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Prior research has examined value antecedents to sustainable consumption, including religious or cultural values. We bridge together these usually separated bodies of literature to provide an ethically-based examination of both religious and cultural values in one model to understand what drives sustainable consumption as well as outcomes on consumer well-being. In doing so, we also fulfill calls for more research on socio-demographic antecedents to ethical consumption, particularly in the domain of sustainable consumption. We examine this relationship using data from the religiously and culturally diverse country of Singapore (n = 1503), collected from a door-to-door, representative sample utilizing numerous quality control techniques. Our path analysis and logical follow-up tests reveal that both religious and cultural values influence sustainable consumption, and then sustainable consumption positively influences consumer well-being. Implications are provided for consumer ethics, business’ ethical practices, and belief congruence theory.

Purpose – The objectives of this study are two-fold. The first is to examine the peculiarities of KM processes that are unique in SMEs from three perspectives, namely knowledge creation, knowledge sharing and knowledge reuse. Secondly, to identify enablers and impediments of these KM processes that influence the competitiveness of SMEs. Design/methodology/approach – The study adopted a case study approach involving 21 participants comprising management staff and front-line employees from four Singaporean SMEs. Findings – The SME owner, rather than the employees, was found to be the key source and creator of knowledge and the sole driver of the KM processes. In SMEs, knowledge creation takes the form of innovative customized solutions to meet customers' needs; knowledge sharing occurs through cross functionality, overlapping roles, and facilitated by close physical proximity in open workspaces; and knowledge reuse is often made tacitly, where common knowledge is prevalently embedded within the KM processes of SMEs. The enablers of knowledge creation process rested largely on the owner's innovativeness, creativity and ability to acquire knowledge of the industry. Knowledge sharing processes are enabled by the awareness of roles, mutual respect and the level of trust among employees within the SME while knowledge reuse is fostered by close proximity of employees and the willingness and openness of the owner to impart his knowledge. The lack of the above enablement factors mentioned will hinder these KM processes. Research limitations/implications – The study is limited by the fact that data was collected from four SMEs in Singapore. Furthermore, only a small sample of staff from these SMEs was interviewed. Hence the findings need to be interpreted in light of such a scope. Practical implications – For SMEs, this research provides perspectives on the factors influencing KM processes, in particular, the importance of the owners' knowledge and leadership, the flexibility and adaptability of the organization, and open culture to enable the capitalization of its knowledge assets to survive and stay competitive. For practitioners, this paper reinforces the importance of the management owners' innovativeness, initiatives and support, and the level of social interaction and high level of trusts among employees in the SMEs to as enablers to effective KM processes in SMEs. Originality/value – To deepen on-going knowledge management research on SMEs, this paper provides insights and rich context to the distinctness of KM processes in SMEs.

Firms commonly undertake philanthropic campaigns as a means of attracting and retaining customers. Such campaigns often take the form of charity-linked promotions, whereby a firm donates a specific amount to a charitable cause when a customer takes up the promotion through a related purchase. We carried out three field experiments to study such promotions in the context of an online taxi-booking platform. Customers were randomly assigned to different treatment groups, which received either a charity-linked or a discount-based promotion from a range of monetary amounts. Take-up rates for charity-linked promotions were not only much smaller than for discount-based promotions but also less sensitive to the exact amount involved, consistent with a view that the decision to take up a charity-linked promotion was driven in part by a “warm glow” from mere association with giving. We also find a selection effect in promotion take-up: charity-linked promotions were disproportionately taken up by people who had already been more active customers. Although a promotion take-up does seem to represent new demand rather than mere substitution of a booking that would have occurred anyway, longitudinal data analysis reveals little evidence of a lasting treatment effect on long-term demand beyond the promotion period for either kind of promotion. Given the high cost relative to benefit for the promotional bookings themselves, this finding raises concerns regarding the prevalent practice of firms devoting significant funds for short-term promotions without rigorously examining their exact impact. The online appendix is available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2017.2887 . This paper was accepted by Uri Gneezy, behavioral economics.

Assessing the potential influence of Vocational Education and Training (VET) courses on creating job opportunities and nurturing work skills has been considered challenging due to the ambiguity in defining their complex relationships and connections with the local economy. Here, we quantify the potential influence of VET courses and explain it with future economy and specialization by constructing a network of more than 17,000 courses, jobs, and skills in Singapore’s SkillsFuture data based on their text similarities captured by a text embedding technique, Sentence Transformer. We find that VET courses associated with Singapore’s 4th Industrial Revolution economy demonstrate higher influence than those related to other future economies. The course influence varies greatly across different sectors, attributed to the level of specificity of the skills covered. Lastly, we show a notable concentration of VET supply in certain occupation sectors requiring general skills, underscoring a disproportionate distribution of education supply for the labor market.

In a world of uncertainty and change, current achievements are no guarantee for future survival. Even if the initial chosen set of principles, policies and practices are good, static efficiency and governance would eventually lead to stagnation and decay. No amount of careful planning can assure a government of continual relevance and effectiveness if there is no capacity for learning, innovation and change in the face of ever new challenges in a volatile and unpredictable global environment. This book provides an in-depth look at dynamic governance, the key to success in a world of rapid, increasing globalization and unrelenting technological advancements. If bureaucratic public institutions can evolve and embed the culture and capabilities that enable continuous learning and change, their contributions to a country's socio-economic progress and prosperity would be enormous. The lessons from their efforts in institutionalizing culture, capabilities and change could provide meaningful and valuable insights for transforming organizations in other contexts.

Construction workers globally face disproportionate threats to health and wellbeing, constituted by the nature of the work they perform. The workplace fatalities and lost-time injuries experienced by construction workers are significantly greater than in other forms of work. This paper draws on the culture-centered approach (CCA) to dialogically articulate meanings of workplace risks and injuries, voiced by Bangladeshi migrant construction workers in Singapore. The narratives voiced by the participants suggest an ecological approach to workplace injuries in the construction industries, attending to food insecurity, lack of sleep, transportation, etc. as contextual features of work that shape the risks experienced at work. Moreover, participant voices point to the barriers in communication, lack of understanding, and experiences of incivility as features of work that constitute the ways in which they experience injury risks. The overarching discourses of productivity and efficiency constitute a broader climate of threats to worker safety and health.

Young adults entering the workforce are at increased risk of becoming overweight or obese. Yet, internationally, young adults are rarely targeted in health campaigns, and little is known on how to improve their interest and participation in health promotion efforts. Through 33 semi-structured interviews with young adults working in Singapore, we explored their engagement with existing public and workplace health promotion efforts that encouraged healthy eating and increased physical activity, and their subjective health in the context of their daily lives. Interviews were coded and thematically analysed, taking an inductive and deductive approach. Despite some interest in health messaging, participating working young adults rarely adopted health-promoting activities such as meeting daily recommended servings of fruits and vegetables and exercising regularly. Participants reported that the health promotion campaigns they were aware of, suggested actions that they couldn’t incorporate in their lives as they did not address the barriers that they are facing from socio-environmental contributors such as long working hours, personal and social commitments, and the food environment. Furthermore, some considered their health to be good enough and therefore had little reason to change existing practices. Affordable and accessible health screenings were an objective way for young adults to re-evaluate their perceptions of their own health which motivated some to favourably change their behaviours. Our findings suggest that future health promotion campaigns would benefit from more fully addressing some of the existing barriers that young working adults face, in tandem with policy changes to directly tackle the socio-environmental conditions for young workers.

This paper examines how culture affects information asymmetry in financial markets. We extract firms traded in the United States but headquartered in regions sharing Chinese culture (“Chinese firms”), and we manually identify a group of U.S. analysts of Chinese ethnic origin (“Chinese analysts”). We find that Chinese analysts issue more accurate forecasts on Chinese firms than non-Chinese analysts. The effect is stronger among firms with less transparent information environments. Further evidence suggests that cultural proximity can go beyond language commonality and analysts’ pre-existing channels for information. Market reaction is stronger when Chinese analysts issue favorable forecast revisions or upgrades about Chinese firms.