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Understanding brand associations and their role in the formation of attitude towards brands is necessary for managers to understand fully the dynamics of their brands and how consumers evaluate and make brand choices. This research paper aims to explore the role of brand associations in the formation of an attitude towards a brand alliance.

A series of hypothetical alliances using real brands were presented to undergraduate students. Data were gathered from a series of open‐ended free associations for the brands alone and in their alliances, and structured questions regarding quality and likelihood of purchase for the alliance attitude rating.

The study identified that brand associations, which are positive on an individual basis, can change when transferred to a new product category with a brand partner. Alliances with poor overall attitudes were often linked to associations of attributes of the original product class, whereas alliances with strong attitudes were linked to favourable associations related to the fit between the alliance partners.

The value of this study is that it has identified that consumers can become “locked in” to brand‐specific associations that may be hard to shift in a brand leverage strategy. Therefore, practitioners should factor into their decisions about whether or not to form a brand alliance not only concrete measures, but also the abstract nature of brand associations. This study focused on consumer brands and hypothetical alliances and used students as a sample. Different findings may therefore be found using non‐student samples, services brand or business‐to‐business brands.

Blockchain technology was once only associated with the financial industry, but it is now being used in a variety of industries, including education. Researchers all over the world take a keen interest in studying the various applications of blockchain technology for the last 4–5 years. The current study is a review of previously published studies on blockchain technology’s applicability in the sector of education. The systematic review was used to conduct the qualitative analysis using the PRISMA Framework (Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis). For this comprehensive literature review analysis, 99 publications were chosen in the final stage of selection. Bibliometric analysis is employed to analyse the collected data. Authorship analysis, co-authorship analysis, keyword co-occurrences, and important applications of blockchain in education are the primary parts in which the literature’s findings are organised. Important directions are given for researchers and academicians involved in blockchain-related research who may use the bibliometric analysis of the present study as a reference.

The purpose of this paper is to study the interaction of electromagnetic fields with biological tissues in the presence of antennas implanted subcutaneously for biotelemetry applications. The authors examined the influence of these radiative devices on energy absorption and also their effects as reflective metal surfaces when incoming radiofrequency energy was present.

The research was carried out using electromagnetic modeling based on the finite difference time domain method and the calculations were performed to determine the electric field and specific absorption rate. The implanted antenna operated in the Medical Implant Communication Service band. The incoming external electric fields considered included different frequency bands covering most current telecommunications standards.

Levels of absorbed energy with and without the implanted device.

The paper offers an analysis of results and comparison with current dosimetric standards and guidelines for limiting electromagnetic exposure.

The paper studies the interactions of implanted antennas with biological tissues, taking into account two behaviors: radiative and passive.

The conflict in Angola saw some of its most intense periods after the end of the Cold War, missing a favorable period of conflict resolution in this transition. This chapter analyzes the reasons that were behind the failure to reach a successful peace process at this specific time when Namibia worked out a peaceful solution but Angola failed with the Gbadolite initiative. The analysis uses a “ripeness” model focusing on agency and processes over the 1989 Gbadolite Accords and its immediate context of the 1988 New York Accords and the aftermath of the 1991 Bicesse Accords. It is proposed that there was a lack of “ripeness” in Angola. On one hand, a resolution of the Angola conflict was not essential to finding a regional solution for Southern Africa, and on the other hand, both parties, the Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA) and National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (UNITA), lacked the conditions to effectively engage in a political solution. Namely, the parties were monolithic, the military process had not reached a point of hurting stalemate, and the incentive structures in terms of oil and diamond wealth in the country hindered both party predispositions. It concludes that finding a point of “ripeness” might take time; it is an agency envisioned process and as such can be possible within virtual new solutions that accommodate old power concerns.

This chapter explores the sustainability of the workforce in the Chilean logging sector, the factors that affect the sustainability of this critical element for the Chilean forestry sector and explores the reasons for each factor.

To achieve the aim of this research, an ergonomics approach was used, specifically an ergonomics questionnaire, to identify elements in the work system that affect forestry workers.

The initial results show that elements in the Chilean forestry sector that affect the sustainability of the workforce, both in terms of occupational health (OH) problems and lack of interest in working in this sector, include organizational factors, physical elements of the environment, economic issues, and physical aspects of the work. The study also showed workers in this sector have a low perception of the benefits of working in the sector, because they recognize the sector has a high degree of risk in terms of safety and health aspects.

It is expected that the result of this research will help to refocus policies towards solving OH problems and, at the same time, potentially improve the market attractions of working in this sector.

Despite the relevance of firm size in the analysis of corporate social responsibility (CSR) engagement, there is still much to know about the specific impact of firm size on CSR formalisation. Moreover, in order to better understand such a relation, the interaction effects of development strategies on which companies may base its growth, namely diversification and internationalisation, will be also taken into account. Specifically, this work contributes to shed light on these issues by combining theories related to external and internal drivers of CSR. Using a sample of Spanish listed firms, the results show that firm size affects positively CSR formalisation, and that this effect is stronger in the case of adopting a diversification strategy, while no evidence was found for the moderating effect of internationalisation strategy.

The purpose of this study is to explore how business-only corporate responsibility coalitions (CRCs) help member firms manage sustainability issues.

This conceptual analysis of business-only CRCs, using the literature on sensemaking and social issues management, explores how participation in CRCs enhances firms’ capabilities for sustainability issues management by improving their sensemaking competencies, abilities to choose and adapt issue responses and efficiency in implementing issue responses through better issue response mechanisms.

Business-only CRCs help firms with high as well as low levels of sustainability orientation better manage sustainability issues by carrying out the exploratory aspects of issues management: scanning, identifying and evaluating issues and proposing responses to issues.

The widely applicable, nonbinding and scripted responses proposed by CRCs allow participating firms a high degree of autonomy to choose and adapt their responses. However, firms must approach their CRC memberships with collaborative intent and high transparency to achieve these benefits.

Participation in CRCs can help scale up firms’ responses to sustainability issues through more efficient issues management processes that allow them to customize issue responses to their needs.

Research on the management of sociopolitical issues can be enriched if these issues are understood as collective, multilevel challenges rather than purely strategic issues faced by individual firms. This study contributes to the business collective action and issues management literatures by emphasizing the importance of collective management of sustainability issues and how it may improve firms’ capabilities for sustainability issues management.

This paper aims to explore the nonfinancial drivers of value creation that influence an investment decision and present a set of drivers that contribute with a useful integrated reporting to its providers of financial capital using evidence from Brazil.

This paper is based on a systematic literature review in the Scopus, Web of Science and Google Scholar databases in the period from 2005 to 2020. Interpretive content analysis is used in 42 documents identified to explore nonfinancial drivers to demand by providers of financial capital, which are classified according to the capitals nonfinancial suggested by the integrated report (IR). Then, the results are evaluated by Brazilian professional investors in a focus group.

The members of the focus group do not consider the IR relevant to investment decision and neither the information about natural capital nor social capital. They highlighted two nonfinancial drivers of value not identified in the previous literature.

The focus group is limited by subjects’ availability and by the participants’ number. But its results represent initial discussions on the subject in the Brazilian context.

The results of this study have value, principally, to investors, target audience of IR, because it aligns your demands with the IRs content, improving its usefulness.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this manuscript is the first study to investigate the perception of Brazilian professional investors about the importance of the IR in investment decision-making and to identify content relevant to the financial capital provider’s investment decision, which can improve the usefulness of IR.

In this paper, the author advocates recognizing, developing, and promoting “critical interactionism” as a legitimate and pragmatically useful scholarly project. The author argues that critical interactionism includes different interactionist traditions, critical approaches, methodological styles, and sensitizing concepts – as long as they tell us something about how power and inequality operate. I review two fundamental elements of this project that constitute its past and likely future: (1) theoretical interventions that excavate critical insights, diversify founders, integrate critical theories, and promote interactionism's usefulness for critical inquiry and (2) empirically grounded conceptual interventions that shed light on generic processes of inequality reproduction. Although the larger discipline of sociology continues to marginalize interactionism yet selectively adopt its principles, critical interactionism has the potential to break through what David Maines called the fault line of consciousness. The promise of critical interactionism is that it can simultaneously make interactionism more relevant to our discipline and make our discipline more relevant to the social world.