Visualising Africa at diaspora expense? How and why humanitarian organisations ignore diaspora audiences in their ‘ethical’ communications

Critical commentaries on visual constructions of distant suffering within humanitarian communication research have critiqued and problematised how International non-governmental organisations (INGOs) frame Black and Brown distant ‘Others.’ However, much focus has been on the implications of these mediated imageries for overseas communities, while African diaspora have received much less attention. African diaspora is critical in current debates around representation, especially given increased criticisms around the ethicality of INGO fundraising communications for UK-situated Black racialised publics. This article thus complicates existing debates by repositioning the empirical preoccupation with distant Others ‘over there,’ towards UK-situated African diaspora ‘over here.’ Using interview evidence with UK-based INGO professionals involved in the production and dissemination of imageries of humanitarian issues, it explores how INGOs construe African diaspora populations in considerations around, and implications of, the ethicality of their communications. Revealing that African diaspora are largely absent or ‘afterthoughts’ in INGO consciousness and practices for three central reasons. (1) They are not considered distinct and differentiated donor audiences worthy of strategic prioritisation, (2) Implicit professional/organisational ‘whiteness’ limits reflexive foresight of potential implications (negative or positive) of communications for diaspora and, (3) INGOs temporise over the (im)practicalities of ‘diaspora inclusive’ agendas for ethical communication.     

Improving agility and resilience of automotive spares supply chain: The additive manufacturing enabled truck model

The global supply chain disruption by the COVID-19 pandemic is difficult, if not impossible, to estimate as over 94% of the top 1000 fortune companies were badly affected. The need for building resilient supply chains to mitigate the effect of such disruptions is rising rapidly than ever before across the global business spectrum. Building resilience in the automotive spare parts (ASPs) supply chain is critically important as any disruption to automotive spares supply chain will affect the operations of the logistics sector, the backbone of global supply chains. This research work contributes to improving the resilience of the automotive spare parts supply chain by proposing a Viable Supply Chain (VSC) framework design that incorporates Additive Manufacturing (AM) enabled trucks in the automotive spares supply chain network. Based on the proposed model, conceptual case models are developed and tested with proposed AM enabled truck manufacturing closer to end customer. A heuristic approach called shortest time heuristic is also proposed to solve the routing and scheduling of an AM enabled truck to deliver customers’ orders of the spare parts through an online platform. Importantly, the study demonstrate how additive manufacturing can help the ASPs industry to switch from the existing practice of make-to-stock to a more efficient inventory management and cost saving make-to-order model while also achieving resilience and sustainability in by providing a source of spares support for discontinued models of vehicles.     

Costs of voting and firm performance: Evidence from RegTech adoption in Chinese listed firms

Employing the 2014 mandatory adoption of online shareholder voting in China, we show that the reduction of voting costs through online voting is positively related to participation in shareholder meetings and future firm performance. Our mechanism analysis suggests that the improved firm performance is mainly driven by the enhanced governance role played by informed investors and institutional investors. Further analysis shows that online shareholder voting makes the firms more attractive to mutual fund managers who are far away from the firms. Moreover, we find that the improved firm performance is concentrated in firms with low controlling shareholder ownership, and that online shareholder voting is associated with an increased likelihood of vetoing proposals and lower tunneling.     

Mining the text of online consumer reviews to analyze brand image and brand positioning

The growth of the Internet has led to massive availability of online consumer reviews. So far, papers studying online reviews have mainly analysed how non-textual features, such as ratings and volume, influence different types of consumer behavior, such as information adoption decisions or product choices. However, little attention has been paid to examining the textual aspects of online reviews in order to study brand image and brand positioning. The text analysis of online reviews inevitably raises the concept of “text mining”; that is, the process of extracting useful and meaningful information from unstructured text. This research proposes an unified, structured and easy-to-implement procedure for the text analysis of online reviews with the ultimate goal of studying brand image and brand positioning. The text mining analysis is based on a lexicon-based approach, the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (Pennebaker et al., 2007), which provides the researcher with insights into emotional and psychological brand associations.     

数字化转型对审计费用的影响研究——基于企业商誉的中介效应

依据2010—2022年中国A股创业板上市公司数据,运用多元线性回归模型探究数字化转型对审计费用的影响。结果显示,企业数字化转型进程与审计费用的增加呈正相关关系,这一关系在重污染行业尤为显著。进一步分析表明,商誉在企业数字化转型对审计费用的提升过程中具有中介效应。鉴于此,企业应加强精细化审计成本预见性与规划性,全面考虑数字化投资与审计成本之间的平衡,适时调整审计策略与资源配置,监管层需适时调整审计行业规则应对数字化转型。     

Investigating the effect of status changes in review platforms

Review platforms often use transient status reward systems where the granted status is not permanent, and reviewers can experience gains and losses in status. To evaluate the effectiveness of such systems, review platforms need to consider a trade-off between the potential positive effects of a status gain and the potential negative effects of a status loss on the quantity and characteristics of reviewers’ contributions. This article examines this trade-off. The results of an empirical study that uses matched difference-in-differences analysis of data from Yelp show that: (i) the positive effect of a status gain on the number of reviews is about three times greater than the negative effect of a status loss; (ii) these effects are more pronounced for reviewers with less experience; and (iii) status changes also change the valence and elaborateness of reviews.     

Should a small-sized store have both online and offline channels? An efficiency analysis of the O2O platform strategy

The emergence of online-to-offline (O2O) has been changing the business environment of the retail industry and making businesses more competitive. Since the relationship between O2O and productivity is of interest, this study examines whether adoption of the O2O platform is effective in improving the efficiency of small-sized online stores. A two-stage approach consisting of stochastic frontier analysis and meta-frontier analysis is applied to estimate and compare the efficiencies between firms using the O2O platform and firms using other methods. Based on stochastic frontier analysis and meta-frontier analysis, our findings show that adopting the O2O platform is an innovative and competitive strategy for small-sized online stores.     

Optimizing customer engagement content strategy in retail and E-tail: Available on online product review videos

The present study attempts to examine how the various emotions expressed in customer engagement content available on online product review videos reflect purchase intentions. The study identified 97 popular review videos of different technical products on YouTube, with a total of 93,181 comments posted between January 2018 and June 2021. After filtering, the final set of data consisted of 18,452 comments. The paper employed both Poisson and negative binomial regression to test the hypotheses and strengthen the findings. The study explores new insights for predicting purchase intentions of potential customers with the help of a four-factor model based on customer engagement content available on online product review videos. Thus, this research supports the applicability of MRT, CET and SOR theories in the existing literature on retailing and e-tailing by developing a four-factor model. A wide range of consumer responses, both quantitative and qualitative, have been taken into account to predict purchase intentions using sentiment analysis, which makes this study unique and robust. Additionally, the paper entails several significant managerial implications for retailing and e-tailing firms to reformulate their marketing strategies.     

The geography of e-shopping in China: On the role of physical and virtual accessibility

Although e-shopping is increasingly adopted, it remains unclear (1) how e-shopping varies geographically, and (2) how this relates to physical and virtual accessibility. This paper presents a combined study of both issues focusing on the case of China, arguably one of the emerging e-shopping hotspots. Drawing on Alibaba's Online Shopping Index, we use a general spatial model (SAC) to explore the role of virtual and physical accessibility in the spatial distribution of e-shopping across 276 prefecture-level cities in China. The results suggest that both physical accessibility (proxy-ed by the relative number of shopping malls and the relative number of buses) and virtual accessibility (proxy-ed by the percentage of broadband subscribers and the relative number of delivery points) increase e-shopping, with both effects complementing each other. We discuss how findings contribute to our understanding of the geography of e-shopping, and outline implications for policymakers and e-retailers alike.     

Online reviews as a pacifying decision-making assistant

Drawing on uses and gratification theory, this article elucidates how consumers capitalize on online reviews for purchase decisions in three markets (Taiwan, Thailand, and Vietnam). Three studies demonstrate this objective. Study 1 considers online reviews as a one-dimensional construct consisting of three behavioral components, including textual comments, contextual images, and star ratings, that had been validated by using reliability and validity analyses. Study 2 employs an ANOVA to analyze how these components relate to different consumer groups in terms of gender, age, and location. Study 3 explores the mediating role of online trust in the online reviews and purchase decision relationship under the moderating effect of the perceived effectiveness of social media platforms. Using a cross-national survey and a two-stage partial least squares analysis, the authors substantiate the proposed relationships and discuss the theoretical and managerial contributions of this research.