Attitudes and Awareness towards Environmental Management and its Impact on Environmental Management Practices (EMPs) of SMEs in Sri Lanka

The main objective of this paper was to investigate whether there is an association amongst SMEs’ attitudes, awareness on environmental issues and their environmental management practices. A questionnaire-based survey was chosen to obtain the information on attitudes, awareness and environmental management practices of SMEs. The questionnaire was developed to find out SMEs’ current environmental management practices as well as their attitudes and awareness on environmental issues. The associations amongst attitudes, awareness and environmental practices for waste, energy, and the environment were investigated by calculating correlation coefficient. These analyses revealed that there is no significant association between attitudes and awareness or attitudes and environmental management practices. Attitudes appear to be remaining positive even where awareness is limited. Managers/owners who expressed rather more positive attitudes appear no more likely introduce environmental management practices for their organizations than managers/owners with less or negative attitude

Effect of promoting country of origin as an ethnocentric appeal in developing local brands: special reference to telecommunication industry of Sri Lanka

Sri Lanka is emerging as service sector driven economy with the GDP penetration of 50%-60% from service sector. After imposing the open economy policy in 1977, local brands had to gear ahead with intensive competition came from international brands. Telecommunication industry of Sri Lanka has been dominated by international brands, but local brands are strategically promoting the concept of country of origin (CO) or being local as a motive for citizens to deliberately purchase locally originated brands. In this context researchers viewed this branding practice, and selected 200 respondents from four geographical areas under the stratified probability sampling method to investigate the effect of country of origin in terms of brand performance. Both descriptive and inferential statistical analysis executed by PCA (principal component analysis) factor analysis accompanied with testing two hypotheses revealed that Country of Origin (CO) or promoting as being local had impacted less significantly on brand awareness and recalled power development of telecommunication brands against the competitive foreign brands. However, it has a significant impact on brand recalling power.Country of origin, ethnocentrism, local brands, telecommunication., Consumer/Household Economics, D12, L96,

Effect of promoting country of origin as an ethnocentric appeal in developing local brands: special reference to telecommunication industry of Sri Lanka

Sri Lanka is emerging as service sector driven economy with the GDP penetration of 50%-60% from service sector. After imposing the open economy policy in 1977, local brands had to gear ahead with intensive competition came from international brands. Telecommunication industry of Sri Lanka has been dominated by international brands, but local brands are strategically promoting the concept of country of origin (CO) or being local as a motive for citizens to deliberately purchase locally originated brands. In this context researchers viewed this branding practice, and selected 200 respondents from four geographical areas under the stratified probability sampling method to investigate the effect of country of origin in terms of brand performance. Both descriptive and inferential statistical analysis executed by PCA (principal component analysis) factor analysis accompanied with testing two hypotheses revealed that Country of Origin (CO) or promoting as being local had impacted less significantly on brand awareness and recalled power development of telecommunication brands against the competitive foreign brands. However, it has a significant impact on brand recalling power

Determinants of environmental management systems of manufacturing small and medium scale enterprises in Sri Lanka

The main objective of this study was to identify the critical factors that affecting the implementation of environmental management systems (EMSs) of manufacturing SMEs in Sri Lanka. Out of twelve factors, management commitment, professional expertise, financial resources, stakeholders and environmental information are identified as key factors. Based on the survey results, it is proposed that the government should play an important role in promoting environmental management in SMEs. It is necessary for the government to provide active support in the aspects including mandatory policy, encouraging policy and supporting policy