Afm Jalal Ahamed

1. Financial advisory work is an important but underexamined context for workplace behavioral health. Although financial planning is often presented as a technical profession concerned with budgeti...

Materialism is not simply a preference for owning more. In consumer finance and related research, it has been treated as a value orientation, a cluster of personality tendencies, a set of extrinsic goals, and a means of constructing identity. This chapter traces those traditions and compares their principal measures, with particular attention to acquisition centrality, possession-defined success, happiness through ownership, status seeking, and identity signalling. It then examines how insecurity, selfesteem, family socialisation, peer comparison, media exposure, inequality, and market conditions foster materialistic orientations. The review links materialism to subjective and financial well-being, relationships, saving and spending, credit and debt, impulsive and compulsive buying, luxury consumption, and sustainable behaviour. These associations operate through impulsiveness, self-discrepancy, compensatory consumption, frustrated psychological needs, and social comparison, and are conditioned by self-control, mindfulness, financial capability, culture, socioeconomic position, and market institutions. Although the balance of evidence connects materialism with lower well-being, weaker financial security, and riskier consumption, the pattern is not uniform. Materialistic motives can also support planned acquisition or visible green and ethical consumption when such choices carry status or identity value. The chapter brings these findings together in a framework that distinguishes value-conflict from identity-signalling pathways and shows how motives and context shape their consequences.

This study examined digital financial literacy (DFL) among older adults in Sweden, with the aim of refining its conceptualisation for highly digitised welfare states. Sixteen semi‐structured interviews with individuals aged 65–93 across two municipalities were analysed inductively. While online banking and Swish were nearly universal, adoption trajectories varied; smartphones dominated everyday payments, whereas personal computers were reserved for complex transactions. Learning pathways combined self‐directed exploration, family and peer support and senior centres. Trust in banks enabled uptake, while psychosocial readiness and social resources shaped confidence. Women reported heightened fraud exposure. Findings position DFL as an adaptive, context‐dependent capacity.

Online fashion returns represent an increasingly important sustainability challenge, as they contribute to transport emissions, reverse logistics, repackaging, and waste within digital retail systems. Despite these environmental consequences, product returns have rarely been examined as a form of sustainable consumption behavior, particularly in the post-purchase stage of online retailing. This study addresses that gap by conceptualizing responsible return behavior in online fashion consumption as a form of sustainable consumption and by examining its psychological antecedents. Using survey data from 447 Swedish online fashion consumers, the study investigates how Big Five personality traits relate to responsible return behavior through self-transcendence values and environmental concern, and whether these relationships differ across age groups. The results show that openness and agreeableness are associated with responsible return behavior primarily through stronger self-transcendence values and higher environmental concern. The findings further indicate that these value-based pathways are stronger among younger consumers than among older consumers, suggesting that responsible return behavior is more closely linked to sustainability-related concern in younger cohorts. Configurational analysis additionally shows that responsible return behavior is shaped by multiple combinations of values, concern, traits, and demographic conditions rather than by any single factor alone. By extending sustainable consumption research to the post-purchase stage of digital retailing, the study contributes to understanding how consumer-level psychological mechanisms may support more sustainable retail systems. The findings offer implications for retailers and policymakers seeking to reduce avoidable returns and their environmental impacts through communication, segmentation, and consumer education strategies.

This chapter examines the idea of money attitude and describes it as a multidimensional psychological concept that influences how individuals interpret, value, and handle money in everyday life. It highlights that money is not only an economic resource but also a symbolic object associated with security, power, status, freedom, achievement, and emotional meaning. The chapter outlines the historical development of money attitude research, reviews its key dimensions, and discusses the main instruments used to measure it, including the Money Attitude Scale (MAS), the Money Beliefs and Behaviors Scale (MBBS), and the Money Ethic Scale (MES). It also synthesized the major factors that shape money attitudes, such as family financial socialization, childhood financial experiences, personality traits, demographic characteristics, and cultural context. Finally, the chapter discusses how money attitudes influence financial behavior and well-being, including saving, spending, compulsive buying, gambling, investment decisions, financial literacy, workplace outcomes, and financial distress in consumer finance contexts.

This chapter views financial wellbeing as a multidimensional concept that combines objective financial conditions, such as income and savings, with subjective perceptions of security, control, and satisfaction. It explains how financial literacy, financial capability, and financial self-efficacy contribute to responsible financial behavior, improved decision making, and long-term financial resilience. The chapter also analyzes financial stress as a key barrier to wellbeing, outlining its effects on cognition, mental health, work performance, and relationships. In addition, the discussion highlights the influence of demographic factors, socioeconomic status, and cultural norms on financial outcomes and perceptions. By integrating theoretical perspectives and empirical evidence from past researches, the chapter provides students with a clear framework for understanding how psychological, behavioral, structural, and cultural factors interact to shape financial wellbeing, offering insights relevant for research, policy, and practice.

Despite growing interest in digital transformation among small and medium-sized enterprises, understanding how they use digital technologies to enhance competitiveness, partic-ularly in emerging markets, is still limited. Grounded in the resource-based view, resource orchestration theory, and digital transformation literature, this study explores how environ-mental dynamism influences firm performance,focusing on the mediating role of digitaliza-tion and digital capability in Ecuadorian companies. To test our hypotheses, we used structural equation modeling with survey data from 109 managers. Our findings indicate that digitalization and digital capability mediate the relationship between environmental dyna-mism and performance, emphasizing the need to integrate technological and managerial dimensions to facedigital transformation. This topic is relevant because small firms face greater challenges for technological adoption.

This study investigates the factors influencing financial management behaviors (FMB) among young adults in Poland, drawing on the Theory of Planned Behavior (TPB). Specifically, it examines the roles of financial attitude, family financial socialization, peer influence, financial self-efficacy, and subjective financial knowledge. Data were collected from 340 university students using convenience sampling. A hybrid analytical approach combining partial least squares structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM) and fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA) was employed. PLS-SEM results indicate that financial attitude, subjective financial knowledge, and financial self-efficacy are significantly associated with FMB. Contrary to expectations, family financial socialization had no significant effect, while peer influence was significant but negative effect. FsQCA revealed two distinct pathways leading to positive FMB, highlighting the importance of financial attitude and knowledge, even in the absence of strong peer or family support. The findings underscore the complexity of financial behavior and suggest that educational interventions should focus on improving financial attitudes and self-efficacy, while also acknowledging the important roles of family and peer influences. This study contributes novel insights into financial behavior research in Eastern Europe and demonstrates the value of combining SEM and fsQCA in behavioral finance studies.

This longitudinal qualitative study examines how globally operating readymade garment exporters from Bangladesh build organisational resilience in order to cope in the turbulent business environment. We found that at the time of crisis, such as the one caused by the global COVID-19 pandemic, the studied exporters lacked robustness, and were not prepared for unexpected external shocks. However, the companies built resilience by adaptation to the situation as well as possible. Their ability to build resilience was found to be partly rooted in the local culture. At the time of crisis, the companies combined jugaad—a regional cultural practice—with a Western mindset and management tools. In this study, this unique combination of regional and Western practices is labelled as jugalbandi. Interestingly, organisational resilience which is achieved in this way seems to be temporary: the exporters discarded the locally-embedded practices when the situation stabilised. Our study challenges the mainstream views on organisational resilience espoused in earlier research, and develops a context-sensitive, culture-embedded framework of resilience building.

In an era of rapidly evolving financial landscapes and complex economic challenges, personal financial management has emerged as a critical determinant of both individual stability and societal well‑being. While financial literacy—the ability to understand and utilize financial information—remains a fundamental prerequisite, research increasingly shows that the confidence to apply this knowledge is equally, if not more, important. This confidence is captured by the concept of financial self‑efficacy, which refers to an individual’s belief in their capacity to manage financial tasks, make sound decisions, and achieve long‑term financial goals. Grounded in Bandura’s seminal Social Cognitive Theory (Bandura, 1977, 1989; Bandura & Schunk, 1981), FSE is recognized as a multidimensional construct that encompasses cognitive, emotional, and behavioral elements. It links personal beliefs and psychological predispositions to tangible financial behaviors—such as budgeting, saving, investing, and managing debt—and ultimately to overall financial well‑being. This chapter synthesizes a broad range of theoretical insights, empirical evidence, and practical considerations regarding FSE. The following sections provide a comprehensive narrative that explores how FSE develops, how it influences financial behavior, and what implications it has for policy and educational interventions.