Religious tourism is one of the most important touristic segments globally. Yet, the cognitive and emotional processes shaping destination loyalty in this context, and the impacts of Augmented Reality (AR) technology were not fully investigated. This study takes a unique approach to examine how awe influences recommendation and revisiting intentions through the mediation of rational (e.g., authenticity) and affective (e.g., emotional) mechanisms. Furthermore, our research unveils the role of AR for reinforcing the future intentions of tourists towards a religious site.

Marketing automation influence the marketer’s decisions, enables them to automate traditionally marketing. Customers should receive automated and personalized communications. Marketing automation is the fastest growing tools in terms of adoption among digital marketers because of its capacity to achieve one-to-one communications and marketing tasks without any technical or personal skills.

In a virtual world, firms and individuals are connected through multiple devices and channels, whereby both act as content creators. The relevance of customer co-creation for brand-building in digital environments requires further research (Ramaswamy and Ozcan, 2016). From a growing body of research, a stream suggests that technology is changing the way consumers and firms interact, whereby consumers perceive brand image to be the sum of all brand online and offline information. Another stream assumes that consumers perceive brands as having personality characteristics, which are used to differentiate them from competitors. For this latter approach, Aaker’s (1997) model is widely used to analyse brand personality (BPS). However, no evidences has been found regarding to what extent firms and customers communicate the same brand values. We accomplish this by analysing the brand personality dimensions communicated online by two international hotel chains (Pestana & FourSeasons) and their clients, using two different digital channels, namely: 12 websites and 600 TripAdvisor comments. A content analysis was carried out using the BPS dictionary of WordStat software, created by Opoku et al. (2006), which contains 833 words, divided into the five BPS categories. The results show that most of the content was created by clients (89% of messages). FourSeasons hotels communicate Excitement and Sophistication, whereas Pestana hotels communicate Sincerity and Sophistication. Sincerity is the highest tagged dimension of the BPS references, both for FourSeasons and for Pestana, which suggests that clients tend to perceive both brands as being reputable. In summary, although clients and hotels converge with regards to hotel brand personality traits, distinctive brand personalities emerge.

The paper investigates the Brain Drain in Chinese family business based on a sample of 319 family businesses in China. Using a fuzzy set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA) to uncover different combinations of conditions (pay and welfare, work environment, management style of the leaders, and career planning) that are sufficient to achieve high and low brain drain. The results show that pay and welfare is a necessary but not a sufficient condition by itself to achieve high brain drain. The findings show that three causal recipes are equifinal in achieving high brain drain. The first causal recipe combines high work environment with low level of career planning and with high pay and welfare. The second combines low work environment with high level of career planning and with high pay and welfare. Finally, the third combines high work environment with high level of management style of the leaders and with high pay and welfare. The study also found two causal configurations that are equifinal to achieve low brain drain. Moreover, these combinations are not a mirror of the combinations founded for high brain drain. This study offers several implications to both researchers and business practitioners: It is acquired that in order to prevent brain drain, the pay and welfare of employees should be raised while the management philosophy should pay attention to humans in the first place. Secondly, the leaders need to improve their own quality so as to strengthen the management of family businesses. Finally, a refined human resource system needs to be established. After brain drain, enterprises should perfect their contract constraining mechanism and, bring in suitable talents promptly so that the loss is minimised.

International Joint Venture (IJV) is one of the most popular market entry mode in emerging markets. The instability and stability of IJV have also been receiving ongoing attention in the literature (e.g. Deitz et al. 2010; Kogut 1989; Rhoades & Lush 1997; Sim & Ali 2000). IJV instability and stability are often treated as opposite to one another in the literature, and assumed the factors that account for instability has an inverse impacts on stability. However, conceptually and empirically they are not exactly two contrasting phenomena. This study adopts the perspectives of Superficial Friendship theory (Yan 2010) to differentiate the determinants of IJV instability and stability and empirically compares their determinants. The results indicate that the factors that account for instability do not have inverse impacts on stability. The empirical results not only contribute to an understanding of the different drivers of IJV instability and stability but also have important implications for international business managers in both parents and IJVs with regard to keeping an IJV profitable and successful.

This research examines the influence of network position, identity construction and role playing within business to business (B2B) interactions processes. The framework used as the basis for considering interaction processes developed from the AAR model (Håkansson & Snehota, 1995) and includes: accessing resources; developing actor bonds and conducting activities. There has been little research conducted into network position (Abrahamsen et al., 2012; Schepis et al., 2014); identity construction (Huemer, 2013; Schepis et al., 2014) and role playing (Abrahamsen et al., 2012; Lowe et al., 2012). This research develops a framework for incorporating all three concepts into the interaction process, rather than investigating them individually or paired, commonly undertaken in previous research. The research is conducted within an interpretive paradigm with 20 interviews conducted within the junior mining industry in Western Australia. Interviews were analysed using Leximancer™ and a comparison of the perceptions from companies playing different roles within the network examined. Results highlight that network position is influenced through accessing resources and developing actor bonds; identity construction occurs through developing actor bonds and conducting activities and role playing occurs when conducting activities and accessing resources. A theoretical framework highlights each of the above concepts within the framework of interaction processes. The value of this paper is that the each of these concepts is influenced through different aspects of the interaction process. Thus, highlighting which aspects of the interactions processes managers can adapt to improve their network position, identity construction and role perceptions.

In order to obtain specific magnetic properties, it is of paramount importance to increase the alloy density of components fabricated by powder metallurgy. An alternative to increase the density of alloys such as Fe-49Co-2V would be the use of elemental Fe and Co instead of the pre-alloyed powder. Trying to give some insight on the industrial application of this strategy, this paper investigates the replacement of more conventional pre-alloyed Fe-49Co-2V powders with elemental Fe and Co. A previous analysis shows that it is possible to achieve higher densities and leads to a noticeable improvement in some important magnetic properties.

The present study investigates the behavior of the sintering and hardness of stainless steel samples reinforced with NbC and TaC. Matrixes of pure stainless steel were compacted with addition of up to 3% wt NbC or TaC in a cylindrical die of steel at 700 MPa and sintered in an electrical resistance furnace under argon atmosphere. The sintered samples were characterized by density and hardness measurement, optical microscopy and scanning electron microscopy (SEM). The preliminary results show that the size and distribution of carbides influence in the sintering and hardness of the sintered samples.

Sintered steels are materials characterized by residual porosity, whose dimension and morphology strongly affect the fatigue crack growth behaviour of the material. Prismatic specimens were pressed at from Astaloy CrM powder and sintered varying the sintering temperature and the cooling rate. Optical observations allowed to evaluate the dimensions and the morphology of the porosity and the microstructural characteristics. Fatigue tests were performed to investigate the threshold zone and to calculate the Paris law. Moreover tests were performed to complete the investigation. Both on fatigue and samples a fractographic analysis was carried out to investigate the crack path and the fracture surface features. The results show that the Paris law crack growth exponent is around 6.0 for sintered and around 4.7 for sintered materials. The same dependence to process parameters is not found for .