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Through activism, brands participate in the sociopolitical controversies that shape society today. Based on social identity theory, this study aims to examine the moderating effects of consumer–brand identification (CBI) and political ideology in explaining consumer responses to brand activism. Furthermore, the role of perceived marginalization that can arise in the case of consumer–brand disagreement is explored.

The hypothesized effects were tested in three experiments. Study 1 (n = 262) and Study 2 (n = 322) used a moderation analysis, which was supplemented by a mixed design analysis with repeated measures in Study 1. In Study 3 (n = 383), the mediating effect of perceived marginalization by the brand was tested using a moderated mediation model.

The results show that strong CBI as well as a conservative ideology buffer the negative effects of consumer–brand disagreement on brand attitude and word-of-mouth intentions. In the case of agreement with a brand’s stance, no direct or interactive effects of brand activism on consumer responses occur. Perceived marginalization by a brand mediates the effects of brand activism.

This study extends the “love is blind” versus “love becomes hate” debate to the realm of brand activism and finds evidence for the former effect. It also contributes to the research on political consumption by highlighting the role of political ideology as an important boundary condition for brand activism. Perceived marginalization is identified as a relevant risk for activist brands.

This study is the first to examine consumer’s neural reaction to different merchandising communication strategies at the point-of-sale (PoS) by applying functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS). By doing so, the purpose of this study is to extend consumer neuroscience to retail and shopper research.

Two experiments were conducted in which 36 shoppers were exposed to a realistic grocery shopping scenario while their brain haemodynamics were measured using mobile fNIRS.

Results revealed that mobile fNIRS appears a valid method to study neural activation of the prefrontal cortex (PFC) in the field of “shopper neuroscience”. More precisely, results demonstrated that the orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) might be crucial for processing and predicting merchandising communication strategy effectiveness.

This research gives evidence that certain regions of the PFC, in particular the OFC and the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (dlPFC), are crucial to process and evaluate merchandising communication strategies.

The current work opens a promising new avenue for studying and understanding shopper’s behaviour. Mobile fNIRS enables marketing management to collect neural data from shoppers and analyse neural activity associated with real-life settings. Furthermore, based on a better understanding of shoppers’ perceptual processes of communication strategies, marketers can design more effective merchandising communication strategies.

The study is the first to implement the innovative, mobile neuroimaging method of fNIRS to a PoS setting. It, therefore, opens up the promising field of “shopper neuroscience”.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate whether and under what condition does affective orientation (AO) drive salesperson performance (SP) and whether there is a tradeoff between affective orientation and the need for cognition (NFC). Using career stage theory, this research proposes that emotion is important and that the relationship between AO and SP is conditional and mediated.

The hypothesized model is tested using survey data that were collected from 611 attendees at a Midwest regional sales meeting of a national direct selling organization. The model was estimated using 5,000 bootstrapped samples drawn to assess the conditional and indirect effects.

The findings reveal that AO increases SP when mediated through motivation to work (MW), but only during the salesperson’s initial stage of their career – their first year. In subsequent career stages, AO’s impact on SP diminishes, while NFC’s impact on SP remains significant regardless of career stage.

The data were collected from a single selling organization.

This study increases the understanding of the relationship between salesperson emotion (AO) and SP. This informs sales managers that new salespeople interpret information both emotionally and cognitively, which impacts the management of early career salespeople.

Sales research rarely investigates the role of emotion. This research finds that emotion can be an asset to new salespeople. However, the need for emotion (AO) decreases with experience and no longer has a significant impact on performance after the initial stage.

The rapid evolution of curation practices today is a response to expanded access to information and knowledge and the dynamic development of intelligent technologies well suited to curatorial practices. This chapter provides an overview of traditional curation theory and practice. It identifies its historical origins of anthropology, ethnography, museum work, and archival practices. The authors note that traditional curatorial practices have been a subset of preservation practices. Today it draws heavily from traditional practices but expands the goal and purpose beyond simple preservation to storytelling, learning, creating new perspectives, interpreting the past and present, and creating new business knowledge. The chapter lays out the emerging spectrum of curation purposes and practices. The widespread access to curatorial tools now opens curatorial work to the general public. More comprehensive access argues for a broader dialog around the new competencies and capabilities these new practices require.

AT the request of the Air Council the Sub‐Committee have discussed the general question of airworthiness of both semi‐rigid and non‐rigid airships and have prepared a report on general lines following the precedent of an earlier report on the airworthiness of rigid airships (R. & M. 970). The present report seeks to provide for the adequate checking of a design from the standpoint of safety, whilst leaving the widest freedom to the designer in producing the factors of safety required.

Buildings alone do not matter, it is only the ensemble of streets, squares, and buildings and the way they fit together that comprises the true principles of good urbanism and place making. One of the main rules of good urban design is the quality of the public space. This paper analyzes the importance of creating & maintaining a true public square in contemporary urban condition, as one of the built environments' pillars for sustaining social and cultural identity.

Criticism has been posed towards the (neo) romanticizing the importance of European squares (as some critics would call it “Postcard Squares”) in everyday life and contemporary town planning. Movements such as New Urbanism, which promote good urban design have not put squares that high on their urban design agendas. Also the usage of the historic European city's public realm model - the square - as the important ingredient for all urban places has not been forthcoming. To investigate this phenomena, and facilitate the discourse, The Square of the St. Blaise Church (Luza Square) and the Gunduliceva Poljana Square in the Old City of Dubrovnik, are analyzed and reflected upon through various data collection, theory reflections and urban design evaluation methods, such as Garham's Sense of Place Typology-Taxonomy.

If cities have livable and vibrant social spaces, do residents tend to have a stronger sense of community and sense of place? If such places are lacking, does the opposite happen?. This paper seeks out to answer these questions. Finally the paper also looks at how the phenomenon of creating good social spaces through creating ‘third places’ is achieved and confirmed in the squares of Dubrovnik.

Researchers recommend a reorganization of the medical profession into larger groups with a multispecialty mix. We analyze whether there is evidence for the superiority of these models and if this organizational transformation is underway.

We summarize the evidence on scale and scope economies in physician group practice, and then review the trends in physician group size and specialty mix to conduct survivorship tests of the most efficient models.

The distribution of physician groups exhibits two interesting tails. In the lower tail, a large percentage of physicians continue to practice in small, physician-owned practices. In the upper tail, there is a small but rapidly growing percentage of large groups that have been organized primarily by non-physician owners.

While our analysis includes no original data, it does collate all known surveys of physician practice characteristics and group practice formation to provide a consistent picture of physician organization.

Our review suggests that scale and scope economies in physician practice are limited. This may explain why most physicians have retained their small practices.

Larger, multispecialty groups have been primarily organized by non-physician owners in vertically integrated arrangements. There is little evidence supporting the efficiencies of such models and some concern they may pose anticompetitive threats.

This is the first comprehensive review of the scale and scope economies of physician practice in nearly two decades. The research results do not appear to have changed much; nor has much changed in physician practice organization.

We aimed to analyze the impact of the transition to the hybrid model of teamwork and team dynamics from the perspective of the five key challenges, i.e. communication, coordination, connection, creativity and culture.

To achieve the stated aim, we conducted a literature review and then an exploratory qualitative study. We split the research into phases: December 2021 to January 2022 and July to August 2022. In the first phase, we conducted computer-assisted online interviews (CAWIs) with all members of the remote team and an in-depth interview with the manager. After the transition from remote to hybrid work in February 2022, we returned to the team to conduct in-depth interviews with team leaders and the manager.

We identified key findings, i.e. managerial implications of differences across the 5 Cs (communication, coordination, connection, creativity and culture) noted in the functioning of the analyzed team as the team shifted from fully remote work to the hybrid work model.

We concluded that if people do not spend time together and are not impregnated with the unique culture and values of a given organization, they will not feel a connection to its distinctive ethos and may choose to leave. In the longer-term, the last challenge may be the biggest single opportunity for employees post-pandemic and concurrently the single biggest challenge that organizational leadership will need to address, given that sustainable market success depends on talent.

The results showed that team communication, teamwork coordination, social and emotional connections among team members, nurturing of creativity, as well as of the organizational culture were of high importance to the team in the hybrid work model. Thus, we confirmed the findings of other authors. The study contributes to our understanding of the impact of the hybrid work model on teamwork and team dynamics and provides some guidance on how organizations can mitigate these, in particular through the team manager.

This review integrates and builds linkages among existing theoretical and empirical literature from across disciplines to further broaden our understanding of the relationship between inequality, imprisonment, and health for black men. The review examines the health impact of prisons through an ecological theoretical perspective to understand how factors at multiple levels of the social ecology interact with prisons to potentially contribute to deleterious health effects and the exacerbation of race/ethnic health disparities.

This review finds that there are documented health disparities between inmates and non-inmates, but the casual mechanisms explaining this relationship are not well-understood. Prisons may interact with other societal systems – such as the family (microsystem), education, and healthcare systems (meso/exosystems), and systems of racial oppression (macrosystem) – to influence individual and population health.

The review also finds that research needs to move the discussion of the race effects in health and crime/justice disparities beyond the mere documentation of such differences toward a better understanding of their causes and effects at the level of individuals, communities, and other social ecologies.