To Help or Not to Help? The Good Samaritan Effect and the Love of Money on Helping Behavior

This research tests a model of employee helping behavior (a component of Organizational Citizenship Behavior, OCB) that involves a direct path (Intrinsic Motives → Helping Behavior, the Good Samaritan Effect) and an indirect path (the Love of Money → Extrinsic Motives → Helping Behavior). Results for the full sample supported the Good Samaritan Effect. Further, the love of money was positively related to extrinsic motives that were negatively related with helping behavior. We tested the model across four cultures (the USA., Taiwan, Poland, and Egypt). The Good Samaritan Effect was significant for all four countries. For the indirect path, the first part was significant for all countries, except Egypt, whereas the second part was significant for Poland only. For Poland, the indirect path was significant and positive. The love of money may cause one to help in one culture (Poland) but not to help in others. Results were discussed in the light of ethical decision making.

Customer-based corporate reputation of a service firm: scale development and validation

Although corporate reputation has attracted significant attention among marketing scholars, current measures of it do not adequately capture the perceptions of the most important stakeholder group, customers, and often overlook its relationship to important customer-outcome variables. In this article, we identify dimensions of customer-based corporate reputation and develop scales to measure these dimensions (Study 1). Based on comprehensive validation procedures across three service firm types, we found support for a five-dimensional scale with the following dimensions: Customer Orientation, Good Employer, Reliable and Financially Strong Company, Product and Service Quality, and Social and Environmental Responsibility. In Study 2, using a second sample, we validate our scale and examine its relationship with important customer-outcome variables—customer satisfaction, loyalty, trust, and word of mouth. Most of the reputation dimensions were strongly associated with important outcome variables, with a few exceptions. We discuss the results with reference to the marketing implications.

Cuts,collaboration and creativity

Massive cuts in public spending are demanding a new era of collaborative working among partners in English local governance. Partnerships have the capacity to pool assets, share scarce resources and leverage new forms of social and human capital. City-wide partnerships are also ideal vehicles for public service creativity. Action research in Sheffield reveals the potential, but also the pitfalls, of attempts to mainstream partnership principles, now they are no longer mandated by central government.     

Top down or bottom up? Issues in the development of sub-national tourism satellite accounts

It is well known that tourism makes extensive use of national identities to help build brand images, and that such use can result in significant negative impacts to peoples and their cultures. Until recent times, the dominant themes for much of Australia’s international tourism advertising campaigns have been based upon male character types, Indigenous culture and landscape. The 2006 ‘Australian Invitation’ campaign which featured a young female model and use of the term ‘bloody hell’ created a media controversy. The research reported in this paper found that the majority of respondents liked and approved of the campaign, but a cluster analysis distinguished a group of approximately one third of the respondents who held negative attitudes towards it.     

Congruity's role in website attitude formation

Retailers with physical stores that also have an online presence (one form of multi-channel retailers) have unique challenges. Consumers bringing their prior attitudes towards the retailer to the site is one such challenge. However, researchers studying website issues focus only on consumers' evaluations of website characteristics, failing to account for how prior attitudes towards the firm and congruity of the website with the retailer's physical store image might affect information processing and attitude formation. The current study draws on categorization theory, by proposing that increases in the congruity between the retailer's known offline and their online presence should decrease the emphasis new visitors place on website characteristics (a piecemeal process) and increase the influence of their prior attitudes towards the firm (an attitude transfer process). Results support predictions and provide guidance for multi-channel retailers.     

The power of plain: Intensifying product experience with neutral aesthetic context

Product packaging aesthetics can be the first observable signal of a product??s underlying traits. Two experimental studies examine the impact of package aesthetics on consumers?? evaluations of sensory hedonic products. The studies show that when paired with inferior or superior product quality, neutral package aesthetics can serve to intensify the negativity or positivity of product experience. Results indicate that surprise and disappointment mediate the relationship between package aesthetics and product evaluation. These findings provide evidence that an aesthetic, which serves to neutralize expectation states and in turn intensifies experience through contrast, may be as important of a contextual factor to consider as aesthetics that bias perceptions via a halo effect.     

Contingent Work and Its Contradictions: Towards a Moral Economy Framework

This article proposes the lens of moral economy as a useful ethical framework through which to assess HRM practice, with a particular focus on the strategic use of contingent work (??non-standard?? employment practices including temporary, agency and outsourced work). While contingent work practices have a variety of impetuses we focus here on their strategic use in the pursuit of economic and flexibility goals. A review of the contingent work literature conveys mixed messages about its outcomes for individuals, and more opaquely, for organisations: on the one hand transferring risks yet on the other, creating opportunities. A moral economy lens views employment as a relationship rooted in a web of social dependencies, and considers that ??thick?? relations produce valuable ethical surpluses that represent mutuality and human flourishing. Applying such an approach to the analysis of contingent work enables a fresh interpretation of contradictory individual and collective outcomes observed in the research literature. We suggest that evaluations informed by moral economy offer a more holistic appraisal of HRM practices such as contingent work, where both economic and social opportunities and costs can be more fully seen. In this way we not only highlight the ethical inadequacies of neglecting the human in HRM but also the conceptual pitfalls of analytically separating the economic from the social.     

Gender gaps and reentry into entrepreneurial ecosystems after business failure

Small Business Economics - Despite the significant role played by serial entrepreneurs in the entrepreneurial process, we know little about group differences in reentry decisions after business...     

Subculture as learning context: subcultural music consumption as language,channel and journey

ABSTRACT

Subcultures cultivate alternative and resistive discourses and practices as well as transcendental meanings, experiences and identities. Yet, current knowledge falls short in documenting the ways in which subcultures facilitate learning. Therefore, this study empirically investigates the ways in which music subcultures offer consumers a learning context and potentially transformative process. Via an extensive online and offline ethnographic research design, the findings show how music subcultures enable learning at both the individual and collective levels. Findings reveal that the language of music awakens, the channel of music engages, and the music as journey of experiences facilitates action, navigation from one subcultural scene to another, alternative ways of knowing and critical social learning. Subcultures of music therefore provide consumers with a highly informal and unstructured experience in a participative, (inter)active, creative learning context.