École Supérieure des Sciences Commerciales d’Angers

This study examines how consumers from individualistic and collectivistic consumer markets form recovery expectations and loyalty intentions in response to service recovery promises and bystander comments on social media. Across two experiments, we find that complainants’ origin fundamentally shapes how they interpret recovery efforts. Individualistic consumers exposed to non-accommodative recovery promises respond more favorably when accompanied by positive consumer comments. In contrast, collectivistic consumers report higher recovery expectations and intentions when the same promises are paired with negative comments. Importantly, bystander comments exert greater influence when companies issue non-accommodative rather than accommodative responses across both markets. This research is the first to reveal that complainant origin (culture) and bystander presence jointly moderate the effects of recovery communications. The findings challenge uniform global customer behavior assumptions and offer actionable insights for managing service failures in global markets. The study advances online service recovery theory.

Scholarly work on corporate social irresponsibility (CSiR) has frequently focussed on incident-based narratives, with more recent studies exploring the complex interplay among various stakeholders and their involvement in perpetuating environmental injustice (EI). Focussing on the relationship between CSiR and EI, we examine the factors that increase the risk of CSiR occurrences, their impact on various stakeholders and related responses, and measures that can prevent or mitigate CSiR. These issues are investigated via means of media discourse analysis (MDA), developing thematic coding using data extracted from various sources in the public domain and available on the internet. Outcomes from the MDA identify a clear and perpetuating link between CSiR and different forms of EI—distributive injustice, procedural injustice, and recognitional injustice. Our findings contribute to the CSiR–EI literature by analysing the structural conditions that reveal and shape the visibility and perceptions of environmental harm; identifying media exposure as a threshold for stakeholder contestation; and offering a typology of CSiR–EI dynamics grounded in sectoral and geographic contexts.

The Bootleggers and Baptists (B B) framework contends that enduring regulatory policies emerge when morally motivated actors (Baptists) provide ethical legitimacy, while economically motivated stakeholders (Bootleggers) discreetly support the measures to advance their own interests. Interestingly, this outcome depends on the support of both groups. We extend the public choice B B theory by showing that Bootleggers can, in some cases, operate without Baptists by using astroturfing—a deceptive practice that simulates grassroots support or public opinion to manipulate perceptions. We identify the conditions—specifically, the absence of genuine Baptists aligned with Bootleggers’ interests and a context dominated by Bootleggers—under which Bootleggers are more likely to fabricate Baptists. Using a transaction cost–inspired framework, we predict that Bootleggers decide whether to ‘make’ an astroturf group or ‘buy’ influence and legitimacy by partnering with genuine Baptists, depending on which arrangement minimizes their transaction costs. We then develop a strategic framework for understanding how Bootleggers tailor astroturfing efforts to manipulate public perception and simulate civic legitimacy.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is increasingly making decisions in healthcare, not just supporting them. This research introduces "agentic loafing" to describe the intentional yet unexamined delegation of decision-making authority from clinicians to AI systems. Using netnography of professional podcasts and secondary analysis of gray literature, this study uncovers three institutional drivers that normalize AI delegation: performance culture conformity, structural isolation of responsibility, and legitimization through quantification. These drivers invert classical delegation theory. Where traditional delegation assumes monitoring, punishment, and shared objectives, AI delegation thrives in their absence. This inversion produces what this research terms "risk evaporation": the systematic disappearance of accountability when AI-assisted decisions fail, leaving no single party responsible. To help organizations manage this risk, this research also develops a "preliminary" diagnostic tool, with its intersectional interventions, that transforms "agentic loafing" from an unmanaged bet into a measurable risk score. From this, a critical implication follows for risk analysis: the most dangerous AI systems are not those that fail unpredictably but those that function just reliably enough to quietly erode human judgment without ever triggering an alarm.

This study draws on the Job Demands–Resources (JD-R) model and transactional theory of stress (TTS) to unpack the processes through which high-performance work systems (HPWSs) influence employee job performance. Central to this integration is the appraisal process through which employees interpret HPWS-induced demands as either threatening or challenging. Building on the JD-R model, our results suggest that HPWSs are positively related to performance pressure. In line with TTS, when performance pressure is appraised as a threat, HPWSs increase psychological stress. However, when performance pressure is appraised as a challenge HPWSs enhance job performance. While this supports the conflicting-outcomes perspective, showing that HPWSs are indirectly related to both stress and job performance, no evidence was found that HPWSs improve job performance through stress. Finally, the dispositional trait of grit was found to moderate employee appraisals of, and responses to, performance pressure. Implications for theory and practice are discussed.