying SO as the primary predictor.

The organization should closely monitor the level of workplace ostracism. One strategy to accomplish this goal is to routinely gauge the extent of ostracism at work using targeted techniques like surveys and observation. The organization can also create an employee assistance program for the workers to assist them in coping with the mistreatment and better adjusting to the workplace culture. Furthermore, employee empowerment and collaborative decision-making can boost workers' self-esteem, eventually leading to diminishing knowledge-hiding and procrastination habits inside the organization.

There is a research gap regarding the barriers to KH from the perspective of team dynamics and interpersonal mistreatment at work because prior research has focused on knowledge sharing, organizational culture and organizational obstruction. Research on organizational behavior and employee psychology in relation to ostracism is still in its nascent stages. Specifically, further investigation is warranted to explore how SO influences TP through psychological processes such as self-efficacy, self-esteem and motivation. Notably, a significant gap exists in the ostracism literature, as it has yet to thoroughly examine employee behaviors related to KH and TP in individual or team-based work.

Impulsive buyers are a dream segment for retailers and marketers. Stimulants in the retail environment and cognitive aspects evoke a sudden urge the acquisition of products spontaneously. This paper aims to examine key cognitive aspects of impulsive buying behaviour and purchase regret in an online context.

An online survey was conducted to collect the data of 317 online consumers with the help of a convenience sampling technique. The structural equation modelling technique was carried out to establish the validity and reliability of measures and examine the proposed relational paths.

The study results suggest that cognitive aspects recede impulsive buying, resulting in purchase regret. The empirical findings on the impulsive buying behaviour and purchase regret to yield several important implications, including developing marketing strategies and policies to evoke the intentions for impulsive buying behaviour, consumer innovation and balancing the feelings of regret.

The study also provides some significant contributions to the literature on online impulse buying and its related paradigms.

This study mainly attempted to determine the precursors of online impulse buying and purchase regret from the perspective of hedonic and experiential consumption motivation and consumer innovation. Getting reflections from cognitive dissonance theory and the post purchase evaluation, a theoretical model was developed and empirically tested for impulsive online buyers.

Recently, sustainable supply chain management (SSCM) has generated significant interest and gained attention of practitioners and academics. The purpose of this paper is to explore different themes in the existing literature, which pertains to social sustainability (SS) in supply chains, to argue for the use of SS model and suggest further research directions.

In the study, the authors have undertaken extensive literature review (n = 171) and used thematic analysis to propose a model.

Through the extensive review and thematic analysis, the paper identifies eight themes, which include stakeholder pressure, sustainability culture, contingencies, sustainability practices, partnerships, drivers and barriers, sustainability performance and optimization, and develops a SS model called “five-factor sustainability model.” Furthermore, a list of potential research directions for five-factor sustainability model is discussed.

The research is an attempt to explore different themes related to SS in supply chain and develop a model that is also applicable to economic and environmental sustainability.

The paper offers a new approach to SSCM literature, arguing for five-factor sustainability model and providing further research directions. Moreover, this model will help sustainability scholars to position and integrate their research within social, economic and environmental sustainability literature.