Fitting room or selling room? Millennial female consumers’ dressing room experiences

As retail experiences have become more important to the modern consumer, the store environment has taken on greater significance. The store environment is especially of great significance to the millennial consumer. These consumers tend to spend more time in the fashion retail store, while their expenditure on fashion items increases on a yearly basis. The dressing room must be seen as the clothing retailer's selling room – the place where the retail environment plays an immense role with regard to a consumer's cognitions, emotions and purchasing behaviour. The purpose of this study was to explore and describe young millennial clothing consumers' Functional, aesthetic, emotional and symbolic dressing room experiences. A qualitative research strategy was followed. Two unstructured interviews were held with 15 participants. Participants had to take photos of retailers' dressing rooms before the second interview. A photo‐elicitation technique was employed during the second interview. Findings revealed that participants had specific expectations with regard to the functionality and aesthetics of the dressing room, as well as with regard to the symbolic messages and the emotions that they expected to experience. If the dressing room did not meet their expectations they got disappointed, experienced negative emotions and thoughts and the need to leave the dressing room. The behavioural response of avoidance strongly came to the forth. Findings of this research point to the importance of the dressing room as part of the retail experience and have implications for consumer specialists and retailers.     

Trade effects of the Europe agreements: A theory-based gravity approach

We analyze normalized productivity differences for 15 developing Latin American countries and four firm types: National Domestic, National Exporter, Foreign Domestic, and Foreign Exporter. There are no productivity thresholds for viability, export activity, or multinational activity, but we do find a clear size productivity premium and development productivity premium in the manufacturing sectors. We also find a clear foreign-ownership productivity premium, both for domestic firms and for exporting firms and both for manufacturing sectors and services sectors. In contrast, we only find an export productivity premium for national firms in the manufacturing sectors.     

Financial Education Interventions Targeting Immigrants and Children of Immigrants: Results from a Randomized Control Trial

We document that immigrants in the United States differ from natives in several aspects relevant for their financial decision making. Based on these differences, we designed novel financial education materials targeted at US immigrants and their children and evaluated their effectiveness using a randomized control trial. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first rigorous evaluation of financial education programs targeted at this population. Compared to a control group, the groups that received the one‐time educational intervention were more likely to correctly answer financial knowledge questions immediately after the intervention. The estimated effects of this one‐time intervention on knowledge were large, but most of them faded away after six months. Moreover, we find little effect of the treatments on intended financial behavior measures, both immediately and six months later. Our results point to the efficacy of this type of educational material in informing immigrants and their children about important financial information that they are unfamiliar with, including information related to their immigrant status. However, they also suggest that a priority for future research should be to test whether repeated opportunities for learning can increase financial knowledge retention and lead to behavior change.     

Public Sector Organizations and Cocreation With Citizens: A Literature Review on Benefits,Drivers, and Barriers

ABSTRACT

Cocreation has captured the attention of public managers and policymakers and yet the literature focusing in the public sector is still relatively dispersed. In this literature review we present a contextualized analysis of the potential reasons that lead public sector organizations to cocreate with citizens and identify potential barriers that may hamper the adoption of cocreation in public settings. The analysis undertaken allowed us to conclude that the topic is increasingly capturing the interest of researchers, although the state of the literature is characterized by a reduced heterogeneity in research methods. We classified cocreation benefits in the public sector as innovation related, improved decision-making, and symbolic related, and we categorized the drivers for cocreation according to three broad categories: external, relation-specific and internal. Finally, we identified potential barriers of cocreation, including structural, organizational, and behavioral barriers.     

The role of contractual governance flexibility in realizing the outcomes of key customer relationships

An entrepreneurial firm's relationships with customers, suppliers, investors, universities, and other organizations have a significant and long-lasting impact on the survival and success of the firm. Yet, little research has focused on how the management of these relationships influences outcomes for entrepreneurial firms.This paper focuses on the customer relationships of new, technology-based firms (NTBFs). We aim to contribute to the literature on the governance of exchange relationships between NTBFs and their customers. Further, in so doing, we seek to explore the implications of such governance for the performance of new firms.Because of their small size, their “liabilities of newness,” and their highly specialized, knowledge-intensive resources, NTBFs are able to maintain only a limited number of close customer relationships. Consequently, NTBFs often become highly dependent on one or a few of their customers. In this study, we focus on the relationships between NTBFs and their single largest customers. We refer to the customer that accounts for the highest proportion of an NTBF's total revenue as the “key customer.”Strategic management literature, resource dependence theory, and transaction cost economics emphasize the risks associated with being dependent on an exchange relationship, focusing on the opportunistic use of power by the exchange partner. These perspectives suggest that firms can minimize their external dependencies and protect themselves against opportunism through the use of contracts. The present paper expands this view by also examining how flexibility in exchange governance may unlock potential benefits or dampen potential dangers that an NTBF faces in its commitment to its single largest customer, e.g., sharing the costs and risks of R&;D with the customer, improving the reputation of the NTBF, and realizing savings in sales and marketing costs. We examine the extent to which the realization of the potential positive and negative outcomes of a high level of dependence are moderated by the flexibility of the exchange partners' attitudes toward contractual agreements. The research question that we seek to answer is: Does the manner in which a contractual agreement is implemented affect the outcomes of a customer relationship for an NTBF at high levels of exchange dependence on the key customer?We develop a set of hypotheses that examines how the governance of the key customer relationship affects the NTBF's new product development, reputation, and sales costs when exchange dependence on the key customer is high. We use the term “contractual governance flexibility” to refer to the extent to which the exchange partners are willing to adjust to changes in the relationship instead of relying on the contract. We test the hypotheses with survey data from 195 NTBFs in the UK. The results of regression analyses reveal that contractual governance flexibility moderates the relationship between exchange dependence and outcomes. In relationships with a high level of exchange dependence, greater contractual governance flexibility was associated with greater new product development and sales cost advantages. No such benefits were realized for relationships in which exchange partners relied heavily on the contract.These findings are important because they suggest that by relaxing formal contractual mechanisms governing a relationship, NTBFs can derive benefits from key customer relationships that are characterized by a high level of dependence. Our findings suggest that at high levels of exchange dependence on key customers, NTBFs can benefit when greater contractual governance flexibility is present. Our data indicated that, interestingly, NTBFs tend to do just the opposite: at higher levels of exchange dependence, NTBFs are inclined to rely increasingly on the contract. By so doing, they may fail to realize the potential benefits of the relationships, such as gaining access to complementary resources and reducing costs. These outcomes, which may be derived from dependent exchange relationships by means of contractual governance flexibility, can have a significant influence on the long-term development and competitive advantage of an entrepreneurial firm.     

Workplace Injury and the Failing Academic Body: A Testimony of Pain

Journal of Business Ethics - In its three decades of development, many constructs of cause-related marketing have been tested from different perspectives and in varied contexts. However, there has...     

Getting to the Bottom Line: An Exploration of Gender and Earnings Quality

For stakeholders, such as investors and lenders, to appropriately assess a company’s financial performance, the reported accounting earnings must closely reflect the economic reality of the organization’s financial activity throughout the reporting period. The degree to which reported earnings capture economic reality is called earnings quality. Managers have an ethical obligation to report high quality earnings to interested stakeholders in a timely matter. Accounting research has identified conditions within an organization, such as management compensation contracts and pending litigation that can impact earnings quality. We extend this line of research by exploring whether another characteristic of an organization, gender diversity in senior management, influences the quality of reported earnings. Companies with more women in senior management are found to be more profitable and have higher stock returns after initial public offerings than those with fewer women in the management ranks. Our findings suggest that the improved bottom line for companies with more women senior executives is not produced through the management of earnings or lower quality earnings. Instead, earnings quality is positively associated with gender diversity in senior management. Gopal Krishnan is an associate professor and holds the VSCPA Northern Chapter Professorship in Public Accounting at the School of Management at George Mason University. He has published several articles on corporate governance and the role of auditors in journals such as Accounting Horizons, Contemporary Accounting Research, Journal of Accounting, Auditing and Finance and Auditing: A Journal of Practice & Theory. Linda Parsons is an assistant professor at the School of Management at George Mason University. She is the author of several papers that examine the value relevance of accounting in the nonprofit sector, especially as it impacts decision-making by donors. Her work has appeared in journals such as Journal of Accounting, Auditing and Finance, Research in Governmental and Nonprofit Accounting, and Journal of Accounting Literature.     

The Neglected Legacy of Lancashire Cotton: Industrial Clusters and the U.K. Outdoor Trade, 1960-1990

This article considers the neglected legacies of the Lancashirecotton industry and their impact on the U.K. outdoor trade.Studies of the decline of the Lancashire cotton industry afterthe Second World War have concentrated on the collapse of coarsecotton spinning and weaving, largely ignoring the impact ofthe knowledge and skills related to the finishing trades. Theexamination of the evolution of rainwear, coatings, and high-performancefabrics in the nineteenth century provides a backdrop to a studyof the innovation process that emerged in the U.K. outdoor tradeafter 1960. It shows that there was a path dependency betweenthe skills that resided in Lancashire’s finishing tradesand coating and fabric innovation for outdoor products. Thisarticle explores both the legacy and the ways in which the networksof innovation functioned as the U.K. outdoor trade expanded.     

New business formation in a rapidly growing economy: the Irish experience

The extraordinary growth of the Irish economy since the mid-1990s—the ‘Celtic Tiger’—has attracted a great deal of interest, commentary and research. Indeed, many countries look to Ireland as an economic development role model, and it has been suggested that Ireland might provide key lessons for other EU members as they seek to achieve the objectives set out in the Lisbon Agenda. Much of the discussion of Ireland’s growth has focused on its possible triggers: the long-term consequences of the late 1980s fiscal stabilisation, EU structural funds, education, wage moderation and devaluation of the Irish punt. The industrial policy perspective has highlighted the importance of inflows of foreign direct investment, but a notable absence from the discourse on the ‘Celtic Tiger’ has been any mention of the role of new business venture creation and entrepreneurship. In this paper we use unpublished Irish VAT data for the years 1988–2004 to provide the first detailed look at national trends in business birth and death rates in Ireland over the ‘take-off’ period. We also use sub-national VAT data to shed light on spatial trends in new venture creation. Our overall conclusions are that new business formation made no detectable contribution to the acceleration of Ireland’s growth in the late 1990s, although we do find evidence of spatial convergence in per capita business stocks.     

Approaches to child labour in the supply chain

This paper examines the difficulties of dealing with child labour in the supply chain. It begins by identifying a number of the factors which make global supply chains so difficult to manage. It goes on to outline a framework of different approaches that can be taken to managing the supply chain with relation to child labour, moving from national and international regulation, through to the role of NGOs and the companies themselves. Focusing on an 'engagement' strategy for dealing with child labour, the paper traces a case study of Adidas-Salomon and its attempts to implement their 'standards of engagement' in this area with relation to one of their supplier factories in Vietnam. The research draws on the direct involvement of one of the authors who visited the site and was able to interview staff and observe the operation in practice. Her findings are supported by wider work on the implementation of corporate approaches to human rights at a range of companies interviewed by another of the authors. The paper aims to highlight the issues needing to be addressed for companies considering the 'involvement' approach to child labour. It also aims to develop theory on our understanding of different approaches to corporate rights.