Sustainable initiatives in the food industry: Role of businesses and regulators

Littering has been a subject of inquiry by environmental economists, as well as social and environmental psychologists, each using a different theoretical and analytical toolkit. While economists see littering as an externality problem or a market failure, psychologists see it as a social behavior problem. Regardless of the discipline, both theories have a common goal: What factors affect littering behavior and how can it be curtailed? This paper, therefore, adopts theory-triangulation approach to review theories concerning littering. It concisely reviews the economist’s and the psychologist’s approaches to littering and their respective solutions. The finding from this review is that the psychological approaches to litter control are narrower in coverage than the economic approaches in that the former are applicable to smaller environmental settings or areas, such as school premises, office places, factories, and market places, as opposed to such lager settings as cities, states or the country at large to which economic instruments are usually applied. Despite the plethora of research extolling the virtues of economic approaches to litter control, their real-world application has not caught on. One of the factors responsible for this is the implementation costs and difficulty involved. The economic instruments are costlier than the psychological instruments, because the former cover a larger setting and entail a lot of bureaucracies. To better understand littering and find appropriate solutions to it, studies on littering should consider looking at littering holistically from this interdisciplinary perspective. Both the economist’s and the psychologist’s approaches to litter control should be synthesized for sustainable waste management. However, policymakers need to consider the available financial resources and the multifarious views of litter in policies relating to litter. An option for policymakers is to minimize those costs associated with implementing economic instruments.

The rich body of literature examining the entrepreneurship education-entrepreneurship intention relations tends to neglect the influence of contingent and other mediating factors on the relationship. This elusion creates an erroneous assumption that entrepreneurship intentions are insulated from external influences and the entrepreneurship education-intentions relationship is an automatic, directly linear interaction. Contesting this premise, this research explores the influence of exposure to entrepreneurship education (EE), mediated by precursors (such as attitude, subjective norms and perceived behavioral control) to entrepreneurial intentions on the actual entrepreneurship intentions (EI) of vocational education students at a particular institution in Zimbabwe. Drawing on a cross-sectional research design and 154 randomly selected students, the study examines the extent to which they intended to engage in entrepreneurship careers in the near future. A non-parametric technique, the Spearman correlation test, and regression analysis were employed to test the relationships between EE on the direct determinants of EI, between the immediate determinants of EI and actual EI and to test a number of predictive effects. The results demonstrate that EE had a positive correlation with the direct determinants of EI. In addition, EE predicted all the immediate determinants of EI, except for subjective norms. Lastly, there was no evidence to support a direct predictive effect of EE on EI, controlling for other psychological factors. To a large extent, the results validated the Theory of Planned Behavior as a guiding tool for estimating any premeditated entrepreneurial behavior. Thus, the Theory remains an invaluable theoretical lens for academics, educators and policymakers’ evaluation of effective ways of enhancing the grooming of potential entrepreneurs.

This study aims to analyze the mediation effect of subjective norms and perceived behavioral control on the linkage between online consumer attitude and online purchase decisions of generation X, generation Y (millennials), and generation Z (centennials) in developing countries, particularly Peru. This empirical investigation surveyed 121 respondents of generation X, 200 millennials, and 200 centennials in Peru. The data were processed through structural equation modeling approach. This study demonstrates that online consumer attitude positively and significantly influences online purchase decisions; this relationship is enhanced through the mediation effect of subjective norms and perceived behavioral control. Furthermore, the results indicate that the effect of the proposed variables is improved progressively in each generation, showing a greater willingness of centennials to purchase online, followed by millennials and generation X. This study assessed online consumer attitudes of different generations in Peru toward the online purchase decisions and the mediation effect of subjective norms and perceived behavior control on the mentioned relationship, which showed improved results when incorporated into a single model.

Acknowledgments
The authors thank the Universidad Nacional de San Agustín de Arequipa for supporting this project.