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The purpose of this paper is to examine how psychological empowerment affects individuals’ likelihood of publicly punishing a company with whom they had unsatisfactory experiences through online complaining behaviors.

A 3 (intrapersonal empowerment: high/low/control) by 3 (interactional empowerment: high/low/control) online experiment was designed using the priming technique. Following the priming tasks, participants were given a scenario in which a restaurant failed their expectations followed by dependent and control measures.

Results revealed a significant main effect of interactional empowerment: participants in the low interactional empowerment condition reported being less likely to engage in the revenge-motivated online public complaining behaviors than participants in the control condition. The study also found a significant interaction effect between interactional and intrapersonal empowerment.

The study findings yield practical application for crisis management and relationship management. Understanding the linkage between power and online complaining behaviors should help corporate communication professionals to better perform risk assessment, environmental scanning and crisis communication and management.

Limited empirical studies have investigated the linkage between empowerment and online complaining behaviors in the consumer context. The present study fills this gap by conceptualizing online public complaining as a revenge-motivated behavior. The study yields both theoretical and practical implications.

Although a large number of prior studies have discussed the impact of using social media to organizations, the existing literature has not yet provided a clear guidance on what specific communication strategy organizations should adopt on social media and what relationship they need to establish with the public. To fill this theoretical gap, the purpose of this paper is to examine the effects of message strategy and interactivity from a relationship-building perspective within a social media context.

Through a 2×2 between-subjects experiment (n=84), this study tests the effects of two message strategies, communal-relationship oriented messages and exchange-relationship oriented messages, with either a high or low level of interactivity within a corporate Twitter setting.

The study findings indicate that communication strategies with different relationship orientations differ in quality. Communal-relationship oriented messages tend to generate more favorable relationship outcomes such as trust and control mutuality than exchange-relationship oriented messages. Message interactivity also positively influences attitude toward the company, perceived company credibility, and commitment.

The unique contribution of this study is to extend relationship theories to a discussion of what message strategies organizations should use on social media. It suggests that messages oriented toward different relationships can lead to different outcomes. It also demonstrates the effectiveness of message interactivity in building a relationship between an organization and the public.

The purpose of this paper is to look into Twitter usage as represented by top US retail corporations in a quantitative manner. This study aimed to determine the dominant purpose of Twitter usage by major US retail companies and to what extent the relationship maintenance strategies were incorporated in Twitter. In addition, the study tested a proposed model that delineates relationship as a precursor of brand loyalty.

A content analysis was conducted comparing two groups of retail corporations – one came from the “top 100 customer loyalty brand leaders” identified by Brand Keys (2011a), and the other came from the Fortune 500 retailers, but excluded those from the top 100 loyalty leaders list.

Study results indicated Twitter as an important channel for corporate communication and relationship maintenance. For the retail industry, Twitter was mainly used for consumer relations. Access was the most widely used strategy followed by assurance and positivity. In addition, the brand loyalty leader group retailers were discovered more inclined to use Twitter in a two-way communication manner than the Fortune 500 group. Furthermore, two relationship maintenance strategies were found significantly more frequent in use in the brand loyalty leader group than the Fortune 500 group – positivity and assurance.

As one of the initial efforts to study relationship maintenance strategies using Twitter, this study contributes to the current literature of relationship management theory on social media by adapting the six relationship strategies to the Twitter context and testing them.

The purpose of this paper is to revisit the disastrous DaimlerChrysler AG takeover episode from 1998 to 2007 in order to arrive at a more comprehensive explanation of this and other merger and takeover failures based on institutional theory.

The case study is based on various secondary sources of information and on the insights that one of the authors gained from working for 14 years in various positions for Daimler-Benz and DaimlerChrysler.

DaimlerChrysler failed because top management made mistakes in trying to globalize the company. They were unable to realize possible synergies between the two companies, which brought complementary resources into the merger. Furthermore, they did not account for the institutional embeddedness of strategies when they adopted lean production globally, diffused the production system developed in Germany to other parts of the world and tried to implement a global stock enlisted in New York and Frankfurt. The underlying theoretical framework is relevant for other merger and acquisition cases. It features institutional embeddedness, path dependency and institutional arbitrage.

The paper develops an institutional perspective on DaimlerChrysler and on cross-border merger and acquisition failure more generally. The perspective is organized around the varieties-of-capitalism approach. This contribution is important because there is increasing dissatisfaction with the dominant explanation of cross-border merger and acquisition failure, which is based on the allegedly failed management of culture “clashes.”

The purpose of this study is to develop luminescence sensors for the detection of nitroaromatic compounds (NACs) and metal ions to protect human health and prevent environmental pollution.

The composition and morphology of Eu-metal-organic frameworks (MOF) (1) were well characterized by powder X-ray diffraction, elemental analyses, Fourier-transform infrared spectroscopy, thermogravimetric analysis, X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy and scanning electron microscopy. The emission spectrum displays that 1 has significant characteristic emission bands of Eu(III) ions. The authors further investigated the fluorescence sensing performances of 1 to NACs and metal ions.

The results show that Eu-MOF (1) exhibits significant fluorescence quenching effect toward p-nitroaniline and Fe³⁺ ions with good stability and recyclability. This means that 1 can be used as a multifunctional sensing material for the detection of p-nitroaniline and Fe³⁺ ions.

The authors have successfully synthesized a fluorescence Eu-based sensing material under hydrothermal conditions. In addition, the fluorescence property and sensing performances for detecting NACs and metal ions were studied. The results suggest that 1 has highly selective fluorescence quenching toward p-nitroaniline and Fe³⁺ ions with not only high sensitivity and selectivity but also excellent stability and recyclability. Furthermore, this study has confirmed that the multifunctional MOF material is very useful in environment pollutants’ detection and monitoring.