Pandemic's effect on the relationship between lean implementation and service performance

Purpose: This paper aims at examining the impact that COVID-19 pandemic and its related work implications have on the relationship between lean implementation and service performance. Design/methodology/approach: The author surveyed service organizations that have been implementing lean for at least two years and remotely maintained their activities during the COVID-19 outbreak. Multivariate data techniques were applied to analyze the dataset. This study was grounded on sociotechnical systems theory. Findings: The findings indicate that organizations that have been implementing lean services more extensively are also more likely to benefit from the effects that the COVID-19 had on work environments, especially in the case of home office. Nevertheless, social distancing does not appear to mediate the effects of lean services on both quality and delivery performances. Originality/value: Since the pandemic is a recent phenomenon with unprecedented effects, this research is an initial effort to determine the effect the pandemic has on lean implementation and services' performance, providing both theoretical and practical contributions to the field. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved)

The impact of coronavirus on business: Developing service research agenda for a post-coronavirus world

Purpose: The coronavirus (COVID-19) has had a tremendous impact on companies worldwide. However, researchers have no clear idea of the key issues requiring their attention. This paper aims to close this gap by analysing all business-related posts on a coronavirus subreddit ("r/coronavirus") and identifying the main research streams that are guiding the research agenda for a post-coronavirus world. Design/methodology/approach: We use data from reddit, particularly the subreddit "r/coronavirus" to identify posts that reveal the impact of coronavirus on business. Our dataset has more than 200,000 posts. We used an artificial intelligence-based algorithm to scrape the data with business-related search terms, clean it and analyse the discussion topics. Findings: We show the key topics that address the impact of coronavirus on business, combining them into four themes: essential service provision, bricolage service innovation, responsible shopping practices and market shaping amid crisis. We discuss these themes and use them to develop a service research agenda. The results are reported against the backdrop of service research priorities. Originality/value: The study identifies four key themes that have emerged from the impact of coronavirus on business and that require scholarly attention. Our findings can guide service research with unique insights provided immediately after the coronavirus outbreak to conduct research that matters to business and helps people in vulnerable positions in a post-coronavirus world. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved)

Reflection, resilience, rebound: Consumer coping with the pandemic

The article discusses about consumer coping with the pandemic. In the article, authors first offer a comprehensive review of COVID-19 articles published in marketing journals through the resilience lens, using the capital-based approach as a framework. Authors then introduce the nine articles in this special issue to provide a perspective on how consumers accumulate social, human, and economic capital to survive and thrive during the pandemic. Authors conclude by discussing several clusters of topics we hope future research can shed light on. Authors also call for research that documents the differential recovery and resilience paths of the groups of consumers who were particularly hit hard by the COVID-19 pandemic. With the high inflation rate, how will the financially disadvantaged consumers cope? How will they prioritize their lives? What kind of community and government resources and support should be put in place for those in the more marginalized groups of society? Which group of consumers will likely sustain a long-term negative impact of the COVID-19 pandemic? (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved)

The comparative perceived effectiveness of simulation versus case study learning methods in the company training of digital marketers

Marketers must adapt to the challenges created by the COVID-19 pandemic, which accelerated innovation and changes across the world, but specifically in the digital marketing industry.Consumer demand and purchasing behaviors have changed fundamentally, and these current trends are affecting how marketers utilize digital marketing. As a result, firms must rely on innovation in marketing strategies for survival. The new expectations from consumers result in marketers determining what learning method for their staff offers a higher retention and implementation advantage to stay abreast of changes in their industry. This study analyzedemployees' preferred learning methods in the digital marketing sphere. This study adds to the body of knowledge on determining the retention and implementation of two learning methods:simulation training and case study learning. These two learning methods in relation to marketing professionals led to the generation of recommendations for employers to improve learning retention for their employees. To this end, a primary research question was identified: How does the selection of a learning method for marketing professionals improve the employees' retention and implementation of new material taught? Other related research areas were also explored,namely, whether age, experience, or gender impact the preferred learning material and whether different marketing categories resonate with different learning methods, resulting in more productive results. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved)

Consumption, production, and entrepreneurship in the time of coronavirus: A business perspective of the pandemic

This book examines the impact of the continuing COVID-19 crisis on consumers and businesses. With stay-at-home orders and social distancing measures mandated by governments worldwide, businesses have made significant adjustments to adapt to the sudden changes caused by the pandemic. The book aims to understand what settling and thriving in the "new normal" have meant for businesses around the world. This book is divided into sections on production, consumption, and entrepreneurship and explores how consumer psychology has changed while also evaluating new digital business opportunities afforded by the pandemic. By bringing together psychology and marketing scholars, this interdisciplinary book will inform research on how businesses adapt to crises. © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022. All rights reserved.

Participatory technologies: How digital innovation and youth-driven data can revolutionize racial & spatial justice and connections with community

Much of our current knowledge about technology in research and learning settings relates to devices and software programs: What types should be purchased?;How many should we buy?;What training is required?;and What return on investment will they produce? The implicit message communicated by this research is that technology transforms learning by simply being introduced into a setting -- and that any technology tool will produce powerful opportunities for learning. Just give youth iPads and results will follow. Over the past several years, groups of learning scientists, critical scholars, and participatory researchers have pushed back against this perspective, arguing that: (a) most traditional technologies utilized by scholars today reproduce problematic "banking" methods of learning (Freire, 1970);(b) scholars, leaders, and educators who rush to integrate technology in formal and informal learning settings often overlook the ways that race, identity, power and privilege shape the technologies that they give youth;(c) context matters -- unlocking the benefits of these new participatory forms of technologies for learning requires a shift in pedagogical approaches, embracing more critical, de-colonizing, and participatory forms like youth participatory action research (YPAR);and (d) new, mobile, interactive, accessible forms of technology have the potential to transform learning by creating a new participatory culture that fosters collaboration, communication, critical consciousness, and creativity. Throughout this dissertation, I use the term participatory technologies to describe these emerging tools. I define participatory technologies as the broad set of technology tools that can allow youth to engage with, critique, and co-create the systems, structures, and environments that shape their everyday lives. Participatory technology tools allow individuals to be both consumers and producers of information;and as the term "participatory" suggests, I argue that it is important for youth to use technology to "read the world" using their own socio-cultural lenses;critique and dismantle systems of power, privilege and oppression;and become active participants in co-creating a more just and equitable world around them. Using participatory technologies, youth can examine, influence, and alter the way that power is conferred and exercised across many arenas ranging from public health (#StayHome), politics (InstagramLive town halls, Arab Spring), civil rights (#BlackLivesMatter), urban planning (Google's Sidewalk Labs), disaster response (Ushahidi), to social justice (#MeToo). In the era of COVID-19, the case for participatory technologies could not be more urgent. As Alain Labrique, director of the Johns Hopkins University Global -mHealth Initiative shares, "The connectivity and participation through technology we have today gives us ammunition to fight this pandemic in ways we never previously thought possible" (A. Park, 2020, para. 3). In the face of this unprecedented global pandemic, colleges and classrooms have rushed onto online settings, physicians are conducting tele-visits through FaceTime and WhatsApp;"non-essential" workforce members, as well as family and friends, are connecting over Zoom;"social distancing" adherence is being tracked by epidemiologists through geo-location data;and global dance parties are being held on Instagram Live. To date, however, the global technology response to COVID-19 has only scratched the surface of what new participatory tools offer. For example, much needed real-time data on where outbreaks are occurring, how many tests are available, and what resources exist in communities in terms of critical health services, tests, or groceries (Where can I buy eggs? Which places take WIC for baby formula? Where are the lines the shortest? Where/when can elders and vulnerable populations shop safely?) (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved)

Essays in intergenerational mobility and the marriage market

This thesis consists of three chapters. The first one contributes to the literature on intergenerational mobility. The second chapter relates the literature on effects of import competition on labor markets with the literature on who marries whom. Lastly, the third chapter relates to literature on female leadership.In the first chapter, I study the effects of assortative mating on intergenerational mobility. There is an extensive literature on early human capital development that highlights the importance of parents' early investment in their children, both in the form of time and money. If marriages are increasingly among spouses of the same education, the inequality on children's initial conditions worsens, suggesting that assortative mating increases income inequality and reduces intergenerational mobility. I extend the standard heterogeneous-agent life-cycle model with earnings risk and credit constraints to allow different degrees of assortative mating to quantitatively evaluate the importance of this mechanism. The estimated model implies that if sorting were as low as the least sorted marriage market within the US (at a commuting zone level), intergenerational mobility would increase by 11%.In the second chapter, I study how a labor market shock affects who marries whom. I first study how a trade-induced local labor market shock affected workers differently by educational level and gender. I find that high school-educated men and women are disproportionately affected. However, while high school men's unemployment increases, women reallocate to less affected sectors and compensate for the job losses in the manufacturing sector. I then study how the labor market shock affects the marriage market. As the trade shock reduces the economic stature of men relative to women and the men's skill gap, the incentives to marry and to whom to marry are affected. I show that the decrease in marriage prevalence is driven by college-educated women marrying less with high school-educated men, as the increase in men's skill gap increases the costs of marrying down for women. On the other hand, high school women marry more with college-educated men. This can be explained as the result of two forces. First, the cost of marrying down for men remains unchanged. Second, college men become less attractive to college women as the shock reduces their relative economic stature.In the third chapter, we study how employee satisfaction changes at the onset of the COVID pandemic using data from the website Glassdoor. The pandemic has not changed what workers care about the most in their jobs: benefits, their team, the firm's culture, work-life balance, and flexibility. Consistent with working-from-home improving several of those dimensions, we find that employee satisfaction increases within weeks of the pandemic's start. Additionally, we find that with the pandemic, workers start also caring about the firm's leadership and if they feel supported and cared for. As research finds that men and women differ in their leadership styles, we further study how the change in satisfaction varies by the presence of women leaders in their firms. We find that workers from women-led companies fared better than workers from men-led companies. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved)

CONSTRUCTION OF DIGIYAL GROUP IDENTITY DURING THE COVID-19 CRISISON THE TWITTER SOCIAL NETWORK

We present the results of a study thar analizes the collective consciousness generated throught digital conversation on the Twitter network during the COVID-19 pancemic, using opinión mining methodology (Google´s API Natural Language) and text analysys, concluding the value provided by this network as a catalyst for stress and enhancer of antisocial behaviors. © 2022 Departamento de Periodismo I de la Universidad de Sevilla.. All rights reserved.

Consumer coping with Covid-19: an exploratory study of clothing consumption shifts and the effect of consumer resilience

Purpose: This study aims to discover clothing consumption shifts and explore the effect of consumer resilience in changing clothing consumption patterns or establishing new clothing consumption routines after experiencing disruptions caused by the Covid-19 pandemic. Design/methodology/approach: A two-phase multi-method approach was employed. The first phase of qualitative inquiry was conducted to identify clothing consumption shifts using a content mining approach on a text data sample of 17,195 tweets posted from 1 January to 30 September 2020. The second phase of the quantitative study was conducted to explore consumer resilience's effect on clothing consumption shifts based on a collected national sample of 418 respondents through an online survey. Findings: This study identified clothing consumption changes including value shifts, style shifts and spending shifts. It was also found that resilient consumers care about a company's ethical practices and value the quality instead of the number of items in their wardrobe. Consumers spend more time wearing comfortable clothing and are used to the working-from-home lifestyle. Originality/value: This study explored approaches to making use of social media data for a better understanding of consumers' clothing behaviour. Also, this study attempted to explore and understand clothing consumption practices during and post the Covid-19 global pandemic, focusing on identifying shifts that might last longer for fashion businesses to explore growth opportunities. © 2022, Emerald Publishing Limited.

Evolution and trends in consumer behaviour: Insights from journal of consumer behaviour

The way consumers behave is fundamental to marketing. Journal of Consumer Behaviour (JCB) is an international journal dedicated to publishing the latest developments of consumer behaviour. To gain an understanding of the evolution and trends in consumer behaviour, this study presents a retrospective review of JCB using bibliometric analysis. Using bibliographic records of JCB from Scopus, this study finds that consumer behaviour research in JCB has grown substantially in terms of collaboration (co-authorships), global reach (countries), productivity (publications), and impact (citations). The major themes explored by consumer behaviour research in JCB include consumer information processing, consumption communities, consumption value, sustainable consumption, intergenerational consumer behaviour, consumer-brand relationship, consumer ethics, and conditional relationships in consumer behaviour. The most recent consumer behaviour research in JCB has considered externalities such as the COVID-19 pandemic and focused on themes such as consumer ethics and sustainable consumption in line with the global movement toward environmental social governance (ESG) and sustainable development goals (SDGs). (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved)

Digital future beyond pandemic outbreak: systematic review of the impact of COVID-19 outbreak on digital psychology

Purpose: The globe has experienced a devastating COVID-19 pandemic, putting the planet under lockdown and causing social alienation. The near collapse of social and economic activities is disrupting the supply chain. Customer-required products were in low supply across the world. A slew of new digital firms springs up to fill the need during this time. This study aims to reach a holistic goal by better understanding customers' digitalisation behaviour. The first step is to review existing consumer digital psychology research to map this study's current knowledge of the pandemic's early and late phases and the impact of digital businesses on consumer behaviour. Finally, it provides lawmakers with a future agenda for limiting the digital psychology of consumers and enterprises. Design/methodology/approach: This study used the Scopus and Web of Science databases to extract records to follow the preferred reporting items for systematic reviews and meta-analyses statement. The final 57 papers were applied after the screening process. The digital environment, psychological digitalisation and behavioural changes were recognised as three primary classes based on a comprehensive examination of the previous literature. This study identified possible difficulties in earlier literature: the scarcity of collaborative and transdisciplinary research on digital psychology, which various academics have emphasised in the past. On the other hand, these investigations were primarily conducted in the psychological surroundings of technology users. Findings: According to this study, digital psychology has improved significantly during the pandemic and many new digital start-ups have arisen. This study also used digital research to create a framework for a pandemic strategic response plan to help minimise the current COVID-19 pandemic and prepare for future outbreaks. Originality/value: The study mapped existing literature on digital psychology alterations because of the novel COVID-19 outbreak. © 2023, Emerald Publishing Limited.

On the benefits of consumer IT in the workplace-An IT empowerment perspective

Technology driven organizational transformation-heightened during the COVID-19 pandemic-is gaining momentum, as employees increasingly invest in technology for work. Referred to as IT consumerization, employees use their smartphones, notebooks and tablets in the workplace, accompanied by a growing toolbox of applications. Google Apps and Dropbox are just a few consumer tools that employees use to get their work done, and in doing so, often bypass the authority of the IT department and the organization. While some organizations discourage, or even prohibit, employees from using their personal IT, others embrace the phenomenon. Employees' investment in consumer IT and its accompanying applications has been suggested as related to innovation and productivity gains, but there has been no empirical validation of such a beneficial relationship. With this paper we propose a theoretical root cause for the perceived positive outcomes of employees using their personal technologies in the workplace. Specifically, we explore the role of IT empowerment-a concept that captures the level of authority an employee assumes in utilizing IT in order to control or improve aspects of their job. Surveying 147 employees, we find support for increased levels of IT empowerment and higher levels of perceived performance among those that actively use consumer IT versus those that do not;we also find a close relationship between IT empowerment and perceived innovative work behaviors. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved)

Consumer practices: Recovering and repairing daily community life

Consumers engage in a multitude of daily practices which contribute to their individual and community wellbeing. I take a multi-method approach to investigating three consequential and interrelated consumer practices with important implications for wellbeing at an individual and community level. In the second chapter, I uncover a new multi-stage theoretical process, practice recovery, in my investigation of how consumers recover or return to practices they have previously abandoned. I examine this process and the potential difficulties inherent in it, in the context of young adults recovering the practice of bicycling for transportation on a college campus, a practice which promotes individual, community, and environmental wellbeing. In the third chapter, I examine and test the model I uncovered in Chapter II in the context of an individually held consumer practice which was interrupted at a community level, namely consumers' gym exercise practices during the COVID-19 pandemic. Working with community stakeholders, I problematize the model of practice recovery and examine this consumers' actual and anticipated recovery of these consequential health practices. In the fourth chapter, I examine how individual consumer practices contribute to community wellbeing through examination of user-maintainer repair practices of a bicycle sharing platform. I uncover emergent commons-based peer production at a community level, carried out through individual practices of stewardship which contribute to the repair of the bicycle sharing platform, which is perceived as an inalienable community wealth, despite its underlying market motivations. In closing, I reflect and provide recommendations on the challenges and opportunities of conducting community-focused research. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved)

Spontaneous charitable donations in sweden before and after covid: A natural experiment

Did the outbreak of COVID-19 influence spontaneous donation behavior? To investigate this, we conducted a natural experiment on real donation data. We analyzed the absolute amount, and the proportion of total payments, donated by individuals to charitable organizations via Swish-a widely used mobile online payment application through which most Swedes prefer to make their donations to charity-each day of 2019 and 2020. Spontaneous charitable donations were operationalized as Swish-payments to numbers starting with 90, as this number is a nationally acknowledged quality control label that is provided to all fundraising operations that are monitored by the Swedish Fundraising Control. The results show that the Swish-donations fluctuated substantially depending on season (less donations in January-February and during the summer months, and more donations in April-May and during the last months of the year) and specific events (peaks in Swish-donations often coincided with televised charity fundraising galas). Interrupted time-series analyses revealed that spontaneous donations were overall unaffected by the pandemic outbreak. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved)

Resource-based view and sustainable advantage: A framework for smes

As firms struggle to regroup their business efforts after Covid-19, significant focus turns to strategically using their resources to competitively outmanoeuvre their rivals through utilizing their human capital, social capital, and brand reputations in their performance. This research scrutinizes the relationship between the intangible resources of human resources practices, brand reputation and sustainable competitive advantage of SMEs through the lens of the RBV as a tool for strategic marketing management - an underexplored area in marketing research - using SEM model. The analysis of primary data collected from 128 SMEs operating in Lebanon reveals the existence of a positive impact of social capital on competitive advantage and shows that competent human capital has a positive impact on both competitive advantage and reputation of Lebanese SMEs. In addition, findings indicate that reputation leads to enhancing both competitive advantage and performance. Finally, the results show that the competitive advantage has a positive impact on SMEs performance during uncertain periods. These findings provide valuable insights into RBV, supporting the belief that human and social capital resources are key success factors for SMEs during uncertain periods, which can be of great significance for strategic marketing managers to help them strengthen the position of their SMEs in emerging markets during difficult times. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved)

Stakeholder implications of corporate sociopolitical activism

Today's dynamic market landscape affects and is affected by a variety of significant cultural shifts and touchstones, from global warming and racial injustice, to voter disenfranchisement and the Covid-19 pandemic. In the current dissertation, I examine how firms have expanded their institutional role to address these issues and communicate a sense of moral engagement linked to their brands. I associate these behaviors with a centralized phenomenon-corporate sociopolitical activism (CSA)-which reflects firms' public speech or actions focused on polarizing issues of societal concern. Such shifts in business behavior coincide with fieldwide conversations among practitioners and scholars about the implied responsibility for broadened social engagement. However, despite the increasing prominence of CSA in the marketplace, the practice has only recently received scholarly attention.In turn, the current dissertation seeks to examine and conceptualize the theoretical, practical, and strategic implications of firms' activist efforts using a multi-methodological approach. First, Essay I ("'Focus on Our Cause: How Brand Activism Helps and Hurts Activist Organizations";under third-round review at the Journal of Consumer Research) utilizes randomized controlled experiments with consequential outcomes to chart the impact of brand activism on consumers' charitable giving to activist organizations. Next, Essay II ("An Institutional View of Investor Response to Corporate Sociopolitical Activism";manuscript in progress;targeting the Journal of Marketing) is an event study that examines the moderating effects of issue legitimacy on stock market response to market leaders' activist efforts. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved)

Partitioning online experiential consumption increases subjective well-being during the times of uncertainty

The current study suggests an effective compensatory control strategy using partitioning experiential consumption that can be implemented into consumers' daily activities. Across four experiments, we examined the effects of partitioned (vs. aggregated) message formats and financial anxiety on sense of control, subjective well-being, and ad attitudes. Specifically, our findings indicated that consumers with higher (vs. lower) levels of financial anxiety respond more favorably toward partitioned (vs. aggregated) experiential messages. Our results provide timely contributions for researchers and practitioners who are interested in understanding and implementing advertising and marketing strategies in the digital landscape with improving consumers' well-being in mind. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved)

Robots or humans for disaster response? Impact on consumer prosociality and possible explanations

Hurricanes, wildfires, pandemics, and other disasters have taken millions of lives in the past few years and caused substantial economic losses. To tackle these extraordinary circumstances, governments, organizations, and companies seek assistance from both humans and high-technology machines such as robots. This research report documents how highlighting robots' (vs. humans') helping behaviors in disaster response can affect consumers' prosociality, explores driving mechanisms, and tests solutions. Study 1 found that consumers donated fewer items of clothing after watching news highlighting robots' (vs. humans') assistance in a mudslide disaster. Featuring the COVID-19 pandemic, Study 2 further showed that this decrease in prosociality occurred because reading about robots' assistance felt less encouraging/inspiring to consumers. Studies 3A-3C (and a supplemental study) explored multiple mechanisms and identified a key driver for the backfire effect-a lower perception of courage in disaster response robots. Accordingly, Study 4 tested three theory-driven solutions to raise the perceived courage in robots to increase consumer prosociality. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved)

Selfishness and consumer ethics: Does (non)religiosity matter?

During the COVID-19 pandemic, frenzied selfishness and panic buying have dominated headlines around the globe. When people hoard supplies, others (including the needy and vulnerable people) cannot find necessities. Despite repeated calls from leaders, people worldwide continue to hoard supplies, and millions of people ignore coronavirus concerns, including churches. Hence, the purpose of this study is first to investigate the impact of consumers' (non) religiosity on selfishness and, subsequently, the impact of selfishness on consumers' ethical beliefs. Secondly, we explore do people's religiosity matters? Are religious people more ethical and less selfish than atheists or vice versa? This study uses the convenience sampling approach to investigate consumers' ethical beliefs. The sample was collected through Amazon M-Turk and totaled 235 responses. The results show that consumers' intrinsic religiosity did not significantly influence consumers' selfishness. Furthermore, extrinsic religiosity and atheism positively influence consumers' selfishness. Finally, the results show that selfishness is prevalent in every group irrespective of the group's belief or nonbelief status. The results indicate that when exploring consumer ethics, the key measure should not only focus on consumers' religiousness or lack of religiousness but, instead, it should also include consumers' selfishness. This study offers several implications for non-profit organizations dealing with ethical issues, and secondly, the study will have implications for ethical education among religious or non-religious consumers. Originality/value-This is one of the first few studies investigating the impact of consumers' religiosity on selfishness. In addition, this study investigates differences between religious and non-religious consumers on consumer ethics. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved)

COVID-19 and hospitality and tourism research: An integrative review

COVID-19 caused a shockwave in all facets of the contemporary tourism industry, triggering a surge in relevant research. Responding to the sheer magnitude of the event, and the plethora of research opportunities, scholars have been investigating the pandemic from an array of perspectives, at both a micro and macro level. With the aim of advancing the existing conceptual capital, this study uses a systematic integrative review to summarize, critique and synthesize the COVID-19-related studies published in hospitality and tourism journals;it identifies important gaps and highlights a future research agenda. We select 362 articles relevant to our analysis and conduct our research using VOSviewer visualization software. Findings, of particular interest and importance to scholars, illuminate thematic areas that may stimulate further research endeavors. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved)