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The purpose of this study is to examine the perceptions of the human resources (HR) function from millennials and postmillennials who are either just finishing college or already in the early stages of their careers. Previous works have often revealed negative stereotypes toward HR, and this study serves to discover whether these perceptions are changing. Further, the study aims to address the origins of and reasoning behind these new perceptions.

A two-study survey research design using a sample of 106 college of business students (Study 1) and an additional sample of 135 former business students who have graduated since 2011 (Study 2) is used.

The results demonstrate that perceptions of HR are changing and quite positive, with the majority of these perceptions originating from personal experiences. In fact, the vast majority of respondents not only felt positive about HR but also like and trust their HR representatives.

Results also suggest that there may be a disconnect between perceptions of the HR function and its actual purpose, suggesting that HR professionals need to better educate others about their important role as a strategic business partner.

Discusses the 6th ITCRR, its breadth of textile and clothing research activity, plus the encouragement given to workers in this field and its related areas. States that, within the newer research areas under the microscope of the community involved, technical textiles focuses on new, ‘smart’ garments and the initiatives in this field in both the UK and the international community at large. Covers this subject at length.

The weapon system of The Navy is the small quantity producing system on multiple kinds. It is consisted of various equipment and the subordinate parts of those which can repair the damaged part. The operating procedure concerning warship's repair parts managed under these systems is as follows. Firstly, if demand of repair parts occurs from warship which is the operating unit of weapon, then the Fleet(the repair & supply support battalion) is in charge of dealing with these requests. If certain request from warship is beyond the battalion's capability, it is delivered directly to the Logistic Command. In short, the repair and supply support system of repair parts can be described as the multi-level support system. The various theoretical researches on inventory management of Navy's repair parts and simulation study that reflects reality in detail have been carried out simultaneously. However, the majority of existing research has been conducted on aircraft and tank's repairable items, in that, the studies is woefully deficient in the area concerning Navy's inventory management. For that reason, this paper firstly constructs the model of consumable items that is frequently damaged reflecting characteristics of navy's repair parts inventory management using ARENA simulation. After that, this paper is trying to propose methodology to analyze optimal inventory level of each supply unit through OptQuest, the optimization program of ARENA simulation.

The purpose of the study is to provide insights on the COVID-19 pandemic communication from the lessons learned by health communication executives—how they perceived the COVID-19 pandemic and recommend preparing for communication management of future public health crises.

A number of top health communication executives in the United States, who worked in the healthcare industry for at least 25 years and held titles like director, president and chief strategist, were interviewed for their unique perspectives on the COVID-19 pandemic. This study used the contingency theory of strategic conflict management for qualitative deductive analysis of the following segmentations of key factors that drove organizational communication management decision making during the pandemic: organization characteristics, relationship characteristics, general external climate, external publics and the issue under question.

Health communication executives heavily relied on their past health communication experiences, which led to nuanced understandings of the COVID-19 pandemic. Practically, the health communication executives urged future practitioners to constantly assess risks, hire and use diverse and representative decision-makers; set a communication protocol; and keep the communication in perspective. Theoretically, the contingency theory is furthered—there appears to be a theoretical linkage between the construct of general external climate and the construct of the external public.

The unique perspectives of top health communication executives, based in the United States, provided in-depth insights on the COVID-19 pandemic—its nuances, challenges and main influences (e.g. political, racial, etc.). These takeaways and recommendations can be adapted by other organizations and future health communicators in other parts of the world.

The objective of this study is to investigate how country risk, different political actions from the government and bureaucratic behavior influence the activities in industry supply chains (SCs) in emerging markets. The main objective of this study is to investigate the influence of these external stakeholders’ elements to the demand-side and supply-side drivers and barriers for improving competitiveness of Ready-Made Garment (RMG) industry in the way of analyzing supply chain. Considering the phenomenon of recent change in the RMG business environment and the competitiveness issues this study uses the principles of stakeholder and resource dependence theory and aims to find out some factors which influence to make an efficient supply chain for improving competitiveness. The RMG industry of Bangladesh is the case application of this study. Following a positivist paradigm, this study adopts a two phase sequential mixed-method research design consisting of qualitative and quantitative approaches. A tentative research model is developed first based on extensive literature review. Qualitative field study is then carried out to fine tune the initial research model. Findings from the qualitative method are also used to develop measures and instruments for the next phase of quantitative method. A survey is carried out with sample of top and middle level executives of different garment companies of Dhaka city in Bangladesh and the collected quantitative data are analyzed by partial least square-based structural equation modeling. The findings support eight hypotheses. From the analysis the external stakeholders’ elements like bureaucratic behavior and country risk have significant influence to the barriers. From the internal stakeholders’ point of view the manufacturers’ and buyers’ drivers have significant influence on the competitiveness. Therefore, stakeholders need to take proper action to reduce the barriers and increase the drivers, as the drivers have positive influence to improve competitiveness.

This study has both theoretical and practical contributions. This study represents an important contribution to the theory by integrating two theoretical perceptions to identify factors of the RMG industry’s SC that affect the competitiveness of the RMG industry. This research study contributes to the understanding of both external and internal stakeholders of national and international perspectives in the RMG (textile and clothing) business. It combines the insights of stakeholder and resource dependence theories along with the concept of the SC in improving effectiveness. In a practical sense, this study certainly contributes to the Bangladeshi RMG industry. In accordance with the desire of the RMG manufacturers, the research has shown that some influential constructs of the RMG industry’s SC affect the competitiveness of the RMG industry. The outcome of the study is useful for various stakeholders of the Bangladeshi RMG industry sector ranging from the government to various private organizations. The applications of this study are extendable through further adaptation in other industries and various geographic contexts.

Notwithstanding their potential benefits especially for individuals with low health literacy, users are still somewhat skeptical about the reliability of healthcare chatbots. The present study aims to address this challenge by investigating strategies to enhance users’ cognitive and emotional trust in healthcare chatbots. Particularly, this study aims to understand the effects of chatbot design cues in increasing trust and future chatbot use intention for low health literacy users.

We conducted two experimental studies with a final sample of 327 (Study 1) and 241 (Study 2). Three different chatbots were developed (Chatbot design: Bot vs Male-doctor vs Female-doctor). Participants were asked to have a medical consultation with the chatbot. Participants self-reported their health literacy scores. The PROCESS model 7 was used to analyze the hypotheses.

The results showed that the female-doctor cues elicited greater cognitive and emotional trust, whereas the male-doctor cues only led to greater cognitive trust (vs bot-like cues). Importantly, this study found that users’ health literacy is a significant moderating factor in shaping cognitive and emotional trust. The results indicated that both the female and male-doctor cues’ positive effects on cognitive trust were significant for those with lower levels of health literacy. Furthermore, the positive effect of the female-doctor cues on emotional trust was also significant only for those whose health literacy level was low. The increased cognitive and emotional trust led to greater future intention to use the chatbot, confirming significant moderated mediation effects.

Despite the strong economic and educational benefits of healthcare chatbots for low health literacy users, studies examining how healthcare chatbot design cues affect low health literate users surprisingly remained scarce. The results of this study suggest that healthcare chatbots can be a promising technological intervention to narrow the health literacy gap when aligned with appropriate design cues.

By adopting a cross-country analysis, this study aims to investigate how consumers' perception of book covers affects their online book purchases in terms of feelings of delight and perceived value of the book.

The authors tested the hypotheses using a structural equation model using two countries' datasets obtained from 191 Japanese and 207 French consumers.

The perceived attractiveness of a picture/photo on a book cover can positively influence feelings of delight. Such emotion enhances a book's perceived value, resulting in active online book purchases. Furthermore, when the perceived value of a book is evident, the French are more strongly motivated to purchase books compared to Japanese consumers.

By simultaneously examining emotion and perceived value as an organism, the authors advance the knowledge of the relationship between book covers and online book purchases. In addition, the authors offer evidence that cross-cultural differences (between the French and Japanese) can stimulate different responses to each affective and cognitive internal state, although similar environmental stimuli are provided.

Looks at the eighth published year of the ITCRR and the research, from far and near, involved in this. Muses on the fact that, though all the usual processes are to the fore, the downside part of the industry is garment making which is the least developed side. Posits that the manufacture of clothing needs to become more technologically advanced as does retailing. Closes by emphasising support for the community in all its efforts.

People’s economic behaviors are often embedded in their social networks. Based on social embeddedness theory, this study investigates how customers’ social network embeddedness (structural and relational embeddedness) affects their online referral intentions through four studies.

This study adopted a vignette experimental design and used both offline and online channels to collect data. The respondents were undergraduate students and consumers, covering different age groups and occupation types. We used the ANOVA and bootstrap methods of SPSS to conduct data processing and hypothesis testing.

We found that when fewer (vs more) people in a customer’s social network participated in reward referral programs (RRPs), the customer’s online referral intention was also lower because of higher perceived social costs and lower perceived control. However, when the tie strength, reciprocity and normative influence between customers and people who have participated in RRPs were high, customers’ online referral intention also increased, ignoring the influence of participants’ network size. In these relationships, perceived social costs and perceived control played important mediating roles.

The results provide practical implications for enterprises to develop efficient RRPs in the context of the increasing popularity of the mobile Internet and intelligent terminals.

This study offers insights into the influence mechanism of social network embeddedness on referral likelihood, contributing to the field of RRPs and social embeddedness theory.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the interplay of crisis type and felt involvement as well as product category on publics’ anger toward the company and empathy for the victims.

This study uses an experiment based on a 2 (crisis type: accident vs transgression) × 2 (publics’ felt crisis involvement: high vs low) × 2 (product category in crisis: food-related vs technology-related) mixed design.

Differential main effects on emotions were detected in different consumer product crises. One of the most interesting findings in this study was the main effects of high felt involvement over low felt involvement in strong feelings of anger toward a company and empathy for the victims in both food- and technology-related crisis situations. There was an interaction effect between crisis type and product category on feelings of anger toward a company. Participants in the food-related crisis condition reported more anger when exposed to a transgression crisis than an accident crisis.

Future research needs to study other important crisis emotions and to measure them with multiple items instead of a single item. It would be useful to find out what combinations among crisis variables would produce interaction effects to better understand how different publics’ emotions are inducted and processed in different crisis situations.

The role of felt involvement on public emotions may not be product category specific, but rather be affectively influential across different product categories. From the standpoint of crisis management practice, the main contribution of the present study is to provide empirical evidence that crisis communication managers could use the level of publics’ felt crisis involvement to better predict publics’ emotions that are likely to be felt and displayed in crisis situations.

This study investigates the crisis-generated discrete emotions as a function of crisis type and felt involvement. Felt involvement should be considered as an important construct due to its potential consequences on publics’ emotions and their behaviors beyond perceptions of crisis responsibility. Crisis response messages should be strategically developed with a consideration of the interplay of crisis type, publics’ felt involvement, and product categories.