Search Results (22)

Digital franchising is increasingly recognized as a technological advancement and a specialized subset of e-commerce, yet its unique entrepreneurial dynamics remain insufficiently explored in the existing literature. Previous studies have primarily focused on platform usability or general e-commerce adoption, often overlooking the motivational, contextual, and capability-based factors that influence individuals’ willingness to engage in digital franchising as either entrepreneurs or consumers. To address this research gap, the present study applies the Motivation-Opportunity-Ability (MOA) framework to examine how personal motivations (e.g., self-expression, financial rewards), perceived platform opportunities (e.g., support, attractiveness), and individual capabilities (e.g., digital literacy, self-efficacy) shape entrepreneurial intention and, in turn, influence consumption adoption intention in digital franchising environments. An online survey was conducted using a non-probability purposive sampling method. The final sample consisted of 491 respondents from Taiwan, all of whom were either entrepreneurs operating digital franchises in the fashion industry or consumers who had purchased fashion products through digital franchising platforms, thereby ensuring contextual relevance to the study’s focus. Data were analyzed using structural equation modeling (SEM). The results indicate that expected external rewards (β = 0.456, p < 0.001) and platform support (β = 0.315, p < 0.001) are the most influential factors in shaping entrepreneurial intention. Furthermore, entrepreneurial intention significantly mediates the relationship between MOA antecedents and consumption adoption intention (β = 0.176, p < 0.001), highlighting its role as a key behavioral mechanism. These findings extend the MOA framework to a new empirical setting and offer practical implications for platform developers, franchisors, and policymakers seeking to promote participation in digital franchising. Future research is encouraged to explore cross-industry comparisons, generational differences, and longitudinal approaches to further enrich the understanding of digital franchising adoption dynamics. Full article

This essay explores the political dynamics of the Godzilla film franchise over the past 70 years, arguing that critical and scholarly characterizations commonly oversimplify the movies’ complicated messages, which reflect the complex, often contradictory responses of Japanese filmmakers and audiences to the experiences of war, the atomic bombings, defeat, occupation, lasting subordination to the United States, and a seemingly endless postwar period. The analysis focuses on Honda Ishirō’s Gojira (1954), in which pacifist sentiments are tempered by depictions of military weaponry and patriotic pride, and Yamazaki Takashi’s Godzilla Minus One (2023), where ahistorical narratives, misty-eyed nostalgia, and ultranationalist tropes co-exist with strong anti-authoritarian and anti-establishment themes. By contextualizing these two films within the contested history of early postwar Japan and the polarized politics of the early twenty-first century, this essay suggests that the Godzilla series has shown remarkable continuities over time and has captured the profound ambivalence with which the Japanese people have negotiated memory, nationalism, and the charged relationship between Japan and the United States since the end of World War II. Full article

In this article, I analyse the function of supporting child-characters in contemporary videogames. I integrate Stephen Zimmerly’s typology of sidekicks in Young Adult literature with critical writing on the ‘Daddening’ of videogames, a coinage that refers to the rise in the number of videogames that centre on the filial bond between a father figure and a child. Bringing these ideas into conversation with each other allows me to expand Zimmerly’s sidekick typology to include the ‘Ludic Gateway’, the ‘Morality Certificate’, and the ‘Disciplinary Tool’. I explore each category in greater depth using two case studies: The Last of Us series (2012; 2014; 2020) and the God of War series (2008; 2018; 2022). These commercially successful, critically acclaimed franchises rely on young deuteragonists to humanize and redeem the gruff, aggressive, violent male player character. Furthermore, the child sidekicks also serve to regulate the player’s in-game behaviour by way of a parasocial relationship. Using a close reading approach, I demonstrate that the supporting child-characters function as meta-critical devices to discipline gaming communities and the video game medium itself. Full article

The Star Trek franchise’s depiction of artificial intelligence (AI) and affiliated technologies—namely, supercomputers, androids, and holograms—evokes common themes and motifs from the myths of the ancient Mediterranean. This article analyzes the mythological underpinnings of Star Trek’s historical treatment and approach to AI, from The Original Series to The Next Generation and up through the newest additions to the canon, Short Treks, and Picard. AI in Star Trek, like Data, the Doctor, and Zora, expresses qualities associated with divinity: superhuman strength, intelligence, and agelessness. These very qualities distinguish them from humans and bar them from considerations of personhood. Like the Greek gods of myth, AI can present as immortal, which fundamentally distinguishes it from mortal humans, as seen in the tensions between gods and humans in Homer’s Odyssey and the Homeric Hymns. The ancient tension between mortal and immortal is manifested in the combative relationship between organic creator and artificial creation, a common sci-fi trope, that can lead to a cycle of fear and hostility evocative of the divine generational warfare in Hesiod’s Theogony. The artificial–organic tension resonates with the contemporary audience’s conflicted experiences with evolving technologies and problematizes the show’s presentation of the evolution of humanity into a posthuman existence. Just as mythology is used to consider humanity relative to the divine, narratives about AI are fertile ground to analyze what it means to be human and establish parameters for what is decidedly not human. Full article

The COVID-19 pandemic has dramatically impacted the beverage industry. It directly causes job losses, reduced income, and changes in customer preferences, and it influences the relationship between franchisors and franchisees. COVID-19 has spread rapidly around the world in the past two years. Meanwhile, the impact has reverberated from abroad to the headquarters of companies in Taiwan. Eight Taiwanese food and beverage brands saw steep drops in sales as the pandemic grew in severity. Thus, it is important to identify the critical elements of running a franchise store. Collected with Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) technology, the results show that the five key factors in franchises are going direct-to-consumer, establishing a B2B portal for distributors, assessing supply chain elastic limit, optimizing inventory, and streamlining e-commerce to meet changing customer needs. Guidelines and directions are provided for decision-makers through this study to design mobile applications in the simplest platform. Full article

Chinese state-endorsed films have transformed in the past decade. These films make up the “new mainstream”, a genre defined by its ability to match strides with Hollywood commercial cinema. But, what exactly comprises Hollywood’s impact on official Chinese media? How does it manifest onscreen? Exploring the relationship between state-endorsed blockbusters and Hollywood, this article analyzes a pioneer of the “new mainstream”, Wolf Warrior II (2017). This film stands out as the inaugural collaboration between Chinese media conglomerates and Marvel Cinematic Universe directors. From this collaboration emerges the film’s protagonist, Leng Feng, an ex-soldier who saves civilians from rebel forces in Africa. As Leng enacts justice at home and abroad, however, affective portrayals of his feats foreground ambiguity over coherence and unresolvable impulses over a singular agendum. These melodramatic sites of contradiction, I argue, culminate in the film’s own “global superhero vernacular”. Such a vernacular aligns with transnationally circulating serial franchise logics, pushing the film’s connection with Marvel beyond local–global and state–market binaries. Ultimately, my analysis complicates the smooth thread that links together the superhuman individual, nationalist sovereign power, and international order, thereby re-evaluating state-endorsed cinema’s role within Chinese media cultures and social fields. Full article

As franchising provides several benefits to both corporations and small business owners, a growing number of contracts have been written through which corporations offer the right to use their brand name and business model, and small business owners pay fees for accepting the offers. In this franchisor–franchisee market, the franchise fee plays a pricing role in the exchange between two parties. In this context, we investigate the influence of franchisors’ strategic pricing approaches (i.e., cost- and value-based approaches) on franchise fee decisions. Furthermore, by examining the moderating effect of the competitive condition on the relationships between pricing approaches and franchise fees, we uncover franchisors’ pricing practices in greater detail. The results show that both pricing approaches have significant influences on franchise fee decisions, and the competitive condition moderates the relationship between the value-based approach and franchise fees but does not moderate the relationship between the cost-based approach and franchise fees. The findings contribute to the franchising and pricing literature and to industry practitioners. Full article

The extraction of rural buildings from remote sensing images plays a critical role in the development of rural areas. However, automatic building extraction has a challenge because of the diverse types of buildings and complex backgrounds. In this paper, we proposed a two-layer clustering framework named gCRF_U-Net for the extraction of rural buildings. Before the building extraction, the potential built-up areas are firstly detected, which are taken as a constraint for building extraction. Then, the U-Net network is employed to obtain the prior probability of the potential buildings. After this, the calculated probability and the satellite image are put into the generalized Chinese restaurant franchise (gCRF) model to cluster for buildings and non-buildings. In addition, it is worth noting that the hierarchical spatial relationship in the images is clarified for the building extraction. According to the compared experiments on the satellite images and public building datasets, the results show that the proposed method has a better performance, compared with other methods based on the same unified hierarchical models, in terms of quantitative and qualitative evaluation. Full article

A franchise business is a contractual relationship in which the franchisor and franchisee should cooperate to promote sustainable growth of their franchise entities. However, it is still unclear whether the relationship between franchisees and franchisors is a principal–agent or a business partner sharing a business goal. Thus, this study is a first attempt to investigate the relationship between franchisees and franchises using metafrontier and bootstrap DEA from the perspective of efficiency. We measured the efficiency of coffee franchises in Korea, which have grown rapidly in recent years despite the COVID-19 pandemic. Based on the bootstrap DEA results, there was a statistically significant difference in efficiency between franchisors and franchisees under the variable return-to-scale assumption. While the main cause of inefficiency in premium coffee chains is attributed to scale inefficiency, most franchisees have pure technological inefficiency. Thus, coffee franchisees can improve the operational efficiency by adjusting their business scale and reallocating service resources. This study demonstrates tailored operational plans to improve the operational efficiency of premium and mainstream coffee franchises and offers strategic initiatives to decrease the difference in efficiency between franchisors and franchisees. Full article

Previous literature has acknowledged franchising as a great way for businesses to expand into new areas and opportunities. It has become a popular option for those who are looking to start their businesses by choosing a well-known company’s brand name and a ready-made business operation, or existing entrepreneurs who want to franchise their firms. Franchising a business contributes to the GDP of the countries involved, including Malaysia. However, little is known about what drives the growth of franchised firms, particularly in emerging countries such as Malaysia. Hence, this study aims to identify the growth factors of franchising, from both the franchisors’ and franchisees’ viewpoints. Therefore, from this dyad relationship, the analysis can provide comprehensive views of the growth factors of franchises. Interestingly, as this study was conducted during the pandemic COVID-19, the findings would include the pandemic situation that reflects the business environment. Therefore, the case study method was adopted, which involved semi-structured interviews with five service firms from two different brands, including franchisors and franchisees. The findings show that three growth factors emerged from this study: product and service innovation, franchisor-franchisee tolerance, and government support. This study contributes to obtaining a deeper grasp of the growth factors of franchisors and franchisees. Moreover, this study contributes to developing an effective franchising business process model as guidance for franchisors, franchisees and policymakers. This study also provides avenues for future research. Full article

Since the world was hit by the COVID-19 pandemic crisis that began in December 2019, many industries have been affected, including the franchise industry in Malaysia. Thus, the COVID-19 pandemic has had a great impact on business survival. Direct effects can be seen in reduced income, job losses, changes in customer preferences, and business relationships between franchisors and franchisees. Some franchises have had to close their operations, and others still struggled to survive during the pandemic crisis. In addressing this situation, the role of government is crucial in supporting the resilience of these franchisor entrepreneurs in an increasingly worrisome situation around the world. However, the existing literature that focuses on the role of government in developing countries such as Malaysia is still poorly understood. In addition, a study of the Malaysian franchising industry during the pandemic crisis is still inadequate, especially concerning the government’s role in the survival of local franchises during the pandemic era. Therefore, understanding the role of the government in advocating the survival of local Malaysian franchises is worth studying. A qualitative research approach was applied through multiple cases involving twelve (12) franchise business owners and four (4) franchise-related agencies in Malaysia. In-depth interviews were conducted in exploring this topic. Thematic analysis has been used by applying “Atlas.ti” in analysing the data. Hence, the findings have indicated four themes from the grounded data. There are: (i) financial assistance; (ii) virtual franchise exhibition; (iii) training and support; and (iv) business development grants. This study is expected to highlight the role of government as well as agencies involved with the franchising industry in improving policies, strategies, and programs to ensure the viability of the franchise industry during periods of pandemic outbreaks. Full article

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the relationship between a firm’s capital structure (i.e., leverage) and its operating environment, taking into account firm (i.e., efficiency, asset structure, profitability, size, age and risk) and industry effects. For a sample of Greek pharmaceutical, cosmetic and detergent (PCD) enterprises, firm efficiency was estimated using bootstrapped data envelopment analysis (DEA), and a leverage model was produced using ordinary least squares (OLS) regression. The findings confirm the significance of firm efficiency (i.e., the franchise-value hypothesis over the efficiency-risk hypothesis) and asset structure on leverage. Efficiency and overall and short-term leverage have a significant negative relationship, indicating that more efficient firms tend to choose a relatively low debt ratio. Pharma firms are more affected since they are less efficient than cosmetics and detergents firms. Furthermore, asset structure and short- and long- term leverage have a significant negative and positive relationship, respectively, indicating that the firms with more tangible assets have less short-term debt and more long-term debt in their capital structure. Cosmetic and detergent firms, which have slightly more tangible assets than pharma firms, appear to be able to substitute high-cost, short-term debt with the low-cost, long-term debt by using such assets as collateral. Full article

During the COVID-19 pandemic, hospitality employees face a tremendous amount of job stress due to the decline in revenue and close contact with people. This study has three aims: first, to analyse the status quo of organizational-climate job stress on employee wellness in the hospitality industry during COVID-19; second, to discuss the correlation between organizational-climate job stress and employee wellness in the hospitality industry; and third, to analyze the associations between of personal background and organizational climate on job stress and wellness in the hospitality industry. This research uses a survey method to examine these issues. Participants were employees of franchise hotel branches in Taipei City, which yielded 295 effective sample sizes from five chain hotels. The personal background factor questionnaire, organizational climate questionnaire, job stress questionnaire, and wellness questionnaire served as the main research tools. In this study, Factor analysis, Pearson Correlation and Multiple Regression Analysis were used for sample analysis. The results revealed a significant relationship between organizational-climate job stress with wellness. Personal background factors, organizational climate, and job stress would affect the wellness of employees. As a result, the present research provides empirical evidence for the impact of organizational climate and job stress on employee wellness in the hospitality industry in Taiwan during COVID-19. The study’s findings, as well as its theoretical and practical implications, are discussed. The main contribution of this study is that the results serve as a reference for hospitality business owners to design better organizational environments for their employees, plan human-resource-related strategies, and provide training for their employees during a pandemic. Full article

Nowadays, due to the complexity of the relationships with external entities, along with the importance that traditional media and the innovative social media have in creating competitive advantages, it is necessary for companies to collaborate in order to create Intellectual Capital (IC). Although collaboration is crucial to create IC, there is a paucity in literature regarding the effects that a specific type of collaboration may have on the IC of an organisation, specifically a franchising with a mediatic actor. Moreover, literature addressing IC creation and destruction over time is scarce, especially when applied to the construction industry. This paper’s goal is twofold: understanding the longitudinal changes of a construction SME’s Intellectual Capital, regarding its creation and destruction; analysing the impact that a specific inter-organisational collaboration franchising—with a mediatic actor may have on such IC. A single in-depth case study was conducted, allowing to conclude that the actions of an organisation can develop both Intellectual Assets and Intellectual Liabilities. It was also concluded that inter-organisational collaboration, through a franchise with an actor with experience in communication, can generate, in the long term, positive and innovative effects regarding the different IC components, namely the Relational one. More specifically, the paper allowed to ascertain that an organisation’s IC changes over time in a dynamic fashion, i.e., Intellectual Liabilities which emerged before an innovative collaboration can be transformed into Intellectual Assets and create competitive advantages. This paper contributes to stress the importance of managing IC, not only when it is created, but namely in when it can be destroyed, in a context of inter-organisational collaborations applied to a construction SME. Full article

Franchising has long been a method by which organizations seek to expand and facilitate local market development. However, franchising as a growth strategy can often be hampered by lack of suitable franchisees. To mitigate this shortage, some franchisors have engaged in recruiting franchisees internally from the ranks of their employees in addition to the traditional approach of recruiting franchisees externally. Predominantly franchisees are individuals rather than corporations and thus purchasing a franchise should most commonly be characterized as a consumer acquisition. To explore the relationship between subjective knowledge, perceived risk, and information search behaviors when purchasing a franchise qualitative interviews were conducted with franchisees from the restaurant industry. Half of these respondents were externally recruited having never worked for the franchisor and half were internally recruited having previously been employees of the franchisor. The external recruits expressed a strong desire to own their own business and engaged in extensive decision-making processes with significant information search when purchasing their franchises. Contrastingly, the internal recruits expressed a strong desire to be their own boss and engaged in limited, bordering on habitual decision-making processes with negligible information search when acquiring their franchises. The results reveal that differences in subjective knowledge and perceived risk appear to significantly impact the extent of information search between these two groups. A model of the relationship between subjective knowledge, perceived risk and information search in the purchasing of a franchise is developed that reconciles these findings. The findings also have practical implications for franchisors’ franchisee recruiting efforts which are integral to their capacity to develop local markets. Full article