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Résumé Facilitant le partage des connaissances latentes des consommateurs, les communautés autonomes de consommateurs en ligne constituent des communautés de pratique de consommation. S’inspirant des études sur la gestion des connaissances, cet article étudie les dynamiques d’activation et d’accumulation des connaissances des consommateurs au sein des communautés en ligne dans le cadre naturel d’un forum en ligne. Cette étude netnographique identifie différents modèles d’activation des connaissances, en donnant un aperçu du type de connaissances des consommateurs qui émerge au sein des communautés en ligne autonomes. Différentes caractéristiques des communautés en ligne, et notamment la présence éventuelle de connaissances rares, la diversité des points de vue ou la valeur ajoutée d’opinions similaires, sont exploitées afin de produire différents types de connaissances collectives. Cette étude contribue à la littérature sur les communautés en ligne en décomposant les dynamiques de partage et d’accumulation des connaissances dans les communautés autonomes, qui agissent comme des communautés de pratique de consommation et participent au renforcement du pouvoir des consommateurs en développant des connaissances collectives à partir d’activations individuelles. Elle contribue à la littérature consacrée aux connaissances des consommateurs en caractérisant l’activation et l’accumulation des connaissances, tant au niveau individuel que collectif.

International audience; Enabling the sharing of dormant consumer knowledge, autonomous online consumer communities constitute communities of consumption practice. Drawing from the knowledge management literature, this article investigates consumer knowledge activation and accumulation dynamics in online communities within the naturalistic setting of an online forum. The netnographic study identifies different patterns of knowledge activation, giving insights into the kind of consumer knowledge that emerges in autonomous online communities. Different characteristics of online communities such as potential presence of rare knowledge, breadth of views or additive value of similar views are leveraged, to produce different types of collective knowledge. The study contributes to the online communities literature by deconstructing the dynamics of knowledge sharing and accumulation in autonomous communities; these function as communities of consumption practice and contribute to consumer empowerment through building collective knowledge from individual activations. It contributes to the consumer knowledge literature a two-level, individual and collective, characterisation of knowledge activation and accumulation.

This study provides an African perspective to the global research and literature on retail customer adoption of Internet banking (IB). It empirically examines the influence of seven demographic variables – age, gender, level of education, marital status, employment status, income level and area of residence – on retail banking customers’ behaviours toward IB adoption in a major developing African country – Nigeria. A sample of 500 customers was surveyed, and ANOVA and multiple regression analyses were used in testing the association of the variables with customer attitude and intention toward IB adoption. Although all seven variables were correlated with attitude and intention, only gender, level of education, and employment status showed significant ability to influence Nigerian customers’ attitude and intention toward IB adoption. The study therefore concludes that gender, level of education, and employment status are the major demographic affecters of Nigerian banking customers’ attitudes to IB adoption.

This article presents a German Sense of Community (SOC) scale for use in military settings. The scale is based on the translation and field-testing of an existing U.S.-based measure of neighborhood SOC (Peterson, Speer, & McMillan, 2008). The methodological intricacies underlying cross-cultural scale development are highlighted, as are the strategies used to overcome them. Administered in a navy context (n = 270), the newly-developed German measure improves the psychometric credentials of the existing scale by confirming the principal theory of SOC and its applicability across borders and contexts. Future research is encouraged to build on the strength and flexibility of the existing U.S. instrument for further cross-cultural scale development, thus enabling SOC theory to attain its international potential.

PurposeWhile the entrepreneurship and small business research literature has tended to portray women as lesser than men in identifying the differences between them, little research has looked at how gender is construed in business ownership. The purpose of this paper is to provide a new focus, examining how male and female business owners construe each other.Design/methodology/approachThe research employs George Kelly's personal construct theory and repertory grids to examine the constructs associated with male and female business owners.FindingsIt is found that there are many constructs used to describe business owners and, counter to predictions from some of the literature review, few differences between the way in which male and female business owners are construed. The paper offers explanations as to why so few differences are found.Research limitations/implicationsThe sample is limited to just one area of Britain and the businesses had all been established in the last three years. This will influence the generalizability of the findings.Originality/valueThis paper is able to offer research evidence to demonstrate that male and female business owners do not construe male and female business owners differently.

The view that excessive regulation constrains small business growth has been a persistent theme within business and policy communities, although recent studies have demonstrated the actual effects of regulation to be relatively modest. A prior small-scale study proposed four reasons why employment legislation does “not damage” small firms. We attempt to assess the robustness of these propositions in a large-scale survey of 16 779 small firms. Results provide empirical support for three propositions. Firstly, perceived dissatisfaction masks actual effects. Secondly, competitive conditions mediate regulatory effects; however, even resource-constrained firms reported few negative effects. Thirdly, informality eases regulatory impact. Results failed to confirm that older laws are ‘routinised’. Length of time as a business owner was found to be more influential than age of regulation, with owners who have been in business for many years having a longer ‘window of exposure’ increasing their likelihood of experiencing negative and positive effects.

We examine two data sets, one from the UK (n = 15,750) and one from the US (n = 3239), to show that SME financial behaviour demonstrates substantial financial contentment, or 'happiness'. We find fewer than 10% of the UK firms seek significant growth and only 1.32% of US firms list a shortage of capital other than working capital as a problem. Financial performance indicators (growth, return on assets, profit margin) were not found to be determinants of SME financing activities, as might be expected in a 'rational' risk-return environment. Younger and less educated SME owners more actively use external financing - even though more education reduces the fear of loan denial - while older and more educated ('wiser') SME owners are found to be being less likely to seek or use external financing. The contentment hypothesis for SME financing also extends to high-growth firms in that we show that they participate more in the loan markets than low-growth firms. By way of contrast to the finance gap hypothesis, the contentment hypothesis observes the importance of social networks (connections) [for finance] and confirms the 'connections - happiness' linkage in the literature on happiness while doubting the theoretical suitability of Jensen and Meckling [Jensen, M., Meckling, W., 1976. Theory of the firm: Managerial behavior, agency costs, and ownership structure. Journal of Financial Economics 3, 305-360.] base-case analysis for SMEs.

There is a widely held belief that banks may be discriminating against female business owners. This study was designed to explore the perceptions held by bank loan officers of male and female business owners, using Bourdieu's theory of practice and Kelly's personal construct methodology. The research literature might lead to an expectation that the characteristics of the business owners would be relatively homogenous but that men and women business owners would be construed differently (for example women might be seen to lack drive). However, the results demonstrate heterogeneity in the constructs held by bank loan officers, and a particular concern with the character of the business owner. Significant gender differences were observed in only 20 of the 325 constructs elicited from 35 bank loan officers. Female bank loan officers were as likely as male bank loan officers to draw gender distinctions between business owners. Detailed multivariate analyses confirmed no evidence of systematic gender differences in the constructs held by bank loan officers of business owners.

This research examines the information search and usage behaviour of physicians when they choose pharmaceutical treatments for their patients. It details this behaviour, its causes, variations and information sources. Grounded Theory was used, with data collection primarily based on depth interviews with primary and secondary care physicians. Two main categories of search behaviour emerged and were labelled self-referencing and surrogating. Self-referencing describes the process where physicians first use internal, patient case experiences to discover behavioral patterns for the successful treatment of patients. If insufficient confidence is held in their internal knowledge, physicians will attempt to use the patient case experience of external sources and surrogate this experience as their own. Recommendations are made regarding matching the information usage behaviors of physicians with that provided by organisations and marketing outputs.

The importance of media selection based on media consumption habits has increased over the past two decades, with rising media placement costs coupled with expanding media options leading to fragmented target segments. Media planners spend valuable resources to understand their consumers' relationships with media, but such information is hard to come by for special audiences. This article characterises medical journal readership of 457 general practitioners (GPs) who responded to a mail survey. GPs were clustered on their medical journal readership patterns. Results indicate that there are four distinct groups of medical journal readership, a finding that is of interest to marketing managers in the healthcare industry.

This article confronts the challenges of charity merchandising and competition for secondhand goods by examining consumer disposal behaviour. It focuses on goods traded by charity retailers and extends existing research on disposal by reporting the multifarious strategies that characterise household disposition. Descriptive research is presented, based on a postal survey of 210 households. Descriptive statistics illustrate patterns of disposal, and a hierarchical cluster analysis using the Jaccard coefficient is performed to distinguish households in terms of goods discarded and channels used. The results show that disposal is significantly influenced by the events that prompt disposition (decorating, purchase, and bereavement), and households use a varied portfolio of disposal channels within and across categories of goods. Five types of households are differentiated with respect to the combination of channels used and the mixture of goods discarded. The conclusions suggest how charity retailers might extend and refine targeting activities to ameliorate procurement, thus facilitating pursuit of increasingly sophisticated retail strategies.

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The economic activities of entrepreneurs are not confined to the ownership of a single firm, but encompass income generation from a variety of sources including wage labour, non-earned income and profit from secondary business ventures. This paper investigates the multiple income sources of a sample of 18 561 business owners in the UK. A latent class analysis revealed seven different groups of entrepreneurs differentiated by their degree of engagement in enterprise ownership and income generation. The results demonstrate the importance of multiple income sources in smaller firms and challenge previous assumptions that portfolio activities are expedited solely as a profit maximization strategy by growth-seeking entrepreneurs. While some use portfolio activities for the purpose of wealth accumulation, others use them as a survival mechanism. The results also highlight time variations in the use of portfolio activities. For some business owners, they are a long-term and relatively stable strategy contributin...

The Theory of Planned Behaviour (TPB) has been widely applied to the explanation of health and social behaviours. However, despite its potential to inform behaviour change efforts, there have been surprisingly few attempts to use the TPB to design actual interventions. In 1998, the Scottish Road Safety Campaign implemented a 3-year mass media campaign to reduce speeding on Scotland's roads which was explicitly shaped by the TPB's three main predictors: Attitude, Subjective Norms and Perceived Behavioural Control. A 4-year longitudinal cohort study examined the impact of the campaign on communications outcomes and on TPB constructs. Overall, empirical support was found for the decision to use TPB as the theoretical underpinning of the advertising. The advertising was effective in triggering desired communications outcomes, and was associated with significant changes in attitudes and affective beliefs about speeding. In conclusion, future directions for road safety advertising and for TPB research are discussed.

This study reports findings about British advertising agency managers’ response patterns to a mail survey and four follow-up techniques (original, photocopy, postcard and letter), which were manipulated to determine their individual impact on response rate. Findings should provide original insights to mail survey researchers planning to sample advertising agency managers in reducing both non-response and sampling bias. The initial response rate was just over 18 per cent and four follow-up techniques altogether lifted the overall response rate to a little less than 32 per cent. There are several statistically significant differences of importance to mail researchers in reducing non-response bias and increasing response rate. © 2003, MCB UP Limited

This paper builds on previous research into blood donation behaviour, focusing on perceptions of risk associated with blood donation in the UK. It compares indicators of risk perceptions obtained through probability and importance indicators and calculated using additive versus multiplicative models. It examines the relationships between perceived risk and blood donation with specific attention to donation frequency. The findings demonstrate that apparent perceived risk in blood donation varies substantially depending on the indicator that is used and that a more accurate indicator of risk is obtained if two components of risk are combined through a multiplicative model rather than an additive one. Social risk emerged as the more prominent aspect of perceived risk, implying a high level of trust by donors in the Blood Transfusion Service. Perceived risk was found to be significantly associated with donation frequency, highlighting the need to keep track of donors and to communicate with those whose donations lapse.

The marketing literature reveals little agreement on the generalizability of two market orientation scales that were developed in earlier works. In this study, a market orientation scale was developed for a specific context,namely retailing and then assessed for reliability and validity. The data were collected from Indonesian retail firms. Three alternative models of the dimension structure of the market orientation construct were tested using confirmatory factor analysis. This procedure was then followed by a purifying process in order to investigate the stability of the items in the final MARKOR scale.The findings suggested that the four multi-item scales developed showed evidence of reliability and validity in this sample. Further, the findings showed that market orientation has positive effects on both supplier partnership and retail performance.

There can be little doubt about the profound impact that the Internet has had on all aspects of business over the past decade. Indeed, it is now widely accepted that we have entered a new and even more revolutionary phase in the development of the Net as a global marketing and communications platform; a phase characterised by information ‘pull’ rather than ‘push’, user-generated content, openness, sharing, collaboration, interaction, communities, and social networking. New generation Web-based communities and hosted applications are beginning to have a major impact on customer behaviour across a diverse range of industries. These new applications represent a fundamental change in the way people use the Internet, their online expectations, and experiences.

Online ‘tribes’ offer opportunities for individuals to communicate interests and opportunities through networks with potential for exponential growth. Such tribal behaviour can be a powerful means of bringing people together, promoting and cementing cultural relationships - with great potential to alter existing power relations. But what happens when that behaviour is not so positive, when ‘tribes’ are perceived as ‘gangs,’ with the negative associations of menace and anti-social behaviour, and how should we respond to that? And what happens if and when such behaviour percolates from online groups into other offline contexts? The growth of online challenges to offline laws and social norms, including challenges to rights of privacy or freedom of speech, raise questions about whether online behaviour should be subject to greater control. The recent UK conviction and appeal judgement on two young men for using social network, Facebook, to encourage rioting, burglary and criminal damage raises some interesting questions about both how integrated online and offline social networks might be - to what extent do online behaviours actually transfer to offline behaviours? Responses to managing gang related and anti-social behaviour in our cities have been criticised in particular for unnecessarily criminalising behaviours and for restricting individual freedom. Looking at responses through the lens of anti-social behaviour, this chapter identifies three possible approaches to influencing online behaviour, focusing on what might be achieved by community members themselves, by external control, or through design and management of the online environment. It explores the capacity of these different stakeholders to address anti-social behaviour online and to harness the positive potential of e-tribes while avoiding the pitfalls of offline precedents.

This paper presents a critical review of online environmental psychology articles based on the stimulus-organism-response paradigm. The structure of the paper follows the sequence of the S-O-R framework, i.e. starting with environmental stimuli both in traditional and online store settings. Then, consumers' inner organism theories are reviewed, followed by behavioural responses.\ud \ud This endeavour also table-summarises a selected set of the most relevant articles in the specific setting of online fashion shopping environments. Content analysis of the table shows that two main themes have emerged in literature; one investigates the influence of online environmental stimuli on consumer trust and risk perception; whereas the second theme is more emotion-centred. Finally, the paper highlights the limitations of current literature and presents an agenda for future research.

Concerns that small firms encounter credit constraints are well entrenched in the literature, despite widespread empirical evidence that a relatively small proportion of small firms have their loan applications rejected. However, many firms may be discouraged from applying for fear of rejection. These businesses are the focus of this paper. Based on responses to a large-scale postal survey of UK small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), we find that twice as many businesses were discouraged from applying for a bank loan than had their loan request denied. More particularly, we observe a number of distinguishing characteristics of “discouraged borrowers” (relative to applicants). These include: strategy, sector, prior entrepreneurial experience and banking relationships. The implications of our findings for policy and future research are briefly discussed.

Home-based businesses are a significant proportion of the small business sector. However, they are largely invisible, not separately identified in official statistics and difficult to survey. Home-based businesses account for 36% of all businesses in the UK. Most are full-time businesses and one in ten have achieved significant scale. They are found in all industry sectors. Only a small minority are largely or exclusively engaged in e-commerce. There is a striking association between areas with the highest proportions of home based businesses and the geography of economic prosperity. Local authorities should make home based business a focus for economic development. Von zu Hause aus geführte Unternehmen machen einen erheblichen Anteil des Sektors der Kleinunternehmen aus. Doch da diese Unternehmen unsichtbar bleiben, wird angenommen, dass sie nur einen geringen Beitrag zur Wirtschaft leisten. In diesem Beitrag wird diese Ansicht in Frage gestellt. Die Unternehmen sind mehrheitlich Vollzeit tätig. Jedes zehnte von ihnen hat eine signifikante Größe erreicht. Die Unternehmen schaffen Arbeitsplätze für mehr Personen als nur den bzw. die Eigentümer. Sie sind konzentriert in den Sektoren der Informationstechnologie sowie der geschäftlichen und professionellen Dienste angesiedelt. Ebenso zeichnen sie sich durch eine charakteristische Geografie aus. Den höchsten Anteil an von zu Hause aus geführten Unternehmen weisen ländliche und nicht-metropolitane Gebiete in Südengland auf. In urbanen bzw. industriellen Regionen finden sich die niedrigsten Anteile. Diese Tatsache legt nahe, dass die Rolle der von zu Hause aus geführten Unternehmen bei der lokalen Wirtschaftsentwicklung überdacht werden muss.

One of the most significant trends in the post-industrial era has been for the home to become an important focus for work. The boundaries between work and home are now increasingly blurred, reversing the forces of the industrial era in which places deemed suitable for each were clearly demarcated and physically separate. The most recent published figures available from the Labour Force Survey (2005)1 indicate that 3.1m people now work mainly from home, 11% of the workforce. This represents a rise from 2.3m in 1997 (9% of the workforce), a 35% increase. The majority of homeworkers (2.4m or 77% of the total) are 'teleworkers' – people who use computers and telecommunications to work at home. The number of teleworkers has increased by 1.5m between 1997 and 2005, a 166% increase. Clearly, it is the growth in the number of teleworkers which is driving the increase in homeworking.

A national minimum wage (NMW) was introduced into the United Kingdom in 1999 as part of New Labour's active labour-market approach. The level has been uprated on several occasions since then. Most research suggests that the NMW has benefited low-paid workers while having little adverse impact on employment levels. This paper explores the regional impact of the NMW on the small business sector, using data from the Federation of Small Businesses' biennial survey, the largest business survey in the United Kingdom. Overall, just over 21% of businesses with employees uprated employees and just under 10% of employees have benefited from pay uprates. The impact has varied across industries, with the greatest effects in the hotels and catering sector. In general, affected businesses have anticipated that they would be able to absorb the costs, although in some cases at the expense of a slight decline in profitability. The impact of the NMW also varies across the regions, having the least impact in London and the South East and the greatest impact in the ‘north‘. In the northern regions, businesses are less able to absorb the increased costs and more likely to respond by increasing prices. This has potential implications for the competitiveness of small and medium-sized enterprises in these regions, which is more likely to be based around price and cost advantages than their counterparts in the south. The Low Pay Commission therefore should give greater attention to the geographical impacts of the NMW in its evaluation and when proposing future increases in the rate.

A review is given of subjective measurement methods in auditorium acoustics. Particular emphasis is laid on research in what may be termed the field of psychometric room acoustics. In the past, traditional psychophysical methods have proved useful for the more limited purpose of determining the effects of physical changes on subjective attributes, but more recent developments in psychometric theory now permit aesthetic characteristics, such as quality, to be evaluated on valid subjective measurement scales. At present there is contention concerning the best approach to adopt in applying such subjective scales to the evaluation of auditoria. Two schools of thought have emerged: one favouring preference comparisons, the other semantic differential ratings. The advantages and disadvantages of both methods are discussed in relation to recent projects. It is suggested that the advantages of these two approaches could be combined to derive a reliable subjective measure for evaluating auditoria in the field.

The general purpose data analysis package is characterized by its user-oriented interface. This paper discusses the nature of the social research package user, and examines features of the conversational package SCSS to point out the important lines of package development. A discussion of these developments covers the areas of data structure flexibility, facilities for model manipulation and testing, self-documentation, adaptability to both expert and novice package users, as well as the facilities of table, graphics and statistics generation systems. Not all of these developments are equally feasible, because they put possibly conflicting pressures on the form of the user interface. The continuing number of users of data analysis packages will continue to make this an interesting area of user-interface development.

It is by now generally known that careful consideration is being given in this country to possible procedures for assessing the impact upon the environment of large scale and complex developments, such as airports, power stations, chemical works or gravel pits. Such procedures exist already in France, Sweden, New South Wales and, notably, in the United States, In the latter case, the National Environmental Policy Act 1969 requires that whenever developments at the Federal level are likely to significantly affect the quality of the human environment, there shall be prepared an Environmental Impact Statement which sets out in detail the nature of the action, any unavoidable adverse consequences, the relationship between short term and long term exploitation of the environment, any irretrievable commitments of resources involved and, finally, possible alternatives to the proposed action.