Journal of Business and Retail Management Research

In this secondary research study the question was researched to establish how entrepreneurs’ measure success in South Africa. In South Africa entrepreneurs’ measure success by evaluating the profitability of the business; the reasons for starting such a business and effective managing of business information. Growing customer is indicated as the least important measuring criteria for the success of an entrepreneurial small business. This research concludes that South Africa has too few people with entrepreneurial small business managing qualities which hamper measuring of the success of an entrepreneurial small business. Most entrepreneurial small businesses measure their success only by profitability which is a short term outlook. May be that is why so many entrepreneurial small businesses are unsuccessful leading to a situation where the South African economy performs poorly because only a few people succeed as real entrepreneurs small business owners.

This research focuses on how the factors influencing the characteristics and the words-of-mouth effect influences the consumer’s purchase decision. Especially, it was researched how the word-of-mouth influences the characteristics of social commerce and purchase decision. As a result, decision-making support system and social influence seemed to have variables and influences on word-of-mouth effect, and cost-reducing and impulse buying did not seem to have any variables or influences on the word-of-mouth effect. Also, the variables influencing the characteristic of social commerce and word-of-mouth effect seemed to influence the purchase decisions of the consumer. The variables influencing the word-of-mouth effect seemed to be influenced much greatly by the characteristics of the sender and the receiver rather than the characteristic of the message. This research has revealed that the word-of-mouth effect of social commerce influenced the purchase decisions of customers using social commerce. The significance of this research is in providing the basis for more efficient and effective marketing by social commerce corporations.

The purpose of paper is to examine the corporate governance attributes that will influence the capital structure of the Malaysian family-owned company. More specifically, this study divides into two objectives which are to examine the relationship between corporate governance and capital structure of the Malaysian family-owned company and to examine whether corporate governance has a significant impact on the capital structure of the Malaysian family-owned company. This study will establish whether capital structure is determined by the various corporate governance attributes, namely board of director size, board of director composition, board of director financial expertise, Chief Executive Officer (CEO) duality role, and Chief Executive Officer (CEO) tenure. This paper employed the family-owned company listed in main market of Bursa Malaysia and yet, the selection of listed family-owned companies based on the prior literature. The sample of 195 companies has met the characteristic of family-owned companies and the study covers three years observations which are 2009, 2010, and 2011 collected from annual report as data for non financial attributes The general findings show that there is a significant negative relationship between board composition and debt ratio, long-term debt ratio and short-term debt ratio which indicates that high proportion of board composition is associated with lower debt ratio and long-term debt ratio which is there is low dependent on debt financing and CEO tenure and capital structure also has significant relationship, but only with long-term debt ratio. This suggests the longer tenure will lower the dependent on the debt financing.

Most of the existing literature in the FDI-political risk nexus has focused on the creation of economic models to assess foreign investment decisions in the presence of political risk. This is entirely legitimate and valuable as foreign investors are interested in assessing the political risk climate of their investment location. However, not much research has been done to assess how FDI could affect political risk. Globalization implies an increasing amount of cross-border investment and trade flows. For some countries, FDI is a huge component of their GDP. Since FDI is a composite bundle of capital stock, knowledge and technology (Balasubramanyam et al, 1996) and represents “International investment made with the objective of obtaining a lasting interest, by a resident entity in one economy in an enterprise resident in another economy” (OECD, 2000), we postulate that because of this stakeholder commitment, FDI could affect a country’s political risk level. The management literature has it that political risk measures the stability of individual countries based on factors grounded in government, society, security, and the economy (Bremmer, 2005). We expand on this notion to investigate whether, and if so, how FDI affects political risk? We believe that the contribution of our study is specifically in examining this reverse relationship running from FDI to political risk. In this preliminary paper we test this hypothesis for a sample of thirty countries in various stages of economic development and regime types over the 1984-2012 period. Preliminary results indicate that countries with increased FDI inflows demonstrate decreased levels of political risk. Although there are variations across countries, country groups that are considered developed and full democracies tend to exhibit the lowest levels of political risk. Our ongoing research is examining a sample of 140 countries using both time series and panel data techniques.

Knowledge is an important topic in modern management. Knowledge considers the new wealth of organizations by which superior business performance and a competitive advantage can be achieved. The primary objective of this research aims to investigate the influence of knowledge management to organizational innovativeness, business competitiveness and potential operation via competitive intensity and market turbulence as a moderator. Data were collected from 104 electrics and electronics businesses in Thailand. Multiple linear regression was performed in this study. The results indicated that the dimensions of knowledge management, namely, knowledge transfer affect product innovativeness and knowledge application affect product innovativeness, process innovativeness, and potential operation. While the competitive intensity and market turbulence not shown moderator effect. The implications of the results of the study are discussed.

The main purpose of the study is to identify the economic, cultural and demographic determinants of life insurance consumption for 28 European countries. The study used panel data analysis techniques over the post financial crisis period 2009-2014 and considers many of the emerging Eastern European economies where there have been significant insurance sectors reforms recently. Europe is the largest insurance market with 35% of the overall insurance premium contribution but ranked third in insurance per capita in 2014, hence Europe is an interesting region to study the insurance demand. Among the explanatory variables assumed in the study, gross savings, inflation, GDP and openness of economy (economic variables), population (demographic variable), power distance, uncertainty avoidance, long term orientation and individualism (cultural variables) have been observed to have a significant impact on life insurance demand in the European region.

Information security is an important activity which is vital for corporate or organizational activities. However, focusing only on the strengthening for the performance of information security may act as a factor increasing the techno-stress the members of the organization feel. This study inquired into the impacts of information security techno-stress on individual job satisfaction and empirically verified the relationship between information security techno-stress and individual job satisfaction, preceding factors and results, regarding how to use information security effectively. The results of the analysis, the strengthening of information security caused techno-stress, and the information security techno-stress had negative impacts on individual jot satisfaction. As security is inclined to technical countermeasures, security technology is further strengthened, and accordingly, the techno-stress of the members of the organization increases, while on the other hand, individual job efficiently decreases, which is judged that this will have negative impacts on the personal performance in the organization.

In today’s world, Mexico and Chile are nations with growing economic development. Both have different and interesting histories leading to that growth and have had to design in recent years, public policies which contribute to the accumulation of capital. One of the principal sources of capital is the attraction of foreign direct investment – which, starting with its normative aspect – and proceeding to the attraction of investment flows, have had to be modified lately. According to the theory of the creation of new determinants, the probability of improving some determinants will contribute to an increase in attracting foreign direct investment flows to the receiving state. This research demonstrates that once the theory mentioned above has been applied to Mexico and Chile, the results shows that both nations attracted more FDI flows. For the case of Mexico, the skilled labor as well as low cost labor, tax incentives and natural resources contributed to get more inflows and for the case of Chile, inflows increased because it offers tax incentives, a better legal framework and an industrial policy focus on FDI to international investors. It is also remarkable that in both cases, they use regularly other determinants to attract FDI such as infrastructure, gross domestic product, geographical location, and the like.

Numerous studies have been conducted in Islamic compliant securities, and yet the debate surrounding whether these securities have a significant influence on the stock market rages on. This paper therefore examines the effects of changes in dividend announcements in respect to the conventional and Shari’ah compliant stocks on Malaysian stock market returns. In addition, the investigation will be conducted based on five different economic conditions namely for the: (1) overall period (1990-2010); (2) before the Asian financial crisis (1990-1996); (3) during the Asian financial crisis (1997-1998); (4) after the Asian financial crisis (1999-2007); and (5) during the global financial crisis (2008-2010).Our findings reveal that the changes in dividend announcements of Shari’ah compliant stocks had a significant effect on the Malaysian stock market returns compared to the conventional stocks for every economic condition, except for the period during the global financial crisis. The findings indicate that the Malaysian investors are more sensitive with changes in dividends of Shari’ah compliant stocks rather than the conventional stocks.

Inventory management represents a key success factor that shows how efficient a company is controlling its inventories. However, there is little information on inventory management practice in a small business setting. Therefore, this study examines the current state of inventory management practices and factors that influence their use in micro retailing enterprises. A questionnaire survey was employed to gather data from the targeted respondents. Using 100 completed replies, the results demonstrate that most responding enterprises have adopted both unsystematic and systematic inventory management approaches in their business. A fully systematic approach of inventory management was only utilized by 33 per cent of the total respondents. In terms of inventory management techniques used, ‘the rule of thumb’ is the most popular among respondents. Meanwhile, EOQ, Bar Code Tagging and VMI are only applied by a small number of respondents. The results also indicate that Purchasing and Controlling are the most frequent inventory management activities applied by micro enterprises as opposed to Storage and Tracing. Finally, the results suggest that owner/managers’ attitude and knowledge in inventory management have significant and positive influences on inventory management practices. On the other hand, the cost factor has a significant and negative influence on inventory management practices. Thus, all three proposed hypotheses developed in this study are supported.

Formulated on resource based view of the firm, the purpose of this study is to investigate the effects of enterprise resource planning system (ERP) adoption within the firm and e-business between firm and business partners for competitive advantage. The relationship between competitive advantage and firm performance is also investigated. Mailed-questionnaire is determined as a data collection instrument distributed to listed companies that are registered on the Stock Exchange of Thailand. Hence, 122 completed questionnaires are used in the analysis. The results indicate that ERP adoption within the firm and e-business between firms positively impact competitive advantage. The positive relationship between competitive advantage and firm performance is also established. In addition, this research discovers the positive effects of the introducing of ERP within the firm and e-business between firms for competitive advantage.

Deregulation, privatization and the change in international rules on trade in services led to the increase in the number of private higher education institutions and international branch campuses in the Arab Gulf region. With the inspiration to shift to a knowledge-based economy and to prepare graduates to meet the needs of the public and the private sectors, recent initiatives in higher education in these countries have been either mostly state-driven or mostly market-driven, with varying degree of success. These initiatives required changes in the regulatory environment and did not fully address the challenges faced in the higher education sector. The paper examines the rationales and strategies used by six countries in the Arab Gulf, which are working towards positioning themselves as regional education hubs, highlighting the challenges and the areas that require further study.

This study is aimed at evaluating the architectural factors attracting customers to shop in the Malaysian shopping malls. Studies in the past, focused attention primarily on the provisions of various shopping items that attract customers to a mall without given due considerations to the architectural factors. The architectural factors were evaluated using five point Liker scales, which is used to obtain mean scores of the factors that attract customers. A questionnaire survey was administered to major customers patronizing Malaysian shopping malls. The customers were randomly selected. The architectural factors attracting customers to shop in the Malaysian shopping malls were ranked using Friedman’s comparison test. The results indicated significant differences in the customers ranking of the factors. This study is limited to the customers patronizing Malaysian shopping malls. The study provided the criteria for an evaluation of the architectural factors that attract customers to shop in the malls. The study also provides information to the developers of shopping malls in developing countries for an improved business growth. The study created bases for self-evaluation and competition among the developers of shopping malls for the enhancement of productivity and general contribution to the country’s GDP. This study emanated from the governmental reports and past research in the area of retailing businesses in Malaysia. Finally, the study recommended developing shopping malls in certain locations, provision of facilities and services and constructions of malls with high quality materials and nice aesthetics beautification.

This study looked at the factors that would attract employees towards an ‘Employer of Choice’. The study explored an analysis into the previous addressed literature along with exploratory sets of interviews held with fresh graduates and five focus groups working in various organizations. This resulted into a set of proposed factors which were compiled in the form of a questionnaire and distributed among 2000 individuals across various domains. Statistical results revealed a number of factors with relatively high importance that were grouped based on their relatedness into a proposed framework to define the factors that constitute ‘an employer of choice’. Future research should extend to other sectors to enhance the process of the generalization of the results.