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This study addresses citizen implication in societal issues, and analysis it at the crossroads of online and offline spaces. It draws on previous literature to advance a research model which differentiates between online and offline forms of civic engagement, and tests their relationships with people's attitudes and behaviors. Results show that both attitudes and behaviors are influenced by offline and online engagement, pointing out the driving role of the online side in forming civic attitudes, and the powerful direct effect exerted by the offline side on civic behavior. The research findings explain attitudinal and behavioral outcomes of online and offline civic engagement. Indicating that people become more involved in civic issues due to the digital evolution, the study extends prior literature and proposes an inclusive framework for understanding online and offline civic engagement, from a theoretical, instrumental, and empirical point of view. Additionally, the paper offers an up-dated scale for measuring the online civic engagement, by adding a 6th item (crowdfunding) into existent scale.

Addressing the debated topic of credibility in online sales, the present study analyses buyer's perspective. The study develops from the literature to test and refine a multi-dimensional measurement of e-shops credibility. Consumer's criteria for assessing e-shops credibility are empirically examined with 817 Romanian student participants. Detailed approach and methodology, as well as the results obtained, research conclusions, limitations, and implications, are presented. The study advances an instrument which reveals new dimensions of establishing credibility although most aspects were found to be similar to results previously presented in other studies. The proposed instrument offers a new multidimensional measurement and knowledge resources for business committed to using Internet advantages, and it might be viewed as a strategic tool which enables e-shops owners to strengthen their market presence, e-sales and customer base through an adequate management of the knowledge regarding online credibility.

The process of Europeanization has been intensively discussed and participation in debates has been vigorously tested by the academic world, mostly concerned with examining political personalities. This process is often seen through a political and economic view, ignoring the spiritual part pointing to a collective identity rationale. Hereby, our interest consists of finding how this concept is perceived through students’ lens. We aim at investigating students’ opinions, revealing young citizens’ points of view. The conducted research is qualitative, consisting of in-depth interviews, for discovering participants’ standpoints and attitudes towards admitting European bonds and becoming Europeans not just as frame, but in a substantial way, from the perspective of belongingness to a European Union (EU) member state or to an Eastern Partnership (EaP) member state. As the findings show, the bond with the European Union is seen through a political and cultural approach. Students’ understanding of the Europeanization process is varied, and so are their endeavours of spreading the importance to adhere to the European Union and to share the European spirit among students belonging to EaP states.

In the endeavor of analyzing urban development perspectives, the current paper aims to find out how warmth and competence stereotypes would operate in the case of a city, predicting its future, as a direct consequence of people's positive or negative feelings and actions. Results of such analyses would be of strategic importance, knowing that various aspects of urban development (from tourism to business, well-being, active population growth and talents retention) depend on people’s decisions to visit that city, to invest, to work, to study, to settle down there, or to simply spread positive opinions about it. Therefore, relying on the well-known SCM -stereotype content model, the paper adapts previous warmth and competence scales, and develops a customized research instrument for analyzing connections between people's perceptions and the mental labels attached to a specific city. Considering warmth and competence dimensions, as well as the other variables of interest such as status, cooperation and competition, we use an exploratory procedure for item selection followed by a Q-sorting analysis for scale content validation. The paper adds to the literature in two main ways. It firstly advances an integrative view that connects the theories from social psychology, communication and branding with those from urban development. Secondly, it offers a content validated measurement instrument, as a necessary departure point for future analyses meant to identify challenges and to predict the potential for development of smart and sustainable cities.

The European Union continuously endeavors to submit to an integrative framework which support the formation of a European spirit and identity. Among the accelerating factors, new media stands for a catalyst of European integration, online networks supporting the users to share opinions, experiences, information, etc. The interactivity provided by new media allow Europeans to learn more about each other and to discover similar or subsidiary objectives. Here, the paper aims to investigate the role of new media in the reconfiguration of social relationships which encompass a shared identity. To this end, several in-depth interviews were conducted with active users who are anchored in online European debates. As the findings showed, new media facilitate people’s engagement in virtual relations and supports the creation of social groups with similar values and standpoints on the European constructs.

Placing online academic networks in the framework of social, cultural and institutional “deterritorialization,” the current paper aims at investigating the functionality of these new forms of transnational and trans-organizational aggregations as knowledge brokers. The emphasis is laid on the influence of human collective intelligence and consistent knowledge flows on research innovation, considering the role of organizational support within higher education systems. In this respect, the research relied on a questionnaire-based survey with 140 academics from European emerging countries, the data collected being processed via a partial least squares structural equation modelling technique. Evidence was brought that, as knowledge brokers, online academic networks are systems aimed to support the access to human collective intelligence and consistent knowledge flows which exert a positive influence on research innovation, both directly and indirectly, by means of formal and informal organizational support. As facilitators of collaborative environments for individuals with specialized knowledge, competence, expertise and experience, online academic networks have set themselves up as an agora for academics worldwide and as an outlet for their acumen and literacy.

Nowadays, technology enables businesses to make transactions without human interaction, which increases their operations, but also erodes the personal nature of commerce and brand loyalty, in most of the cases. Independent lines of research have warned about this phenomenon, pointing out that the lack of consumer trust represents the main cause of losing brand loyalty. Stressing on the benefits of updating branding practices by integrating results from other social sciences, our paper explores an interdisciplinary literature. The paper presents recent branding-related findings and how are they supported or not by results from social psychology and behavioral economics. It highlights two opposite views and theoretical contradictions, and extracts a hypothesis that would be conceptually supported by some convergent opinions and facts. Arguing why an effective branding process, meant to achieve both consumer trust and sales objectives, should change the focus from profit-maximization onto relationship building, we hypothesize that brands should reveal worthy intentions prior to competence. Since our paper is of conceptual nature, further empirical studies are needed to test the hypothesis. Yet, the present paper offers an integrative view of the consumer underlying behavior, as revealed by recent results from different social sciences, discussing the potential impact of worthy intentions and competences on trust building, and consequently, on the brand construction process.

In a world where competitiveness has become the second nature of the business environment, an insight on the organizations’ endeavour to go international seems natural. And yet, most of the times, under the lens of the worldwide researchers and practitioners, corporations have been settled as milestones. In this context, focusing on the small and medium enterprises (SMEs), on the managerial and entrepreneurial micro-universe may generate an alternative perspective on their approach on the international markets versus the global market. Starting from this premise, the paper intends to analyze the business internationalization versus business globalization perspectives assumed by managers of SMEs at present. The distinction between the two approaches is based on a step-bystep touch of the specialized markets versus a straight forward venture into far-away markets with a view to obtain higher profits. The emphasis was laid on 107 European steel pipe SMEs, whose managers responded to a 15-item questionnaire regarding their market strategies and experiences. As the results show, the socio-demographic characteristics of respondents have a considerable impact on their approaches on the issue, the choice for going international or going global relying on the subjects’ age, number of foreign partners, experience on the foreign markets and education field.

Recent decades have strongly commanded in the public conscience the importance of considering the ethical dimension in organizations. Business ethics exceeds the ordinary compliance with the law or the choice between right and wrong. There are situations when actions are clearly right or wrong and the decision about what should be done is relatively simple, but often managers have to distinguish between shades of gray and the decision is enforced by different degrees of righteousness. Moreover, when fulfilling ethical responsibilities, businesses should consider simultaneously the economic and competitiveness pressures. Starting from these premise, the present study intends to investigate the standpoints of managers in the Romanian business consulting firms about the double rationality of their endeavors: profit versus ethics. Accordingly, twenty-two semi-structured interviews were conducted to assess the ethical dilemma. As most of the answers underline, there is a myriad of ethical issues posed by the business consultancy, especially when big contracts are scarce and the competition for clients is high.