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The purpose of this study is to draw on terror management theory (TMT) to explore the impact of pervasive mortality cues on consumer behaviour as a result of residing in a community ravaged by escalating violence.

A qualitative analysis of 27 in-depth interviews of consumers living in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico during the height of the Mexican drug war provides insight into their coping strategies and consumption.

Living under such conditions results in unrelenting mortality salience (MS), as well as the adoption of consumption-related coping strategies that can conflict with cultural worldviews and threaten self-esteem. The normalization of coping strategies severely strains worldviews. Consumers manage their ensuing intrapersonal evaluative tension by developing consumption safe havens and through identity fragmentation. Moreover, permanent proximal defences result from persistent MS.

Although cross-sectional and idiosyncratic to the Mexican culture, the findings broaden TMT by suggesting that consumers facing relentless MS experience altered brand meanings and social interactions, as they were reluctant to acquire prestige brands, while indicating an increase in the value placed on relationships over possessions.

Marketers can help consumers alleviate their death-related anxiety by eliminating telemarketing campaigns, promoting online shopping, using unique customer identification numbers and investing in visible security measures such as gates, security cameras, and guards.

This exploratory study provides a preliminary theoretical framework for consumers’ reactions to persistent MS.

The purpose of this paper is to introduce a new scale designed to assess a firm's green orientation from the consumer's perspective. Its effects are tested on a managerially relevant outcome variable and an objectively measured product-performance indicator.

Four studies based on various data sources identify and operationalize a green-oriented firm. Leveraging signaling theory, a model tests the orientation’s impact on two outcome variables, behavioral intentions and revenue, demonstrating its relevance to both scholars and practitioners.

Previous research has explored consumers’ reactions to green products, announcements and initiatives in a piecemeal fashion. This study suggests that firms are perceived as green-oriented when they operate in an environmentally friendly manner, develop green products and publicize these accomplishments. Consequently, consumers’ identification of a firm as green-oriented affected their behavioral intentions, which positively influenced firms’ revenues.

Green-oriented firms must incorporate environmental standards into production efforts and confidently trumpet such behaviors if they wish to profit from consumer perceptions.

To accrue positive behavioral intentions from consumers and to increase the firm’s revenues, marketers should invest in developing green-oriented products, operating in an environmentally friendly manner and publicizing these efforts. Understanding consumer perceptions is critical, as they are a leading indicator of firm performance.

This novel operationalization of a green orientation captures consumers’ perceptions, demonstrating that firms can significantly benefit from this consumer-aligned strategy.

Consumers are assumed to engage in external information search only after exhausting their internal information sources. Guided by the accessibility/diagnosticity and ease-of-retrieval frameworks, and the elaboration likelihood model, the current study investigates this phenomenon.

To test the relationships between internal information accessibility/diagnosticity and the importance of external search, and the moderating role of involvement in these relationships, 308 responses were collected on Amazon MTurk. Then, structural equation modeling was employed to analyze the data.

The analyses showed that while accessibility and diagnosticity of internal information have an impact on external information search, involvement with the product class has a consequential moderating effect on these relationships. In particular, in the low-involvement group, only the diagnosticity of internal information had a negative effect on external information search. On the contrary, in the high-involvement group, only accessibility of internal information had a negative effect.

These findings highlight the possibility of drawing erroneous conclusions resulting from not incorporating involvement, in conjunction with information accessibility and diagnosticity, in the study of the consumer external information search behavior.

The findings also imply that if practitioners aim to prime consumers to engage in external information search, they need to take into account that the effects of internal information's accessibility and diagnosticity on consumers' external search behavior may be different depending on their levels of involvement.

This study's results showed that without considering the moderating effect of involvement, spurious conclusions may be made about the relationships between accessibility and diagnosticity of internal and external information importance. This finding may explain the discrepancy between the accessibility/diagnosticity and ease-of-retrieval frameworks, thus enriching the literature.

Collegiality is often discussed and analyzed as a challenged form of governance, a form of working that used to function well in universities prior to the emergence of contemporary and modern forms of governance. This seems to suggest that collegiality used to dominate, while other forms of governance are now taking over. The papers in volume 86 of this special issue support the notion of challenged collegiality, but also show that for the most part, nostalgic notions of “the good old days” are neither true nor helpful if we are to revitalize academic collegiality. After examining whether a golden age of collegiality ever existed, we discuss why collegiality matters. Exploring what are often described as limitations or “dark sides” of collegiality, we address four such “dark sides” related to slow decision-making, conflicts, parochialism, and diversity. This is followed by a discussion of how these limitations may be handled and what measures must be taken to maintain and develop collegiality. With a brief summary of the remaining papers under two headings, “Maintaining collegiality” and “Revitalizing collegiality,” we preview the rest of this volume.

This paper aims to identify and classify consumers’ goals associated with the consumption of environmentally sustainable products. The applicability of such goals to the positioning of environmental products is also tested.

Study 1 used 62 laddering interviews to identify a hierarchical map of adoption related goals. Study 2 used a survey design (N = 152 students) to test the effects of construal-goal fit on evaluations of environmental product attributes of a hybrid car. Study 3 involved an online experiment (N = 125 consumer panellists) to test the effects of construal-goal fit on consumers’ willingness to pay a price premium (WTPP) for energy-efficient light bulbs.

A hierarchical goal map displays consumption goals attainable through environmentally sustainable products. Consumers with a chronic, high-level construal placed more importance on product attributes associated with abstract goals than those with chronic, low-level construal. This effect was stronger for males than for females. Additionally, construal-goal fit increased WTPP.

The results suggest that marketers consider construal-goal fit to communicate the value of environmentally sustainable products. The results, however, should be replicated in other product categories and across diverse cultural settings.

This paper identifies and classifies the goals related to consumption of environmentally sustainable products. Additionally, it tests the effects of construal-goal fit on evaluations of environmental products, providing insights for marketers seeking to improve their promotional efforts and for public policymakers as they institute demarketing campaigns.

This research aims to examine the buffering effect of a firm's religious association on customer reactions to a service failure.

Two scenario-driven studies containing religious and non-religious reasons for a store closing were conducted.

The results from Study 1 suggest that a religious affiliation safeguards against negative reactions to failures related to store policies (see Hoffman et al., 2003). Customers are more likely to forgive transgressing firms when service failures are associated with religion, regardless of attitudes toward the religious group. A follow up study supports the first, even when no specific religion was identified in the scenario, the service failure involved a firm that closed weekly, and a non-student sample was used.

While the results provide support for the buffering effects of a religious affiliation against a particular type of service failure – temporary service interruptions due to the observance of religious holidays and celebrations, future research should test the robustness of this effect on technology failures and rude treatment by employees.

This paper is the first, to the authors' knowledge, to test the effect of a firm's religious affiliation on customer perceptions of frontline service encounters in general and service failures in particular.

The purpose of this paper is to examine to what extent the factors of the operating environment influence the structural dimensions and subsequent performance of a firm's recovery system.

Using contingency theory and a sample of 158 service firms, this research tests for structural differences in service recovery systems based on Schmenner's widely‐cited taxonomy, the service process matrix. To conduct the analysis, both multiple analysis of variance (MANOVA) and analysis of variance (ANOVA) models were tested to assess overall system differences and to detect individual dimensional differences.

The results indicate that differences in the structure of service recovery systems do exist across divergent operating environments. Additionally, differences in performance measures were found only in capability improvements, while customer‐oriented performance did not vary across operating environments.

The paper is believed to be the first to empirically investigate how differences in operating environments increase the likelihood that firms will employ divergent recovery system configurations. This work yields valuable insights into how organizations can design their systems to more appropriately respond to the demands of the environments in which they operate. The results also lend credence to the concept of equifinality, which suggests similar ends are attainable through multiple means.

This chapter offers a contemporary overview of philanthropy in education as an emerging research field. Although the education sector has traditionally been a popular recipient of philanthropic investment, the scale and scope of funding and policy involvement on the part of philanthropy are growing. In addition, and potentially amplified by COVID-19, big- and in particular tech-philanthropies are emerging as increasingly influential players in national, regional, and global educational contexts. This chapter describes how most existing education research on philanthropy is mainly US- and higher education-focused which has resulted in a narrow geographic and thematic scope whereby contemporary developments remain either overlooked or under-researched. It discusses venture philanthropy inside and outside of the United States, a greater diversity of geographic perspectives, and an increasing dependence of academia on philanthropic funding as emerging research areas that bear great potential to being explored further.

This paper attempts to investigate the potential effect of mobile banking (m-banking) service quality dimensions (ease of use, usefulness, security/privacy and enjoyment) on customers’ value co-creation intention (CVCCI) in the banking sector.

A questionnaire was administered with a sample of 301 respondents from Egypt. Mediation and moderation analyses were performed to explore the role of m-banking service quality, attitude toward using m-banking (ATT-m-banking) and bank trust in shaping CVCCI.

The empirical evidence confirms the potential role of m-banking service quality dimensions, the ATT-m-banking, and customer trust in developing CVCCI. In addition, the mediation effect of ATT-m-banking in the m-banking service quality dimensions and CVCCI link was demonstrated. Interestingly, trust was not found to have a moderating effect between the ATT-m-banking and CVCCI.

Outcomes of the study will benefit bank managers to allocate resources when developing an m-banking platform, which helps in effectively promoting value co-creation in the banking sector.

This paper is a pioneering study to move the m-banking literature forward beyond the extensively studied m-banking adoption by exploring a longer-term outcome of customer engagement with m-banking, which is CVCCI.