Artificial intelligence (AI) is transforming service industries by enabling personalised experiences that enhance customer satisfaction and operational efficiency. Despite its growing significance, research on AI-powered personalisation remains fragmented, being dominant by technicality and with limited consensus on conceptualisation, theoretical frameworks, key concepts, and typologies. This paper addresses these shortcomings through a structured review of 201 journal articles published between 2006 and 2024 using the Theory-Context-Method-Characteristic (TCMC) framework. The review offers valuable theoretical contributions and practical implications. First, it bridges service and computer science literature through a unified analytic framework and develops an updated conceptualisation of AI-powered personalisation. Second, major research gaps are identified, including limited theory-driven inquiry, concentration on tourism and hospitality contexts, an overreliance on algorithm optimisation methods (i.e., algorithm-based experiments), and insufficient attention to personalisation features, consumer psychology, and non-customer stakeholders. Third, a forward-looking agenda is proposed, emphasising stronger theoretical grounding, broader cross-industry/ cross-country research, and deeper examination of emotion-aware and anthropomorphic AI. Finally, for practitioners, the findings underscore that responsible and high-impact AI-powered personalisation hinges on three pillars: transparent data governance, intuitive and low-friction AI touchpoints, and a workforce equipped to manage and complement advanced AI systems.
Growing sustainability claims in tourism have intensified concerns about credibility and greenwashing. This study examines how tourists interpret environmental practices by analyzing 138,683 online reviews from major Southeast and East Asian coastal and island destinations. Drawing on signaling theory and attribution theory, the study proposes that observable sustainability cues are associated with eco-authenticity inference, which is linked to green trust and, in turn, more positive review sentiment. Using natural language processing, topic modeling, regression analysis, mediation analysis, and robustness checks for sparse text-derived variables, the findings show a positive association between eco-signal richness and eco-authenticity inference, as well as a significant indirect association from eco-authenticity inference to sentiment through green trust. Eco-authenticity inference is not directly associated with more positive sentiment once green trust is included. Because the focal sustainability, authenticity, and trust expressions are infrequent and have median values of zero, the findings identify a consistent but sparse textual pattern rather than a large or pervasive psychological effect. Because the Valence Aware Dictionary and sEntiment Reasoner (VADER) is English-oriented, VADER-based sentiment models were also checked using the English-language subset; the qualitative pattern remained consistent. Topic modeling provides supplementary contextual evidence that sustainability discourse in reviews is episodic and grounded in concrete visitor experiences. Practically, the findings suggest that destinations and tourism providers should make sustainability practices visible, verifiable, and experience-based rather than relying on abstract promotional claims.
Recently, China witnessed a rapidly growing interest among urban women in bodybuilding and fitness. They made up nearly 62% of gym members nationwide by 2022 (Santi Yundong Shuju Zhongxin, 2023), and more than 13,000 women had competed in professional bodybuilding contests by 2023. With slightly plump slenderness being a traditional marker of feminine health and beauty (Jung, 2018), what motivates women to take up strength-training? What bodies do they consider “beautiful”? Using the concept of post-feminist healthism (Evans et al., 2018) to frame ethnographic fieldwork data gathered in Kunming, we maintain that socio-economic anxieties about the “disordered body” drive urban women to epitomize the bodies of Western-style fitness competitors as “healthy beauty.” Contrary to the individualistic neoliberalism embedded in post-feminist healthism, however, the Chinese iteration is also strongly shaped by the family, the nation-state, and pre-existing ideals of femininity and bodily restraint. As much as advertisements sell the hope of achieving the desired “healthy beautiful” body, most women cannot attain it unless they too restrict their diets and train like professional fitness athletes. Thus, our research highlights how post-feminist healthism needs further qualification in China.
PurposeThis study aims to investigate the institutional determinants of firms' environmental, social and governance (ESG) performance. Drawing on stakeholder and institutional theories, the authors examine how three distinct types of national institutions - formal, informal and financial market institutions - shape firms' ESG performance. By analyzing the differential effects of these institutional types on each component of ESG performance, the study offers a more nuanced understanding of the relationship between institutional environments and corporate social performance.Design/methodology/approachThe authors developed and tested a multi-source data set analyzing the ESG performance of 3,872 firms across 49 countries over 15 years (2002-2016) using data from the ASSET4 database. To assess the relationships between the three types of institutions and firms' ESG performance, the authors used multilevel random-effects models with lagged independent variables.FindingsThis research provides a comprehensive analysis that links specific types of institutions to each component of ESG performance, rather than to aggregate corporate social responsibility performance. It advances stakeholder and institutional theories by demonstrating how distinct stakeholder groups - represented through different institutional arrangements - shape specific ESG outcomes, thereby offering valuable insights for policymakers and managers.Originality/valueThis study provides a comprehensive examination of how distinct types of institutions are linked to individual ESG dimensions.
