Health motive and the purchase of organic food: A meta‐analytic review

There are many empirically determined influential factors known to control the organic food purchase behaviour. Of these known factors‐ health, product quality and concern for natural environmental degradation are seen as the major motives behind the organic food purchase. We, therefore, attempted to investigate the most prominent reason(s) for buying organic food, using the meta‐analyses of studies published during the last 25 years as our basis for conviction. Multilevel meta‐analyses was applied to the studies in review, in order to find the major reason(s) for the purchase of organic grocery, milk, fruits and vegetables. Although the three motivational factors mentioned above have been echoed throughout the history of organic food purchase research, the health factor has always topped the priority chart. The study in its overall empirical scale contributes to managerial implications and sets an agenda for future research.     

Mimicry and modernity in the Middle East: fashion invisibility and young women of the Arab Gulf

Prior consumer research has addressed the encounter between global brands and styles versus local cultures through the concepts of glocal hybridity, post-assimilationist resistance, and the de-stigmatization of local practices in the face of competition from global consumer culture. Based on fieldwork with college women in the Arab Gulf states we detect two other practices involving highly conspicuous consumption that act to create a space for identity that lies between Western modernity and Islamic conservatism. The first is layering in which outer garments act as a “cloak of invisibility” for luxurious Western wear beneath. The second is “mimetic excess” that responds to envy of Western consumption, provokes local envy, and participates in “modern” consumption at the same time that it encompasses these practices within a covering of religious and national virtue. The key contribution of this study consists of identifying these new strategies of reconciling two opposing hegemonic fashion discourses to which privileged Muslim minorities in their own wealthy countries are subjected.     

OPTIMAL PRICING: THE ROUTE TO A SELF-FUNDING INFRASTRUCTURE - AND MORE

Optimal pricing delivers not only a self-funding infrastructure but also the additional revenues to reduce economically damaging taxes on capital, labour and final consumption. For the transport sector, this result has now been established by a concerted international research effort. Optimising prices across all modes of transport will ensure the efficient use of existing infrastructure, provide the informational base to optimise investment decisions and generate revenues in excess of both current infrastructure costs and the costs of justified investments.     

An Analysis of Corporate Social Responsibility,Corporate Identity and Ethics Teaching in Business Schools

Recent events have raised concerns about the ethical standards of public and private organisations, with some attention falling on business schools as providers of education and training to managers and senior␣executives. This paper investigates the nature of, motivation and commitment to, ethics tuition provided by the business schools. Using content analysis of their institutional and home websites, we appraise their corporate identity, level of engagement in socially responsible programmes, degree of social inclusion, and the relationship to their ethics teaching. Based on published research, a schema is developed with corporate identity forming an integral part, to represent the macro-environment, parent institution, the business school and their relationships to ethics education provision. This is validated by our findings. Dr. Nelarine Cornelius, Reader in Human Resource Management and Organisational Behaviour, Brunel Business School, Brunel University, is a Fellow of the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts. She is also a Chartered Psychologist and is Director of both the Centre for Research in Emotion Work and the Human Resource Management and Organisational Behaviour Research Group at Brunel University. Dr. James Wallace, Lecturer in Quantitative Methods, School of Management, University of Bradford, is a Fellow of the Royal Statistical Society. He has considerable experience of statistical and mathematical modelling gained over several years in the UK utilities sector and in H.E. His current research interests include, applying statistical and mathematical modelling approaches to Technological, Operational and General Management problems. Dr. Rana Tassabehji, Lecturer in Information Systems and E-business, School of Management, University of Bradford, is a member of the British Academy of Management and the UK Academy for Information Systems. She worked as an international business consultant and as a consultant in the UK IT sector and is currently an academic member of the eGISE eGovernment network. Her research interests include ethics and e-business, Internet security and e-government.     

Buyer–supplier relationships from the perspective of working environment and organisational performance: review and research agenda

Management Review Quarterly - The internationalisation phenomenon driving MNEs to go for globalisation of production has made the working environment (WE) and its relation to organisational...     

Do Asian Countries Upgrade in Global Value Chains? A Novel Approach and Empirical Evidence

This paper examines the move into upstream and downstream global value chain (GVC) activities by 11 Asian countries. We use international input–output tables in combination with employment data and measure the number of workers in each country involved in manufactures GVC. Jobs are classified by business function based on occupational information, such as R&D, fabrication, logistics, sales and marketing. In most Asian countries, we find a faster employment increase in R&D and other support services relative to fabrication activities between 2000 and 2011. However, the participation in GVC and the pace of upgrading appears to differ substantially across Asian countries. We use a structural decomposition method to explore the role of trade, consumption and technological change in accounting for changes in countries' involvement in GVC.     

Electoral system,corporate political donation,and carbon emission intensity: Cross-country evidence

We examine the association between a country's electoral system and greenhouse gas (GHG) emission intensity of firms and explore whether this association is influenced by corporate political donation. The study draws on the neo-pluralist theory of power in society to examine how possible corporate influence in the electoral systems relates to corporate environmental performance. Using a cross-country panel dataset, we find that companies operating in countries using majoritarian electoral systems (MAJ), where corporations have a relatively low influence on election outcomes, are associated with lower GHG emission intensity than those in proportional electoral systems, after controlling for macro-economic factors and variations in firm characteristics. Further, our findings show that corporate political donation positively moderates the association between MAJ and GHG emission intensity. Our results suggest that corporations are likely to utilise political donations as a component of business strategy to ease the regulatory actions of the state on companies. The results are robust to alternative variable measurements and tests of sensitivity.     

The role of farmers’ attitude towards their resources to alleviate rural household poverty

Quality & Quantity - The key objective of this study is to analyze the moderating effect of farmers’ attitude between the resources of farmer and poverty incidence in rural areas. For...     

Meeting basic needs: An overview

This paper summarizes some of the main issues related to the World Bank's basic-needs oriented lending programme. In particular, based on country experience it discusses the lessons learned with regard to sectoral policies and programming for their basic needs and their implications for future lending.