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Situated in the context of India, where women’s representation on corporate boards remains low, this study aims to explore whether and how tokenism impacts the behaviours of female directors.

The boardroom experiences and perceptions of 14 women directors are explored through semi-structured interviews and analysed using an inductive and interpretive process. Also, to get a counter perspective and avoid the social desirability bias from the women participants’ responses, 16 men directors are interviewed.

The study finds that, as gender minorities, women directors' visibility on boards can create performance pressures on these women. To counter gender-based prejudices, women directors consciously alter their behaviours and project both male and female traits consistent with the director role. By doing so, women directors overcome tokenistic stereotypes and are accepted as part of the director in-group, irrespective of their numeric representation on the board.

The research has implications for governments attempting to increase women’s board presence through affirmative actions and for firms aiming to improve the gender diversity of their board composition.

These findings present an alternative perspective on women directors’ board behaviour by exploring the applicability of Western trends on tokenism and critical mass in the context of India, adding to the vast body of literature concerned with minorities on corporate boards.

The authors investigate the adoption of nomination committees in Australia and identify the managerial power perspective as one explanation for firms not establishing nomination committees. A positive outcome of establishing a nomination committee from the perspective of board diversity is also examined.

The authors adopt an archival approach by collecting data for firms listed on the Australian Securities Exchange (ASX) during the period 2010 to 2018. The authors establish the prevalence of nomination committees for small medium and large Australian firms. Regression analyses are used to determine whether the power of the chief executive officer (CEO) influences the adoption of a nomination committee. The association between having nomination committee and board diversity is also analyzed using regression analyses.

Less than half of firms adopt a nomination committee. Larger firms are more likely to adopt a nomination committee than medium and smaller sized firms. Firms with less powerful CEOs are more likely to adopt a nomination committee. Adoption of a nomination committee is also associated with greater board tenure dispersion and board gender diversity in medium and smaller sized firms.

Evidence on nomination committees provides original research that extends previous research focusing on the audit, risk and remuneration committees and samples restricted to large firms. The nomination committee has an important role to play in the appointment of directors yet limited evidence exists of the adoption rate, explanation for non-adoption and benefits of adoption. The authors add to this evidence.

The purpose of this paper is to explore why different directors feel different levels of accountability toward board tasks.

The paper employs a reflexive three wave data and analysis process culminating in a rich data set of 49 interviews with Australian directors and 15 h of boardroom observations.

Differences in role identification lead directors to perceive their accountability differently resulting in wide variation in levels of firm specific knowledge, eventually affecting their breadth of contribution to board tasks.

Researchers should question the application of traditional governance theory (such as agency theory) if it fails to account for individual differences in intrinsic self-interest.

Selecting board members for their functional knowledge alone may not always produce optimal outcomes for the board and firm. Board induction processes and ongoing director training are important tools to inform and remind directors of their role and accountabilities on a board.

This paper establishes that the strength of directors' identification with either the director role or expert role affects what they feel accountable for, the development of firm specific knowledge and long-term efficacy as a director.

Director selection is an important yet under-researched topic. The purpose of this paper is to contribute to extant literature by gaining a greater understanding into how and why new board members are recruited.

This exploratory study uses in-depth interviews with Australian non-executive directors to identify what selection criteria are deemed most important when selecting new director candidates and how selection practices vary between organisations.

The findings indicate that appointments to the board are based on two key attributes: first, the candidates’ ability to contribute complementary skills and second, the candidates’ ability to work well with the existing board. Despite commonality in these broad criteria, board selection approaches vary considerably between organisations. As a result, some boards do not adequately assess both criteria when appointing a new director hence increasing the chance of a mis-fit between the position and the appointed director.

The study highlights the importance of both individual technical capabilities and social compatibility in director selections. The authors introduce a new perspective through which future research may consider director selection: fit.

The in-depth analysis of the director selection process highlights some less obvious and more nuanced issues surrounding directors’ appointment to the board. Recurrent patterns indicate the need for both technical and social considerations. Hence the study is a first step in synthesising the current literature and illustrates the need for a multi-theoretical approach in future director selection research.

Beyond traditional brand endorsement, many celebrities have in recent years decided to launch their own product lines, which may be used to promote their own celebrity brand. Which product categories or social causes match a celebrity’s brand personality? This study aims to investigate the antecedents of celebrity–product degree of fit and willingness to pay (WTP)/make a donation in different scenarios. The manipulation of the scenarios aims to capture the role of celebrity attributes, perceived personality profiles, product involvement and acceptance of social causes.

In total, 335 respondents answered an online questionnaire with a factorial plan corresponding to 20 different matching scenarios: five celebrities/perceived personalities (Emma Watson, Jennifer Lawrence, Kim Kardashian, Natalie Portman and Scarlet Johansson) × four types of branding scenarios (a lipstick for low involvement; a watch for high involvement; an eco-foundation for “high social acceptance” and vodka for “low social acceptance/controversial”).

Scarlett Johansson obtained the highest degree of fit, both for launching her own brand of lipstick or a watch. Kim Kardashian had the best degree of fit for launching her own vodka brand, while Emma Watson’s attributes confirmed that she would be seen as the ideal founder of an eco-foundation. Significant predictors of WTP/make a donation were assessed by multiple linear regression for each type of product.

The paper provides recommendations that may help guide celebrity brand managers through the celebrity–product matching process.

Celebrity branding in relation to social causes is also discussed in this paper.

This study explores a gap found in the literature as it explores the product match-up hypotheses within a celebrity branding context and moreover extends this investigation to social causes and products with different degrees of involvement and social acceptance.

Board faultlines, which reflect intrinsic divisions of board members into relatively homogeneous subgroups, are associated with poor firm performance. This paper aims to extend the existing board faultline research by examining how acquisition deal size moderates the negative implications of board faultlines.

This paper uses a sample of acquisitions and a quantitative research approach to conduct statistical analysis.

Using a sample of acquisitions announced between 2007 and 2016, this paper finds evidence suggesting that strong faultlines are associated with poorer acquisition outcomes in the long-term, but not in the short term. Further, this paper finds that the effect of faultline strength on long-term acquisition outcomes is weaker for larger acquisition deals than smaller acquisition deals. The findings are consistent with deal size moderating the relation between faultlines and acquisition outcomes.

This paper addresses possible endogeneity through firm fixed effects and instrumental variable analysis. Although this paper provides evidence on the moderating role of deal size in the context of faultlines, future research could examine the role of additional moderators, such as pro-diversity, trust, board leadership and board and task characteristics.

The findings suggest that boards need to be aware of situations where the negative effects of faultlines are more likely to come to the fore. For example, faultlines are more likely to play a role in more routine, obscure monitoring than for high-profile strategic decisions.

The study is multidisciplinary as it draws on the management, organizational behaviour and psychology and finance literature. It contributes to the developing literature on faultlines in several important ways. First, this paper supports their view that faultlines have adverse effects on board performance by showing that faultlines negatively impact discrete strategic investment decisions. Second, this paper provides evidence that deals size moderates the faultline-acquisition performance relation, indicating that the role of faultlines is contextual. Third, this paper finds evidence that suggests investors do not factor in board faultlines when responding to acquisition announcements.

In my preliminary thesis studies of social media, in the wake of the killings of women such as Natalie Connolly, there was a seeming widespread agreement, that if a man could get a relatively minor sentence for ending the life of a woman, using the purportedly ‘erotic’ context of the death as a legal means, then something in the judiciary was going wrong. Traditional feminists and many sex freedomists appeared to concur, in a rare moment of overlap on contemporary sexual ethics from these often scrummaging political groups. However, this ostensible concurring mystifies a more fundamental set of antagonisms that has plagued what we occasionally understand as the rhizomes of the ‘progressive left’, not least in the difficult relationship between political feminism and the sexual freedom movement, or indeed ‘sex positive feminism’. This latter ‘choice’ feminism seemingly elided with sexual freedom and jettisoned the hang ups of radical, Marxist and some branches of equality feminism, still persisting but indicative of what we broadly call ‘the second wave’. This elision between feminism and sexual freedom situates women as individuals with identities that signify an inexhaustible will, not as a casted and economized subjectivity embedded in a historical moment. This move sought to overcome the stalemate between sexual liberation, and women’s liberation. But did it? If we ask questions such as: what should legal practice and policy privilege in its functioning, the protection of individual sexual choices, or defence of the physical safety of women made vulnerable to violence by sexually oppressive cultures? – we may uncover the more profound ethical and epistemological contentions at stake. I want to frame the disputes between sexual freedomists and feminists that still persist, despite our contemporary liberal feminist vernacular, in relation to this theoretical shift in what is understood as ‘choice’, using the issues that satellite ‘the rough sex defence’ (BDSM, porn, violence, consent) in order to illuminate this tension. I want to use a materialist feminist analysis that retraces the concept of ‘choice’ in the feminist canon in order to analyse this elision in the context of the antagonisms between women’s liberation and sexual liberation. In tracing this ethical history I hope to contribute to an untangling of these unwieldy political notions in order to better confront the crystallized divisions in progressive sexual politics that contextualize the underlying disputes that frame the ‘the rough sex defence’. Doing so is necessary if we are to manage a more open, lucid conversation about what the role of the law is, or should be, in dealing with sex and violence in twenty-first century Britain.

This study aims to explore the role of the linguistic style used in the brand-posted social media content on consumer engagement in the Fintech domain.

A total of 3,286 tweets (registering nearly 1.35 million impressions) published by 10 leading Fintech unicorns in India were extracted using the Twitter API. The Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC) dictionary was used to analyse the linguistic characteristics of the shared tweets. Negative Binomial Regression (NBR) was used for testing the hypotheses.

This study finds that using drive words and cognitive language increases consumer engagement with Fintech messages via the central route of information processing. Further, affective words and conversational language drive consumer engagement through the peripheral route of information processing.

The study extends the literature on brand engagement by unveiling the effect of linguistic features used to design social media messages.

The study provides guidance to social media marketers of Fintech brands regarding what content strategies best enhance consumer engagement. The linguistic style to improve online consumer engagement (OCE) is detailed.

The study’s findings contribute to the growing stream of Fintech literature by exploring the role of linguistic style on consumer engagement in social media communication. The study’s findings indicate the relevance of the dual processing mechanism of elaboration likelihood model (ELM) as an explanatory theory for evaluating consumer engagement with messages posted by Fintech brands.