Eugene Chan

Moral harm brand crises occur when a brand’s conduct appears to violate prevailing social norms, eroding goodwill and threatening financial stability. Although scholarship on these value-driven breaches has expanded, findings remain scattered across disciplines and contexts, limiting their practical utility. This review integrates four decades of research by systematically analyzing seventy-four peer-reviewed articles using a multi-stage protocol that combines bibliometric mapping with qualitative coding to trace the field’s evolution and organize existing knowledge into a coherent framework. The synthesis identifies key antecedents, mediators, moderators, outcomes, and theories. Building on these insights, we formulate a set of research propositions that call for culturally inclusive studies, longitudinal designs and deeper investigation of social media amplification, emotional complexity, and industry-wide contagion. By clarifying the mechanisms through which ethical lapses escalate and by outlining a roadmap for theory development and managerial action, we hope to equip scholars and practitioners with resources that enable them to anticipate, mitigate, and learn from moral harm brand crises in an era of heightened stakeholder scrutiny.

This research investigates how environmental, social, and governance (ESG) strategies shape stakeholder perceptions and funding outcomes for startups, with attention to their ethical implications. Grounded in debates within business ethics, particularly the tension between instrumental and normative motivations for ESG adoption, we investigate whether ESG strategies help startups navigate moral expectations while also building credibility and stakeholder trust. Across four studies—a survey, two survey experiments, and an archival analysis—we test how ESG messaging strength (i.e., the specificity and commitment level), its focus (environmental vs. social), and startup stage (early vs. scaling) affect stakeholder perceptions of authenticity, risk, reward, and support. Study 1 reveals that startups are seen as more innovative but less credible than established companies. Study 2 shows that strong ESG claims bolster stakeholder support, especially for startups, while weak claims backfire. Study 3 finds environmental ESG claims reduce perceived risk for early-stage startups, whereas social claims enhance rewards for scaling ones. Study 4 confirms these effects with Crunchbase data. Findings demonstrate that ethically grounded ESG strategies can strengthen stakeholder engagement and funding success when tailored appropriately.

While many brands face the after-effects of historical transgressions, prior research provides little insight into these issues. Against this backdrop, this research presents five experiments providing convergent evidence for a lingering negative effect of historical brand transgressions (HBTs) on present brand evaluation, an effect that is due to a detrimental effect of HBTs on perceptions of brand warmth. Studies 1 and 2 establish the main effect and mediation. Studies 3–5 examine mitigating effects. Study 3 checks if high institutional pressure can serve as an excuse strategy that buffers the negative effects of a transgression. Studies 4 and 5 test the mitigating effect of different response styles (recognition, apology, and/or compensation). Together, these results contribute to the business ethics and marketing literature by defining the concept of HBT and showing why it harms a current brand’s evaluation and how brands can mitigate its negative effects.

© 2015 American Chemical Society.Near-infrared dye-sensitized upconversion nanoparticles can broaden the absorption range and boost upconversion efficiency of UCNPs. Here, we achieved significantly enhanced upconversion luminescence in dye-sensitized core/active shell UCNPs via the doping of ytterbium ions in the UCNP shell, which bridged the energy transfer from the dye to the UCNP core. As a result, we synergized the two most practical upconversion booster effectors to amplify upconversion efficiency. We demonstrated two biomedical applications using these UCNPs. By using dye-sensitized core/active shell UCNP embedded poly polymer implantable systems, we successfully shifted the optogenetic neuron excitation window to a biocompatible and deep tissue penetrable 800 nm wavelength. Furthermore, UCNPs were water-solubilized with Pluronic F127 with high upconversion efficiency and can be imaged in a mouse model.

While prior research suggests a link between mindfulness and ethical decision-making, most of the evidence for this link is correlational and refers to self-focused ethical behaviors. The paucity of experimental evidence, coupled with a lack of clarity on what mechanisms underlie the effect, limits our understanding of whether and how mindfulness might foster other-focused ethical behaviors. In this research, we hypothesize that state mindfulness might promote other-focused ethical behaviors by increasing resourcefulness, which we define as a perceived state of resource abundance. Across four experimental studies, we report causal evidence for the effects of state mindfulness instantiated through brief mindful meditation exercises on other-focused ethical behaviors, including choice of fair-trade products, charitable giving, and volunteering. Resourcefulness mediates the effects of mindfulness on other-focused ethical behaviors. Our work answers the call for more experimental research on mindfulness and its important implications for ethical decision-making.

Coffee and tea are two beverages commonly-consumed around the world. Therefore, there is much research regarding their physiological effects. However, less is known about their psychological meanings. Derived from a predicted lay association between coffee and arousal, we posit that exposure to coffee-related cues should increase arousal, even in the absence of actual ingestion, relative to exposure to tea-related cues. We further suggest that higher arousal levels should facilitate a concrete level of mental construal as conceptualized by Construal Level Theory. In four experiments, we find that coffee cues prompted participants to see temporal distances as shorter and to think in more concrete, precise terms. Both subjective and physiological arousal explain the effects. We situate our work in the literature that connects food and beverage to cognition or decision-making. We also discuss the applied relevance of our results as coffee and tea are among the most prevalent beverages globally.

While environmental claims are increasingly used by companies to appeal consumers, they also attract greater scrutiny from independent parties interested in consumer protection. Consumers are now able to compare corporate environmental claims against external, often disconfirming, information to form their brand attitudes and purchase intentions. What remains unclear is how the level of information specificity of both the environmental claims and external disconfirming information interact to influence consumer reactions. Two experiments address this gap in the CSR communication literature. When specific claims are countered by specific external information, consumers report more negative brand attitudes and lower purchase intentions. The effect is serially mediated by skepticism toward the claims and lack of corporate credibility. We conclude by discussing strategies that firms can utilize to avoid information dilution and ensure that external disconfirming information percolates to consumers as specific.