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The purpose of this paper is to investigate how the public views two corporate social responsibility (CSR) initiatives practiced by a Major League Baseball (MLB) team. This study examined the role of perceived fit between an MLB team and its two CSR initiatives in shaping consumers’ intentions to support the team’s CSR efforts.

A between-subjects experiment (n=207) was conducted using Amazon’s Mechanical Turk to examine the impact of CSR fit on consumers’ patronage intentions.

The results of this study showed that consumers’ perceived fit between sports teams and their CSR has a positive impact on consumers’ patronage intentions. The values-driven and strategic-driven attributions of the team’s CSR initiatives were positively associated with their patronage intentions.

Both the values-driven and strategic-driven attributions were positively associated with consumers’ patronage intentions, while previous studies suggested negative association between strategic-driven attributions and consumer behaviors. The findings indicate that consumers do not view professional sports teams’ strategic-driven CSR initiatives to be negative business practices. This could result from the fact that CSR initiatives have become a prevalent and expected organizational practice.

This study contributes to the literature of CSR within the context of professional sports teams as corporations. The findings of this study suggest that professional sports teams could benefit from CSR initiatives when the teams select social causes with which consumers could infer values-driven and strategic-driven attributions.

Using the theory of planned behavior (TPB) as a theoretical framework, this study investigates individual level psychological determinants of individuals word-of-mouth (WOM) intentions as a way to support corporate social advocacy (CSA).

An online survey (N = 505) using a Qualtrics panel was conducted.

Individuals' attitudes towards WOM, subjective norms, and self-efficacy was positively associated with their positive WOM intention, whereas perceived controllability over WOM behaviors was not associated with WOM intention. Age was negatively associated with WOM intention.

This study is one of the early attempts to test individual level factors in shaping individuals' WOM intention in response to CSA. This study also employed recent TPB argument and tested the role of self-efficacy and perceived controllability on behavioral intentions in the context of corporate communication. The findings of this study offer theoretical and practical insights to corporations when developing CSA campaigns and designing CSA messages.

This study aims to examine the role of different forms of corporate social advocacy (CSA) in shaping individuals’ attitudinal and behavioral intentions towards companies taking their public stand on controversial socio-political issues. With an online experiment as the research method, this study tests whether depicting nonpolitical or political behaviors in CSA messages increases individuals’ positive behavioral intentions.

This study uses a single factor between subject online experiment. A total of 135 US young adults were recruited through a Qualtrics online panel. Three social media mockups were created to manipulate three levels of actions in CSA messages (no action, nonpolitical action and political action). Participants viewed one of those social media posts depicting presented actions to counter anti-LGBTQ + legislation in the USA and answered questions about values-driven motives behind CSA, brand preference and positive word-of-mouth (WOM) intention.

Participants displayed higher levels of brand preference when they viewed CSA messages depicting the company’s political action intended to repel anti-LGBTQ + legislation. Participants showed more positive WOM intentions towards the company when they perceived its political actions as more values-driven.

The findings of this study offer practical insights to companies when designing CSA messages and strategies. The results of this study indicate that the presence of political actions in CSA communication increases individuals’ positive behaviors towards companies. The results also suggest that depicting altruistic motives behind CSA leads individuals to talk about companies more in positive ways.

This study is one of the early studies investigating the impact of various forms of CSA on individuals’ attitudinal and behavioral intentions to companies practicing CSA. This study provides practical implications on how to effectively appeal individuals’ favorable attitudes and behaviors towards CSA. In particular, this research presents the importance of action aspects in individuals’ attitudes toward corporations’ CSA messages.

This paper aims to deepen understanding of the interrelated questions: how Japanese antidumping policies have been formulated and transformed; what the reasons are for such caution in adopting antidumping measures; and what patterns can be observed of recent changes in antidumping policy and legal systems.

To explain the changes in antidumping policy and rules in Japan, this paper examines not only political competition among bureaucratic organizations but also policy learning by bureaucratic organizations and their effects on change in policy preferences and advancements in the legal system.

The effects of bureaucratic politics and policy learning not only complexly interact but also are highly complicated to initiate policy changes in accordance with the maturity of antidumping legal system. In this case study, the policy learning has led the rival bureaucrats to a consensus to change antidumping policy and legal system, but the agreement could be a temporal truce that may easily collapse by political contingencies.

Along with the influences of large‐scale economic and political dynamisms, this paper focuses on two aspects of the policy subsystem to explain those changes: one is political competition among bureaucratic organizations claiming jurisdiction of antidumping policy; the other is the effect of policy learning among bureaucratic organizations on changes in policy preferences and on advancements in antidumping rules.

The purpose of this paper is to propose a generic platform for a robotic mobile system, seeking to obtain a support tool for under-graduation and graduation activities. Another objective was to gather knowledge in the mobile robotic area in order to provide practical solutions for industrial problems.

The proposed new integrated platform would serve as didactic material for many disciplines, shown to be an ideal platform to teach DC motor drives, stepper motor and motion-control systems. To reach this objective, the ability of the robot to plan its motion autonomously is of vital importance. The control of a mobile robot in dynamic and unstructured environments typically requires efficient processing of data/information to ensure precise navigation and many other applications. Path planning is also one common method of auto-navigation. After the computation of the shortest path, mobile robot can navigate safely and without occlusion.

The developed platform is an integrated system for intelligent software middleware to coordinate many activities in the field of electric drives, robotics, autonomous systems and artificial intelligence.

As a result of the study, this paper contributed to research in the industrial development, principally in the fields of industrial robotics and also in different application purposes such as entertainment, personal use, welfare, education, rehabilitation, etc.