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It is widely held that good relationships between partners are beneficial for firms' performance, and the literature on strategic management has consistently promoted the bright side of these relationships. This study extends that stream of investigation by investigating the degree to which three components of relationships (trust, affective commitment, and calculative commitment) can contribute to or impede innovation performance in high-tech industries. Thus, a theoretical model is developed and tested using data from 173 Taiwanese high-tech firms. The findings reveal that the relationships between trust and commitment and innovation performance can be depicted as an inverted curve.

In recent decades, Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) has moved steadily up boardroom agendas, but the launch of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), which cover a wide range of social, economic and environmental goals, by the United Nations in 2016, presents an unprecedented challenge for the corporate world. This chapter offers an exploratory and illustrative review of how the UK’s four largest retailers are addressing the SDGs. While all four of the UK’s largest retailers have emphasised their commitment to the SDGs, the chapter concludes that the retailers need to address a number of major challenges if they are to make a lasting contribution to the SDGs, and that their current approach reflects some elements of the dark side of marketing communications.

Gamification found acceptance as an intriguing business tool, especially in the marketing domain wherein game-like processes encourage human engagement with products or services. Several studies have highlighted various uses of gamified approaches not only in marketing but also in other domains. However, what is unexplored is the “dark side” of gamification for various users across various businesses. Though gamification incentivizes customers to repeatedly play for more chances to win, it is covert in nature, which can lead to stress or strain on individuals and may have a huge impact in terms of ethics, privacy, and health monitoring on the users. As gamification engages users on psychological levels, it can be associated with privacy invasion, social overload, and negative health conditions, thereby revealing shocking exhaustion scenarios. These have huge ethical, privacy, surveillance, and monitoring impacts as gamification is in a way manipulating human minds and continuously keeping people addicted to an opaque and nonexistent world for materialistic benefits and pleasure. This chapter explores the impact of the false transparency creation, unethical interactions, and worst-case scenarios that gamification can cause. This can have huge ramifications on human beings as gamified systems are really complex processes. This chapter further highlights that businesses need to understand their limitations before gamification becomes a more powerful psychological tool with serious consequences, including life-threatening ones, for its users.