Business: Conference Contributions

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  • ItemOpen Access
    Loneliness in young adult workers
    (MDPI AG, 2022) Wright S; Silard A
    Loneliness is commonly associated with older people with the majority of research and interventions focusing on loneliness in aged and aging populations. However, loneliness seems to be on the rise for young adults more so than the elderly. Our research focusses on the experiences of young workers who report feeling lonely at work. We explore individual and organisational factors that may be contributing to loneliness, and comment on the consequences of feeling lonely at work. Qualitative data from 37 young adults from Western Europe suggest that these workers feel invisible at work, have a thwarted sense of belonging to their employing organisation, and often experience relational deficiencies due to automation and individualisation of work practices.
  • ItemOpen Access
    Sustainable transformation mini-track
    (Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, 2020) Peko G; Sundaram D; Sadovykh V; Chung C
  • ItemOpen Access
    Influences of e-retailer sponsored virtual community on consumer loyalty: an exploration of underlying mechanisms
    (2013) Bi Q; Vogel D
    An e-retailer sponsored virtual community (ESVC), as the backyard of an e-commerce website, provides consumers with an online platform to play with each other. Different from transactional e-commerce platform, ESVC assembles consumers together to fulfil their social needs. In recent years, with the popular of Web 2.0 information and communication technologies (ICTs), e-retailers also start to integrate social media within ESVC. This greatly increases consumers' online community participation, as social media facilitate information sharing and interactions among community members with a social flavour. Moreover, social media provide a variety of IT artefacts to visualize the interactions between consumers and e-retailer, which reshapes the relationship between e-retailer and customer as a triad model. However, in this new context, the influences of ESVC characteristics and IT artefacts on e-retailer- customer relationship were not well investigated. Some researchers have made effort to open the "black box" between ESVC with social media investment and customer loyalty, but still lack theoretical foundations. This research explores the underlying mechanisms from a new perspective, and proposes a theoretical framework based on reciprocal theory.
  • ItemOpen Access
    Facilitating learning of public governance, management, administration, accounting and finance among undergraduates majoring in accounting and other commerce disciplines
    (2021) Dixon, Keith
    Purpose – This article is descriptive and reflective. It contributes to knowledge about designing and staging undergraduate study programmes in the interrelated areas of accounting, finance, management and governance for, of and about governments, public sector organisations and public services. The focus is at the level of a course, otherwise known as a paper, module or unit, rather than either the level of a study programme (or similar) or of teaching techniques (or similar). Method –. The empirical materials are drawn from the experiences of the author relating to two final-year courses for undergraduates majoring in accounting and other commerce disciplines at an Aotearoa New Zealand university, and include the voices of students participating in them, as provided from a learning reflection assessment at the end of the series of classes. The courses cover Public Management and Governance and Public Accounting and Finance, and are in successive semesters. Both comprise learning within the smallest unit for which participants are awarded credit towards a qualification, each counting as 15 points, or credits, on the scale used in the university and across New Zealand, being the equivalent of 15 CATS or 7.5 ECTS in equivalent scales in Europe and 3.75 Credit Hours in equivalent scales in North America. Findings – The descriptive analysis relates several matters. With the courses being advertised as “student-centred”, it starts with the participants, the majority and the vast majority being accounting majors aspiring to enter the accounting profession. Related after that are matters about the other participant in both courses, that is the lecturer responsible for designing and staging them, and the author of this article. The rest of the descriptive findings cover matters of context, subject matter, learning and assessment. Notable are the use of learning materials comprising case studies, and videos, podcasts, official and other documents, etc. on local regional and international current affairs and events (e.g., Budget Day in the Parliament in Wellington). The assessments comprise blogs about, for example, the broad responsibilities of officials to society, financial statement items, service reporting, capitals and accountabilities; team assessments and presentations to the student audience; the aforementioned learning reflections; and final examinations. These descriptive findings are enriched with student data to give a sense of student opinions, emotions, etc. These indicate students realising that the business world, on which most of the other courses in their degrees are based, is much more partial than they had thought before studying either of the courses featured in the article. Besides, they realise the availability of the many opportunities there are in public services and public bodies to develop a career. And they extend their appreciation of business operations having broader characteristics, including their consequences for human societies, economies and natural environments. Originality value –This article is unusual for analysing an entire course, rather than some particular feature, or teaching technique, or some aspect of students. It is unique in covering a public sector accounting course (or public sector management course) in this way.
  • ItemOpen Access
    The financing of uncertain future investments
    (Emerald, 2018) Keefe M; Yaghoubi, Mona
    Purpose - This study investigates the effects of two important financing sources, debt and cash, on a firm’s investment decisions and explores the intertemporal impact of this financing on future investment volatility. Design/methodology/approach - We first report our results using ordinary least squares (OLS) estimation and then employ an instrumental variable (IV) strategy which addresses potential endogeneity that arises from future investment volatility on current capital structure and cash levels. Findings - We find i) firms with low levels of debt or high levels of cash experience higher future investment volatility, and ii) the probability of large future investment increases with high cash levels. Our findings are economically important; for example, a one-standard-deviation increase from the mean of debt ratio implies an approximate 7.8% decrease in future investment volatility; and a one-standard-deviation increase from the mean of a firm’s cash level leads to a 47% increase in the probability of a large investment in the next year. Originality/value - The findings of this study help firms understand the impact of their present financing decisions on the plausibility of their future investments. This paper contributes to the literature by making both novel and confirmatory findings. We structure our paper to include confirmatory findings for two reasons. First, we use different methods to construct investment volatility and the related investment spike. Second, and more importantly, the hypotheses are interrelated and communicate how firms plan for and execute against uncertain future investments. Growth options are ephemeral, and the hypotheses structure provides a guideline for how a firm finances future growth options.
  • ItemOpen Access
    Executing management control through decision technology
    (2010) Liew A; Akroyd, Chris
    When competition is tough and resources are scarce, management may seek ways to systematise their decision-making process so as to control their operations and resource allocations. Yet little is known about how decision technology is used as a means to administer managerial control. This research investigates how an organisation used decision technology to execute management control to manage the work activities of their employees in a group decision-making setting. It assesses the impact decision technology has had at the firm level focusing on the transformation of the formalised decision process and the individuals involved. The research is carried out using case study, where the data is collected from multiple sources including passive observations in board meetings and functional team meetings, and interviews with decision makers of different hierarchal levels. We found that the decision technology not only enabled management to execute management control vertically across different hierarchal levels but also horizontally over their fellow peers. We also learned that product development decisions that were previously avoided (due to fear of project failure) are now made. This is noted from the increased number of radical (for the firm) new products commercially launched.
  • ItemOpen Access
    Predicting workplace loneliness from personality and person-environment fit
    (2019) Veit K; Wright S; Decker E; Klavohn K
  • ItemOpen Access
    Shared Development: Greater than the Sum of its Parts?
    (2021) Sawyer A; de Clercq B
  • ItemOpen Access
    The Future of Identity Management: Understanding Consumer Attitudes towards Biometric Identification
    (2019) Zheng Z; Mills, Annette
    The explosive growth of consumer-facing biometric technology is providing opportunities for organizations to change the way in which they identify and authenticate consumers, and replace traditional forms of identification such as usernames and passwords. For consumers, the benefits include increased account security and convenient access to services. However, these positives can be countered by issues such as concerns about privacy and security. Drawing on Protection Motivation Theory (PMT) and prior research, this study uses data collected from 132 online banking consumers to assess the relative impacts of benefits and concerns on their attitude towards using biometric identification for their banking. Implications for practice and future research are discussed.
  • ItemOpen Access
    Digital Identities – Impact of Information Privacy Awareness on Identity Threats
    (2021) Tewari N; Mills, Annette
    Identities help individuals understand who they are and are a tool to project themselves before others in ways they desire. This is achieved through privacy, which provides control over information sharing. However, complexities arise with digitalization of information and creation of digital identities. Digital identities are highly malleable and entities (whether human/non-human) other than the data subject themselves can add, delete, and modify information about others leading to loss of privacy and increasing privacy concerns and identity threats. Identity threats are met with responses from individuals and can potentially impact society negatively. At the same time, there are legislative frameworks that aim to protect individuals’ privacy rights. While there is research linking identity and privacy, the role of privacy concerns in the formation of identity threats and impact of awareness of protective mechanisms has had little attention. This study addresses his gap by exploring the relationship between privacy concerns, information privacy awareness (of legislative frameworks) and identity threats in the context of digital identities.
  • ItemOpen Access
    Trust in Digital Humans
    (2020) Liu L; Mills, Annette
    With technology advances, the interaction between organisations and consumers is evolving gradually from ‘human-to-human’ to ‘human-to-machine’, due, in part, to improvements in Artificial Intelligence (AI). One such technology, the AI-enabled digital human is unique in its combining of technology and humanness and is being adopted by firms to support customer services and other business processes. However, a number of questions arise with this new way of interacting, among which is whether people will trust a digital human in the same way that they trust people. To address this question, this study draws on technology trust theory, and examines the roles of social presence, anthropomorphism, and privacy to understand trust and people’s readiness to engage with digital humans. The results aim to benefit organisations wanting to implement AI-enabled digital-humans in the workplace.