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Purpose: This paper aims to investigate the difference between the impacts of indicators of trade barriers (TBs) on bankrupt enterprises (BEs), new enterprises (NEs) and other enterprises (OEs). Design/methodology/approach: The paper has used a multiple-step approach. At the first stage, the initial data has been collected from interviews with 164 top managers of SMEs in West Azerbaijan in Iran during two periods of 2013–2015 and 2017–2019. At the second step, multiple correspondence analysis has been used to summarize the relationships between variables and construct indices for different groups of TBs. Finally, the generalized structural equation model method was used to examine the impact of export barriers. Findings: The results showed that the political legal index is the main TBs for BEs and NEs, but it had a more significant impact on BEs; the financial index was the second major TBs factor for BEs, while OEs did not have a problem in performance index, and the financial index was classified as a minor obstacle for them. All indicators of marketing barriers (except production index) had a negative and significant effect on all enterprises; the most important TBs for NEs was the information index. Originality/value: The results indicated that if enterprises have a strong financial system and function, they can lessen the impact of sanctions and keep themselves in the market. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The primary objective of the article was to delineate the role and diversity of the ‘About Us’ pages on the websites of online food retailers. The research employed the content analysis method, allowing for identification of the content variables on the studied pages, along with an analysis of their frequency and occurrence. The findings revealed that the utilisation of ‘About Us’ pages is prevalent in organic food online stores. These pages exhibit a diverse range of content, primarily centred around promoting the offered products and conveying the values associated with a healthy lifestyle and nutrition.

The aim of this study is to determine final purchasers’ preferred environment of cooperation with offerors. The study also sought to determine the significance of this environment in relation to (1) advantages perceived in online and offline environments as places for this cooperation and (2) the type of services final purchasers would like to co-create.

The purpose of the current study is to examine the mediating role of organizational pride on the relationship between ethical leadership and employees’ creativity. Using a convenience sample of (130) managers, heads of the department, and their employees from private hospitals in Jordan, the data were gathered by questionnaire. The current study adopted a quantitative approach. Furthermore, structural equation modeling (SEM) was used to test the study hypotheses. The current study reveals that ethical leadership has a significant and positive impact on employees' creativity. On the other side, the results of the study showed that ethical leadership has a significant and positive impact on organizational pride. Additionally, the current study also showed that organizational pride has a significant and positive impact on employees' creativity. Finally, it has been found that there is a mediation impact on the relationship between ethical leadership and employees' creativity. These findings may help the leader to focus heavily on organizational pride to foster the relationship between ethical leadership and employees’ creativity.

Driven by the Dual Process Theory and the Theory of Consumption, the purpose of this paper is to provide a refined scale for luxury consumption motives in addition to categorising the motives into emotional and rational concepts.

This paper proposes a model to determine the direct and moderating effects of COVID-19 on the overall satisfaction of cultural tourists with the heritage destination visited. The hypotheses put forward in the model have been tested employing non-linear structural equation models (SEM), estimated with data from the Resident Travel Survey of the National Statistics Institute (NSI), on domestic demand for cultural tourism in Spain. The data analyzed covers both a pre-covid and pandemic period, from January 2019 to September 2021. The results confirm that COVID-19 significantly impacted the decrease in cultural tourists' satisfaction with the visit. It highlights the negative relationship between cultural tourists' socioeconomic profile and satisfaction. This research provides knowledge on the impact of COVID-19 on the behavior of cultural tourists, with practical implications for the design of tourism policies for the promotion and marketing of heritage destinations through differentiated marketing that increases satisfaction for this demand segment in crisis scenarios.

This study tests a framework of business-to-business (B2B) sellers’ sales performance motivations in services firms. An exploratory-descriptive research design was used and data was collected from 389 respondents working in the services-orientated business sector of Norway. The study's results verify that B2B service sales are complex contexts and situations for B2B seller services firms and their B2B customers to handle. Many elements are required to reach a final deal. Therefore, services firms must maintain seller motivation throughout the B2B services sales process, which is usually hard and may involve psychological wear-out. Consequently, this study examines and verifies an important area of sales performance indicators, namely B2B sellers’ motivations in services firms, and explains B2B sellers’ intrinsic and extrinsic motivations.

The Web 2.0 era and the following phases of web development bring new challenges to businesses, but also new opportunities to establish and maintain relationships with market participants, indulge in direct contact with customers and learn about their needs, emotions and opinions. The advancement of content creation and sharing technologies creates an opportunity to collect information from anyone with access to the Internet. User-generated content (UGC) information is increasingly supporting decision-making and analysis for various types of business, management or marketing activities. Such information is also increasingly used as a source of data in scientific research. The present study seeks to evaluate the relevance of UGC in scientific research and the scope and ways in which content created by Internet users can be used by researchers of phenomena existing in the service sector. To achieve this goal, a bibliometric literature review (quantitative analysis of publications, identification of research collaborators, co-author analysis, co-citation analysis and co-word analysis) was conducted covering articles between 2012 and 2022 published in journals indexed in the Scopus database. The analysis used descriptive statistics and text and content analysis. A significant increase was observed in publications between 2020 and 2022. Among the various service branches, the researchers most often chose data sets in the form of comments posted online by customers of tourism industries, mainly those using accommodation services, but also restaurants. TripAdvisor was observed to be the most frequently used data source. In their analysis, the authors used both qualitative and quantitative methods, as well as a combination of them. It is observed that more sophisticated machine learning algorithms have been implemented for text analysis. Finally, the paper also presents future research recommendations.

This paper aims to enhance the understanding of the concepts of service quality, customer satisfaction with service, and organizational reputation in the context of educational services. The conceptual framework for testing the relationship between the three constructs was developed and tested on a sample of 97 educational service users. The results showed no significant difference between perceived and expected service quality. However, a positive relationship was found between customer satisfaction and three subconstructs of perceived service quality. Also, a significant positive correlation between organizational reputation and three latent variables of perceived service quality and a positive relationship between satisfaction and organizational reputation.

Analyzed from the sender’s perspective, marketing communications aim to engage audiences and create benefit-oriented relationships. In order to adequately assess the reciprocal efforts of the sender and receiver of the communication process, one cannot limit oneself to its purely economic analysis, but should pay attention to its broader praxeological context – take into account factors such as efficiency, effectiveness, and expediency. It is also crucial to evaluate parameters beyond the purely usability characteristics of communication practices used in the marketing aspect. Their ethical evaluation from current and potential customers, the social environment, and other stakeholders poses significant challenges for communicators but should also spur potentially beneficial transformations – toward a new view of socially engaged marketing and the ethical dimension of marketing. The purpose of this inquiry is to identify a conceptual framework for measuring the efficiency of marketing communications based on axiological and praxeological dimensions. Five research hypotheses were formulated, which can be verified in the future research.

It is essential to identify consumer purchase behavior to establish and implement effective marketing strategies by Western food chains in Pakistan. By identifying motives, firms can offer extra-value products to their current and potential clients. Thus, this study seeks to understand what drives Pakistani consumers to buy imported Western food. This quantitative study uses A standardized structured questionnaire to collect data from 375 Karachi residents. The researchers use a convenient sampling strategy and analyze the data using PLS-SEM modeling through Smart-PLS 4.0. The findings of this research demonstrate that subjective norms, religiosity, product attributes, brand trust, customer satisfaction, and lifestyle significantly and positively influence consumer purchase intention. The findings also show that consumer purchase intention, lifestyle, and subjective norms significantly and positively correlate with purchase behavior. Finally, the study concludes that purchase intention significantly and positively mediates between exogenous and endogenous variables (purchase behavior). This research has significant theoretical and managerial implications. Local and international marketing professionals who wish to investigate the expanding consumer market in Pakistan can find the study's findings extremely useful. In addition, the outcomes of this research enrich the existing body of consumer behavior literature, which is helpful for future researchers.

Background: Type 2 immune cells play a pivotal role in allergic rhinitis (AR). Increasing evidence shows that inhibition of cholinergic nerve activity decreases the severity of airway diseases including asthma and AR. However, the role of the cholinergic receptor muscarinic 3 (m3) in type 2 inflammation in AR is unknown. Objective: We aimed to investigate the effect of m3 on the type 2 immune response, including both T helper 2 (Th2)-mediated and type 2 innate lymphocyte (ILC2)-mediated inflammation, in AR. Methods: Peripheral blood mononuclear cells (PBMCs) from human were cultured in vitro. Treatment with the m3 antagonist 1,1-dimethyl-4-diphenylacetoxypiperidinium iodide (4-DAMP) was used. The percentages of Th2 and ILC2 cells in PBMCs were evaluated by flow cytometry. AR mouse models were established by house dust mite (HDM) sensitization, and treated with tiotropium intranasally. The expression of Th2 cytokines, ILC2 cytokines and related factors in the nasal mucosa was assessed by immunohistochemistry and quantitative real-time polymerase chain reaction. Serum HDM-specific immunoglobulin E (sIgE) level was detected by enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay. Results: Both Th2 and ILC2 percentages in PBMCs were decreased after 4-DAMP treatment. Similarly, the levels of Th2 cytokines (interleukin 4 [IL-4] and IL-13) and ILC2 cytokines and related factors (IL-25, IL-33, GATA3 and RORα) were significantly decreased in the nasal mucosa of AR mice after tiotropium treatment. Furthermore, tiotropium treatment decreased the nasal symptom score, the serum sIgE level and eosinophil infiltration in AR mice. In addition, tiotropium decreased phospholipase Cγ1 (PLCγ1), PLCγ2, nuclear factor of activated T cell 1 (NFATc1), and NFATc2 mRNA levels in AR mice. Conclusion: Antagonism of m3 alleviated type 2 inflammation in the nasal mucosa of AR mice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research purpose. Cultural centres are multifunctional interdisciplinary cultural institutions that provide access to culture and a wide variety of cultural services, promote citizen participation in culture, offer lifelong learning opportunities and perform various other functions. Cultural centres are a phenomenon shared with many other countries, especially former Soviet republics; however, although historically different models of cultural centres have also been developed in Western countries, the field has been relatively little studied in an academic setting. The aim of this research is to study the problems of defining and classifying cultural centres, to identify the most characteristic functions of cultural centres in Europe and suggest a classification model based on the functions of cultural centres.

Purpose: The article presents research on enterprises from various economic environments, namely the mature Finnish market and the Polish post-transformation one. Thus, our study examined how the external (international) environment affected the internationalization and business opportunities of Polish and Finnish SMEs.

Prenatal stress is associated with a high risk of developing adult intestinal pathologies, such as irritable bowel syndrome, chronic inflammation, and cancer. Although epithelial stem cells and progenitors have been implicated in intestinal pathophysiology, how prenatal stress could impact their functions is still unknown. We have investigated the proliferative and differentiation capacities of primitive cells using epithelial crypts isolated from colons of adult male and female mice whose mothers have been stressed during late gestation. Our results show that stem cell/progenitor proliferation and differentiation in vitro are negatively impacted by prenatal stress in male progeny. This is promoted by a reinforcement of the negative proliferative/differentiation control by the protease-activated receptor 2 (PAR2) and the muscarinic receptor 3 (M3), two G protein-coupled receptors present in the crypt. Conversely, prenatal stress does not change in vitro proliferation of colon primitive cells in female progeny. Importantly, this maintenance is associated with a functional switch in the M3 negative control of colonoid growth, becoming proliferative after prenatal stress. In addition, the proliferative role of PAR2 specific to females is maintained under prenatal stress, even though PAR2-targeted stress signals Dusp6 and activated GSK3b are increased, reaching the levels of males. An epithelial serine protease could play a critical role in the activation of the survival kinase GSK3b in colonoids from prenatally stressed female progeny. Altogether, our results show that following prenatal stress, colon primitive cells cope with stress through sexually dimorphic mechanisms that could pave the way to dysregulated crypt regeneration and intestinal pathologies. NEW & NOTEWORTHY Primitive cells isolated from mouse colon following prenatal stress and exposed to additional stress conditions such as in vitro culture, present sexually dimorphic mechanisms based on PAR2- and M3-dependent regulation of proliferation and differentiation. Whereas prenatal stress reinforces the physiological negative control exerted by PAR2 and M3 in crypts from males, in females, it induces a switch in M3- and PAR2-dependent regulation leading to a resistant and proliferative phenotype of progenitor. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Financial development is one of the most important prerequisites for rapid and sustained industrial. Against this backdrop, this study utilized the techniques of Fully Modified Ordinary Least Squares and Granger causality to appraise the relationship between financial sector development and industrial performance in Nigeria between 1990 and 2019. The findings that came up in the study are presented as follow; out of the three principal variables used to proxy financial sector development in this study, two of them-M3 and interest rate have both direct and significant interlink with industrial performance in Nigeria. As such the study concludes that financial development contributes to a positive and significant industrial performance in Nigeria. The findings from direction of causality show that a unidirectional feedback relationship flows from industrial performance to interest rate in one hand and one way feedback relationship flows from total credit to private to broad money supply on the other hand. In view of these findings, this study recommends the following for the policymakers in Nigeria, and by extension policymakers in Africa that whenever these policymakers desire to achieve industrial development, policy that will drive the development of financial sector should be embarked upon. In addition, the Nigerian monetary authorities should ensure that adequate credit is disbursed to private sector in order to drive better industrial performance in the country. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]