Walking the talk about corporate social responsibility communication: An elaboration likelihood model perspective

Large organizations, including listed businesses, financial service providers as well as public services entities are increasingly disclosing information on their environmental, social and governance (ESG) issues through corporate websites or via social media. Therefore, this research uses valid measures from the Elaboration Likelihood Model (ELM) to explore the individuals’ attitudes toward online corporate social responsibility (CSR) communications. The data were gathered from a structured questionnaire among three hundred ninety-two respondents (n = 392). A structural equations modeling partial least squares (SEM-PLS 3) approach was used to analyze the data. The findings revealed that the timeliness, relevance and accuracy of information as well as the source expertise were highly significant antecedents that were affecting the research participants’ attitudes toward CSR communications. This contribution implies that there is scope for content curators to publish quality online information on their business activities to improve their trustworthiness and positive credentials among stakeholders.     

Reformulating Environmentally Constrained Traffic Equilibrium via a Smooth Gap Function

Various government laws have recently been enacted to alleviate the environmental deterioration of transportation systems. Environmental constraint is a valid means to explicitly reflect various environmental protection requirements imposed by the government. In this paper, we examine the environmentally constrained traffic equilibrium problem (EC-TEP), which is a fundamental tool for modeling and evaluating environmental protection requirements. Specifically, we provide an equivalent reformulation for the EC-TEP. The proposed reformulation adapts the concept of gap function to simultaneously reformulate the nonlinear complementarity conditions associated with the generalized user equilibrium conditions, environmental constraints, and conservation constraints as an equivalent unconstrained optimization problem. This gap function reformulation has two desirable features: (1) it can handle a general environmental constraint structure (linear or nonlinear; link-based or area-based) and a general link and route cost structure, enhancing the modeling adaptability and flexibility; (2) it is smooth and unconstrained, permitting a number of existing efficient algorithms for its solution. A gradient-based solution algorithm with a self-regulated averaging stepsize scheme is customized to solve the reformulated unconstrained optimization problem. Numerical examples are also provided to demonstrate the modeling flexibility of the proposed EC-TEP reformulation.     

Has Australia's floating exchange rate regime been optimal?

This paper develops a straightforward theoretical framework for evaluating exchange rate regime choice for small economies. It proposes that a floating exchange rate minimises national income and employment variation when real macroeconomic shocks predominate, whereas a pegged exchange rate achieves this goal should monetary shocks predominate. It then shows econometrically that, in the case of Australia, a floating exchange rate best suited the economy for the period 1985 to 2010, because real shocks were more significant than monetary shocks. Moreover, consistent with the theory, further results showing that a stronger (weaker) exchange rate correlated with positive (negative) deviations from trend GDP affirm that a floating exchange rate regime was optimal for Australia over this time.     

Advancing tourism research through multilevel methods: research problem and agenda

Tourism research often encounters social phenomena and research problems that involve multiple levels. However, most researchers assume that the phenomena exist in a single level and perform analyses that do not reflect the hierarchical nature of social dynamics. This article heeds the call from Current Issues in Tourism by illustrating multilevel methods and proposing an agenda for multilevel research. In particular, this article seeks to reconcile the limitations of single-level analysis and to delineate how multilevel methods could be applied in tourism research. It further seeks to advance tourism theories by introducing more complex multilevel design with broader applications in various tourism settings. This article presents two common tourism research scenarios, critiques their limitations, and proposes how multilevel methods could not only address these limitations, but also how they could advance tourism theories. An empirical study is offered to demonstrate multilevel design and analytical techniques.     

Channels of employee voice: complementary or competing for space?

This article identifies the existence of employee voice channels and examines how they interact within the context of an overall organisational voice system. In so doing, we can better appreciate the disparities between the micro‐level reality and macro‐level rhetoric of employee voice for highly skilled employees in the knowledge intensive sector. Drawing on an instrumental, inductive case study involving managers and, most notably, employees, the research finds that the plurality of mechanisms provided for voice appears to cause some confusion that leads to a neglect of certain channels and others competing for attention. This raises the issue, which has not received attention thus far, as to whether the availability of multiple voice channels can have counter‐productive effects whereby they start to compete with rather than complement each other.