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2008 Poetry Publication Showcase: selected titles
|
[
"Poetry",
"Bibliographies"
] |
[
{
"content": "Summarize the following paper into structured abstract.\n\n__NO_TITLE__: Poets House, it needs to be said, is not a warehouse of past dreams, but an ongoing experiment in cultural imagination (Stanley Kunitz).This year the ongoing experiment in cultural imagination that our co-founder Stanley Kunitz envisioned takes on its next incarnation as Poets House moves to its permanent home in Battery Park City. The new Poets House will include:* a state-of-the-art Programming Hall dedicated to poetry-related performance;* an expansive Reading Room with sweeping views of the Hudson River and the Statue of Liberty;* a spacious, whimsical Children's Room with the capacity to vigorously expand Poets House's poetry programs for children, schools and families;* an open-access multimedia archive;* a multidisciplinary Exhibition Space; and* a poetry-enriched lobby that will spark the curiosity of visitors of all ages.Best of all, the future of Poets House is secure for generations to come with a rent-free lease through 2069.\nIndividual collections: Armantrout, R. (2007), Next Life, Wesleyan University Press, Middletown, CT, (hardcover, $22.95, ISBN 9780819568205)\nAnthologies: Baker, D., Townsend, T. (2007) (Eds), Radiant Lyre: Essays on Lyric Poetry, Graywolf Press, St Paul, MN(paperback, $15, ISBN 9781555974602)\nProse on poetry: Ginsberg, A. (2007), The Book of Martyrdom and Artifice: First Journals and Poems 1937-1952, Da Capo Press, New York, NY (hardcover, $27.50, ISBN 97803068142624)\n",
"role": "user"
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{
"content": "Purpose: - The purpose of this paper is to present an annotated bibliography of the new poetry volumes from the Poet's House 2008 Poetry Showcase.\nDesign/methodology/approach: - The titles were selected from the Poet's House 2008 Poetry Showcase as titles that are both challenging and accessible.\nFindings: - This list provides the librarian and reader with a guide to collection development in poetry.\nOriginality/value: - This is one of the few lists of its kind showcasing contemporary poetry.\n",
"role": "assistant"
}
] |
Social capital: does it matter in a microfinance contract?
|
[
"Microfinance",
"Poverty",
"Social capital",
"Transaction costs",
"Group lending",
"Joint liability",
"Repayment performance"
] |
[
{
"content": "Summarize the following paper into structured abstract.\n\n1. Introduction: Exploring the role that social capital plays in the economic behavior of the people, has been one of the potential areas of research during the last decade. Coleman (1988) defines social capital as \"social structure that facilitates certain actions of actors within the structure.\" In this concept he highlights the roles of mutual obligation, expectations, trustworthiness, social norms, social sanctions and the transmission of information.\n2. Literature review: All the economic theories which seek to explain the high-repayment performance of group lending can be divided into three categories:\n3. Conclusion: Several studies which have been conducted to find whether and how joint liability lending programs work, have also considered the role of social capital. Early theoretical works on microfinance contracts like Stiglitz (1990), Varian (1990), Besley and Coate (1995) and Ghatak (1999) point out the positive effects of social capital on group lending in terms of facilitating active screening, effective peer monitoring and enforcement through reduced cost, increased accuracy of information and higher reputation values. However the empirical literature on the subject provides contradictory findings. But certain conclusions can be drawn from them for policy recommendations:\n",
"role": "user"
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{
"content": "Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the role of social capital in a microfinance contract.\nDesign/methodology/approach: Systematic review of the theoretical and empirical literature on the role of social capital in microfinance.\nFindings: The theoretical literature has shown using models of peer selection, peer monitoring and peer pressure that group lending with joint liability overcomes both the informational and enforcement failures present in credit markets for poor. However findings from the empirical literature conclude that social capital should not be taken as a single concept but should be considered in light of its different aspects which may be having different effects on the performance. For example, the trust between the borrowers, cultural and social homogeneity has been found to have more significant affect on repayment performance in contrast to the incentives due to peer pressure. The groups formed by family members and relatives are consistently been reported to have weakening influence on repayment.\nPractical implications: For a same program the effect of social capital on performance can be different for different geographies and different classification of subjects and thus should be studied before initiating a microfinance program in any social setting.\nSocial implications: The borrowers should be encouraged to form groups with others who are more trustworthy and not with those they are just having an acquaintance with. The borrowers should be encouraged to come to aid of those who are victims of negative externalities. The positive experiences will lead to reciprocity of actions in future. The borrowers should be discouraged to form groups with family members and relatives.\nOriginality/value: It analyzes both theoretical and empirical literature by disentangling different aspects of social capital within groups and their effects on group performance.\n",
"role": "assistant"
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] |
How do enterprise social media affordances affect social network ties and job performance?
|
[
"Affordance",
"Enterprise social media",
"Social network ties",
"Job performance"
] |
[
{
"content": "Summarize the following paper into structured abstract.\n\n1. Introduction: A new class of information and communication technologies, known as enterprise social media (ESM), has proliferated in organizations to support interpersonal communication, coordination and collaboration (Chen and Wei, 2019; Forsgren and Bystrom, 2018; Kane et al., 2014; Rode, 2016). ESM consists of digital platforms that incorporate bundled social media tools, such as microblogs, wikis and social networking services, thus facilitating information sharing and social interaction among employees within organizations (Chen and Wei, 2019; Rode, 2016). An increasing number of companies, including Microsoft, Google and IBM, are expending considerable resources on developing ESM (Lu et al., 2015). Indeed, Leonardi et al. (2013, p. 6) noted that \"the time seems ripe for researchers to examine how ESM are implicated in various processes that occur within organizations.\"\n2. Literature review: 2.1 Enterprise social media\n3. Research framework and hypotheses: Figure 1 presents the study's research model based on the above review. ESM affordances can expose employees to more diverse groups of contacts and types of information that are, in turn, useful to strengthen and improve both instrumental and expressive relationships, which should improve in-role and innovative employee job performance in general, but with differential effects.\n4. Research methodology: 4.1 Measurement development\n5. Data analysis and results: 5.1 Data analysis technique\n6. Discussion and implications: 6.1 Discussion\n7. Conclusion: The findings of this study are crucial in elaborating the nuances of debating about the role of ESM in the workplace. Some organizations may ban or restrict ESM use, thereby missing out on the benefits obtained from these tools. This study bolsters the body of knowledge surrounding the positive effect ESM may have on employee job performance, particularly through the causal path from affordances through social network ties. Our findings should encourage managers to develop policies and use strategies toward ESM, which can help reduce managerial fears about loss of employee productivity, as well as employee concerns about possible loss of potential networks of informational and emotional exchange within the workplace. This research also provides a starting point for future studies and practice to consider the importance of using affordance and network perspectives in ESM contexts.\n",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to investigate how four enterprise social media (ESM) affordances (visibility, association, editability and persistence) affect social network ties (instrumental and expressive), which, in turn, influence the in-role and innovative job performance of employees.\nDesign/methodology/approach: A survey of 251 ESM users in the workplace in China was conducted.\nFindings: All four affordances are positively associated with instrumental ties, yet only the association and editability affordances are positively related to expressive ties. Although instrumental and expressive ties are positively related to in-role and innovative job performance, instrumental ties exert stronger effects on in-role job performance, whereas expressive ties show stronger effects on innovative job performance.\nResearch limitations/implications: First, additional relevant affordances should be included in an expanded model. Second, future research could examine how patterns of affordances use (unrelated, or hierarchically or sequentially related) affect organizational network ties. Third, there are likely (many) other exogenous factors affecting the model's relationships. Fourth, the data collected are self-reported.\nPractical implications: This study advances the theoretical understanding of the role of ESM affordances in the workplace, especially through their influences on network ties. The findings can guide organizations on how to emphasize ESM affordances to foster instrumental and expressive ties to improve the job performance of employees.\nOriginality/value: First, it provides novel views on affordance theory in ESM contexts by empirically testing four central affordances, thereby further providing preliminary evidence for prior theoretical propositions by confirming that social media affordances might be associated with or influence relational ties. Second, the study integrates an affordance lens and a social network perspective to investigate employees' perceived performance behavior. Including social network ties can offer a more detailed understanding of the underlying processes of how ESM affordances can and do affect job performance. Third, it supports the validity of distinguishing instrumental and expressive ties in ESM contexts, thus offering a possible explanation for the inconsistencies in prior research on the impact of social networks on employee outcomes. Finally, it also shows how two kinds of organizational performance (in-role and innovative) are somewhat differentially influenced by affordances and network ties.\n",
"role": "assistant"
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] |
On the heterogeneity of Generation Y job preferences
|
[
"Recruitment",
"Generation Y",
"Conjoint analysis",
"Heterogeneity",
"Preferences"
] |
[
{
"content": "Summarize the following paper into structured abstract.\n\nIntroduction: A quality workforce is a source of competitive advantage (Huselid, 1995). Particularly salient in the competition for talent is the ability to attract qualified individuals - bachelors as well as masters graduates (Montgomery and Ramus, 2011). The job search literature establishes that, if companies want to attract young graduates, they need to develop a better understanding of the expectations of these graduates and to know what job and organizational characteristics influence them during their job searches (Montgomery and Ramus, 2011).\nGenerational theory: Research on Generation Y is related to the socio-cognitive perspective of generations (Kertzer, 1983). From this socio-cognitive perspective, according to socialization theory (Ward, 1974), individuals of each generation are influenced by the political, economic or cultural context in which they evolve and the historic events that shape their values (Mannheim, 1952). Due to the power of these shared events, each generation is thought to develop a unique set of beliefs and attitudes that guide its behavior (Ryder, 1965) and a unique pattern of behavior based on these common experiences (Kupperschmidt, 2000). For example, Generation Y shares events like the fall of the Berlin Wall, the 9/11 terrorist attacks and the omnipresence of technology in their world (they are called \"digital natives\").\nGeneration Y preferences: Over the last years, Generation Y has entered the job market and this raises many questions concerning its attitude toward the world of work as well as the means firms could use to attract and retain its members. For all aspects of people management, Generation Y is presented as different from previous generations and the popular practitioner idea is that generational differences exist (Parry and Urwin, 2011). In recent years, many researches have focussed on Generation Y by examining their work values and attitudes or their motivational factors but finally, the findings regarding generational differences in the workplace have been contradictory and generally inconclusive (Parry and Urwin, 2011; Ng et al., 2012; Krahn and Galambos, 2014).\nIntragroup homogeneity: Among many other segmentation criteria, generational cohort is a factor that is often used in the marketing literature to segment consumer markets. In a segmentation approach, generational marketing is only meaningful if individuals belonging to the same generation have similar attitudes that are also different from other generations (Noble and Schewe, 2003). Intragroup homogeneity means that it is possible to observe similar attitudes within a generational cohort.\nMethodology: In this study, we are interested in analyzing the preferences of young graduates when choosing a future employer. We collected their preferences using conjoint analysis. Conjoint analysis is a technique for handling situations in which a decision maker has to deal with options that simultaneously vary across several attributes (Green and Srinivasan, 1978, 1990; Carroll and Green, 1995). Conjoint analysis then processes these preferences in such a way as to generate a utility for each level of each attribute for a given respondent, and allows the calculation of how important each attribute is vis-a-vis all the attributes on the list (Montgomery and Ramus, 2011). The use of conjoint analysis to address the research questions put forward in this paper is relevant, in that this method places the respondent in a situation that is similar to reality and avoids rationalization bias. With regard to surveying methods, only research using conjoint analysis studies systematically calibrated preferences across a set of factors. It is a sophisticated, experimental, real-time technique that overcomes limitations of post hoc and self-reported (direct) ratings research into individuals' decision making and is thus likely to generate more accurate results.\nResults: Generation Y job preferences\nDiscussion: Validity of generational cohorts\nConclusion: This study provides knowledge about Generation Y job preferences. Among job attributes, young graduates from Generation Y, on the whole, have a preference for job security and a relaxed work atmosphere. However, their preferences are not homogeneous and this calls into question the relevance of the concept of Generation Y, particularly for recruitment.\n",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Purpose: Based on generational theory, this research studies the preferences of French young graduates from Generation Y for job and organizational attributes of a future employer. The purpose of this paper is to contribute to the debate on the inter- vs intragenerational differences and discusses the common stereotype of an intragroup homogeneity within the Generation Y.\nDesign/methodology/approach: Reviewing generation and job search literature, the paper update graduates' preferences for job and organizational attributes in their initial job search by using conjoint analysis, a rarely used methodology in human resource management (HRM). To test the intragroup homogeneity and to overcome methodological difficulties inherent in examining differences within a generational cohort, the paper operationalized a homogeneous sample (n=592) composed of people of the same age, career stage, cohort and nationality.\nFindings: The authors demonstrate that, even if on the whole young graduates from Generation Y prefer job security and a relaxed work atmosphere, their preferences are heterogeneous.\nResearch limitations/implications: This research leads to discuss the relevance of the concept of Generation Y for recruitment. Additional research is needed to improve the external validity of this study which must be reproduced in other contexts and with different populations.\nPractical implications: The results provide useful information to assist HR managers and recruitment specialists in improving the efficiency of the recruitment process and in considering the relevant segmentation criteria for recruitment.\nOriginality/value: Using an original methodology, conjoint analysis, this paper focusses on the heterogeneity of Generation Y and its consequences in terms of HRM.\n",
"role": "assistant"
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] |
Cross-functional integration and functional coordination in purchasing and supply management: Antecedents and effects on purchasing and firm performance
|
[
"Purchasing",
"Supply chain management",
"Financial performance",
"Purchasing and supply management",
"Functional coordination",
"Cross‐functional integration",
"Path analysis"
] |
[
{
"content": "Summarize the following paper into structured abstract.\n\n1 Introduction: Some decades ago, the purchasing function was treated as a low-level operational function that only made minor contributions to corporate performance and competitive strategy (Ammer, 1974). However, a common response of firms to the competitive pressures of the last decades has been to focus on core competencies. The disintegration of hitherto vertically integrated value chains into globally dispersed supply chains has led to the appreciation of the purchasing and supply management (PSM) function as a source of competitive advantage (Carter and Narasimhan, 1996; Krause et al., 2001). Consequently, the ability of the PSM function to contribute to corporate success is widely recognized in practice nowadays (Gonzales-Benito, 2007; Narasimhan and Das, 2001).These changes in managerial practice are reflected in and have partially been supported by so-called \"PSM maturity\" models, which suggest that the function is and/or should be undergoing a number of subsequent changes to develop from an \"immature\", clerical function, to a \"mature\", more strategic function (Keough, 1993; Kraljic, 1983; Reck and Long, 1988). These models, however, have hardly been validated (Ramsay and Croom, 2008). The majority of empirical studies has analyzed single PSM practices and found a positive relationship with the overall success of the enterprise (Carr and Pearson, 1999; Chen et al., 2004; Cousins et al., 2006). The common starting point of these previous studies is that PSM's contribution to business performance is achieved through the implementation of individual practices, such as buyer-supplier relationship management (Carr and Pearson, 1999), purchasing training and skill development (Carr and Smeltzer, 1999, 2000), purchasing coordination (Trent and Monczka, 2003) and PSM's strategic integration with senior management (Das and Narasimhan, 2000; Gonzales-Benito, 2007).This focus on solitary PSM practices has led to useful but somewhat fragmented evidence for the impact of PSM practices on purchasing performance and firm performance. Attempts to integrate the findings from these studies in a comprehensive model have been limited (Paulraj et al., 2006). Our knowledge on the effects of PSM maturity as a whole and the interrelations of individual purchasing practices is, therefore, largely restricted to conceptual models (Ramsay and Croom, 2008). Thus, the current study tries to address this research gap by focusing on four critical, complementary dimensions of PSM maturity. The two strategic dimensions of functional coordination and cross-functional integration have been identified as the main elements in the professional development of the PSM functions (Axelsson et al., 2005). We further elaborate our research model by introducing talent management and performance management as antecedents of the two strategic dimensions of PSM maturity.The integration of one function with other functional units has been identified as a means to achieve strategic consensus, resulting in an ability to participate in further strategic activities and to contribute to the competitive position of the firm (Hayes and Wheelwright, 1984). Consequently, the PSM function should strive for increased cross-functional integration in order to participate in strategic decision making, to align its practices consistent with internal requirements and to contribute to the competitive position of the firm (Kotabe and Murray, 2004). Although the performance implications of increased strategic alignment of PSM at top-management level have been empirically investigated (Gonzales-Benito, 2007; Narasimhan and Das, 2001), our knowledge of the performance implications of enhanced integration at the cross-functional level is limited (Pagell and Krause, 2002). A similar knowledge gap can be observed for the coordination of activities within the PSM function (Zsidisin et al., 2002).Thus, we shape our research model around the two practices of cross-functional integration and functional coordination to assess and compare their respective impact on purchasing performance and, indirectly, on firm performance. Furthermore, we investigate the influence of talent management and performance management practices in PSM as antecedents of integration and coordination practices. Previous research has systematically identified talent and performance management as key enabling processes for achieving PSM maturity (Cousins and Spekman, 2003). Analyzing the literature on the two enabling practices, however, reveals that the effects of performance management have not been investigated as extensively as talent management.Accordingly, we develop a research model on the maturity of integration, coordination, talent and performance management practices in PSM and their effects on purchasing and firm performance. We empirically test this model using different data collection techniques for predictor (PSM practices) and criterion variables (performance outcomes), thereby minimizing the impact of common method variance (Podsakoff et al., 2003).The remainder of this article is structured in six sections. First, we present our literature review and develop the conceptual framework. Subsequently, we describe the methods of data collection and data analysis. Then we present the results of the measurement model and hypotheses tests regarding the structural model. In the discussion section, we address the theoretical and practical interpretations of our findings. Finally, the paper concludes with a summary of the key findings, limitations and suggestions for further research.\n2 Purchasing and supply management maturity and the impact on performance: 2.1 The concept of purchasing and supply management maturity\n3 Conceptual development and research hypotheses: The proposed research model is shown in Figure 1, comprising six constructs and the relationships among them. Table I defines the six constructs, as well as the short names that we use for brevity. We examine the extent to which PSM's cross-functional integration and functional coordination impact on purchasing performance, which in turn is hypothesized to impact firm performance. Additionally, we investigate the impact of talent management and performance management practices on cross-functional integration and functional coordination. Enhanced levels of talent management and performance management are also hypothesized to directly affect purchasing performance. In the following discussion, we present the arguments for these hypotheses.3.1 Cross-functional integration and purchasing performance\n4 Research methods: 4.1 Sampling\n5 Results: 5.1 Construct validation\n6 Discussion: 6.1 Theoretical implications\n7 Conclusions and further research: PSM maturity models have long suggested that PSM functions across organizations follow a typical sequence of development stages towards greater maturity. These models suggest that the higher the level of maturity of the relevant strategic PSM practices, the higher its intra-organizational recognition and status, thus the greater the opportunities to contribute to the competitive position of the firm (Ramsay and Croom, 2008).In the current study, we break down the concept of maturity into four underlying practices, two of which are related to the way strategic PSM processes are executed (cross-functional integration and functional coordination) and two of which are capability building and enabling (talent management and performance management). Through this cohesive conceptualization and our subsequent data collection and analysis, we provide a comprehensive attempt to validate the broader concept of PSM maturity. Our data analysis provides support for eight of the nine hypotheses from our research model, and each of the four strategic and enabling practices has a significant total effect on purchasing performance. Together, the four practices also explain a sizable portion of the variance in purchasing performance and, indirectly, firm performance.Specifically, we find support that enhanced cross-functional integration leads to higher purchasing and firm performance. Most studies in the field of PSM have investigated the concept of integration in terms of strategic alignment at the corporate level (Gonzales-Benito, 2007; Narasimhan and Das, 2001). Investigating integration one level below, at the level of different business functions, we complement prior research on PSM's strategic integration with general management.In terms of functional coordination, we provide evidence for the organizational requirements for effective purchasing coordination proposed by previous research in the field (Faes et al., 2000; Harland et al., 1999; Trent, 2004). Interestingly, functional coordination has a stronger effect on purchasing and firm performance than cross-functional integration. The findings suggest that firms should continue to focus on coordinating processes within the PSM function - despite all the (appropriate) calls for increased cross-functional collaboration between PSM and other functions such as R&D, marketing and sales, etcetera. Harmonizing processes like category management and supply base management across the entire PSM function, where applicable globally, still has a profound impact on purchasing performance and thus firm performance.Of the four practices in this study, talent management was identified as the strongest driver of purchasing performance and firm performance. Thus, firms should have an incentive to provide clear career paths in PSM, which are as equally attractive to those offered in other organizational functions, in order to attract and retain highly capable and motivated personnel (Giunipero et al., 2006). Firms should also implement strong performance management in PSM, particularly in terms of comprehensive target setting and performance tracking, and individual feedback and reward. These requirements can be considered as essential foundations for enhanced levels of functional coordination and cross-functional integration (Axelsson et al., 2002; Reck and Long, 1988).As with all empirical research, this study has some limitations that need to be taken into account when interpreting its findings and conducting further research. The selection of very large companies in the population for our sample limits the external validity of the study results with respect to smaller firms. We propose future research to focus on a mixed population of firms in terms of revenue and head count to validate the wider generalizability of our propositions.Moreover, the four practices researched in this paper are primarily deployed within the organizational boundaries of the buying firm. However, there are other PSM practices, extending beyond a firm's boundaries, which are not captured in this study. Thus, future research could incorporate outward-facing practices such as supplier integration (Paulraj et al., 2006), building buyer-supplier relationships (Paulraj and Chen, 2005) and supplier development (Krause et al., 2007). We specifically encourage further research to investigate to what extent the investigated internal practices act as a catalyst for effective external PSM practices.Also, in our model we solely focus on assessing the economic performance impact of our selected purchasing practices. Over recent years the PSM function had to take on greater responsibility managing environmental and social performance in upstream value creation in addition to the economic purchasing performance measures underlying this research. Thus, further research should attempt to capture the complementary or possibly conflicting effects of enhanced PSM maturity on the triple bottom line, namely financial, ecological and social performance. Such research would provide support to PSM executives in dealing with the growing multi-dimensionality of performance targets they are facing. Finally, the current economic crisis puts pressure on the PSM function to attain short-term cost reductions (Aberdeen Group, 2011). Therefore, future research could study how the crisis is affecting strategic, long-term oriented PSM practices such as talent management, and the consequent effects on purchasing performance, particularly in dimensions related to quality and innovation.We hope that the current study into some of the most central aspects of the development or maturity of the PSM function, and their interdependencies and effects on performance, will help to inform and inspire further research along these lines.\nAcknowledgements: The authors wish to thank all seminar participants at Rotterdam School of Management, Maastricht University and EBS Business School for their useful comments. In addition the authors would like to express their gratitude to the editors and the reviewers for the effort they gave in reviewing the paper. The feed-back provided was very useful in improving the work.\n",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Purpose: - The purpose of this paper is to develop a set of nine hypotheses linking four purchasing and supply management (PSM) practices directly to purchasing performance and indirectly to financial performance.\nDesign/methodology/approach: - The authors collected data in a global cross-industry survey of 148 companies, combining primary interview and survey data with secondary data on firm performance, in order to minimize the impact of common method variance.\nFindings: - Support was found for eight of the nine hypotheses. In particular, a positive impact was found of cross-functional integration and functional coordination on purchasing performance, and of purchasing performance on firm performance. Both talent management and performance management have a positive impact on cross-functional integration and functional coordination. Talent management also has a direct impact on purchasing performance, in contrast to performance management.\nOriginality/value: - The association of enhanced PSM maturity levels with financial performance metrics collected from secondary data sources provides robust empirical support for the stated but to this point largely untested positive impact of PSMmaturity on the firm's competitive position.\n",
"role": "assistant"
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] |
Personal interaction and customer relationship management in project business
|
[
"Customer relationship management, Project management, Business relationships",
"Personal interaction",
"Project marketing",
"Interpersonal relations"
] |
[
{
"content": "Summarize the following paper into structured abstract.\n\n__NO_TITLE__: An executive summary for managers and executive readers can be found at the end of this article.\nIntroduction: Project business represents an industrial marketing setting in which the business is built around discontinuous, unique and complex deliveries of projects (Cova and Hoskins, 1997; Mandjak and Veres, 1998). It has attracted considerable research interest, especially during the last two decades (Tikkanen et al., 2006). Management of project business is said to involve two primary levels - management of projects or project portfolios and management of customer relationships (Skaates et al., 2002). Management at both levels is complex especially owing to the unique qualities of the projects and the discontinuity of relationships inherent to the project business (Cova and Hoskins, 1997).\nCustomer relationships in the project business: Personal interaction in project marketing\nMethodology: Case study strategy\nCase study on two project business firms: The empirical analysis led to the identification of presence and expertise as the two functions of personal interaction in project business relationships. These are the functions that work at both relationship and project levels and connect personal interaction and management of customer relationships in the project business. The study will now describe the two functions and empirically illustrate their different types. On this basis we model personal interaction as an essential part of customer relationship management and depict two situational factors that influence the personal interaction.\nConclusions: The present study combines research on project business management with research on industrial buyer-seller relationships to study the role of personal interaction in the management of customer relationships in project businesses. When the previous research emphasizes the forms and influences of personal interaction at different levels, we depict two specific functions that combine personal interaction with customer relationship management. These two functions explain the importance of personal interaction and disclose the contents of interaction that must be considered in relationship and project management. Furthermore, we illustrate how two situational factors influence and are affected by personal interaction.\n",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to examine the role of personal interaction in customer relationship management in the project business. The research question addressed is: How is personal interaction intertwined with the management of customer relationships in the project business?\nDesign/methodology/approach: The authors connect an extensive knowledge of personal interactions in industrial business relationships with research on social interaction in the project business to enrich their understanding of customer relationship management in that business. Exploratory case study is used to empirically examine two firms providing project business solutions: one provides highly-tailored technological solutions to the process industry, and the other provides professional engineering services to that same industry.\nFindings: The study reveals two specific functions that connect personal interaction with customer relationship management. These two functions explain the importance of personal interaction and disclose the contents of interaction that should be considered in relationship and project management. Furthermore, the authors illustrate how two situational factors influence and are influenced by personal interaction.\nOriginality/value: The study suggests specific conceptualization of personal interaction as a part of project business management.\n",
"role": "assistant"
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] |
Whistle-blowing by external auditors in South Africa: Enclosure, efficient bodies and disciplinary power
|
[
"South Africa",
"Panopticism",
"Auditor regulation",
"Foucauldian power and control",
"Reportable irregularity (RI)",
"Section 45 of the APA (the RI provisions)",
"Whistle-blowing"
] |
[
{
"content": "Summarize the following paper into structured abstract.\n\n1. Introduction[1]: The relationship between financial crisis and regulation and the implications that this has had for the traditional self-regulatory franchise of the audit profession has been well documented (Malsch and Gendron, 2011). Less clear are the exact attributes of arms-length regulation that have led to its institutionalisation and proliferation over the last decade (Unerman and O'Dwyer, 2004; Humphrey, 2008). In particular, what is it that allows additional laws and regulations to reassure users of financial statements that the quality of audit reports has improved after corporate scandals have shaken the confidence vested in the assurance function?\n2. The South African auditor's reporting duties under Section 45 of the APA: In South Africa, as in over 50 other jurisdictions where ISA's are applied, an auditor is required to express an opinion on a client's financial statements (Independent Auditing and Assurance Standards Board, 2009b, g; IRBA, 2011). In addition, South African auditors are obliged, in terms of the reportable irregularity (RI) provisions, to bring RI's to the attention of the IRBA[2].\n3. Theoretical frame of reference: Principles of enclosure, the efficient body and disciplinary power\n4. Method: The prior literature on auditor regulation has not adopted a primarily Foucauldian perspective. As a result, a qualitative method illuminating this relatively understudied aspect of audit is the most suitable approach (Brennan and Solomon, 2008; O'Dwyer et al., 2011). Using detailed interviews, this research focuses on the perspectives of those who are directly involved with audit and have been contributing to the development of audit practice in South Africa. Respondents included audit partners from the Big Four, as well as second tier audit firms, with at least five years' experience in their role as \"engagement leaders\" (IAASB, 2009i) (experts). Informed users of audit reports serving at institutional investors, on audit committees or at regulatory bodies also participated in the research (users). (We use \"U1-13\" and \"E1-16\" to identify the user and expert interviewees respectively). The result is that some of the most influential and knowledgeable individuals on the issue of audit practice, reporting and quality have been engaged[5].\n5. Discipline and punish? Views of the RI provisions in South Africa: On principles of enclosure and the efficient body\n6. Conclusion: This paper argues that that RI provisions have an impact of the conduct of at least some audit partners and senior members of management at audit clients. The ability of the auditor to access any part of the organisation, during the normal part of his duties, and resulting possibility of irregularities being reported to the IRBA adds to a sense of transparency and accountability that \"works on the mind\" of those subject to audit. In turn, this allows the RI provisions to add to the perceived value of the attest function in the eyes of some stakeholders.\n",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to explore how notions of disciplinary power manifest themselves in audit regulatory developments. When it comes to research on the relationship between audit quality and regulation, much of the prior scholarly work has kept to the positivist tradition of quantitative analysis under the guise of \"economic rationality\". In contrast, this research takes an interpretive approach to provide an alternate and unique perspective, using motifs of Foucauldian power and control to illuminate the operation of external regulation in a South African setting. The paper examines what may be loosely described as a mandatory whistle-blowing duty imposed on external auditors.\nDesign/methodology/approach: Detailed interviews with some of South Africa's leading corporate governance experts are used to highlight the disciplinary effect of an auditor's duty to bring reportable irregularities to the attention of an independent regulator.\nFindings: Blowing the whistle on irregularities contributes, not only to increasing the information made available to stakeholders, but to creating a valid expectation of auditors serving the public interest by enhancing a sense of transparency and accountability. Elements of resistance to panoptic-like control are, however, also present suggesting that, in part, the regulation may simply be creating the illusion of active reporting.\nResearch limitations/implications: The research relies on a relatively small sample of subject experts and does not provide a complete account of regulatory developments taking place in South Africa and abroad. Additional research on the role of whistle-blowing in an external audit setting is needed focusing particularly on similarities and variations in interpretations of reporting by auditors from the perspective of more diverse stakeholder groups.\nPractical/implications: Mandatory reporting of irregularities by auditors can provided additional useful information for stakeholders and may contribute to demands for more effective reporting by auditors.\nSocial implications: Arms-length regulation of the audit profession should not be seen only as a means of improving audit quality and the utility of audit reports. Powerful social forces are also. This research demonstrates how laws and regulations have a potential disciplinary effect on the audit profession that contributes to a restoration of confidence in the audit process after it is best by scandals, even if motifs of power and control are somewhat illusionary.\nOriginality/value: This research addresses the need for more detailed analysis of precisely how mechanisms of accountability and transparency operate in the broader corporate governance arena. The paper also contributes to the calls for more detailed, context-specific studies of audit. Finally, this paper is one of the first to employ a critical theoretical perspective on audit in an African setting, responding to the need for contextual, methodological and theoretical eclecticism in the area of corporate governance research.\n",
"role": "assistant"
}
] |
Do different national samples yield similar dimensions of national culture?
|
[
"Data reduction",
"Cross-cultural management",
"Dimensions of culture",
"Sampling"
] |
[
{
"content": "Summarize the following paper into structured abstract.\n\nIntroduction: Uses for dimensions of cross-national differences in business studies\nSampling in large-scale cross-cultural studies: The available large-scale comparisons of national culture and other national indicators have used very diverse samples. Some were nationally representative; others were matched or loosely matched samples of university students, teachers, or company employees. There has been considerable diversity within the last category as well. Hofstede (1980) compared employees from different national subsidiaries of a single multinational company, IBM. Merritt (2000) studied pilots from national airlines. Smith et al. (1996) relied on data collected by Fons Trompenaars from diverse company employees working in a variety of sectors and having different job descriptions. Smith et al. (2002) respondents were also diverse: middle managers from a variety of organizations, industries, and company departments. Project GLOBE's (House et al., 2004) samples consisted of middle managers in a few selected industries (financial, chemical, and food-processing) that commanded a sizeable presence in all countries of interest. Ralston et al. (2011) pooled together data from professionals and managers at three different hierarchical levels from diverse companies.\nGoals of the present study: The first goal of our study is to compare results from the administering of the same questionnaire items to different samples: nationally representative, as in the work of Inglehart and Baker (2000), vs loosely matched, as in the work of Smith et al. (1996) and Smith et al. (2002), Project GLOBE (House et al., 2004), Ralston et al. (2011), and other similar studies. In particular, we are interested in the following research question:\nPopular data reduction methods: Most cross-cultural analyses of large databases have used some sort of factor analysis (a popular variant of which is principle components analysis (PCA)) with varimax rotation. This method amounts to imposing a multidimensional coordinate system with orthogonal axes on the available data. The orthogonal axes stand for unrelated dimensions of culture (or whatever other domain is studied). The closer an item is to a particular axis, the stronger its statistical association with that axis. Further, the varimax rotation ensures that the dimensions are as distinct as possible. One of the peculiarities of this method is that the addition of a single item to the factor matrix can change the factor structure dramatically. Additionally, a preference for orthogonal factors rests on a dubious philosophical position: factors can usefully be seen as causes of various phenomena, but if we insist on looking for unrelated factors, we subscribe to the view that the world is governed by unrelated causes (Minkov, 2013). In consequence, some scholars, notably Schwartz (2011), explicitly object to the use of factor analyses, especially those with orthogonal solutions.\nA theory of national culture explaining desirable qualities for children using the WVS: For the purpose of this study, we have chosen to work with the most recent version of a set of items, regularly fielded by the WVS, the world's largest repository of longitudinal measures of values, beliefs, and other components of culture in almost 100 nations. We used data from the 2005 to 2008 wave of the survey, freely available on the project's official web site: www.worldvaluessurvey.com, focussing on a particular set of items: ten potentially desirable traits that parents may wish to see developed in their children. They can be seen as important values, namely, goals for socializing children, as perceived by their community members (see the Appendix).\nSampling methods in this study: WVS 2005-2008 presents a list of occupational categories to its respondents (item v242) and asks them to assign themselves to one of them. Information about this variable is available for 49 countries. The cross-tabulation of this item revealed that some of the occupational categories (for instance \"farmer\") are not well represented in some countries, where there are too few respondents belonging to them. In view of that relative shortfall, it seemed reasonable to work with the following categories.\nData reduction methods in this study: All our analyses were carried out at the national level, after aggregating each item to that level. We started with the nationally representative samples, repeating the analyses with managers, experts, and skilled manual workers. In each case, we first assessed the structure of the selected set of values visually, using MDS, just as in the work of Schwartz (e.g. 1994). MDS is a data reduction technique, somewhat similar to factor analysis. Although MDS uses Euclidian distances rather than Pearson correlations in its algorithms, it produces plots that resemble those from PCA; thus, items that are shown close together tend to be highly and positively correlated, whereas those that are opposite each other, and far apart, tend to be highly and negatively correlated.\nResults: MDS analysis\nDiscussion: Our study compared nation-level value structures across four different national samples - nationally representative samples, managers, experts without supervisory functions, and skilled manual workers. We used, and simultaneously compared, two different data reduction methods: Schwartz's MDS-based method and EFA (PCA).\n",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Purpose: Cross-national studies of employees' values and beliefs have extracted dimensions of national culture from diverse samples of employees. The purpose of this paper is to find out if this sample diversity impacts the nature of the extracted dimensions: is a given dimension replicable across diverse samples (such as managers vs skilled workers?).\nDesign/methodology/approach: The authors analyzed a set of values from the World Values Survey, comparing nation-level value structures from four types of samples in 46 countries: national representation, managers, experts without supervisory duties, and skilled workers. The authors analyzed the data with, and simultaneously compared, two data reduction methods: multidimensional scaling (MDS) plots (Shalom Schwartz's preferred method) vs exploratory factor analysis (EFA).\nFindings: MDS plots suggested structural similarity across the four samples, whereas EFA suggests divergence.\nResearch limitations/implications: Whether dimensions of national culture replicate across different samples or not depends on the data reduction method. There is no one best method in an abstract sense. Researchers' choice of method should be contingent on their research philosophy: theory-driven vs empirical.\nOriginality/value: No such study has been published previously.\n",
"role": "assistant"
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] |
Communication technology in international business-to-business relationships
|
[
"International",
"Business-to-business",
"Europe",
"Regression",
"Survey",
"Communication technology"
] |
[
{
"content": "Summarize the following paper into structured abstract.\n\n__NO_TITLE__: An executive summary for managers and executive readers can be found at the end of this article.\nLiterature review and hypotheses: The literature exploring the link between information/communication technology (ICT) and international business is relatively recent and continually growing. Some of the research, originating mostly in economics and IT, explores, at the macro-level, the impact that investment in information technology and more specifically in communication technology has on economic activity. For example, Datta (2001) uses Granger causality tests to show that the level of telecommunication infrastructure predicts economic activity in both developed and developing countries. In the same vein, Clarke and Wallsten (2006) explore the relationship between the internet and increased trade, while Goyal (2008) argues that communication technology makes global markets more inclusive by enabling outsourcing, off-shoring, and leveling wage differences. Finally, Vemuri and Siddiqi (2009) report a positive and significant effect of ICT infrastructure on the volume of international trade, across 64 countries with a variety of economic development levels.\nMethodology and data analysis: To test the above hypotheses we used a sample of US exporters to emerging European countries. We created a list of 747 companies from three main sources:\nData analysis and results: We analyzed the data using the step-wise linear regression procedure in SPSS. For each of the three communication technologies, we first introduce the control variables (technical level of the product and language skills), followed by country variables block and the dyadic variables block.\nDiscussion of results: The purpose of this paper is to ascertain the primary drivers of the use of ICT in the international operations and the impact of these technologies on the performance. The model tested in this paper allows for an examination of both dyadic and country level antecedents of communication technology use in export dyads. Overall, the dyadic-level variables provide a more compelling pattern of results than country level-variables. For example, information exchange predicted all three communication modes, while the use of warnings predicted both inter-personal communication methods. These findings are broadly consistent with previous research on inter-organizational strategies in the context of Russia (Mikhailitchenko and Lundstrom, 2006) and underline the pervasive role of cultural factors in business relationships.\nManagerial implications, limitations, and directions for future research: The managerial implications of our findings are fairly straightforward. Our findings suggest that US firms exporting to emerging European markets should make more use of communication technologies such as phone and e-mail because they are associated with better economic performance for the dyad. Importantly, internet data communication technology may not be a performance enhancer as it does not provide communication richness.\n",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Purpose: This study aims to examine the antecedents and performance consequences of three types of communication technology (phone, e-mail and internet) in cross-border business-to-business relationships.\nDesign/methodology/approach: Based on the proposed theoretical framework six hypotheses are advanced and tested. The authors use regression analysis on data from a survey of American exporters combined with secondary data on emerging European markets.\nFindings: This research finds that relationship-level variables are better predictors of ICT use than country-level variables, and that ICT use impacts dyadic performance. More specifically, information exchange predicted all three communication modes, while the use of warnings predicted both inter-personal communication methods. From an institutional standpoint, the authors find that bureaucratic barriers predict both phone and e-mail communication. At the firm level, it is found that firm-level technological skills are a significant predictor for the use of internet-based data exchange. The paper also finds that increased frequency of phone and e-mail communication among dyadic partners improves performance.\nResearch limitations/implications: Although micro-level variables are found to be more important, country variables still bring interesting insights and should not be ignored. Also, newer technologies should be explored in future research.\nOriginality/value: The authors explore antecedents of information/communication technology (ICT) use at three levels: country or macro level, dyadic (or inter-firm relationship) level, and firm capabilities (intra-firm). At the country level, the authors move beyond infrastructure to examine the impact of institutional factors, such as government red tape. At the relationship level, the authors include trust-type social norms, but extend the analysis to incorporate the use of unilateral influence attempts, such as warnings.\n",
"role": "assistant"
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] |
E-laboratory design and implementation for enhanced science, technology and engineering education
|
[
"Computer‐based e‐laboratory",
"Simulation",
"Engineering education",
"E‐learning",
"Learning styles",
"Higher education",
"Northern Ireland"
] |
[
{
"content": "Summarize the following paper into structured abstract.\n\n1. Introduction: An increasing use is being made of e-learning technologies to widen participation in STEM subjects. Existing systems, however, rely heavily on the exchange of information through text-based formats. Although linguistically intelligent students are very much at home in this environment this may not be so for those having other learning styles and studying approaches. Many students of science, technology and engineering require a more practical approach to study (Kolb, 1984; Honey and Mumford, 1992) and may find their learning needs not being met. Current technologies fail to make available that which is possible on-campus, off-campus. This deficiency is particularly evident to learners who have a preference for a pragmatic hands-on approach to learning.1.1 Widening participation\n2. Active experimentation, increased engagement and active learning: Science, technology and engineering students need more than the verbal means of transfer of knowledge through theory-based classroom learning. Learning from experience is the desired learning style for many - Gardner's Bodily-Kinesthetic and Spatial-Visual, VAK's Kinesthetic, Kolb's Converging and Accommodating, and Honey and Mumford's Activists and Pragmatists, are important examples (Kolb, 1984; Honey and Mumford, 1992; Gardner, 1999). Defining learning as the process of creating knowledge through the transformation of experience (Kolb, 1984), we see experience is either through internal reflection (intention), or active external manipulation of the world (extension).For e-learning programmes to encompass both transformation modalities, requires the addition of functionality to facilitate student involvement in practical learning activities, which permit learning through extension. The provision of active-experimentation, through practical laboratory activity permit learners to learn using their preferred learning style, This has been identified as an essential element in nurturing a positive attitude towards science and engineering, as well as strengthening learner understanding and improving performance within engineering (Ornstein, 2006; Aziz et al., 2007; Aladejana and Aderibigbe, 2007).Implementing a programme of courses that encourages knowledge transformation through active-experimentation, in a cost effective way, with existing technologies, is a challenge for e-learning technologists and providers. Blended e-learning, that is, combining distance learning with face-to-face modalities, is a possible solution. Running theory based portions of science or engineering courses over the internet and laboratory segments on-campus is a viable solution. It is however, one that limits the \"anywhere anytime\" advantages of a fully online programme.2.1 Computer-based simulation\n3. Methodology: To evaluate usability, and to validate further development, an action research approach was undertaken. Although envisaged as an off-campus learning environment, downloadable via a VLE, usability evaluation was conducted on-campus in a conventional computer laboratory. This approach allowed observations and comparisons to be made with traditional learning events previously run over a ten-year period, in relation to the same learning outcomes. Furthermore, it provided an opportunity to monitor and assist learners while they carried out their tasks. This was beneficial in gaining a better understanding of student requirements and how these could be included in later versions of the software to better assist autonomous learners. In order to establish the level of student satisfaction, a number of questionnaires, comprising three closed and one open sets were used during the study. Questionnaire design was based on the recommendations of Lewis (1993) and Cato (2000). Informal, unstructured interviews were also used to provide supplementary insights to compliment information obtained using the above-mentioned tools.Questionnaires were incorporated into the learning environment. This approach was taken in order to achieve a closer association between the questions on the questionnaire and the learner's views on the subject being measured. It permitted also the easier management of documentation by saving the result of each questionnaire to a designated file location online, for later opening and processing. The main disadvantage of implementing questionnaires using this format is the disruptive effect on the task activities carried out by learners, which in turn may affect both qualitative and quantitative evaluation measurements (Lewis, 1993).The sample population consisted of 56 first year undergraduate students enrolled on an Engineering Foundation Degree at the University of Ulster each taking the first year module in Engineering Skills. This cohort was considered ideal for the study as engineers align well to the converger learning style, preferring technical tasks and having a desire to experiment with new ideas (Kolb, 1984). Historically, the cohort is predominately male. However age, gender and ethnicity, for the purpose of the present study have not been considered relevant. Educational background and academic achievement are presumed similar. Teaching assumes little or no prior experience in building or testing electronic circuits. Familiarity with the internet, and interaction with software applications traditionally installed on a home computer, was assumed. Students were informed in writing of the study on the opening page of the e-laboratory and again verbally during each teaching sessions. All learners and participants in the study were assured of the fact that the trial was voluntary.\n4. Results: Of the 56 students registered on the module, 33 completed the printed circuit boards (PCB) assembly stage, with 28 going on to test their circuit. Of these 28 who proceeded, 22 completed the questionnaires. Results indicate that the visual format and structure used for content display was easy to understand. Learners agreed that the activities had practical relevance, were motivating and enjoyable. They found using the e-laboratory improved their understanding of testing methods. The majority of students concluded that the e-laboratory was suitable for distance and online learning incorporating ODL and blended approaches.Observation of learners in the context of this study, and extensive knowledge of previously run presentations, permitted an accurate subjective assessment to be made on the effectiveness and efficiency of the e-laboratory. Comparing presentations to discover their relative efficiency levels resulted in noticeable differences. During the traditional implementation teaching was tutor-centred with learners depending on tutor support. Computer based provision was found to be more student-centred with learners taking responsibility for their own learning. The measurement of effectiveness relates to whether a task can be accurately and completely achieved (British Standards Institute, 2006). Common parameters included percentage task completion, error rate and assistance required. Obvious differences occurred when comparing the two implementations. The face-to-face (F2F) pre-computer scenario learners had a very low completion rate, a high error rate and required constant assistance. The computer-based scenario resulted in a high completion rate, low error rate and a significant reduction in learner supervision. The difference could not have been more contrasting.\n5. Conclusions: It is generally agreed that practical laboratory and workshop activities offer science, technology and engineering students an opportunity to advance their learning through the linking of taught theory to the real world (Laurillard, 1994). The benefits associated with laboratory-based hands-on learning are not easily obtainable through present VLE features to online learners. Online virtual laboratories, reliant on simulation software, have been developed to allow students to conduct simulated versions of scientific experiments (Tejedor et al., 2008). Interaction is through a computer-based user interface that lacks a truly hands-on learning experience. This study has taken an alternative and original approach by developing a system where the learner interacts more fully with the materials and devices associated with their subject, doing and carrying out actions, rather than watching. The successful implementation of a computer-based laboratory that can be downloaded with ease, using presently available VLE file transfer capabilities, to distant learners, achieved an extremely positive and encouraging response. From observations, we conclude that learners became actively involved in the learning process and were more inclined to take responsibility for their own learning, through an inquiry based approach, than was normally seen during traditional presentations. Student feedback confirmed a high level of enjoyment when using the system and indicated an increased level of motivation through this experience. Many of the students believed such a system could be used successfully as a distance learning online laboratory. As campus-based students they expressed their desire to have their own e-laboratory which would allow them to complete laboratory work they had missed on-campus. Findings to-date show there is an appetite for using a computer-based laboratory amongst learners. As an enhancement to established traditional teaching models it provides a means of widening participation through diversity of learning stimuli. Current research has been limited to one well-defined teaching scenario, however, analysis of gathered data would indicate a wider potential for this type of learning tool in other modules and in other areas of science, technology and engineering fields of study. We recommend that further works be done to extend this piece of research investigation and for the diverse learners in various institutions. The results could spell progress for developments and refinements of works in the development of experiments in these subjects areas carried out in remote and virtual laboratories.Opportunities exist for the development of a much wider range of interactive teaching materials. For example transducers that respond to variations in environmental phenomenon like pressure, temperature, velocity etc make it possible to set up similar e-laboratories providing endless opportunity to gain knowledge through active-experimentation. Learners would have access to real life data to manipulate and display in an enjoyable but useful way, relating learning to real world occurrences. The world of engineering has always lent itself well to physical learning experiences utilising laboratory based experiments which have become well established tools for enhanced engineering education, providing support for different learning styles. However these experiments are governed by resources and infrastructure available at a particular institution. This limits exposure of valuable educational material to a small audience. The advent of virtual laboratories has helped to address this problem as well as providing realistic, multidimensional records which capture the physical experiments essential characteristics (Kuester and Hutchinson, 2007). Online learning and experiments in virtual worlds enables students to study experiments in real time with access to such advanced features as slow motion, fast-forward and playback. It provides students with the means to observe, explore, analyse and conceptualise complicated experiments in digital form, enhancing and providing positive hand-on learning experience for the learner.\n",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Purpose: - This paper aims to report on the design and implementation of an e-laboratory for enhanced science, technology and engineering education studies.\nDesign/methodology/approach: - The paper assesses a computer-based e-laboratory, designed for new entrants to science, technology and engineering programmes of study in further and higher education to enable them complete proper \"hands-on\" (not simulation) laboratory experiments off-campus and also in virtual learning environments accessible remotely. The development of such a laboratory was in response to the inherent inability of web-based learning environments to duplicate, off-campus, the laboratory facilities and availability on-campus. The measurement of effectiveness relates to whether a laboratory task can be accurately and completely achieved. Common parameters included percentage task completion, error rate and assistance required. Operations under different conditions were studied and observations made from comparison on implementations.\nFindings: - E-laboratories were found to be more student-centred with learners taking responsibility for their own learning.. The face-to-face pre-computer scenario learners had a very low completion rate, a high error rate and required constant assistance. The computer-based scenario resulted in a high completion rate, low error rate and a significant reduction in learner supervision.\nResearch limitations/implications: - The technical constraints imposed by present online environments, the resulting impact on specific learning styles, and possible solutions to overcome these limitations are discussed.\nPractical implications: - Both quantitative surveys and qualitative interviews established a positive impact on student learning, thus justifying development of similar systems. More research and applications could follow as this has the potential to impact positively on development and use of e-labs for enhanced science, technology and engineering studies in terms of costs, time and space requirements.\nOriginality/value: - The recent interest and advances in the development of remote and virtual labs has shown that students of today, who are digital natives, especially those in the fields of science, technology and engineering, find the use of e-laboratories very useful in enhancing their studies, encouraging them to use familiar technologies to access and do experiments either remotely or virtually online, thereby enhancing their learning. The approach adopted is unique and original, blending both virtual and hands-on approach to experimental studies.\n",
"role": "assistant"
}
] |
Quality changes of nugget prepared from fresh and smoked rainbow trout during chilled storage
|
[
"Quality control",
"Sensory evaluation"
] |
[
{
"content": "Summarize the following paper into structured abstract.\n\nIntroduction: Ready-to-eat foods are in great demand due to social and cultural changes in recent years. One of the most important foods in this group is battered products. Battered products such as fish nuggets are products, which have been coated with batter and pre-fried so the consumers or food service providers only have to apply a final cooking procedure, usually deep frying; however, the use of conventional or microwave ovens has been increasing lately (Albert et al., 2009). Today, there are numerous variations of meat formulations, coated with different batters, breading combinations (Huse et al., 2006; Barbut, 2012).\nMaterials and methods: Materials\nResults and discussion: Product yield (percent), proximate compositions of fresh and smoked fish nugget are given in Table I. Performance of prepared fresh fish in the fish system was found to be almost equal to that of smoked fish. According to findings, there were no significant differences between samples for crude ash. However, protein, total lipid and moisture were significantly different (p<0.05). Smoked fish nuggets had lower moisture content and higher protein and fat content compared to those prepared from fresh fish which could be due to partial dehydration of meat during smoking. Raw material treatment, however, did not influence ash contents in the nuggets. Similar findings were reported by other researchers (Tokur et al., 2006; Berik et al., 2011; Alcicek, 2011; Duman and Ozpolat, 2012).\n",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to produce fish nugget from fresh or smoked fish and to investigate the quality characteristics of fish nuggets during refrigerated storage.\nDesign/methodology/approach: The study was designed to evaluate the effect of fresh and smoked fish on the storage quality parameters of fish nuggets. The products were developed by incorporating optimum level of fresh and smoked separately and were vacuum packaged in low-density polyethylene pouches and assessed for various storage quality parameters under refrigerated (2+-1degC) conditions for 27 days of storage. The products were evaluated for various chemical, microbiological and sensory parameters at regular interval of three day.\nFindings: Nuggets from smoked fish had lower (p<0.05) moisture, higher fat and crude protein compared to fresh fish nuggets. Total volatile basic nitrogen for fresh nugget samples exceeded the limit value of 30 mg N/100 g fish muscle on the 24 days of storage. At the end of storage period, TBA values were 2.8 mg malonaldehyde/kg for fresh nugget samples and 2.1 mg malonaldehyde/kg for smoked nugget samples. Microbial counts were found to be significantly (p<0.05) higher in fresh nugget than in smoked nugget samples. Sensory quality scores of smoked nuggets were significantly higher, than fresh nugget. The shelf life of fish nugget was found to be 24 days for fresh nuggets and 27 days for smoked nugget samples according to sensory assessment results.\nOriginality/value: The paper has demonstrated that the smoked fish meat prouduce nuggets of better quality, as indicated by lower microbial counts and higher sensory attributes compared to fresh fish meat.\n",
"role": "assistant"
}
] |
Collaborative development of enterprise policy: A process model for developing evidence-based policy recommendations using community focused strategic conversations and SERVQUAL
|
[
"Entrepreneurs",
"Small firms",
"Service quality",
"Government",
"Stakeholder analysis"
] |
[
{
"content": "Summarize the following paper into structured abstract.\n\nIntroduction: The job creation capabilities of entrepreneurship and SMEs are becoming increasingly important to Australian policy makers. The Australian manufacturing industry has lost more than 100,000 jobs over five years and even industry-leading manufacturers in Australia are experiencing a decline in sales and profitability during the resource boom (Critchlow and Curran, 2012). The growth of a resource- and commodities-based economy is vulnerable to changes in the global economic environment\nStrategic conversations and stakeholder satisfaction with policy: As Bryson (2003) has noted, stakeholder input into and satisfaction with policy development processes is critical to ensuring that policies incorporate stakeholder interests and information, are supported by stakeholders, and satisfy stakeholders by creating value which is meaningful to them. In other words, strategic conversations with stakeholders can enhance the process and outcomes of policy development.\nThe strategic conversation policy recommendation process: The five-stage process model (Figure 1 summarises this process) for creating policy recommendations from strategic conversations includes:\nDiscussion: This study has advanced knowledge about evidence based policy making by generating new insights into the role that research and researchers can play in the development of enterprise policy. During the process described in this paper, researchers enhanced the process of policy development by contributing a novel methodology for analysing the community consultation data and understanding stakeholder perspectives. Researchers enhanced the information base for policy recommendations by generating new insights into stakeholder perspectives through their analysis of the community consultation data. Researchers helped policy makers and policy recommendation agencies learn more about what can be achieved through strategic conversations with stakeholders and from this kind of consultation process. Finally, researchers learned more about policy-makers needs and perspectives, enhancing their own understanding of the ways in which research can contribute to policy processes. Hence, the study empirically supports Thompson et al.'s (2012) proposition that better understanding of the role that research and researchers can play in the development of enterprise policy would enable policy makers, agencies, researchers and policy stakeholders to enhance their own contribution to policy and to enhance their understanding of each other's contribution.\n",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Purpose: The aim of this paper is to integrate an augmented version of the Thompson et al. model of enterprise policy, delivery, practice and research with services marketing models including SERVQUAL and strategic conversations; and demonstrate a practical application of the analysed through the application of N-Vivo qualitative data classification software to create more satisfying enterprise policy recommendations that better reflect the voices of SMEs and other stakeholders.\nDesign/methodology/approach: A five-stage iterative process model to integrate stakeholder input into enterprise policy recommendations is developed through integrating services marketing theory and the Thompson et al. model into a field study of community conversations hosted by the Tasmanian Department of Economic Development, Tourism and the Arts, Regional Development Australia's Tasmanian committee, and local governments.\nFindings: The five-stage iterative model leverages strategic conversations, analysis (through N-Vivo), comments and revisions, recommendation co-creation, and policy assessment using SERQUAL to craft more satisfying policy recommendations.\nResearch limitations/implications: The first limitation was the time and costs associated with conducting the community consultation workshops and analysing the data. The second limitation was the inability to craft policy quickly in response to a changing environment due to the time taken to collect and transcribe the data, undertake the analysis, and develop and report policy recommendations. The third limitation was the complexity of coordinating three levels of government, which took time and effort because each level had different interests and time frames and were at times distracted by other priorities.\nOriginality/value: This paper contributes to better enterprise policy by providing a process model developed using both theory and a field study to illustrate how policy makers can co-develop policy that is more satisfying to policy stakeholders.\n",
"role": "assistant"
}
] |
Hospital responsiveness and its effect on overall patient satisfaction: A cross-sectional study in Iran
|
[
"Patient satisfaction",
"Health system responsiveness",
"Non-medical aspect of care"
] |
[
{
"content": "Summarize the following paper into structured abstract.\n\nIntroduction: The World Health Organization (WHO) evaluates the performance of health systems on three main goals: improving health, fair financing and responsiveness (WHO, 2000). Responsiveness of health systems pertains to one's reasonable expectations of the non-medical aspects of health care (Karami-Tanha and Fallah-Abadi, 2014); the way and the environment in which patients are treated during their interaction with the health system (Valentine et al., 2015). Reasonable expectations are the known and accepted principles, laws and standards of non-medical care (Desilva and Valentine, 2000). The proposed model of responsiveness by WHO consists of eight elements of non-medical aspects of health care; these falls into two important components:\nMethod: Study design\nFindings: The mean age of patients was 47.7+-18.2 years. About 51 percent of patients (235 cases) were female, the average length of stay was 6.7+-3.8 days. The detailed profile is given in Table I.\nDiscussion and conclusion: This study was conducted to investigate the effects of responsiveness on overall patient satisfaction at selected hospitals in Tehran, Iran. Based on Cohen's recommendations, any value more than 0.25 represents a large variance in the model (Cohen, 1988). This indicates that our theoretical model was effective at explaining the relationship between responsiveness and overall patient satisfaction; this is consistent with the results of other studies conducted in the European Union and Qatar (Bleich et al., 2009; Messina et al., 2009; Faleh et al., 2015). Our findings suggest that responsiveness has a strong impact on overall satisfaction and that patient satisfaction is affected by the type of hospital ownership, the ability of hospitals to give patients PA, communication, dignity, autonomy, the ability to choose one's health care provider and quality of BA. Patients who were hospitalized at public hospitals were overall less satisfied than those patients who were admitted to private hospitals. Varmaghani et al. (2012) also found higher levels of satisfaction among patients in private hospitals compared to public hospitals. Public hospitals are known for having high levels of customer dissatisfaction, long waiting periods, poor and unclear communication and poor quality of services (Yaghoubi et al., 2011). Thus, patients generally prefer private hospitals.\nConclusion: Hospital responsiveness had a strong effect on overall patient satisfaction. Hospitals should not only focus on clinical aspects of care, but also consider including efforts to responsiveness improvement in their strategic plans. Patient autonomy is an important aspect of non-medical care, and the right to choose one's care provider impacts overall patient satisfaction. Hospitals should take actions to address these factors to increase their patients' levels of satisfaction. It is also recommended that patients should be involved in their treatment processes and have the right to choose their physician.\n",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Purpose: Hospital responsiveness to the patient expectations of non-medical aspect of care can lead to patient satisfaction. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the relationship between the eight dimensions of responsiveness and overall patient satisfaction in public and private hospitals in Tehran, Iran.\nDesign/methodology/approach: This cross-sectional study was conducted in 2015. In all, 500 patients were selected by the convenient sampling method from two public and three private hospitals. All data were collected using a valid and reliable questionnaire consisted of 32 items to assess the responsiveness of hospitals across eight dimensions and four items to assess the level of overall patient satisfaction. Data analysis was performed using descriptive statistics and multivariate regression was performed by SPSS 18.\nFindings: The mean score of hospital responsiveness and patient satisfaction was 3.48+-0.69 and 3.54+-0.97 out of 5, respectively. Based on the regression analysis, around 65 percent of the variance in overall satisfaction can be explained by dimensions of responsiveness. Seven independent variables had a positive impact on patient satisfaction; the quality of basic amenities and respect for human dignity were the most powerful factors influencing overall patient satisfaction.\nOriginality/value: Hospital responsiveness had a strong effect on overall patient satisfaction. Health care facilities should consider including efforts to responsiveness improvement in their strategic plans. It is recommended that patients should be involved in their treatment processes and have the right to choose their physician.\n",
"role": "assistant"
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] |
The influence of leader empowering behaviors and employee psychological empowerment on customer satisfaction
|
[
"Organizational commitment",
"Customer satisfaction",
"Employee satisfaction",
"Leader empowering behaviors",
"Psychological empowerment"
] |
[
{
"content": "Summarize the following paper into structured abstract.\n\nIntroduction: Researchers and practitioners have recognized the importance of employee empowerment at the frontline level in the hospitality industry where prompt action is often required to deliver high quality service to customers (Kim et al., 2012; Ottenbacher and Gnoth, 2005; Hartline and Ferrell, 1996; Heskett et al., 1997; Sergeant and Frenkel, 2000). Researchers have also shown that empowered employees are more likely to report higher job satisfaction and organizational commitment (Kim et al., 2012; Bhatnagar, 2007; Liden et al., 2000). Customer evaluative judgments, such as perceived service quality or satisfaction, are often used as indicators of organizational effectiveness (Schneider et al., 1998; Anderson and Mittal, 2000). Despite abundant theoretical evidence, there is a lack of research linking employee empowerment and customer satisfaction, since integrating employee and customer data can be challenging (de Jong et al., 2008).\nLiterature review and hypotheses development: Psychological empowerment\nMethodology: Sample\nResults: Table I contains correlations and descriptive statistics for all study variables. The hypothesized overall model showed a good fit (kh2=10.58, df=12, p>0.01; CFI=0.99, RMSEA=0.01). H1 stated that employee satisfaction will mediate the relationship between psychological empowerment and customer satisfaction. The direct path from psychological empowerment to employee satisfaction (b=0.53, p<0.01) and from employee satisfaction to customer satisfaction (b=0.42, p<0.05) were significant (Figure 2). Additionally, the total indirect effect from psychological empowerment to customer satisfaction through employee satisfaction was significantly positive (b=0.22, p<0.05). Therefore, H1 was supported.\nDiscussion: The findings of this study suggest that leader empowering behaviors (LEB) has an indirect effect on customer satisfaction and employees' organizational commitment. LEB was positively related to psychological empowerment (PE), which in turn was related to employee satisfaction. Consequently, employee satisfaction was positively related to customer satisfaction and organizational commitment of employees. The implications of our findings and the limitations of our research are discussed below.\n",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Purpose: This study aims to examine the role that psychological empowerment (PE) and employee satisfaction (ES) play in the relationship between leader empowering behaviors (LEB) and customer satisfaction (CS) and employees' organizational commitment (OC).\nDesign/methodology/approach: Data were collected from 365 frontline employees and 2,915 customers at 40 units of a chain restaurant in the USA.\nFindings: Structural equation modeling (SEM) results indicated that LEB influences PE, and PE in turn influences employee satisfaction, which consequently results in higher employees' OC levels and higher customer satisfaction.\nOriginality/value: Although recent hospitality research recognizes the importance of employee empowerment and leadership, few studies have focused on leader empowering behaviors and its influence on organizational outcomes. Moreover, potential mediating processes have not received research attention. Addressing this, the current study tests a conceptual model that shows how leader empowering behaviors ultimately lead to customer satisfaction through employee psychological empowerment and job satisfaction. Although, some of these relationships have been studied separately in different contexts, the current work shows the complete process of how leadership is linked to organizational outcomes, which has not been previously studied.\n",
"role": "assistant"
}
] |
Partial least squares structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM): An emerging tool in business research
|
[
"Structural equation modeling",
"Partial least squares",
"PLS-SEM"
] |
[
{
"content": "Summarize the following paper into structured abstract.\n\nIntroduction: The popularity of structural equation modeling (SEM) has grown out of the need to test complete theories and concepts (Rigdon, 1998). Much of SEM's success can be attributed to the method's ability to evaluate the measurement of latent variables, while also testing relationships between latent variables (Babin et al., 2008). Although the initial application of this method embraced a covariance-based approach (CB-SEM), researchers also have the option of choosing the variance-based partial least squares technique (PLS-SEM).\nPrior PLS-SEM review studies: The argument for PLS-SEM as a viable methodology is gaining acceptance throughout many business disciplines. Several scholars have published studies summarizing PLS-SEM usage within their respective fields. The studies summarize the application of PLS-SEM, including the year of publication, range of years covered by the review, number of articles analyzed, and the justifications given for using PLS-SEM. The articles also reported the top three reasons given for applying PLS-SEM, which included data distribution, sample size, and the use of formative indicators. Table I summarizes the information reported in these articles.\nWhen to use PLS-SEM: PLS-SEM provides numerous advantages to researchers working with structural equation models. Given the popularity of CB-SEM, the use of PLS-SEM often requires additional discussion to explain the rationale behind the decision (Chin, 2010). As our meta-analysis of PLS-SEM review studies has shown, the most prominent justifications for using PLS-SEM are attributed to:\nHow to use PLS-SEM: When applying PLS-SEM, researchers need to follow a multi-stage process which involves the specification of the inner and outer models, data collection and examination, the actual model estimation, and the evaluation of results. In the following, this review centers around the three most salient steps:\nAdvanced topics: The growing application of PLS-SEM is accompanied by broad range of methodological research that extends the method's toolbox. Several of these extensions deal with approaches to allow researchers specifying more complex model set-ups. In its simplest form, a PLS path model considers direct relationships between (sets of) constructs. However, more complex model set-ups are easily conceivable such as the estimation of moderating effects, mediating effects, or hierarchical component models.\nDiscussion: SEM has become the dominant analytical tool for testing cause-effect-relationships models with latent variables. When the goal of the analysis is to gain substantial knowledge about the drivers of, for example, customer satisfaction, brand image or corporate reputation, SEM is the technique of choice. For many researchers, SEM is equivalent to carrying out CB-SEM. While researchers have a basic understanding of CB-SEM, most of them have limited familiarity with the other useful approach - PLS-SEM.\n",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Purpose: The authors aim to present partial least squares (PLS) as an evolving approach to structural equation modeling (SEM), highlight its advantages and limitations and provide an overview of recent research on the method across various fields.\nDesign/methodology/approach: In this review article, the authors merge literatures from the marketing, management, and management information systems fields to present the state-of-the art of PLS-SEM research. Furthermore, the authors meta-analyze recent review studies to shed light on popular reasons for PLS-SEM usage.\nFindings: PLS-SEM has experienced increasing dissemination in a variety of fields in recent years with nonnormal data, small sample sizes and the use of formative indicators being the most prominent reasons for its application. Recent methodological research has extended PLS-SEM's methodological toolbox to accommodate more complex model structures or handle data inadequacies such as heterogeneity.\nResearch limitations/implications: While research on the PLS-SEM method has gained momentum during the last decade, there are ample research opportunities on subjects such as mediation or multigroup analysis, which warrant further attention.\nOriginality/value: This article provides an introduction to PLS-SEM for researchers that have not yet been exposed to the method. The article is the first to meta-analyze reasons for PLS-SEM usage across the marketing, management, and management information systems fields. The cross-disciplinary review of recent research on the PLS-SEM method also makes this article useful for researchers interested in advanced concepts.\n",
"role": "assistant"
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] |
Exploring the antecedents of social network service fatigue: a socio-technical perspective
|
[
"Social comparison",
"Social networking service fatigue",
"Social information overload",
"Social interaction overload",
"Social surveillance"
] |
[
{
"content": "Summarize the following paper into structured abstract.\n\n1. Introduction: Social networking services (SNSs) such as Facebook have created new ways for individuals to communicate with each other (Moqbel and Kock, 2018). They enable users to connect in more convenient ways than ever before. As a result of the various benefits they bring (e.g. enjoyment, information access), since their emergence, SNSs have experienced rapid growth across the world (Ngai et al., 2015). However, it has been found that the number of active SNS users has declined in recent years. According to a report from Edison Research (2019), the number of Facebook users has decreased by 15m since 2017. A similar phenomenon can also be observed in China. QQ Zone, a well-known SNS in China, lost 60m users by the end of 2017 (Kandar, 2018). The monthly logins by users of Renren, one of the largest social networking sites in China, has decreased from 170m in 2010 to 31m in 2018 (Kandar, 2018). The use rates of WeChat and QQ Zone in 2018 have decreased by 3.9 percent and 5.6 percent, respectively, compared to 2017 (CNNIC, 2018). This phenomenon of decreasing numbers of SNS users has been coined \"SNS fatigue\" (Goasduff and Pettey, 2011).\n2. Literature review: 2.1 Social networking service fatigue\n3. Methodology: 3.1 Measures\n4. Results: 4.1 Measurement model\n5. Discussion and implications: 5.1 Discussion of key findings\n6. Limitations and future research directions: This study is not without limitations. First, the data were collected using a cross-sectional approach, which did not provide particularly strong support for the causal relationships among variables. Longitudinal studies and experiments are recommended for future research, as these methods can provide strong inference and the direction of causality (Dillon and Goldstein, 1984), which can help understand the causality process of various antecedents on SNS fatigue. Second, this study focused on the social and system factors that may cause SNS fatigue by using a socio-technical perspective. There are other factors that may cause SNS fatigue, which can be explored in future research. For instance, research in technostress has found that individuals with neurotic personalities are more likely to feel stressed (Xiao and Mou, 2019). Future research could try to explore the impacts of personalities on SNS fatigue. The issue of privacy is also regarded as serious on SNSs. Future research could explore the impact of privacy-related factors (e.g. privacy fatigue, privacy concern) on SNS fatigue from other theoretical perspectives. Finally, the data were collected in China. Prior research has indicated that social comparison, social surveillance and social interaction overload is related to a cultural gap (White and Lehmam, 2005). Compared to western cultures, people in eastern cultures are more likely to conduct social comparisons and social surveillance on SNSs. Future research might replicate this study based on data collected in other cultural contexts to test whether the social factors identified in this study can cause SNS fatigue in other cultures as well.\n",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Purpose: Despite the various benefits of social networking services (SNSs), users have begun to experience fatigue in recent years, as evidenced by a decline in active user numbers. This relatively new phenomenon has only recently received significant managerial and academic attention. The antecedents of SNS fatigue are still unclear in the literature. The purpose of this paper is to identify the key factors causing SNS fatigue, based on a socio-technical approach.\nDesign/methodology/approach: The authors empirically tested this research model with 424 SNS users via an online survey. Structural equation modeling with partial least squares was used to analyze the data.\nFindings: The results showed that the social factors of social comparison, social interaction overload, social surveillance and social information overload, and the technical factor of system complexity are significantly related to SNS fatigue.\nPractical implications: This research benefits SNS providers by allowing them to better understand how to effectively design social networking platforms to retain and attract more users. It also benefits users by providing guidance on how to actively manage their own behavior to avoid potential negative outcomes induced by SNS usage.\nOriginality/value: This study focuses on the \"dark side\" of SNS from the perspective of fatigue, extending existing research on technostress. It also extends the applicability of the socio-technical approach to the phenomenon of SNS fatigue. Moreover, it enriches SNS fatigue research by addressing the importance of both social and technical factors in causing SNS fatigue.\n",
"role": "assistant"
}
] |
Factors influencing implementation of organizational health literacy: a realist review
|
[
"Australia",
"Health care",
"Continuous improvement",
"Health services",
"Healthcare"
] |
[
{
"content": "Summarize the following paper into structured abstract.\n\nIntroduction: Organizational health literacy (OHL) is defined as an organization's capacity to ensure programs, services and information are easy to navigate, understand and use (Brach et al., 2012). OHL has been linked to improved health-seeking behaviors and ability to better understand and self-manage health conditions (Berkman et al., 2011; Sheridan et al., 2011; Coleman et al., 2002; Davis et al., 1998; Williams et al., 1998). OHL should be a fundamental element of the healthcare system, as it shapes a person's long-term health outcomes, safety and quality of the care they receive (Australian Commission on Safety and Quality in Health Care, 2014). When organizations take health-literate approaches, the people accessing their services have improved medication compliance, are better able to conduct self-examinations such as breast exams and are more likely to engage in cancer screening services such as mammograms (Coleman et al., 2002; Hussey, 1994; Davis et al., 1998). Health organizations have a responsibility to ensure they are taking health-literate approaches across all facets of their work, including ensuring the health information they provide is understood and acted upon by people of all health literacy levels (Stableford and Mettger, 2007) to support and empower people to take charge of their own health (Nutbeam, 2000). However, OHL is complex and multifaceted and is much broader than just providing clear communication (Brach et al., 2012; Trezona et al., 2018). OHL is ultimately about ensuring a health organization designs and delivers person-centered care (Australian Commission on Safety and Quality in Health Care, 2013).OHL is a relatively new concept, and understanding how to operationalize such a complex construct is still evolving. OHL is a multilayered system issue, which includes how the system engages and interacts with people (Naccarella et al., 2016). Multiple changes are concurrently required to improve OHL, including aligning the organizational values and purpose, embedding changes within core business, workforce development, ensuring clear communication is utilized in all situations (including written, verbal, signage) and ensuring consumers are involved in health systems design, development and evaluation (Brach et al., 2012; Trezona et al., 2018).As a system issue, it is prudent to take a system-based approach to understand the mechanisms and impact of OHL interventions (Australian Commission on Safety and Quality in Health Care, 2013; Naccarella et al., 2016). OHL interventions can be multifaceted and benefit from reference to a larger guiding framework or strategy (Finlay et al., 2018). Frameworks to operationalize OHL (Department of Health and Human Services, 2017, Dodson et al., 2014, Dewalt et al., 2010, Tennessee Charitable Care Network, 2017, Australian Commission on Safety and Quality in Health Care, 2014, Brach et al., 2012) outline what is required for an organization to become health literate, but there is little detail on the implementation process (Berkman et al., 2011; Koh et al., 2013b; Ross et al., 2009). Operationalizing an OHL framework may involve the implementation of multiple interventions (Brach et al., 2012; Gippsland Primary Care Partnerships, 2015); however, there is limited evidence about the effectiveness of health literacy interventions at a client, organization or system level (Naccarella et al., 2016) and how (if at all) this leads to improved health outcomes (Naccarella et al., 2016). There is a need to evaluate initiatives aimed at building OHL (Murray et al., 2010; Larsen et al., 2015).OHL is not implemented in isolation, but into a dynamic healthcare system. OHL should be considered alongside and intertwined with other quality improvement approaches such as person-centered care (PCC) (Farmanova et al., 2018). Many studies have discussed the synergies between OHL and PCC, including the need to consider their implementation as co-dependent, as one can be seen as the catalyst for the other and vice versa (Parnell, 2014; Farmanova et al., 2018; Koh et al., 2013a; Koh et al., 2013b). OHL has also been linked to other organizational change improvements such as cultural competency (Parnell, 2014; Lie et al., 2012) and quality and safety (Rothman et al., 2009). Similarly, OHL should also be considered alongside organizational change principles. In the absence of empirical evidence about OHL implementation, research has drawn on organizational change literature (Willis et al., 2014), which has been used previously to investigate OHL initiatives (Willis et al., 2014).OHL interventions have typically been implemented using linear or sequential steps, which may not be the most useful method within complex systems (Finlay et al., 2018). Complexity theory, organizational change theory and systems theory support the use of nonlinear approaches because of the nature of feedback loops impacting on these settings (Styhre, 2002; Tenbensel, 2013), so consideration of a nonlinear approach to implementation of OHL is warranted. Nonlinear changes within complex healthcare systems are well suited to a systems lens (Checkland et al., 1990), which is \"an organized way of tackling messy situations in the real world\" (Checkland et al., 1990) by considering multiple inter-dependent factors. Checkland et al. (1990) proposed a systems model called the \"inquiring/learning cycle of soft systems methodology\" (Checkland et al., 1990). The seven-stage model addresses a complex problem from a perceived real-world perspective and cycles through to \"models of relevant activity\", \"enabling accommodations,\" \"actions to improve\" and \"result.\" There is no defined endpoint as results become the new real-world situation, at which point, the cycle can be started again (Checkland, 2000). Systems lens thinking is useful in the initial framing of OHL problems, as it helps refine and systematize the complex OHL systems change processes. This notion is supported by other OHL research that emphasizes that becoming a health-literate organization is not a destination that is ever reached because further improvement can always be made (Brach, 2017).OHL interventions can be context specific and therefore may not be transferrable to other settings. The aim of this review was to identify how OHL frameworks and interventions are operationalized in different healthcare settings and the contexts aligned with successful implementation. Realist methods were used to examine how and why the operationalization of an OHL framework and/or OHL interventions contribute to changes in OHL and why it is more effective in some contexts than others. In realist work, the term context is used to describe the varying conditions that affect the outcomes of an intervention. The term mechanism is used to describe the resources and reasoning that affects the outcomes of an intervention (Pawson and Tilley, 1997; Dalkin et al., 2015). Resources include elements such as skills, supports and materials, whereas reasoning describes people's attitudes, values and beliefs (Pawson and Tilley, 1997).The research questions explored in the OHL literature were:RQ1. How do OHL frameworks/interventions influence OHL outcomes, for whom and in what contexts?RQ2. What are the contexts and mechanisms that support OHL implementation?This review explores what works for who, in what circumstances and why in OHL implementation. The purpose of the review is to provide guidance for organizations seeking to understand how to operationalize OHL. This will assist organizations to deliver services that are more health literate so that people are better able to access and utilize healthcare to promote and maintain good health (Brach et al., 2012).\nMethod: Realist methods are well suited to complex topics such as the operationalization of OHL where notions of causality are difficult to ascertain (Pawson et al., 2004). Realism is not a linear theory, but nonlinear and iterative (Emmel et al., 2018), making it a suitable method for this review, given the nonlinear nature of OHL. A realist review is a form of literature review that utilizes realist principles (Pawson et al., 2005) and follows the sequence: (1) clarify the scope; (2) search for evidence; (3) appraise primary studies and extract data; (4) synthesize evidence and draw conclusions; and (5) disseminate, implement and evaluate (Pawson et al., 2005). The details of each stage are outlined below.A realist review forms initial theories about how programs work from broad evidence and expert knowledge then refines these theories through empirical evidence to understand how context (C) impacts on implementation, how the mechanisms (M) support or hinder implementation and what outcomes (O) are produced. This information can then be analyzed to create context, mechanism, outcome (CMO) patterns to provide a deeper understanding of \"what works for whom, in what circumstances, in what respects and how\"(Pawson et al., 2005). For the purposes of this review, mechanisms are defined as elements or processes \"that when activated, brings about particular sequences of events\" (Emmel et al., 2018). Essentially, a mechanism is that which causes the outcome in a particular context (Emmel et al., 2018). In the absence of a logical theoretical lens in this emerging field, initial theories on how OHL implementation might occur were drawn from change management theories, complexity theory, system theories (utilizing soft systems methodology Checkland et al., 1990), organizational change theories and research team knowledge. Dalkin et al. (2018) advocate for the use of realist approaches in conjunction with soft systems methodology as a logical way of looking at realist data (CMOs) in healthcare settings, allowing for a more transparent and robust theory-building process. This review aspires to propose the CMO patterns to guide health professionals on the most optimal way to implement an OHL intervention, recognizing the interdependent components that are needed for successful implementation (Wong, 2015).This review was underpinned by realist synthesis quality standards (Wong et al., 2014) and publication standards (Wong et al., 2013) in conjunction with a PRISMA-P (Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis Protocols) checklist (Moher et al., 2015).Clarifying scope\nResults: This review sought to determine how OHL frameworks and interventions influence OHL outcomes for whom and in what contexts. This review also sought to understand what contexts and mechanisms support OHL implementation. The review unpacked a broad range of contexts and mechanisms that support OHL implementation as well as some detailed CMO patterns.The database search yielded 162 publications. A further 12 publications were identified from reference lists. Following removal of duplicates, title and abstract screening and full text review, 17 publications were included (Figure 1). The 17 publications (Adsul et al., 2017; Allott et al., 2018; Barrett et al., 2008; Blake et al., 2010; Brach, 2017; Brega et al., 2015; Briglia et al., 2015; Dewalt et al., 2011; Mabachi et al., 2016; Montealegre et al., 2014; Naccarella and Murphy, 2018; Palumbo et al., 2017; Peter et al., 2015; Shermont et al., 2016; Shoemaker et al., 2013; Weaver et al., 2012; Weiss et al., 2016) included data from 19 studies as Brach (2017) included data from three separate studies in three different organizations (Brach, 2017). Table I provides a summary of the study contexts and OHL interventions.Context\nDiscussion: This review outlines how operationalization of an OHL intervention and/or framework contributes to changes in OHL and suggests why it is more effective in some contexts than others. The results provide valuable insights into what contexts and mechanisms contribute to particular outcomes while highlighting the complexity of OHL. These findings confirm earlier reports about the difficulties of implementing OHL frameworks (Australian Commission on Safety and Quality in Health Care, 2013; Brach, 2017; Palumbo et al., 2017; Naccarella et al., 2016).This review found OHL operationalization to be very complex, as previously described (Brach, 2017; Naccarella et al., 2015; Kickbusch et al., 2013; Palumbo et al., 2017). The systems lens proved beneficial to facilitate analysis of the data as continuous, without an endpoint. Past studies have taken a linear approach to OHL operationalization (Finlay et al., 2018), but the expert panel endorsed the usefulness of a systems lens to understand the implementation of OHL, without a set endpoint. The realist method was useful to analyze OHL as a tangible way of describing a complex system and is able to tackle nonlinear data in a way that other methods cannot (Shearn et al., 2017; Emmel et al., 2018; Dalkin et al., 2018).The ten mechanisms identified in this paper are consistent with the barriers/facilitators previously identified (Farmanova et al., 2018; Lloyd et al., 2018) and identified the contexts in which mechanisms occur, the patterns of interaction and the specific outcomes achieved. Consistent with a realist approach, we have identified what works for whom, in what circumstances and why (Pawson and Tilley, 1997).Implementation sequence matters\nConclusion: This review advances concepts of OHL framework operationalization by identifying key concepts of \"executive leadership,\" \"OHL embedded into existing practices\" and \"workforce skilled in OHL practices\" that need to be implemented first before undertaking any further OHL framework implementation.This realist review used the theory of soft systems methodology to advance our understanding of OHL operationalization. By detailing the CMO configurations, the research contributes further to theories of change about how OHL frameworks can be advanced to more effectively change organizational outcomes and, ultimately, health outcomes.Health professionals charged with the implementation on OHL may be able to use these findings to successfully and efficiently operationalize an OHL framework. The findings of this review will also be used to inform the development and refinement of CMO configurations of OHL implementation through a realist evaluation. Further refinement of the abovementioned CMO patterns will inform strategies for effective OHL implementation.\n",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Purpose: Healthcare systems are increasing in complexity, and to ensure people can use the system effectively, health organizations are increasingly interested in how to take an organizational health literacy (OHL) approach. OHL is a relatively new concept, and there is little evidence about how to successfully implement organizational health literacy interventions and frameworks. This study, a literature review, aims to explore the operationalization of OHL.\nDesign/methodology/approach: A realist literature review, using a systems lens, was undertaken to examine how and why the operationalization of OHL contributed to changes in OHL and why interventions were more effective in some contexts than others. Initial scoping was followed by a formal literature search of Medline, CINAHL plus, Web of Science, Scopus, Embase and PsychINFO for original peer-reviewed publications evaluating OHL interventions until March, 2018.\nFindings: The search strategy yielded 174 publications; 17 of these were included in the review. Accreditation, policy drivers, executive leadership and cultures of quality improvement provided the context for effective OHL interventions. The dominant mechanisms influencing implementation of OHL interventions included staff knowledge of OHL, internal health literacy expertise, shared responsibility and a systematic approach to implementation.\nResearch limitations/implications: This study outlines what contexts and mechanisms are required to achieve particular outcomes in OHL operationalization. The context in which OHL implementation occurs is critical, as is the sequence of implementation.\nOriginality/value: Health services seeking to implement OHL need to understand these mechanisms so they can successfully operationalize OHL. This study advances the concept of OHL operationalization by contributing to the theory underpinning successful implementation of OHL.\n",
"role": "assistant"
}
] |
From image to economic value: a genre analysis of sustainability reporting
|
[
"Economic sustainability",
"Sustainable development",
"Reports",
"Business policy"
] |
[
{
"content": "Summarize the following paper into structured abstract.\n\n__NO_TITLE__: Almost 20 years have passed since the publication of the Brundtland report (also frequently referred to as Our Common Future), the landmark text that introduced the concept of sustainability to the global audience. Written in response to increasing concerns over global environmental and human rights issues, the Brundtland report called for a new paradigm of economic and industrial development, one that \"meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs\" (World Commission on Environment and Development, 1987). In the 20 years since the release of the report, talk of this new model of development has spread beyond the walls of non-profit organizations and has now become a prevalent topic in corporate communications. In fact, many of the top companies in the world now issue sustainability reports with \"no fewer than 75 of the top 100 global companies reporting in some manner\" (SustainAbility, 2006, p. 5).\nTheoretical background: genre - evolution and change: One of the central assumptions underlying contemporary rhetorical theory is that the production of texts is situational, and one of the more significant contributions to this line of thought has been Bitzer's (1968) article, \"The rhetorical situation.\" Rhetoric, according to Bitzer, is designed to \"effect change\" and what motivates the desire to effect change is the exigence found in certain situations (p. 302). The exigence, as defined by Bitzer is \"an imperfection marked by urgency; it is a defect, an obstacle, something waiting to be done, a thing which is other than it should be\" (p. 304). The production of a genre thus occurs when a writer encounters a situation, discovers the exigence in that situation (something that is not as it should be), and produces a textual response in an attempt to change the imperfection.But because he perceives the exigence as a material and objective phenomenon, Bitzer's conception of exigence has come under close scrutiny. Scholars have challenged Bitzer's assertion that writers discover and then respond to a material and objective exigence, contending instead that writers interpret the situation and through the process of interpretation construct an exigence. According to Vatz (1973, p. 463), one of the primary responders to Bitzer, \"meaning is not discovered in situations, but created by rhetors\". In other words, the exigence does not exist prior to the writer becoming engaged with the situation; rather, the exigence comes into being through the writer's interpretive interaction with the situation:Carolyn Miller (1984, p. 156) views the rhetorical situation in a similar fashion and relates the concept of exigence to the creation, maintenance, and evolution of genres. Situations are the result, not of \"perception,\" but of \"definition.\" Because human action is based on and guided by meaning, not by material causes, at the center of action is a process of interpretation. Before we can act, we must interpret the indeterminate material environment; we define or \"determine\" a situation.Defining or determining the situation or exigence is not the isolated act of an individual but rather a social act. According to Miller (1984, p. 157), \"exigence is a form of social knowledge - a mutual construing of objects, events, interests, and purposes [...]\". When we define an exigence and determine the proper response to that exigence, we do so by drawing from our existing body of social knowledge or those socially agreed upon practices as to how such situations have typically been defined. And one of the readily identifiable ways we respond to an exigence is through the creation of a genre that has been deemed as an appropriate response to that particular situation.The process of responding to an exigence is clarified quite lucidly in Bawarshi's (2003) description of the various genres available to us when encountering a death. When a friend, family member, or acquaintance has died, we are aware, based on our social knowledge, of several genre opportunities by which to respond. Among these responses are \"elegies, eulogies, obituaries, epitaths, requiems, even greeting cards,\" and each of these genres \"are not just tools to express our feelings\" but are rather \"sometimes conflicting ways we make sense of and treat death in our culture by transforming it into a specific social motive\" (Bawarshi, 2003, p. 42). When we encounter a death, we are motivated to act and respond in an appropriate way by identifying the specific genre that communicates the way we perceive and understand that particular instance of death:We recognize obituaries, for example, as notices of a person's death, usually accompanied by a short biographical account. They serve to notify the general public, and so do not play as direct a role as, say, the eulogy does in helping those who are grieving deal with their loss. The purpose of the obituary, then, is not so much to console those closest to the deceased or to help them maintain a sense of continuity in the face of loss but to ascribe the deceased with a social identity and value, one that is recognizable to others within the community (Bawarshi, p. 42).When we define an exigence in a certain way, defining whether the death requires an effort to console or construct a social identity for instance, we subsequently respond by invoking a genre suitable to that definition. The obituary and the eulogy both have distinct motives, and our decision to invoke either of these genres rests in how we define the situation. If the motive is to console friends and family, we respond through the eulogy. If our motive is to create a public identity of the deceased, we choose the obituary.The criticism of the genre of the sustainability report noted in the opening pages of this paper can be understood as an effort to redefine the exigence. To a large degree, the material conditions that gave rise to the initial efforts to generate sustainability reports have remained unchanged. Energy consumption, greenhouse gases, human rights, and toxic emissions remain issues of concern. What has changed, however, is the motive for corporations to respond to these issues and the way companies are defining the rhetorical situation. In the initial manifestations of the sustainability report, companies defined the exigence as a need to respond to critics of industry who portrayed the practices of industry as blindly contributing to the world's increasing environmental and social issues. Corporations subsequently responded by attempting to convey a particular public image of environmental and social responsibilities and to illustrate the extent to which they complied with various environmental and social regulations. Subsequently, standard reporting practices, as set forth by the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI), have been developed that reflect defining sustainability as a matter of compliance. Yet because of the emphasis now being placed on economics, the situation and exigence have become redefined, resulting in the need for new rhetorical responses.\nMethods: genre - recurring substance: While scholarship has shifted the study of genre to a focus on how particular texts reflect specific social responses, scholars have not completed disregarded the fact that genres also exhibit recurring content. \"Genre knowledge embraces both form and content, including a sense of what content is appropriate to a particular purpose in a particular situation at a particular point in time\" (Berkenkotter and Huckin, 1995, p. 13). Yates and Orlikowski (1992, p. 301) similarly contend that genres can be defined not only in relation to recurring situations but also with respect to recurring substance. Substance, as defined by Yates and Orlikowski, \"refers to the social motives, themes, and topics being expressed in the communication.\" And as Miller (1984, p. 159) adds, substance is the \"semantic value of discourse\" or how the particular response to the situation becomes manifest in terms of linguistic meaning. Put another way, the substance of the genre can be viewed as what Kress identifies as the issues or discourses that constitute a text. Drawing from Foucault, Kress (2003, p. 94) identifies discourse as the \"content/material from a particular institutional point of view, as in \"legal discourse,\" \"religious discourse,\" \"sexist discourse.\" Substance, when viewed in conjunction with genre and exigence, can thus be used as an analytical tool to examine the shift toward economics in sustainability reporting. More specifically:What economic themes and topics are prevalent in these reports and how does such economic discourse advance the business case for sustainability?In the analysis that follows, I compare the most recent sustainability reports from ten global companies to earlier versions of these same companies' sustainability reports. These ten companies have been selected based on their recognition by SustainAbility (2006, p. 2) as being representative examples of the shift in sustainability reporting. In addition, these companies span various industry sectors and services, thus providing an additional line of inquiry by which to investigate how specific sectors are responding to this suggested shift.The analysis first seeks to uncover the extent to which a shift in the substance of these reports is occurring by identifying whether the more recent reports redefine sustainability as an economic opportunity rather than as a call to convey the company's ability to comply with environmental regulations and social mandates. To determine if the redefinition exists, I will analyze the introductory sections of the reports and the introductory letters of the ten companies' chief executive officers (CEOs). I will also identify the emergence of economic themes in the latter reports, themes not present nor common in earlier versions.\nResults: In the following section, I provide the results of my analysis with a focus on identifying a shift in the definition of sustainability and any increased integration of economic discourse.Defining sustainability\nDiscussion and conclusion: As noted in the analysis of ten leading reporters, a unified trend in which companies define sustainability in economic terms is occurring. A significant shift toward economics is evident with the increased inclusion of efforts to define and support the business case for sustainability. The shift is also evident in the increased reporting of specific business initiatives designed to develop environmentally and socially responsible products that can increase revenue and market share. Subsequently, the substance of the reports, while still including such themes as the need to lessen environmental impacts and to attend to various social issues, now includes such themes as how lessening environmental impacts and attending to social problems can reduce operating costs, generate revenue, open new markets, and provide a competitive advantage. While many of the companies I analyzed attempt to align sustainability with economic opportunities in their early reports, there is a greater effort, by making the business case and by describing their specific business initiatives, to align their social and environmental performance with economic themes in their more recent reports.One significant component of this trend is the movement to provide specific measures of the cost savings and revenue growth resulting from sustainability activities. The addition of this content raises some questions as to the future direction of the genre. Currently, many companies continue to report on their performance using the GRI performance indicators, which define economic value in terms of a company's ability to provide economic benefits to all of its stakeholders:The economic dimension of sustainability concerns the organization's impacts on the economic conditions of its stakeholders and on economic systems at local, national, and global levels (www.globalreporting.org/ReportingFramework/G3Online/DMA/).Furthermore, the GRI guidelines assert that financial performance is typically restricted to financial reports and what is \"frequently desired by users of sustainability reports is the organization's contribution to the sustainability of a larger economic system\" (www.globalreporting.org/ReportingFramework/G3Online/DMA/). Yet the trend to include financial information in sustainability reports suggests that readers are seeking information pertaining to the economic benefits of sustainability to the company itself. In fact, the comment earlier alluded to with respect to the need for Marks & Spencer to provide measures of the cost savings and revenue from its Plan A initiative runs counter to the assertions made by the GRI as to the needs of readers of sustainability reports. Future studies may be needed to investigate how this change in the needs of the readership affects the way that economic performance is measured, including any shift in performance indicators used to measure a company's environmental and social performance.Of the ten companies analyzed, eight draw, in their most recent reports, from the principles of materiality to determine the content to include in their reports. The relationship between the concern for economic performance and the material approach becomes even more evident when examining the comments conveyed in the most recent reports by Nike and Shell. As is evident in examining the shift in Nike's reporting strategy, the key conversation taking place within its corporate walls is how sustainability can be \"a catalyst for growth and innovation\" (2006, p. 1). For Nike, determining what to include in its report centers on identifying and addressing those particular environmental and social issues that can lead to growth and innovation. In Shell's most recent report, a similar effort to relate materiality to business practices is made. As materiality becomes a more common practice, the possibility exists that reports will become structured around the issues most aligned with the business case.Sustainability reports go beyond illustrating to investors the possible economic value of addressing social and environmental problems. These reports reflect the way companies define sustainability and in doing so also reflect the practices that companies view as valuable in addressing various environmental and social problems. As reports increasingly make the business case, they also shape public perception of the role of corporations in addressing social and environmental issues. Some environmentalists have recently advocated for the merits of a market-based approach to solving various environmental and social issues (Shellenberger and Nordhaus, 2004). Yet defining sustainability in terms of an economic model has met with some criticism from outside of industry. These critics contend that the reliance on a market-based ideology does not indicate any corporate acknowledgment of sustainability since sustainability involves a reconsideration of the market-based system, especially its association with unrestricted growth (Livesey, 2002, p. 316). Furthermore, when companies report on their economic returns from their sustainability practices they tend to rely on the discourse of the market and the prevailing myth of progress, thereby elevating economics over environmental and social concerns (Luke, 2001; Starkey and Crane, 2003; Sandstrom, 2005). Subsequently, there remains considerable contestation with respect to a definition that is acceptable to all parties involved in the debate and how to best address the problems that gave rise to the term (Waddell, 1995; Stevens, 2006). Communicating the economic viability of sustainability entails more than just persuading investors and shareholders that a company's actions are economically viable; it is also an attempt to convince the entire range of stakeholders and readers of reports of the proposition that economic benefits and environmental and social action need not be distinct and competing entities. As Livesey (2002, p. 318) suggests, not enough attention has been paid to companies' \"proactive efforts to shape public understanding of ecological issues.\" As economic concerns become more prominent, future studies may be needed to investigate the extent to which corporate sustainability reports, and the corporate values embedded in the reports, influence public understanding of sustainability. The above discussion of the shift to economics offers new lines of scholarly inquiry. But these lines of contemplation should not be the sole domain of academic research. Reflection on the implications discussed above and on defining sustainability in terms of economic value should also take place in the private sector and within corporate walls.\n",
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"content": "Purpose: - The paper aims to examine the extent to which the genre of the sustainability report has evolved due to the increased emphasis placed on the economic value of addressing environmental and social problems.\nDesign/methodology/approach: - Drawing on the concept of genre, this paper compares the most recent sustainability reports of ten global companies to earlier versions of these same companies' sustainability reports.\nFindings: - A concerted effort to define sustainability in terms of economic value is evident in the opening sections and chief executive letters. More recent reports illustrate an increase in efforts to advance the business case for sustainability, including attempts to provide measurable economic outcomes from various sustainable activities and initiatives. In sum, while sustainability reports still convey a company's efforts to comply with environmental and social regulations, sustainability reports are showing an increase in communicating the direct economic benefits that sustainable actions can bring to the company.\nOriginality/value: - The paper provides a new approach, in the form of genre analysis, to the study of sustainability reporting. The findings from this paper suggest further lines of inquiry, including the need to examine the relation between the global reporting initiative and the emphasis on economic value, to explore the intersection of materiality and the shift toward economic value, and to consider the influence of economic pursuits on the public perception and definition of sustainability.\n",
"role": "assistant"
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Strategies for potential owners in Singapore to own environmentally sustainable homes
|
[
"Green",
"Environmental sustainability",
"Capital cost",
"Life cycle costs",
"Malaysia",
"Housing",
"Sustainable development",
"Construction operations"
] |
[
{
"content": "Summarize the following paper into structured abstract.\n\nIntroduction: In an era in which mitigating climate change and adapting to global warming have become the greatest environmental challenges faced by the human kind, there is a growing interest in developing environmentally sustainable buildings. This is because the construction industry is regarded as one of the major contributors to climate change. According to the American Institute of Architects (AIA, 2000), the biggest source of emissions and energy consumption both in the US and around the globe is the construction industry. According to a briefing note prepared for the International Investors Group on Climate Change (Kruse, 2004), the cement sector alone accounts for 5 percent of global man-made CO2 emissions.In heavily urbanized Singapore, where half the total land area is built up, the building sector is said to account for approximately 16 percent of national CO2 emissions (MEWR, 2008). This figure includes emissions resulting from primary and secondary energy consumption by buildings but excludes the emissions from the industrial process involved in the construction industry. Hence the total of direct and indirect emissions resulting from the construction industry itself could be much higher.In response to the above challenge, the Singapore Building and Construction Authority's (BCA) Green Mark Scheme was launched in January 2005. It is a green building rating system that assesses buildings and rates their performance in the following areas: energy efficiency (maximum 70 points); water efficiency (14 points); environmental protection (32 points); indoor environmental quality (eight points); and other green initiatives (seven points) (BCA, 2010). Depending on the score, the building is categorized in four levels:1. Platinum (>= 90 points);2. Gold Plus (85-89 points);3. Gold (7584 points); and4. Certified (50-74 points).Details of the assessment criteria are found in BCA (2010). The scheme hopes to promote the adoption of green building design and technologies that improve energy efficiency and reduce the impact of buildings on the environment (BCA, 2009a). It enables the benchmarking of the building's environmental performance and allows comparison between buildings. Singapore has set a lofty target of having at least 80 percent of its buildings attain the BCA Green Mark Certified rating by 2030. Details of Green Mark certification are available at BCA (2009b).The incorporation of green features to achieve Green Mark certification generally leads to higher construction costs (BCA, 2007). Hitherto, it is not known to what extent potential homebuyers are willing to buy green homes that cost more than traditional non-green homes. The aim of this study is to investigate the strategies that are needed to get potential owners to own environmentally sustainable homes. The specific objectives are to:1. determine the extent to which potential homeowners are willing to pay for homes that are environmentally sustainable;2. uncover the green features that potential homeowners are willing to pay for; and3. provide recommendations on how more green features can be incorporated in homes.It is important to develop environmentally sustainable homes as they have lower carbon footprints and contribute less to global environmental degradation. As these homes have higher upfront costs, it is therefore important to know how tolerant potential homeowners are to pay more for these homes. If they are not willing to pay more, this study provides suggestions on how to overcome this problem and yet ensure that environmentally sustainable homes are built.\nLiterature review: Importance of environmentally sustainable development\nGap in knowledge: The review above suggests that green buildings are likely to have higher upfront/first costs. Hitherto, it is not known the extent to which potential homeowners in Singapore, are willing to pay more for green homes. In the fieldwork, potential homeowners' level of sensitivity towards green home prices and their tolerance level to pay more for green homes are investigated. Homeowners play an important role in requiring green homes as they are the real driving force for buildings to achieve better sustainability (Shen et al., 2010).Many features could be added to homes to make them environmentally sustainable, thus converting them to green buildings. Green building features are those features that lead primarily to energy efficiency, water efficiency, environmental protection and better indoor environmental quality and other green features (BCA, 2009a, b; IMCSD, 2009). Thus far, it is not known which of these features are welcomed by potential homeowners, and whether they are willing to pay for them. In the fieldwork, investigation was carried out to investigate these matters.\nResearch method: From the literature review, features of environmentally sustainable homes were identified (see Table I). The research method had the aim of finding out the green features that potential homeowners would like to have and the extent to which they would pay for them.The general research approach was based on questionnaire survey. This was chosen because it allowed a large number of subjects to be studied. The data collection technique was hand-delivered, self-administered survey. This method was chosen because it could efficiently reach a large sample, and allowed ease of response. The questionnaire was a more effective alternative to interviews because it enabled a greater proportion of the population to be reached within a limited time frame. Respondents were requested to base their responses on the new home that they would purchase in the near future. A summary of the survey findings was available to respondents who were interested in the research to encourage participation.The data collection instrument was a structured questionnaire specially designed for this study. Section A of the questionnaire contained questions to gauge respondents' awareness of environmental sustainable issues. In Section B, respondents were asked to rate the extent to which they would pay extra for homes with different levels of green mark certifications. These were based on BCA's (2010) four certification levels (certified, gold, gold plus and platinum) and the additional costs associated with each level. In Section C, respondents were presented with 16 green features, which were derived from BCA's (2010) green mark rating criteria and literature review in the previous section. They were asked to rate the extent of wanting a green feature if they need to pay more. The questions in Sections B and C were based on a seven-point Likert scale, where 1=not willing or not wanted; 4=neutral; and 7=extremely willing or certainly wanted. The last section gathered demographic characteristics of respondents.Before the actual survey, a pilot survey was conducted with three experts to check that the questionnaire is coherent, the data collected would be accurate and meaningful data analysis can be carried out subsequently. After the pilot survey, minor amendments were made to remove ambiguities and discrepancies, and several questions were added.The population of this research was all potential home buyers. The sampling frame was undergraduate students in Singapore. The samples were randomly identified and the questionnaires were hand-delivered to them.Statistical analyses were performed using the PAWS Stats 17 software. The main inferential statistical tests were t-test of the mean and Pearson's correlation analysis.\nCharacteristics of the sample: Of the questionnaires, 120 sets were hand-delivered, and 75 responses were received. The response rate of 62.5 percent is good. The characteristics of the respondents are given in Table II. The respondents' age ranged from 20 to 27, with an average of 22.15. There is an almost equal mix of male and female respondents, and almost all of them are single. Large portions (45.3 percent) of the respondents major in Arts and Social Sciences and Engineering. The majority (69.3 percent) of them would be completing their studies in 1 to 2 years' time, and would purchase their first homes in 5 to 7 years' time. In total, 80 percent of them indicated that their first homes would be public apartments and most would be buying three-bedroom units.In terms of knowledge and understanding of environmental sustainability, Table II shows that the majority (58.7 percent) of them have high levels of awareness, and the average is 4.63 on a seven-point scale (7=full awareness) which is significant at p=0.000 and positive t-value. On a seven-point scale (7=extreme importance), they indicated an average of 5.86 for level of importance in developing the built environment in an environmentally sustainable way.It can be concluded that the respondents are at the threshold of buying their first homes, they represent both males and females who have significantly high level of environmental awareness and have strong belief in the importance of sustainable development of the built environment (p=0.000). Their views and requirements would be more applicable to the public housing authority in Singapore.\nResults and discussion: Willingness to pay more for green homes\nLimitations of the study: The main limitation of this study is the use of undergraduates as the subject of study. They were selected because this sampling method is an inexpensive way of ensuring sufficient numbers. Moreover, many studies in humanities and social sciences (e.g. Gouveia et al. (2002) and Herrero et al. (2010)), at least initially, were obtained with student subjects. As these student subjects who are purchasing a house in five to seven years' time, the findings would give developers time to incorporate the green features into the new homes that are built. Furthermore, the general public's understanding of green homes and the related public awareness programs do not have a long history. In many countries in Asia, including Singapore, only recently have initiatives been taken to promote public awareness of the need for sustainability in the built environment. Thus, engaging undergraduates who have benefited from such initiatives was considered an effective way of testing the pulse of the next generation of potential home buyers. Nevertheless, the limitation is that the findings might not be representative of the general population, and future studies could be conducted on a random sample of population.Another limitation is the degree of reliability of the data gathered due to self-reporting and a possible difference between actual and perceived behavior. Future research on other population groups, e.g. subjects without higher education, and actual behavior could be conducted.The next limitation is the correlation results in Table I. Some statistical anomalies are found in several instances whereby there is significant correlation between wanting a green feature and willingness to pay a higher price, but no significant correlation with willingness to pay a lower price. These statistical anomalies could be due to internal inconsistencies. Future studies could ask respondents to rate the maximum extra price they are willing to pay for each green feature.This study provided several recommendations on how potential homeowners can be persuaded to purchase green homes, which have higher upfront costs. In future studies, these recommendations could be tested for their efficacy.\nConclusion: This study investigated whether potential homeowners are willing to pay for environmentally sustainable homes. Using a structured questionnaire, data were collected from undergraduates who plan to buy their first homes in several years' time. The statistical analysis revealed that the majority (72 percent) of them are willing to pay more for homes that incorporate green features. However, their cost tolerance is low - the majority of them are only willing to pay 1 percent more in upfront costs. This is far too low to fund the many green features that could be incorporated to make homes more environmentally sustainable.Of the 16 features, this study shows that potential homeowners are willing to pay for half of them. These generally relate to natural ventilation, greenery, water conservation and certification that confirm the homes used environmentally sustainable materials and adopted sustainable construction practices. As for the other eight features, though they lead to more environment sustainability, there is significant reluctance on the part of potential homeowners to pay for them.It is therefore recommended that potential home buyers be educated about lifecycle costs instead of focusing merely on upfront costs. In addition, third party financing of green features should be considered. The third party financier may recover the investment plus expected profits over a reasonable period of time from the end-user who will benefit from the green features. The next recommendation is to give out low interest loans to end-users. Government should also lead by developing highly green public housing.In the road ahead, policy makers and regulators may need to take into consideration issues such as the demand for new and cheaper buildings; the cost of finding new and energy efficient technologies; the need to meet national and international emission reduction standards; the need to restructure existing practices and energy usages in the industry to be more environmental friendly; and the need to be alert to adapt to changing climate conditions which is likely to be inevitable, when planning and taking decisions relating to building and construction industry. In other words, the entire lifecycle of buildings could be changed in order to establish a coherent succession of sustainable construction activities.\n",
"role": "user"
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"content": "Purpose: - With global climate change, it is increasingly necessary to develop the built environment in an environmentally sustainable way. The aim of this study is to investigate the strategies that are needed to enable potential owners to own environmentally sustainable homes. The specific objectives are to: determine the extent to which potential homeowners are willing to pay for homes that are environmentally sustainable; uncover the green features that potential homeowners are willing to pay for; and provide recommendations on how more green features can be incorporated in homes.\nDesign/methodology/approach: - The survey research method was adopted and data were collected using a specially designed structured questionnaire. Self-administered questionnaires were distributed to randomly selected potential homeowners in Singapore.\nFindings: - Based on the data received, the findings show that the majority of the respondents are willing to pay more to own an environmentally green building. However, they are very price sensitive and only willing to pay 1 percent more in upfront costs.\nPractical implications: - The study found that the green features that potential homeowners are willing to pay relates to siting for natural ventilation, provision of greenery, and water conservation. It is concluded that the extent to which homeowners are willing to pay higher upfront costs is limited.\nOriginality/value: - The research provides several recommendations on how to enable more green features to be incorporated to homes owned by price sensitive individuals.\n",
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The impact of country of origin on context effects in choice
|
[
"Country of origin",
"Compromise effect",
"Attraction effect",
"Categorical attribute",
"Context effect"
] |
[
{
"content": "Summarize the following paper into structured abstract.\n\nIntroduction: Virtually all consumer products carry qualitative and quantitative information. In many real-world choice settings, consumers often utilize information on both the categorical and quantitative attributes of the options in the choice set (Ha et al., 2009). In the decision-making domain, Huber (1980) showed that when attribute values are presented in numerical terms, people are more likely to conduct within-attribute comparisons across alternatives, because it is easier to precisely characterize differences for numerical (\"comparable\") attributes (e.g. price, quality rating, etc.). Conversely, categorical (\"enriched\") attributes, primarily described verbally, represent a variety of associations, beliefs, and experiences (e.g. brand name, country of origin (COO), etc.) and are often more meaningful and informative to consumers when evaluated on their own (Nowlis and Simonson, 1997).\nCOO studies: A product's COO is typically communicated by the phrase \"made in ____ (name of country).\" However, specifying a product's COO is becoming harder, because global sourcing and manufacturing have resulted in many products having dual or multinational origins (Chattalas et al., 2008). As such, COO is no longer a unidimensional concept (e.g. Chao, 1998). For instance, Pharr (2005) mentions that COO dimensions include country of manufacture, country of assembly, country of parts, country of design, country of brand, and country of corporation ownership. Pharr also states that several dimensions of COO directly affect product quality assessments, which in turn influence purchase intentions. Thus, previous literature contains different definitions for COO, such as the country where the product is made, the country of the firm's corporate headquarters, the country of manufacture or assembly, etc. In addition, COO can be classified into different dimensions in terms of the degree of localness (local vs foreign COO; Zhuang et al., 2008) or valence (positive vs negative COO; Chuang and Yen, 2007). Despite the variety of COO dimensions, this research defines COO as the country of manufacture, which is usually operationalized and conveyed with the phrase \"made in\" and the country name.\nContext effects in choice: Context effects have been of interest to consumer behavior researchers for the past several decades. Numerous studies on context effects have consistently shown that introducing a new alternative to an existing choice set can have a systematic influence on the relative preferences for the original alternatives (Mourali et al., 2007). Two of the most important and robust context effects in various hypothetical and real choice domains are the attraction (or asymmetric dominance) effect and the compromise effect.\nThe effect of categorical attributes on context effects: Most products possess both monotonic and non-monotonic attributes. The word \"monotonic\" means that there is a linear relationship between product attributes and consumers' preferences. Certain product attributes such as price (with some exception), speed of delivery, and quality have linear relationships with consumer preferences. With all else being equal, the higher the quality of a product or speed of delivery, the more that product is preferred. The word \"non-monotonic,\" on the other hand, signifies a non-linear relationship between product attributes and consumers' preferences. Consider, for example, a product attribute such as sweetness in a soft drink. As the sweetness increases, consumer preference for that soft drink will increase to a point. Once that point is reached, more sweetness will result in a decrease in consumer preference (cf. Borna and Chapman, 1993, p. 55).\nAttraction effect and COO: In the current research, we propose that COO information can be used as an important/salient categorical attribute inducing category-based processing. As in Ha et al.'s (2009) study, we focus on the typical choice context effects where conflict or preference uncertainty arises from similar overall attractiveness of the options in the two-option core set. In that situation, the editing of the decision problem can play an important role in a cross-category asymmetric dominance choice, as stated. For example, consider the choice scenario involving the asymmetric dominance choice set (ABC) when the unique COO is introduced in the competing option: A competing option A is a product made in Italy, while two options, a target option B and an asymmetrically dominated option C, are made in the UK. In this context, a categorical grouping of options into option A (\"made in Italy\") and a group of options B and C (\"made in the UK\") may occur automatically at the initial stage of the choice process. Consumers are more or less equally attracted to the provided categories (Italy vs UK). The categorical grouping will most likely make it easier to detect a dominance relationship between options B and C, because the grouping of options tends to facilitate within-group (vs between-group) comparisons of options (Simonson et al., 1993). Thus, when an asymmetrically dominated option is added to a binary core set, consumers are more likely to edit out the dominated option early in the choice process when the unique COO is introduced in the competing option than when the common COO is shared by all of the options. Accordingly, we suggest the following hypothesis:\nCompromise effect and COO: A compromise configuration, which is created by the addition of an extreme option to the two-option core set, provides a more realistic choice context that consumers are likely to confront frequently in the marketplace (Ha et al., 2009). Thus, we examine whether the tendency to prefer a middle option in the compromise choice set will be affected by the introduction of unique COO information in the competing option.\nOverview of studies: We present five studies that test H1 and H2. These studies use different product categories, samples, choice settings, and experimental designs. In particular, to test H1 regarding the attraction effect, we used an asymmetrically dominated option as a third option in the context of the attraction effect. In addition, we adopted two different experimental conditions, the unique and common COO conditions, as in Ha et al.'s (2009) study. In the unique COO condition, a unique COO is introduced in the competing option, whereas in the common COO condition, the same COO is shared by all of the options.\nStudy 1: attraction effect: Study 1 is designed to test H1 regarding the attraction effect. We demonstrate that when an asymmetrically dominated option is added to a binary set, the attraction effect will be attenuated in the unique COO condition, while it will still occur in the common COO condition.\nStudy 2: compromise effect: Study 2 is designed to test H2 regarding the compromise effect. We demonstrate that when an extreme option is added to a binary set, the compromise effect will occur in both the unique and common COO conditions.\nStudy 3: replication: The main purpose of Study 3 is to test H1 and H2 regarding the attraction and compromise effects. Study 3 replicates the findings of Studies 1 and 2 in a single full-blown experiment incorporating the experimental designs used in Studies 1 and 2. In Study 3, we directly compare context effects (i.e. asymmetric dominance and compromise effects) under both the common and unique COO conditions in a single experiment.\nStudy 4: robustness of results: The purpose of Study 4 is to demonstrate the robustness of the results of Studies 1-3. One of the limitations of Studies 1-3 is the homogeneity of the participants (all students), which may call the study's external validity into question. Although it is a common practice to use students in research, this may reduce the generalizability of the attraction and compromise effects to other populations (Milberg et al., 2014). According to Peterson (2001), replications with non-student samples are of fundamental importance when researching specific effects, especially if the effects are to have practical relevance. Thus, we designed Study 4 to replicate the findings of Studies 1-3 by employing participants with more diverse demographics (i.e. non-student samples). In addition, there was some concern that the choice products used in Studies 1-3 were hypothetical in terms of COO. Country image is generally known to be product category specific (Lampert and Jaffe, 1998). Some countries have a strong image in several product categories (e.g. Japan in cameras and consumer electronics and Germany in cars, tools, and machinery). In Studies 1-3, however, Italy and UK generally do not have a strong image in such products as vitamin water, digital cameras, and cell phones. Consumer-based equity of a brand made in a country with stronger product category-country associations was proven to be significantly higher than that of a brand made in a country with weaker product category-country associations (Pappu et al., 2006). This concept could arguably apply to wine, with the strong product category-country associations in such countries as France, Italy, and the USA. As a product category, wines are always strongly linked to their origin (Guidry et al., 2009), and origin at the country level is a key evaluative feature for wines (Balestrini and Gamble, 2006). The perception of an origin and the presentation of origin information in a retail environment can have a great influence on wine sales (Chaney, 2002). Thus, as a realistic product stimulus in terms of COO, we chose wines made in two major wine-producing European countries (France, Italy) in the product choice task.\nStudy 5: robustness of results in real-world settings: The purpose of Study 5 is to generalize the results to business practice and establish the practical relevance of Studies 1-4. In Study 5, we replicate the findings of Study 4 in a more realistic choice setting that fosters external validity. There was some concern that Studies 1-4 applied simplified hypothetical choice settings that did not match the decision context of real purchase decisions. In the real-world situations, however, consumers always have the option not to buy a product/service and to leave empty-handed (Dhar and Nowlis, 2004). The importance of including a no-buy option has been acknowledged in consumer research (e.g. Dhar and Simonson, 2003) and has been emphasized in the context effect domain (e.g. Chuang and Yen, 2007). Thus, we need to include an option not to buy any of the items offered. Such a procedure in the domain of attraction and compromise effect studies is mandatory to create correspondence between the experimental setting and the real-world extrapolation system (Lichters et al., 2015). In addition, if the choice options are not perceived as intended in attraction and compromise settings, the context effect under research will not be observable due to a failure in the experimental manipulations (Lichters et al., 2015; Simonson, 2014). In particular, it is notable that the higher decoy shares tend to occur primarily in impersonal online surveys (e.g. via MTurk), which points to potential problems with the participants' involvement/motivation (Simonson, 2014). Thus, we need to control for the participants' perceptions of choice stimuli.\nGeneral discussion: The current research proposes that the COO information will interact with other product attributes to affect consumer choice. Specifically, relating COO information to the two context effects (i.e. the attraction and compromise effects), we propose that COO can play a significant role in consumer choice setting as a basis for the categorization of the options in the choice set. Thus, the present research adds to the current understanding of context effects by examining the impact of COO as a categorical attribute on context effects. In particular, we examine whether the introduction of a unique COO in the choice set will have a differential influence on context effects depending on the relative position of the third option (the asymmetrically dominated option vs the extreme option). More specifically, we first propose that when an asymmetrically dominated option is added to a binary core set, the attraction effect will be attenuated in the unique COO condition, whereas it will occur in the common COO condition (H1). In addition, we propose that when an extreme option is added to a binary core set, the compromise effect will occur in both the unique and common COO conditions (H2).\n",
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},
{
"content": "Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to examine the effect of country of origin (COO) information as an important/salient categorical attribute on choice context effects. Specifically, this research examines whether the introduction of a unique COO in the choice set will have a differential influence on context effects depending on the relative position of the third option (the asymmetrically dominated option vs the extreme option).\nDesign/methodology/approach: Five experiments were conducted in this research. Study 1 had a 2 (set size: two-option core set vs three-option asymmetric dominance set)x2 (competitor's COO: common vs unique) between-subjects design. Study 2 had a 2 (set size: two-option core set vs three-option extreme option set)x2 (competitor's COO: common vs unique) between-subjects design. To address the robustness of the effects, Studies 3-5 replicated the results of Studies 1 and 2. The data were analyzed by kh2 tests and logistic regression analyses.\nFindings: The current research demonstrates that the attraction effect is attenuated by the introduction of a unique COO information in the competing option, whereas the tendency to prefer a middle option is not significantly affected.\nOriginality/value: The present research adds to the current understanding and the practical relevance of COO effects and context effects in marketing by examining the impact of COO as an important/salient categorical attribute on context effects.\n",
"role": "assistant"
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] |
The consumer-perceived value of non-traditional media: effects of brand reputation, appropriateness and expense
|
[
"Information media",
"Advertising",
"Brands",
"Marketing strategy"
] |
[
{
"content": "Summarize the following paper into structured abstract.\n\n__NO_TITLE__: An executive summary for managers and executive readers can be found at the end of this article.Around 8 a.m. on 31 January 2007, the Boston city police was alerted about suspicious light displays in and around the city. Identifying them as possible explosive devices, they rallied the bomb squad. Within the hour, several subway stations, bridges, and a portion of Interstate 93 were closed for the disarmament of the devices, events that were covered by live TV and drew large on-site crowds of spectators. Eventually, someone recognized a light display as a character from the Cartoon Network's Aqua Teen Hunger Force (ATHF) TV series. The rumor spread like wildfire on the internet until the network, later in the afternoon, issued a statement that the light displays were part of an outdoor marketing campaign for the launch of the upcoming ATHF movie.\nNon-traditional media and consumer-perceived value: A projected US ad spending in 2007 above 300 billion dollars (Phillips and Noble, 2007) produces an overwhelming amount of ads that consumers are no way near of being able (and even less willing) to attend to. In fact, research shows that consumers are avoiding traditional advertising with increasing success, either with new technology or mentally (e.g. Dahlen and Edenius, 2007; Speck and Elliot, 1997). To succeed in this age of selective and empowered customers, many authors argue that one must create marketing that possesses value \"in and of itself\" (e.g. Ducoffe and Curlo, 2000; Morris et al., 2002, Phillips and Noble, 2007). Consumers screen out most advertising because its perceived baseline value is so low that they do not consider individual ads worth attending to (Ducoffe and Curlo, 2000). Advertising is an exchange between advertisers and consumers, where consumers give their time and cognitive effort and expect to receive something of value in return (the main value components have been found to be entertainment and information, Ducoffe, 1995, 1996). Low perceived value tends to result in negative consumer responses (tuning out, or unfavorable ad evaluations) whereas high perceived value produces positive responses.We believe that the measurement of consumer-perceived value may be particularly interesting in the investigation of non-traditional media. The publicity-seeking logic of employing non-traditional media is likely to generate attention (which is the point at which many assessments stop in practice), but as the ATHF case suggests, the attention may be negative and hurt both the advertiser and people's perceptions of an entire marketing discipline. Overall, (less controversial forms of) non-traditional media could also be expected to generate positive emotions and liking, simply because of its novel form (see Dahlen, 2005). Consumer-perceived value, on the other hand is a cognitive assessment of the value consumers derive from the ad, and focuses both on what the advertiser gains (e.g. positive evaluations), and on what the consumer receives. This focus on mutual benefits gives valuable input in the assessment of new marketing forms (Ducoffe, 1995, 1996).We hypothesize that marketing in non-traditional media enhances consumer-perceived value. Enhancing consumer-perceived value need not be a matter of producing more entertaining or informative content; it could quite possibly be a matter of form as well. For example, Dahlen and Edenius (2007) found that the employment of an egg or an elevator panel increased the perceived information value of a message compared to when it was exposed in a newspaper. Similarly, rhetorical figure research suggests that the manner in which a message is communicated may have an entertainment value in itself, so that clever manners are perceived as more entertaining (e.g. Toncar and Munch, 2001). Therefore, we expect the employment of non-traditional media to enhance consumer-perceived value:H1. Employment of non-traditional media enhances consumer-perceived value.Moderating effects of brand reputation\nMethod: We tested the hypotheses with a full-factorial design: 2 (traditional media/non-traditional media) x 2 (high/low reputation) x 2 (high/low appropriateness) x 2 (high low expense). Media type and brand reputation were manipulated between subjects. Appropriateness and expense were measured within subjects.Stimulus development\nResults: First, we used median splits to divide our within-subjects variables into high/low groups of perceived appropriateness and expense. Next, we ran an ANOVA (multivariate analysis of variance) including the effects on consumer-perceived value of all factors simultaneously. Please refer to Table II. Media type (traditional versus non-traditional) had a main effect on perceived consumer-perceived value (as well as purchase and WOM intentions) (F=3.94, p<0.01), and so did brand reputation (F=10.67, p<0.01). As hypothesized, media type and brand reputation also produced a significant interaction effect on the dependent variable (F=5.07, p<0.01). Whereas perceived appropriateness had a main effect (F=2.09, p<0.01) and perceived expense had not, both factors produced significant three-way interactions with campaign type and brand reputation as hypothesized: The media type x brand reputation x appropriateness interaction term was significant at F=6.12 (p<0.01) and the media type x brand reputation x expense interaction term at F=4.33 (p<0.01).Table III displays the planned comparisons for our hypothesis tests. Overall, the non-traditional media campaigns generated significantly higher consumer-perceived value than the traditional campaigns, Mguerrilla=4.01 vs. Mtraditional=3.35 (p<0.01). H1 is thus supported. In support of H2, the difference between the non-traditional campaigns and the traditional campaigns is greater for the low-reputation brands (Mguerrilla=3.82 versus Mtraditional=2.74, p<0.01) than for the high-reputation brands (Mguerrilla=4.43 vs. Mtraditional=3.93, p<0.01).H3 stated that perceived appropriateness moderates the effect of non-traditional media for high-reputation brands but not for low reputation brands. Planned comparisons support the hypothesis. The non-traditional media campaigns were perceived to be of significantly higher value for high-reputation brands at a high level of appropriateness (Mguerrilla=5.04 versus Mtraditional=4.05, p<0.01), but not at a low level of appropriateness. In fact, at a low level of appropriateness, the non-traditional media campaigns were even perceived to be of less value than traditional media campaigns (Mguerrilla=3.48 versus Mtraditional=3.84, p<0.05). For the low-reputation brands, however, the non-traditional media campaigns produced higher consumer-perceived value than the traditional campaigns at both levels of appropriateness (both differences significant at p<0.01). In line with H4, perceived expense produced a similar pattern. The non-traditional media generated higher consumer-perceived value at a high level of expense (Mguerrilla=5.19 versus Mtraditional=4.16, p<0.01) for the high-reputation brands. At a low level of expense, however, the non-traditional media were perceived to be of less value than the traditional media (Mguerrilla=3.59 versus Mtraditional=3.88, marginally significant at p<0.10). For the low-reputation brands, the non-traditional media generated higher consumer-perceived value than the traditional media regardless of the appropriateness level (both differences significant at p<0.01).The initial MANOVA revealed that the non-traditional media had a positive effect on purchase and WOM intentions, as well. The reason for this should be that the increase in consumer-perceived value translates into a greater willingness to buy and talk about the brand. This notion was confirmed when we tested if consumer-perceived value mediated the effects of the non-traditional media on purchase and WOM intentions (see Table IV). Following the classic Baron and Kenny (1986) procedure, we first ran regressions with media type as the independent variable, and perceived value and intentions as dependent variables. The regressions revealed that non-traditional media enhance both perceived value and intentions (p<0.01). Next, we ran regressions with intentions as the dependent variables and perceived value as the independent variable, confirming that perceived value drives intentions (p<0.01). When we included both perceived value and media type as independent variables in the regression with intentions as dependent variables, the explanatory power of media type dropped significantly, suggesting that the positive effects of the non-traditional media on intentions came primarily from the increased perceived value of the marketing.\nDiscussion: The results of the present study give some support to the received wisdom that non-traditional media may be an effective means of reaching consumers. Overall, the tested non-traditional media campaigns were rated as having higher perceived value than the traditional media campaigns. The results are also in line with the notion that non-traditional media should be particularly beneficial to small, unestablished companies, as our tests revealed that low-reputation brands' advertising gained more in value when employing non-traditional media than did high-reputation brand advertising.However, the often mentioned low-cost aspect of non-traditional media is qualified by our results; when it comes to perceived expense, lower need not be better, and especially not so for high-reputation brands' non-traditional media marketing. Our tests revealed that high perceived expense enhanced the value of high-reputation brands' advertising, whereas low perceived expense decreased its value, even to the level of being lower than the value of traditional advertising. A similar pattern emerged for perceived appropriateness. At a high appropriateness level, non-traditional media generated greater consumer-perceived value than traditional campaigns for high-reputation brands, but at a low appropriateness level, the same brands' non-traditional media campaigns were perceived to be of less value than their traditional advertising. These two patterns did not materialize for low-reputation brands, as their non-traditional media campaigns seemed to be less sensitive to consumer perceptions; regardless of the perceived appropriateness and expense levels, the non-traditional media campaigns provided higher perceived value than their traditional campaign counterparts.The present results constitute a first step in the assessment of the consumer-perceived value of non-traditional media. Although it has generated much interest among practitioners, and although its use has spread from small on-the-edge companies to established giants such as, for example, Adidas and SonyEricsson, academic testing has been scarce. The academic investigation closest to this field would be Dahlen's (2005) and Dahlen and Edenius' (2007) studies of the advertising effects of non-traditional media. Whereas those studies focused mainly on the novelty of the media placement, the present study adds two aspects that are central to the perceptions and practice of non-traditional media and guerrilla marketing, namely its appropriateness and expense. Appropriateness has not been subject to much inquiry in marketing research during the last few years. This is probably because traditional marketing and advertising has become a kind of negotiated space, in which its appropriateness (or lack thereof) is not an issue (see Dahlen and Edenius, 2007). The results in the present study support such a notion, as the perceived appropriateness did not affect the consumer-perceived value of the traditional marketing campaigns.Perceived expense, on the other hand, has been studied as a signal of marketing effort, and has been found to have positive effects on brand perceptions (e.g. Kirmani, 1997; Kirmani and Rao, 2000). The present study adds two twists, investigating the effects on advertising (rather than brand) perceptions, and testing the potentially negative effects of low expense (rather than positive effects of high expense). These twists in our tests provided the insights that low cost, which is hailed as a primary benefit of new campaign types such as non-traditional media, may actually lead to perceptions of inequitable exchange, where consumers feel that the marketer gives little in return for their participation in the advertising exchange.Adding this notion of advertising exchange is also a contribution to the field of non-traditional media (and to investigations of guerrilla marketing in general). As suggested in the introduction of this paper, a specific campaign need not only have effect on its advertiser, but also on people's perceptions of the very form of marketing and their subsequent willingness to take part in it (e.g. will the high-profiled ATHF campaign make consumers apprehensive of all kinds of non-traditional media activities?) As suggested by Ducoffe (1996), aadvertising persuasion theory needs to take into account not only advertising's ability to meet a specific advertiser's business goals but also how it furthers the aims of consumers. Otherwise, there is a risk of a catch 22 situation, where advertising efforts become more aggressive to break through consumers' defenses, and in so doing, raise their defenses even more (see Waller, 1999). Whereas non-traditional media and guerrilla marketing in theory are intended to further the mutual exchange between advertisers and consumers (e.g. Levinson and McLaughlin, 2005; Morris et al., 2002), the present study suggests that its practice may have opposite effects if one is not careful.Our exploratory analysis of purchase and WOM intentions suggest that managing consumer-perceived value is crucial to marketers, as marketing efforts that increase perceived value automatically generate higher intentions to buy and recommend the brand to others.Managerial implications\n",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Purpose: - The purpose of this paper is to test the consumer-perceived value of non-traditional media, and the moderating effects of brand reputation, appropriateness and expense.\nDesign/methodology/approach: - The approach takes the form of an experimental study of six (real) campaigns, manipulating media type and brand reputation (with appropriateness and expense measured within subjects).\nFindings: - Non-traditional media enhance consumer-perceived value. The effects are greater for low- than for high-reputation brands. High-reputation brands are more sensitive to the appropriateness and expense of the marketing. Consumer-perceived value leads to higher purchase and word-of-mouth intentions.\nResearch limitations/implications: - The analysis of the mediating effects of consumer-perceived value is exploratory and requires follow-up. Being a first test of the effects of non-traditional media, no discrimination was made between different types. This requires further attention.\nPractical implications: - The paper shows that non-traditional media enhance the consumer-perceived value of marketing, and suggests that consumer-perceived value is important in generating purchase and word-of-mouth intentions. The approach also gives advice with respect to brand reputation, budget (expense) and appropriateness of marketing.\nOriginality/value: - The paper is a first academic test of non-traditional media/guerrilla marketing; it argues that marketing must generate consumer-perceived value in order to be successful and finds support for this; and employs previously neglected (but highly current) variables such as appropriateness and expense. The paper is valuable in its high action-orientation.\n",
"role": "assistant"
}
] |
Towards a diversified knowledge organization system: An open network of inter-linked subsystems with multiple validity scopes
|
[
"Ontology",
"Diversity",
"Ontologies",
"Diversified classification systems",
"Knowledge organization systems",
"Multi-theory classification systems",
"Multi-viewpoint ontology",
"Multi-vocal classification systems",
"Open classification systems"
] |
[
{
"content": "Summarize the following paper into structured abstract.\n\nIntroduction: Traditionally, knowledge organization systems (KOS) have been constructed by limited groups of experts/librarians representing the \"common\" view of the domain knowledge. This approach has known flaws (Hajibayova, 2018), as it does not consider users' preferences, and does not reflect the diversity of opinions and theories, but rather tends to prefer a chosen single viewpoint over the others. In the last couple of decades there has been a shift toward personalized information retrieval and search systems which require individualized or community-oriented approach to knowledge organization (Ghorab et al., 2013; Pitokow et al., 2002). Multi-vocal representation systems of cultural heritage are required to better capture the information needs of marginal communities and individuals (Zolyomi and Tennis, 2017; Hajibayova, 2018), such as indigenous cultures, neural diversity and sexual minorities.\nRelated work: The main dimension in KOS is the ontological one which enables inter-disciplinary representation of knowledge as basic phenomena represented by concepts common for different domains (e.g. chemicals and their influences, people and their information behavior) (Gnoli, 2011a; ILC, 2007). The epistemological dimension of KOS deals with the perspective under which the ontological knowledge is considered and discussed (Hjorland and Hartel, 2003; Gnoli, 2011a, 2012).\nThe open KOS network model: The open KOS is a generic network-based model that aims to allow for diverse and even controversial theories and viewpoints on the domain to harmonically logically co-exist. In the proposed model, the domain knowledge is represented as a set of ontological statements of the form of a triple: concept - relationship - concept. This type of modeling was selected since communications research has already shown empirically that statements are less ambiguous than individual concepts (Keyton and Beck, 2010; Zhitomirsky-Geffet and Bar-Ilan, 2014).\nPotential challenges and limitations in the open KOS network construction: Several challenges might emerge when building the proposed network. First, the determination of validity scopes depends on the domain and might suffer from subjective views of the KOS composer/s. For instance, the statement \"cannabis treats depression\" might be linked to the temporal validity scope of the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries or to the pro-cannabis voice validity scope. Consequently, the distinction between the subject ontological knowledge (statements and theories) and the epistemological knowledge (validity scopes) might be complicated especially in non-scientific domains.\nDiscussion and conclusion: In this paper, we presented a new generic model for building diversified KOS. The model is domain independent and brings previously examined types of representation of epistemological knowledge presented in past research to the common ground by defining a validity scope type of KOS. Each statement of the system is defined within the validity scope/s in which it is true. The model provides a concrete unified implementation of various frameworks presented in the literature, and further extends and generalizes them as follows:\n",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Purpose: The need for inclusive and logically consistent representation of diverse and even confronting viewpoints on the domain knowledge has been widely discussed in the literature in the past decade. The purpose of this paper is to propose a generic model for building an open coherent diversified knowledge organization system (KOS).\nDesign/methodology/approach: The proposed model incorporates a generic epistemological component, the validity scope type, assigned to each statement in the constructed KOS. Statements are clustered by their association with various validity scope types into internally coherent subsystems. These subsystems form a knowledge organization network connected through the universal (consensual) subsystems with more than one validity scope type. The model extends the Galili's Cultural Content Representation paradigm, which divides the knowledge content of a scientific theory into two confronting parts: body and periphery.\nFindings: The knowledge organization network model makes it possible to comparatively examine similarities and differences among various viewpoints and theories on the domain knowledge. The presented approach conforms with the principle of Open Knowledge Network initiative for creation of open accessible knowledge.\nPractical implications: The proposed model can be used for ontological reasoning by a variety of information services, such as ontology-based decision-support and learning systems, diversified search and customer management applications.\nSocial implications: The model enables explicit representation of social and cultural minority voices and historical knowledge in the KOS.\nOriginality/value: The main contribution of the proposed model is that it generalizes and enhances various previously proposed representations of epistemological aspects of KOS and allows for multiple inter-linked subsystems to coherently co-exist as part of the extensible network.\n",
"role": "assistant"
}
] |
Spatial effects and non-linearity in hedonic modeling: Will large data sets change our assumptions?
|
[
"Housing",
"Generalized additive model (GAM)",
"Geographically weighted regression (GWR)",
"German residential market",
"Hedonic model",
"Semi-parametric regression"
] |
[
{
"content": "Summarize the following paper into structured abstract.\n\nIntroduction: What are the three most important things when dealing with real estate? - location, location, location. This is a pretty common saying about real estate, which makes the statement that the location of a property is one of the most important factors in defining its value. Traditional models for defining the value of properties make use of regression methods in order to decompose the underlying value drivers of properties considering a series of attributes and of course their location within a certain market. The estimation of hedonic regression models has indeed grown substantially over the last years integrating new approaches for modeling spatial heterogeneity, which is essential in the explanation of real estate prices across space. With the list of spatially estimation techniques being very extensive, the geographically weighted regression (GWR) has established itself as a widely used method that expands the restrictive traditional ordinary least squares (OLS) by considering spatially varying effects. Based on the assumption that real estate prices vary over space within a certain market, the GWR method estimates local regressions in order to identify spatially varying parameters and therefore different marginal price functions. The rationale behind the GWR method is plausible since real estate prices are mainly determined by neighborhood effects, the proximity to common amenities and lastly by household's income distribution. In this context, a major part of the empirical research encourages the assumption that the explanatory power as well as the forecasting accuracy of hedonic models increases when their functional form accounts for spatial effects, thus emphasizing the potentials of the GWR in explaining real estate prices.\nSpatial modeling of real estate prices: Regardless of whether it is building up hedonic real estate indices, forecasting prices or analyzing different markets, a significant share of empirical real estate research does not take spatial variables or non-linearity into account. This may be due to different reasons. In the most cases, the lack of the needed data to capture spatial heterogeneity should be the cause. Another possibility may be that spatial models are considered to be complex and difficult to estimate or interpret and that they are not integrated in standard econometric programs.\nData description: Since the sample size is a very important factor either in parametric or semi-parametric or nearly any kind of analysis, it might be worth taking a look at the data sets of other studies. In the considered literature there is a pretty wide range. Five of them use a data sets reaching from 440 to 950 observations (Pace, 1998; Anglin and Gencay, 1996; Chrostek and Kopczewska, 2013; Mason and Quigley, 1996 and Gencay and Yang, 1996). One has to admit though that four of the five studies were published in the late 90s, when real estate data was not that easy to get or even available. A pretty good example for the struggles of data search are Chrostek and Kopczewska (2013) who initially had 5,600 observations in their database, but had to remove nearly 90 percent due to incomplete information. Next there are six studies with a sample size between 2,500 and 5,200 observations, which is the major part of the considered literature (Baranzini, Ramirez, Schaerer, and Thalmann, 2008; McCord et al., 2014; McMillen and Redfearn, 2010; Widlak et al., 2015; Bourassa et al., 2007; Bao and Wan, 2004). The studies with the largest data sets are Bourassa et al. (2010) with nearly 13,000 observations, Clapp (2004) with 49,500 observations and finally Cohen et al. (2015) with 326,000 records. Even though Cohen et al. (2015) extend the work of Clapp (2004) the employed data set is a different one.\nMethods for estimating hedonic price functions: It is not the goal of this section to hand over a complete technical description of the used models. Other authors have done this before[7]. The goal of this section is to give an overview of how those approaches and their methodology work and where the differences are.\nModel parameterization and out-of-sample forecasting approach: This paper aims at comparing the prediction accuracy and large sample statistical properties of the models mentioned above based on a sample of more than 570,000 asking rents with full hedonic characteristics across 46 NUTS3 regions in German residential markets from 2013-Q1 until 2015-Q2.\nEmpirical results and out-of-sample forecasting accuracy: This study aims at evaluating the prediction accuracy of linear, spatial and non-linear models in estimating the hedonic equation for asking rents across several German residential markets. While the employed functional form is based on the OLS, GWR and the GAM, the estimation methodology was chosen to be iterative in forecasting the fitted rents for each quarter based on their 1-quarter-prior functional form. The forecasting accuracy is set to be evaluated by the overall quantile distribution of the ME, EV, MSE and MSPE on an aggregated basis regardless of period or the NUTS3-area. Thus, instead of looking at the difference in the estimated coefficients or the patterns of the deviations, we focus merely on the forecasting accuracy of the models based on the four forecasting indicators rather than showing the ME and EV of each of the 46 NUTS3-areas and on each quarter[12].\nConclusion: The choice of the functional form in hedonic regression models is crucial when explaining rents within a certain real estate market. Empirical research has thoroughly attested that traditional hedonic models fail to explain the variation of rents accurately, mainly due to the exclusion of both spatial effects and non-linear relationships. In the course of the past years the GWR has established as a suitable hedonic method able to capture spatial effects. The explanatory potentials and statistical advantages of further semi-parametric hedonic models - like the GAM method - that account for non-linear relationships have not been extensively exploited in empirical real estate research.\n",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to test the asymptotic properties and prediction accuracy of two innovative methods proposed along the hedonic debate: the geographically weighted regression (GWR) and the generalized additive model (GAM).\nDesign/methodology/approach: The authors assess the asymptotic properties of linear, spatial and non-linear hedonic models based on a very large data set in Germany. The employed functional form is based on the OLS, GWR and the GAM, while the estimation methodology was chosen to be iterative in forecasting, the fitted rents for each quarter based on their 1-quarter-prior functional form. The performance accuracy is measured by traditional indicators such as the error variance and the mean squared (percentage) error.\nFindings: The results provide evidence for a clear disadvantage of the GWR model in out-of-sample forecasts. There exists a strong out-of-sample discrepancy between the GWR and the GAM models, whereas the simplicity of the OLS approach is not substantially outperformed by the GAM approach.\nPractical implications: For policymakers, a more accurate knowledge on market dynamics via hedonic models leads to a more precise market control and to a better understanding of the local factors affecting current and future rents. For institutional researchers, instead, the findings are essential and might be used as a guide when valuing residential portfolios and forecasting cashflows. Even though this study analyses residential real estate, the results should be of interest to all forms of real estate investments.\nOriginality/value: Sample size is essential when deriving the asymptotic properties of hedonic models. Whit this study covering more than 570,000 observations, this study constitutes - to the authors' knowledge - one of the largest data sets used for spatial real estate analysis.\n",
"role": "assistant"
}
] |
Food expenditure patterns, preferences, policy, and access of Rwandan households
|
[
"Policy",
"Rwanda",
"Food purchasing decisions"
] |
[
{
"content": "Summarize the following paper into structured abstract.\n\nIntroduction: Since its genocide and civil war in 1994, Rwanda has experienced impressive agricultural and economic growth, resulting in considerable improvements in living standards and poverty reduction. From 2001 to 2014, average GDP per capita grew at an annual rate of 5 percent resulting in a decline of poverty from 79 to 63 percent during this period (World Bank, 2015). Despite these gains, poverty remains significant and 72 percent of total household expenditures goes toward food consumption (Global Food Security Index, 2016). Given the importance of food in total expenditures, policies/programs that increase income are believed to significantly impact nutritional outcomes as households purchase more food and shift away from staples. However, Moss et al. (2016) found that though efforts to enhance smallholder coffee producer incomes in Rwanda were successful, coffee growers' higher income did not translate into significant food expenditure increases. Simultaneously, stunting in children remains high and decreased from 48 percent to only 44 percent between 2000 and 2010. In total, 18 percent of Rwandan children under five years old remain underweight (WHO, 2010). This puzzle of persistent undernourishment in spite of economic gains and poverty reduction is not particular to Rwanda and has been observed elsewhere (Subramanyam et al., 2011; Haddad et al., 2003; Kelly et al., 2004).\nDeterminants of food demand: a brief review: Economists have long employed demand analysis to study how different factors effect food demand. This section briefly reviews the key determinants of food demand, as they relate to Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA), in general, and Rwanda, in particular.\nData: The Rwandan Ministry of Agriculture and Animal Resources (MINAGRI), National Institute of Statistics of Rwanda, and the World Food Program conduct the Rwanda Comprehensive Food Security and Vulnerability Analysis (CFSVA) and Nutrition Survey every three years. This paper utilizes a subset of the CFSVA, the Household Questionnaire and the Village Key Informant Questionnaire from 2012. More than 7,000 households in Rwanda were interviewed with over 6,000 of them located in areas classified as rural. The Household Survey collected data on demographic information, agricultural production, expenditures, and consumption and the Village Key Informant Questionnaire collected data on which villages were impacted by certain government policies/donor programs.\nMethods: Households maximize their utility from their purchases, U (q1, q2, ..., qn) subject to a budget constraint. The Marshallian demand functions for each good, qj=gj (m, p), are derived from this utility function, where qj represents the quantity purchased of food group j, m denotes total food expenditure, and p is a vector of food group prices. If certain assumptions are satisfied (e.g. the expenditure function is continuous, non-decreasing in prices and utility, concave and homogeneous in prices) then a theoretically plausible demand system can be derived.\nResults: The six food group models (cereals, R&T, meats, pulses, F&V, and milk) are estimated using a DH model. All of the results are computed with standard errors clustered at the village level. Stage one coefficients are used to estimate APEs (the impact of changes in the explanatory variables on the purchase decision for each food group). This paper focuses primarily on the second stage results; however, there are four key summary findings from the first stage that should be stated: as total expenditure increases the probability of purchasing each of the six food groups increases; households that produce a crop reduce their probability of purchasing a food item from that respective food group; price, policy, and demographics all had mixed effects on the purchase decisions; and, access to markets variables including distance to a main road and time to market had no effect on the purchase decision.\nConclusions and implications: The decision to purchase food and how much to purchase is complex and varies per food group. Rural Rwandan households purchase more than half of the meats, milk, and cereals they consume. However, they consume pulses almost daily followed by F&V and R&T with the majority of those food items being produced at home.\n",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Purpose: An extended period of economic growth along with stubborn childhood stunting and wasting levels raises questions about how consumer food purchasing behaviors respond to income increases in Rwanda. The purpose of this paper is to assess the role income, prices, policy, agricultural production, and market access play on how rural households purchase different food groups.\nDesign/methodology/approach: Six separate log-normal double hurdle models are run on six different food groups to examine what affects the probability a household purchases in each food group and for those who do purchase, what determines the quantity purchased.\nFindings: Rural Rwandans are price and expenditure responsive but prices have more impact on food group purchases. Crop production resulted in reduced household market procurement for its associated food group but had mixed effects on the purchases of all other food groups. Rural Rwandans purchase and consume low amounts of animal-based proteins which may be a leading factor related to the high stunting and wasting rates. Owning an animal increased the purchased quantity of meat but lowered the purchased quantity of most other food groups.\nPractical implications: Results suggest that policies and programs have to address multiple constraints simultaneously to increase the purchases of the limited food groups in the rural household diets that may be contributing to the high rates of stunting and wasting.\nOriginality/value: This study is the first to evaluate the interplay among prices, household income, household production, policies and donor programs, and demographic variables on rural Rwandan household food purchases.\n",
"role": "assistant"
}
] |
"Carne Fraca": Crisis in Brazilian beef processing and the effect of the media on consumers' purchase behaviour
|
[
"Risk perception",
"Food quality",
"Food retail",
"Beef consumption",
"Beef slaughter",
"Skepticism towards advertising"
] |
[
{
"content": "Summarize the following paper into structured abstract.\n\n1. Introduction: In recent years, a number of events have occurred in a variety of countries that reduced consumer confidence in relation to food safety. Some examples are the outbreaks of avian influenza (Nerlich and Halliday, 2007), hormones and residues of veterinarian drugs found in meat (Verbeke et al., 2007), dioxin-contaminated swine feed in Ireland and the melamine case in China (Banati, 2011). Another recent issue that triggered concern among consumers was the operation called \"Carne Fraca\" (weak meat), which was made public by the Brazilian Federal Police (FP).\n2. Theoretical framework: The reactions of consumers to crises can be understood through risk perception, risk attitudes and the interaction between the two. This interaction demonstrates that decision makers who are risk averse will engage in behaviours that reduce risk, and this behaviour becomes more prominent as the decision maker perceives more risk (Pennings et al., 2002).\n3. Material and methods: This quantitative and descriptive study investigated the variables related to the assessment and purchase intention of beef during the crisis resulting from the \"Carne Fraca\" scandal in Brazil. An online survey was conducted of consumers from all over the country. The link was posted and managed during March 2017 through a market research company panel, and 417 valid responses were collected. To provide greater validity and representativeness of the data, the sample was designed based on the proportional distribution of per capita beef consumption across Brazil according to POF-2009 (IBGE, 2010).\n4. Results: Before analysing the proposed models, the scales used in the research were also analysed by a CFA (Hair et al., 2010). Table I shows the composite reliabilities, the AVE and the Cronbach's as (CA) of the constructs. The AVE is a measure of model convergent validity and should be 0.50 or higher (Hair et al., 2010). CA values above 0.60 and 0.70 are considered suitable and CR values of 0.70 and 0.90 are satisfactory (Hair et al., 2010).\n5. Discussion and conclusions: The objective of this study was to analyse the impact of knowledge of news portrayed in the media that pointed to a national crisis in beef production on the assessment and purchase intention of beef, proposing and testing two conceptual models. Furthermore, we analysed the mediating effect of risk perception and the moderating effects of scepticism towards media and risk attitudes.\n",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Purpose: Over the last few years, several events have reduced the consumer confidence in relation to food safety. Recently, one event that triggered discussions and concern among consumers in Brazil was the \"Carne Fraca\" operation which cast doubt on the quality and safety of Brazilian beef. The purpose of this paper is to analyse the impact of the news regarding a national crisis in beef production on consumers' assessment and purchase intention of beef.\nDesign/methodology/approach: A quantitative study was conducted involving 417 respondents in Brazil. The procedure for the analysis consisted of the investigation of two models, incorporating mediation and moderation effects.\nFindings: The results show that news on the crisis had a positive impact on risk perception. This impact was negatively moderated by consumer scepticism. Risk perception had a negative effect on the assessment of beef and purchase intention. These effects were negatively affected by risk attitude. The news directly affected consumers' assessment of beef and indirectly affected purchase intention through mediation of perceived risk.\nOriginality/value: This study proposes two models, analysing the effect of the media on consumers' assessment of beef and purchase intention, mediated by risk perception. Furthermore, the models analyse the moderating effects of scepticism and consumers' risk attitude.\n",
"role": "assistant"
}
] |
Strengthening regional identities and culture through wine industry cross border collaboration
|
[
"Development",
"Culture",
"Tourism",
"Wine",
"Consumer"
] |
[
{
"content": "Summarize the following paper into structured abstract.\n\nIntroduction[1]: Agro-food processing is characterized by a variety of different and idiosyncratic traits, collectively composing the individual - and frequently unique - regional food and wine cultures. Customers' cultural needs are often hidden and are deeply connected with the human aspect of production (Conto and Lopez, 2008) and with environmental, historical and cultural assets (Marks, 2011; Melo et al., 2011). In this context, consumers frequently extend their regional/national fidelity to region-based brands (Orth et al., 2012; Conto et al., 2011). In fact, food has not only the function of satisfying primary needs, but it is also a reflection of other, higher grade and complex notions such as national and cultural identity (Bonnekessen, 2010). A new hedonistic lifestyle that does not support the globalization of food led to an increase in consumption, in the last few years, of traditional and local foods. The consumers' need to immerse themselves into a different context hence meets the need to nurture and feed themselves: a self-proof of their own conscience and worth through a period, more or less long, that creates change (Pine and Gilmore, 2000).\nLinking culture, food and wine - an international outlook: Researchers showed that food products and traditions are a function of the exploration into various cultural aspects, including subsistence/economic issues and ethnic/national identities (Bonnekessen, 2010). Currently, there is renewed enthusiasm for food products that are perceived to be traditional and local (Sims, 2009; Cavicchi et al., 2007), as part of a wider desire for authentic experiences (Bessiere, 1998). Local foods are conceived as \"authentic\" products that symbolize the place and culture of the destination and connect consumers to the region and its perceived culture, heritage and identity (Sims, 2009; Wang, 1999). The latter, especially, is determined by a number of factors including religion, history, ethnic diversity, innovations, traditions and values that have a significant impact on gastronomic characteristics (Conto et al., 2013). For example, wine represents a fusion of components, textures and flavors, all linked to cultural identity (Harrington, 2006). In fact, wine can be studied from a variety of perspectives which encompass environmental influences, the economics of cultivation, marketing, politics and cultural perceptions of places, products and people (Dickenson and Salt, 1982). Hence, in wine production, the human factor may be significant in differentiating the final product from different viticultural regions (Gonzalez-Centeno et al., 2013).\nThe role of wine events: Food tourism can be classified into different types, according to the interest tourists have in food as a travel motivation and according to the number of tourists served (Sidali et al., 2011). Wine, food, territory, art and culture generate a virtuous circle for promoting new perspectives on traditional foods and on tourism preferences. The imagery of wine country as a rural paradise has been conveyed to wine consumers, in which leisure, cuisine, scenery and outdoor activities are bountiful (Woodside and Martin, 2008). Houghton (2001) demonstrated the importance of wine festivals for attracting new market segments to wine regions and wineries. In the last decade, food and wine events have had a rapid growth: fairs, festival, events and meetings are organized more and more for buyers, professionals, tourists and consumers. In Europe and over the world the number of events organised by local communities, industries and associations grows every year. In the EU framework, many projects are based on cooperation and are related to wine events/fairs/seminars contributing to building new relations and connections among \"rural\" areas, natural resources and food and wine producers; thus influencing local development and strengthening traditional values. \"Old World\" food and wine events also often take part on occasion of religious festivities (Frochot, 2000), showing the deep linkage with local culture, traditions and values.\nOpportunities through transnational cooperation projects: Cooperation initiatives have yielded a wide range of practical improvements in the economic, social, political and cultural spheres, thanks to a LEADER (based on the \"bottom up\") approach (Conto et al., 2012a, b). Cooperation contributed to the creation or safeguarding of about 115,200 jobs and 5,800 new businesses; while 2,000 networks led to around 63,000 signed cooperation agreements, and 18,000 km of roads, railways and pathways being built or upgraded during the period of 2000-2006. The most important result, however, was the building of trust and a shared cultural identity between people across borders (EU, 2011). In this framework, a cross border project fits well within EU's main objective to economically and culturally integrate marginal areas, which account for 185 million EU citizens (about 37 percent of the population).\nThe \"Adriatic Sea - Black Sea\" cross-border project: This section presents and analyzes, in the form of a case study (Yin, 2009), the project \"Transnational Network of Rural Solidarity of Local Sustainable Tourism, Multi-functionality, and Environmental and Cultural Tours: Cross-Border for Rural Identities Development (Adriatic Sea - Black Sea).\" The project was approved in 2012 and incorporated eight countries, with available total resources amounting to 1,000,000 and planned duration of six years (until 2018). The project, implemented by the LAGs of the Apulia region of South Italy, aims at including areas of Eastern Europe and in particular: Slovakia, Croatia, Serbia, Kosovo, Moldova, Romania, Albania, Macedonia and Bulgaria. It intends to pursue rural development and promote cultural identity in the areas of focus by means of agricultural multi-functionality. The analysis of the project data marked similarities between the involved territories; which are rich in resources, culture and identity, but poor in their promotion. For this purpose, a primary objective of the project was the creation of an integrated network that links different economic and social sectors to improve the utilisation of these areas' resources, to improve their quality of life, to diversify economic activities related to the rural world and to emphasize traditional and local foods and natural resources.\nFirst stage empirical research: Initially this research developed a context analysis of the potentialities and needs related to the multifunctional integration process among the countries aiming at enhancing the competitiveness of their rural areas.\nFindings - generating product, industry and regional value: Wine, as a message carrier and as a symbolic representation of lifestyles, cultures, social and economic status, is a potential significant source of competitive advantage and differentiation at a regional level. The data related to the cross border project (above) have been analysed in terms of phases, activities and results, in order to investigate the probability, degree and nature of success of further such cross border projects toward promoting wine culture and associated touristic systems. The analysis incorporated theoretical and empirical findings to identify these implications and prescribe action (below). The emerged findings of this pioneering research set the foundation for helping the various stakeholders in the sector to contribute toward building strong brands and defend against the fierce competition from foreign brands.\nConclusions and managerial implications: Further to the scholarly value of the above findings, a number of explicit descriptive and prescriptive implications are identified regarding practical implementation. These relate to three distinct groups of stakeholders: wine industry players, tourism industry players and central and local governments and authorities.\n",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to explore the potentialities of cross border projects to develop and promote wine culture, and consequently tourism and hospitality; paying particular attention to the process and actions supporting the development and refinement of cultural attributes, traditional values and regional identity.\nDesign/methodology/approach: Methodologically, it is a deductive reasoning exploratory research, based on the findings of an extensive undergoing project across ten countries, spanning from Italy to Eastern Europe, and theoretically founded on an extensive literature review.\nFindings: The findings identify the spectrum and nature of opportunities and constraints of cross border collaborations in developing the wine industry and reaping of its wider economic and cultural benefits. Further to the scholarly value of the findings, the paper identifies and presents the descriptive managerial/industrial implications, along with prescriptively explicit directions toward practical implementation.\nResearch limitations/implications: The research is exploratory and therefore, by nature, in need of further empirical validation.\nPractical implications: The research constructs a viable framework for an integrative approach involving the improved definition of regional cultural image and identity, proper strategic industry-region and cross-border collaborations, and socio-economic development.\nSocial implications: To promote cross border countries and cultural territorial values and identity.\nOriginality/value: The research's value lies in its multi-perspective outlook which keeps the wine business at its focus, but investigates its development outside the strict confines of its own industry to present potentialities through strategic collaborations with the tourist industry and other regions/countries in integrative synergistic approach and with strong cultural elements.\n",
"role": "assistant"
}
] |
Information transparency and digital privacy protection: are they mutually exclusive in the provision of e-services?
|
[
"Privacy",
"Virtual banking",
"Data security"
] |
[
{
"content": "Summarize the following paper into structured abstract.\n\n__NO_TITLE__: An executive summary for managers and executive readers can be found at the end of this article.\nIntroduction: Internet users are very often upset by the voluminous inflow of junk mails and unwanted messages to their e-mail accounts. In times of the extensive use of internet communication, the maintenance of privacy, especially the right to be left alone, has become a subject of increasing concern.Various kinds of e-services, which are the services provided to customers through electronic media, are now provided through internet and the issue of privacy has attracted much attention (Zhu, 2004; Lagrosen, 2005). In spite of the convenience, many e-service users are becoming more alert about the threat of losing control of personal information. On one hand, people would like to be more informed about the current state and the impeding as well as potential changes of the external environment (Zeithaml et al., 1996). On the other hand, they are getting more cautious about protecting their own privacy. This dilemma of sharing of information and protection of its privacy at the same time has received much attention in literature of service and information management (Brounen et al., 2001).Quite a number of e-service marketers, who are willing to share their information with their customers, are being accused of their excessive eagerness and aggressiveness of invading the privacy of their customers (Culnan and Armstrong, 1999; Elmer-Dewitt, 1994). This raises an important question: how do e-service marketers react to two important concerns about privacy and information sharing? The first concern is information transparency, which is the degree of visibility and accessibility of the service information of e-service marketers to their customers (Brounen et al., 2001; Evans and Wurster, 1999). The second concern is about digital privacy, which is the protection of the confidentiality of personal data of customers that is stored on computers and other digital electronic media by e-service marketers, as well as the rights of customers not to be disturbed by unwanted information (Miller and Weckert, 2000).We develop a model of the interaction between information transparency in e-services and three types of digital privacy (information, communication and individual privacy). Our model has significant practical implications for e-service marketers (as shown in Figure 1). We propose that the concern for digital privacy protection by e-service marketers is closely related to their information transparency policies. Based on the propositions of social exchange theory, we argue that e-service marketers who adopt a more open information transparency policy will be very positive in sharing their service and company information with their customers, and at the same time, are willing to protect the information and communication privacy of the personal information of these customers. However, it is possible that if these e-service practitioners are too eager to share their information with their customers, they will very likely intrude into the individual privacy of their customers. If our propositions can be proved by empirical studies, practitioners in e-services will need to be very careful about the necessity to be transparent in information sharing, but at the same time, have to well aware of the need of the protection of individual privacy of their customers. We are afraid that an e-service marketer who is too aggressive in adopting a more open information transparency policy will very likely upset their customers by intruding into their individual privacy. We validate our hypotheses through surveying 150 e-banking service marketers who provide online financial services in China and the data supports our propositions.We contribute to literature by analyzing the interaction between e-service marketers and their customers in terms of the information exchanges between these two parties, and the possible consequence of a lack of protection of customers' individual privacy by e-service marketers. We further pave a way for the development of literature for describing, analyzing, as well as prescribing the balance that needs to be struck between privacy and transparency.\nThe model and hypotheses: The model\nResearch methodology: The research tool for this study is a questionnaire-based survey carried out in China. A total of 320 questionnaires were sent out to all e-banking service marketers in the Guangdong province in China in 2004, based on the Almanac of China's Finance and Banking sector 2001. The questionnaire was pre-tested with a group of eight Chinese businessmen in China in order to clarify and test the validity of the questions in the survey. Each of the respondents received a letter explaining the purpose of the survey and they were further interviewed by interviewers who were provided with a document containing instructions for assisting them with interviewing each respondent. By the end of 2004, we collected 150 useable questionnaires and the response rate is 46.9 percent.Measures\nConclusion and implications: As a new model of business transactions, e-commerce has been growing rapidly since its birth. Most business organizations now feel obliged to have some forms of internet presence, at least in the form of websites. Providing e-services is becoming a necessary part of normal business transactions and this will have significant impact on the lives of people, especially their privacy. Our study sheds new light upon current literature about the relationship between information transparency and protection of privacy and it has significant managerial implications for practitioners in e-services as well as research implications for scholars in services marketing.Managerial implications\n",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Purpose: - The purpose of this study is to develop and validate a model to analyze the inter-relationship between information transparency and the protection of digital privacy of customers, from the perspective of e-services providers.\nDesign/methodology/approach: - A total of 320 questionnaires were sent out to all e-banking service providers in the Guangdong province in China in 2004 and 150 useable questionnaires were collected. The response rate was 46.9 percent.\nFindings: - The paper identifies three types of digital privacy: information, communication and individual privacy. The findings show that e-service marketers who adopt a more open information transparency policy are more likely to pay attention to customers' information and communication privacy, but less to their individual privacy.\nPractical implications: - E-services providers need to be very careful about the necessity to be transparent in information sharing, but at the same time, have to be well aware of the need of the protection of individual privacy of their customers. Unfortunately, at times they may be too aggressive in adopting an open information transparency policy that may upset their customers by intruding into their individual privacy.\nOriginality/value: - The paper contributes to a more comprehensive conceptualization of digital privacy not only by identifying three generic types of privacy (information, communication and individual), but also by looking into the relationship between information transparency and these three generic types of privacy. This study shows that, unlike the first two types of privacy, individual privacy of customers is given less concern by most e-service providers.\n",
"role": "assistant"
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] |
Health services management education: why and what?
|
[
"Health services",
"Medical management",
"Education",
"United Kingdom"
] |
[
{
"content": "Summarize the following paper into structured abstract.\n\nIntroduction: It is an increasingly commonplace observation that the power of managers in health systems, and the dominance of managerialism as a governing philosophy, appears greater now than ever before. In the context of the UK's National Health Service (NHS) the ascendancy of management is particularly apparent and has provoked reactions ranging from the defensive (Edwards, 2004) to the hostile (Pollock, 2004). The basic premise of this paper is that, given this position of ascendancy, it is now more essential than ever before that health services managers are suitably educated for their roles. This paper uses the UK context to raise two questions of management education for health services managers: is it needed and what should it involve?Although the discussion is based on UK experience, much of it will also be applicable to other national settings. The paper is not an attempt at a comprehensive discussion of the topic from an educationalist perspective: it does not engage upon discussions of matters of primary interest to educators, such as strategies for learning and teaching. Neither does it discuss the appropriate level of management education within the higher education qualifications framework. On this question it can be assumed that we are largely discussing postgraduate study. Instead the principal focus is an examination of what is distinctive about health services as a context for management as a way of identifying the educational needs of health services managers. This examination is structured around a discussion of the curriculum. The conclusions reached are that health services management education is needed now more than ever and should involve a broad curriculum that reconciles liberal and vocational imperatives in education.In preparing this paper, the author has drawn on over a decade's experience as a senior manager in the NHS, as well as experience as an educator of health service managers.\nThe purposes of management education: What do we mean by suitably educated? A short answer would be: educated in a way that improves performance in management roles. But this only raises more questions than it answers. What do we mean by \"improved performance\" in the context of management? And what is the contribution of formal education to improving performance anyway? These are questions that have been researched and debated at length, without specific reference to any one sector, by management educators.At the risk of over-simplification, this debate can be summarised by constructing a number of opposing positions: between vocational and liberal education; between training and education; and between the teaching of technique and the development of critical and reflective capacity. Critics of management education see its rise as part of a broader phenomenon of a shift across education at all levels towards vocational ends, as defined increasingly by business interests. This has challenged the long-standing values of a liberal education, which emphasise the importance of strong theoretical grounding in a chosen discipline, mastery of a body of knowledge and the development of the individual's critical faculties. Vocational education or training is instrumentalist in its purpose, seeing value in the educational process as derived from the transmission of specific skills and competencies. Liberal education is more disinterested, seeing the acquisition of all knowledge as valuable in its own right because it develops our cognitive abilities and better equips us to make sense of the world.The vocational interpretation has led to an emphasis on the teaching of technique in management degrees, and especially in the MBA. Originating in the business schools of the USA, and subsequently internationalised, the MBA has traditionally given a heavy emphasis to the teaching of technique in areas such as strategy, accounting, corporate finance, organizational behaviour and marketing (McGlade, 1998). Some of the harshest criticism of management education has been focused on the MBA, and emanates from amongst the field's leading practitioners (Mintzberg, 2004). This criticism focuses on the dominance of the curriculum by the teaching of technique and the moral fiction that technical expertise, uninformed by reflective practice and experience, can be a legitimate source of authority. Mintzberg also attacks business schools for recruiting the wrong students, being those at an early stage in their careers who have yet to accumulate substantial experience. This criticism is linked to the observation that management education often does little to prompt reflection upon the tacit and habitual knowledge that informs actual management practice (Roberts, 1996). The response of many business schools to this critique has been to give greater emphasis to the teaching of context and to the capacity to cope with change. The latter suggests a route by which more liberal concepts of education might be reconciled with the vocational bent of management education. Only the development of a critical and reflective capacity can create the capacity to learn from experience and to re-frame complex and novel problems. In other words, only the development of the cognitive ability to relate theory to practice and vice-versa can create adaptability in response to change. Without this managers become enslaved by the experience which is itself the necessary precondition for effective performance (Thomas and Anthony, 1996).To relate this overview of the management education debate to health services management we must consider what is distinctive about health services as a context for management practice.\nThe health sector as a context for management practice: The health and health care sector presents a distinctive context for management practice. Firstly, there are the circumstances of working in close proximity to clinical professionals (and, indeed, for some managers actually being clinical professionals). Secondly, there is the dominance of evidence-based practice as a paradigm for the clinical professions and the contrast this presents with management practice. Thirdly, there is the weakness of professionalism as a governing concept for managers and the contrast this presents with clinicians. Linked to all these issues is the politicisation of health services management, specifically within the NHS as the dominant employer of health services managers in the UK, and the consequences of this for management practice.Proximity to clinical professions\nHealth services management education: the current position: In so far as the Department of Health (2002b) has articulated a position on management development, it can be found in a document from 2002: Managing for Excellence in the NHS. Invoking the familiar rhetoric of permanent revolution this asserts that \"the next phase\" of NHS reform will require new skills. These skills are those that resonate with the modernisation agenda: skills in patient engagement; in process mapping; in process re-engineering and in project management. Investment in skills development must be \"linked specifically to reform and to working to a common set of leadership qualities\" (p. 12). The intended vehicle for the delivery of this skills training was to be the NHS University (NHSU), a project which serves as a vivid illustration of the government's impatience with any concept of education in the health sector that is not severely vocational (Davies, 2002).A dominant theme in managing for excellence is that of leadership development, which has been taken forward by the Leadership Centre of the NHS Modernisation Agency. The concept of leadership pursued by this organisation is captured in the NHS Leadership Qualities Framework (NHS Leadership Centre, 2003). This document perfectly describes the ideal qualities of a \"commissar of modernisation\". These include a great deal of attention to self-management, \"intellectual flexibility\" political astuteness and a \"drive for results\". The document is, however, thin on personal values which are reduced to formulations such as \"resilience that enables [leaders] to push harder, when necessary, in the interests of developing or improving the service\". \"Improvement\" is, needless to say, uncritically equated with implementation of the government policy of the day. What is absent from the document are those qualities that we might equate with professionalism: critical and independent thinking and adherence to a value-set that is not politically-determined. What is also missing is any sense of the skills required for managers in approaching the issues of evidence-based practice outlined above.Whilst the Leadership Centre forged ahead in developing programmes other aspects of management development languished, caught up in the implementation failure of the NHSU. Both organisations are now being re-organised into the new NHS Institute for Innovation and Improvement, and this process will probably result in a further loss of momentum in the short term. The loss of interest in a broader approach to management education at the national level can be seen reflected in the priorities of the workforce development departments, which commission education for the NHS locally.\nThe curriculum for health services management education: What, then, might an ideal curriculum for health services management include? In seeking to answer this question there is little to draw on by way of external reference points. For obvious reasons, given the discussion above, there are no professional body requirements to draw upon. There is also little within the academic infrastructure. Only the QAA subject benchmark statement on masters' awards in business and management appears to be of any relevance insofar as it includes guidance on specialist MBAs (QAA, 2002). So the proposals that follow are, necessarily, drawn mainly from the analysis presented above.Firstly, any curriculum should include material to develop an understanding of the context for health services management. This might include an introduction to the major themes in health policy and an overview of policy development, linked to the history of national systems development. It should also include an introduction to the comparative study of health systems, enabling students to place their national health system in an international context. The purpose of this type of studies would be to give students some perspective and critical distance from the environment in which, in many cases, they will have spent their whole working lives. The deeper purpose is to develop their ability to interpret and respond to change in that environment.Secondly, the curriculum should include the development of research awareness and, more fundamentally, an understanding of the concept of critical appraisal of evidence. This will involve the development of an appreciation of different perspectives on the nature of knowledge production and utilisation. The purpose of this element of the curriculum is to equip managers to work in an evidence-seeking way alongside clinical professionals working to evidence-based paradigms, whilst recognising both the opportunities and the limitations of those paradigms in their own practice.Thirdly, the curriculum should include some grounding in a range of disciplines which are relevant to the health services context. These might include health economics, epidemiology, sociology and the history and philosophy of science. The purpose of including these subjects would be to equip students with a range of concepts that would assist them in engaging with clinical colleagues and in interpreting the diverse challenges of their own practice.Finally, the curriculum should include some of the standard fare of management education: topics such as managerial effectiveness and behaviour, leadership, organisational behaviour and the management of resources. This element should be taught in a way that maximises scope for reflection upon experience and the sharing of experience. This, of course, suggests that those students who will benefit most will be those who have already accumulated some management experience in the health sector.Cutting across all this would be the standard requirements of the higher education qualification framework for key and transferable skills development in areas such as communication and the use of information technology. These, however, can be secured as much by learning and teaching strategies as by curriculum design.\nConclusion: The analysis presented leads to the conclusion that health services management requires a broad, perhaps even an eclectic, curriculum, reflecting the rich experience that health services management, at its best, can offer as an occupation. In the context of the health sector, the question \"can management education be educational?\" should be clearly given in the positive. Any individual who had pursued the course of study proposed at postgraduate level should be better educated in the liberal sense, as well as having acquired new skills and techniques. This will, surely, better equip them to engage with their clinical colleagues on a basis of intellectual parity and mutual respect as well as to increasing their ability to respond intelligently to change. From any position other than one of extreme scepticism about management, this can only be viewed as conducive to improved systems performance. It is disappointing, then, to observe in the UK the apparent indifference of the centre towards promoting education for health services managers. Commenting on a national tendency to undervalue management education across all sectors, Thomas and Anthony (1996, p. 31) make this telling observation:British managers' comparative lack of education may, in fact, have resulted in this one disabling weakness, not so much incapacity to think but to debate, to see different perspectives, different conceptions of truth and right. If so, all our recent efforts to reinforce the power - not the authority - of an uneducated management will make things worse, more encased and isolated in its secure and protected status.As an observation, this seems strikingly apposite to the current state of the NHS. As the power and influence of managers and managerialism in health care continues to grow, so it becomes all the more important that we question what is required for their education and attach value to providing opportunities for that education.\n",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Purpose: - To examine the importance of appropriate education for health services managers and to identify what might be included in the curriculum for health services management education.\nDesign/methodology/approach: - The paper approaches these two questions through an exploration of the distinctive characteristics of health services as a context for management, relating these to a less context-specific literature on management education. The case for health services management and a description of the ideal curriculum are both developed from this analysis. The analysis is based on the UK but much of it will be applicable to other national settings.\nFindings: - Health services as a context for management practice are made distinctive by the circumstances of working in close proximity to clinical professionals and dominance of evidence-based practice as a paradigm for the clinical professions. Professionalism is weak as a governing concept for managers and health is often a politicised context for management, especially in publicly owned systems like the UK National Health Service. Management education for health services managers is important for improving systems performance and should offer a broad curriculum that includes the context for practice; research awareness and skills of critical appraisal; a grounding in a range of disciplines and a reflective approach towards general management skills.\nPractical implications: - Greater value should be attached to health services management education and a systematic approach taken towards curriculum development.\nOriginality/value: - The analysis presented leads to the conclusion that health services management requires a broad curriculum reflecting the rich experience that health services management can offer as an occupation. As the power and influence of managers and managerialism in health care continues to grow, so it becomes all the more important that what is required for their education is questioned and value attached to providing opportunities for that education.\n",
"role": "assistant"
}
] |
Governance and performance in co-exploitation and co-exploration projects
|
[
"Collaborative innovation",
"Co-exploitation project",
"Co-exploration project",
"Contractual governance",
"Informal governance",
"Inter-organizational governance",
"Project performance"
] |
[
{
"content": "Summarize the following paper into structured abstract.\n\nIntroduction: Collaborating with other firms to innovate has gained prevalence in the past decades and will continue to thrive, in contrast with fully internally developed innovative strategies that show important liabilities to success in an ever-changing environment (West et al., 2014). However, collaborating with other organizations is no guarantee of success, with potential drawbacks derived from its complexity and potential of conflicts, the unpredictability of outcomes and the issues related to their appropriability (de Araujo Burcharth et al., 2014). Scholars have focused on the issue of inter-organizational governance to explain the success or failure of such business relationships (Huang and Chiu, 2018; Olander et al., 2010; Ring and Van De Ven, 1994).\nTheory and hypotheses: Inter-organizational governance and performance\nMethodology: Sample\nResults: Ordinary least squares regression analysis was used to test our hypotheses. The estimated function is:\nDiscussion and conclusions: Previous studies have found a positive effect of project governance on project performance (Haq et al., 2018; Sirisomboonsuk et al., 2018). Nevertheless, the way governance is applied, being formal or informal to obtain better results in the context of collaborative innovation projects is still a matter of research. Thus, the aim of this study is to analyze the effect of governance on performance in collaborative innovations and whether that effect is the same in co-exploitation vs. co-exploration innovation projects. Using a sample of Colombian companies that have developed innovative projects in collaboration with other organizations, results suggest that, on the one hand, in co-exploitation, the best performance is obtained by companies that use contractual governance mechanisms. On the other hand, in co-exploration projects, both contractual and informal governance may improve performance.\n",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Purpose: This study aims to investigate how contractual vs. informal governance influences the performance of collaborative innovation projects considering their exploitation vs. exploration character.\nDesign/methodology/approach: Data are collected from a sample of 218 companies that have developed innovative projects in collaboration with other organizations. Regression models are estimated to test the hypotheses.\nFindings: The results indicate that contractual governance is the most effective for co-exploitation projects compared to informal governance. Specialization in either contractual or informal governance is more effective for co-exploration projects.\nPractical implications: Developing collaborative innovation projects with other organizations is an alternative for firms to innovate either by exploiting complementary assets or by exploring new opportunities. Thus, the success of the collaborative innovation project is significantly affected by the way the collaboration is governed. On the one hand, for co-exploitation projects, companies should rely on contracts to improve their performance. On the other hand, for co-exploration projects, governance may specialize in either contracts or informal mechanisms to reach higher performance.\nOriginality/value: Despite previous studies analyzing the effect of contractual or informal governance on the performance of collaborative innovation projects, no research has focused on comparing simultaneously these effects, by using the innovation character of the project of co-exploitation or co-exploration as a moderator. Therefore, this paper explores comparatively the most effective type of governance mechanism for co-exploitation and co-exploration projects.\n",
"role": "assistant"
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] |
Technology foresight: creating the future of Thailand's industries
|
[
"Thailand",
"Innovation",
"Communication technologies"
] |
[
{
"content": "Summarize the following paper into structured abstract.\n\n1. Introduction: The paper is concerned with the application of foresight in devising strategic technology policies in Thailand. The Thai government, through the National Science and Technology Development Agency (NSTDA) and the APEC Center for Technology Foresight (which is under NSTDA), has used the foresight as a policy instrument to develop national science and technology (S&T) policies. The study has applied a foresight process to look forward the plausible paths of the Thai industries in 2020. By grasping the trends and a view of the future, Thailand aims to create national programs to increase technological capabilities for catching up and competing in tomorrow's world. The paper is organized as follows. Section 2 presents the literature review on technology foresight and the role of S&T in advancing the national innovation system. Section 3 analyses the foresight exercise undertaken mainly by NSTDA and the APEC Center for Technology Foresight to understand future visions in S&T. Section 4 presents the process of foresight exercise for guiding S&T development and foresight directions by using the cluster-based development approach. Policy implications for policy makers as well as conclusions are drawn in section 5.\n2. Theoretical framework: 2.1 Technology foresight\n3. Management of the foresight exercise: NSTDA is an autonomous agency committed in applying scientific and technological capabilities to promote and sustain the nation's economic, social development and growth. It has undertaken technological development activities to support R&D in priority areas. NSTDA has supported research activities of the centers under its umbrella:* the National Center for Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology (BIOTEC);* the National Metal and Materials Technology Center (MTEC);* the National Electronics and Computer Technology Center (NECTEC); and* the National Nanotechnology Center (NANOTEC).Apart from the R&D efforts, NSTDA has also conducted policy research to make recommendations to the government on scientific and technological issues impacting Thai society. One of the focal points for research is technology foresight. In this pursuit, NSTDA proposed Thailand as the site of the APEC Center for Technology Foresight in collaboration with agencies in Japan, Australia and other countries. The APEC Center for Technology Foresight was established in 1998 and is supported by APEC member economies.NSTDA has recognized the need to employ technology foresight as a useful tool to bring forth a new dimension of the policy making process. The foresight project study \"S&T 2020\" (foresight in science and technology) was developed at a national level. The foresight exercise was carried out mainly by NSTDA and the APEC Center for Technology Foresight, the center under the remit of NSTDA. Being hosted by NSTDA, the center has engaged in preparing issues, organizing the internal forum meetings to facilitate the exchange of ideas and information, and integrating findings for use as a basis for a proposed recommendation to the government. The foresight study aimed at looking into the future of science, technology, and economy for formulating a coherent vision of Thailand's science and technology within a 20-year timeframe. The time horizon within which the technology foresight is undertaken covers the period between 2000-2020.The foresight project study where the author has involved in the implementation of the main foresight stage to explore future visions in S&T comprises the 3 core steps of pre-foresight, foresight and post-foresight (Figure 1). The activities of the foresight process are shown in Table I.To foresee the direction of future S&T development during the period of 2000-2020, the foresight exercise was conducted through three rounds of strategic conferences. The views were from 2,677 people including well-qualified personnel and experts from the public sector, private sector and disparate group of people. Each conference aimed at eliciting expert opinions on the direction of future S&T deemed to be of high level importance for economic and social development of the country. The essence of the strategic conferences is also to build a network of industry-government collaboration to understand a level of changes occurring in business that would aid an evaluation of research priorities. NSTDA conducted \"forward looks\" for agriculture; manufacturing; service; education, culture, healthcare and welfare system; environment, energy; and communication and telecommunication. Table II shows specific considerations when undertaking the research and development in creating the future of Thailand's industries (the base of scientific and technological activities that need to be stimulated over the years).The support of government through budget to enable the move into the future is shown in Figure 2. The R&D budget for developing technological capabilities can be seen as policy enabler. From the year 1992 to 1997, it can be seen that the budget increased by 1,229 million THB or 387 percent. However, after years of economic growth, then things changed. The currency crisis forced Thailand to float the THB currency on July 2, 1997. This devaluation plunged the country into a financial turmoil and had an important influence on the budget allocated to support the government's planned activities. The downward trend outlined in this graph after the year 1997 was a consequence of a financial crisis. Even so, the overall budget in the forthcoming years is increasing (although at the decreasing rate). This increase could be seen as a deliberate commitment throughout the economic uncertainty to maintain the momentum in developing S&T capabilities.\n4. Foresight exercise for guiding the direction of S&T development: NSTDA and the APEC Center for Technology Foresight took responsibility for conducting the exercise. The foresight exercise aimed to guide S&T development in six sectors:1. Research, development, design and engineering (RDDE).2. Technology transfer.3. Science and technology (S&T) human resources development.4. Enhancement of S&T infrastructure.5. Internal management.6. S&T information services.4.1 Research, development, design and engineering (RDDE)\n5. Policy implications and conclusions: As a developing country, Thailand faces the need to develop simultaneously their economies and their technological capabilities. The Thai government, through the NSTDA and the APEC Center for Technology, has used the foresight processes to influence policy-making and create national foresight programs with the purpose of improving the national competitiveness. The technology foresight process aimed at developing R&D plan for the future (setting priorities and selecting key technologies to be strategically developed). The policy implications from the study are as follows:* Sufficient and comprehensive policies seem necessary for the implementation of the expected outcome in 2020. To catch up with rapid technology changes, future policies need to clear and consistent. It is important that NSTDA emphasizes on educating the researchers to keep the R&D activities right on the scheduled track. Otherwise, the process of catching up with other countries might have been delayed. The opportunity for catching up needs strengthening S&T policies since the technological capabilities are a major source of the national competitiveness.* The government needs to provide an infrastructure and environment conducive to the institutionalization of organized problem-solving. Currently, NSTDA has shaped the plans for the development of S&T priority setting. The Thailand science park and the software park have provided facilities in terms of technology support, production support and marketing support to strengthen research efforts which can bring improvements of S&T capability. However, in the interim period until 2020, the operation of scientific research system should be innovation-driven to promote competitiveness of the economy. The government policies need to be in line with the broad aims of the industrial development plan. Technology planning should be developed in an integrated way of all the interacting actors/institutions in order to implement the results of a foresight program effectively.* The foresight exercise is an important investment of the government. However, technology foresight is a process whose payback is usually long, and thus requires the foresight committee to follow up the task of translating the results into advice for government activities. It is important that NSTDA and the APEC Center for Technology Foresight (the government organizations at macro level) play a key role to articulate the objectives of a desired national endeavor and to proactively induce R&D activities of enterprises (organizations at micro level). The feedback from an implementation process would provide useful information for the government to improve an industrial development plan with appropriate continuity of policy.\n",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Purpose: - The paper aims to deal with the application of foresight in devising strategic technology policies in Thailand.\nDesign/methodology/approach: - The paper examines the foresight exercise carried out by the Thai government, through the National Science and Technology Development Agency (NSTDA) and the APEC Center for Technology Foresight, to examine the potential of the Thai industry and to devise development policies necessary to make the Thai industry successful by the year 2020.\nFindings: - The results of the foresight process provide a comprehensive overview of the trends of the Thai industry. The study contributes towards the formulation of feasible technological and industrial policies, which would enhance the country's ability to improve the competitive position for tomorrow.\nOriginality/value: - The paper provides an overview of Thailand's comprehensive national foresight program.\n",
"role": "assistant"
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] |
Management training: benefits and lost opportunities (part II)
|
[
"Management training",
"Management development",
"Organizational performance"
] |
[
{
"content": "Summarize the following paper into structured abstract.\n\n__NO_TITLE__: Improving management skills and competences can be a great source of competitive advantage when handled with great care and taken seriously ... While there are many reasons organizations fail to properly train their managers, very few of them of them are justified if an organization is serious about improving performance (a management trainer's observation).\nClosing the managerial skills gap: There is no getting around the fact that we [HR] need to do a better job of working with line managers and spear-heading management training initiatives ... We need each other to get better at doing training more effective to create a learning organization (HR manager's hope).In order to address the managerial skills gap that exists for far too many managers and in far too many organizations, human resource professionals need to get organizational leaders to not approach management training simply as an \"expense\" which hurts their year-end numbers or time away from more pressing and important activities. Let us illustrate the importance of this proposition with the following scenario. An upper-level manager approaches an HR manager with a rather tired and perturbed look on her face. She states: \"I've just reviewed the management training plan and the budget seems awfully expensive to me. What happens if we train these front-line managers and they just pick up and leave?\" The HR manager looks his boss in the eye and answers the question with another question, \"What happens if we don't train them and they stay?\"The moral of the story is pretty simple. In the heat of battle, line managers and HR managers can look at training from very different perspectives. This happens even though our study demonstrates that line managers were able to identify and articulate the individual and organizational problems associated with poorly-trained management personnel. Apparently, in the real world, filled with conflicting goals and targets, old habits, time pressures, and lack of resources and skills frequently prevent organizations and upper-level managers from practicing effective training even when they know better (Longenecker, 1997).If organizations are really going to close the managerial skills gap, top management and HR managers must work together to identify organizational training problems and systems to improve training at all management levels. This effort requires four main thrusts, presented below.Assess your organization's current commitment to management training\nA call for action: Managerial training processes should be incorporated into the corporate culture of any organization wishing to avoid the negative individual and organizational consequences caused by ineffective training practices (Longenecker et al., 1998). It requires knowledge, time and discipline, and is best achieved when managers at all levels and HR managers function in unison to achieve the common goal to create a high performance management work force. Training must be planned and budgeted for all managers, regardless of level, and must be a top management priority. Those involved in management training should be recognized and rewarded for their participation in this critical activity (Longenecker and Simonetti, 2001).High performance organizations like Dell Computer, Southwest Airlines, Honda, Motorola, Cisco, and Marriott make management training a systematic practice that is part and parcel of their organizations' culture - with telling performance results! Without proper attention, training efforts will be ignored, delayed, inconsistently and/or ineffectively implemented, thus widening the potential managerial skills gap. Without a supportive organizational culture, management training and development efforts can easily be neglected. In the ultra-competitive world of business, failure to train your managers not only can prevent you from gaining a competitive advantage but can actually put you at a competitive disadvantage! Use the findings and recommendations from this two-part series guide and improve your management training and development initiatives. Action on your part will help your managers improve their performance and better help your organization achieve its performance goals and objectives.\n",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Purpose: - This paper aims to explore why organizations often focus little attention and resources on management training and provides a useful checklist of ways to close the managerial skills gap through training.\nDesign/methodology/approach: - Seasoned managers (278) in rapidly changing organizations were surveyed on their experiences with management training.\nFindings: - A content analysis revealed the most frequently cited causes of why organizations fail to properly train their managers.\nResearch limitations/implications: - Generalization of these findings to non-rapidly changing organizations may be limited.\nPractical implications: - Results indicate that organizations fail to properly train managers for a host of reasons. Many of failures to train are caused by misconceptions about training needs, the ability of managers to handle their own training or the value of training to the organization compared with other efforts. Lack of accountability and poor implementation are other key reasons cited for training failures.\nOriginality/value: - The findings provide a useful list of the causes for ineffective training and the discussion focuses on ways to close the managerial skills gap.\n",
"role": "assistant"
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] |
The sustainable organisation: blueprint for an integrated model
|
[
"Sustainability",
"Economic sustainability",
"Integrated sustainability",
"Integrated sustainability matrix",
"Organisational phase model",
"Organisational sustainability"
] |
[
{
"content": "Summarize the following paper into structured abstract.\n\nIntroduction and background: In recent times, there has been a wave of interest in sustainability by senior managers and interested organisational stakeholders. There is a growing awareness and acceptance in the society and in the business community of the need to create sustainable and sustaining organisations (Unruh and Ettenson 2010). Signs of this are manifest by the increasing role being accorded sustainability in conference agendas, in the exponential increase in publications on sustainability including new journals. The trend is also evident in new specialist business school courses in sustainability and an increasing emphasis on sustainability across the range of traditional courses throughout school, university and technical and further education curricula. Most importantly, there are widespread business initiatives, emerging political debates and hotly debated government legislation in a range of areas related to sustainability such as carbon emissions, water allocation and alternate energy technologies, as well as in non technological areas such as corporate governance, occupational health and safety and equal opportunity.\nA progressive change model of approaches to sustainability: This article sets out to show the different approaches to how an organisation may vary in its approach to managing the various aspects of sustainability. It will first draw on an existing model that emphasises the social and environmental aspects of sustainability in an organisational phase model. Recent support will be cited that proposes that meaningful sustainability strategy should embrace all three critical aspects, i.e. social, economic and environmental. The paper will then go on propose a new integrated phase model that embraces the critical economic sustainability path along with those of the social and environment.\nAn interdependent approach to sustainability: The task of integrating the environmental and social elements with economic sustainability has received considerable attention by way of discussion in the accounting and financial literature. Some authors have referred to the triple bottom line of an organisation where it is judged on its performance in the three key areas of: financial, social and environment (Fauzi et al., 2010). Discussions of corporate performance have been traditionally focused on the two dimensions of financial performance: market-based (e.g. share price and dividend performance), and accounting-based (e.g. return on equity and assets). Triple-bottom-line thinking suggests that an organisation should combine standard metrics of financial success with those that measure environmental stewardship and social justice. It is sometimes called the 3P approach with three cornerstones of successful sustainable organisations-people, planet and profits. One comprehensive review of the body of knowledge in this area suggests that sustainable organisations are resilient and create economic value, healthy ecosystems and strong communities; \"they survive over the long term because they are intimately connected to healthy economic, social and environmental systems\" (Bertels, 2010, p. 7).\nAdding an explicit economic dimension to the organisational change model: The commercial and strategic orientations of sustainability management are seen as a critical component of an advanced phase of evolution towards becoming a highly effective sustainable organisation (Lueneburger and Goleman, 2010). Other authors have pointed out that companies that excel in sustainability have moved from an initial ad hoc and tactical approach, to a more systematic, integrated and strategic management approach (Lubin and Esty, 2010, p. 5).\nTowards an integrated organisational sustainability model: The economic path of sustainability can now be added to the original phase model and is recreated in Figure 3. This proposes a new integrated sustainability model showing all three sustainability dimensions of the economic, the human, and the environment. Describing the landscape of this new broadened, integrated model, for each dimension, an organisation will hold certain mores and standards regarding its approach to that particular sustainability endeavour. It may forward plan objectives and strategies for each dimension of sustainability endeavour. At any point in time, there will be drivers for further change to sustainability policy and strategy (shown as small arrows along each of the sustainability pathways in Figure 3). Stakeholders in the organisation will have ongoing input to the issues that impact on sustainability plans and activities, moving towards a longer term vision for the role and status of sustainability in the organisation's future (Wilner et al., 2011, p. 1334). Inhibiting these drivers will be resistance or barriers to those forces that drive an organisation to progress towards a more comprehensive sustainable position (shown as diagonal bars along each of the sustainability pathways in Figure 3). Along each sustainability path, it is possible to reach one of the six sustainability phases at a point in time (rejection, non-responsiveness, compliance, efficiency, strategic proactivity, the sustaining corporation).\n",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Purpose: The purpose of this article is to build on the original Dunphy, Griffiths and Benn (2007) model by proposing a new model of organisational sustainability which includes the economic dimension. There is a growing level of interest by senior executives in the role and potential impact that sustainability will have on their organisation's future strategy and structure. Although management is keenly aware that sustainability is important in their future planning, there is much uncertainty about what level of involvement and commitment they should make towards sustainability endeavours.\nDesign/methodology/approach: This article reviews the existing organisational sustainability change model while building a case to have the important economic strand added to the original change dimensions relating to the human and the environmental strands.\nFindings: This conceptual paper builds on previous work of sustainability organisational change theorists to produce an enhanced sustainability change model thus proposing a more comprehensive and integrated sustainability stage model that can guide managers in their quest to evolve effective and more sustainable organisations.\nOriginality/value: This is a conceptual paper that builds on previous work of sustainability organisational change theorists to introduce an enhanced sustainability change model that includes the important economic dimension to the widely accepted social and environmental dimensions, thus proposing a comprehensive and integrated sustainability stage model that can guide managers in their quest to evolve effective and more sustainable organisations.\n",
"role": "assistant"
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] |
The online oxymoron: teaching HRD through an impersonal medium
|
[
"E‐learning",
"Human resource development",
"Teaching",
"Learning"
] |
[
{
"content": "Summarize the following paper into structured abstract.\n\nIntroduction: In an earlier article (Callahan and Sandlin, 2008), I argued that educational institutions had jumped down Alice in Wonderland's rabbit hole by not mindfully considering the implications of online learning. I will make a similar argument here as it relates specifically to the teaching and learning of HRD. As HRD seeks more innovative ways to educate and train future professionals, online learning is often justifiably positioned as a cutting edge approach to reaching learners. In the past few decades, online learning has exploded as a novel teaching technique poised to solve a whole host of problems associated with education and training. As sites of learning in organizations, HRD departments are being encouraged to implement online learning to deliver training materials; as sites of learning in universities, HRD programs are embracing online learning as a means to educate new HRD professionals. Indeed, online education is seen by many simply to be the inevitable future of teaching and learning (Clegg et al., 2003).It is this very unbridled enthusiasm of inevitability that provides me with pause for thought. With such enthusiastic support for a \"new\" technique of teaching, the potential for performative, instrumental, and commercial ideologies infiltrating spaces of learning is very real (Hides, 2005; Clegg et al., 2003), and yet these underlying assumptions associated with online learning are rarely addressed in the literature. Thus, using a lens of my own experiences and reflections about the past decade in which I have been engaged with online learning as evaluator, designer, teacher, and student, I will present an alternative and critical view of online learning for and by HRD professionals.\nHRD education via on-line learning?: HRD professionals engage in a wide variety of activities designed to promote learning and development within and by organizations. Although dated, McLagan's (1989) three domains of HRD activities - career development, organization development, and training and development - still form the knowledge base for many HRD professionals. To that end, HRD professionals learn skills such as how to interact with others in order to help those individuals and the organizations within which they work to meet desired goals; they learn to problem solve and help teach others to do the same; they learn how to design and deliver training; they learn how to evaluate training and organizational programs; they learn to work in groups; they learn to think in critically reflective ways to enact their role in ways that will benefit both employer and employee. Traditionally, these skills were taught in face-to-face sessions - in classrooms or on the job; now, however, the growth of technology is enticing - perhaps pressuring - HRD educators to teach new HRD professionals through online learning.But can online learning technologies promise all things to all learners and to all topics? No, just as no single teaching platform can, and yet techno-utopians argue that online learning is so powerful that it will make traditional sites of learning obsolete (Goldberg and Reimer, 2006). Despite combating a history of performative orientations, a core value consistently held by HRD professionals is \"promoting meaningful change and making a difference\" (Bierema, 2002, p. 250). To accomplish this, important HRD practices are often those based in humanistic principles that privilege interaction, relationships, dialogue, and emotion (Callahan, 2004). While these things can take place within an online environment, the richness of experience is certainly diluted. Gulati (2008) notes that the prevalent instructional design of online courses privileges an objective instrumentalist approach to learning, which is at odds with the essence of what HRD stands for.Instructional design \"is the process of deciding what methods of instruction are best for bringing about desired changes\" (Riegeluth, 1983, p. 8). One of the first principles of design is to identify your learning objectives or outcomes before you decide the best techniques to accomplish those outcomes (Welle-Strand and Thune, 2003). The fascination with online learning has by-passed that principle and assumed that the method, namely technology, will drive the learning. This assumption is so prevalent that techno-utopians (Goldberg and Reimer, 2006) do not even acknowledge the importance of outcomes before determining whether or not online learning is an appropriate medium for accomplishing the course objectives. For example, in their chapter on incorporating instructional design principles with the world wide web, Ritchie and Hoffman (1997) highlight seven important steps of instructional design - none of which include the determination of whether the method (i.e. internet-based learning) is even appropriate for reaching the desired objectives.To be sure, online learning can be an effective tool for teaching many HRD essentials. Online learning is likely to be highly effective for teaching basic information or objectives that call for knowledge, and perhaps comprehension, levels of intellectual activity. As objectives progress to more complex intellectual activities, such as application or evaluation, online learning becomes challenging at best. For example, learning how to write training objectives can be accomplished fairly easily online because it requires that learners recognize, relate, and reproduce statements that fit their circumstances. On the other hand, learning how to facilitate a training session with an unruly class participant is less likely to be effective without experiencing first-hand real or simulated conflicts in a learning environment. To accomplish similar abstract objectives, online learning can take much longer than face-to-face courses. For example, in a face-to-face class, interacting with fellow learners to read, troubleshoot, and respond to a brief case study can easily be structured to take part or all of a single three-hour meeting. The same case would take up to three weeks in an asynchronous environment; and synchronous interaction is both at odds with the \"flexibility\" promise of online education and it requires access to high speed internet connections that are beyond the reach of many learners.\nA techno-utopia?: The praises for online learning have created a techno-utopia (Goldberg and Reimer, 2006) that promises to make education more accessible to the less wealthy and to disadvantaged racial and ethnic groups, eliminate power structures, and reduce costs. These are powerful statements that appeal both to those who advocate for social justice and to those who espouse the need to increase profit margins. Perhaps because of this diverse appeal, these claims have rarely been challenged.Accessibility to computers and the internet is strongly correlated with existing wealth (Goldberg and Reimer, 2006), suggesting that the less wealthy are less likely to have access to the required infrastructure to even participate in online learning. Reporting statistics from Allen and Sieman (2008), Doyle (2009) notes that online students are more likely to be white, financially stable (earning more than $60,000 per year), and live within 40 miles of the university from which they are taking classes. Indeed, the majority of students in my online classes often live closer to the university than I do! Until recently, the online classes that I taught were delivered using WebCT (Blackboard) Vista. My personal off-campus internet connection was not fast enough for me to access the course in an efficient manner; in one semester, it took three hours to submit grades for a class of 15 students. I could not help but wonder how my students were faring. Many of them indicated that they had to wait in line at the city library or come to campus to use the computer labs because either they could not afford a home computer or they could not afford the high speed internet required to access the courses. More often than not, these individuals were non-white and/or single mothers trying to further their education so they could qualify for promotions or higher paying jobs. This dilemma is also present for those engaging in online HRD training in organizations - are they given work time to accomplish the training (often, no) or must they find alternate high speed internet access on their own time? This lack of accessibility and lack of convenience directly contradicts some of the very benefits of online learning touted by techno-utopians.With regard to the leveling of power structures, Gulati's (2008) research revealed that online learning did nothing to eliminate power structures, but simply created new and different types of power differentials. As a method of ensuring that students are completing the training, increased surveillance is often implemented to track accountability. Also, required participation in online discussion privileges active learners and potentially creates an unsafe environment for silent learners, resulting in power differences that reinforce extroversion and teacher dominance. Yet, engagement in the discussion forums is often perceived as necessary for creating community and for teaching interaction. The creation of community is also behind a feature in the learning systems software Moodle, which allows teachers and learners to upload profile pictures that appear with every post by the individual. On the one hand, this does increase the sense of community and provides a visual reference - a good thing. On the other hand, this also increases the likelihood that racial and gender biases that create power structures in face-to-face classes can be re-created in the online forum. Thus, dominant power structures may be expanded rather than eliminated in online forums. Again, this is another dilemma that challenges the extent to which online learning can truly support the HRD profession. The creation of community is an important element inherent within HRD practice; yet the coercive construction of that community is counter to HRD principles of inclusion and choice.Finally, online learning is reported to reduce costs for training. But does it? And, whether it does or does not reduce costs, at what cost does it do so? There is an unmistakable symbolic violence (Bourdieu, 1990) that accompanies the appearance that online learning costs less - it may cost the organization less, but when it does cost less, it is often at the expense of the trainer and the learners. The costs in online learning are potentially hidden. HRD educators must spend the time that they used to spend doing other relevant, and still needed, activities to learn how to use ever changing technology. Further, in an online environment, the educator is expected to not only be a content expert, but is also expected to expertly manage the structures or mechanisms through which the content is delivered. This would be analogous to asking a brick and mortar educator to learn how to troubleshoot and fix the lighting or air conditioning in a classroom1 - an absurd notion, to be sure, but seen as perfectly normal (or hegemonic!) in online environments. Perhaps the greatest cost to HRD professionals is the relegation to delivering compliance oriented training online where it has minimal cost, maximum surveillance, and minimal chance for effecting real change. This places HRD not \"at the table\" as a strategic player, but instead marginalizes the field as an unwanted, but necessary, function to meet government regulations.For learners, the symbolic violence may be seen in the amount of unpaid time needed to learn skills and knowledge comparable to that of their face-to-face colleagues is significantly longer, as mentioned earlier, placing a greater burden upon the learner to be responsible and use personal time to be competitive. Also, the types of interpersonal and problem solving skills needed by HRD professionals are not easily transmitted in online environments. In one semester, I split my Introduction to Training & Development course into one online class and one face-to-face class. The primary objectives were to provide an overview of classic models of training (e.g. ADDIE) and to introduce students to platform and facilitation skills; all of my classes also incorporate some type of scholarly writing. The syllabus was the same for both courses, with minor differences accounting for the nature of the courses; for example, online students submitted videos of their platform delivery presentations while face-to-face students delivered the presentation in class. By the end of the semester, the online students had better rote memory recall of factual items (e.g. components of ADDIE, milestones in training history) while the face-to-face students had better platform and facilitation skills and produced more critically reflective scholarly papers - with fewer incidents of plagiarism. I submit that the skills acquired by the face-to-face students are far more important for HRD professionals. Sadly, because of the transition to a new semester, a new version of WebCT Vista, and my then lack of expertise with the software, all of the data associated with that semester were lost - yet another \"victim\" of technology!\nConclusion: In conclusion then my point is this. I am arguing that online learning technologies can be a double-edged sword for HRD educators, but, as a field, we often fail to reflect on the implications of technology for our practice. For this reason, I purposefully have focused more on criticisms of online learning, as the praises abound. Citing Latour (1988), Grint (1997, pp. 16-17) highlights the challenge of technology as:[...] just one more temporary and recalcitrant ally in the war of competition against other capitalists. The consequence, therefore, may be that workers' lives are lightened by technology - if it appears that such a strategy will secure a competitive advantage for one capitalist over another. Of course, the opposite may also occur and workers' lives may be ruined by technology, but the issue is determined not by the technology but by the strategic intent of the capitalists.This fascination with online learning may serve to highlight that HRD can adopt cutting edge technology and reduce costs significantly for the broader organization - all the while at the expense of creating HRD practitioners with watered-down skills whose shallower skill sets rob HRD of positions of credibility and influence within organizations. The field of HRD may lose the potential to help people when its professionals become depersonalized cogs facelessly delivering pre-packaged online services.Because of my experiences, I argue that the push for online learning is at odds with much of what the field of HRD stands for - including dialogue, interaction, and relationships. While learning through interaction and dialogue can certainly be accomplished in online environments, it is a pale shadow of the depth of what could be learned through substantive face-to-face interaction. A quote by David Noble (2001) bears repeating in my conclusion, \"... all too often in the past people had only belatedly realized the dimensions of the calamity that had befallen them, too late to act effectively in their own interest\" (p. ix). Innovations such as technology are neither inherently good nor bad. Technology, as the innovation discussed in this reflection, may help us better teach some things and it may hinder us from teaching other things. But we must mindfully consider our options before allowing technology, or any innovation for that matter, to drive our decision making. Let HRD educators act effectively in their own interest - use online learning wisely and do not be pressured into adopting technology for technology's sake.\n",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Purpose: - This paper aims to present an alternative and critical view of online learning for and by HRD professionals.\nDesign/methodology/approach: - This paper is positioned as a conceptual reflection regarding practical implications not frequently considered with regard to implementing online learning systems.\nFindings: - This paper contends that many of the practical reasons for implementing online learning (accessibility, power equalization, and cost reduction) have fatal flaws.\nResearch limitations/implications: - This paper suggests that researchers broaden their perspectives beyond the assumption that using online learning is the goal to be achieved with regard to teaching and learning HRD. Both traditional and critical perspectives of online learning should be more thoroughly explored through empirical research.\nOriginality/value: - Few conceptual or empirical works challenge the unquestioned hegemony of the appeal of online learning, especially within the field of HRD. This reflection will hopefully serve as a catalyst for research that challenges unquestioned assumptions about online learning as a cutting edge innovation for teaching and learning HRD.\n",
"role": "assistant"
}
] |
International retailers' strategic responses to institutional environment of emerging market: Multiple case studies in China
|
[
"Institutional environment",
"Retailing",
"Internationalization",
"Retail management",
"Strategic management",
"Emerging markets",
"China"
] |
[
{
"content": "Summarize the following paper into structured abstract.\n\n1. Introduction: In spite of a challenging consumer environment, retailers continue to grow their cross-border businesses (CBRE, 2011), especially in the emerging market because of its excellent economic growth potential. For example, Walmart recently accelerated its expansion in Brazil and Starbucks has been moving closer to opening stores in India. However, the institutional environment of an emerging market is characterized by rapid changes, multiple overlapping layers of jurisdiction and structure of industries, low level of professional and efficient business support services and importance of collective social network (Zhou and Poppo, 2010). Such a turbulent environment creates a great challenge for international firms, especially for international retailers. These international retailers are more embedded in the local context than production-based international firms (Wrigley et al., 2005). The local institutional environment influences their strategic choices more than those of manufacturers (Bianchi and Ostale, 2006). For instance, international retailers have direct contact with consumers in the host country, which makes retailing highly culture specific (Vida et al., 2000). Even with regard to sourcing, food retailers in particular still source the vast majority of their products from within the national territory they are serving (Coe and Hess, 2005), which makes retailers' competitive advantages more vulnerable to local business practices and existing relationships. In addition, international retailers need to sink capital into physical assets such as the store network and the infrastructure of distribution and logistics, which connects them intricately to the real-estate and land-use planning system of the host country (Wrigley and Currah, 2006).It is therefore a crucial issue for the international retailers how to respond to the challenges from the institutional environment of an emerging market. However, the answers are not yet clear so far. First, the effects of the institutional environment on firms' strategic choices has mostly been examined in developed markets (Lu, 2002; Palmer et al., 1993). Assumptions based on developed markets are inadequate in the context of an emerging market because of its instability (Gao et al., 2007). Second, most of the existing research choses general or production-based companies as data settings. However, the differences between the retailers and manufacturers are quite significant, especially in international expansion (Dawson, 1994). It is important to understand the uniqueness of international retailers' responses to the institutional environment (Huang and Sternquist, 2007). Third, although some researchers (Arnold et al., 2001; Bianchi and Arnold, 2004; Huang and Sternquist, 2007) have recognized the importance of studying the impact of the institutional environment on the internationalization of retailers, more empirical studies, especially based on multiple case studies are necessary because the research findings of Arnold et al. (2001) and Bianchi and Arnold (2004) were examined by the case study of only one company and Huang and Sternquist (2007) focused merely on the market entry strategy influenced by the institutional environment. This article addresses this gap and aims to add to the research on institutional theory in international retail.This research focuses on China as an empirical setting for three major reasons. First, the Chinese retail market is characterized by continuous change (Wang, 2009), great complexity (Cui and Liu, 2000) and intensified competition. In such a turbulent market, environmental factors play an important role in international retailers' strategies. Second, China is one of the most lucrative and rapidly growing retail markets in the world (Lu, 2010). The presence of many important international retailers provides numerous potential research sites. Third, China's institutional environment, given the nation's socialist tradition and strong culture, differs considerably from that of the West (Peng and Heath, 1996). Thus, for researchers, China provides a compelling context for examining and refining our understanding of how international retailers respond to the pressures from the institutional environment in an emerging market.\n2. Research question built: In organization theory, the study of the relationship between the environment and organizations can be classified into two main streams: task environment and institutional environment perspectives (Oliver, 1997). From the task environment perspective, the environment is considered either as an information source, which results in the problem of uncertainty about external conditions (Aldrich, 1979), or as a stock of resources, which raises the issue of dependence on the environment for critical resources (Pfeffer and Salancik, 1978). Organizations are motivated by economic efficiency considerations. From the institutional perspective, the environment is constituted by taken-for-granted social and cultural meaning systems, or norms (DiMaggio, 1988; Scott, 1987; Scott and Meyer, 1994), which act as unwritten rules of proper social conduct to which organizations must adhere. The organization's performance is judged by how well it enacts and upholds environmental norms. Organizations are oriented by the pursuit of legitimacy (Oliver, 1997). Compared with the traditional task environment perspective, the institutional environment perspective provides a more comprehensive point of view, by which the organization is regarded as an organic, indivisible part of a complex environmental system, including both \"hardwired economics\" (the task environment) and \"sociocultural norms\" (Dacin, 1997; Scott, 1987).2.1 Institutional environment\n3. Methodology: For this study we used grounded theory inductive study approach, based on comparative analysis of 18 companies. We highlight four reasons why we believe a qualitative methodology such as grounded theory is appropriate to study this phenomenon.First, since our study tries to explain a complex and multifaceted problem - different strategic responses to different types of environmental institutions under different mechanisms - grounded theory allows us to consider and manage many variables at the same time, without letting any existing preconceptions limit the number and type of variables involved.Second, grounded theory is oriented towards actions and processes (Corbin and Strauss, 2008). This is precisely the object of this study: a firm's strategic responses to the institutional environment can be considered as the process of its social construction, as influenced by the different types of institutions in the environment where it survives or thrives (Scott, 2008).Third, previous studies in this area normally focus on developed markets or address production-based firms. Grounded theory allows a theory to emerge without imposing a particular scenario. Researchers can use this method to discover the specificities of international retailers' strategic responses to the institutional environment in emerging markets.Last, grounded theory allows us to understand the special context and the setting (China) within which the issues of this study are addressed, so we can appreciate more fully the circumstances behind the stories told by the top managers of international retailers in China, who are involved in strategic choices.When choosing between Straussian and Glaserian approaches in grounded theory, we decided to follow Strauss and Corbin's approach because it offered us more procedural guidance and flexibility. This approach allows us to adopt the existing conceptual framework (Figure 1), but at the same time to avoid forcing or imposing concepts that reflect our own predispositions during our empirical study.3.1 Sampling and field interviews\n4. International retailers' strategic responses to institutional environment: The main result of our empirical study (Figures 2-5) is that international retailers in China deploy all four different strategies (conformance, selection, manipulation and creation) to respond to three types of institutional pressure: regulatory, normative and cognitive; the only exception is the creation strategy in response to regulatory institutions. The following sections present these 11 dimensions and the categories and the sub-categories related to them, and explain the main ideas that emerged from the interviews.4.1 Conformance to the environment\n5. Discussion and managerial implications: The results of our research show that retailers are very pragmatic in their strategic choices and they react to institutional pressure with a mix of adaptation and standardization of their marketing and management. We find that international retailers do not respond uniformly to institutional pressures, but rather adopt varying strategies that depend on the nature of the institutional pressures impinging on them. This finding is consistent with that of Oliver (1991) and Zimmerman and Zeitz (2002). The results of the research of Goodstein (1994) also give the empirical support on it. For example, to respond to regulatory pressure, international retailers should adopt the strategy of reinforcing their corporate governance by the application of strict control system on their operations. However, to respond to normative constraints, international retailers tend to implement a decentralization strategy combined with their adaptation strategy to ensure they satisfy the demands of the local retail norms and become part of the local economic body. The management challenge for international retailers is how to implement the decentralized strategy but also not to lose the control on the store network.The major theoretical contribution of this study is to highlight the specificities of strategic choices taken by international retailers in an emerging market.First, our study indicates that international retailers cannot consider the emerging country a homogeneous market since the institutional environment there is often complex, with multiple overlapping layers of jurisdiction and industrial structures (Child and Tsai, 2005), The tension between the central and provincial government, and the inducement policies in different provinces or different industries, require international retailers to select the right business model and entry mode and to enter the right place at the right time.Second, we find the international retailers should be flexible and ready to use different tactics to penetrate the emerging market, as there laws and policies often change rapidly. By sticking to their preferred entry mode, they may lose opportunities. Moreover, they should be dynamic, able to adjust their strategies to closely follow the pace of change in the institutional environment.Third, our findings show that the international retailers should be aware of the importance of cultivating the host market and committing to investment in managerial, professional and technical training for their local employees, consumers, suppliers and other service providers because they cannot find the same level of business support services, such as accounting, financing, distribution services and management education systems, in an emerging market as in their domestic markets.Fourth, we identify that the international retailers tend to choose decentralization strategy while the psychic distance between the home country and host country is high given the big difference of institutional environment between the developed market and emerging market. A decentralized organizational structure may facilitate greater learning about foreign markets because there is greater communication and interaction with a wider range of management across headquarters and foreign subsidiaries in the decision-making process. This level of involvement will give senior management a deeper understanding and awareness of the similarities and differences between the home and foreign markets (Evans et al., 2008).Finally, we disclose the importance of building an economic network in an emerging market where legal and regulatory institutions are less developed and market-support systems less advanced than in the home market (Peng, 2003). Our study finds that, as a new entrant, an international retailer should be able to create added shared value in an existing network by developing new services and new products for local consumers, bringing new technologies to local industries, and making local suppliers responsible for quality. This added shared value created by international firms helps them break the old social network and create a new one in which they often become the pilot. We find also that whether an international retailer is capable of breaking the old social network largely depends on its bargaining power in a given industry. The purchasing volume realized by international firms in the host country for their national and global market, and their market share in the host country, is then very important for them. Therefore, their strategic choices can be seen as pursuit of market leadership through gaining scale advantages.5.1 Managerial implications\n6. Conclusion: This research examines the effects of the institutional environment on international retailers' strategic choices in an emerging market, China. Our findings enable us to understand how international retailers employ strategic alternatives to confront regulatory, normative and cognitive pressures in the environment, but this study has limitations that further research should address. First, we examine the effect of the institutional environment on the choices of international firms in the largest emerging market, China. Although emerging markets share some common features in their institutional environments, they vary remarkably in the stages of their economic, institutional development (Peng, 2003) and position of global supply chain. For example, as China is often considered as one important sourcing country for most of international retailers, we think it might be only the Chinese case that the international retailers could change the old business practices and create new ones, relying on their big volume of purchase in China. Research in other emerging markets is thus needed to test how far our findings can be generalized. Second, our research studied 18 international retailers having operations in China; we can suppose that company responses to institutional pressure are different amongst different sector according to their experience in the Chinese context. We cannot, however, verify this hypothesis because our sample is too limited to allow us to analyze sectoral variation and strategic modifications linked with the learning curve of the companies. This represents a path for future research, that can study in detail a large sample of companies belonging to two or more different sectors to try to find differences in the response to institutional environment. It would be interesting also, in future research, to read the response to institutional environment through a longitudinal study taking into account the learning curve of international retailers in China. Third, constituting over two-thirds of the world's population and one-fifth of its GDP, the emerging markets are not only an important testing ground for existing models and concepts of international retailers, but also a fertile ground for developing their new models. The study, focusing on the international retail innovations driven by the special characteristics of institutions in emerging markets (Reinartz et al., 2011), will be attractive. Finally, although Scott (2008) has claimed that institutional theory has reached its adulthood, very limited rigorous research has been conducted in the area of international retailing. This study opens up the path for other quantitative studies on a larger scale, for example to understand how institutional pressure and process evoke business strategic actions, which in turn, affect firm performance.\n",
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"content": "Purpose: - The purpose of this paper is to analyze the international retailers' strategic responses to the institutional environment in emerging markets.\nDesign/methodology/approach: - Based on in-depth interviews with top managers from a grounded-theory perspective, the research provides a comprehensive analysis of the implications of the institutional environment for the strategic choices of international retailers in an emerging market, especially in China.\nFindings: - The international retailer's strategic choices are often identified as pragmatism, dynamism, public policy-orientation, seeking lead position in the market and decentralization if the institutional distance between the home country and host country is high. Moreover, when international retailers can commit to cultivating local markets and creating shared added value, they are better able to respond proactively to an institutional environment that is geared to a collective social network and still in a phase of transition.\nResearch limitations/implications: - This paper focuses on only one country, China.\nOriginality/value: - The major value of this paper is to highlight the specificities of international retailers' strategic responses to the institutional environment of an emerging market. Attention to these specificities would enable researchers to analyze better the reality of retail internationalization process in an emerging market.\n",
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] |
The insoluble problems of books: what does Altmetric.com have to offer?
|
[
"Books",
"Altmetrics",
"Research evaluation",
"Databases",
"Library tools",
"Social sciences and humanities"
] |
[
{
"content": "Summarize the following paper into structured abstract.\n\n1. Introduction: Many types of indicators have been suggested for the evaluation of books (Zuccala and Robinson-Garcia, 2018). Still, this publication type represents a weak spot when applying bibliometric techniques to assess the scientific impact of research. Most of the attention given to monographs is coming from bibliometricians specialized in the assessment of research in the Social Sciences and Humanities (SSH). This is partly due to the many changes taking place in the publishing market, in addition to the emergence of new databases, analytical tools and information providers. Moreover, there is an increasing demand from policy makers to develop metrics and indicators that can better assess the performance of SSH. In the last decade, all of this has led to a renaissance of studies devoted to this particular issue. An example of such interest is the launch of the \"European network for research evaluation in the social sciences\" (http://enressh.eu). This initiative includes several working groups with one of them, \"Databases and uses of data for understanding SSH research,\" which, among other goals, aims at developing alternative metrics for the SSH.\n2. Antecedents: An avalanche of studies exploring new data sources took place at the beginning of the decade, with the launch of Web of Science's Book Citation Index (Leydesdorff and Felt, 2012; Gorraiz et al., 2013; Torres-Salinas et al., 2014a, b), the inclusion of books in Scopus (Kousha et al., 2011) and the increase in research focused on Google Scholar (Kousha et al., 2011) and Google Books (Abdullah and Thelwall, 2014; Kousha and Thelwall, 2015a). They have also brought to light some of the characteristics and peculiarities (Torres-Salinas et al., 2012, 2013; Torres-Salinas et al., 2014a, b; Chi, 2016; Glanzel et al., 2016), which cannot be discerned on the basis of micro-analytic case studies or small samples of data.\n3. Altmetric.com book collection: In this section, we will describe what can be found when consulting data directly from the Altmetric Explorer for Institutions web platform. We will start by giving an overview of raw numbers by type of output, and year. Then we will analyze data sources tracked by Altmetric.com to identify books and track mentions in social media.\n4. Data retrieval and processing of altmetrics for a collection of SSH books: In this section, we test the capacity of Altmetric.com to retrieve data given a predefined set of books. This is a basic feature needed by any institution considering a subscription to this tool, where the aim is to monitor the altmetric impact of the book collection of their institution. To perform this test, we downloaded all books included in the Master Book List from Clarivate's Book Citation Index (http://wokinfo.com/mbl/). A total of 60,239 books were retrieved from this list, including book title, ISBN, publisher, subject category and series title. We used the ISBN data to query the Altmetric Explorer. It is noteworthy that the Master Book List provides a single ISBN by book, which means that there may already be a loss of information if a book has more than one ISBN identifier.\n5. Main characteristics, strengths and limitations: This paper aims at exploring Altmetric.com as a source for retrieving altmetric indicators for books. The two previous sections were devoted to describing the tool and its usability. Throughout the text, we have briefly mentioned issues that limit to a great extent the utility of this data source. In this section, we will expand on significant issues observed when testing this tool that should be considered. To do so, we have structured this section into three parts, containing crucial aspects to consider when assessing a new data source: pertinence, usability and reliability.\n6. Differences between Altmetric.com and PlumX: This paper aims at providing a full scope of the usability and potential of Almetric.com as a source from which to extract metrics for books. We do not address directly the potential of altmetrics for books but rather describe and analyze this tool. It is also not part of the scope of this paper to make comparisons with other altmetric providers which also offer metrics for books. Nevertheless, we can use findings from our previous research and experience with the provider PlumX. First of all, we must emphasize that none of the tools provide clear documentation on how the input data are exactly processed and how books are identified and tracked. It is almost a trial and error process to fully understand how they work and what it is exactly to fully understand how they work and what exactly they are providing to the user.\n7. Concluding remarks: This paper tests the reliability and usability of metric indicators for books offered by Altmetric.com. In 2017, Altmetric.com announced that their Altmetric Explorer for Institutions now included metrics for monographs (Altmetric Engineering, 2017). As noted elsewhere (Hammarfelt, 2014), books are still far from finalizing a shift from print to electronic format, which journal articles have. Altmetrics have the potential to trace the social uptake of research (Robinson-Garcia et al., 2018) and can help to monitor the transition of scholarly outputs to Open Access (Wilsdon et al., 2017). Furthermore, their speed and immediacy present them as \"catchy\" indicators in the eyes of research managers, publishers and authors. This is especially relevant in the evaluation of SSH research where citation windows are longer and analyses based on citations are limited.\n",
"role": "user"
},
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"content": "Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to analyze the capabilities, functionalities and appropriateness of Altmetric.com as a data source for the bibliometric analysis of books in comparison to PlumX.\nDesign/methodology/approach: The authors perform an exploratory analysis on the metrics the Altmetric Explorer for Institutions, platform offers for books. The authors use two distinct data sets of books. On the one hand, the authors analyze the Book Collection included in Altmetric.com. On the other hand, the authors use Clarivate's Master Book List, to analyze Altmetric.com's capabilities to download and merge data with external databases. Finally, the authors compare the findings with those obtained in a previous study performed in PlumX.\nFindings: Altmetric.com combines and orderly tracks a set of data sources combined by DOI identifiers to retrieve metadata from books, being Google Books its main provider. It also retrieves information from commercial publishers and from some Open Access initiatives, including those led by university libraries, such as Harvard Library. We find issues with linkages between records and mentions or ISBN discrepancies. Furthermore, the authors find that automatic bots affect greatly Wikipedia mentions to books. The comparison with PlumX suggests that none of these tools provide a complete picture of the social attention generated by books and are rather complementary than comparable tools.\nPractical implications: This study targets different audience which can benefit from the findings. First, bibliometricians and researchers who seek for alternative sources to develop bibliometric analyses of books, with a special focus on the Social Sciences and Humanities fields. Second, librarians and research managers who are the main clients to which these tools are directed. Third, Altmetric.com itself as well as other altmetric providers who might get a better understanding of the limitations users encounter and improve this promising tool.\nOriginality/value: This is the first study to analyze Altmetric.com's functionalities and capabilities for providing metric data for books and to compare results from this platform, with those obtained via PlumX.\n",
"role": "assistant"
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] |
Determinants of capital structure: an empirical study of firms in Iran
|
[
"Ownership structure",
"Capital structure",
"Iran",
"Emerging markets",
"Financing",
"Tehran stock exchange"
] |
[
{
"content": "Summarize the following paper into structured abstract.\n\n1. Introduction: Generally, capital structure emphasizes on a combination of debt and equity to finance a firm. The various financing decisions are vital for the financial welfare of the firm. A false decision about the capital structure may lead to financial distress and eventually to bankruptcy. The management of a firm sets its capital structure in a way that the firm's value is maximized. Many studies have attempted to discover the optimal capital structure. Despite the huge body of research on capital structure, no specific method is developed for managers to determine optimal capital structure (Sheikh and Wang, 2011). Myers and Majluf (1984) show how managers do not attempt to maintain a particular capital structure. Instead, corporate financing choices are driven by the costs of adverse selection that arise because of information asymmetry between better-informed managers and less-informed investors (Hovakimian et al., 2004). An appropriate capital structure is a critical decision for any business organization (Simerly and Li, 2000).\n2. Economic and financial markets in Iran: Iran, a country of more than 75 million people, is situated in West Asia, in a region commonly referred to as the Middle East. Iran is a country with rich resources of oil, gas and other natural reserves. However, it is considered a developing country. The idea of having a well-organized stock market and accelerating the process of industrialization dates back to the 1930s in Iran when the National Bank of Iran undertook a study on the subject. A report completed in 1936 worked out the details for the formation of a stock market and laid the foundations for the plan. The outbreak of World War II and subsequent economic and political events delayed the establishment of the stock exchange until 1967, when the Stock Exchange Act was passed. The Tehran Stock Exchange (TSE) opened in April 1968. Initially, only government bonds and certain state-backed certificates were traded on the market. It currently includes 450 listed companies, and it is one of the oldest and biggest capital markets in the Middle East region. There is a good relationship between banks and companies because most of the banks are governmental and those that are not are severely under the control and regulations applied by the government. The government or semi-governmental units are themselves one of the big stockholders at TSE. It can be said that bank loan is a main resource for the managers in Iran and is the best way of financial support. In Iran, there is no organized system for corporations to issue bonds for public investors. At the same time, institutional changes like the transfer of shares of public companies and large monopolies to employees and the private sector led to the expansion of stock market activity (Mashayekhi and Mashayekh, 2008). While there have been some changes in the accounting institutions, the structure of the Iranian capital market has not changed in any significant way. According to Pourjalali and Meek (1995), lack of knowledge about long-term government plans, high inflation rates, foreign sanctions and general unavailability of essential goods resulted in great uncertainty of Iranians about their future, causing uncertainty avoidance in the form of decreased savings in cash or current assets. The capital market in Iran is very new and somewhat inefficient. The institutional environment for Iranian firms and this country has several salient features:\n3. Theoretical discussion and empirical determinants: In this empirical paper, we will only make a brief review of the different theories of capital structure. The objective is to better explain the choice of the various empirical determinants of capital structure and their links to the different theories. Then, we will describe in more depth each empirical determinant that will be used in the empirical study.\n4. Determinants of capital structure: Based on data availability, the following determinants of capital structure are analyzed in this paper: effective tax rate (ETAX), size, liquidity [current ratio (CR) and working capital ratio (WCR)], financial flexibility (FLEX), share price performance (SPP), assets structure [tangibility (ASST)], growth opportunities [sale growth (SAGR) and expected growth (EXPGR)], risk [volatility (VOLAT) and variability coefficient of profit (VCP)], profitability (ROA), assets utilization ratio [agency cost (AUR)] and ownership structure [state ownership percentage (SOP)]. The general form of the model can be specified as follows:\n5. Method: 5.1 Data\n6. Results: 6.1 Descriptive statistics and correlation analysis\n7. Discussion: The study shows very interesting results in terms of the capital structure of Iranian firms. Short-term debt constitutes a relatively high proportion of total debt of Iranian firms. This represents 61 per cent of total financing. It can be said that bank loan (short-term debt) is a main resource for the managers in Iran and is the best way of financial support. In Iran, there is no organized system for corporations to issue bonds for public investors. This is because corporations would have a preference for short-term debt financing over long-term debt financing, as the cost of long-term financing is greater for the firm. Our finding on effective tax rate and short-term debt confirms the results of Modigliani and Miller (1963), Graham (1996) and Zimmerman (1983). However, our results are inconsistent with those obtained by most prior studies (Antoniou et al., 2008; Karadeniz et al., 2009). Consistent to theorizing, the results of this study show that size is also negatively related to all measures of capital structure. The negative coefficient is, nevertheless, consistent with Marsh (1982) and Titman and Wessels' (1988) contention that accessibility to the equity market and economies of scale with respect to issue costs influence the firm's debt-equity choice. The effect of liquidity (WCR) on two leverage measures (short-term and total debt) is found to be negative and significant. Also considering the obtained results, current ratio (CR) has a negative relationship with long-term debt ratio (LTD), signifying that firms with sufficient liquid assets will be able to finance future investments with less reliance on external (debt) sources. This result is consistent with the results of Myers and Rajan (1998), Eldomiaty and Azim (2008), Deesomsak et al. (2004), Eriotis et al. (2007) and Sheikh and Wang (2011). On the other hand, current ratio (CR) is positively related to short-term financing.\n8. Conclusion: This study examined the determinants of capital structure of corporations in the context of emerging markets, where the issue has been under-researched. This study specifically focused on industrial firms in Iran. Of course, there may be many factors interfering with identification of capital structure, but in this research, several variables have been studied and pooled and panel data analysis has been used to analyze the models. This paper examines the debt financing as a proxy for corporate capital structure. It is necessary to outline the basic factors that affect debt-financing decision. First, the results show that short-term debt constitutes a relatively high proportion of total debt of Iranian firms. Firm's capital structure involves a tradeoff between the common types of financing: equity and debt financing. The results of this study show that firms use both types of debt interchangeably. Firms use more debt relative to equity for financing their operations, which does not conform to the principles of financing. Managers of Iranian firms must pay attention to this issue, for they may face problems in their long-term investments due to utilization and quick settlement of short-term debts. They will face liquidity deficit and this can affect the performance of these firms. Second, the negative relationships between all the measures of capital structure and size suggest that size of the firms is very important in influencing firms' access to debt finance. Third, the significantly negative relationship between financial flexibility (FLEX), share price performance (SPP), sales growth (SAGR), expected growth of assets (EXPGR) and return on assets (ROA) and capital structure (STD, LTD and TD) denotes the fact that these variables play an important role in corporations' access to debt finance. The results clearly support that firms which have more flexibility, growth, share price performance and profitability demand less debt. While, the results for effective tax rate (ETAX), liquidity (CR), firm risk (VCP and VOLAT), asset structure (ASST) and state ownership (SOP) are mixed. Fourth, our results generally confirm the fact that corporations in Iran try to finance their fixed assets with long-term debts, and their current assets with short-term debts. Fifth, we found a puzzling positive relation between assets utilization ratio and the leverage. Sixth, as for the effects of liquidity, the results of the regression analysis show that the estimates of the liquidity are negative and statistically significant. These negative relationships indicate that firms with a higher liquidity ratio will borrow less (Deesomsak et al., 2004). Seventh, the relationship between all measures of capital structure and growth opportunities is negative. This finding suggests that firms with higher future growth opportunities should use more equity financing. Finally, the results showed that state ownership has a significant positive relationship with long-term debt ratios.\n",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Purpose: This paper aims to investigate the determinants of capital structure of non-financial firms in Iran.\nDesign/methodology/approach: This paper reviews different conditional theories of capital structure to formulate testable propositions concerning the determinants of capital structure of Iranian companies. Pooled ordinary least squares and panel econometric techniques such as fixed effects and random effects are used to investigate the most significant factors that affect the capital structure choice of manufacturing firms listed on Tehran Stock Exchange Iran during 2003-2007.\nFindings: The results of the study suggest that variables such as firm's size, financial flexibility, asset structure, profitability, liquidity, growth, risk and state ownership affect all measures of capital structure of Iranian corporations. Short-term debt is found to represent an important financing source for corporations in Iran. The results of the present research are consistent with some capital structure theories.\nResearch limitations/implications: In general, the results provide evidence that the five theories discussed influence emerging markets. Due to the existence of a negative relationship between profitability and capital structure, investors must consider capital structure before making investment decisions.\nPractical implications: This study has laid some groundwork to explore the determinants of capital structure of Iranian firms upon which a more detailed evaluation could be based. Furthermore, the empirical findings will help corporate managers in making optimal capital structure decisions.\nOriginality/value: To the authors' knowledge, this is the first study that explores the determinants of capital structure of manufacturing firms in Iran by using the most recent data. Moreover, this paper provides a theoretical model to explain the mechanism of how the ownership structure impacts debt financing.\n",
"role": "assistant"
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] |
Could "Lean Lite" be the cost effective solution to applying lean manufacturing in developing economies?
|
[
"Pakistan",
"SME",
"Lean",
"Economic and social benefits",
"Developing economy",
"Lean Lite"
] |
[
{
"content": "Summarize the following paper into structured abstract.\n\n__NO_TITLE__: The research follows a case study based on work in Pakistan carried out by The Institute of Productivity and managed by the United Nations Industrial Development Organisation (UNIDO). This paper examines a consultancy project with a fan manufacturer in Pakistan and identifies issues where lean manufacturing was seen as a logical improvement opportunity in a developing economy but where, for reasons mostly related to resources in terms of time and financial contribution, a traditional lean implementation was not appropriate. The conclusion goes on to suggest that the methodology adopted by the team, in this case termed \"Lean Lite\" could be applied in other situations where, for whatever reasons, resource availability is limited; as well as considering some of the mechanisms that are being used to make lean manufacturing more accessible to the small-/medium-sized enterprise (SME) in a developing economy.\nThe application of lean in developing economies: The manufacturing powerhouses of the world have moved from the developed economies of the west, particularly the USA and Europe, to the world's developing economies, particularly those in Asia and the Indian subcontinent. The relocation of manufacturing to developing nations has, to an extent, been matched by the spread of the lean philosophy. Many of the manufacturing sectors within these emerging economies are adopting a lean approach and there is evidence of many successful implementations in several industry sectors (Dangayach and Deshmukh, 2005; Eswaramoorthi et al., 2011). However, the pace of change in many of these manufacturing economies is slow (Shabeena Begam et al., 2013) and there is evidence that this could be attributed to management's perception both of the impact that implementation will have on limited resources and a concern about the attitude and culture of the work force. There have been several responses to the need to start to address global competition by these emerging economies using the philosophy and techniques inherent in the lean approach. In China although the Chinese Government originally actively subsidised raw material costs to protect the developing manufacturing sector (Norman, 2008) there has been a more recent move to encourage companies to embrace lean in order to become more directly competitive (Taj and Morosan, 2011). In other emerging manufacturing sectors governments have started to use concepts such as national productivity organisations (NPOs) to attempt to drive forward the lean agenda often trying to leverage funding from international sources (WCPS, 2012). These national productivity entities then become repositories for the training and development knowledge of a particular country helping to foster good practice within the manufacturing companies in their economy.\nPakistan's economy and manufacturing: Since 2007 Pakistan's GDP growth has steadily risen from a 0.4 per cent increase in 2007/2008 to a 4.14 per cent increase in 2013/2014 (Pakistan Ministry of Finance, 2014). While these figures are above the equivalent global GDP growth rates they are below those recorded by Pakistan's neighbours that of India, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka. Obviously there are many factors influencing this improving growth trend, not least the state of the global economy, but the government of Pakistan has identified manufacturing as one of the main planks of this and future economic growth. In 2013/2014 the manufacturing sector in Pakistan accounted for over 13 per cent of total GDP, the majority of this was large scale manufacturing which in turn was dominated by the textile industry. The textile industry remains Pakistan's largest exporter, nearly 2 per cent of all global textile and clothing exports come from Pakistan, however, this figure has not substantially changed in the last ten years and there is evidence that it will actually reduce as China starts to leverage its growing clothing manufacturing base (World Trade Organisation, 2014). Pakistan has identified other manufacturing sectors as the target for growth and has developed strategies to support the improvement in the technology and skills within these sectors. Towards this objective the government of Pakistan has worked with many agencies, for example the UNIDO on their \"Triple Bottom Line\" project in SE Asian (United Nations Industrial Development Organisation, 2003).\nCase study: The case study presented examines a project that was implemented by The Institute of Productivity and managed by the UNIDO. The overall objective of the initiative was designed to help improve aspects of Pakistan's manufacturing industry. It must be noted that the Institute of Productivity has a particular focus on social productivity, i.e. using productivity to create social impact, and much of the support takes place in developing countries (Dillon and Heap, 2012).\nResults: As a direct result of the initial training, the fan manufacturer received 27 improvement suggestions from the workforce. The simplest ideas, the type often termed \"quick wins\", could be implemented almost immediately. For example one of these was for the use of a ratchet screwdriver during the securing of the blades to the fan which as well as reducing the time to complete that stage of assembly also reduced the risk of injury. The more significant ideas made more fundamental changes to cycle time and quality aspects of the operation; even in what was a comparatively new factory suggestions were made to change the layout to improve the flow of material. It could also be argued that the most significant change resulting from the training was that the workforce had been engaged and included in the identification of problems and the generation of improvement suggestions; this was the first time that they had had a significant input into this process. The impact on their morale and well-being was substantial and it was clear that their new found appetite for involvement could form the basis of effective, future kaizen activities and projects.\nConclusion: The benefits of lean manufacturing are widely understood and the approach has been applied to industry sectors well away from its manufacturing origins (Laureani, 2012, Bateman et al., 2014). The concepts are moving around the world as manufacturers in developing economies seek to move to compete on the international stage. The major obstacles to the implementation of the approach in smaller businesses in developing economies appears to be a perception that the approach is expensive, requiring a great deal of support delivered over a long time period, and the benefits dubious, as in the case study many small companies may not be able to take full advantage of the reduced resource requirement or increased capacity that may result. A factor that future projects could address is to consider the marketing aspects of any likely improvements. The belief that lean is difficult to implement has particularly been fostered by western consultants keen to demonstrate to their clients and prospective clients that they provide value (Wilson, 2009). The reputation of lean as a people reducer is also seen as acting against its implementation in situations where labour is already cheap; frequently the reason manufacturing initially took off in these target economies. The mechanisms that can be used to attempt to refute these views are the development of approaches that require less investment in both time and money while illustrating that lean is far more than people reduction.\n",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to suggest a solution to the problem of implementing a full \"Lean\" methodology for small-/medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in a developing economy.\nDesign/methodology/approach: This is a reflective paper that looks at an illustrative case study against the wider perspectives of the financial and resource costs of implementing a full lean programme in a developing country and suggests that using a \"Lean Lite\" approach may help the consultant/manager introduce lean concepts into a manufacturing organisation in a developing country.\nFindings: The paper concludes that \"Lean Lite\" as an approach that can be used to introduce lean initiatives in an SME in a developing economy by allowing a company with very limited resources to engage not only in business improvement but also in improving working conditions and education for employees.\nResearch limitations/implications: The observations are limited to a single case study, although tempered by the authors' wider experience. Further empirical research and critique of the original research is required to validate the observations and conclusions.\nPractical implications: The proposed \"Lean Lite\" initiative can help to introduce lean concepts to an organisation with limited financial and other resources. This helps organisations to increase productivity and assists the adoption of the lean philosophy and principles in a developing economy. The approach may also be used to engage in a wider corporate social responsibility strategy at ground level.\nSocial implications: The social benefits as a result of implementing a Lean Lite approach include improving working conditions and educating employees.\nOriginality/value: The paper proposes an approach that can be used to widen organisational involvement in lean initiatives in a developing economy by allowing a company with limited resources to engage not only in business improvement but also in improving working conditions and education for employees. As such the approach has both economic and social benefits.\n",
"role": "assistant"
}
] |
The power of spirituality: Exploring the effects of environmental values on eco-socially conscious consumer behaviour
|
[
"Spirituality",
"Perceived consumer effectiveness",
"Altruistic values",
"Biospheric values",
"Egoistic values"
] |
[
{
"content": "Summarize the following paper into structured abstract.\n\n1. Introduction: Environmental problems are escalating and are posing a serious socio-economic threat to both developed and developing countries (Remoundou and Koundouri, 2009; Shah, 2015). However, the effects of environmental changes are more catastrophic in developing countries, given their economic instability and lack of capability to effectively respond to post-disaster situations (Im et al., 2017). At the same time, the current economic growth of developing countries is expected to drive increased use of natural resources. This, in turn, may end up in raising the threat of swiftly depleting natural resources and negatively affecting the environment (Khan and Mohsin, 2017). Therefore, understanding the nature of environmental challenges and the primary causes of environmental problems is essential in designing effective pre-emptive measures to avoid, or at least minimise, such problems. Despite the growing importance of understanding the nature of environmental issues, little scientific investigation into the behavioural dynamics of environmental problems in developing countries has been undertaken.\n2. Literature review: 2.1 Theoretical background\n3. Method: 3.1 Survey instrument and participants\n4. Analysis and results: Analyses of the data were conducted using SPSS v. 24.0 and AMOS v. 24.0. First, a measurement model validation was carried out by exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses. After validation of the measurement model, structural model analyses were conducted using PROCESS macro (Hayes, 2013) in SPSS following the suggestions of Preacher et al. (2007). Both the Sobel test and bootstrap approaches were followed to test indirect and conditional indirect effects. In total, 10,000 bootstrap re-samples and bias-corrected 95% confidence intervals were used for analyses (Preacher et al., 2007).\n5. Discussion and implications: The findings of this study support the notion that there is a growing inclination of customers towards environmentally friendly behaviours in developing countries such as Pakistan, and such behaviours are affected strongly by customers' environmental values. More specifically, customer choice of alternate fuel vehicles and their eco-social use is strongly influenced by spirituality beliefs if environmental values are favourable and customers consider that their actions can protect or help restore the environment. Overall, the direct, indirect and conditional indirect hypotheses of this study are supported and show that PCE mediates the relationship of egoistic, altruistic and biospheric values and ESCCB and these relationships are moderated by spirituality.\n6. Conclusion: The aim of the study was to test a model of environmental values, PCE and spirituality influencing ESCCB related to choice and use of personal cars. This was done in the context of VBN framework and Schwartz Norm Activation Model in the context of a developing country, Pakistan. All hypotheses of the study received statistical support. Altruistic and egoistic values were negatively associated with ESCCB while biospheric had a positive association. PCE positively mediated the hypothesised relationships while spirituality successfully moderated the mediated associations.\n",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Purpose: In the wake of growing environmental issues, active public and corporate interventions are inevitable to reduce the negative impact of human activities on global environments. Building on the Norm Activation Model and Value-Belief-Norm Theory, the purpose of this paper is to report on research exploring consumers' eco-socially conscious behaviours related to the choice and use of personal cars in a developing country, Pakistan.\nDesign/methodology/approach: To test a moderated-mediation model of environmental values, perceived consumer effectiveness (PCE), spirituality and eco-socially conscious consumer behaviours (ESCCBs), data were collected from 447 customers of three automobile manufacturing firms from eight different cities of Pakistan. The data collection was undertaken by using a self-administered questionnaire based on key themes in the literature.\nFindings: Analysis of the data revealed that altruistic and egoistic values were negatively while biospheric values were positively associated with eco-ESCCB. PCE mediated all the relationships and spirituality moderated the mediated paths.\nOriginality/value: Although there are several models that explain purchase and use of personal cars in isolation or in conjunction with other general pro-environmental behaviours, an explanation of the eco-social aspects of purchase and use of personal cars in one theoretical model is rare to find. Second, among the many theoretical predictors and intervening factors explaining several pro-environmental behaviours, some culture-specific factors have been ignored - spirituality being one of them. This study contributes to the body of knowledge related to pro-environmental behaviours by conceptualising and testing the impact of spirituality in a moderated-mediation model.\n",
"role": "assistant"
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] |
Empirical study of relationship value in industrial services
|
[
"Relationship marketing",
"Services",
"Services marketing",
"Value analysis",
"Partnership"
] |
[
{
"content": "Summarize the following paper into structured abstract.\n\n__NO_TITLE__: An executive summary for managers and executive readers can be found at the end of this issue.\nIntroduction: Partnering has become a topic of great interest as buyers and suppliers recognize value from sustained relationships. According to Anderson (1995), the purpose for relationships is to work together in ways that add value to the parties. Buyers benefit from cooperation, while suppliers distinguish themselves along intangible dimensions that are difficult to imitate. This struggle for distinction is intensified as buyer power grows from border openings, deregulation and the internet. Collectively, these circumstances provide buyers with more outsourcing options, which, in turn, place more pressure on suppliers to find advantage. Moreover, evidence is mounting that suppliers gain far more profits from customer retention than from prospecting (Anderson and Weitz, 1989; Reichheld and Sasser, 1990).Yet, despite a growing body of research devoted to relationship value, few conceptualizations have emerged. An exception is the recent work of Ulaga and Eggert (2006) in US and German manufacturing settings. The study offers a promising framework that is potentially extendable to services and more cultures. Of the remaining studies in the industrial sector, most examine value at the transaction level or with the intent of discovering source selection criteria.The examination of value from a relational perspective is especially relevant to industrial services because of the personal contact between parties (Liljander and Roos, 2002; Moller and Torronen, 2003). Moreover, the intangibility of service attributes is often revealed over several historical transactions from which the buyer can predict future performance. Consequently, buyers of services are more likely to seek longer-term partnerships than those in the market for goods (Gronroos, 1998; Holmlund and Kock, 1995; Mittal, 1999). Despite its relevance, however, only a few studies (Hogan, 1998; Ulaga, 2001; Ulaga and Chacour, 2001; Ulaga and Eggert, 2004, 2006) have attempted to operationalize relationship value using a methodology that is psychometrically sound. Scholars are therefore calling for research that reveals its nomological structure along with its behavioral outcomes (Anderson, 1995; Ulaga, 2001; Woodruff and Gardial, 1996).To this end, this study will test determinants and outcomes of relationship value relevant to global industrial services. The global context follows sufficient evidence that certain cultures are rationally driven while others are socio-sentimental in nature. For example, empirical studies in cross-cultural marketing (Furrer et al., 2000; Hewett and Bearden, 2001; Williams et al., 1998) reveal strong correlations between a buyer's national individualism and its tendency to form economic judgments (Gilliland and Bello, 2002). Relationship value may therefore have distinct perspectives across nations.The paper is divided into three sections. The first section reviews the extant literature for concepts relevant to relationship value. In the next section, hypotheses are tested in support of the proposed model following an evaluation of fit statistics for the structural equation model. Finally, conclusions are drawn relative to questions of explanatory power and construct relevance.\nLiterature review: Relationship value structure\nRelationship value antecedents: Exploratory research\nRelationship value outcomes: Future intentions\nMethodology: This research begins with an evaluation of a structural equation measurement model that exemplifies the nomological structure underlying the hypotheses. Consistent with the literature (Ulaga, 2001; Ulaga and Eggert, 2006), the research follows a formative approach in measuring relationship value. Consequently, dimensions of relationship value, such as that suggested by Wilson and Jantrania (1994), need not be highly correlated with each other (Diamantopoulos and Winklhofer, 2001).Data collection\nData analysis and findings: Measurement model results\nStudy limitations: The study suffers from a few limitations related to scale development and generalizability. Although the scale items were subjected to rigorous examinations of wording and contextual fit during interviews and pre-tests, the latter served more as a domain context check. Given that the questionnaire was administered in English, the nature of some behavioral-oriented questions could have different interpretations with overseas buyers despite language editing after the pre-test. A more accurate examination of cultural context would have applied back translations across each country. Also, given the blend of product and service attributes in industrial after-sales applications, generalizations of this study beyond industrial settings is questionable.\nImplications and suggestions for future research: The study results are encouraging in their support of theories suggesting buyers are influenced not only by the transfer of services, but with the value of interaction with their service providers. The benefits weighed against the costs of a relationship frame the buyer's choice to either maintain or withdraw from future interactions with their service provider. In the particular case of industrial services, buyers will rationalize the value gained from their relationships as a way to streamline their vendor programs and weed out unprofitable relationships. These evaluations often transcend beyond economic assessments into the strategic aspects of the relationship.The key to building sustainable value is for service providers to balance aspects of the offer with that of the relationship itself. It behooves service providers to be in tune with buyer tensions and their perception of relative cost savings, including those incurred from switching suppliers. Moreover, suppliers should administer their own scorecards on work performance, responsiveness in handling requests, and willingness to be flexible.Results of this research are beneficial to both scholars and practitioners. The research offers a model of high explanatory power that predicts relationship value from the standpoint of the relational behaviors of service providers. A further contribution of this study is that it supports recent findings that relationship value encompasses more than simply an economic but also a strategic dimension (Wilson and Jantrania, 1994; Ulaga, 2001; Ulaga and Eggert, 2006). The findings confirm that, just as buyers form cognitive judgments of the service provider's perceived value to their organization, they also form affective attachments from the commitment shared with their suppliers.Finally, this study adds to the growing field of cross-cultural research especially important to relationship marketing. By including a broad cross-section of nations, the model provides a global perspective of relationship value along with its determinants and outcomes. Although results of this study are encouraging, additional research is encouraged to examine its global relevance beyond industrial services. Researchers are therefore encouraged to investigate model relevance to professional and consumer services as well as other relational variables discussed in the literature (e.g. sales effectiveness, supplier image and conflict resolution) that can further enrich the field of relationship value.\n",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Purpose: - The purpose of this paper is to assist industrial service providers in building relationships that maximize value to their customers. The study aims to add to relationship value research by examining its dimensions, antecedents, outcomes, and cross-culture relevance.\nDesign/methodology/approach: - Using structural equation modeling, the study examines the influence that relationship value has on commitment and intentions, as well as the determinants of value encompassing the core offering, sourcing process and buyer operations. The sample covers 42 countries for cross-cultural perspectives.\nFindings: - By understanding the factors creating relationship value, providers are more likely to build enduring relationships with their buyers. Findings confirm that commitment and intentions are influenced by relationship value, which, in turn, is impacted by benefits such as performance, efficiency, and reliability as well as comparative costs and switching costs.\nResearch limitations/implications: - The study is oriented more towards industrial services. Further research is encouraged that extends the study domain to consumer and professional services.\nOriginality/value: - The research demonstrates the mediating influence that relationship value has on behavioral outcomes. Especially important to global service providers, this knowledge is then extended beyond the traditionally studied single-country settings to a world perspective, while extending the field of relationship value into the largely ignored industrial services sector.\n",
"role": "assistant"
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] |
The role of the academic Library Information Specialist (LIS) in teaching and learning in the 21st century
|
[
"Information technology",
"Academic libraries",
"Information services",
"Distance learning",
"Developing countries",
"Library and information networks"
] |
[
{
"content": "Summarize the following paper into structured abstract.\n\n__NO_TITLE__: At the center of every teaching, learning or research institution is a library. And, at the heart of every library is a thriving information community, which helps to distinguish each library type. Libraries are divided into four distinct categories - public, academic, school or specialized. Public libraries are supported by public funding and are geared toward local or community activities. Academic libraries are positioned around teaching and learning institutions. School libraries collect and disseminate literary and information resources with a focus on Kindergarten through 12th grade teaching and learning. And specialized libraries support institutions with a specific subject (e.g. law, theological, medical or health science). This survey of the existing contemporary research literature will discuss libraries from the perspective of academic library information specialists (LIS).\nPurpose and methodology: This survey of literature examines the impact of information and communication technologies (ICT) usage with mobile technologies and e-learning in academic libraries. The methodology for selecting appropriate resources was approached by searching specific terms using one or more of the following databases: Communication and Mass Media (CMM), EBSCO, Web of Science and Library Literature and Information Science Fulltext (LLISF). Several key terms were explored primarily in LLISF and CMM databases. Searches were made first with the terms \"ICT\" and \"academic libraries\". Only one article was retrieved out of the two databases. The first set of terms rendered very little if any resources of significant value. The second set of terms examined was \"ICT\" and \"library and archives\" which produced 11 articles in the CMM database and 143 in LLISF. Consequently, more articles, especially those pertaining to the use of ICTs in developing countries, were retrieved. After sorting through the professional journal articles, \"libraries\" and \"information communication and technology\" rendered 684 in LLSIF and 85 scholarly articles in the CCM database. The final search coupled with selected articles from journals retrieved from previous searches produced sufficient scholarly articles to complete this study.\nBackground: The role of what has traditionally been titled the school, or academic, librarian, later the library media specialist and, more recently in the USA, the LIS has evolved dramatically (Craver, 1986). From a solitary staff person secreted among book stacks to a multi-faceted, multi-tasking information specialist/educator expected to assume a key leadership role in the area of information literacy for the school and school community: students, teachers, staff, parents, volunteers, businesses and stakeholders (American Association of School Librarians and Association for Educational Communications, 1998; Branch and Oberg, 2001; Todd and Gordon, 2012). The LIS is no longer the staff person impatiently requiring silence and hushed tones from the student-patrons; she or he must now be a technologist specializing in information retrieval in any number of hard-copy as well as digital formats (Vanergrift, 1979; Dorrell and Lawson, 1995; Van Deusen, 1996). Currently, the LIS is also expected to lead instruction and must obtain the educational preparation necessary to meet state certification requirements (Hartzell, 2002), as well as participating in the greater school community in the areas of instruction, technology integration in teaching and learning and peer collaboration (Pickard, 1993; Loertscher and Haycock, 2000; Doll, 2005).\nThe library as \"Place\": To fully understand how school and academic libraries have evolved, along with the LIS and staff who serve within them, it is important to review how the very concept of a \"library\" itself has been transformed from a repository of books and mostly bound paper resource archives to a clearinghouse hub of electronically networked resources from all over the planet.\nThe changing landscape: Prior to the increase in digital information, libraries were recognized as academic repositories of print information (Cheng, 2001; Ludwig and Starr, 2005; Cybulski, 2007). Notably, while the brick and mortar library continues to hold onto its reputation of an information center that serves as the heart of every institution, the internet has helped weaken the library's status as the primary place to secure material for academic research and scholarship. The prolific availability of digital information and resources via the World Wide Web leaves some to discredit the usefulness of a physical library. Studies reveal a radical shift in user behavior with very few college students begin initial searches at library websites (Liu and Liao, 2009). To the library's detriment, modern day faculty, students and researchers recognize the brick and mortar library as a traditional facility where little if any print materials can be found. This concept especially holds true for the academic library, where electronic or digital information is recognized as readily accessible resources. The open, easily accessible library is one without walls (Kaske, 2004). Online academic libraries are forerunners in the transition from physical to wall-less institutions. Technology and ICT allow academic libraries to provide its users with fast, up-to-date and trustworthy resources. This web-based audience presents expectations which are best addressed by a \"ubiquitous\" library, a term first used in 1999 to define networked access to noteworthy data. This concept includes the use of technologies made available in any format, device and location at any time or place. Kaske (2004) recognized the stability nature of a \"ubiquitous\" or always accessible, online library, as being more than a fad or a passing trend. Chat services and 24/7 access to resources are here to stay. The ease of use, access and retrieval through a multiplicity of devices is an attractive benefit to library users.\nThe changing role of the academic library information specialist: Many LIS who were not raised or schooled as \"digital natives\" requires new digitally savvy skills to survive. Furthermore, academic LIS are expected to remain current and skilled in emerging technologies which could affect their ability to serve users; consequently, libraries are often the decision drivers in the selection and implementation of electronic resources accessed by users (Long and Applegate, 2008; Barnhart and Pierce, 2012). LIS are faced with the challenge of learning new technologies which entail training and the application of core skills. Cheng (2001) observed several core competencies for future LIS to acquire in their quest to remain knowledgeable of evolving technologies. Some of those essential competences include:\nInformation and communication technologies: For information seekers in the ICT environment the internet functions as the information instrument. ICT has transformed our societies and the way we, as individuals, live (Amiree and Khabbazan, 2009; Andronie and Andronie, 2014; Oliver, 2002; Omona and Ikoja-Odongo, 2006). The impact of ICT in information retrieval and research has been extensive over the past two decades and is expected to continue to grow in the future.\nE-learning: \"E-learning\" has been variably defined as the utilization of electronic technologies to train, educate or instruct others; learning, instruction or teaching through use of the computer, CD-ROM, internet or other form of communication technology; and, more recently, instruction provided through use of a digital or wireless object such as smartphones, computers, tablets or mobile devices (Laurillard, 2006; Sun et al., 2008; Kattimani and Naik, 2012). E-learning - as online learning - changes the way instruction is transmitted and is identified as the incorporation of telecommunication and technology to distribute educational and training material (Rye, 2009; Keengwe and Kidd, 2010; Liu and Hwang, 2010). Kattimani and Naik (2012) emphasize that some of the benefits derived from e-learning include the ability to work at one's own pace with 24/7 accessibility, can be conducted in an asynchronous or synchronous fashion which grants users with the opportunity to remain diverse and flexible in his or her learning experience and requires that information content and instructional techniques be interconnected. Subsequently, academic libraries are tasked with providing a welcoming space, a plethora of online resources, coupled with knowledgeable librarians equipped with technologically savvy instructional programs. E-learning allows for academic libraries and instructional activities to take place virtually.\nMobile technologies and information and communication technologies in developing countries: Mobile ICT are defined as any portable, wireless communication device such as laptops, smartphones, iPhones, personal digital assistants, short message/text-only services and multimedia services capable of transmitting, receiving or connecting to information through use of the internet or World Wide Web (Keegan, 2007). The number of global mobile users who are actively connected grew more than 81 per cent between 2000 and 2011 (Cisco Systems, 2012). As the number of mobile users increase, the need to provide authentic information will also escalate. Ellaway et al. (2014) explored the use of mobile devices, the benefits and disadvantages, and how learners' use mobile devices in the educational environment as a whole.\nConclusions: In providing responses to the three initial questions that form the rationale for this survey of the literature, the recent and contemporary research provides the following answers.\n",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Purpose: This study aims to examine the impact of information and communication technologies (ICT) usage with mobile technologies and e-learning in academic libraries.\nDesign/methodology/approach: Selection of appropriate resources using the Communication and Mass Media, EBSCO, Web of Science and Library Literature and Information Science Fulltext databases.\nFindings: The \"Library as place\" concept requires libraries to explore and re-purpose its physical space while redefining its virtual, online space to align with the needs of those who are native to the digital age. Library information specialists (LIS) must also be knowledgeable of - and comfortable with - the use of the new technologies introduced. As mobile technologies continue to evolve and advance in developing countries, libraries and LIS may be best positioned to assist students and researchers in accessing information required to be proficient and productive in scholarly pursuits without physical boundaries.\nPractical implications: The existing research literature surveyed here implies that the growth of ICT and evolving concepts of libraries require the need for LIS training and greater understanding of the use of mobile technologies in providing academic library services.\nOriginality/value: Academic librarians are at the forefront of providing aspiring academics and professionals with access to digital collections and e-learning courses using mobile information communication and technology devices; the implications of the research discussed in this survey of the current literature discloses a need for diverse skills for the appropriate and continuing effectiveness to support students and academic researchers.\n",
"role": "assistant"
}
] |
The effect of algorithm teaching on the problem-solving skills of deaf-hard hearing students
|
[
"Programming",
"Secondary school",
"Algorithm teaching",
"Problem-solving skills",
"Scratch training",
"The deaf-hard hearing"
] |
[
{
"content": "Summarize the following paper into structured abstract.\n\n1. Introduction: In the world of ever-changing knowledge, the subject of the development of problem-solving skills and the use of programmes to aid the teaching of algorithms has caught the attention of many in the field. The teaching of programming is based upon algorithms. Karli (2009) stated that algorithm is the way including procedures, decisions and performance of these respectively to solve a problem. According to the literature, training students in computer programming and design tools improve their digital literacy and motivation towards school and lessons (Akpinar and Altun, 2014). Moreover, students' problem-solving skills, analytical thinking, and learning habits such as designing major product-directed projects, learning by doing and learning by teaching to computer can be improved (Akpinar and Altun, 2014; Cakiroglu et al., 2011). In addition, programming improves the computational thinking (CT) skills of students. CT is taking an approach to solving problems, designing systems and understanding human behaviour that draws on concepts fundamental to computing (Wing, 2006). CT is being located at the focus of educational innovation, as a set of problem-solving skills that must be acquired by the new generations of students to thrive in a digital world full of objects driven by software (Roman-Gonzalez et al., 2017).\n2. Method: 2.1 Research method\n3. Findings: 3.1 Findings related to the scale of problem solving for the deaf-hard hearing\n4. Conclusion and discussion: In the present study, which aimed to research the effect on the problem-solving skills of deaf- hard hearing students in the fifth, sixth, seventh, and eighth grades when using the programme Scratch to teach them algorithms to, it has been determined that algorithm teaching performed with Scratch, which was applied as per pre-test and post-test results, had an important effect on improving the problem-solving skills of the students. According to Millner et al. (2013), programmes such as Scratch, StarLogo, and TNG contribute to the students' success by helping to build the students' self-efficacy, increase their repertoire for creative and personally meaningful expression and to compensate for limitations in other forms of expression. Furthermore, it has been concluded from the observation results that the students had a fair level of success. Also Giannakos and Jaccheri (2014) instructed the participants to design a game in a programming workshop they carried out by deaf-hard hearing K-12 students and concluded that it is helpful for the students. Goldman and Pellegrino (1987) demonstrated that the use of computer education programmes for the children with impairments positively affects their academic achievements, lingual and mathematical skills, reading and writing literacies and advances their attention span and learning capability (adapted by Demirhan, 2008).\n5. Limitations: Because the ability of students participating in the study to express themselves is inadequate, frequencies were not included in the findings of interview questions. In order to reveal general trends opinions were expressed with title of questions. The authors of the manuscript were the scorers in the observation form.\n",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to identify the effects of algorithm teaching on the problem-solving skills of deaf-hard hearing students.\nDesign/methodology/approach: In this research, a pre-test and post-test problem-solving scale was applied to the single group (16 deaf-hard hearing students at a secondary school level) that had received algorithm education. Pre-test and post-test results were compared in order to see whether there was a significant difference among students in terms of their problem-solving attitudes. Students' levels of performing the applications were examined through observation forms and their opinions about algorithm teaching were received.\nFindings: As a result of the research, it was determined that implemented algorithm teaching had a significant effect on improving the problem-solving skills of the students.\nOriginality/value: Scratch training can be administered as either a compulsory or an optional course for hearing students as the Scratch programme offers the opportunity of teaching algorithmic reasoning with games, making the courses entertaining and giving students the chance to create their own designs which helps to improve their creative problem-solving skills and their motivation accordingly. Scratch teaching can be beneficial in developing students' problem-solving behaviours and creativity.\n",
"role": "assistant"
}
] |
How restaurant variety indirectly impacts gaming for different casino worth segments
|
[
"Casinos",
"Customer segmentation",
"Gaming",
"Restaurants",
"Hotel and catering industry",
"Market segmentation"
] |
[
{
"content": "Summarize the following paper into structured abstract.\n\nThe importance of casino segments: Customer segmentation is an important marketing tool for hospitality. It enables businesses to evaluate customers and develop market-positioning strategies (Bowen, 1998). For casinos, customer segments take on added importance, since they are based on gaming value - the primary source of revenue for many casinos. Casinos use player cards to track gaming activity and classify customers into tier levels based on historical gaming behavior. Tier levels serve an important function in growing casino profitability. With higher tiers come greater benefits, providing customers with an incentive to move to higher tiers so they too can obtain the service levels and rewards they observe high tier guests receiving (Loveman, 2003). Internally, casino players are typically segmented based on their value to the casino. Average daily theoretical win (\"ADT\") and average trip theoretical win (\"ATT\") are two commonly used measures, which represent the amount a casino expects to win from a particular guest per day or during an entire trip. Casino win translates into loss for the player. The segments are used to determine which marketing offers and promotions are provided to players within each segment (Lucas and Kilby, 2008). Higher worth customers receive offers, such as dining coupons, which are more costly to the business, under the assumption that the returns will also be greater. However, empirical testing is needed to determine if this assumption is correct.\nThe changing role of casino restaurants: Restaurants are considered essential for casino survival; however, the role of restaurants in casinos is changing (Harris, 2011). Historically, non-gaming amenities such as restaurants and shows in casinos are known for being operated at a loss or break-even (Benston, 2011a). Non-gaming amenities are considered effective tools to improve gaming revenues as they can attract people to the casino, broaden the customer base, improve the overall casino experience, and extend the guest's stay, resulting in greater expenditures (Marlin, 2008; Ring, 2009; Sherf, 2010). Some industry professionals believe that providing new shows and restaurants can help casinos recover from a recession (Benston, 2011b). In fact, some casino operators have reduced the number of games to allocate more space to restaurants and other non-gaming amenities (GGB Staff, 2010).A typical full service casino has a buffet, 24-hour cafe or casual restaurant, and a steakhouse at a minimum. However, many resort-style casinos have diversified their offerings to provide a variety of food and beverage outlets that are attractions in themselves. Nowadays, it is not uncommon to see a celebrity chef's restaurant, a brand name chain restaurant and a five-star upscale restaurant in addition to the typical dining array. There is a demand for these new, more upscale offerings. The 2011 American Gaming Association (AGA) survey revealed that about 73 percent of casino visitors ate at a fine dining restaurant (AGA, 2011). In casinos with resort-style amenities, restaurants and non-gaming amenities are now expected to be profit centers rather than complements to gaming (Benston, 2011a; GGB Staff, 2010). The revenue from these non-gaming amenities account for more than half of total revenues in some casino resorts (GGB Staff, 2010; Sherf, 2010). Chain restaurants are becoming popular in casinos, and are replacing casino-owned outlets. Even the buffet is being transformed in many cases to a distinctive dining experience. Horseshoe Southern Indiana's $3.4 million renovation added the Paula Deen Buffet and retail store featuring the chef's southern-style food and signature items (Caesars License Company, 2011; Stewart, 2010).While dining has become an amenity in its own right, it is still a valuable tool to attract gaming customers. In the 2011 \"State of the States\" survey published by the American Gaming Association, dining was the most preferred method for casino customers to utilize their player's club points. Thus, dining is a desired incentive for gambling, and casino operators need to understand this relationship in order to provide dining offers that appeal to target customers. The traditional role of casino restaurants as gaming revenue drivers is still widely accepted, particularly in local and regional markets. Many casino restaurants operate at a loss under the assumption of indirect gaming contributions (Kalrgyrou et al., 2012; Lucas and Santos, 2003; Tanford and Lucas, 2011). For example, Ameristar Casinos, which operates local casinos in several states, reported higher gaming revenue ($1.28 billion) than net revenue ($1.19 billion) in 2010 (Ameristar, 2011). Food and beverage made up 9 percent of total revenues, but promotional allowances (which include free meals and rooms) accounted for 20 percent of revenue. Thus, non-gaming revenues did not directly contribute to the bottom line.Clearly, operators who follow this business model need to determine whether their restaurants are in fact contributing to gaming revenue. Considering the economic downturn and competition from new casinos opening throughout the US and abroad, it is critical to maximize the contributions of casino amenities such as restaurants to the property's bottom line. In order to do so, operators need a way to evaluate the indirect relationship between each type of restaurant they offer and the gaming value of its patrons. This will allow operators to determine which restaurant types produce sufficient direct and indirect profits to justify their costs. The current research provides such a method, and applies it using secondary data from two casino-hotels.Although there are plenty of anecdotal claims on the positive gaming contributions of casino restaurants, there is no empirical research estimating the gaming contributions of different restaurant types by player worth segment. This issue is critical to operators, since worth segments drive their marketing and promotions. This research was the first to use a segmented approach and to apply the company's a priori segmentation scheme. The current research analyzes the dining-gaming relationship by restaurant type for each player worth segment. Given the widespread use of food as a loss leader, this study helps casino executives evaluate the profitability of each type of restaurant they operate. It also offers implications for the optimal restaurant mix at casinos and the types of offers that are given to different customer worth segments.\nLiterature review: Casino segmentation\nMethodology: Data source\nResults: Property 1\nDiscussion: The findings supported all four hypotheses. Each restaurant type displayed significant relationships with slot-coin in, supporting H1-H3. However, there were clear and readily interpretable differences in these relationships for different gaming worth segments. This finding supports H4. There is a progression of influence from low- to high-end dining that corresponds with low- to high-worth gaming. The conceptual model in Figure 1 presents a simplified schematic of this relationship. The solid arrows represent coefficients that were significant for both properties, while the dashed arrows indicate coefficients that were significant for one property or the other. At the end points, low/medium-low value gaming behavior (under $100) is consistently related to dining at the buffet, while high-end gaming ($400+) is related to steakhouse dining. Medium-worth customers, which represent a fairly large range of worth values ($100-$400 per day), are influenced by all dining types, but primarily by casual dining, the only coefficient that was significant in both models. For untracked players, who are not using a player card, the relationship between dining and gaming is less consistent, and can result from any restaurant type. This group may represent a variety of gaming levels, as suggested by the fact that it accounts for more gaming revenue than the low-worth segment, and an amount roughly equivalent to the high-worth segment at Property 1.It may seem obvious that high-worth gamers would eat at high-end restaurants and low-worth gamers would choose buffet or casual dining. However, high-worth gamers are not necessarily \"high rollers\", nor do they have high incomes, especially in local and regional markets. Gary Loveman points this out in his 2003 article by stating:We were surprised to find out who our best customers really were. They were emphatically not the gold cuff-linked, limousine-riding customers ... Instead, they turned out to be former teachers, doctors, bankers and machinists - middle-aged and senior adults with discretionary income who enjoyed playing slot machines (Loveman, 2003, p. 111).The tourist market in the current investigation caters to budget conscious guests, many of whom are senior citizens. To them the offer of a steak dinner could provide an opportunity to experience a level of luxury to which they are not accustomed in their everyday lives. This could be part of the attraction of a casino visit.The findings support previous research that obtained improved prediction of slot coin-in when isolating lower denomination slot players (Lucas et al., 2006), as well as research that found significant relationships between casual restaurant volume and low denomination slot play (Tanford and Lucas, 2011). The findings could also help reconcile previous research analyzing aggregate data that has obtained significant dining-gaming relationships (Lucas and Santos, 2003) versus that which has not (Lucas and Brewer, 2001). There may have been segment differences in Lucas and Brewer's study, which were masked by analyzing the data set in aggregate.Managerial implications\nLimitations and future research: The study has limitations that should be addressed in future research. It only included data from two casino properties, and may not generalize to other casinos. Only four types of restaurants were investigated, whereas casino operators are offering an increasingly wide array of dining options. The results apply only to the time period from which the data were collected. Future research extending the segmentation approach to other markets, dining venues, and time periods, would be desirable. Regression analysis does not imply causality. Further investigation using other methodologies could be used to validate the directional influence of restaurants and gaming. For example, an experimental design could be used in which customers of each segment are randomly assigned to receive coupons for different restaurants, and the relative impact on gaming could be analyzed statistically.The research is limited to the variables supplied by the donor. Future research should examine cash versus complimentary dining volumes and profits by segment and their effects on gaming activity. A refined segmentation that includes customer attitudes and demographics could provide an opportunity to tailor reward program benefits to particular customer needs. Additionally, an examination of the number of daily meals served to different player segments could further elucidate the dining-gaming relationship specific to each segment. Some casinos are moving to a \"total worth\" segmentation approach that includes non-gaming expenditures on entertainment, spa, restaurants and hotel stays. As such data become available, a more refined understanding of the relationship between non-gaming and gaming can be developed.The study investigated the relationship between dining and gaming on the same day. However, casino reward programs seek to increase repeat visitation, not just spend per visit. Future research should investigate the role of dining experiences on intentions to return to the casino in the future. Studies have investigated a variety of factors that affect intentions to return to restaurants of all types, from fast food to upscale (e.g. Kim et al., 2012; Jani and Han, 2011; Ryu et al., 2012). These include physical environment, food quality, service quality, restaurant image, price, hedonic value, and feelings of well-being. Most of these will vary by restaurant type, and could play a role in the dining-gaming relationship. For example, a feeling of well-being from a dining experience could motivate a return visit to the casino, which would translate into increased gaming spend on the casino floor.To date, all of the research investigating indirect gaming influences has been restricted to US casinos. With the explosion of gambling in Asia, future research should investigate the role of non-gaming amenities for Asian casinos. Wong et al.'s (2012) study of casino players in Macau found that \"hard-core\" players were more satisfied with food service than \"leisure players\". Future studies should investigate this relationship further to help Asian casinos maximize the effectiveness of their restaurants and other non-gaming operations.The research was the first to use a segmented approach for both independent and dependent variables and apply the company's own segmentation scheme. This is critical for casinos, since worth segments are the main drivers of marketing initiatives. The breakdown of restaurant types is equally vital, since it provides a metric to quantify each venue's contribution. The methodology could be extended to other applications where managerial decisions are influenced by customer segments, such as revenue management and special events. The influence of other amenities including lodging, entertainment and spa services could be investigated to determine the optimal mix of amenities to maximize profitability. In this pursuit, researchers and operators should not lose sight of amenity types, such as different forms of entertainment, as these too may appeal to different customer segments. Given the importance of customer segmentation for casinos and other hospitality businesses, the application of a segmented approach holds great potential for future investigations.\n",
"role": "user"
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"content": "Purpose: - Casinos offer a variety of dining experiences to appeal to the tastes of different customers. The aim of this paper is to investigate the indirect impact of dining by restaurant type on gaming by worth segment.\nDesign/methodology/approach: - Data from two hotel-casinos were analyzed using time series regression analysis. Variables representing restaurant covers at steakhouse, buffet and casual dining venues were used to predict slot coin-in for five customer worth segments.\nFindings: - Steakhouse dining was a significant predictor of slot coin-in for high worth players, buffet and casual dining were related to low-worth gaming volume, whereas medium-worth players were impacted by a range of dining options.\nResearch limitations/implications: - Regression analysis does not imply causality, and the results may not hold for other casino properties or sample time periods.\nPractical implications: - The findings have implications for the optimal restaurant mix at casinos and the types of offers that are given to different customer worth segments. This study also helps casino operators evaluate the profitability of each type of restaurant they operate.\nOriginality/value: - The research fills a gap in the casino literature by segmenting customers using the same metric as casino operators, namely gaming worth. It provides new insight into indirect dining-gaming relationships by investigating different restaurant types.\n",
"role": "assistant"
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] |
The effect of perceived external prestige on Greek public employees' organizational identification: Gender as a moderator
|
[
"Perceived external prestige",
"Organizational identification",
"Gender",
"Self‐esteem",
"Citizens Service Centres",
"Public sector organizations",
"Greece"
] |
[
{
"content": "Summarize the following paper into structured abstract.\n\nIntroduction: Organizational identification has received increased attention in the extant literature. For many years, scholars have neglected organizational identification compared with other important variables (Riketta, 2005). Recently, though, an emerging stream of research has focused on this construct as it is considered a key factor for organizations' effective functioning. Employees who experience high levels of identification with their organizations are more likely to act in a supportive way towards them (Ashforth and Mael, 1989). Moreover, few studies have examined the influence of organizational identification on various outcomes such as, organizational citizenship behavior (Dukerich et al., 2002; van Dick et al., 2006; Restubog et al., 2008), turnover intentions (van Dick et al., 2004), creative behavior (Carmeli et al., 2007), job satisfaction and involvement (van Knippenberg and van Schie, 2000).Apart from organizational identification outcomes, extant research includes numerous studies focusing on its antecedents and, mostly, on the relationship with organizational prestige (Mael and Ashforth, 1992; Dutton et al., 1994; Smidts et al., 2001; Riketta, 2005; Carmeli et al., 2006; Fuller et al., 2006a, b; Bartels et al., 2007; Carmeli and Freund, 2009; Cohen-Meitar et al., 2009). However, there is a research dearth regarding interactional models which may provide useful insights into the mechanisms that account for this relationship (Fuller et al., 2006a). In this regard, the purpose of this paper is twofold: to replicate the impact of perceived external prestige (PEP) on organizational identification in a different sample, that is Greek public sector and, moreover, to examine gender as a moderator in the above relationship. In order to address the above issues a survey has been conducted on Greek Citizens Service (the so-called KEPs in Greek context), one of the most popular Greek public organizations in terms of user satisfaction and acknowledgement from Greek citizens (VPRC, 2008).\nLiterature review and hypotheses: Citizens Service Centers\nMethod: Data and sample\nResults: Table II presents the results of the moderated hierarchical regression analysis. The results for the first step indicate that control variables, age, education, family status, and tenure have a non-significant relationship with organizational identification. H1 predicted that PEP was positively related to organizational identification. After controlling for the effects of control variables, the results for step 2 shows that there exists a statistically significant relationship between PEP and organizational identification (b=0.33, p<0.001). Thus, H1 was supported. H2 predicted that gender would moderate the relationship between PEP and organizational identification. The results for step 3 found support for the interaction of PEP and gender when influencing organizational identification (b=-0.29, p<0.05). Also, the incremental variance explained by the interaction term was statistically significant (DR2=0.02, p<0.05). Thus, the present results supported H2.\nDiscussion: The purpose of this paper was to support and extend existing research as regards the relationship between PEP and organizational identification. Although few studies have examined the impact of PEP on organizational identification, there is no sufficient empirical evidence for this association in various contexts and sectors. Therefore, the present paper attempted to fill this void by examining the relationship between PEP and organizational identification in one of the most prestigious Greek public organizations, namely Citizens Service Centers. Congruent with previous studies, the present results replicated this finding extending, thus, the generalizability of the critical role of PEP on enhancing organizational identification. As such, these results show that, similarly to other samples, Greek public employees identify with the specific organization when they believe that are positively evaluated by outsiders. In addition, although not hypothesized, the moderated hierarchical regression analysis demonstrated that control variables, such as age, education, family status and tenure as well as gender had no effect on organizational identification. These findings are similar to previous studies that examined these variables in relation to organizational identification (Carmeli et al., 2006; Fuller et al., 2006a, b).Also, there is a dearth in the literature vis-a-vis possible moderators in the association between PEP and organizational identification (Fuller et al., 2006b). Hence, the present paper contributed to this gap by investigating gender as a moderator in the above relationship. In consistence with our hypothesis, the results demonstrated that the effect of PEP on organizational identification varies across gender. More specifically, the effect of PEP on organizational identification was stronger for men than for women. This is possibly attributed to the different traits and orientation between men and women. For instance, authors (Putrevu, 2001; Robbins et al., 2001) have argued that men are more achievement oriented, more aggressive than women who are more communal oriented. In this vein, men are perceived to experience higher levels of self-esteem (Feingold, 1994; Kling et al., 1999), status and prestige (Gerber, 2009) compared with women. As such, we showed that men when being identified with their organization they place higher importance on PEP than women as a route to fulfill their self-enhancement needs such as the need for self-esteem.\nLimitations and future research: The present results have some limitations, though. This study, based on data from employees working in Citizens Service Centers, allows us to make limited inference to other private and public organizations. Notably, Citizens Service Centers are considered as a highly prestigious public organization and, consequently, this may influence the magnitude of the relationship between PEP and organizational identification. Another limitation is related to the cross-sectional analysis of the data which cannot directly assess causality. Further, because both constructs were measured with self-report questionnaires from the same employees, relationships might be inflated due to common method variance.These limitations suggest directions for future research. The present findings should be replicated in other, both public and private, contexts. Also, future studies should adopt a longitudinal design to strengthen the causal relationships examined. Moreover, an avenue of future empirical research is to extend the present model by examining the moderating role of other demographic variables such as, age, tenure, employment status on the relationship between PEP and organizational identification.\nManagerial implications: Organizational identification is considered as an important variable that will lead employees to contribute to organizational functioning (Pratt, 1998). If managers wish to foster identification with the organization, then our results support the need for focusing on the status and image of the organization. As such, organization should incorporate practices that will ameliorate employees' perceptions regarding their prestige. For instance, this may be achieved by enhancing the status of the organization and exhibiting its accomplishments both internally (e.g. via e-mail) and externally (e.g. newspapers, advertising) (Fuller et al., 2006b). Particularly, in the Greek problematic context, the present results are valuable since they demonstrate that embellishing Citizens Service Centers' prestige may be a relatively costless, yet useful, tool for top management in order to increase employees' feelings of organizational identification.Apart from that, the present paper demonstrates an additional useful implication. The results show that men and women are differently influenced by PEP when identify with organization. More specifically, the influence of what outsiders think about organizational prestige on organizational identification is stronger for men than women. This is not to suggest that top management should address the issue of communicating its achievements and its prestige solely to men neglecting women. However, according to our results former employees' perceptions regarding the image and prestige of organization must be the target of a more elaborate and effective strategy, implementing, thus, a segmented approach (Smidts et al., 2001).\n",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Purpose: - The purpose of this paper is to examine the impact of perceived external prestige (PEP) on organizational identification in the context of a Greek public organization and to address the moderating role of gender in the relationship between PEP and organizational identification.\nDesign/methodology/approach: - Data were obtained from a sample of 159 employees working in Citizens Service Centers. Analysis was conducted using moderated hierarchical regression analysis.\nFindings: - PEP is positively related with organizational identification (b=0.33, p<0.001). The influence of the interaction of PEP and gender on organizational identification is also supported (b=-0.29 p<0.05). In particular, the effect of PEP on organizational identification was stronger for men.\nResearch limitations/implications: - Limited inference to other private and public organizations because data are based on one public organization. The cross-sectional analysis of the data cannot directly assess causality.\nOriginality/value: - This is the first study to examine the moderating role of gender in the relationship between PEP and organizational identification.\n",
"role": "assistant"
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] |
Transferring family logic within a multinational corporation: Japanese subsidiaries in the USA and Thailand
|
[
"Institutional duality",
"Institutional logics",
"Japanese MNCs",
"Japanese management",
"Mundane practice"
] |
[
{
"content": "Summarize the following paper into structured abstract.\n\nIntroduction: Japanese companies have long manifested the concept of \"company as family\" (Hatvany and Pucik, 1981; Keys and Miller, 1984; Keys et al., 1994; Kondo, 1990; Bhappu, 2000). As \"family members\", the employees of these companies tend to share \"a common destiny\" (Kondo, 1990), thereby bearing a \"collective responsibility\" for the economic success of the companies to which they belong (Keys and Miller, 1984). For these Japanese companies, management practices such as lifetime or long-term employment, seniority and company loyalty are all fundamentally grounded in the notion of the company as family (Hatvany and Pucik, 1981; Keys and Miller, 1984; Keys et al., 1994). In addition, even mundane practices, such as many formal and informal social events, tend to manifest this notion of family, driving, as well as being driven by, the economic efficiency and success of their companies.\nTransferring family logic in institutional duality: Family logic in Japanese companies from institutional logics perspective\nResearch method: A comparative case study in the USA and Thailand\nFindings: actors neglecting and accepting the family logic: Comparing and contrasting mundane practices in both subsidiaries revealed a sharp contrast regarding the family logic. That is, unlike in JITL, the family logic is rarely manifested in mundane practices in JIUS. Through data analysis, four types of mundane practices emerged: overall socialisation practice, daily work practice, job assignment practice and dining practice with customers. These are discussed below.\nDiscussion: By comparing and contrasting the practices of JIUS and JITL from the institutional logics perspective, this paper aims to explore how the family logic is transferred through mundane practices within a Japanese MNC across different national contexts. Through data analysis, three findings and their theoretical significances are discussed and elaborated.\nConclusion: This paper aimed to answer the research question:\nKey points: for Japanese management scholars, the finding that the constellations of family, market and religion logics were transferred differently in different cultural context illuminates the importance of actors and their perception of the (lack of) necessity of logics in a Japanese MNC facing institutional dualities;\n",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to extend the understandingof how family logic is transferred through mundane practices across the subsidiaries of a Japanese multinational corporation (MNC) in different national contexts.\nDesign/methodology/approach: In order to fulfil this purpose, a comparative qualitative case study was adopted with emphasis on actors' interpretations.\nFindings: Through qualitative data analysis, three findings and their theoretical significances can be summarised. First, it was found that the constellations of family, market and religion logics were transferred differently. This is significant for Japanese management scholars since it illuminates the importance of actors who perceive the (non-) necessity of logics in a Japanese MNC facing institutional dualities. Second, it was found that the family logic is enacted at different levels and with different boundaries. This is significant for both institutionalists and international business scholars since it highlights the strong influence of language and religion in the transfer of logics from one country to another. Third, it was found that the enactment of the family logic greatly affects the acceptability of Japanese management practices. This is significant for business managers since it further proposes an intimate relationship between Japanese management practices and the meanings attached to the family logic.\nOriginality/value: The originality of this work stems from an updated comparative qualitative study of the management of a Japanese MNCs' subsidiaries across different countries, providing in-depth insights for international business, Japanese subsidiary management and institutional logics perspectives.\n",
"role": "assistant"
}
] |
AI feel you: customer experience assessment via chatbot interviews
|
[
"Customer experience",
"Customer feelings",
"Sentiment analysis",
"Chatbot",
"Artificial intelligence",
"Storytelling"
] |
[
{
"content": "Summarize the following paper into structured abstract.\n\n1. Introduction: Understanding customer experience (CE), comprised of experiential elements (e.g. cognitive and emotional), is paramount for service organizations aiming to successfully co-create value with their customers (McColl-Kennedy et al., 2015). As a result, CE has remained an area of interest for both managers (McIntyre and Virzi, 2018) and researchers (Marketing Science Institute, 2018) for more than 50 years (Lemon and Verhoef, 2016).Despite the growth of CE research, the body of literature remains fragmented and overlapping (Kranzbuhler et al., 2018), mainly focusing on the antecedents and outcomes of CE rather than defining and understanding it as a holistic, complex and subjective phenomenon (Kawaf and Tagg, 2017). Additionally, attempts to assess CE using survey approaches tend to possess an organizational bias. Such approaches focus on aspects deemed to be important by researchers or managers and not the elements of a context-specific experience, perceived significant by the customer (Ordenes et al., 2014). Specifically, they fail to recognize that CE is perceived and thus should also be measured within the domain of an individual's overall human experience (Fisk et al., 2020). To address this, more appropriate approaches to study holistic CE, spanning the \"digital, physical and social realms\" of today's digital age, are required (Bolton et al., 2018, p. 777; Holmlund et al., 2020).Arguably, phenomenological and introspective approaches - involving a process of narrative inquiry via data collection mechanisms such as storytelling and interviews (Connelly and Clandinin, 1990) - are better suited for capturing comprehensive understanding of experiential constructs such as CE (Caru and Cova, 2003; Holbrook and Hirschman, 1982). This is because, in storytelling, key experiential elements like thoughts, feelings and behaviors are exchanged in the form of encompassing narratives, which are useful for studying critical events (Webster, 2007) and understanding CE in context.While attempts have already been made to understand CE via storytelling in service research (e.g. Gentile et al., 2007), these methods largely remain within the confines of interviews conducted by researchers. Such qualitative approaches constitute a minority of service research as they are more resource, time and cost-intensive compared to more efficient but potentially less informative quantitative methods (Benoit et al., 2017). Finding awn approach that is both highly informative and efficient has until now seemed unattainable. However, contemporary services firms could now attain the \"best of both worlds\".This could be achieved by employing chatbots and exploiting their ability to engage customers via storytelling. With growing recognition of their potential in service research (Kumar et al., 2016), chatbots equipped with artificial intelligence (AI) could automatically extract CE from narrative conversations with customers - using a sentiment analysis (SA) algorithm - and hence contribute to CE theory. This could provide a useful starting point for a cost-effective service excellence strategy for service organizations (Ordenes and Zhang, 2019; Robinson et al., 2019; Wirtz and Zeithaml, 2018).The use of AI methods generally, SA in particular, calls for high semantic clarity (i.e. precise mapping to linguistic meanings). As a result, a bottom-up abductive approach was adopted to develop a granular and semantically clear model for feelings, one of the five elements of CE: thought, feeling, sensation, activity and relation (De Keyser et al., 2020; Schmitt, 1999). There are several reasons why focusing on these elements individually and on feelings in particular, could yield advantageous results. First, there is an academic need to address the challenges in measuring feelings in CE (Richins, 1997) as well as understanding them better using empirically validated multi-methods (McColl-Kennedy et al., 2015). Feelings relating to outcomes of service encounters are holistically connected with a person's overall assessment of their human experience. Thus, an improved understanding of this CE element would aid managers to co-create service encounters with their customers to better satisfy their needs (Fisk et al., 2020). Second, focusing on the CE feeling element addresses managerially-driven research priorities of (1) establishing robust emotional connections between customers and brands (Marketing Science Institute, 2016) and (2) improving emotional experiences (Temkin, 2018). Tackling the entirety of the CE elements simultaneously would require multiple methods tailored to each element and is beyond the scope of this paper.The objective of this study is to develop and validate a novel and cost-effective approach, employing the recognized potential of AI in the service context to gain an improved holistic understanding of CE. Specifically, the study contributes to the CE literature in three key ways, via: (1) the development of a granular and semantically clear CE feeling model (CEFM) that is employable using AI techniques; (2) proposing a unique approach utilizing chatbots and SA to extract CE (feelings) from primary interview data and (3) empirically validating the effectiveness of this approach in extracting CE feelings. A detailed research agenda geared toward exploiting the potential of the proposed approach to inform and manage CE is outlined.The following sections present an overview of the relevant CE and AI literature, details of the AI approach used, key findings and discussion of contributions and implications and concluding with limitations and a research agenda for future work.\n2. Literature review: 2.1 The feeling component of customer experience\n3. Method: In an attempt to improve the understanding of CE, this research adopts a bottom-up abductive approach using technologies that collect and evaluate experiential CE element data to build up a general and context-specific notion of the CE feeling concept (Brodie et al., 2017). Developing a one-size-fits-all technological solution to the entirety of CE is not desirable, as studying different elements calls for different methodological strategies (e.g. SA works well for studying feelings but less so for studying sensations, where electrodermal activity measures and others may be more suitable). Focusing on a single CE element is also meaningful due to the fragmented literature on CE and its elements (Kranzbuhler et al., 2018; Palmer, 2010); high levels of semantic clarity are thus required for the effective implementation (e.g. extraction of experiential data) of the proposed approach.Methodologically, this study consists of four inter-connected phases: data collection and preprocessing, scale validation, SA and the comparison between scale and sentiment scores. The phases are elaborated below. 3.1 Phase 1: data collection and preprocessing\n4. Results: 4.1 Phase 2: Scale validation results\n5. Discussion: The objective of this study was to develop and validate a novel and cost-effective approach, drawing on the recognized potential of AI in the service context for gaining an improved understanding of CE. The empirical findings support the effectiveness of SA chatbot interviews for eliciting and examining CE feelings, highlighting the promise that the approach holds in the digital age. The key theoretical and methodological contributions, practical implications, research agenda and limitations are highlighted and discussed below. 5.1 Theoretical and methodological contributions\n",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Purpose: While customer experience (CE) is recognized as a critical determinant of business success, both academics and managers are yet to find a means to gain a comprehensive understanding of CE cost-effectively. The authors argue that the application of relevant AI technology could help address this challenge. Employing interactively prompted narrative storytelling, and the authors investigate the effectiveness of sentiment analysis (SA) on extracting valuable CE insights from primary qualitative data generated via chatbot interviews.\nDesign/methodology/approach: Drawing on a granular and semantically clear framework for studying CE feelings, an artificial intelligence (AI) augmented chatbot was designed. The chatbot interviewed a crowdsourced sample of consumers about their recalled service experience feelings. By combining free-text and closed-ended questions, the authors were able to compare extracted sentiment polarities against established measurement scales and empirically validate our novel approach.\nFindings: The authors demonstrate that SA can effectively extract CE feelings from primary chatbot data. This findings also suggest that further enhancement in accuracy can be achieved via improvements in the interplay between the chatbot interviewer and SA extraction algorithms.\nResearch limitations/implications: The proposed customer-centric approach can help service companies to study and better understand CE feelings in a cost-effective and scalable manner. The AI-augmented chatbots can also help companies to foster immersive and engaging relationships with customers. This study focuses on feelings, warranting further research on AI's value in studying other CE elements.\nOriginality/value: The unique inquisitive role of AI-infused chatbots in conducting interviews and analyzing data in realtime, offers considerable potential for studying CE and other subjective constructs.\n",
"role": "assistant"
}
] |
Effects of socio-economic factors on the consumption of milk, yoghurt, and cheese: Insights from Turkey
|
[
"Consumption",
"Dairy products",
"Consumer behaviour",
"Turkey"
] |
[
{
"content": "Summarize the following paper into structured abstract.\n\nIntroduction: Milk constitutes an important food at every stage of human life because of the many nutrients it contains. The annual milk consumption per person is 79.2 l, in the European Community (EC) countries, 92 l in the USA, and about 25 l in Turkey including non-registered consumption (Capdevila et al., 2003; Tekinay, 2006). These numbers are an indication that the milk consumption in Turkey is significantly lower compared to some developed countries. This illustrates the importance of research on milk consumption in Turkey.\nMaterials and method: The households located in the urban and rural areas within the Central Township of the province of Van (eastern Turkey) are the focus of this study. According to the population census of 2000, there are 44,811 urban households and 9,604 rural households in the township (DIE, 2003).\nResearch findings: Socio-economic and demographic differences in rural and urban areas\nConclusions: Urban and rural areas are different in terms of their socio-economical character. The aim of this study is to determine how these differences affect consumer consumption of milk, yoghurt, and cheese. In this study, the effects of various socio-economic differences between rural and urban areas, such as age, education, income, and occupation, on milk, yoghurt, and cheese consumption behaviours are investigated. According to the results of the investigation, 76 per cent of the surveyed population in the urban areas and 54.74 per cent of the surveyed population in the rural areas is made up of women. The average age of urban consumers is 35 and that of rural consumers is 40. The illiteracy rate is 26 per cent in the urban area and 42 per cent in the rural area. Of consumers in the urban areas, 13 per cent have completed their high school education, while 4.2 per cent of consumers in the rural areas have completed their high school education. In terms of income, 12.5 per cent of urban and 7.37 per cent of rural consumers are in the high-income group. There are differences between urban and rural areas in terms of gender, education, occupation, and income.\n",
"role": "user"
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{
"content": "Purpose: People living in rural and urban areas experience different socioeconomic conditions, which should affect their consumer behaviour. The purpose of this study is to examine the effects of these socio-economic differences on the consumption of milk, yoghurt, and cheese.\nDesign/methodology/approach: Face-to-face interviews are conducted with 191 households in the city of Van (Eastern Turkey). The collected data are evaluated using SPSS - Multiple Correspondence Analysis.\nFindings: Results of the evaluations show that there are socio-economical differences between urban and rural populations in terms of age, education, occupation, and income, which affects their consumption behaviour. The rural consumers generally consume raw (unpasteurized, unpackaged) milk. These consumers tend to have low income and be illiterate. The urban consumers, on the other hand, consume pasteurized milk and have higher incomes compared with the rural consumers and have a mid-level to university education. In the rural areas, consumers usually make their own yoghurt but those who purchase their yoghurt pay attention to its packaging the most. In the rural areas, consumers who make their own cheese have mid-level income and primary school education.\nOriginality/value: The paper analyses the current effects of socio-economic differences in rural and urban areas on the consumption behaviour of milk, yoghurt, and cheese using the Multiple Correspondence Analysis (MCA). MCA analysis has rarely been used in this area.\n",
"role": "assistant"
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] |
Corporate reputation and reputation risk: Definition and measurement from a (risk) management perspective
|
[
"Corporate reputation",
"Reputation risk",
"Corporate reputation management",
"Reputation risk management"
] |
[
{
"content": "Summarize the following paper into structured abstract.\n\n1. Introduction: Due to social media, abundant information is available at all times and spreading very fast. In addition, the ongoing globalization implies a large number of competing products, employers and business partners. Therefore, a firm's corporate reputation is becoming increasingly important (Sarstedt et al., 2013), and a positive corporate reputation can lead to a significant competitive advantage for firms (Gatzert, 2015). A positive corporate reputation has, for instance, positive effects on the financial performance in general (Gatzert, 2015 for an overview), facilitates raising capital (Fombrun et al., 2000a) and supports in the war for talents (Fombrun et al., 2000a). Moreover, companies can benefit from a positive corporate reputation, e.g. when negotiating with suppliers or when building customer relationships (Fombrun and van Riel, 2004). Especially without having their own experience, stakeholders, such as customers, tend to start relationships with companies having a good corporate reputation (Fombrun and van Riel, 2004). Hence, aiming for a positive corporate reputation is crucial and companies should take measures to build a positive corporate reputation in the long term, which we call corporate reputation management.\n2. Definition of corporate reputation and reputation risk: 2.1 Definition of corporate reputation\n3. Measurement of corporate reputation and reputation risk: 3.1 Measuring corporate reputation\n4. Summary and implications: The literature offers various definitions of corporate reputation, and there is no general accepted measurement method for corporate reputation. Furthermore, even though previous definitions of reputation risk agree in considering reputation risk as a risk of risks, they focus on different aspects. Our aim with this research is to discuss existing literature in this regard from a corporate reputation (risk) management perspective. Based on this, we suggest a holistic and consistent approach for defining and measuring corporate reputation and reputation risk with (risk) management purposes.\n",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Purpose: The corporate reputation of a firm and reputation risk is becoming increasingly important because of the rise of social media and the ongoing globalization. While defining and measuring corporate reputation and reputation risk represent the first steps in corporate reputation (risk) management, there is no general agreement in defining and measuring these two terms. Hence, this paper aims to give an overview of the existing literature in this regard, discuss it with respect to the operability in corporate reputation (risk) management and, based on this, present a holistic and consistent approach to define and measure corporate reputation and reputation risk.\nDesign/methodology/approach: The paper gives an overview of the literature regarding definitions and measurement methods of corporate reputation and reputation risk. Moreover, it discusses such definitions and measurement methods with respect to the operability in corporate reputation (risk) management.\nFindings: Based on an overview of the literature regarding definitions and measurement methods of corporate reputation and reputation risk, the authors present a holistic and consistent approach to define and measure corporate reputation and reputation risk.\nOriginality/value: The authors present an holistic and consistent approach to define and measure corporate reputation and reputation risk with focus on (risk) management purposes.\n",
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Strategic human resource management: a power based critique
|
[
"Performance",
"Power",
"Organizational performance",
"Human resource management",
"Industrial relations"
] |
[
{
"content": "Summarize the following paper into structured abstract.\n\n1. Introduction: The Strategic Human Resource Management (SHRM) literature has sought to characterize the employment relationship, in as objective a way as possible in order to come up with prescriptive typologies of courses of action that the human resource (HR) department must take in order to link up to firm level strategy on the one hand and link down to desired employee behavior on the other. Yet, time and again, fitment issues have plagued empirical attempts at modeling these complex relationships. Empirical contexts in turn such as implications for and by multiple stakeholders, ethical issues for society at large and outcomes for specific varieties of work, careers, psychological contracts and employment relationships have remained unaccounted for. Chadwick and Cappelli (1999) note that \"neat models\" that encapsulate strategy typologies into SHRM body of knowledge have been the order of the day with little regard to contextual details. The absence of context awareness in turn makes difficult the operationalization of SHRM theory into HRM practice and performance outcomes.\n2. Method: We have followed a four step method in this paper. In the first step, we have undertaken an extensive thematic review of the articles to decipher the trends in SHRM discourse. To retrieve relevant papers, I searched the EBSCO database with the terms: \"SHRM,\" \"HR Architecture,\" \"Organizational Performance,\" \"HR function,\" \"HR typology,\" \"Fit,\" \"Contingency Theory,\" \"Psychological Contract,\" \"Strategic HR,\" etc., singly and in combinations. As we analyzed the papers retrieved, we identified more search terms along the way, thus following a snowballing strategy of retrieval (cf. \"snowball sampling\"). Based on content analysis of the relevant articles, we refine our analysis in two parts, bearing fidelity to Foucault's twin methods of archaeological and genealogical analysis; these constitute our second and third steps.\n3. The strategic HR function: an alternative exposition and archaeological analysis: The SHRM discourse derives its theoretical roots from organizational strategy literature (Barney and Wright, 1998) and in so doing, seeks to elevate the level of analysis of HR outcomes from the employee's level to the organization's level (Prowse and Prowse, 2010). The micro-perspective of development in individual functions of HR; for example studying performance appraisal of employees at the exclusion of selection systems, i.e. ignoring the larger picture of the department's performance as a whole was what triggered an entire stream of research in the form of SHRM. The latter's objective was to bring a macro theorizing in research and practice in this domain so that business outcomes of the function may be better visible and gain legitimacy (cf. legitimacy theory and institutional theory). However, HR practices or \"routines\" need to be clearly articulated along with all their manifestations in order to really make that possible (Aghazadeh, 2003; Adhikari, 2010).\n4. Genealogical analysis and unresolved dichotomies: In this section, we look at some adjoining literatures and/or perspectives in organization studies and examine how they have served to highlight tropes of power and disempowerment in the SHRM discourse. The literatures that we take as our points of departure, are, respectively: epistemological thoughts of Burrell and Morgan (1979); organizational learning; professions; and social network theory. How the SHR function will choose to orient itself and the climate of the organization, is what we are interested in problematizing here.\n5. Navigating power and the nature of negotiations: a synthetic model: The question that emerges for us then is that what is the posture or ideology that the SHR function should assume, to redress this imbalance? Some corollary questions that follow from it are: Is a prescriptive, unitary position even possible? If not, then what might the different contingent configurations be and what conditions will they be contingent upon? We attempt to address some of these in the ensuing paragraphs.\n6. Discussion: The over-riding concern of the power discourse in this paper, is composed of two facets. As opposed to the HR architecture and other typologies discussed in our thematic review in the first half of the paper, we show how the power orientation attempts to dissect the employee pool and the corresponding HR functions into carefully engineered silos to optimize the savings to the bottom line and over time breeds and conflates the problems of inequity among different power factions that develop within the organization. In the second half of the paper, we strive to address this very problem by first identifying the course that such power differentials may take, conceptualizing their extant shape and quantum and thence pre-emptively suggesting the less and the more viable alternatives that may be possible to adopt in each such scenarios. In enabling organizations and their current and prospective employees to craft this discourse, the \"power lens\" gives a more forward-looking tool and in the process, facilitates \"empowerment\" (Conger and Kanungo, 1988; Humborstad, 2014) of both sets of parties. We believe that as social inequities between big corporations and other societal stakeholders become more acute, adoption of this lens will be an increasingly inevitable policy circumstance.\n7. Future research directions: The grand or meta theories of sociology (Ritzer, 2011, pp. A1-A5) have a special role to play in the theory building effort in social sciences. While grand theories are not testable and this makes it imperative that they be broken down into mid-range theories in order to validate observable phenomenon; the fact remains that they may cause tectonic shifts in the way a discipline is pursued and promoted. Foucault's Power discourse, Marx's dialectic Materialism and Husserl's Phenomenology are but some theories which have ushered in a whole new disciplinary branch of CMS within the management domain (Alvesson and Deetz, 1999, p. 193).We have strived to demonstrate just one such possible thought re-alignment by the above power discourse. One more theoretical lens which is yet to reach \"grand\" status but may be fruitfully pursued by management scholars to craft theory is the Structuration Theory by Anthony Giddens (1984). While the said agency-structure dichotomy concept has been quiet exhaustively explored in Economics and Finance with the development of the twin models of shareholder profit maximization and stakeholder value-maximization; it is yet to penetrate other areas of organizational research. Future research may look at similar theory building or re-creating exercises and serve to enrich the \"sociality\" and \"constructivist\" aspects of management studies.\n",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Purpose: By undertaking a detailed review of the Strategic Human Resource Management (SHRM) discourse, the purpose of this paper is to uncover and explicate the power differentials embedded in the social structure of organizations and suggests ways to reconcile them.\nDesign/methodology/approach: Methods used are thematic review, content analysis, and inductive theorizing, with Foucault's archaeological and genealogical analysis style as the overarching framework.\nFindings: At the methodological level, the authors demonstrate the application of Foucault's twin methods: archaeological and genealogical analysis. At the substantive level, the authors have two contributions. First, the authors critique and analyze the various themes of power that emerge from the SHRM discourse as well as the hybridized overlaps of SHRM with other organization studies topics of interest such as organizational learning, network studies, control and postmodernism. Second, the authors propose a \"Power\" theory based nomothetic, typological synthesis for crafting the business-facing human resource (HR) function. The power lens manifests as the meta-theory to guide a much required streamlining of constructs and \"value laden\" synthesis of the literature.\nResearch limitations/implications: The potential of critical theory in crafting situated and context-sensitive research propositions is demonstrated.\nPractical implications: Organizational strategists and HR managers can utilize the proposed typology to better understand their current ideological positions and decide future aspired images.\nOriginality/value: This is a conversation between two paradigms, SHRM and power theory, that are epistemologically at two opposite poles.\n",
"role": "assistant"
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] |
Modeling manufacturer's capabilities for the Internet of Things
|
[
"Servitization",
"Internet of Things",
"Business intelligence",
"Resource-based view",
"Digitalization",
"Industrial internet"
] |
[
{
"content": "Summarize the following paper into structured abstract.\n\n1. Introduction: The Internet of Things (IoT) is changing the competitive environment in traditional manufacturing industries and will eventually change manufacturers' value chains (Porter and Heppelmann, 2014, 2015). Due to this changing environment, manufacturers are beginning to mirror software companies when implementing IoT. The rapid development connectivity and sensor technologies allow manufacturers to develop new servitized business models, value-based earnings logics and organizational capabilities. IoT has improved manufacturers' abilities to provide services throughout the product life cycle, to enhance and optimize work, to serve their existing installed base and to mitigate risks of product-related stoppages. Principally, IoT has enabled manufacturers to progress servitization of their business models by allowing them to determine their total cost of equipment ownership and to prevent product breakdowns and abuses (Brax and Jonsson, 2009; Rabetino et al., 2015). Business opportunities facilitated by IoT are tremendous. For instance, Strategy& report estimates that by 2020, digitization and IoT will increase annual revenues by EUR110bn for the European industry sector, and \"European industrial companies will invest EUR140 billion annually in Industrial Internet applications.\" (Koch et al., 2014, p. 6).\n2. Theoretical background: 2.1 Solutions' connectivity\n3. Methodology: The study's analysis uses a qualitative comparative multiple case study method to study new and complex phenomenon comprehensively and from different perspectives. Flick (2009) recommends its use in studying the development, acceptance and use of new technologies. The study describes how the IoT-specific resources, processes and capabilities are used in manufacturing companies, and how these tie together to generate a competitive edge in the market. Exploratory and qualitative approaches were used to gather results and form a generalizable conceptual model (Eisenhardt, 1991; Yin, 2009). Five industrial companies were examined by using multiple sources of data (interviews, executives' presentations, internet pages, sales and internal training materials, annual reports, seminar observations, etc.) to triangulate the information gathered (Eisenhardt, 1989; Huberman and Miles, 1994; Yin, 2009).\n4. Findings: 4.1 Core capabilities in case companies\n5. Discussion: 5.1 Theoretical contribution\n",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Purpose: This paper aims to identify a manufacturer's abilities to develop, build, sell and deliver Internet of Things (IoT) services.\nDesign/methodology/approach: This paper is a qualitative comparative case method that uses multiple sources of data, including executive interviews and secondary data, to understand a manufacturer's IoT capabilities.\nFindings: Five strategic IoT capabilities were identified: digital business model development, scalable solution platform building, value selling, value delivery and business intelligence and measurement.\nResearch limitations/implications: The main limitations are related to the qualitative research method applied. The results are applicable mainly to relatively large and global manufacturers.\nPractical implications: Managers responsible for solution business development can apply the developed model to acquire and manage IoT specific resources, processes and capabilities.\nOriginality/value: Existing studies have not addressed the IoT-specific resources, processes and capabilities that manufacturers' possess. This is one of the first studies to conceptualize how these capabilities are used.\n",
"role": "assistant"
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Learner-instructor similarity: a social attribution approach to learning
|
[
"Diversity theory",
"Instructor role"
] |
[
{
"content": "Summarize the following paper into structured abstract.\n\n__NO_TITLE__: Constructivists view learning as a social event (e.g. Vygotsky, 1962); an interpersonal process in which actors - instructor and learners - operate synergistically to elaborate new meanings. Rather than unidirectionally transmitted, knowledge is collectively construed in the intersection of dialogue and debate. Constructivism challenges notions that development occurs internally by questioning the idea of an objective and transferrable body of information. Knowledge emerges dialectically as individuals engage in inquisitive exchanges. Learning is viewed as a cultural artifact, the concerted metamorphosis of pre-existing ideas internalized in idiosyncratic ways (Palincsar, 1998).\nDiversity theory and learners-instructor relationships: Diversity theory (Lau and Murnighan, 1998; Williams and O'Reilly, 1998) has been a fundamental framework for explaining the nature of social relationships. At its core, the theory proposes a bipolar effect in which similarities foster acceptance and attraction (Byrne, 1971) whereas differences engender antipathy and repulsion (Rosenbaum, 1986). In diversity theory, these bipolar reactions are conceived of as ego-defense mechanisms (e.g. Singh and Ho, 2000). Because individuals define their own identify on the bases of social categories (e.g. married vs single), they strive for establishing relationships with individuals sharing similar categories. Social responses are directed at protecting the self by avoiding exposure to individuals who might challenge our own identity.\nLearners-instructor relationships and social attributions: Learner-Instructor diversity can also color the attributions learners infer from instructors. Research on attribution indicates that assumptions about others may be rooted in artificial social separations, similar to those accounting for the bipolar reactions that diversity theory prescribes (Kelly and Michela, 1980). Individuals are judged on the basis of the position they hold with respect to observers (Jones and Nisbett, 1972). Whereas perceived similarities may foster affectionate conjectures that amplify the competencies of individuals, between-individual differences can lead to insensitive suppositions that belittle others' capacities. As Kooij-de Bode et al. (2008, p. 308) note, \"people tend to place more trust in in-group members [and] see in-group members as a more valid source of information.\" Of note, the definition of in-group depends on the viewpoint of the observer. Observers' characteristics place others as in-group or out-group, triggering unfounded attributions that deserve careful considerations in learning.\nTrainee attributions and learning outcomes: We considered two learning outcomes in this study: satisfaction with the experience and declarative knowledge. Satisfaction with the experience captures the emotional reactions to the event; how learners feel about the sessions. Declarative knowledge is more cognitive in nature. It emphasizes the amount of factual information retained, the ability to recall the material discussed. We expect the attributions above (goodwill and competence) to have a direct impact on these two outcomes.\nMethods: Sample and procedures\nAnalyses: We first test the factor structure of the scales applied after the training sessions. In doing so, confirmatory factor analyses (CFA) were conducted utilizing EQS 6.1 on the data from the competence, goodwill, trainer-trainee relationship, and satisfaction with the experience scales. In total, four factors were specified as latent constructs. Although fit statistic reached acceptable standards (CFI=0.927; GFI=0.878; RMSEA=0.083), Lagrange Multiplier tests indicate the misspecification of one item from the trainee-trainer relationship scale. The item \"the instructor approaches learners with interest\" exhibited loadings on both the goodwill and the trainer-trainee relationship factors. For parsimony purposes, a decision was made to drop this item from further analyses. An ensuing CFA showed improvements in model fit (CFI=0.944; GFI=0.893; RMSEA=0.068) and further corroborated the ability of four latent factors to account for the study data.\nResults: H1 predicts the effect of agreeableness-diversity on the quality of learners-instructor relationships and H2 the superiority of agreeableness-diversity over age-diversity in influencing this relationship. The correlations in Table I suggest that agreeableness-diversity influences learners-instructor relationship (-0.25, p<0.05) and that this effect is more detrimental than age differentials (0.02, p>0.05). To further test this hypothesis, we regressed learners-instructor relationships onto age-diversity and agreeableness-diversity separately. While the regression coefficient for agreeableness-diversity is statistically significant (-0.016; p<0.05), this is not the case for the age-diversity coefficient (0.007; p>0.05), thus supporting the tenets of H1 and H\nDiscussion: The central assumption of this study is that learning is a social event as results can be explained on the basis of interpersonal processes (relationship, attributions). Our findings provide further evidence to this view indicating that instructor's personality influences learning by shaping the quality of the instructor-learners relationship and the social attributions learners elaborate of the event. Next, we discuss the theoretical and practical implications of these findings.\nLimitations: As mentioned above, we exclusively analyzed the role of age over other demographic differences (e.g. race). Of note, we purposely refrained from considering gender as this variable tends to drive unfavorable attributions in learning (e.g. Clune, 2009). But we acknowledge that other demographics could have been considered (e.g. race). As such, generalization of our findings with respect to the superiority of psychological differences over demographics is restricted. More research is needed to further explore the conditions that make instructor-learners' psychological differences a preponderant factor in learning and the role of other personality traits (e.g. extroversion) under these circumstances. Common-method variance could also be considered as a study limitation, especially because learners' attributions and instructor-learner relationship were assessed simultaneously.\n",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to test a model in which instructor's attributes (i.e. personality, age) are specified as social stimuli. Drawing on a constructivist view of learning (Palincsar, 1998) and similarity-attraction paradigm (Byrne, 1971), the authors hypothesize that instructor's attributes influence learners' reactions and dictate key attributions for learning: instructor's competence and goodwill. The authors place these attributions as antecedents of learning results.\nDesign/methodology/approach: In a quasi-experimental design, undergraduate business students (n=133) participated in a training program of managerial skills over a three-week period. Regression and path analyses were utilized in testing the hypothesized model.\nFindings: Results provide partial support to the hypothesized model and suggest that learning is a social event wherein learners' attributions play a key role. Results also indicate that learner-instructor similarity in personality is an important antecedent of learners' social reactions. The authors discuss how instructor's attributes become social stimuli.\nPractical implications: The authors address why the instructor's personality might be more consequential for learning than his/her demographic attributes. Also, the authors discuss why the manipulation of learners' attributions might be considered an appropriate pedagogical strategy.\nOriginality/value: Scholars primarily considered learners' traits (e.g. IQ) and educational practices (e.g. teaching style) in explaining learning results. This emphasis has neglected analysis of the social role of instructors. This study contributes by examining how instructors induce social reactions on learners with significant repercussions for learning.\n",
"role": "assistant"
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The high-performance organization: making good decisions and making them happen
|
[
"Decision making",
"Organizations"
] |
[
{
"content": "Summarize the following paper into structured abstract.\n\n__NO_TITLE__: If you have ever worked in an organization that is truly high performance or encountered one as a competitor, you do not soon forget. High-performance organizations push the limits of growth, the way Intel has done with its record of continuous innovation. They adapt better to change, as Vodafone has in its pursuit of global leadership in mobile phone services. They become talent magnets, like Nike, where \"athletic authenticity\" is a clear priority. Dell, BMW, Procter & Gamble, Toyota, and Enterprise Rent-A-Car all know how to mobilize their organizations to pull away from competitors. For companies such as these, organization is more than a means of translating objectives into action - it has become a source of competitive advantage.\nBuilding a system: How do companies come to excel at decision-making and execution? The high performers recognize that the org chart - who reports to whom - is only a small part of the equation. They put their energy into building an integrated system, one that supports a high-performance organization. They aim to outperform competitors on five vital dimensions:1. 1 Strong leadership that provides compelling vision and direction based on the sources of value in the business.2. 2 Clear accountability for the most important decisions, reinforced by the organization's structure.3. 3 Talented people, placed in the jobs where they can have the biggest impact, and focused on the measures that matter.4. 4 Outstanding frontline execution, enabled by the right tools and working practices.5. 5 A performance culture that motivates people at all levels to get things done and to strive for excellence.The high performers we studied recognize how the attributes of effective organization reinforce one another: clear vision and cohesive leadership contribute to crisp decision-making and vice versa; and a performance culture keeps frontline employees intent on high-quality execution, which feeds the expectations and shared objectives that reinforce the culture (Figure 3).Most organizations do not achieve this kind of performance. What holds them back? Complacency is part of the problem. Many firms are willing to settle for \"good enough.\" Raising the performance of an entire organization can seem overwhelming, and some companies simply do not know where to focus. But these companies are making a costly mistake. An effective organization is an enormous asset that's difficult to copy.\nThe five attributes of a high-performance organization: 1. Provide compelling direction and leadership\nEstablishing a culture: Enterprise Rent-A-Car knows the value of a strong culture. The largest car-rental agency in the USA - it passed Hertz for the number 1 ranking in 1996 - Enterprise leads the market for neighborhood and off-airport rental cars, where people rent because they need a replacement vehicle while theirs is in the shop for repairs or because they want to take a short business or leisure trip. Enterprise built its industry leadership in large part by establishing a culture that connects performance with customer loyalty, and instills the conviction among employees that attention to customers' needs leads to success. The rental car company has pioneered the use of clear, simple customer-advocacy metrics. One of these is the Enterprise service quality index (ESQi), which measures how satisfied customers were with their rental on a five-point scale. Rental branches' scores on that metric are the key variable in determining promotions for branch managers and employees. So they are watched closely, and everyone in the branch learns that he or she must take personal responsibility for turning customers into enthusiastic promoters of Enterprise.What makes it all work is the company's strong values-based culture. \"Put customers and employees first, and profit will take care of itself,\" declared founder Jack Taylor, and Enterprise leaders ever since have taught that philosophy to managers and employees throughout the organization. CEO Andy Taylor and President Don Ross make a point of addressing training classes of new managers on Saturday mornings. They relate examples of outstanding customer service to reinforce their message, like the story of one branch employee who accompanied the wife of a customer stricken by a heart attack to the hospital and stayed with her for hours until relatives arrived. When it comes to ordinary day-to-day operations, the company says, ESQi is \"one of many ways in which we remind ourselves to put customer needs first.\"Another important attribute of performance cultures is personal accountability. With its policy of hiring college graduates - Enterprise is the largest employer of university graduates in the USA - the company gives regional managers more autonomy than competitors typically do. For example, regional managers for Enterprise buy and sell the cars for their fleets. They also try to keep the fleets small, typically breaking off to form a new branch when a fleet grows above 150 cars, in order to inspire a sense of personal accountability.Cultures such as Enterprise's truly emerge in a crisis, when employees must think and act quickly without guidance from headquarters. Enterprise faced a dilemma in the aftermath of September 11, 2001, as stranded travelers desperately sought cars to return to their homes. Enterprise ordinarily does not rent one way; its neighborhood branch system lacks the logistics and operations to track and offer one-way rentals. But many branch managers quickly decided to give customers the cars anyway and worry about how they would get them back later on.The response came as no surprise to Enterprise employees. One sign of a strong, effective culture is that everyone in the company understands what to do without being told. Three days later, with the nation's transportation system still crippled, Enterprise headquarters issued a policy instructing branches to permit out-of-state one-way rentals for stranded travelers and to waive or reimburse drop-off fees. \"There will be losses,\" said CEO Taylor, who stayed in touch with employees via e-mail during the crisis. \"But right now we're just concerned about taking care of our customers.\" His managers, at it happened, were out ahead of him.Some executives dismiss the Enterprise philosophy - customers and employees come first, and profit will take care of itself - as disingenuous or naive. But a fundamental component of the Enterprise formula is to pay employees a share of the profits they help generate. With this reward system, and a culture that enables Enterprise employees instinctively to do the right thing, profits do tend to take care of themselves. Privately held Enterprise does not report its profits, but the firm's worldwide revenues have grown 32 percent between 2000 and 2004, to $7.4 billion, helping to establish Enterprise as the leading car rental company in North America.\nThe path to high performance: The hallmark of any highly effective organization is making good decisions and making them happen - better, faster and more consistently than their competitors. To achieve this, the top performers excel across all elements of the organizational system - effective leadership, clear accountability for the key decisions, the right people in the right jobs, strong frontline execution and a performance culture.Because it is a system, not just a structure, companies often find it difficult to know where to start. To help address this, Bain has developed a simple \"scorecard\" to measure organizational effectiveness. It allows a company to benchmark its own performance against the businesses in our database and to develop a picture of how its organization compares with that of industry leaders (Figure 5).The scorecard probes each of the five attributes of high performance (see sidebar, \"Measuring an organization's effectiveness.\") By isolating the root causes of underperformance, a company can focus action where it is most needed. The scorecard also gives companies a tool to guide change. After all, no organization is forever. Even high-performance organizations need to evolve.Sustaining high performance is difficult. No single lever turns a company's people into a decision-driven organization, capable of making good decisions and executing them again and again, and no blueprint can provide for all the contingencies and business shifts that a company is bound to encounter. The most successful companies take a holistic approach, integrating capabilities across the organization, from the boardroom to the front line. That's difficult to achieve - and even more difficult for competitors to copy. But the steps required to build a high-performance organization are practical and measurable. Any company can make its organization more effective, beginning with its next decision.\n",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Purpose: - To demonstrate that high performance in organizations results from their being decision-driven.\nDesign/methodology/approach: - Executives from 365 companies in seven countries were surveyed. More than 40 high-performance companies were then interviewed. Industry leaders in the study were compared with trailing competitors, while transformations where organizational change was clearly a leading factor were also examined in depth. More broadly, the article draws on the experience of more than 1,000 organization cases for more than 500.\nFindings: - The findings were that only 15 percent of companies have an organization that helps them outperform and that these companies are differentiated by the quality of their decision-making - and their ability to repeatedly implement their decisions successfully. Successful implementation depends on an integrated organizational system that aligns five attributes - leadership, accountability, people, frontline execution and a performance culture.\nPractical implications: - This research has lead to the development of a scorecard to measure organizational effectiveness. This enables companies to benchmark their performance against the 365 businesses in the survey. The scorecard gauges agreement (on a one-to-four scale) among managers and employees with ten key statements that reflect the five attributes of high performance.\nOriginality/value: - The article will help focus company leaders on the organizational issues that drive high performance. In addition to identifying the key attributes of high performance, it presents an organizational effectiveness scorecard to isolate the causes of underperformance and guide change. It should be of value to all management levels from the chief executive to front line staff.\n",
"role": "assistant"
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] |
General practitioner non-principals benefit from flexible working
|
[
"General practitioners",
"Flexible working hours",
"Gender",
"Job satisfaction",
"Hours of work",
"Scotland"
] |
[
{
"content": "Summarize the following paper into structured abstract.\n\nIntroduction: Ongoing concerns about recruitment and retention difficulties in primary care (Lambert et al., 2002; Luce et al., 2002) and the imminent introduction of revalidation have highlighted the need for accurate data on all general practitioners (GPs) working in the UK National Health Service. At the time of this study, official data on GPs remained incomplete, with many non-principals excluded. This inevitably made research on GP non-principals difficult. The introduction of supplementary lists of non-principals (www.nanp,org.uk/news/index.htm, 28 May 2003) should resolve this problem for researchers and medical workforce planners in the future. It is anticipated that this paper will add to the existing literature on general practitioners by reporting the results of the most comprehensive survey of non-principals in Scotland to date.The term non-principal has been used traditionally as a term of convenience, used to describe any GP who is not a principal. It has been regarded as divisive and unnecessary (Sykes, 1998) since principals and non-principals are similarly qualified but work under different contractual arrangements. The new contract, recently accepted by GPs in the UK, is likely to increase flexible working options in primary care (www.bma.org.uk/ap.nsf/Content/NewGMSContract) and the somewhat artificial division between principals and non-principals may become obsolete. In any case, non-principals do not form a homogeneous group. They include locums, retainees, associates and assistants, among others. Many are women with childcare responsibilities. In the past, non-principals tended to have less favourable employment conditions than principals and difficulty in accessing continuing professional development (Oxley and Egan, 1998; French, 1999). In recent years, recruitment and retention difficulties in general practice (Lambert et al., 2002) coupled with government initiatives to promote flexible working (Scottish Executive Health Department, 2002) have resulted in an enhanced profile for non-principals. Many now enjoy improved terms and conditions of work (NHS Executive, 1999).Following the introduction of the new GP contract, the term sessional GPs has become the preferred descriptor for non-principals while locums have been redesignated freelance GPs (www.nasgp.org.uk/, accessed 19 October 2004). In this paper, the old terminology has been retained as it better reflects the situation at the time when the research was conducted.Advantages of non-principal work include the associated flexibility, whether by choosing when, where and how often to work (locums) or by working part-time (retainees, associates and assistants). Locum work is undertaken by general practitioners at both ends of the career spectrum: either to gain experience or to reduce work commitment prior to retirement. Disadvantages remain for many non-principals, particularly job insecurity and obstacles to participation in continuing professional development (Oxley and Egan, 1998; French, 1999; Colvin and Steele, 1999; McKevitt et al., 1999; Pringle et al., 1999; Baker et al., 2000a). Consequently, they may have difficulties meeting the requirements of revalidation, particularly the audit component (Bowie et al., 2001). Locums are self-employed and therefore not entitled to employee benefits. However, in Scotland, those who are on a supplementary list will be entitled to join the NHS superannuation scheme, with contributions being backdated to April 2001 (www.nanp,org.uk/news/index.htm, 28 May 2003).The GP Doctors' Retainer Scheme had a number of deficiencies (Bahrami, 1994; Oswald and Ray, 1994; Douglas and McCann, 1996; Bahrami and Singleton, 1999), some of which have now been addressed (NHS Executive, 1999). Retainees may work a maximum of four sessions per-week in general practice and a limited amount of other NHS clinical work may be undertaken. Although the Doctors' Retainer Scheme is open to both genders, most retainees are women with childcare responsibilities (Bahrami, 1994; Oswald and Ray, 1994; Douglas and McCann, 1996; Bahrami and Singleton, 1999).The 1990 GP Contract allowed associates to be employed by single-handed principals in remote and rural Scotland to enable the latter to take regular holidays and study leave. An associate is usually employed between two practices. While it has benefited principals, associates are inadequately remunerated (Marshall, 1997).Assistants work part-time and are employed directly by the practice or the Health Board. Only those employed by a Health Board appear in official statistics. Policy initiatives have resulted in the emergence of a new term, that of \"salaried GP\", usually used to denote those GPs employed by Personal Medical Services (PMS) practices (DoH, 1997). However, their position within the principal/non-principal divide is somewhat ambiguous. The launch of the Flexible Careers Scheme in England in 2002 will provide further opportunities for GPs to work less than full-time, albeit for a maximum of four years (www.doh.gov.uk/pricare/fcs/index.htm, 28 May 2003).National GP surveys are conducted regularly (British Medical Association, 2001; British Medical Association (Scotland), 2001; Simeons et al., 2002; Sibbald et al., 2003) but only some have included a proportion of non-principals (British Medical Assocation, 2001; Simeons et al., 2002). Two national studies of non-principals have been conducted: in Northern Ireland (personal communication, Dr Agnes McKnight, 1999) and Wales (Carlisle et al., 2000). A number of regional studies have also been published (Oxley and Egan, 1998; French, 1999; Bowie et al., 2001). Several studies have reported that many non-principals wish to become principals (Oxley and Egan, 1998; French, 1999; Pringle et al., 1999; Baker et al., 2000a, 2000b). However, it cannot be assumed that a move from non-principal to principal will be accompanied by increased working hours (Oxley and Egan, 1998; French, 1999; Baker et al., 2000a, 2000b). In one study, around a quarter of respondents had previously been principals (Baker et al., 2000a, 2000b). Reasons for moving to a non-principals' post included the incompatibility of a principal's workload with family commitments and problems within the practice partnership (Baker et al., 2000a, 2000b). Principals and non-principals also report different preferences when asked to choose between different GP job characteristics (Wordsworth et al., 2004).The present survey was part of a wider research study of non-training grade doctors in primary and secondary care. The purpose of the study was to seek their views about the potential of enhanced flexible working in NHSScotland. Data were also gathered on contractual commitments, working hours, job satisfaction and retirement plans.\nMethods: Non-principals were identified from various sources: the Information and Statistics Division (ISD) of the Scottish Executive, Associate Advisers for the Doctors' Retainer Scheme, practice managers and non-principal groups. Some difficulties were encountered due to Data Protection Act restrictions. The final list, while not complete, was the most comprehensive in Scotland at the time. \"Salaried GPs\" were classed as non-principals. Practice characteristics were not collected because of the high mobility among non-principals, particularly locums.The questionnaire, originally designed for use with consultants, the staff and associate specialist grades (formerly non-consultant career grades) and GP principals, was refined using focus group and interview data, together with the results of a literature review (French, 2000). The pilot questionnaire was sent to all focus group participants and interviewees. In March 2002, the questionnaire was sent to all identified non-principals (n=967), accompanied by a pre-paid reply envelope and covering letter. Each questionnaire had a unique identifier. One reminder letter and a second questionnaire were sent to non-responders after four weeks. Respondents were assured that all data would remain confidential.The questionnaire contained open-ended and closed questions. Ten items from the Warr-Cook-Wall job satisfaction scale were included (Warr et al., 1979). Attitudinal statements were presented with four response options: strongly agree, agree, disagree and strongly disagree.\nData analysis: Quantitative data\nDiscussion: As in previous studies, retainees were almost exclusively women with childcare commitments (Oxley and Egan, 1998; Bahrami, 1994; Oswald and Ray, 1994; Douglas and McCann, 1996; Bahrami and Singleton, 1999; French, 1999). Newly qualified GPs, male and female, had chosen locum work to gain experience while older GPs, usually male, were working as locums as a means of reducing their work commitment prior to retirement age or because they had become disillusioned with being a principal (Oxley and Egan, 1998; Colvin and Steele, 1999; McKevitt et al., 1999; French, 1999; Pringle et al., 1999; Baker et al., 2000a, 2000b)[2]. Whatever the reason for becoming a non-principal, most respondents were positive about the flexible aspects of their work. Associates were most likely to describe inflexible aspects and this was related to the nature of their work in remote and rural, single-handed practices. Associates and assistants were least satisfied with their pay.The traditional gender division of labour was apparent among the non-principals in this study. Males were more likely to work full-time and to participate in out-of-hours work. However, they were only able to do this because their spouses were more likely to modify their working hours/career aspirations than were the spouses of women non-principals. Most non-principals reported a satisfactory work/life balance. Women non-principals would prefer a \"salaried GP\" post to that of principal, primarily to maintain that balance. Consequently, a move from non-principal to principal does not necessarily mean a desire for increased hours. Thus, we would reiterate against relying on non-principals as a significant additional source of GP manpower (Oxley and Egan, 1998; French, 1999; Baker et al., 2000a, 2000b).Female locums were more likely than male locums to consider becoming a principal. This may have been due to the fact that more male locums were nearing retirement age. While most respondents planned to retire at age 59, many would consider working beyond that age if they could do so part-time. Similar findings have been reported for GP principals (Luce et al., 2002; French et al., 2004) and consultants (French et al., in press).As in previous studies (Oxley and Egan, 1998; French, 1999), lack of time and resources for continuing professional development were again reported, despite many identified learning needs. As anticipated in an earlier study (Bowie et al., 2001), respondents identified the audit component of revalidation as likely to pose most difficulty. They felt that the provision of examples of audit and information technology support could be helpful in enabling them to meet the requirements of revalidation.Our response rate of 55 per cent was acceptable but lower than most of the other non-principal studies cited in this paper. This may have been attributable to the lack of up-to-date records for these doctors and the fact that two other GP surveys were conducted around the same time (British Medical Association, 2001; Simeons et al., 2002). As stated earlier, supplementary lists should resolve the first problem but there is a need for greater collaboration among those researching the primary care labour market. Although we were unable to compare responders and non-responders, responders had similar characteristics to those in other non-principal surveys (Oxley and Egan, 1998; French, 1999). Other limitations included reliance on self-reported hours of work and estimates of hours spent on different work activities. Such estimates must be treated with caution.The message for Scottish policymakers is that the non-principals in this study were largely positive about the flexibility of their posts. It is anticipated that the new GP contract (www.bma.org.uk/ap.nsf/Content/NewGMSContract) will extend these opportunities and that less than full-time posts will become more widely available, rendering unnecessary additional special schemes such as the Flexible Careers Scheme introduced in England. The term non-principal should no longer be used. It is not only divisive, it also has negative connotations for non-principals. Improvements in pay should be considered for assistant GPs while improvements in the terms and conditions of work for associate GPs might improve recruitment to these posts in remote and rural Scotland.\n",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Purpose: - The purpose of this study is to explore non-principals' working patterns and attitudes to work.\nDesign/methodology/approach: - The article is based on data provided by a questionnaire survey.\nFindings: - Gender division was apparent among the non-principals. Males were more likely to work full-time, because their spouses modified their working hours.\nResearch limitations/implications: - It was impossible to identify all non-principals in Scotland or to compare responders and non-responders, due to the lack of official data. Hence, the results might not be representative.\nPractical implications: - More flexible posts would enable GPs to more easily combine paid work with family commitments. It is anticipated that the new GP contract should deliver this.\nOriginality/value: - This was the first time a study of all non-principals in Scotland had been attempted. The findings provide a more comprehensive picture of GPs in Scotland and provide valuable information for policymakers.\n",
"role": "assistant"
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] |
mHealth apps design using quality function deployment
|
[
"House of quality",
"Quality function deployment",
"MHealth applications",
"MHealth revolution"
] |
[
{
"content": "Summarize the following paper into structured abstract.\n\nIntroduction: Advances in internet, mobile communication, smartphones and mobile apps have revolutionized many areas, and have an emotional, commercial and communicative effect on everything from lifestyles to businesses. Besides mobile marketing, shopping, commerce, entertainment and advertising, mobile apps can affect healthcare.\nMobile technology and mHealth revolution: Hospital administrators are under pressure to: increase patient satisfaction; boost efficiency and service quality; and decrease their costs. Consequently, they are investing in advanced information and communications technologies and in mHealth apps that are designed to achieve these aims. After their launch in 2007, smartphones have been transformed and improved. Smartphones or tablets loaded with mHealth apps will connect hospital systems anywhere, and mHealth apps will offer abundant potential for improving coordination among patients and clinicians, and their healthcare institutions. Although mHealth, an informatics sub discipline, exploits mobile communications devices for health and wellness activities, Fox et al. (2017) used the mHealth domain as the context for an interdisciplinary learning experience for professionals.\nmHealth apps industry: The mHealth industry is growing rapidly, and the mHealth app is a popular term to describe it. There are many reports and studies about mHealth that are designed to improve patient satisfaction and healthcare efficiency. The latest smartphones are increasingly viewed as hand-operated computers rather than phones (Wilhide et al., 2016; Boulos et al., 2011). Additionally, smartphones offer facilities that computers cannot, such as automatically retrieving and sending SMS/MMS/Apps messages. Accordingly, the mHealth app user count is increasing, and mHealth app revenues rise yearly (Statistics and Facts about mHealth, 2018).\nQuality function deployment: QFD is a tool used to understand users' wants, while helping designers invent new and efficient mHealth apps. One critical step in any new development process, including product, service and software development, is to understand user/buyer/customer wants before the product, service and software are produced, designed or developed, which indicates that actively seeking and understanding what customers really want is one goal that needs to be accomplished. The QFD approach provides a structured framework for concurrent engineering that indicates client's desires through all product, service or software development phases. QFD converts spoken and unspoken customer requirements into the firm's internal language (Klien, 1990; Govers, 1996; Barutcu, 2006; Zheng and Pulli, 2007).\nHouse of quality: HOQ provides a basic implementation tool for managing QFD throughout product or service design, development and manufacturing (Hauser and Clausing, 1988). The HOQ cornerstone is determining customer requirements, wants and needs, which is difficult because it requires obtaining and expressing what the customer wants and not what we think or what users expect (Govers, 2001). The customer requirements (WHATs) are translated into design characteristics (HOWs), based on surveys and interviews with customers (Figure 1).\nMethodology: Our aim was to apply QFD/HOQ to mHealth apps development consistent with doctors' expectations. The QFD method helps app designers to recognize doctor expectations from mHealth apps, while designing and defining their requirements to meet their wishes. Data were collected through in-depth interviews and surveys. Our target group was 30 hospital doctors working. The convenience sampling method was used. In the interviews, five doctors were questioned to determine their positive and negative attitudes toward mHealth apps and to obtain their wants (WHATs list). Two stated that it was badly perceived if doctors turn their faces away from patients while examining them. For the survey, 30 questionnaires were distributed to doctors that were later returned and analyzed. There were 12 questions for prioritizing their wants. Analytic hierarchy process (AHP) and HOQ were used to analyze survey data.\nConclusions and recommendations: mHealth technology has the potential to improve personal healthcare service quality and doctor effectiveness since they can facilitate remote care virtually anywhere, mHealth apps will develop into significant tools. However, as far as the related literature is concerned, there seems to be few mHealth apps developed for doctors. Therefore, developing mHealth apps from doctors' perspectives can be used for clinical decision support and for timely health monitoring, which enables doctors to send treatments using mHealth apps rather than relying on face-to-face interactions with nurses and patients. These are important for improving doctor as well as patient satisfaction through mHealth apps. However, there are also obstacles and challenges in using mHealth apps. The main obstacles are the small mobile device screens, high development cost and some doctors' low technological skills, who are unable to recognize and understand the benefits provided by mHealth apps for health institutions. Owing to the differences in intended use, mHealth apps are subject to a wide-ranging requirement in healthcare institutions. mHealth apps designers can minimize these challenges by customizing wants or by developing special mHealth apps for each health institution.\n",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Purpose: The purpose of this paper is threefold: first, to draw health managers', clinicians', entrepreneurs' and mobile apps designers' attention toward new mobile health applications (mHealth apps); second, to define mHealth apps design characteristics intended for doctors; and third, to highlight how mHealth apps can be designed using quality function deployment/house of quality (QFD/HOQ) techniques from doctors' perspectives.\nDesign/methodology/approach: Data were collected through a survey and in-depth interviews with doctors to understand their needs and attitudes toward mHealth apps. Analytic hierarchy process, QFD and HOQ methods were used to analyze data.\nFindings: Doctors agreed that mHealth apps provide them with the tools to improve their service and to become more efficient. Once the 12 doctors' wants were collected, they were prioritized according to their significance and used for mHealth apps development. Eight technical characteristics that cater to doctors' expectations were sorted. The authors suggest that mHealth app designers need to provide design requirements recommended by health personnel for a higher satisfaction level.\nOriginality/value: Healthcare managers are focusing on increasing their efficiency, patient satisfaction and care quality, and decreasing costs. For these purposes, mHealth revolution and mHealth apps have high potential for improving doctor effectiveness and healthcare quality. This study is among the first to: define Turkish doctors' wants from mHealth apps; elaborate the app's technical characteristics; and increase design quality, which is implied in improving app design. This research makes a significant contribution to define doctors' wants from mHealth apps, to elaborate their technical characteristics and to increase mHealth apps design quality using QFD.\n",
"role": "assistant"
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] |
Implementation of patient-focused care: before-after effects
|
[
"Job satisfaction",
"Organizational development",
"Patient centredness",
"Quality assessment"
] |
[
{
"content": "Summarize the following paper into structured abstract.\n\nIntroduction: Interest in patient-focused care (PFC) and related concepts like patient-centred care, patient-closer care and person-centred care has grown rapidly in the last decade (Edvardsson and Innes, 2010). However, the dominating theme in most publications is that there is little consensus regarding PFC's meaning (Hobbs, 2009; Marshall et al., 2012; Mitchell et al., 2000). A Cochrane Collaboration literature review concludes that there is no accepted PFC definition and there are multiple interventions assumed to promote it (Lewin et al., 2001). Without a common PFC definition or model, healthcare providers tend to ascribe different meaning (Mitchell et al., 2000). Some attempts to identify PFC's core dimensions emphasize an individual-level focus where aspects such as a bio-psycho-social perspective and seeing patients and healthcare providers as persons with shared power and responsibility (Mead and Bower, 2000). In a controlled study with a six-month follow-up, Ekman et al. (2012) showed positive effects among chronic heart failure patients compared to standard care. Other writers underline organizational conditions that enable patient care to be as close to the bedside as possible. Within this approach, structural aspects, organizational values and culture are highlighted (Clarke and Lee, 1994). Research aimed at evaluating PFC shows mixed findings (Robinson et al., 2008). The Cochrane Collaboration report noted few randomized or controlled clinical trials and controlled before and after studies. Given the multi-professional intervention designs in 17 studies passing the Cochrane Collaboration study inclusion criteria, only 15 included physician-oriented interventions. There is some evidence that PFC may impact positively on patient satisfaction but no conclusion can be reached regarding patient healthcare related behaviours or health status (Lewin et al., 2001). However, some negative results were reported following PFC interventions, including increased RN dissatisfaction (Lovgren et al., 2002; Mikesell and Bromley, 2012; Seago, 1999). In summary, there is still an insufficient empirically based understanding of PFC content and its potential effects, and more evidence is needed (Lewin et al., 2001).\nMethodology: Our study had a before-after (PFC introduction) design. In 2005, a county-wide policy decision was made to implement PFC in all Swedish county council hospital wards. As a first response to this policy, staff in six medical and surgical wards (of 35) reported their interest in introducing PFC. Before-assessments were carried out in 2005-2007 (for practical reasons, it took two years from introducing staff in the first and sixth wards). An after-assessment was conducted in 2012. In addition to the six wards from the before-measurement, we included five additional wards, randomly selected from the county's remaining 29 medical and surgical wards. Study participants were selected as follows.\nResults: Pre-post implementation care quality\nDiscussion: Using a pre-post research design, our aim was to evaluate PFC effects on work climate among healthcare providers and care quality. Beginning with patients' care quality evaluation, a post-implementation improvement was predicted, but no significant pre-post differences were noted. One possible explanation is that patient ratings were already high before the implementation, thus providing little room for improvement (a ceiling effect). Compared to previous studies, where the QPP instrument was used, mean scores in the present case were considerably higher (Grondahl et al., 2011, 2013). The second prediction assumed improved staff work climate perceptions. This prediction was similarly unsubstantiated as no change was found, which cannot be explained by a ceiling effect; therefore, PFC had no measurable effect on work climate. Compared to reference data, we conclude that the mean scores obtained in the present study were comparable to the healthcare reference samples (Ekvall, 1990). The third prediction was improvement in provider care quality perceptions. Expected results were found regarding medical-technical competence and socio-cultural atmosphere in the care environment. An alternative (or contributing) explanation to the observed associations between PFC and the medical-technical competence could be a general improvement in these respects during the five- to seven-year interval between the two assessments.\nConclusion: A multiple regression analysis showed that the higher degree to which healthcare providers adhered to the PFC principles and experienced a favourable work climate, the more favourable the patients evaluated care quality. The results' trustworthiness is strengthened by the large sample size, long follow-up period and using well-established measurements. Thus, we regard our results promising from the organizationally oriented PFC model's perspective. Providing care in real life is a complex process and, hence, a complete model confirmation in a study like this is probably unrealistic. Patient-focused and person-centred care (Edvardsson and Innes, 2010), appear to have long-term relevance. In Sweden, there is current advocacy for new patient-oriented legislation, the content of which appears to overlap strongly with PFC principles. Given ongoing and further large-scale implementation, an important requirement for both practice and research is to tailor PFC to various health and social care contexts. In particular, we suggest that care organizational aspects, such as high-quality leadership and humanistic values, which are emphasized in the present PFC model, need to be adapted to conditions such as shorter care periods, less permanent and more temporary teams, stronger inter-cultural aspects, etc. Further practical implications include a need to better understand physicians' PFC role. Contrary to nurses and their assistants, physicians are typically responsible for several wards and thus become part members of many PFC teams. Clearly communicating the PFC model when recruiting and introducing new personnel may affect self-selection processes and contribute to selecting highly motivated individuals.\n",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to evaluate an organizationally oriented, patient-focused care (PFC) model's effects on care quality and work climate.\nDesign/methodology/approach: The study has a before-after (PFC implementation) design. The sample included 1,474 patients and 458 healthcare providers in six participating wards before and after PFC implementation, plus five additional randomly chosen wards, which only featured in the post-assessment.\nFindings: No pre-post differences were found regarding care perceptions or provider work climate evaluations. Statistically significant improvements were noted among provider care evaluations. Using aggregate-level ward data, multiple regression analyses showed that high adherence to PFC principles and a positive work climate contributed significantly to variance among care quality ratings.\nResearch limitations/implications: Among healthcare providers, questions related to specific PFC aspects during evenings, nights and weekends had to be dropped owing to a low response rate.\nPractical implications: An important requirement for both practice and research is to tailor PFC to various health and social care contexts.\nOriginality/value: The study is large-scale before-after PFC model review, where patient and provider data were collected using well-established measurements.\n",
"role": "assistant"
}
] |
Analyzing reputation of Swiss universities on Twitter-The role of stakeholders, content and sources
|
[
"Reputation",
"Higher education",
"Twitter",
"Content analysis"
] |
[
{
"content": "Summarize the following paper into structured abstract.\n\nIntroduction: The investigation of the reputation of scientific organizations and scientists has a long tradition. As early as 1903, James McKeen Cattel used peer rankings \"to identifying the order of merit of American psychologists\" (Over, 1982, p. 53). Reputation within the field was and sometimes still is defined and measured on the basis of achievements and evaluations within the realm of science (Weingart and Pansegrau, 1999; Over, 1982; Petersen et al., 2014; Schmalbeck, 1998). However, universities are facing increased public pressure by non-academic stakeholders to legitimize their actions (Vercic et al., 2016), a point that is especially true for publicly funded institutions. This means that scientific organizations and scientists are not only evaluated on behalf of their academic achievements by their peers but also by non-academic stakeholders and within non-academic topics.As a consequence, \"higher education institutions are investing increasing resources in order to achieve favorable perceptions among their stakeholders\" (Lafuente-Ruiz-de-Sabando et al., 2018, p. 8). As one strategy to manage their reputation in the public, universities increasingly orient themselves toward the media (Kohring et al., 2013), because (legacy) media are important sources of information about science for the members of the public (Schafer et al., 2018). However, digitization has fundamentally changed the traditional media landscape and altered how organizations and their actions are publicly evaluated. In this process, the influence of legacy media on the reputation of organizations has been challenged (Meraz, 2009; Etter et al., 2019). \"Current assumptions about how the media shape the reputation of organizations are largely based on an understanding of the media landscape before the rise of social media, when public awareness of an incident [...] heavily relied on a journalist who somehow got to know about the incident and found a way to collect sufficient information\" (Etter et al., 2019, pp. 28-29).Even though a great deal of research has been conducted on the way social media and the Internet in general influence the perception of science by the public (e.g. Anderson and Huntington, 2017; Arlt et al., 2018b; Davies and Hara, 2017), there have been almost no studies on how this process influences the reputation of scientific organizations. The study at hand addresses this gap in research by showing how Swiss universities have been evaluated on Twitter by different stakeholder groups within the different dimensions of reputation, which information sources were used and, finally, which effects in form of retweets and likes were generated by those tweets. It follows Colleoni et al. (2011), who measured reputation as an aggregate of evaluations or sentiments in social media content and linked it to the topic and the user who posted the content. By looking at the communication dynamics on Twitter, the study will, therefore, give detailed insights on how the reputations of universities were constituted in the Twitter-sphere. It shows if their reputation was driven by academic stakeholders and topics within the realm of science, or by the media and societal stakeholder groups who focused on the corporate dimension of reputation.\nConceptual framework: Reputation can be broadly defined as the evaluation of an organization by its stakeholders (Fombrun, 1996). However, the literature laments that there is no clear scientific definition of reputation (for an overview, see Lange et al., 2011). Despite the many definitions, scholars agree that reputation is a perceptual phenomenon that is based on the evaluation of past and expected achievements of an organization, and it can contribute to the creation of value for the organization and its stakeholders (Eisenegger, 2005; Vidaver-Cohen, 2007; Vercic et al., 2016). A good reputation is also shown to be a competitive advantage for universities. It influences the university choice of graduating high school students (Conard and Conard, 2000; Nguyen and LeBlanc, 2001; Briggs, 2006; Bowman and Bastedo, 2009), increases the satisfaction of students (Plewa et al., 2016) as well as student loyalty (Sung and Yang, 2009) and is an advantage for its graduates when looking for a job (Rindova et al., 2005).The media and university reputation\nHypothesis development: Reputation dimensions and evaluations\nMethods: The case of Switzerland\nResults: First, descriptive results for stakeholder groups, reputation dimensions and external sources (shared URLs) are presented. Almost one-third of all tweets were written by academic stakeholders, meaning scientific organizations (24.5%) or scientists (8.1%; see Table 2). About one out of five tweets was posted by news media (7.0%), specialized media (11.6%) or journalists (5.7%). Within the societal stakeholder group, businesses (19.6%), individuals (5.6%) and politics (5.2%) were the most important user categories. Tweets by politicians (M = 11.9), authorities (M = 8.9) and scientists (M = 7.2) generated the most reactions.To measure reputation, the reputation index by Eisenegger (2005) was used. The index was created to measure reputation as an aggregate of evaluations of an organization in media articles. For this study, the index was applied for evaluations in tweets instead of media articles. It is, thus, calculated by subtracting all tweets with a positive tone from the number of tweets with a negative tone and then dividing the result by the total number of tweets (including tweets with a balanced or neutral tone). For most stakeholders, a positive reputation of the universities was found (see Table 2). Only the news media (RI = -4.4), journalists (RI = -5.4) and students (RI = -9.1) evaluated the universities predominantly negative in their tweets.The scientific dimension of reputation was clearly predominant in the debate about Swiss universities on Twitter (see Table 3). In all, 71.6% of tweets referred to the realm of science, with research (37.7%) and events (21.3%) being the most important topics. The corporate reputation dimension was mentioned in 28.3% of the tweets. Tweets mentioning the topics CSR and ethics (M = 8.0) generated the most reactions, followed by finances (M = 5.9) and personnel (M = 5.8). Only within the topics of CSR and ethics (RI = -34.8) and regulation (RI = -8.4) were the universities evaluated negatively.As shown in Table 4, in tweets about Swiss universities, URLs with academic content were shared most often (26.6%), followed by news media (20.5%), special media (13.3%) and societal sources (12.9%). Only approximately one out of four tweets did not contain any URLs (26.8%). Tweets with URLs of news media websites generated the highest average reactions (M = 6.0). News media content (RI = 4.3) also led to a lower reputation than other sources.Hypotheses for reputation dimensions and evaluations\nDiscussion: The study at hand is one of the first to comprehensively analyze the formation of reputation of universities on Twitter and the influence of content, stakeholder groups and shared sources (URLs) in this process. This study illustrated that university reputation is a multifaceted construct on different levels. It showed that university reputation on Twitter depends on the stakeholder groups and the reputation dimensions under review, as both factors influence the evaluations as well as the number of reactions to tweets. By considering these different aspects of multidimensionality, the study makes a valuable contribution to a comprehensive understanding of university reputation in a social media environment. The study also makes a first step toward a prominently articulated research desideratum to \"pinpointing the dimensions or essential aspects that influence [university reputation] and determining whether their degree of influence differs when considering the perspectives of different stakeholders or individuals from different geographical areas\" (Lafuente-Ruiz-de-Sabando et al., 2018, p. 8). Further research could test the validity and reliability of the dimensions which were used in the content analysis, for instance, with survey data. Such research would also shed light on the validity of analyzing reputation with a content analysis of social media data.Taken together, the results indicate a discrepancy between the scientific reputation (Weingart and Pansegrau, 1999) and the corporate reputation of a university (Vercic et al., 2016). Academic stakeholder groups valued different topics and evaluated universities more positively than societal stakeholders or the media. They focused on the merits of universities within science, whereas a critical perspective on universities was rather seldomly articulated. The media, in contrast, were a source of negativity in the debate about universities on Twitter. This, on the one hand, can be traced back to their orientation toward news value, and especially negativity. On the other hand, it might also be a result of their focus on societal implications of research or the organizational behavior of universities, through which the media perform their role as watchdogs in society. For societal stakeholder groups, the results were mixed, as this group was also the most heterogeneous. Business stakeholders were the most active users within the societal stakeholder group and used more positive ratings compared to, for instance, politicians. The latter were more critical toward universities, albeit in sum, their evaluation was still positive.With the differentiation between the author of the tweet and the source of information in tweets, the study also provided insights in agenda-building processes on Twitter. The results indicated that the news media were not very successful with their tweets, and they did not use Twitter in a dialogic way but instead mainly promoted their own articles. However, the media were an important source of information for other stakeholder groups. One out of three tweets contained content which was produced by media organizations. This shows that the media still play an important role in the formation of reputation on social media. This adds a nuance to the question if the news media or social media are more important in the process of reputation formation (Etter et al., 2019; Blevins and Ragozzino, 2019). The results suggest that on social networks like Twitter, the media are one among many, though important, stakeholder participating in the process of reputation formation.Practical implications\n",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Purpose: This study investigated the reputation of Swiss universities on Twitter. It gives detailed insights on how the reputation of universities was constituted in a digitized media environment.\nDesign/methodology/approach: The reputation of universities was conceptualized as a multidimensional construct with an overarching scientific and corporate dimension. It was measured for academic and societal stakeholders as well as for the media. Tweets about Swiss universities were collected through the Twitter application programming interface (API) and analyzed with a manual content analysis.\nFindings: Academic stakeholders had a stronger focus on the scientific dimension of reputation and evaluated universities more positively than societal stakeholders or the news media. The news media were the main source of negative evaluations of universities on Twitter.\nResearch limitations/implications: The study showed a dichotomy between the scientific dimension on the one hand, and the corporate dimensions of reputation on the other hand, and thus implies a decoupling of scientific and corporate reputation. However, the findings should be explored beyond Twitter to be more generalizable.\nPractical implications: The news media play an important role in the constitution of the scientific and corporate reputation of universities on Twitter. An orientation toward the news media, therefore, remains a promising strategy to manage reputation.\nSocial implications: The news media are an important source of information for academic and societal stakeholders. Thus, they can contribute to integrating academic and societal stakeholder groups by producing a common base of knowledge of higher education and its organizations.\nOriginality/value: This is the first study to comprehensively measure the reputation of universities on Twitter.\n",
"role": "assistant"
}
] |
Customer portfolios - challenges of internal and external alignment
|
[
"Communication",
"Legitimacy",
"Alignment",
"Customer portfolios",
"Interaction space"
] |
[
{
"content": "Summarize the following paper into structured abstract.\n\nIntroduction: Handling customers and their various needs is a central issue in marketing strategy. Customer portfolio models have been recommended as a tool to help to determine how to handle customers differently in accordance with a focal firm's strategic aims and prioritizations (Fiocca, 1982, Turnbull, 1990; Anderson and Narus, 2001; Terho and Halinen, 2012). Customer portfolios can also be seen as one of the key levels at which business markets are managed (Moller and Halinen, 2000; Wilke and Ritter, 2006; Terho and Halinen, 2012). A firm's customer portfolio should provide an overview of its various customer relationships and help guide, handle, prioritize, and allocate a firm's limited resources to ensure the best collection of customer relationships (Turnbull, 1990). At the same time, consideration needs to be given to scarcity of resources and understanding that relationships bind resources that can only be invested once (Hakansson and Snehota, 1989). In this sense, a customer portfolio can be defined as: the customers that provide an organization with the opportunity to achieve a balance of its resource utilization and capability deployment whilst ensuring that it achieves profit maximization both now and in the future. In this way, customer portfolios can be used to balance the implementation of strategic aims of the firm as it addresses the composition of its customer base.\nLiterature review: In the sections below we review the relationship portfolio planning literature and the sales literature, with a view to understanding how alignment of portfolios can be enacted and the challenges this enactment brings. The overall aim of the literature review has been to discover important variables relevant to the topic and then using this to synthesize and develop a new perspective (Hart, 1998). In the literature review we searched well-established databases[1] and the IMP archive[2] to identify contributions that have a relational view on portfolio and sales management. The literature search focused upon business-to-business marketing and sales literature. The first and main search used customer portfolios and sales management as the criteria. These abstracts were reviewed to identify articles containing a relational view of customer portfolios and sales. Further searches have been carried out on specific areas such as alignment and legitimacy to support our conceptual elaboration. Finally, to identify additional relevant articles and books a snowballing technique was applied.\nPortfolio alignment: a conceptual framework: The above discussion goes some way to identifying the important issues related to customer portfolio alignment and partially answers our first research question: Alignment requires taking both internal and external factors into account. We see such consideration as generic for all actors in networks both on the selling and purchasing side of firms. Figure 1 and the discussion below describe this process in more detail and provide our answer to the second question that drives our research: how can these issues be internally and externally addressed by a focal firm.\nConclusion: In answer to our first research question, alignment of customer portfolios highlights a number of issues. First of all, it is important to understand the nature of a relationship and how it may affect a firm's possible actions. In a relationship both parties have aims, make prioritizations, and want to allocate resources. This can potentially result in a misalignment of strategic aims when the aims and prioritizations of the other party are not taken into consideration and/or both parties do not share similar aims or priorities. It is vital to understand what is interpreted as legitimate actions by the other firm and what kind of pressure conflicting aims and prioritizations will have on the organization. In answer to our second research question:\nManagerial implications: The notions of alignment and misalignment relate to the dynamic nature of customer portfolios. Our framework, see Figure 1, illustrates the importance of understanding the actions and activities that should take place within the interaction space and how potential differences in the strategic aims of the two parties involved need to be taken into consideration during this alignment process.\n",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to extend the discussion about customer portfolios beyond simple identification of models and how they can be used for balanced resource allocation to a discussion about how portfolios should take into account views from relationship partners and how they should be aligned in internal as well as a relational context.\nDesign/methodology/approach: The portfolio literature is reviewed (most recent, seminal, IMP related) and considered in the context of both the sales organization and the customers involved in the portfolio. A conceptual framework is introduced that helps improve the understanding of how customer portfolio models can actually be applied from a relational perspective.\nFindings: The key aspects of the conceptual framework relate to how alignment of the relationships in the portfolio is achieved. Critical to this are the interaction spaces that facilitate communication relating to alignment and provide the context for the legitimacy of these actions to be discussed.\nResearch limitations/implications: This framework needs to be empirically explored.\nPractical implications: Understanding of alignment and misalignment processes in customer portfolios gives managers a tool to help to cope with the dynamic aspects of the customer portfolio. Recognition of the importance of communication to the process, the development of trust and the role of legitimacy also provides areas that managers can focus upon in their relationship management processes.\nOriginality/value: This conceptualization moves the consideration of relationship/customer portfolios beyond simply that of a resource allocation tool into a process that facilitates the use of the portfolio in relational processes and thus aids their understanding of how portfolios can be usefully applied.\n",
"role": "assistant"
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] |
Influence of evolving culture on leadership: a study of Fijian cooperatives
|
[
"Leadership",
"Leadership culture",
"Fiji",
"Cooperatives",
"Hybrid leadership"
] |
[
{
"content": "Summarize the following paper into structured abstract.\n\nIntroduction: Leadership in organizations is effective when it can adapt strategically to changing situations and also to what is deemed appropriate to people, groups, culture, place or time (Kriger and Zhovtobryukh, 2013). When situations change, leaders need to be adaptable, and skilled leaders must attend to these situations strategically by varying their style of leading. Strategic leaders require the skills to anticipate, interpret, challenge, decide, align and learn from diverse operating contexts (Schoemaker et al., 2013).\nLiterature review: The multidimensional construct of leadership\nFijian society: Fiji is a small nation state in the South Pacific region located at the junction of Melanesia and Polynesia. A British colony for a century, the country became an independent nation in 1970 as a democracy within the British Commonwealth. Fijian society has a complex traditional social structure characterized by kinship groups led by indigenous (iTaukei) chiefs, organized into tribes, clans and families (Sutherland, 1984). While leadership is no longer confined to chieftainship, iTaukei chiefs continue to be authoritative, delegative and accommodating to the needs of their communities (Ramesh, 2003). This traditional leadership gradually changed throughout the colonial and post-colonial eras. Christianity was introduced in the nineteenth century as a new religion and the idea of trading had implications on the Fijian way of life (Lal, 1992) and thus the way its traditional chiefly leaders interact with members of their community. As chiefs converted to Christianity, their people also converted. Today, approximately 65 per cent of Fijians are Christians, with other religions, especially Hinduism, Sikh and Islam, also prominent (Fiji Bureau of Statistics, 2012). Fiji is one of the most multicultural nations in the South Pacific region with a population of indigenous Fijians (57 per cent), Indians (37 per cent) and the remaining being Rotuman, European, Chinese and other Pacific islanders (Fiji Bureau of Statistics, 2012).\nMethodology: This exploratory study examined leaders' experiences of managing Fijian cooperatives. Adopting a social constructionist ontology (Phillips and Hardy, 2002), study participants were selected with theoretical sampling to maximize diversity and the potential to generate new theory (Eisenhardt, 1989). Theoretical sampling is the process of selecting participants with the potential to influence emerging theory based on concepts that emerged from the literature review and data collection. Eight cooperatives were recruited to this study reflecting diversity in the nature and location of the cooperative, its outreach (urban or rural), age, size of operation, sources of income and types of business activities. All conducted a business with the aim of creating economic and societal impact. A leader of each cooperative was interviewed who held a responsible position such as Chairperson, Manager or Director. Each was knowledgeable and influential in the decision-making processes for the organization (see Table I). These leaders were encouraged to freely express their views about their leadership experiences in semi-structured interviews lasting approximately 30 min.\nFindings: Leadership in Fijian cooperatives is diverse and embedded in an evolving cultural and political context. Participants in this study expressed concerns towards development challenges faced in Fiji and these concerns help explain their intentions when interacting with members and followers. In this study, leaders combined transactional, visionary, transformational, democratic, authoritative and delegative styles into a hybrid leadership approach. Transactional leadership was the dominant style adopted with other styles integrated in response to cultural changes brought about by local, political, social, economic and cultural factors. We argue that the evolving leadership culture in Fijian society affects the way leaders are expected to behave and this shapes their attitude towards leadership in cooperative organizations. The following section provides details and discusses the implications of these findings which are summarized in Table II.\nDiscussion: The results of this study contribute valuable new understandings of the effects of an evolving culture in Fiji on styles of leading in cooperatives. Leadership does not operate as isomorphic actions, especially when societies are undergoing significant social, economic and/or political change. This finding reflects the effects of change in Pacific societies on local leadership traditions as proposed by Hassall et al. (2011). Societal changes in Fiji have effects on the local leadership culture which in turn influences the nature of organizational leadership in cooperatives and how leaders interact with their members in a culturally acceptable manner. Context-sensitivity and legitimacy of actions are important characteristics of the dialectic relationship between agents (leader/follower) in leadership. Legitimacy is a generalized assumption that the actions of an agent are culturally supported by people in the society (Suchman, 1995). Context sensitivity of leaders is viewed not only from the spatial but also temporal perspectives. Leaders adapt to changing situations strategically and appropriately to suit context, time or place. The findings from this study contribute new understandings of a hybrid leadership style of a multidimensional leader who has the capacity to vary the nature of their relationship to followers. Figure 1 illustrates the effects of social context on the relationship between multidimensional leaders and followers.\nConclusion: This study is an important step in gathering evidence of how leadership is affected by social norms, cultural practices and political arrangements in a developing country. By exploring Fijian cooperatives, we established a relationship between the changing culture and the hybrid form of leadership which is adopted to maintain connections between local leadership traditions and the need to provide new services effectively. Noting that the cultural context of leadership is complex, we find that multidimensional leaders have the capacity to adapt to social, economic, political and cultural changes in their society, and that a hybrid, context-sensitive style of leading is appropriate in a rapidly changing, or unstable social context. Strategic leaders are multidimensional as long as they have the capacity to be context-sensitive, but they are genuinely ethical when they have the capacity to maintain the moral legitimacy of their actions when adapting and responding to their local environments. Effective leaders acknowledge changing contexts, adjust their behaviour strategically through conditioning and adopt hybrid styles of leading that are perceived as legitimate and conforming to societal norms.\n",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to examine how leadership is shaped by a changing cultural context.\nDesign/methodology/approach: This is an exploratory study based on semi-structured interviews with leaders of Fijian cooperatives.\nFindings: The political and cultural environment in Fiji has changed over time, and these changing arrangements shape expectations of what is considered to be appropriate leadership in Fijian cooperatives. To be consistent with changing societal values, leaders of Fijian cooperatives employ a context-sensitive hybrid leadership style in which legitimacy is an important dimension.\nResearch implications: Researchers need to examine the cultural context as a dynamic influencing element of leadership.\nPractical implications: Leaders of cooperatives and similar values-based organizations would benefit from applying a legitimate and context-sensitive hybrid leadership style.\nOriginality/value: This study contributes new understandings of the cultural influences on organizational leadership.\n",
"role": "assistant"
}
] |
Factors associated with the publication of a CEO letter
|
[
"Portugal",
"Agency",
"Annual report",
"CEO letter",
"Isomorphism",
"Signalling"
] |
[
{
"content": "Summarize the following paper into structured abstract.\n\n1. Introduction: For several decades, many professional and regulatory bodies have advocated the expansion of corporate financial reporting to meet growing demands for information about a company's opportunities, risks and uncertainties (e.g. American Institute of Certified Public Accountants, 1994; Financial Accounting Standards Board, 2001; International Accounting Standards Board, 2010). There have been many advocates of the benefits of narrative disclosures in promoting transparency and enhancing corporate governance. A popular contention is that the complexity of full financial reports has prompted companies to provide summary reports (including narrative summaries, such as in CEO letters to shareholders) to render reported information more comprehensible. However, as Hrasky and Smith (2008) observe, there is no research evidence to support this contention.\n2. Literature review: 2.1 Theoretical background\n3. Hypotheses and independent variables: 3.1 Company size\n4. Results: 4.1 Descriptive analysis\n5. Conclusions: This exploration of the factors likely to be associated with a decision to publish a CEO letter to shareholders was conducted in a country, Portugal, which had no prior tradition of this kind of reporting. Using agency theory, concepts of isomorphism, and signalling theory, we reveal an association between the propensity for a company to publish a CEO letter and each of the following factors: level of profitability; number of foreign subsidiaries; and auditing by a Big 4 accounting firm. Finance companies are also slightly more likely to publish CEO letters than non-finance companies.\n",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Purpose: In most European code-law oriented Latin countries, the publication of a CEO's letter to shareholders in a company's annual report is a fairly recent phenomenon. In this paper, the authors seek to determine the characteristics that explain why companies in one such country, i.e. Portugal, published a CEO letter.\nDesign/methodology/approach: The paper's holistic theoretical framework draws on elements of agency theory, institutional theory and signalling theory. To understand the characteristics of Portuguese holding companies that published CEO letters, the authors used a logistic regression model to explore 266 observations over the years 2006-2011.\nFindings: The publication of a CEO letter becomes more likely if a firm is audited by a Big 4 accounting firm; has a higher level of profitability; and has a high number of foreign subsidiaries. Other findings are that finance companies are slightly more likely to publish a CEO letter than non-finance companies. The number of CEO letters increased to a peak in 2008, and then declined.\nPractical implications: The increasing number of companies now publishing a CEO letter raises the concern for regulatory authorities of whether the content of the CEO letter should be audited, since any numbers presented in the management report have to be audited in Portugal.\nOriginality/value: To the best of the authors' knowledge this is the first empirical exploration of the characteristics that explain why companies publish a CEO letter. Mimetic and normative isomorphism is revealed to be a potentially important influence, since there is a tendency of companies audited by Big 4 accounting companies, and with foreign subsidiaries, to publish a CEO letter.\n",
"role": "assistant"
}
] |
Agile learning: living with the speed of change
|
[
"Human resource management, Organizational change",
"Skill development",
"Learning",
"Learning management system",
"Agile learning",
"HR and learning professionals",
"Human resources"
] |
[
{
"content": "Summarize the following paper into structured abstract.\n\n__NO_TITLE__: The world of work is very familiar with change - it drives innovation and prosperity, and it is an unavoidable response to competition, success, failure and the shifting global economy. But, at the moment it is a challenge which many organizations are struggling to meet and there has rarely been a time when so many businesses are running so fast just to stand still. But why?\nCan learning keep pace with change?: Critically, organizational change is happening much faster than just five years ago (75 percent agree) - and given the struggling global economy, and the pace of technological change this is perhaps not surprising. Over 80 percent of HR leaders globally believe the speed of learning has to run alongside the speed of change, and as a result employees are under pressure to adapt quickly and develop their skills to meet changes in their markets, demands from their customers and the innovation of their rivals.Indeed, HR professionals fully understand their central importance in responding to this pace of change to deliver new skills and knowledge to their employees - however 70 percent believe they need to do this more rapidly than ever before. Less than one-third (30 percent) argue that HR is not faced with this challenge.Respondents were also asked whether their HR organization was actually able to deliver against the speed of change for the workforce. Worryingly, only 53 percent of large enterprises (10,000 employees or more) reported that they can currently provide the training and skills quickly enough to keep pace with how they, their markets, competitors and customers are changing, and this is a challenge which should be a shareholder concern. The picture is slightly more positive for much smaller organizations, but as the employee count grows, the challenge deepens. This presents an enormous business challenge, and one with the potential to affect a huge range of issues, from employee satisfaction and motivation, to bottom-line results. Taking the broadest possible perspective, across organizations of all sizes, some 40 percent of HR leaders reported they were unable to deliver against the speed of change.\nHow well is learning being delivered?: This is reflected in the view HR holds of its own organizational effectiveness, with just 10 percent of respondents worldwide (in organizations of all sizes) believing that HR is seen as \"extremely useful\" by employees for skills development - 22 percent of HR leaders globally think their employees do not see them as a useful partner in developing the right skills to succeed. More specifically, over 70 percent of HR managers globally believe employees see HR as providing little or no learning, or just the minimum skills for them to succeed. Less than a third think employees view HR as being able to \"future proof\" their skills and knowledge. A logical conclusion is that while the speed of change has increased, many employees are not prepared for current or future challenges.But this is not just a matter of HR's view of employee perception. HR's view of its own effectiveness in delivering learning is just as compelling - over 50 percent of HR managers globally report that HR in their organization is not delivering to its full potential in providing employees with the right training and knowledge for their role (rising to over 60 percent for large enterprises). So, how effective do they actually think they are being? Clearly, HR professionals themselves see considerable scope for improvement - their average assessment is that HR is only delivering to 39 percent of its potential for employee skills and knowledge development. At its most extreme, some 15 percent of HR professionals across organizations of all sizes feel HR is only delivering learning at just 10 percent or less of its full potential.Looking at that situation more positively, any organization operating within these levels of HR/learning effectiveness has clear opportunities for significantly impacting organizational performance through the delivery of the right learning blend, to the right people, at the right time.\nWhere do we go to learn?: This shortfall has practical consequences, with 40 percent of HR managers worldwide claiming that employees would not seek help from HR if they needed to develop new knowledge or skills quickly. This is likely to be due to a number of factors, including previous experience or the approach to learning taken by many employers, which is often characterized by a focus on baseline skills, or at the other extreme, on organizational elites.In fact, HR argues that employees actually see their colleagues as a more valuable resource for acquiring new skills or knowledge than their internal learning management systems (LMS), and LMS's in general are only marginally more valuable than Google or employees' own professional networks when they need to quickly acquire new skills or knowledge. This is intuitive, but if these colleagues have not received formal or approved learning there is no possible control of quality and effectiveness.The impact should be as worrying for senior management as it is clearly becoming for employees. Given the shortfall in timely learning delivery and the difficulty both HR practitioners and employees have in keeping up with the pace of change, HR managers report that 32 percent of their employees feel insecure in their jobs because their skills and knowledge are not up-to-date.\nResponding with agile learning: To bridge these gaps, learning strategies will need to become much more \"agile\", and respond far more quickly to change, with the minimum gap between \"need identified and learning deployed\".What we term \"agile learning\" is the ability to respond incredibly quickly to change, ensuring the minimum gap between \"need identified\" and \"learning deployed.\" This can be done using hands-on experts to deliver strong learning content geared towards today's diverse working culture, using tools employees trust and actively want to use.Finally, it will require a change in the way HR professionals think of learning - developing an agile learning function requires us to develop new skillsets, toolsets and a new mindset.\n",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Purpose: - The purpose of this paper is to identify whether HR leaders could prepare and train their workforce for tomorrow's skills demand.\nDesign/methodology/approach: - A survey was commissioned by Lumesse contact database and third party research house, Survey Shack, which ran from 6-17 August 2012. Respondents were sourced from 24 different countries and worked in SMEs of less than 1,000 employees to enterprise-sized organisations with more than 50,000 employees.\nFindings: - Over a third of HR leaders believe they cannot sufficiently prepare their workforce for tomorrow's skills demand, leaving one in three employees feeling insecure in their job as a result. Only 10 per cent worldwide believe HR is seen as an \"extremely useful partner\" by employees for skills development; over 70 per cent of HR leaders believe that employees see HR as providing little or no learning, or just the minimum skills for them to succeed; and 40 per cent of HR leaders believe that employees would not seek help from HR if they needed to develop new knowledge or skills quickly. The majority of employees see their colleagues as a more valuable resource for acquiring new skills or knowledge than their internal Learning Management Systems.\nPractical implications: - The paper will help HR leaders understand the benefits of adopting more agile tools and approaches to learning and development programmes in organisations\nOriginality/value: - This paper is valuable to HR leaders and learning professionals needing to understand how best to implement valuable learning and skills for employees, to keep up with the speed of change.\n",
"role": "assistant"
}
] |
Clothing consumption culture of a neo-tribe: Gay professionals within the subculture of gay consumers
|
[
"Canada",
"Interviews",
"Theory of reasoned action",
"Clothing consumption culture",
"Gay professionals",
"Neo-tribes"
] |
[
{
"content": "Summarize the following paper into structured abstract.\n\nIntroduction: \"Homosexuality is a way of being, one that can completely influence a person's life and shape its meaning and direction\" (Grahn, 1984, p. 38). Even though homosexual men have some similarities to heterosexual men, they also possess some distinct characteristics. They have been perceived as distinct consumers as well (Gudelunas, 2011). Designated a \"Dream Market\" (Penaloza, 1996) gay consumers constitute a viable and powerful market segment (Reilly et al., 2008). As consumers of above average education with strong interests in hedonic consumption pursuits they offer immense potential market (Schofield and Schmidt, 2005).\nClothing research on gay consumers: The available research on gay consumers' clothing consumption examined a number of relevant rudiments such as aesthetic, semiotic and behavioural factors. From the aesthetic perspective, research studies have identified particular clothing aesthetic codes serving to form a style within the gay community (Fischer, 1977). Distinct preferences in terms of clothing style and fragrance choices distinguishing homosexual men from heterosexual men were also revealed (Snezek, 1986; Rudd, 1996). Abraham-Murali and Littrell (1995) also found the importance of colour and texture in creating aesthetic experiences for gay consumers. Furthermore, compared to their heterosexual counterparts, trendy clothing styles are preferred more by homosexual men (Rudd, 1992). From the semiotic perspective, semiotic codes have also been identified as values underlying appearance management among homosexual students. Kates (2004) noted the importance of symbolic meanings of consumption to gay consumers. Rudd (1996) also found homosexual students to exhibit significantly different responses to innovative, trendy variations in various categories of dress such as dramatic, athletic, classic and romantic categories.\nPostmodern consumer research: tribal approach to consumer behaviour: Traditional research studies in the field of marketing have focused on understanding sub-cultures of consumers and brand communities (among others) to help marketers direct their efforts in reaching out to consumers. Postmodern studies, on the other hand, changed the focus to the tribal aspect of consumption (Cova and Cova, 2001). Under this context, a consumer tribe consists of a group of people who use the social value of products and services to connect and create a community (Cova, 1997; Cova and Cova, 2002). In addition, Bauman (1992) considers consumer tribes or neo-tribes as groups that emphasize symbolism to show adherence to the group by its members. Thus, emotional elements are deemed as more important than rational elements to the tribal members (Mitchell and Imrie, 2011). These consumer tribes are perceived as different from sub-cultural groups in that their connections are much more narrow and they want to set themselves apart from dominant cultural groups (Mitchell and Imrie, 2011).\nConceptual framework: Ajzen and Fishbein's (1980) theory of reasoned action has served as the theoretical foundation for this study. This theory supposes that there must be reasons behind any individual's behaviour, that is, people consider the implications and consequences of their actions before they decide to engage or not engage in a given behaviour. Sheppard et al. (1988) stated that, \"not only does the model appear to predict consumer intentions and behaviour quite well, it also provides a relatively simple basis for identifying where and how to target consumers' behavioural change attempts\" (Sheppard et al., 1988, p. 325). This theory has been widely used in consumer behaviour research to understand and predict the purchase behaviour for various products, such as the consumption behaviour of olive oil (Thompson et al., 1994), alcohol-free beer (Thompson and Thompson, 1996), environmentally responsible products (Follows and Jobber, 1999), newspapers, breakfast cereal and kitchen paper towels (Walker and Knox, 1997). Belleau et al. (2007) have also used the theory of reasoned action (Ajzen and Fishbein, 1980) as a predictive tool in examining the purchase intention of a generation Y consumer group and found it to be relevant in the clothing consumption context.\nResearch methodology: A qualitative research approach using interview method was applied. This technique gathers information through face-to-face contact with individuals (Berg and Lune, 2012). It is useful for exploring details or probing for latent attitudes and feelings. The semi-standardized format was adopted. It allowed a number of predetermined questions based on the conceptual framework as well as offered freedom to probe further (Berg and Lune, 2012). In-depth interview questions were developed based on the proposed conceptual framework.\nFindings: The findings captured through in-depth interviews in this investigation are presented in two parts. The first consists of general clothing consumption cultural manifestations including stereotypical as well as non-stereotypical understandings. In the second part, deeper understandings of the clothing cultural manifestation, specifically of a neo-tribe of gay professionals are presented.\nDiscussions: Overall, findings from the in-depth interviews provided evidence to better understand the clothing consumption behaviour of a neo-tribe, gay professionals, within the context of attitude and behaviour framework as proposed in the theory of reasoned action (Ajzen and Fishbein, 1980). In the present study, the specific neo-tribe of gay professionals was examined in-depth. In the first place, the findings indicate the stereotypical understandings as well as additional insights into the clothing consumption phenomena of gay consumers. The unique nature of gay consumers and their diverse clothing consumption culture manifestation indicates the notion of various neo-tribes (Schofield and Schmidt, 2005) within the gay consumers sub-cultural group. Specifically, it is to be recognized that within the gay consumer sub-cultural group there exists neo-tribes such as gay ghetto consumers, martini bar consumers and leather bar consumers. This leads the need to focus on unique differences among them as well as inherent similarities between these consumers.\nConclusion: Overall, findings from this study support the notion of neo-tribes which are defined much more narrowly and differ from the dominant cultural group (Mitchell and Imrie, 2011). The results indicated the existence of multiple neo-tribes within the gay community. Furthermore, in comparison with other neo-tribes of gay consumers, this study found that gay professionals possess characteristics, such as an elevated mindset and self-identity, that differentiate them from the rest of the gay community. This study also captured the notion of neo-tribes as being different from the brand loyal consumers that form a specific brand community. Gay professionals in this study indicated their preference for quality over brand loyalty. However, it is also important to note that branding is a multidimensional concept. There could still be some deeper reflections at the subconscious level thus not acknowledged by the respondents in this study.\n",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Purpose: A number of postmodern consumer scholars have their attention on the consumption behaviour of neo-tribes. Changing gender roles and households' consumption practices have also shaped new sets of cultural manifestations for the clothing consumption milieu. The purpose of this paper is to explore the clothing consumption culture of a neo-tribe, gay professionals within the subculture of gay consumers.\nDesign/methodology/approach: An extended conceptual framework built upon Ajzen and Fishbein's (1980) theory of \"reasoned action\" served as the conceptual guideline for this study. Specifically, the attitude-behaviour framework is proposed and employed to better understand the clothing consumption behaviour of a neo-tribe consisting of gay professionals. Personal in-depth interviews were conducted in a metropolitan city as well as two small towns in Canada.\nFindings: Stereotypical as well as non-stereotypical understandings are offered. The findings from this study portrayed the gay professions of this neo-tribe as rational and practical. Personal psychological factors, social factors and marketplace factors relevant to a neo-tribe of gay professionals are documented and deeper insights are presented.\nResearch limitations/implications: Findings challenge the existing understanding of fashion manifestation for this consumers group. However, this study may be of limited scope. Future studies should further examine the clothing consumption cultural manifestations of other neo-tribes within the gay community.\nPractical implications: The interviewees consistently demonstrated their positive attitudes towards quality, stylish and conservative clothing. For marketers it is crucial to perceive the gay community as a non-homogeneous market segment. There is a need to understand different consumption practices within this community and to tailor marketing mix elements accordingly.\nOriginality/value: This study has extended the understanding of the neo-tribes of gay consumers. In addition, this study offers the clothing consumption reality of a neo-tribe encompassing gay professionals. This study illuminates their rational and practical clothing consumption cultural manifestations and clothing consumption behaviour. These insights further enrich the general understandings that exist in the area of consumer research.\n",
"role": "assistant"
}
] |
Breaking the glass ceiling: opportunity for the organization
|
[
"Mentoring",
"Glass ceiling",
"Stereotyping",
"Glass cliff",
"Gender diversity"
] |
[
{
"content": "Summarize the following paper into structured abstract.\n\nIntroduction: Organizations face certain challenges that hinder their performance and gender discrimination is one of such issues confronting organizations. Despite adequate qualifications, varied experiences, and achievements, female employees are unable to climb the corporate ladder. They face organizational and supervisor biases that hinder their performance. These biases have been termed as the glass ceiling effect. The paper discusses reasons of the glass ceiling and how it impedes personal and professional growth of women employees. Women constitute 50 percent of the population of a nation. For inclusive growth of a nation, equal gender participation in the workforce is an imminent requirement. Organizations encourage participation of women, as they possess certain competencies: professional, social, and personal defining their talent. These competencies are beneficial for organizational performance. Therefore, the paper reviews academic literature and theories rationalizing gender diversity initiatives of the organizations and discusses interventions to break the glass ceiling.\nLiterature review: Researchers have identified that gender diversity initiatives by organizations have improved their brand image (Desvaux et al., 2007), corporate governance norms (Adams and Ferreira, 2009), corporate communication, stakeholder relations, social responsibility (Soares et al., 2011), creativity and innovation (Danilda, 2011; Diaz-Garcia et al., 2013), work ethics (Akaah, 1989), employer branding (Liu, 2010), customer satisfaction (Desvaux et al., 2007), and overall financial performance (Campbell and Minguez-Vera, 2007; Marinova et al., 2010). Human capital theory rationalizes contributions of female executives to the organizational performance because of their inherent skills, traits, and competencies (Singh et al., 2008). Despite their discernible contribution to overall organizational performance, still most corporate have been callous toward gender diversity (Jackson, 2001). One of the reasons for their callousness is prevailing old boys' network (Gamba and Kleiner, 2001) and gender stereotyping (Heilman, 1997). The old boys' network is an informal channel through which male executives of the same social class, profession, and interest group develop acquaintance, show affiliations, and seek each other's assistance for their personal and professional growth, excluding female executives from the network. Gender stereotyping is having a pejorative attitude toward women employees in the organization. Male managers generally perceive their female subordinates to be a poor performer and have lower expectations of their performance. They accord less importance for their professional development. Stereotyping is deeply rooted in the culture that perceives women to be suitable for specific roles; such as caregiver and home maker. It has etched an indelible mark in the mindset of people and it would take relentless efforts to erase it from their behavior. One of the common perception is that men are leaders and women are followers supporting them at work. Many female executives exhibit aggressiveness and dominance in their management style. They have been perceived as \"bossy\" and \"pushy\" whereas male managers exhibiting such behavior have been termed as \"great leader,\" reflecting the gender stereotype in the work culture of organizations (Eyring and Stead, 1998). Lack of appropriate career development programs for women and absence of gender sensitization initiatives further adds to the apathy of women employees (Ragins et al., 1998). Managing both personal and professional life becomes difficult for them (Doerfler and Kammer, 1986). Stakeholder theory rationalizes that sustaining in a dynamic environment organization requires building rapport with both internal and external stakeholders (Francoeur et al., 2008). Internal stakeholders are employees, trade unions, and shareholders, whereas external stakeholders are banks, government, customers, society, intermediaries, media, and suppliers. Female possess emotional intelligence, adapts, and establish an amicable relationship with stakeholders to improve firm performance.\nMethodology: This paper reviews, databases of Emerald, EBSCO, Elsevier, Springer, and Google Scholar from the year 1986-2014 to develop a conceptual framework.\nConceptual framework of glass ceiling and its intervention: Female competencies: professional, social, and personal, contribute to the organizational performance and provide competitive advantage to the firm (Bakanauskiene and Martinkiene, 2011). The first conceptual framework highlights antecedents of glass ceiling (Figure 1); the second conceptual framework shows the supervisor and organizational barriers, impeding organizational performance (Figure 2). Supervisor barriers consist of self-fulfilling prophecy, stereotype, old boys' network, and lack of psychosocial support. Organizational barriers consist of absence of gender inclusive policies, diversity initiative, career and development planning, work life balance, supportive culture, and top management support.\nDiscussion: Gender stereotyping is a stumbling block to women's upward mobility in the corporate hierarchy. Women are stereotyped for holding family responsibility of child rearing, nursing, cooking, and other household chores. They are perceived as incapable of handling professional responsibilities (Wood, 2008). Stereotypes and misconceptions about women employees need to be erased. Psychosocial support given by the top management to the female employees can discourage their attrition and enhance equal gender participation. They should support diversity initiatives in the organization and continuously get the timely feedback. Career and developmental planning would equip women employees with necessary skills required for senior management positions. Succession planning can be managed if female mentors are assigned for young female executives. Old boys' network and macho culture in an organization are barriers to their career advancement and progression. Therefore, establishing women's networking groups through inclusion of women in formal/informal channels can provide a long-term solution (Linehan, 2001). However, succession planning in an organization is mostly meant for men. Female talent can be developed and equipped with requisite competencies for key managerial position. More budgets to be allocated to gender diversity initiatives in diversity and inclusion programs. Support of male counterparts in recognizing female talent is encouraged. More emphasis to be given to flextime, child care, elderly care programs, and job sharing as it motivates female employees to stick to the organization, perform better, and reduce glass ceiling. Inspire-engage-transform strategy to be taken by top management to retain female employees.\nManagerial implications: This review will help in identifying barriers and develop necessary strategies to develop gender diversity initiatives in the organization. Participation of women in every echelon of management will help firms accrue benefits in terms of financial performance, brand image, employer branding, strong corporate governance, and innovation.\n",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to decipher the benefits of breaking the glass ceiling in the organization, providing strategies to overcome it, and discussing the benefits availed by the organization in bringing more participation from women in middle and senior level management.\nDesign/methodology/approach: This paper critically analyses the literature on women's contribution to the organization's success, their barriers to their advancement to corporate hierarchy, and breaking the glass ceiling, supported by appropriate theories.\nFindings: Gender diversity initiatives are perquisite for an organization\nResearch limitations/implications: With understanding the benefits of gender diversity initiatives, an organization will emphasize more on the development of female employees personally and professionally. This, in turn, will help organizations in terms of productivity.\nOriginality/value: Originality and value with understanding the benefits of gender diversity initiatives in an organization can focus more on growth and development aspects of female employees by breaking the glass ceiling and recognizing their competencies, qualifications, and achievement. This will lead to more participation of women in every echelon of management, resulting in firm performance.\n",
"role": "assistant"
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Kentz builds South Africa's workforce of tomorrow: Company teams up with government to overcome skill shortages
|
[
"Training",
"Engineering",
"Construction industry",
"South Africa",
"Skills"
] |
[
{
"content": "Summarize the following paper into structured abstract.\n\n__NO_TITLE__: A major international company is helping to overcome the shortage of skilled workers in the fast-growing South African construction and engineering industry by training people of its own.\nTraining center established: Kentz Training Solutions set up a training center to supply skills to meet project requirements throughout South Africa and neighboring countries. The initiative needed to follow South African law regulating training and development, and ensure that trainees received the correct standard of training as outlined by the industry sector education and training authority (Seta).The training programs were accredited and the training center was approved by the Seta concerned. The training began in March 2010 with a course for nine welders. There are now 67 trainees at the center. The aim is to increase competency, reduce health and safety risks and improve the quality of work.The training center, based at Chamdor, Johannesburg, offers courses in welding, boiler-making, pipe fitting and steel erecting. The training is 70 percent practical and 30 percent theoretical. The inclusion of theory is unusual in the construction industry, but it is hoped that it will be useful both for Kentz as well as the trainees.Some training programs are administered in different languages. For example, the welder-training program is conducted in the preferred language of the trainees. The trainees involved in the boiler-making and pipe-fitting program can take part in various tasks on site relating to their discipline.In order to ensure safety, some training is conducted in cubicles. The training center has 14 cubicles, equipped with jigs, work-benches and cylinder partitions for welder training.\nSpecialist training initiatives: As the construction industry becomes ever more complex, more technical training becomes necessary, often for specialized equipment. Kentz identified a need for specialized Siemens training around the area of Vanderbijlpark, south of Johannesburg.The courses, done on Siemens equipment and approved by Siemens and Kentz Training Solutions, are offered to Kentz personnel and outside candidates. At the Siemens Industry Automation Partner awards 2010 in South Africa, Kentz Training Solutions received the Best Training Partner award for being the best Siemens training ambassador.Kentz is one of the six training partners for Siemens Training (Sitrain), whose courses in automation and industrial solutions are available worldwide and provide extensive expertise directly from the manufacturer. Classes can be taken in a traditional classroom or by using learning and communication media such as web-based training.One area of the Kentz Training Solutions training center has been opened as a \"production area\", or realistic work environment. Once trainees have completed their three months in the training workshop, they move to the production area. Here they carry out actual work for various projects throughout Kentz under the supervision of the fabrication-workshop manager.Trainees are assessed again after three months and, if successful, move to the main fabrication workshop. Once the trainees have that experience and have been assessed after a further three months, trainers can tell if they are fit to work on a project anywhere in Kentz Africa.A number of trainees for boiler-makers and pipe-fitters were taken into the training center in June 2010 and completed in September. They made excellent progress and the assessors believe that they will be able to perform as competent craftsmen.Kentz is working on the Medupi power station in Lephalale, Limpopo - the biggest coal-fire power station under construction in the world. Kentz is to train and qualify 75 people on completion of the project, which is estimated at four years.For this reason, Kentz decided to develop a training facility on site. This allows trainees to be close to the actual project in operation. A lecture room, training workshop and fully equipped store area have been established on site. This ensures that training can be done in-house and no other training providers are necessary. To date, the project is on track and in line with the training plan.\nExcellent results: Kentz in South Africa is pleased with the success of the various training initiatives to date. Results from the trainees have been excellent and there are plans to continue to fund the Kentz Training Solutions Chamdor site as an innovative center for training.Despite the slackening of the South African economy, the construction industry will continue to grow and will need skilled and trained people for the future. Companies like Kentz will need to continue to co-operate with governments and to offer stakeholders investment in time, effort and capital to help to ensure that the skills are available to help both organizations and countries to prosper in the future.Kentz Corporation Limited, operating in 27 countries across six continents, employs 11,700 people worldwide. The South African subsidiary began in 1979 with an oil and gas project. In 1982 the first office opened in Johannesburg. More than 30 years later, Kentz South Africa operates in African countries including Nigeria, Madagascar, Sierra Leone, Mozambique, Botswana and Zambia. The company's African operations contribute around US$300 million a year to Kentz's US$1.6 billion turnover.\nComment: \"Addressing scarce construction skills for competitive advantage: a case study\", by Hayley Barker, regional human-resources manager, Africa, Kentz (Pty) Ltd and Hadyn Ingram, principal consultant, Corporate Learning Consultants Ltd, considers the benefits of investment in training for scarce skills in the South African construction and engineering industry. The authors suggest that reducing skill shortages provides benefits for organizations, individuals, families, regions and national economies. The paper urges companies to work with national governments to reduce skill shortages and reveals that companies can obtain competitive advantage through investment in training. More information is available by e-mailing Hadyn Ingram, at hingram@yourclearadvantage.com\n",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Purpose: - This paper aims to consider how major international company Kentz Corporation is helping to overcome the shortage of skilled workers in the fast-growing South African construction and engineering industry by training people of its own.\nDesign/methodology/approach: - The paper examines the reasons for the training, the form it takes and the results it has achieved.\nFindings: - The paper considers several training methods, both on- and off site, and looks at more innovative modes of training. It claims that companies can work with national governments to address skill shortages and can obtain competitive advantage and customer satisfaction as a result of investment and innovation in training initiatives.\nPractical implications: - The paper explains that, to date, the Kentz scheme has enjoyed success in South Africa in providing tradespeople at all levels in the national construction and engineering industry.\nSocial implications: - The paper suggests that addressing training shortages provides benefits for organizations, individuals, families, regions and national economies.\nOriginality/value: - The paper illustrates how investment in training to combat skill shortages can increase an organization's competitive advantage.\n",
"role": "assistant"
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] |
Addressing the research needs of the insurance sector
|
[
"Insurance",
"Research practice",
"Research challenges",
"Methodology",
"Research methods"
] |
[
{
"content": "Summarize the following paper into structured abstract.\n\n__NO_TITLE__: To provide a contextual backdrop to this special issue on insurance, the results of recently conducted research within the insurance sector are outlined here1. This research included themes relevant to this special issue and explored the areas in, which research is currently being conducted by insurance research practitioners and the challenges they face when conducting this research.\nWhat types of research are insurance practitioners currently conducting?: Insurance practitioners are currently conducting a wide range of research with numerous audiences. Customer satisfaction was a key focus for all research practitioners and covered the total service experience from premium quote to claim handling to renewal.We do a lot of satisfaction tracking and opinion tracking. We have three audiences, we have the consumer and policyholders, then we have intermediaries and we also have employers as well (Practitioner no. 8).In the general insurance context, customers fall into two broad groups. In the intermediated market, where insurance companies transact insurance typically via a broker, the intermediary is one type of customer. In the intermediated and direct market the policyholder (also called the end customer in the intermediated market) is the second type of customer. Policyholders can be either private individuals (for personal insurance) or a company (for commercial insurance). Customer satisfaction research is conducted with all groups on a regular basis. Intermediary satisfaction studies are carried out to identify their views on the service provided by insurers. These studies are conducted by individual insurers as well as on a syndicated basis (with other insurers) enabling individual companies to benchmark their performance within the industry. The majority of these studies are large scale and frequently undertaken by a research agency specialising in financial services research.It is interesting to note that although insurance falls into the classic definition of a service, insurers differentiate their offerings in terms of \"product\" and \"service\".Most often I would say we do satisfaction: it could be satisfaction with the service and end customer or satisfaction in terms of satisfaction with the product. So we interview every month (Practitioner no 3).The product is seen as the insurance policy and the service includes the policy quotation or claims service. The latter is often described as the \"acid test\" of insurance as it is at this point that the customer truly experiences the promise that they have purchased. Satisfaction with the claim service is therefore extensively researched.Product development was the second most frequently mentioned area of research. This included in-depth research on particular market segments to aid understanding of the needs of that market as well as survey and interview work on the generation and testing of new ideas with intermediaries and policyholders. Other research themes frequently mentioned included pricing, product communication (e.g. advertising and product documentation) and brand.Practitioners reported using a good mix of qualitative and quantitative methods. Although research practitioners selected their method based on the objectives of the research, researchers were influenced, in part, by the preferences of the internal client, typically underwriters. This preference was explained by one practitioner:It is an industry of people that love numbers and I do think that people do actually value that. I think that qualitative is seen positively as well but I think it has to be couched in the right way if you know what I mean and I think a lot of this is industry lead because you have a lot of underwriters and for example all the board here are chartered institute members so they have all gone through that process of attaining those qualifications which a lot of it is very numbers based (Practitioner no. 2).The majority of practitioners were collecting data on-line, using on-line surveys and on-line journals. On-line was particularly liked for its speed.We can send the survey out to our audience and we had something like 10,000 responses in a week and that's just phenomenal. So speed especially when you need to change something quickly, the fact that they are data entering so you don't get a data imputer making mistakes (Practitioner no 6).And for its fit with their delivery channel:We do a lot of business on-line, it is a channel that our customers are familiar with and therefore it's good to use that channel (Practitioner no. 1).Few practitioners however were found to use new technology, such as social media, as part of their data collection methods, although this was increasingly being considered as a possibility in the near future. The benefits of research using social media, particularly for qualitative research, were recognised by respondents:I am looking at dialogue and you get a lot of information and it becomes very qualitative, so I can see that evolving and I am quite excited about that it would be a very good way to get the views from a wider audience but I think you have to think about the structure, what kinds of questions you are asking (Practitioner no. 5).Insurance practitioners were looking for guidance on how best to use social media in research. They were however concerned about its application in research on complex products, mature markets and issues of reliability in terms of response rates (particularly in B2B markets) and data quality. While practitioners realise that innovative research methods need to be utilised, they are not convinced \"how\" and \"what impact\" they may have on their clients.\nWhat challenges do practitioners encounter in their research?: Two internal challenges were identified in the research. First, and a challenge faced by most project managers, was the problem of balancing time, budget and quality:The challenges are around costs and budget, time and quality and what you can do with the budget in the time available and that is a constant business issue (Practitioner no. 3).... the challenges are budget and time. Everything is wanted yesterday; sometimes they push too quickly for results in my opinion for us to do a proper analysis. To do a proper piece of research you need time to pool together everything you need (Practitioner no. 6).Quality was also an issue in the context of meeting the internal client's objectives, especially when these were not always communicated clearly:The main thing is making sure the problem has been defined properly for the research needs and working with our internal clients to make sure that they are communicating the problem properly to us. It is difficult to find a solution if you don't know what the problem is (Practitioner no. 8).With research budgets increasingly coming under pressure from the business in, which the researchers operate, respondents reported the need to more clearly justify their research budgets and demonstrate value for money for each project. There is therefore an increasing need to agree clear objectives with the internal client and demonstrate a return on investment on the research budget. Time from the start of the project to the presentation of the findings, budget in terms of the cost of the research and quality in terms of its contribution to the business (i.e. did the research add anything new or help a decision to be made) were identified as key performance indicators.In terms of external challenges, respondent fatigue and the growth in incentives were the most frequently mentioned. Both were pertinent in the B2B context and particularly with intermediaries (but were also recognised to be a growing issue in the private consumer market). Whilst the use of incentives is becoming common place in many markets, the type, frequency and rationale for their use still raises a number of questions.As the majority of insurers share the same brokers over-researching and respondent fatigue was mentioned by almost all practitioners. This problem is especially an issue amongst the small number of top performing brokers (the key accounts) whose views all insurers wanted to research on a regular basis. Associations such as GIMRA are working to address this issue by promoting syndicated work to lighten the research burden of brokers; however response rates continue to be a problem.On the commercial side its respondent fatigue, not so much on the consumer side, there are plenty of ways to get to the consumers ... There is respondent fatigue especially amongst brokers, we deal with a lot of insurance brokers and there is a lot of fatigue. We are seeing people that just don't want to take part; and we are seeing companies who are saying that we don't want to participate in research, that is probably the biggest issue ... it is harder to get feed back on other things like on the product development side, we are finding it very hard to pool them for a new product and they are being offered incentives and they are starting to hold out for incentives and that is starting to worry me as well as it is going to make it harder for everyone in the long run, you know it does have a knock on effect (Practitioner no. 6).As individuals are time poor, and are having to balance both work and personal commitments respondent fatigue is further exacerbated. Insurers are concerned that sample sizes are suffering, quality of responses are impacted and so is the potential credibility of the research findings. Incentives also add to the cost of the research and put further pressure on the research budget.Insurers are increasingly using, or considering the use of, incentives to encourage respondent participation, but this creates problems in its own right. In particular, concerns are being voiced amongst those undertaking work on the personal insurance side about respondent integrity and the emergence of the \"professional respondent\" who repeatedly participates in research solely motivated by the incentive provided. Questions are being asked about how this repeated exposure impacts on the quality of the information they provide and whether the respondents are indeed who they claim to be in terms of specified demographics or insurance purchasing behaviour. These are some of the worrying observations to emerge from this research. Hence, further work is required on the extent to which the respondents are real \"amateurs\" rather than \"professional\" participants. Also, how can the pool of respondents/participants be widened?\nAdvice for academics: Although there is a plethora of literature guiding researchers on methodological issues, areas of evolvement in research, ethical considerations, the use of incentives and respondent fatigue, there is still a need to develop these areas further and in different contexts, particularly within insurance where experienced research practitioners are grappling with these problems.The findings from the research undertaken in the general insurance context reveal that practitioners want further information and guidance on the following:* How can new research techniques, such as social media, be utilised to provide quality and timely research, particularly in the areas of customer satisfaction?* What is the impact of incentivising on research in a business and management context?* How can the value of research be measured?There is also a desire to learn from \"best practice\", the findings revealed researchers and practitioners in Insurance wanting more forums and workshops to learn from others across different industries and sectors.\n",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Purpose: - The purpose of this paper is to report on HEIF4 funded research exploring the important areas of research currently being conducted by insurance research practitioners and to identify the key challenges they face when conducting this research.\nDesign/methodology/approach: - Empirical data was collected via ten in-depth telephone interviews and two separate round table group discussions with research practitioners in the general insurance sector.\nFindings: - Three key challenges were identified: over-researching and respondent fatigue; the increasing use of incentives and the emergence of professional respondents; and the problem of ensuring research credibility. The findings reveal the need to update research practices, to take account of the changing context within which research is undertaken, discussing research methodologies and social issues as well as the evolving and ever changing nature of research.\nResearch limitations/implications: - The study focused on the general insurance sector. The challenges identified reflect in part the unique nature of this sector but are likely to be equally applicable to other financial services sectors. It would therefore be useful to explore the prevalence of these challenges in other financial sectors.\nPractical implications: - The paper calls on academic researchers to address the challenges identified. Research practitioners want further information, guidance and to learn from \"best practice\" on how new research techniques can be used to provide quality and timely research; the impact incentives have on research in a business and management context; and how the value of research can be measured. These implications are discussed against a financial backdrop and take account of academic, practitioner and industry challenges.\nOriginality/value: - Academic research on marketing in the insurance context remains scant. This paper highlights the needs and challenges of this sector.\n",
"role": "assistant"
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] |
The potential of foods treated with supercritical carbon dioxide (sc-CO2) as novel foods
|
[
"Novel foods",
"Sc-CO2 drying",
"Sc-CO2 pasteurization"
] |
[
{
"content": "Summarize the following paper into structured abstract.\n\n1. Introduction: Different preservation treatments are used in the food industry with the aim to delay the inevitable alteration of quickly perishable foods between the moment of production and consumption. Food alterations are not only mainly related to microbial spoilage or presence of food-borne pathogens, but also changed due to enzymatic activities. Therefore, food preservation treatments should inactivate and reduce pathogenic and spoilage microflora and inactivate enzymes. In addition, treated foods have to be constantly safe and legally compliant until the end of declared shelf-life. Preservation treatment includes thermal pasteurisation applying temperatures up till 80 degC, sterilisation applying temperatures up till 120 degC, drying, freezing, the usage of chemical preservatives, gamma irradiation, etc. Although these treatments are effective in eliminating microbial and enzymatic degenerative effects, they also affect food quality by causing alterations in the taste and organoleptic characteristics. Nowadays, there are various alternative non-thermal treatments, such as high hydrostatic pressure, pulsed electric fields, intensive light pulses, UV light, supercritical fluid processing, etc. These treatments may be used alone or in combination, within so called \"hurdle\" concept (Leistner, 2000; Rajkovic et al., 2010). Alternative treatments have reached different levels of development, some of them being already applied in the food industry, such as high hydrostatic pressure, while others still under scientific discussion, such as oscillating magnetic fields.\n2. Material and methods: Scientific databases such as Science Direct, EBSCO and Wiley were searched for English language research and review articles published until May 2018. The following search terms were used: \"sc-CO2\", \"high pressure carbon dioxide\", \"dense phase carbon dioxide\", alone or in combination with \"pasteurisation\", \"drying\" and \"fruits/vegetables\". Articles related to the application of sc-CO2 to animal foods were manually excluded from further search, while legislation and articles on novel foods were included in the study.\n3. Results and discussion: 3.1 Literature search results\n4. Conclusion: The globalisation of food supply, the consumers' demand for more convenient, fresh-like food and rapid development in food science and technology have resulted in the need for the introduction of foods not previously available at European market. Novel foods which have not been used for human consumption prior to 15 May 1997 need to be assessed for its safety. Within this paper, supercritical technology to be applied as a novel preservation treatment was analysed, namely sc-CO2 pasteurisation and sc-CO2 drying. Both treatments are aimed at reducing pathogenic and spoilage microflora in food products, and consequently extending shelf-life of treated foods. Having this in mind, information on microbiological changes of treated food presents important part of the novel application file. sc-CO2 pasteurised fruit juices have been most extensively investigated, both for the microbiological and chemical changes that occur following the treatment. The research data indicated that both inoculated and naturally presented microflora, pathogenic and spoilage microorganisms could be efficiently inactivated. Compared to thermal treatment, sc-CO2 pasteurisation resulted in similar or even greater level of microbial inactivation, which makes it suitable for the usage in the juice industry. Promising results on microbial inactivation rates have been obtained for solid fruits and vegetables, but intrinsic food characteristics and its related pathogenic and spoilage microflora do not allow making general conclusion on the microbiological quality of solid foods. Limited research was performed on the microbiological changes in sc-CO2 dried foodstuffs, but promising results were reported. It is to be expected that this treatment will not make a final product less microbiologically safe than other dried products available in the market.\n",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Purpose: Supercritical carbon dioxide (sc-CO2) is a promising novel treatment that might be used in the food industry, such as sc-CO2 pasteurisation and sc-CO2 drying. Before sc-CO2 treated foodstuffs may be introduced to European market, they have to be authorised according to novel food regulation. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to give an overview of available literature data on sc-CO2 treated fruits and vegetables, which might be used for novel food authorisation.\nDesign/methodology/approach: The paper is based on literature data available via Science Direct, EBSCO and Wiley concerning sc-CO2 pasteurisation and drying of fruits/vegetables. Studies performed on animal foodstuffs were manually excluded, while articles related to novel foods and legislation were included in the study.\nFindings: Database search resulted 34 articles related to microbiological and compositional/nutritional changes in sc-CO2 treated foods. Obtained data indicated that sc-CO2 pasteurisation is effective in inactivating microorganisms in liquids, while no general conclusion on the microbiological quality of sc-CO2 pasteurised solid foods or sc-CO2 dried foods could be made. Available literature data showed that sc-CO2 pasteurisation did not result in significant compositional/nutritional changes in liquids, while for sc-CO2 pasteurised solid foods or sc-CO2 dried foods, one is not able to make common conclusions due to insufficient research data. Therefore, additional research and case-by-case study for each treated food have to be prepared.\nOriginality/value: This study is original to the extent that it brought together available information on sc-CO2 pasteurised and dried foods, needed the novel food application.\n",
"role": "assistant"
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] |
How personal advisors make a difference in serving "almost rich" bank customers
|
[
"Service quality",
"Customer satisfaction",
"Bank",
"Mass affluent segment",
"Personal advisor"
] |
[
{
"content": "Summarize the following paper into structured abstract.\n\nIntroduction: Research on service quality in banking have primarily focused on retail banking services (Kumar et al., 2010; Lewis, 1991; Parasuraman et al., 1988). An exception is Lassar et al. (2000), who studied private banking, and concluded a need for service quality models tailored to fit different bank customer segments. The mass affluent customer segment is growing and receiving increased attention in banks' marketing strategies (e.g. Miamoto et al., 2006). This segment is composed of relatively wealthy customers with liquid assets between EUR100,000 and EUR1,000,000 (Strandberg et al., 2012). Although the wealth of these \"almost rich\" customers does not warrant private bankers, they are served by dedicated personal advisors providing customized advice on wealth management and a variety of financial services in face-to-face meetings. Strandberg et al. (2012) call for more research on this strategically crucial customer segment.\nFrame of reference: Service quality models and the need for tailor made service quality models\nResearch method: Sample, and questionnaire design\nFindings and discussion: Salient service quality dimensions\nConclusions: Service quality dimensions important to mass affluent customers\nImplications, limitations, and suggestions for further studies: Managerial and strategic implications\n",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to explore mass affluent customer perceptions of the service quality delivered by personal advisors and banks, and the contributions of personal advisors and banks to customer satisfaction; and also to analyse the strength of the relationship between customer satisfaction with personal advisors and banks.\nDesign/methodology/approach: A survey composed of items designed to mirror service quality practices used in the mass affluent segment was administered to customers of a major Swedish bank. Statistical analyses of the responses were performed.\nFindings: Four service quality dimensions are identified as salient to customer satisfaction: interpersonal behaviour, knowledge, service portfolio, and trust. The relative importance of these dimensions depends on whether customer satisfaction with the personal advisor or the bank is focused. Moreover, the analysis indicates a double \"rubbing off\" effect where customer satisfaction with the personal advisor influences customer satisfaction with the bank and vice versa.\nOriginality/value: The unexplored separation of service quality provided by the bank and the personal advisor is central to perceived service quality. The study focuses on customer satisfaction in the mass affluent segment, which is an unexplored context different from retail banking.\n",
"role": "assistant"
}
] |
A cost minimisation model for system reliability allocation
|
[
"Optimization",
"Lagrangian multipliers",
"Reliability adjustment routine",
"Reliability allocation"
] |
[
{
"content": "Summarize the following paper into structured abstract.\n\n1. Introduction: Reliability allocation refers to the process of assigning reliability values to the different components comprising the system (Ebeling, 1997). Various methods and approaches to allocating optimal reliability are proposed in the literature. For instance, on the basis of choice of objective function and constraints, one typically finds two broad approaches in the literature: minimizing the cost of system, subject to reliability constraints (Elegbede et al., 2003), and maximizing the reliability, subject to budget constraints (Colt and Liu, 2000). On the basis of network configuration, researchers developed various network types, such as simple series, simple parallel, series-parallel and other configurations (Ebeling, 1997; Blanks, 1992). Li and Haimes (1992) developed a decomposition approach for optimization of the reliability, subject to the costs, system weights and the system volume as the constraints. This methodology is suitable for a complex system reducible to a series-parallel configuration where the system configuration is known. Kim et al. (2013) used the reliability allocation weight concept to apportion the system reliability into subsystems. They considered the severity of failure effects as one of the parameters for assigning the weights.\n2. Cost minimization model for reliability allocation: In the present paper, it is assumed that the cost incurred in reliability improvement for each of the components follows an exponential function. This function satisfies the typical situations where the cost involved in improving the reliability of the component increases greatly as we seek higher and higher reliability for the component.\n3. Improving the solution: As shown in Table II, the improvement of the current solution is possible only when\n4. Neighborhood search for optimality criteria: We change the reliabilities of only two components at a time. The local search for optimality condition can be achieved as follows.\n5. Interpretation based on Lagrangian method: Expression (5) has an interesting interpretation based on Lagrangian multipliers. Suppose, in the problem (2a)-(2c), we assume\n6. Proposed algorithm for optimal reliability allocation: Step 0.\n7. Conclusions: This paper considers exponential cost-reliability tradeoff function for each component in a series system for optimization of reliability allocations. Various scenarios are considered for this purpose. A RAR is proposed to compute an initial feasible solution to the problem. We also present an illustration to compute the initial feasible solution. We explain a procedure to optimize the reliability allocation to various components for minimizing total system cost starting from the initial feasible solution without compromising on the target reliability. The problem is also solved by using a Lagrangian multiplier approach. We also propose an algorithm for computing the optimal step size, and demonstrate the convergence of Lagrange multipliers using an example. We also provide formal proofs to show that the obtained local optimum is also the global optimum solution.\n",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to consider a nonlinear problem of minimizing the cost of providing reliable systems. The authors assume that the system consists of several components in series, and for each such component, the cost of the component increases exponentially with its reliability.\nDesign/methodology/approach: In order to solve this nonlinear optimization problem, the authors propose two approaches. The first approach is based on the concept of adjusting the reliability of a pair of components to minimize the cost of the system. The authors call this procedure as reliability adjustment routine (RAR). Proofs of optimality and convergence for the proposed model are also provided. The second approach solves the problem by using a Lagrangian multiplier. A procedure is developed to obtain the maximum step size to achieve the desired optimal solution in minimum iterations. Proposed approaches are efficient and give exact solutions.\nFindings: Proposed methods enable a decision maker to allocate reliability to the components in series while minimizing the total cost of the system. The developed procedures are illustrated using a numerical example. Although an exponential relationship between the component cost and reliability is assumed, this can be extended to various other nonlinear distributions.\nOriginality/value: This cost optimization problem, subject to system component reliability values, assumes the near practical nonlinear pattern of cost vs reliability. Such problems are complex to solve. The authors provide a unique approach called RAR to solve such convoluted problems. The authors also provide an approach to solve such problems by using a Lagrangian multiplier method. Various proofs have been worked out to substantiate the work.\n",
"role": "assistant"
}
] |
Architectural marketing capabilities of exporting ventures: The contingent effect of the distributor
|
[
"Market orientation",
"Exports",
"Architectural capabilities",
"Resource-based theory"
] |
[
{
"content": "Summarize the following paper into structured abstract.\n\nIntroduction: Annual world exports reached nearly $23 trillion in 2017 (World Bank, 2018a) representing 28.5 per cent of the $80.68 trillion global GDP (World Bank, 2018b) making exporting a major business activity requiring particular attention. Exporting via a distributor as a mode of entry is fairly attractive since it involves less risk and engages a knowledgeable producer and a local expert. This complementary pair consists of the exporter who is responsible for planning and producing a product that is of interest to foreign customers, and their foreign distributor who becomes the marketing implementation arm that also needs to sense competitor moves and customer requirements. The underlying strategic marketing planning processes and related implementation processes shape the export venture's architectural marketing capabilities (Morgan et al., 2003). More specifically, architectural marketing capabilities deal with higher-level processes that are put in place to formulate and implement strategic decisions which are essential for exporting organisations in order to achieve their strategic goals (Spyropoulou et al., 2018) and enhance export venture's performance (Morgan et al., 2003).\nConceptual framework and hypotheses development: RBT is considered one of the most widely-used, highly effective and influential theories in the broader area of management studies. RBT embarks upon the early work of Penrose (1959) who defines the firm as a pool of physical and human resources which altogether determine the level of firm performance. Simply put, firm performance differs because the amount, quality and deployment of firm resources and capabilities is diverse among firms. Wernerfelt (1984), drawing on the early work of Penrose, suggests that the term resource is envisaged as anything that can be considered a strength or a weakness of the firm. Indeed this initial resource-based view describes firm-specific resources and capabilities as central sources of competitive advantage and increased performance (Barney, 1991; Peteraf, 1993) and has evolved into a key theoretical perspective (Barney et al., 2011). As a response to increasing external environmental changes, firms need to innovate and maintain a high level of competitive advantage by constantly advancing and reconfiguring their skills and capabilities (Eisenhardt and Martin, 2000). This need is even more pronounced for internationalising firms that compete in diverse marketplaces and idiosyncratic environments.\nExporter - distributor alignment: From an RBT perspective, we argue that when exporter planning is aligned with the distributor's implementation capability (i.e. the components of the venture's architectural capabilities) then export performance will increase. The logic behind this argument is that exporter investments when tailored to a distributor's needs and idiosyncrasies are more likely to lead to a greater competitive advantage as compared to general assets being held and deployed by the exporter. Katsikeas et al. (2009) find evidence on the aforementioned argument. Specifically, they empirically show that an exporter's transaction-specific (idiosyncratic) investment in its foreign distributor diminishes the possibility of exporter opportunism and increases the level of importer trust in the exporter, which altogether infer higher efficiency in this dyadic process.\nMethodology: Data collection\nResults: Measurement model\nDiscussion: This study is motivated by the fact that extant literature has not sufficiently addressed the need for better and stronger alignment between the export venture architectural capabilities held by the exporter and their distributor, and the need for providing further clarification on the role of each actor's idiosyncratic capabilities in the exporting process. To address the aforementioned imperfection in the extant literature, we employ RBT as a theoretical framework and examine the contingent effect of the capabilities held by the distributor on the relationship between exporter marketing capabilities and export venture financial performance.\nImplications for theory and practice: While marketing capabilities and their influence on international performance are the subject of sizeable empirical research (Morgan et al., 2018), our empirical testing demonstrates that our conceptual framework (Figure 1) provides some further insights, which are of interest to both academics and practitioners. First, an exporter's planning capability when examined on its own, is positively linked with the export venture's financial performance. Second, the distributor's implementation capability partially mediates the exporter's planning capability but does not moderate it as originally hypothesised. Third, the distributor's market orientation while it has direct impact on performance, it also positively moderates the exporter's planning capability. Overall, based on the exporter's own evaluation, our results clearly indicate the dependency of the exporter on its distributor.\n",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Purpose: The importance of architectural marketing capabilities (i.e. marketing planning and implementation) in exporting ventures has been recognised. However, extant literature has not taken into account the explicit roles and required synergy between the exporter and their foreign distributor in delivering these capabilities. Drawing from the resource-based theory, the purpose of this paper is to examine the complementarity of distributor implementation capability and market orientation with exporter planning capability.\nDesign/methodology/approach: The study was carried out using a survey. Data were collected from 147 Greek exporters who replied to our questionnaire and the hypotheses were tested using the full information maximum likelihood estimation procedure.\nFindings: The results support the hypotheses about the importance of exporter planning capability on financial performance and the complementary role of distributor market orientation. Further, the authors find that the distributor's implementation capability partially mediates the impact of the exporter's planning capability on financial performance.\nOriginality/value: This study contributes to a better understanding about the complementarity of exporter and distributor capabilities. It demonstrates the crucial role of the distributor in the deployment of architectural capabilities for the export venture: the distributor's market orientation and implementation capability have the final say in achieving higher levels of export performance.\n",
"role": "assistant"
}
] |
Technology, innovation and post-bureaucracy: the case of the British Library
|
[
"Bureaucracy",
"Innovation",
"Communication technologies",
"Digital libraries",
"Organizational change",
"United Kingdom"
] |
[
{
"content": "Summarize the following paper into structured abstract.\n\nIntroduction: technology, innovation and the \"post-bureaucratic\" world: Recent years have seen an increasing volume of comment on the supposed \"end\" of bureaucracy and its replacement by new and more flexible organisational forms in the emergent \"knowledge society\" (Reed and Courpasson, 2004; Alvesson and Thompson, 2004). Adversarial comment on bureaucracy cannot be regarded as new. Burns and Stalker's seminal work on innovation and organisational structure, published in the early 1960s, built on earlier critiques of \"rational\" bureaucracy (Merton, 1949; Crozier, 1964; Blau, 1955; Burns and Stalker, 1961). But the late 1970s saw a much more fundamental questioning of bureaucracy and its role in organising the advanced industrial societies. An extensive body of work on \"post-Fordism\" and \"flexible specialization\" contended that the organizational forms which had underpinned the rapid economic growth of the post-war era could not be expected to deliver the same performance in the much more turbulent and uncertain conditions of the 1980s and 1990s. This line of argument has been a central feature of comment on information technology over the last 30 years (McLoughlin and Clark, 1994; McLoughlin and Harris, 1997) and it bulks large in the work of those who argue that the information revolution can be understood as a \"new techno-economic paradigm\" (Freeman and Perez, 1994; Freeman and Louca, 2001; Castells, 2000).Whereas in the 1970s Daniel Bell and other theorists of postindustrialism regarded the state as central to the technological society (Bell, 1974; Kumar, 1995; Mattelart, 2003), the closing decades of the twentieth century saw a growing conviction that innovation was best left to the free market. Private sector corporations operating in sectors such as telecommunications and information technology came to be regarded as the primary locus of innovation and, with the advent of the internet, a new generation of US \"cybergurus\" (Negroponte, 1995; Dyson, 1997; Kelly, 1998) claimed that ICTs were the natural province of entrepreneurial capitalism. These authors championed the \"mobility of knowledge\" arguing that the ubiquity and costlessness of information would undermine the position of large established providers in industries such as media and communications. In the UK, policy makers such as Hague (1996, p. 22) wrote that the digital revolution would undermine the role of traditional universities, arguing that \"people will increasingly use knowledge where it is and not where it is institutionalised\".All of these above commentators draw heavily on imagery which equates information technology and innovation with atomisation, dispersal and disaggregation (Leadbeater, 1999). These elements are apparent in contemporary accounts of the post-bureaucratic organisation, invariably represented as decentralised, loosely coupled, non-hierarchical and fluid. Manuel Castells' theory of the \"network enterprise\" is premised on the view that \"vertical bureaucracies\" are being transformed into \"horizontal corporations\". He defines the network organization is defined as:... a dynamic and strategically planned network of self programmed units based on decentralization, participation and coordination (2000, p. 178).Like many other advocates of the new paradigm, Castells cites intensified competition, globalised production networks, information technology and an increased prevalence of knowledge work as major \"drivers\" of the new organisational forms (Child and McGrath, 2001; Hedberg, 1997). Whilst supporters of the new paradigm have maintained that the information revolution will precipitate a historically decisive break from bureaucracy, several areas of academic enquiry and debate suggest a more equivocal view. Several studies have pointed to the historic role of bureaucracy in creating and sustaining innovation networks (Fransman, 1990; Johnson, 1982; Molina, 1990; Howells and Hine, 1993). Other studies have found that there is no necessary homology between decentralised forms and \"knowledge intensive\" activities such as research and development. (Hill et al., 2000; Coombs and Richards, 1993; Coombs, 1996). Thirty years of research on the organisational changes associated with a range of information technologies shows that these are not conditioned by the technology itself, but by inherently complex managerial choices (Child, 1972, 1997). IT is potentially compatible with both centralised and decentralised organisational forms (Barras, 1994) and has frequently been used to enhance managerial control of day-to-day operations (McLoughlin and Clark, 1994; McLoughlin and Harris, 1997). The large scale adoption of IT in services is associated, moreover, with standardisation, routinisation and \"industrial\" scale in sectors such as education, leisure and entertainment - precisely those sectors where recent commentary on the \"knowledge organisation\" predicted a decisive break with the structures and controls of industrial capitalism (Cohen and Zysman, 1994; Quinn, 1992; Alvesson and Thompson, 2004).Comment on technology and post bureaucracy has been pitched at two several distinct levels of analysis. At one level, technology is viewed as a key factor in contemporary restructuring and changes in the political economy of production. Another body of comment views technology as a key element in changes which have occurred at the organisational level (variously, the \"post-bureaucratic\" \"networked\"; or \"virtual\" organisation). Comment on \"hybrid political regimes\" and \"democratic hierarchies\" is centred on the long-standing question of how organisations combine centralised control and co-ordination of resources with flexibility offered by agents on the ground. Thus, Reed and Courpasson (2004) show that project managers exercised considerable autonomy, but did so within a wider bureaucratic context. Hill et al. (2000) show that the marketised and decentralised responses of advanced manufacturers to changing product markets coincided with more centralised financial control of strategically important R+D resources. The theme of \"hybridisation\" indicates the need to go beyond the binary oppositions inherent in the idea of the \"post-bureaucractic\" organisation. Organizational hybrids are characterized by open-endedness and diversity[1]. The theme of organisational hybridity points to the emergence of new and more reflexive organisational structures - it also highlights new cognitive and cultural orientations which are outside those commonly ascribed to the bureaucratic form (Dent, 1995; Courpasson, 2000; Clegg and Courpasson, 2004).\nICT and innovation in public service delivery: The changes described by advocates of \"the post-bureaucractic organisation\" have had a particular relevance for the public sector. Most of the advanced industrial economies have experienced a \"rolling back\" of the state and attempts to curb the inefficiencies ascribed to public sector bureaucracies. In the Anglo-Saxon countries, attempts to restructure public sector organizations have been very substantially influenced by \"the New Public Management\" (NPM) (Hood, 1998). Studies of the organizational changes associated with NPM have highlighted the part played by managerial control strategies that blend standardised performance measures with attempts to introduce changes in the culture and professional practices of public sector organizations (Ferlie, 1996; Kirkpatrick and Martinez Lucio, 1995; Farrell and Morris, 2003). These strategies have formed a serious threat to the \"professional syndicalism\" previously practiced by professional elites in the UK public sector (Reed, 1995). Whilst authors working in a \"managerialist\" vein have little or nothing to say on the question of public sector values, Reed and Courpasson (2004) hypothesise that the values and cognitive orientations of the public sector may be \"swept away\" by the political, economic and technological conditions of the post bureaucratic world. The rapid diffusion of ICTs across the public sector adds a substantial degree of complexity to these changes. These technologies features prominently in claims made by supporters of post-bureaucracy, but these claims have not been corroborated by empirical studies. A partial exception is the substantial body of research that has grown up around the burgeoning academic field of e-government. Studies have revealed a complex mix of continuity and change, much of it directly mediated by public sector professionals responsible for IT-based service delivery (Dutton and Guthrie, 1991; Bellamy and Taylor, 1998; Dutton, 1999). In many cases the technical and organizational changes observed by researchers have a distinctly utilitarian character which does little to support visions of \"digital government\". While many of the changes associated with large scale investment in IT can be equated with rationalization and cost cutting in \"machine bureaucracies\" (Cabinet Office, 2000; Curthoys and Crabtree, 2003), the UK context provides some evidence for genuinely new interactive public services, for example, those which have emerged in healthcare (NHS.Direct); local and central government services (uk.Gov), and the new digital services offered by the BBC.One of the most pervasive claims made for the information society was that ICT would make possible learning on a highly decentralized \"anyone, anyplace anytime\" basis. The recent marked increase in academic work on ICT and institutional change in higher education (HE) (Dutton and Loader, 2002; Robins and Webster, 2002; Noble, 1998) displays strong commonalities with the current interest in post-bureaucracy. The enthusiastic endorsement of the \"virtual campus\" concept by leading commentators (Hague, 1996; Handy, 1995; Negroponte, 1995) contrasts strongly with more critical work which regards virtual learning as synonymous with the commodification of the public sphere and the homogenisation which comes from corporate control of the new digital media (Schiller, 1999). Some commentators claim that global information networks may have triggered a \"dereferentialisation of knowledge\" which detaches learning from its institutional and national context (Robins and Webster, 2002, p. 5), whilst others have argued that global information networks may act to undermine the autonomy of learning institutions, as their public service remit \"becomes diffused in a new set of social relations\" (Delanty, 2002, p. 42). Agre's (2000) review of ICT and institution change in HE, offers an alternative to this polarization, arguing that if ICTs do in fact \"standardize the world\", then they do so in ways which also reflect institutional specificity and choice. The last 30 years have seen a large volume of empirical work on information technology and organisational change. The main thrust of this work is that the implementation of this technology is heavily influenced by both the context of its introduction and by the strategic interests of actors on the ground. It follows that ICT needs to be examined in the light of particular institutional contexts and social practices if specific research is progress beyond the highly programmatic, a historical and decontextualised claims made for post-bureaucracy. It is with this in mind that this paper draws on research, which investigated the extensive programme of digitisation and organizational change, which has occurred at the British Library (Harris, 2005 for a fuller account) in recent years. This case study depicts an organization characterized by advanced forms of service delivery, the extensive use of ICT, and an increasingly internationalised context of operations. The case study allows us to consider the possibility that intensive use of ICTs may allow bureaucracy to be replaced by new and more flexible \"hybrid\" regimes of accountability and control. We also consider the longer-term implications of these hybrid forms for the public service values embodied by public libraries.\nDigitisation and institutional change: the case of the British Library: As a library of legal deposit, the British Library (BL) is responsible for the integrity of the national published archive, and has been the single most influential body in lobbying for the principle of legal deposit to be extended to electronic resources in the UK. A series of reports, policy reviews and press statements (available at: www.bl.uk/news/report.html) have affirmed the BL public service remit to serve its traditional users in HE whilst emphasising a new commitment to corporate and business users. The BL has responded to government policies on social inclusion by extending this remit to include \"non-traditional\" users such as life-long learners and schoolchildren. Digitisation is central to the BL mission of providing \"access to the world's knowledge\", and new developments in ICT feature heavily in maintaining the BL's position as the largest provider within the UK national research infrastructure. More than 50 per cent of BL activity is aimed at supporting HE, and a further 25 per cent is directed towards support for industry and business. Three specific digitisation projects are explored below. The first relates to the introduction of electronic document delivery (EDD). The second is the use of the internet to bring BL web resources to lifelong learners and schools; the third shows the BL involvement in the development of new research infrastructures serving the UK HE sector.Electronic document delivery\nSummary of findings and conclusions: We have now examined the ways in which ICT was related to both specific organisational changes made at the British library, and to broader patterns of institutional change. The analysis that follows begins by highlighting the broader policy context of the observed changes, then moves on to consider the implications of the case study findings for the debate on hybridisation and the \"end\" of bureaucracy.The programme of investment in ICT was very substantially informed by the modernising imperatives of the \"NPM\". Senior management statements emphasised the need for new revenue streams, marketisation and consumer choice. The broader policy context was, however, one in which BL services were being extended to a widened constituency of business users, lifelong learners, schoolchildren and the general public. The changes observed at the BL cannot be read as a simple transposition of public sector values for marketisation and \"enterprise\" (Du Gay, 2000). On the contrary, the public sector remit of the library has been substantially broadened and this has been driven by new and more stringent criteria of public sector accountability. The ICT projects investigated were thus embedded in an overtly \"bureaucratic\" context.ICT and new organisational hybrids\n",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Purpose: - In recent years it has been argued that the widespread adoption of new information and communication technologies (ICTs) presages the \"end\" of bureaucracy and its replacement by new and more flexible organisational forms. The purpose of this paper is to question contemporary accounts of \"the network enterprise\" and \"the virtual organisation\", arguing that these are founded on a logic which abstracts innovation from its institutional and organisational context.\nDesign/methodology/approach: - The paper uses a case study analysis of the British Library to explore the relationship between ICTs and new organisational forms.\nFindings: - The case study evidence suggests that there is a need to go beyond the binary opposition of \"bureaucratic\" and \"post-bureaucratic\" forms. The evidence also shows that the bureaucratic form was associated with the institutional legacies, expertise and practices that are crucial in fostering innovation.\nOriginality/value: - The paper shows that the bureaucratic context offers a more propitious environment for innovation than has been suggested by managerialist accounts of the \"post-bureaucratic organization\".\n",
"role": "assistant"
}
] |
Integrated healthcare facilities maintenance management model: case studies
|
[
"Facilities",
"Health services",
"Cost analysis",
"Modelling",
"Israel",
"Resource allocation"
] |
[
{
"content": "Summarize the following paper into structured abstract.\n\nIntroduction: Increased competitiveness in the business sector puts considerable pressure on companies to reduce expenditures on \"non-core\" activities, such as maintenance and operations. This encourages buildings' owners and users to raise their expectations and requirements of facilities. Facility managers are thus expected to attain lower operational costs and risks through effective and efficient design, construction, management, and maintenance of facilities, without compromising their performance.Over the past three decades, the field of facilities management (FM) has witnessed significant development, mainly due to the following five global trends:1. increased construction costs;2. greater recognition of the effects of space on productivity;3. increased performance requirements by users and owners;4. contemporary bureaucratic and statutory restrictions; and5. recognition that the performance of facilities is highly dependent on their maintenance (Shohet, 2006).As a result, the traditional \"maintenance manager\" has become a \"facility manager,\" and FM practices have been enriched with methodological procedures particularly implemented with key performance indicators. The facility manager makes strategic and operational facilities-planning decisions that affect the organization's business performance. This is particularly true in healthcare facilities, which are considered to be among the most complicated and difficult types of facilities to manage, maintain, and operate.This paper illustrates the implementation of the integrated healthcare facilities management model (IHFMM), as developed in the frame of this research, using a case study. The results and the conclusions of this case study are presented and discussed.\nBackground: Facilities Management has traditionally been regarded in the old-fashioned sense of cleaning, repairs and maintenance (Atkin and Brooks, 2000). A decade ago, FM responsibilities broadened to encompass \"buying, selling, developing and adapting stock to meet wants of owners regarding finance, space, location, quality and so on\" (O'Sullivan and Powell, 1990). Recognition of the effects of space on productivity stimulated the development of the Facilities Management discipline (Alexander, 1996; Brown et al., 2001; Douglas, 1996; Granath and Alexander, 2006; Kweon et al., 2008; Neely, 1998; Then, 1999). From the 1990s onward, there has been a trend toward more open markets, and especially toward gradually increased competition, as a result of globalization (Hamer, 1994). Now, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, it is recognized that property is a cost-center that can contribute to the performance of an organization, and as such, it requires effective management. As stated by the International Facility Management Association (IFMA, 2004), FM is \"[a] profession that encompasses multiple disciplines to ensure functionality of the built environment by integrating people, place, process and technology.\"Drivers of healthcare facilities management are discussed extensively in the literature. Gallagher (1998), for instance, defines the following six issues as encouraging successful implementation of healthcare FM: strategic planning, customer care, market testing, benchmarking, environmental management, and staff development. Amaratunga et al. (2002) demonstrate a model developed for assessing the impact of organizational FM cultural processes (SPICE-FM) on a hospital facility.The healthcare sector in many countries suffers from an under-investment in the allocation of resources, as reflected in different financial reports (AHA, 2004; British Ministry of Finance, 2003). This trend might adversely affect the non-core activities of healthcare providers, and primarily facilities management aspects, such as maintenance and operations. Ritchie (2002) posits that improving the delivery of healthcare services, as well as the services' performance and quality, can be achieved by paying similar attention to the quality of service as is paid to financial issues. The reforms made by the UK government in the National Health System (NHS) during the 1980s and 1990s improved efficiency by increasing the responsibilities given to the management level (Procter and Brown, 1997).From this review of literature the authors of this paper conclude that the effectiveness of healthcare services will increase with the growth and development of the facilities management profession. This in turn will lead to a change in the position of FM in healthcare organizations to being a more central part of the organization - a position that will help shape organizational decisions and processes.\nThe integrated healthcare facilities management model: The integrated healthcare facilities management model (IHFMM) was developed to establish a deductive mechanism capable of identifying how maintenance and performance of healthcare FM can be related to each other and synergize each other. The model provides insight into the parameters that affect maintenance and performance in healthcare facilities, e.g. level of occupancy, age of buildings, annual maintenance expenditure, and level of performance. The proposed model consists of three main interfaces: input interface, reasoning evaluator and predictor phase, and output interface. These interfaces are divided into five phases (A to E), which are further subdivided into 12 levels (1 to 12). Lavy and Shohet (2007b) present a detailed description of the structure of the IHFMM.The Input Interface requires the user to provide parameters related to the facility, while the output interface provides the user with a review of the main topics analyzed by the reasoning interface. The reasoning evaluator and predictor phase implements 15 procedures used by the model for computing the key performance indicators (KPI's) for the facility in question. Two main principles outline the design of the IHFMM, as follows:1. The structure of the database is object-oriented, enabling the database's adaptability to diverse healthcare buildings.2. The model links topics that combine the core issues of healthcare FM. It could be expanded to include operations and energy, business management, and development aspects in addition to the existing modules focused on maintenance and performance of facilities.The following paragraphs depict the rationale, reasoning, and functions of the major procedures, as developed in the IHFMM. These represent five out of the 15 developed procedures, and they were selected as the core of the model. The discussion will also assist in understanding the case study, presented in the following sections.Building performance indicator (BPI)\nIllustration of the model - a case study: Method\nRobustness of the model: The robustness of the model was examined by applying sensitivity analyses to its parameters. Within these analyses, two principal parameters were studied by examining the sensitivity of the core outcomes to inaccuracies in the performance scores used as input, as well as to the hypotheses of the components' patterns of deterioration used to project future performance and the AME.Analyzing the sensitivity of the outcomes to inaccuracies in the performance rating revealed that the output of the model is slightly sensitive to inaccuracies in the performance ratings of four systems. This finding coincides with the central limit theorem (CLT): as the distribution of a variable composed of a sum of multiple variables is normal, its variance equals the variance of the parent variables divided by the sample size. This is attributed to the large number of components sampled in the survey.The second sensitivity analysis studied the effect of different patterns of deterioration of two building components. One assumption of this research states that the performance of all building components, apart from the components in the Structure system, deteriorates in a linear pattern during the designed life cycle. This analysis examines this hypothesis for two out of 51 components existing in the ten building systems. Conclusions of this analysis may be summarized as follows:* The sensitivity of the predicted performance to diverse patterns of deterioration was found to be low for a single component and very low for the total BPI. Replacing the linear pattern of deterioration with either intensive or moderating patterns of deterioration revealed that for the two examined components, a maximum effect of 3.2 points in the predicted performance was found within a period of three years. Furthermore, it was found that the maximum effect on the facility's total predicted performance is less than 0.11 points, which represents less than 0.2 percent of its performance score.* The sensitivity of the predicted annual maintenance expenditure to diverse patterns of deterioration was found to be very low. Substituting the linear pattern of deterioration with either intensive or moderating patterns of deterioration revealed that for the two examined components, a maximum effect of 3.5C/ per m2 in the predicted maintenance expenditure was observed. This result represents less than 0.15 percent of the total predicted Annual Maintenance Expenditure, and as a result, is negligible.\nConclusions: Existing methods for facilities management decision-making are limited, particularly at the strategic level of facilities management. This research focused on identifying principal parameters that affect the performance and maintenance of facilities throughout their service life. An integrated healthcare facilities management model has been developed, which proposes simultaneous analysis of the complexities involved in the field, such as resource allocation and setting of maintenance policy for a given level of performance, or improving efficiency with which the implementation of maintenance activities are carried out. These complexities are dealt with by almost all facility managers of public as well as private facilities; nevertheless, this point is even more crucial and significant in healthcare facilities that operate 24 hours a day, seven days a week, provide care and treatment services, and support critical infrastructures of healthcare such as medical gas and power for operating theatres.The model developed in the research includes 15 procedures, out of which five core procedures were discussed in the frame of this paper: building performance indicator, facility coefficient, annual maintenance expenditure, projected performance, and maintenance efficiency indicator. The implementation of the methodology was illustrated by two case studies that confirmed the viability of the model. Both of these case studies show high correlations and significant results, by predicting different FM-related aspects, such as the level of performance and the required maintenance budgets.The model's robustness was examined using sensitivity analyses. Two principal factors were considered: inaccuracies in the performance scores, and sensitivity to the hypothesized deterioration patterns of building components. Robustness of the predictions of the model is achieved primarily due to the central limit theorem.The present research enables an analytical hierarchical process for facilities maintenance strategic and operational decision making by simultaneous analysis of facilities maintenance core parameters. The core procedures are illustrated in this research with the building performance indicator, facility coefficient for the adjustment of the maintenance resources to prevailing building environment and occupancy, and maintenance efficiency, as expressed by the ratio between expenditure on maintenance and performance.\n",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Purpose: - Increasing demand for healthcare services world-wide creates continuous requirements to reduce expenditures on \"non-core\" activities, such as maintenance and operations. At the same time, owners, users, and clients of healthcare expect a high level of built-facilities performance and minimized risks. The objective of this research is to develop an integrated facilities management (FM) model for healthcare facilities.\nDesign/methodology/approach: - The paper presents a case study analysis of an Israeli acute care hospital, in which the integrated healthcare facilities management model (IHFMM) was implemented, and the findings were examined and evaluated three years later. The case studies investigated the effectiveness of the developed model in terms of maintenance and performance management. The robustness of the model was also examined by applying sensitivity analyses to its parameters.\nFindings: - Both of the case studies show significant results in predicting FM-related aspects, such as the level of performance and the required maintenance budgets. The findings reveal a high correlation between the two phases of the case studies in terms of financial outcomes and performance predictions.\nOriginality/value: - The core of the model is based on the strength of identified effects of certain parameters, such as maintenance expenditure and actual service life, on the performance and maintenance of healthcare facilities. The proposed IHFMM addresses two core topics of FM: maintenance and performance, for strategic FM decision making.\n",
"role": "assistant"
}
] |
Archives in the stacks: documentary editions in collections
|
[
"Collection development",
"Archival appraisal",
"Archival sources",
"Documentary editions",
"Evaluation of sources",
"Scholarly sources"
] |
[
{
"content": "Summarize the following paper into structured abstract.\n\nIntroduction: Archival documentation exists in varied documentary forms and is collected and made accessible through multiple documentary practices (Oliver and Duff, 2012; Cappon, 1976, pp. 432-433; Stevens, 1950, pp. 172-173; Pierazzo, 2014, pp. 2-4; Giunta, 1986; Conway, 2015, p. 56). Primary sources, in their original artifactual bodies, are collected and appraised by archivists, and form archival collections that commonly reside in archives, special collections and related collecting institutions. However, neither is the evaluation and collection of archival material limited to the purview of archivists nor is the containment of these materials limited to traditional archival terrains (Trant, 2009; Bastian et al., 2018, p. 6; Wythe, 2007, pp. 52-53; Robinson, 2013). Librarians, engaged in collection development activities removed from traditional archival appraisal practices, engage with archival materials in the form of documentary editions, developing collections of published representations, in print, microfilm and digital editions (Clement et al., 2013, pp. 113-117; Giunta, 1986; Cox, 1991, pp. 108-110). These works support wider to access to original source materials beyond the boundaries of their originating artifacts, gather contextual related but dispersed collections and, in cases where a source cannot be safely used because of preservation concerns, support surrogate access. Librarians, in forming collections from these works, are allies in supporting access to archival information and are professionally presented with the task of evaluating archival and manuscript content for acquisition.\nBuilding collections through the acquisition of archival information: In academic environments, traditional archival holdings are developed through the acquisition of primary sources in their original documentary forms and made accessible through on-site and digital access structures. Archives are formed through the appraisal of records and collections, housed within the context of specialized archival environments, and managed by archival professionals possessing expertise in responding to their unique characteristics, properties and custodial requirements (O'Toole and Cox, 2006, pp. 119-121; Bastian et al., 2018, pp. 17-21).\nProperties and characteristics of documentary editions: Documentary editions possess both archival and bibliographic aspects. Artifactually, they contain information elements that reflect varying degrees of intentionality. This includes archival documentation generated by creator actions, mediated by documentary editors, and scholarly notes that contextualize these actions (O'Toole and Cox, 2006, pp. 35-40; Kline and Perdue, 2008, pp. 27-31). The individual items contained within a documentary edition, including letters, journals and manuscript drafts, originated as records, have their origins in the functions, activities and actions that produced the records. Circumstances of production mark the records, evidential \"traces\" of the generative actions, thoughts, ideas that brought the objects in being; these unique evidential elements are what define archival materials (Conway, 2015, p. 53). The materials also reflect assigned values. Objects were often retained by a creator or custodian, such as a descendent, because of an assignment of significance, providing the necessary conditions that would later permit their use by editors in the construction of documentary editions (Butterfield, 1961, pp.15-68; Boyd, 1976; Boyd, 1959, pp. 152-154; Sifton, 1977).\nRepresentational considerations in forming collections from documentary editions: The utility of the documents contained within editions is derived from their ability to serve in place of, and function similarly to, the materials they represent. A critical standard of evaluation is the extent to which the work functions effectively as a representation. In evaluating this characteristic, three primary questions merit careful consideration. First, to what extent do the artifactual identifies of the edited documents reflect those of the originating sources? Second, how does the documentary edition, functionally, represent these sources, in terms of the visual presentation of the documents, and evidentially, the influence of any editorial emendations to the texts? Following these questions, it is possible to consider the extent to which these representational capabilities align with readers' needs.\nFunction, intention and evaluation: The second evaluation is bibliographic. Documentary editions present documents that are assemblages (Frohmann, 2004, pp. 16-17; Brilmyer, 2018, pp. 96-97). The most visible information objects are the edited documents, but additionally, scholarly evidence and interpretation in the form of introductory essays and annotations are also present. Embedded within these are the scholarly and professional values that informed the construction of these elements (Knobel and Bowker, 2011). What interpretive and informational elements are provided? What is soundness of these scholarly contributions? What is the expertise of the documentary editors providing this contextualization? The questions asked of traditional scholarly sources in their evaluation for acquisition can be asked of this editorial content (Kline and Perdue, 2008, pp. 38-44; Ashby, 2011, pp. 141-144; Sternfeld, 2011, pp. 564-571; Eamon, 2006, pp. 302-307).\nConclusions: Documentary editors create works that are intended to operate in the place of, and function in conjunction with, the original sources that they represent. Collecting institutions are an audience that forms collections of archival information through acquiring published collections of historical documentation. While an institution might not hold original founding era documentation in their originating artifactual forms, an institution can hold a monographic copy of Princeton University Press's Papers of Thomas Jefferson or acquire a subscription to the corresponding digital edition, supporting archival engagement in providing access to these resources. The published editions, in print and digital formats, compose collections that represent a critical element of the infrastructure that enables archival research (Rundell, 1970, pp. 160-161). Original sources are read through interacting with original sources themselves, and also with reliable published editions of historical documentation. Documentary editions are a tool for providing access, of a particular form, to archival content, outside of traditional archival environments. They augment the original archival materials and complement related secondary sources.\n",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Purpose: This paper aims to investigate the role of documentary editions in supporting the development of historical collections in libraries, their function as evidential and informational objects and considerations for their evaluation in collection development. Framed as objects possessing bibliographic and archival characteristics, attention is given to the evaluative challenges these objects present during collection development.\nDesign/methodology/approach: This paper provides an archival and bibliographic analysis of documentary editions through examining and discussing their archival and bibliographic elements. Consideration is given to how these elements are expressed as information and evidence, how they operate as scholarly and archive-like objects and how they acquire value as collected objects. This approach clarifies the informational and evidential characteristics of these works, offering a framework for their evaluation in libraries.\nFindings: Documentary editions possess archival and bibliographic characteristics, requiring that evaluators critique the scholarly value and archival integrity of their content. This has implications for the curation of archival objects in library collections, where library and archival expertise can support a more nuanced assessment of these works.\nOriginality/value: The blurred documentary character of these works has been identified by scholars (Cox, 1991). This paper presents evaluative considerations. Here, these characteristics are clarified, and an approach for evaluating these works is offered.\n",
"role": "assistant"
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] |
Aspiring to break away from the same old Spanish educational leadership model
|
[
"Improvement proposals",
"Principal’s demands",
"Principal’s role",
"Principals’ leadership",
"Principalship challenges",
"School principalship"
] |
[
{
"content": "Summarize the following paper into structured abstract.\n\nThe constant \"tug of war\" between the positive impact of principalship and aversion to the role of principal: Numerous studies to date have highlighted the important relationship between leadership practices, teaching quality and student outcomes (Gu and Johansson, 2013; Sukru et al., 2016). Shelton (2013), for example, found that 60 per cent of students' success was attributable to the work and effectiveness of the teaching staff and principal together, with a quarter of all improvements being attributable to the performance of the principal. This confirmed the claims of some experts who have stressed that the relationship between principals' leadership and academic achievement is indirect and results from the direct relationship established between that leadership and the quality of the academic staff's teaching (May and Supovitz, 2011; Penlington et al., 2008). It is for this reason that the principal's leadership can be considered the second most relevant internal school factor in terms of learning achievement, after the effect of the teacher's leadership (Day et al., 2016; May and Supovitz, 2011; Robinson et al., 2009).\nMethod: The purpose of this study is to gain insights into the demands and challenges faced by school principals in Spain, especially as regards the LEA. With this aim in mind, the research questions to be answered are as follows:\nResults: This section discusses the narratives given by principals regarding how the LEA could make their work easier. These are grouped together in code areas under three different categories. The information, although predominantly narrative, is supplemented by descriptive data giving the frequency percentage, which is calculated using the formula Fx100/Total F. Thus, Table II shows the number of times principals refer to a code as a proportion of all frequencies as a whole.\nDiscussion and conclusions: While numerous studies have highlighted the positive influence of good practices that are mainly associated with the principal's leadership, there is evidence of a growing unwillingness on the part of teachers to become principals in most European countries, including Spain (Bush, 2015; OECD, 2008; Tran, 2016). Many studies have noted that principals feel overburdened, under-rewarded and sometimes unprotected and isolated (Alalfy, 2014; Tahir et al., 2015; Pont, 2014). In line with the baseline research, the participants in this study expressed opinions and made demands that would deal with some of the challenges facing principals in the context of Spain, the consideration of which by the LEA could lead to the development of policies to make the principal's job more attractive.\n",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to seek insights into the demands and challenges faced by school principals in Spain, especially in their dealings with local education authorities.\nDesign/methodology/approach: In all, 100 principals from public infant, primary and secondary schools in Alicante (Spain) participated in the study, which was carried out from a qualitative research perspective using deductive content analysis.\nFindings: Most participants noted the need to improve channels of communication with, and support from, the local education authority. They also stressed the desirability of increasing their autonomy, reducing bureaucratic tasks and improving working conditions, which is in line with the international framework. Their narratives make it clear that they remain tied to a management leadership model but actually aspire to an instructive leadership.\nResearch limitations/implications: An absence of triangulation and the use of a single data collection technique are the limitations of this paper.\nPractical implications: These participants are practising professionals who are proposing ways to improve aspects of their working lives based on actual experience. Acknowledging their voices could inspire the design of policies aimed at improving the principal's role in Spain.\nOriginality/value: Knowledge is contributed to the area of study into proposals for improving the role of the principal, but with new and contextualised insights.\n",
"role": "assistant"
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] |
Relationship between the financial crisis of Korean construction firms and macroeconomic fluctuations
|
[
"Financial crisis",
"Macroeconomic",
"Vector error correction model",
"Republic of Korea",
"Construction industry"
] |
[
{
"content": "Summarize the following paper into structured abstract.\n\nIntroduction: The state of the construction industry has a close relationship with the state of the national economy. Put simply, the construction industry plays an important role in leading the national economy, and macroeconomic fluctuations substantially influence the construction business (Ortalo-Magne and Rady, 2004; Gauger and Snyder, 2003; Pamulu et al., 2007). This can be also seen when one looks at the current global recession, and more specifically at the period of inactivity in the construction industry following the subprime mortgage crisis.With the instability in the global economy following the subprime mortgage crisis, Korea has suffered drastic macroeconomic fluctuations, which have taken the form of increased exchange rates and interest rates. This phenomenon has led to a severe depression in the construction industry, causing many construction firms to suffer serious liquidity crises.Macroeconomic fluctuations influence both demand and supply in the construction industry. According to an analysis by the Korean MLTM (Ministry of Land, Transport and Maritime Affairs), the number of unsold apartments reached a record high of 160,000 following the subprime mortgage crisis in July 2008. This means that the purchasing power of consumers has been weakened by the economic depression. From the supply perspective, the profitability of construction firms was sharply worsened after the subprime mortgage crisis by sudden increase of lending rates, and the tendency of financial institutions to perform more conservative risk management in this crisis made their financial troubles more severe. Finally, a serious problem occurred in cash in and out, leaving the liquidity of construction firms in jeopardy, and liquidations are reportedly increasing.On the premise that macroeconomic fluctuations in the vicinity of the construction industry can significantly affect the financial risk to construction firms, this study will analyze the relationship between financial crisis and macroeconomic fluctuation through a VECM (Vector Error Correction Model).Representative indices to present financial crisis are liquidity ratio and leverage ratio. In this study, current ratio has been used an acting variable for liquidity ratio, and debt ratio for leverage ratio. GNI, L, exchange rate, interest, and CPI were used for macroeconomic variables. VECM consisted of Crt model and Drt model in order to analyze the relationship between current ratio and macroeconomic variables, and between debt ratio and macroeconomic variables.\nLiterature review: Table I presents a summary of previous analyses of the relationship between the construction business and macroeconomic variables. Most preceding studies have analyzed the manner in which macroeconomic variables influence comprehensive indexes of the construction business, such as residential investment, non-residential investment, and construction investment.However, such preceding studies are limited in terms of directly analyzing the financial crisis of construction firms, as the indexes of the construction business are very comprehensive. Therefore, this study is going to analyze the extent to which macroeconomic variables actually influence the financial crisis of construction firms, by directly confirming the financial statements of the construction companies and using them as variables.Table II documents previous analyses of the financial ratios of construction firms. Most such preceding studies have developed an appraisal model of construction firms, or actually performed an appraisal.However, analyses of the relationship between these have been revealed to be lacking, in that macroeconomic fluctuations actually influence the financial crisis of construction firms.\nEmpirical procedures: Selection of variables\nEmpirical results: The VECM procedure mentioned earlier was used to appraise the relationship between current ratio and macroeconomic variables and, between debt ratio and macroeconomic variables. VECM is a way to solve some, but not all, of the problems of VARM, and is related with the concept of cointegration (Eagle and Granger, 1987). Most economic variables are unstable time series, but those series variables can have long-term balanced relationships in the event that such unstable ones have a relationship of cointegration, being able to test their dynamic structural relation.Let us assume that simple integral calculus was done for every element of variables' vector Y=(Y1,t, * * * ,Yk,t)'. Vector Y can be expressed in this manner, as the following VAR(p) model: Equation 4 Here, Yi is a variable vector of (kx1), and Ai is the coefficient matrix of (kxk), and et is the vector of the white noise items of (kx1). Such a VAR(p) model can be transformed into the following: Equation 5 Here, DYi is (kx1) vector of first-order difference values for variables, while Gi and P are the coefficient matrix of (kxk). Since matrix P contains information about the long-term balanced relationship of VAR model variables, P is often called a long-run equilibrium matrix. Since DYi and e were assumed to be stationary, PYt-1 must be also. Matrix P must have linearly independent items for PYt-1 to be stationary, since Yt-1 is a vector of non-stationary variables. The rank of P is the numbers of linearly independent items, which are the same as the numbers of cointegration. According to Granger representation theorem, the rank of P is less than that of the cointegrated variables. In other words, there are (kxr) matrixes a and b which make every elements of P=ab' and b'Ytb'Yt stationary. Therefore, Granger representation theorem is presented in the following formula: Equation 6 Matrix b consists of cointegrated vectors, and matrix a can be translated into weight to cointegrated vector elements. In other words, the previously mentioned formula can present the short-term and dynamic character of cointegrated variables to restore their long-term balanced relationship, which is called a Vector Error Correction Model.In this study, the result of variance decomposition and impulse response was described ten quarters out of the total 32 quarters, because there was no extreme fluctuation after ten quarters.As a result of variance decomposition to measure the relative significance of each variable by decomposing them in proportion to the rate of contribution to shock, first of all the current ratio is reduced to about 50 per cent at the tenth quarter as its influence becomes reduced, when total fluctuation up to the fourth quarter of 2008 is assumed to be 100. In other macroeconomic variables the influence of L is relatively the biggest, which increases with the passage of time to reach about 32 per cent by the tenth quarter (see Figure 1 and Table VII).When the total change of debt ratio from the first quarter of 2001 to the fourth quarter of 2008 was presented as 100, the influence of debt ratio change on debt ratio itself until the tenth quarter dropped to about 32 per cent. In contrast, interest continued increasing after surging in the second quarter, having an influence of about 49 per cent relative to the fluctuation of the debt ratio at the tenth quarter (see Figure 2 and Table VIII).IRF (Impulse Response Function) is used to determine the manner in which a specific variable influences other variables when it is shocked by 1 standard deviation. First of all, in IRF of Crt model, the influence of RGNIt shock on Crt has increased from 0.003 per cent in the first quarter to 0.007 per cent to the second quarter, and maintains a nearly uniform level thereafter. Lt shock was more influential than macroeconomic variables on Crt, from about -0.008 per cent in the first quarter to -0.025 per cent in the fifth quarter, and maintains a nearly uniform level thereafter. The influence of Ert shock on Crt was about 0.002 per cent in the first quarter, began to have a negative influence from the second quarter, increased to about -0.008 per cent in the sixth quarter, and kept a nearly uniform pattern thereafter. The influence of It shock on Crt was about 0.002 per cent in the first quarter, began to have a negative influence from the second quarter, increased to about -0.011 per cent in the seventh quarter, and maintained a nearly uniform level thereafter. The influence of CPIt shock was about 0.009 per cent in the first quarter, increased to about 0.012 per cent in the eighth quarter, and maintained a nearly uniform influence thereafter. In conclusion, the shock of RGNIt and CPIt had a positive influence on Crt for ten quarters, while the shock of Lt, Ert, and It almost had a negative influence on Crt for ten quarters (see Figure 3 and Table IX).Seen from IRF of Drt Model, the shock of RGNIt on Drt was about -0.007 per cent in the first quarter, began to have a positive influence from the third quarter as 0.007 per cent, which has decreased as time flows, finally reaching about 0.004 per cent in the tenth quarter. The shock of Lt and Ert was about 0.004 per cent in the first quarter for Drt and about 0.004 per cent for Lt, and about 0.012 per cent for Ert, keeping a positive influence for the whole period. The shock of It was more influential than other macroeconomic variables on Drt. The shock of It influenced Drt by about 0.008 per cent in the first quarter, began soaring from the second quarter, and reached 0.049 per cent in the tenth quarter. The shock of CPIt on Drt was about 0.010 per cent in the first quarter, maintaining a positive influence for nearly the whole period of time. In conclusion, the shock of every variable's positive influence on Drt overall, and that of It on Drt, were the most influential (see Figure 4 and Table X).\nConclusion: As can be seen from the depression in the construction business following the recent subprime mortgage crisis, various macroeconomic fluctuations significantly influence the construction industry, including their financial conditions, possibly leading to the worst-case scenario of non-payment. However, previous research in this area has been limited in terms of analysis of the influence of macroeconomic variables on the actual financial state of construction firms, as they were performed on the fluctuations of indices relating to comprehensive construction business, such as residential investment, non-residential investment, construction investment, etc. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to analyze the influence of macroeconomic variables about financial states of construction firms in a more practical manner, by investigating the relationship between the financial crisis of Korean construction firms and macroeconomic fluctuations through VECM.To confirm the financial crisis of construction firms, the representative financial crisis indexes of Liquidity ratio and Leverage ratio were used. There are many detailed indexes for Liquidity ratio and Leverage ratio, and this study has employed current ratio for liquidity ratio, and debt ratio for leverage ratio. To secure series data of current ratio and debt ratio of construction firms, current ratio and debt ratio were first calculated through financial statements for each quarter, which was followed by determining their arithmetic meaning. The firms studied are the biggest 30 of the most capable 50 construction firms in Korea. GNI (Gross National Income), L, exchange rate, interest, and CPI (Consumer Price Index) were used for macroeconomic variables.This paper has defined VECM between current ratio and macroeconomic variables as Crt model, and between debt ratio and macroeconomic variables as Drt model.Looking at Impulse Response Function of Variance Decomposition in Crt model, L is revealed as highly influencing current ratio. In other words, most fundraising is focused on highly capable financial institutes, investment corporations and public funds, since the scale of construction project funds is huge. Such financial sources actually belong to index L, but are calculated as current liability in the financial statements of construction firms, knotting an inverse relationship with current ratio.Looking at Variance Decomposition and Impulse Response Function of Drt model, interest is revealed as significant against debt ratio. This seems to be because each construction project needs to raise substantial funds, and the amount to repay is directly influenced by interest fluctuation.This study is limited in its terms of its data collection, as it has secured time series data of current ratio and debt ratio based on the financial statements of the most capable 30 construction companies in Korea. If the sample companies are divided in future research according to scale to analyze the relationship between financial crisis and macroeconomic fluctuation for each scale of company, a more developed result could be obtained.\n",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Purpose: - This study aims to analyze the relationship between the financial crisis of Korean construction firms and macroeconomic fluctuations.\nDesign/methodology/approach: - In this study, current ratio has been used an acting variable for liquidity ratio, and debt ratio for leverage ratio. GNI (Gross National Income), L (index of Liquidity), exchange rate, interest, and CPI (Consumer Price Index) were used for the macroeconomic variables. VECM consisted of Crt model and Drt model to analyze the relationship between current ratio and macroeconomic variables, and between debt ratio and macroeconomic variables, in order to analyze each model through variance decomposition and impulse response function.\nFindings: - In Crt model, L is revealed as highly influencing current ratio. In other words, most fundraising is focused on highly capable financial institutes, investment corporations and public funds, since the scale of construction project funds is huge. Such financial sources actually belong to index L (index of Liquidity), but are calculated as current liability in the financial statements of construction firms, knotting an inverse relationship with current ratio. In Drt model, interest is revealed as significant against debt ratio. This seems to be because each construction project needs to raise substantial funds, and the amount to repay is directly influenced by interest fluctuation.\nResearch limitations/implications: - The collected data are limited, as the time series data of current ratio and debt ratio were secured based on the financial statements of the most capable 30 construction firms in Korea. If the sample companies were divided in future research according to scale, in order to analyze the relation between financial crisis and macroeconomic fluctuation by company scale, a more developed result could be obtained.\nPractical implications: - This study is a useful research to analyze the dynamic relationship between the financial crisis of construction firms and macroeconomic fluctuations. This study can be used to establish a set of countermeasures to apply in the event of macroeconomic fluctuation.\nOriginality/value: - The financial ratios of construction firms are directly used for analysis, making this a more practical analysis than studies of the relationship between macroeconomic fluctuations and the comprehensive indices of construction business.\n",
"role": "assistant"
}
] |
Tools for transfer
|
[
"Knowledge transfer",
"Trainers",
"Training",
"Behaviour"
] |
[
{
"content": "Summarize the following paper into structured abstract.\n\n__NO_TITLE__: A carpenter uses tools to work in their trade; a mechanic uses tools to work on automobiles; a trainer also uses tools, sometimes called interventions, to ensure transfer of training. Broad and Newstrom (2001) defined transfer of training \"as the degree to which trainees apply in their jobs the knowledge, skills, and attitudes they gained in training\" (p. 6). But, is transfer taking place on a regular basis in organizations? Training is an investment for the individual and for the company. There should be a direct link between training, productivity, and wages.\nResearch and results: A random sample of trainers from the Midwestern section of the USA was selected from the listing of members of the American Society for Training and Development; a survey with a cover letter was sent to them via e-mail attachment. The trainers responded to the researcher via e-mail attachment. The survey listed as follows ten tools for transfer of training based upon the literature review:1. Coach learners and provide them with guidance and encouragement to transfer training to the workplace.2. Provide positive reinforcement, rewards, and feedback to behaviors learned in training.3. Provide job performance aids to assist employees to retain new learning.4. Implement peer support groups for transfer of training to the workplace.5. Schedule follow-up sessions to solve problems and prevent relapse.6. Provide refresher courses and/or retraining when necessary.7. Communicate an expectation that learning will be transferred to the workplace.8. Provide opportunities to use the newly learned skills in the actual workplace.9. Identify and remove barriers for the transfer of training.10. Provide and communicate support for application of learned skills to the workplace.The trainers were asked to score the above tools for transfer on a five-point Likert-type scale. The three statements used most often for effective tools for transfer of training are listed in rank order according to the arithmetic means of the study as follows:1. Communicate an expectation that learning will be transferred to the workplace.2. Coach learners and provide them with guidance and encouragement to transfer training to the workplace.3. Provide and communicate support for application of learned skills to the workplace.\nConclusion: Although these results were from one area of the USA, they are very similar to a later study conducted by the researcher of North American trainers. The results of this study are the perceptions of trainers concerning the best tools for transfer. It would be interesting to see if the same results would occur sampling trainers on the different continents throughout the world.\n",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Purpose: - Transfer of training is vitally important in today's workplace, where organizations spend millions of dollars on training their employees. The purpose of this study is to identify effective tools for the transfer of training.\nDesign/methodology/approach: - A survey was conducted of Midwestern trainers in the USA to identify the three most effective tools for transfer.\nFindings: - A limitation to the research may be that only one area of the USA was used in the survey.\nPractical implications: - Future research might include a survey of trainers throughout the United States and/or in other countries. To ensure that transfer of training occurs, trainers may want to utilize these three tools that have been identified.\nOriginality/value: - The paper identifies effective tools for the transfer of training.\n",
"role": "assistant"
}
] |
Making the virtual leap: ten issues to consider about telecommuting
|
[
"Virtual work",
"Homeworking",
"Portable digital assistants"
] |
[
{
"content": "Summarize the following paper into structured abstract.\n\n__NO_TITLE__: The notion of working from home may conjure up images of lounging about in one's pyjamas while surfing the internet all day. In fact, effective telecommuting requires great discipline and commitment. Following are ten issues to consider before making the virtual leap.\nEquipment: One key to successful telecommuting is reliable hardware and internet access. Employers have as much sympathy for telecommuters who cannot access the internet as they do for onground employees who cannot find transportation to work. It is expected that when a contract for distance work is accepted that primary and secondary access will be secured. Seasoned telecommuters typically possess several computers, including at least one laptop, so that in the event one is not operating, work can be done on the other. Likewise, they possess several means to access the internet. Preferably, one if these means is high speed wireless broadband in nature making it possible to work from any location where there is cellular telephone service avoiding the need to be tethered to a desk in one's home.Additionally, a cellular telephone is necessary if one is to have any degree of mobility during the workday. Most telecommuters invest in PDAs that include internet access along with cellular service in a handheld device. The phone should have high quality speaker and mute features so that conference calls can be attended without background noise interrupting the meeting. This also allows for hands free conversations so that multitasking can occur during a phone conference. Finally, an \"all in one\" device that serves as a fax, copy machine, scanner, and printer rounds out the minimal amount of home office equipment needed to work at a distance.\nEnsuring personal safety online: Note that publishing a land line phone number as a work number can provide enough information for even a novice internet user to secure directions and a map to the telecommuter's home. In many situations, such as teaching online, this is not recommended for reasons of personal safety. Likewise, it is advisable to secure a post office box as a business address when surface-mailing addresses must be provided. Attached files often contain properties that list the author's name, business name, etc. Care should be taken to review such properties and ensure that private information is not shared with the recipient. Also, posting photos of oneself and one's family on the internet can assist identity thieves. Telecommuters should inquire with employers as to the measures taken to protect their personal information.\nTime management: The problem with working from home is that anywhere with internet access can be considered as \"home\". Telecommuting can consume every waking hour of every day if care is not taken to separate work time from home time. Many telecommuters cannot remember the last time they took a vacation without a laptop; sat in traffic without checking email on their PDAs; or spent a weekend without internet access. Time is money to telecommuters, so they soon become master multi-taskers working on several projects simultaneously. Time that used to be spent on preparing for work onground and driving back and forth to an office each day is now spent accomplishing work tasks.Effective time management includes controlling one's e-mail. Nothing overwhelms the telecommuter's work day faster than answering every email ping on demand. Those who are most successful in managing great workloads in working at a distance develop a system where they respond to specific email accounts at specific times of day allowing time for work on larger projects between correspondence.\nWorking from home awareness: It is important for the telecommuter to make family and friends aware that even though work is being done from home, the telecommuter must devote a significant amount of hours to work each day just like any onground employee. Although the telecommuter may possibly have some flexibility in work hours, the work must be completed in a timely manner. So when family and friends ask for favors to be done during the workday, they need to understand that this adds to the work the telecommuter will need to do later in the day to meet deadlines. Additionally, friends who send significant numbers of SPAM type emails and regularly interrupt the telecommuter with instant messages need to be made to understand that a minimal amount of time is available for such activities when one is working online.\nOut of touch with world events: Even though telecommuters are constantly online, they often are so consumed with work from the moment they log in that they may not be aware of daily news. Since most work is asynchronous in nature, they are not immediately informed of major news events as they may have once been in an office setting where colleagues have listened to news reports on the way to work and share stories at the water cooler. Consequently, it is not unusual for telecommuters to feel out of touch with world events in comparison to their former careers in face-to-face work environments.\nThink globally: Most telecommuters work with colleagues from around the globe. They quickly learn to eliminate colloquialisms from their vocabulary that those living across the country or across the world may not understand. They realize that colleagues have no interest in the local news that was often the center of conversation in the face-to-face environment. They quickly learn to always include country codes, area codes, and time zones when exchanging telephone numbers. And they learn to master the world's time zones even for those areas that do not observe daylight savings time so that they can attend teleconferences on schedule.\nLimited social interaction: Aside from an occasional face-to-face conference or streaming video teleconference, telecommuters may work many months without any physical contact with colleagues. Time and money that were formerly spent on work clothes, hairstyles, cosmetics, etc. suddenly becomes nonessential. What formerly was a daily occurrence of going to a restaurant for lunch now may become a rare treat. The telecommuter needs to make concerted efforts to maintain face to face contact with friends and loved ones as it is quite easy to spend many weeks inside one's home without outside contact.\nReduced resistance to illness: An unexpected consequence of working from home can be reduced resistance to illness. Many telecommuters find that their cloistered environment shields them from former office-mates, clients, and students who used to expose them to the colds, coughs, and flu making them particularly susceptible to communicable illnesses when they are encountered. Therefore, the telecommuter should maintain a healthy regimen of vitamins, exercise, flu shots, etc. to avoid bouts with illness when exposed to groups in face-to-face situations, such as conferences.\nFull time vs part time: There are advantages and disadvantages to both full time and part time work online. In the case of teaching, adjunct employees generally have more command of their time choosing when they will work during the week, the institutions with whom they will work or not work, etc. The disadvantages are the unpredictability of work from term to term, lack of pay during term breaks, and the juggling of many college calendars with little or no time off. The online instructor does not take personal breaks during a term and typically cannot have a substitute instructor take over a class. When vacations, conferences, and other outside commitments are attended, it is understood that online work will be completed as usual. Full time online work brings a reliable pay check and benefits, including time off. But full time work generally requires the telecommuter to be online at specific times to conduct business, attend meetings, etc. limiting one's flexibility.\nPreparing for online work: Telecommuting positions are generally secured by those who have experience in telecommuting. Therefore, it is recommended that the individual who is interested in making the virtual leap secure experience in working and learning online. This may include taking an online class or training, working with clients or students online, designing online courses, etc.Although telecommuting can be very rewarding, it is important to weigh each of these issues before making the virtual leap because once one is entrenched in the telecommuting lifestyle, it can be difficult to return to working on the \"outside\". As demanding as the work can be, the advantages of increased flexibility, being able to spend every day with one's children, increased income, and fewer expenditures on transportation, day care, work clothes, etc. can make the notion of transitioning back to a full time, face to face work environment very difficult to consider.The best decision is an informed decision. Those considering telecommuting are encouraged to try working from home on a part time basis while maintaining outside work if possible. After a few weeks, the advantages and disadvantages of working from home vs. working in a face to face environment will be evident making the decision as to whether or not to take the virtual leap into full time telecommuting far less daunting.\n",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Purpose: - The purpose of this paper is to address ten key considerations regarding telecommuting that one should consider before leaving an onground position to become a telecommuter. The \"insider's\" view presented provides a realistic overview of changes that one can expect on a day-to-day basis comparing working in an office to working from home so an informed decision can be made.\nDesign/methodology/approach: - This paper is written from the perspective of a telecommuter.\nFindings: - The paper finds that ten key considerations have been addressed that provide valuable insights into the telecommuting world.\nPractical implications: - The paper shows that anyone considering becoming a telecommuter would be well advised to weigh each of the considerations listed before making the virtual leap to working from a distance.\nOriginality/value: - The paper is written from lived experience. The lessons learned addressed in this piece provide those considering telecommuting with a realistic overview of pros and cons to consider that can only come from an experienced telecommuter.\n",
"role": "assistant"
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] |
Advanced planning and scheduling with collaboration processes in agile supply and demand networks
|
[
"Value chain",
"Flexible labour",
"Supply chain management",
"Production scheduling",
"Market share"
] |
[
{
"content": "Summarize the following paper into structured abstract.\n\n1 Introduction: The production planning and control procedures used in industry are subject to dramatic changes. Many companies have recognized that the currently used MRP II and enterprise resources planning (ERP) philosophy does not support planning in the sense that the capacities of the resources are adequately considered during the planning process. It is now commonly understood that ignorance with respect to capacity results in high work-in-process combined with decreasing service levels and long customer waiting times. In addition, in highly integrated supply networks with small \"slack\" insufficient planning procedures become more evident than in non-integrated logistic networks. Being considered as waste, safety stock and safety time are reduced to a minimum. Generating feasible plans under these conditions is a real challenge for a planning system. However, feasibility is only achievable if planning is based on a realistic modeling of the logistic processes that reflects the key factors having an impact on the system's performance.The appeal of advanced planning and scheduling (APS) to integrated supply networks is that it enables a supply chain (SC) to distribute job orders and machine scheduling to meet the required due date, and at the same time to improve product margin by reducing costs and increasing manufacturing throughput (Lee et al., 2002; Moon et al., 2004; Chen and Ji, 2007). This makes the planning system of APS the first business model to deal with the gap between the requirements of the sales department and those of the manufacturing department. To satisfy a customer's requirements, the APS system usually makes a schedule and then changes it frequently (Nishioka, 2004).Furthermore, APS is also useful for managing the SC, where multi-tier and multi-site production exists. This means the planning process has to be de-coupled (Wiers, 2002). A tier agent not only has the planning capability for its production planning but also needs to cooperate and to coordinate with other tier agents as well as site agents to meet the order (Chen et al., 2009). This coordination makes multi-tier and multi-site production capable of promising delivery lead times to end customers.However, today's APS has been developed in a way that partially ignores global optimization for the entire SC (Lockamy and McCormack, 2004). That causes upstream SCs to suffer from receiving orders that cannot be accomplished optimally by them. For instance, it is common in practice that the master production schedule (MPS) of a buyer, due to demand changes, produces an unrealistic and unconstrained order plan to suppliers such that when it is issued to purchase material then the suppliers find it very difficult to deploy the order into their operations scheduling to meet the delivery schedule because of capacity limitation. The purpose of our paper is to tackle this issue by developing a conceptual model of APS with collaboration process to coordinate supplier and buyer planning. The expected result of the model is to produce coordinated action between suppliers and buyers that will enable lead times to be guaranteed to the end customer.The reasons for developing coordinated actions among suppliers and buyers are twofold. Module tier collaboration in APS is managed to generate flexibility by providing the capability to promise in the SC, and at the same time to structure a streamline SC to improve efficiency. The aim of this collaboration process is to improving the competitiveness of the SC (Stadtler, 2005). Second, in order to introduce the APS model with collaboration process to practitioners, a business model had to be taught. Though generic in design, these business models did not result in industry standards.The following section first introduces background for the research (Section 2). Then the methodology section is started by structuring the APS model with collaboration, which continues with analytical modeling to detail the operability of the APS (Section 3). Section 4 models the APS modules coordination that is analyzed further by comparing it with the existing APS software (Section 5). Managerial implications are then examined in Section 6 and finally the outcomes of this paper are concluded in Section 7 to summarize the analysis results and discuss some future research opportunities.\n2 Literature review: In introducing the importance of APS with collaboration process, we will first give some examples of best practices that are using collaboration process in their SCs to improve their competitiveness: for instance, the business practices in Dell computers (Lee, 2004), Hewlett Packard (HP) desk jet printers (Feitzinger and Lee, 1997), Amazon (Kassmann and Allgor, 2006), and Phillips Personal Garment Care (Sanchez, 2002). One of them, HP, established the Strategic Planning and Modeling group to apply more radical approaches, namely the realignment of manufacturing and distribution strategies, improvement in forecasting techniques and methods, and product and process redesign for SC management.HP strategy has further investigated the application of logistics and manufacturing integration (Feitzinger and Lee, 1997).The important outcome of this research is how to optimize SC performance by building coordination among marketing, research and development, manufacturing and distribution and finance activities. However, the logistics and manufacturing integration seem to be confined to within an enterprise or factory.Manufacturing and logistics integration beyond the enterprise is practiced by Dell Computers' virtual integration, which insists on the manufacturer specializing and integrating together the business with partners. One important piece of information from this example is that manufacturing also opens the possibility for outsourcing strategy. This outsourcing definition, however, is different to traditional thinking on outsourcing, where the buyer also outsources his or her problems. Indeed, risk sharing emerges as a form of SC collaboration. In this case, Dell Computers is not just cost-effective and fast, but also agile, adaptable and aligned (Lee, 2004).From the examples, SC best practices can be categorized into three properties, namely agility, adaptability and alignment, where they supports the application of a collaboration process (alignment) in order to achieve a quick response to highly varied demands (Lee, 2004). Thus, it is important to look beyond the enterprise to create adaptability and agility in collaboration in material and capacity planning in order to give availability to promise (ATP) to customers.APS improves the integration of materials and capacity planning by using constraint-based planning and optimization modules (Van Eck, 2003; Chen and Ji, 2007). This integration can be seen in Figure 1, which details the coordination of the APS modules. Different modules can interact via sending messages and exchanging data. This gives benefit to SCs by using all APS modules from the same vendor thus avoiding redundancies and inconsistencies in the planning data caused by multiple databases (Rohde, 2002).The functionalities of each module can be described as follows: the demand-planning module necessitates forecasting, and what-if analysis is conducted to make the optimal calculation of required inventory and safety stock level (Meyr et al., 2002). The master-planning module is used to balance supply and demand by synchronizing the flow of materials within an enterprise or factory (Meyr et al., 2002). The ATP module is used to guarantee that customer orders are fulfilled on time and in certain cases, even faster. The production planning and scheduling module is intended for short-term planning within APS so that it sequences the production activities in order to minimize production time (Stadtler, 2002a, b). The material requirement follows a top-down hierarchical approach, where it starts with MPS. The schedule is then detailed into material requirement planning (MRP) by ignoring capacity constraint and assuming fixed lead times. The distribution-planning module is very much correlated with transport agreements for shipping consumer goods from manufacturers to customers (Fleischman et al., 2002).2.1 Insight from the literature\n3 Methodology: This section starts with methodology as the focal point and only addresses the background for the readers in order to understand the motivation of this research, how and why the research methods and techniques were chosen in answering the research questions. Thus, this section presents a comprehensive framework within which this research operates.Business and analytical models are used in this research since these approaches are predominant in science and assumes that science quantitatively measures independent facts about a single apprehensible reality (Healy and Perry, 2000). In terms of the ontology element, this research uses naive realism because the reality that is considered in this research is real and apprehensible (Guba and Lincoln, 1994). Furthermore, this research aims to understand the operability of collaboration within APS that requiring the kind of measurement rather than changing collaboration concept in APS. In other words, we can conclude that our research area is closer to theory testing research (Healy and Perry, 2000).3.1 Research design\n4 APS modelling: APS modelling is intended to build tools for APS with collaboration process. When we are discussing APS in the SC domain, we refer to the Supply Chain Operations Reference (SCOR) model as a reference for performance metrics within the SC that should be analysed (Meyr et al., 2002). In this paper, we will not discuss the SCOR model further since the metrics have, in fact, been included into ASDN software. The main task of this section is to build the new concept of APS with collaboration through business process model development. The reason is that the model will be used to analyse the potential of the SC to improve business performance (Kilger, 2002). Thus, the business model is created in the first phase of APS implementation.This business model includes strategic alignment of the planning processes, the structuring and interaction of the processes, the internal relationships and cooperation mode between modules involved in the planning tasks, and finally the collaboration mode between purchasing and sales. The result will be synchronizing the purchasing decision and order promising based on forecast (ATP) (Kilger, 2002). Afterwards, analytical models are developed (Section 4.2) to transform the business model into application.4.1 Building APS with collaboration process business model\n5 Results and analysis: ASDN calculates the benefit of APS with collaboration in terms of lead time to customer (days), cycle time (days), inventory holding cost (Euro), safety stock holding cost (euros/year) and inventory turns (turns/year). Thus, combining APS with collaboration into ASDN gives advantage to SCs for giving ATP to end customers as well as measuring the benefit of the APS with collaboration process (Figure 6).Furthermore, we also compare the developed APS with collaboration process with the existing APS software (Table I). The results show that the proposed APS with collaboration process has strength in ATP and flexible scheduling that can be updated according to received demand information and inventory allocation policy. On the other hand, the existing APS software emphasizes distribution optimization by using rule-based ATP to give guaranteed lead times. In the later case, the supplier cannot get a guaranteed order from the buyer since the buyer has autonomy in finding appropriate suppliers to meet the customer demands. Thus, the collaboration strength between buyer and supplier is not as strong as the proposed APS with collaboration process.\n6 Implications: The concept of APS is shown by giving emphasis to information availability in the SC and the company giving value added in each step of order processing. It ensures that customers have accurate information about the available product configuration and allows them to configure not only the product but also the lead times. This mechanism can be applied within APS with collaboration process because the supply and demand functions are matched (Figure 4). The APS with collaboration process makes possible firm interoperability within the SC by making an interface between strategic inventory allocating and purchasing modules. This interface creates information exchange between at least two firms within the SC. This suggests that SC managers should encourage information sharing between at least two connected firms.Related to value SC integration, this APS model makes the planning task coordinated and integrated (Figure 4). This coordination and integration gives APS distinctive functionality to ERP or MRP II. Without intending to replace the roles of ERP and MRP II, APS should be emphasized as a coordination and integration tool for multi-tier and multi-site production. This makes ERP or MRP II suitable for analyzing non-critical planning (Rohde, 2002).Last but not least, the APS with collaboration process has two advantages. The first is that the APS structure becomes more modular and simple where it finally increases its processing speed and inter-operability. The second is that APS can have a strong relationship with ERP without an overlapping of each other's functions.\n7 Conclusions: This paper has discussed value chain re-engineering, which is represented by a new APS model. We may summarize the results derived from the model as follows:* APS module integration needs to be addressed in the APS with collaboration process discussion. The integration makes for faster decisions and information flows amongst the modules.* Information exchange between the purchasing and strategic inventory allocation modules from two different sites reflects the APS with collaboration process. Furthermore, technological support and purchasing activity need to be involved in the main activities of the manufacturing process. Purchasing should have a strategic position in the business activities.* The first limitation of this APS is that the model does not incorporate customer and service department interface in assuming that the sales department is replaced by e-marketing. On the other hand, this situation has the advantage of offering a new future research direction with regard to the possibility of organization interchangeability by developing collaborative APS where it requires information sharing amongst sites in SCs.* Attaching APS into ASDN simulator reflects the integration of strategic, tactical and operational planning, resulting in delivering orders at minimum cost and a high level of responsiveness.* The second limitation is that there is no solution to support the function of the sales mode. It would be necessary to conduct future research on the personalization of the sales function by employing information technology to give added value to the APS.\n",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Purpose: - The general purpose of the paper is to improve supply chain (SC) responsiveness and agility by developing advanced planning and scheduling (APS) with collaboration process into agile supply and demand networks (ASDN).\nDesign/methodology/approach: - Some industrial examples are presented to extract the APS requirements, then business models that are supported by analytical models are developed into APS modules to respond to the requirements. At the end, the modules are attached into an ASDN simulator to measure the benefit of the APS with collaboration process.\nFindings: - The results show that the APS with collaboration process is superior to existing APS software in terms of promising lead times to customers at minimum inventory level.\nResearch limitations/implications: - Since the APS with collaboration process cannot optimize transportation planning, SCs cannot therefore optimize networks by finding the optimum network configuration. Currently, the simulator needs to be tested in several possible network scenarios to find the optimal network configuration.\nPractical implications: - The APS with collaboration process makes it possible to give guaranteed lead times at minimum inventory level. Furthermore, it is possible to combine the APS with collaboration process with enterprise resources planning or MRP II by considering the criticality of the planning.\nOriginality/value: - The attachment of APS with collaboration process business into ASDN represents the original aspect of this paper.\n",
"role": "assistant"
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] |
From local IT needs to global process transformation: Hilti's customer service program
|
[
"Customer service",
"Global Contact Center",
"Hilti Corporation",
"IT-enabled transformation",
"Process transformation"
] |
[
{
"content": "Summarize the following paper into structured abstract.\n\nIntroduction: This is Smith, I'd like to place an order.\nBackground: It is no secret that the implementation of information technology (IT) can bring fundamental change to organizations (e.g. Gregor et al., 2006; Markus, 2004), but IT itself does not necessarily lead to a competitive advantage (Brynjolfsson and Hitt, 2000). IT's business value is rather determined by the changes it causes in organizational structures and work processes (Melville et al., 2004; Powell and Dent-Micallef, 1997), so the study of IT-enabled process transformation has a long history in research (Besson and Rowe, 2012). What started with Henderson and Venkatraman's (1993) model for organizational transformation via IT soon became a central subject of IT-related research. Seminal publications in the field are Venkatraman's (1994) five-level framework of IT-enabled business transformation, Orlikowski's (1996) situated change perspective on organizational transformation, and Brynjolfsson and Hitt's (2000) study on the relationships between IT investments, organizational transformation, and business performance.\nHilti's GCC program: from initiation to continuous improvement: Overview\nLessons learned from the GCC program: Hilti learned several important lessons from its GCC program that can be organized along the four program phases of initiation, planning, execution, and continuous improvement.\nDiscussion: The present summary of Hilti's GCC experience can help practitioners in planning and executing similar projects toward customer service excellence. Researchers can use the results in order to further theorize about IT-enabled process transformation. Along Venkatraman's (1994) framework of IT-enabled business transformation, the case provides an illustrative example of a successful process transformation that started on an evolutionary change level and grew into a revolutionary transformation. Specifically, while Hilti's GCC program originated from the idea of a localized exploitation of a telephone system, it eventually resulted in an enterprise-wide transformation program that changed the company's infrastructures, working standards, and business processes at a global level. While similar cases have been reported (e.g. Tansley et al., 2001; Tarafdar and Gordon, 2007), the Hilti case not only provides insights of a successful process transformation; as it focusses on customer service, it further contributes to related works that have predominantly studied enterprise systems like ERP software (e.g. Mattila et al., 2010; Velcu, 2010; Voordijk et al., 2005).\nSummary: This paper described Hilti's GCC program, a global initiative in which Hilti completely redesigned its customer service worldwide. The GCC case illustrates how a local IT demand - in Hilti's case, the request for a new telephone system - can lead to the successful transformation of processes, standards, and infrastructures at a global level. On the basis of the four general program management phases of initiation, planning, execution, and continuous improvement, we highlighted and discussed the decisions that Hilti made during the GCC program and analyzed these decisions to identify important lessons to be learned from the Hilti case. The analysis of the GCC case shows that Hilti's innovative wave approach to implementation proved beneficial by saving Hilti time and money, fostering the exchange of knowledge and experiences among Hilti's market organizations, and creating trust in the program.\n",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to summarize an information technology (IT) initiative at Hilti Corporation that began with a local IT need and ended with the global transformation of the company's customer service processes and infrastructures. The authors highlight 12 lessons learned from the transformation, which Hilti referred to as the Global Contact Center (GCC) program.\nDesign/methodology/approach: The authors analyze Hilti's GCC program based on first-hand experience. Hilti applied an innovative, wave-like implementation approach that facilitated a fast roll-out, fostered peer-to-peer knowledge transfer, and helped to overcome reluctance to change.\nFindings: The analysis of Hilti's approach to its new customer service management reveals a number of simple, yet, critical lessons learned regarding leveraging IT-driven business value through global process transformation.\nResearch limitations/implications: The case report can help researchers to further theorize about IT-enabled process transformation. The GCC program resulted in significant improvements in the performance and quality of customer service processes and enabled transparent reporting and performance measurement on a global scale.\nPractical implications: Overall, the GCC case provides an illustrative example of successful process transformation at the global level that also demonstrates implementation challenges. As such, the case report can help practitioners in planning and executing similar projects toward customer service excellence.\nOriginality/value: Hilti's GCC case not only provides fresh insights into a successful process transformation. As it focusses on customer service, it also concerns an application area that has received little in the way of attention from process transformation research.\n",
"role": "assistant"
}
] |
The prioritisation and satisfaction on Thai's Rating of Energy and Environmental Sustainability criteria: A case study of Bangkok green condominium
|
[
"Environmental performance",
"Occupant satisfaction",
"Added value",
"Green condominium",
"Prioritisation aspects",
"TREES criteria"
] |
[
{
"content": "Summarize the following paper into structured abstract.\n\n1. Introduction: 1.1 The Thai's Rating of Energy and Environmental Sustainability\n2. Research methods: To answer research questions within real-life contexts, a case study approach has been chosen for the research approach. In the study of stakeholder perception appraisal, some elements can be described objectively such as green space area, distance to public transport and satisfaction and prioritisation percentages. However, to identify the assumed cause-effect relationships between variables including physical environment characteristics, FM arrangements and potential buyer and occupant responses to green building aspects, qualitative data are required. The qualitative data such as building quality (i.e. location, architectural design and interior environment) are described in Section 3. The perception of current occupants, potential buyers and real estate developers through interviews is included in the data analysis. This paper applied mixed-method approach, including interviews, observations, document analysis and the use of two questionnaires.\n3. Case study: This project has been awarded with TREES Silver certification (Table I). The Ideo Mobi Sathorn is a condominium project, developed by Ananda Development, located at Krung Thon Buri road, Khlong San district, Bangkok. Construction of the Ideo Mobi Sathorn was completed in 2014. The condominium comprises a single building, having 31 storeys and includes 529 units. The condominium located within 930 metres or about 11 minutes walk from the Wong Wian Yai, a large roundabout in Thonburi province, and within 80 metres from Bangkok Sky Train. The nearest tollway entrance is located 2.4 kilometres by car from the condominium. The building comprises residential units from 6th-31st floor. Common facilities include elevator, parking, 24-hour security, CCTV, swimming pool, fitness, library, garden, laundry and shop on the premises. There are restaurants, shops, schools and office buildings nearby. The building has a gross floor area of 30,528 square metres and a total green space of 2,133 square metres (Plates 1 and 2).\n4. Research findings: 4.1 Assessment from potential buyers\n5. Discussion: The findings show various factors influencing different responses from potential buyers and current occupants with regard to the prioritised aspects and satisfaction percentages on the TREES criteria. The potential buyers perceived water conservation as the least important aspect (22 per cent), whereas this item is most satisfied from the current occupants (97 per cent). Water conservation concerns water saving and water efficiency. Findings from the company's performance assessment report show the use of greywater to water plants in green areas of the condominium (Ananda Development, 2015). However, findings from the interview show that the potential buyers have not realised the link between water efficiency and cost-saving benefits that resulted in the least prioritised aspect of this item. On the contrary, the occupants experienced cost savings from water efficiency that has had an effect on the high satisfaction percentage in water conservation from the green building features. This item has rather low allocated points of the TREES assessment system (six points; Table I). In terms of energy management, the development of green condominiums concerning water conservation helps improving occupant satisfaction.\n6. Conclusions and recommendations: Not only the organisations have to consider building and facilities aspects as the provision of value in FM, but the perception of value in FM from stakeholders also has to be realised. The assessment of stakeholder perception on the TREES criteria helps real estate developers and facilities managers to understand different responses from potential buyers and current occupants in regard to the green building concept. There are criteria including water conservation, materials and resources, environmental protection and building management that are not recognised as important criteria for potential buyers but are essential to the development of green building concept.\n",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Purpose: The environmental performance of buildings can be measured by using an existing green building indicator system. In Thailand, the Thai's Rating of Energy and Environmental Sustainability (TREES) has been applied to 70 buildings including condominiums. It is important to collect feedback from stakeholders to identify the criteria of green features that respond to the expectation of condominium's potential buyers as well as the satisfaction of current occupants. This paper aims to examine prioritised aspects from potential buyers and occupant satisfaction of the TREES criteria in the case study, a green condominium in Bangkok, Thailand.\nDesign/methodology/approach: The case study was conducted at IDEO Mobi Sathorn in Bangkok, the only condominium certified with the TREES system so far. Research methods include interviews, observations, document analysis and the surveys from the condominium's potential buyers and current occupants.\nFindings: The findings indicate that the condominium's potential buyers are more concerned about site and landscape, indoor environmental quality and energy and atmosphere, whereas the current occupants are more satisfied about water conservation, site and landscape and energy and atmosphere in comparison with the other TREES criteria. Despite the provision of green features in the condominium, occupants are less satisfied about green innovation as showed in the least satisfied percentage of TREES criteria. In Facilities Management perspective, the paper shows connections between TREES criteria and FM functions in multi-unit residential project. The findings show that the application of TREES criteria focuses on the provision of value in FM, whereas stakeholder perceptions regarding the TREES criteria contribute to the perception of value in FM.\nPractical implications: The findings and reflections upon the finding can help to understand the impact of green building aspects of the TREES system on perceptions of different stakeholders, that is, potential buyers and current occupants of the condominium. Recommendations for real estate developers and facilities managers regarding the development of green building concept on the TREES system are provided.\nOriginality/value: There has been no prior research in this area. The paper provides better understanding with regard to prioritised aspects from the potential buyers and occupant satisfaction of TREES criteria in Bangkok green condominium. This paper provides empirical data regarding stakeholder perception on TREES criteria that can be used to compare with similar data of the TREES-certified condominiums when they are available in the future.\n",
"role": "assistant"
}
] |
Interfunctional climate and a new product performance: dependence as a moderator
|
[
"New products",
"Performance appraisal",
"Relationship marketing",
"Trust",
"Conflict",
"Spain"
] |
[
{
"content": "Summarize the following paper into structured abstract.\n\n__NO_TITLE__: An executive summary for managers and executive readers can be found at the end of this article.\nIntroduction: The analysis of an innovation performance and its determining factors has become an issue of great business relevance due to environmental changes such as globalisation, increasing competition, the rapid evolution of technologies and the shorter and shorter products' life cycles. Since the development of new products is a multidisciplinary process, the most recent works have dealt with the study of interfunctional integration, understood as the cooperation and communication that is established among the areas involved in the innovative process, especially between marketing and R&D. The results obtained have shown the important role played by the cooperation and communication between these departments, as well as the presence of other more affective factors of the interfunctional climate, such as trust, commitment, satisfaction or conflict.Nevertheless, it is possible that the same level of integration and a good climate between the areas of marketing and R&D may not be always necessary, but this may differ depending on the type or complexity of the project (Sethi, 2000) or the environmental conditions (Souder et al., 1998). The justification lies in the fact that the level of perceived dependence by these functional units may be different in different situations. For this reason the aim of the present work focuses on the analysis of the relationship between marketing and R&D during the development of a new product under different situations of relative dependence. Specifically, we analyse if the effect six key variables of relationship marketing - cooperation, communication, trust, commitment, satisfaction and conflict - exert on a new product performance is moderated by the level of dependence of the functional areas.The study is structured as follows. In the first place, we offer a overview of the interfunctional integration literature, presenting immediately after the variables that may act as determinants of this. Then we introduce a brief explanation of the moderating role dependence plays in the relationship between interfunctional integration and its determinants and the new products' performance. As a result of this explanation a theoretical model is developed. Next the methodology used to carry out the analysis undertaken is explained in detail and the empirical results obtained are discussed. Finally, we comment on the conclusions drawn from the study as well as the main limitations and possible future lines of research.\nInterfunctional integration and its determining factors: the moderating role of dependence: The creation of new products is a multidisciplinary process that demands the necessary involvement of different functional units (Olson et al., 2001). For an effective development of that process the functions involved must interact, exchange information and collaborate closely (Griffin and Hauser, 1996). Thus, in the last decades there has been a growing interest in cross-functional integration, particularly between R&D and marketing. Although it is not easy to delimit this concept, from Kahn's (1996) work the most recent research works suggest a multidimensional definition of it, differentiating between what seem to be its best known components: interaction and collaboration.Interaction refers to the periodical exchange of information between departments through different planned activities like meetings, seminars, or report exchange. For its part, collaboration implies situations in which departments work together on a basis of common goals, mutual respect and teamwork (Kahn, 1996). Really, collaboration is in fact a broader concept that includes both behavioural and affective/attitudinal aspects (Olson et al., 2001). Since attitudes and emotions are more intangible, and therefore, more difficult to measure, in agreement with Olson et al.'s (2001) contribution, in the present work we focus on the behavioural aspects of integration. In this way, we adopt a multidimensional perspective of interfunctional integration and distinguish between two components, which we will call communication and cooperation.Cross-functional communication can be defined specifically as \"the vehicle through which personnel from multiple functional areas share information that is so critical to the successful implementation of projects\" (Pinto and Pinto, 1990, p. 201). Communication is especially relevant if the departments exchange information about consumer needs, technology or the competitors' behaviour. The consequence of this fact is that the information exchange between the technical and marketing functions contributes to a large extent to the success of such projects (Song et al., 1997). In this respect, the interaction between Marketing and R&D allows providing technologically sophisticated products that meet the consumer needs (Ayers et al., 1997).Regarding cooperation, several terms have been used in the literature to refer to the idea of individuals working together to accomplish a specific task. Among these we can mention the terms coordination, collaboration, cooperation and, even integration. However, despite the terminological differences, they all refer to a similar idea and all of them have as a common denominator the \"joint behaviour toward some goal of common interest\" (Pinto and Pinto, 1990, p. 204). As it happened with interaction, the evidence also reveals the positive influence cooperation between different functions has on the new product development performance (Pinto and Pinto, 1990; McDonough, 2000).We can also add that both dimensions of functional integration are related: the frequent exchange of information and the existence of effective communication between the functional areas may cause an increase in the cooperation between them (Anderson and Narus, 1984, 1990; Kalafatis, 2000).Interfunctional integration determinants: the Commitment-Trust Theory\nMethodology: Data collection and sample design\nResults: Verification of the multidimensional nature of a new product performance\nConclusions: The innovation literature has emphasised the important role played by cooperation and communication between the areas involved in the innovative process in order to make the new product more successful. However, there can be no doubt that, since after all the departments are formed by people, there exist other aspects of a \"social\" nature that will have some influence on the interrelation that takes place between such functional areas. Nevertheless, we must bear in mind that the importance of such relationships does not have to be always the same; it may differ according to the level of interdependence perceived by the departments. In this way, the main aim of the present research has been to examine the relationship between the marketing and R&D departments under different scenarios of relative dependence of the parties. With this objective, thirteen hypotheses have been formulated that collect the moderating effect of the level of dependence perceived on the causal relationships existing between six key relational variables - cooperation, communication, trust, commitment, conflict and social satisfaction - and the new product performance.The results obtained from the testing of the model reveal that the intensity with which some of these variables affect the final product performance varies considerably depending on the level of dependence of the areas involved in this process. Specifically, the previous studies carried out show a positive effect of the social satisfaction on the level of trust and commitment that the functional areas develop towards the relationship. Nevertheless, and in view of the results obtained in our work, the effect of satisfaction seems to be stronger in situations of high perceived dependence. In this way, when a functional area is highly dependent (which means that it needs the other party to reach its objectives), the fact that it realises that the relationship is satisfactory will have an especial influence on the development of positive feelings towards the other party such as trust and commitment.An additional result reveals the general relevance of the integration between marketing and R&D as well as the existence of a good climate between such functions to achieve a better performance of the new product, irrespective of the parties' level of dependence. The consequence is that the development of such relationships may be considered a valuable organisational resource with the aim of obtaining a competitive advantage. Our results show that relationship marketing theory can contribute to a large extent to improve the insights of a new product development research.\nManagerial implications: The internal marketing model proposed and tested may have several implications in the entrepreneurial field. Thus, in agreement with previous studies, it has shown that cooperation and effective communication among the areas involved in the innovative process, especially between marketing and R&D, can lead to obtaining a greater performance of the new product. Managers must bear in mind that in order to achieve such cooperative behaviour it is essential that the individuals from different departments share mutual commitment and trust. Likewise, they must be aware of the influence that in the development of such feelings has the personnel's perception that the relationship they maintain with other areas is satisfactory and that there is a low level of conflicts. Consequently, managers must direct their efforts to the creation of the necessary environment to develop closer relationships in which the areas are not considered isolated units but an integral part of a whole, and appear to be sensitive to the other party's needs. Managers must direct internal marketing towards the creation and maintenance of close personal relationships between the marketing and R&D staff. The aim is to reach a shared understanding, promote joint work continuously and show that the existence of an effective communication exchange is important for the project's success.Nevertheless, if what has been stated above is true under any circumstances, managers must pay especial attention to those projects that involve a greater interdependence between the parties. In this context, the contribution each area makes to the project is more important, which makes the existence of a high quality relationship between them essential. In this respect, when there is a high level of dependence perceived by the parties it is especially relevant the creation of a satisfactory climate that implicitly promotes the development of affective bonds and therefore stimulates the undertaking of cooperative activities between them. Our work has shown that satisfaction depends especially on the level of perceived conflict. For this reason, it is important for the managers to work actively in the solution of the conflicts that arise, favouring understanding and esteem among the areas and, as a consequence, the perception that the relationship they maintain is satisfactory. This may foster the parties' flexibility and their willingness to reach joint solutions to shared problems.\nLimitations and future research lines: Among the most important limitations of this work we want to point out the fact that the study has been carried out from an only functional perspective: the R&D department that has analysed its relationship with the marketing department. On the other hand, although these areas play vital roles in the development of new products they are not the only ones involved in such a process. Other functions, like production, will also get involved. A third limitation would be the use of a convenience sampling when choosing medium-sized and large-sized firms to guarantee that they will have structured departments. This circumstance together with the fact that the average size of Spanish firms is smaller than in other countries makes it necessary a careful generalisation of the results to other economies. Lastly, the results must be considered bearing in mind the use of subjective measures of performance.Finally, we want to point out some of the possible lines of research through which to give continuity to the present work. Among them we can mention the joint consideration of both perspectives, marketing and R&D, the incorporation of other points of view through the inclusion of additional functional areas such as Production or the inclusion of firms of different sizes and sectors.\n",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Purpose: - This study aims to examine the marketing/R&D relationship under different relative dependence situations. Specifically, its basic objective is to analyse if the effect that the climate between these departments exerts on new product development performance is moderated by the dependence perceived by these areas.\nDesign/methodology/approach: - The interfunctional climate was measured through six key variables of relationship marketing: cooperation, communication, trust, commitment, social satisfaction and conflict. To do this, the R&D directors of 178 Spanish innovative firms were surveyed. A sample of 345 products (177 successes and 168 failures) was been obtained.\nFindings: - The results derived from a multisample analysis allow the conclusion that in those situations of high dependence the creation of a satisfactory climate is specially important for the development of affective bonds, such as trust and commitment among the functional areas.\nOriginality/value: - The novelty of the research lies in the use of the relationship marketing approach to investigate industrial intra-functional relationships and their influence on a new product performance. Furthermore, the inclusion of dependence as a possible moderator of that influence represents an added value of the study.\n",
"role": "assistant"
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] |
Joint management-stakeholder committees - a new path to stakeholder governance?
|
[
"Corporate responsibility",
"Corporate governance",
"Governance structures",
"Stakeholder",
"Stakeholder governance",
"Stakeholder analysis",
"Management activities"
] |
[
{
"content": "Summarize the following paper into structured abstract.\n\nIntroduction: Increasingly corporations need to consider not only the financial impacts, but also social and environmental impacts of the decisions they take. Some companies have learned the hard way that ignoring stakeholder concerns such as child labor issues in the supply chain (Zadek, 2004) or environmental issues in the disposal of oil platforms (Livesey, 2001) can have devastating effects on share price and corporate reputation (Hertz, 2004).More and more companies have learned from these experiences and engage proactively with their stakeholders. Research on stakeholder engagement first focused on identifying the right stakeholders for dialogue (Mitchell et al., 1997) and providing frameworks for engagement (Foster and Jonker, 2005). The few existing empirical investigations (AccountAbility and Utopies, 2007; Mackenzie, 2007; Spitzeck, 2009; Spitzeck and Hansen, 2010), however, raise doubt as to whether the voices of stakeholders find their way into corporate decision-making processes and governance arrangements. Recent research on stakeholder governance (Spitzeck and Hansen, 2010) identified some promising pathways into meaningful engagement with stakeholders, most significantly joint management-stakeholder committees (JMSCs).This paper explores the impact JMSCs have on corporate decision-making based on data extracted from Business in the Community's (BITC) Corporate Responsibility Index (CRI) in the UK. We first present the theory on stakeholder governance, and then we explain the methodology applied in this research. We then present the results and examples of JMSCs we found in practice. After a discussion of the results, we conclude by outlining implications for theory and practice.\nTheoretical background: Stakeholder governance\nResearch methodology: We address this gap with a large-scale empirical analysis of 51 companies in the UK, all listed in the Business in the Community (BITC) Corporate Responsibility Index (CRI). The CRI is a benchmarking tool to which more than 400 companies in the UK have voluntarily reported since 2002. The index consists of an extensive questionnaire (88 question sets) that is filled out by the participating organisations and evaluated by independent experts for accuracy and credibility. Questions involve a quantitative self-evaluation which needs to be backed up by either measurements and/or qualitative data provided by the company. All 51 companies in the sample have been participating annually in the CRI from 2003 to 2008.The data in the index was analysed by an inductive research strategy (Eisenhardt, 1989). Both quantitative and qualitative data were analysed. For the latter, we used a qualitative content analysis (Miles and Huberman, 2005) and a quantitative representation of qualitative results (Srnka and Koeszegi, 2007). A team of researchers scanned the responses of those 51 companies to relevant sections of the CRI for stakeholder engagement patterns searching for governance arrangements that were composed of a mix of management and stakeholders. Where important information was missing we consulted company websites and reports. Emerging results were discussed within the team as well as with experts from BITC to increase the validity of the results (Yin, 2003). This process facilitated the triangulation of results (Jick, 1979).\nResults: Our results show that companies involve stakeholders in the identification of risks, the development of policies and key performance indicators (KPIs) as well as reporting using a wide array of engagement mechanisms as well as JSMCs (Figure 1).A more detailed analysis demonstrates that in comparison to other forms of engagement JMSCs seem to be particularly effective in impacting corporate governance and decison-making processes (see Figure 2).In comparison to surveys, interviews, focus groups, stakeholder dialogue fora, collaboration, stakeholder advisory panels, multi-stakeholder initiatives as well as other forms of engagement JMSCs demonstrate a measurable impact in more than 75 per cent of the cases. Our in-depth analysis on stakeholder advisory boards and JMSCs found that the growth of (pure) stakeholder advisory boards came to a peak in 2005; in contrast, JMSCs are growing steadily (Figure 3).In Table I we present some examples of SABs and JMSCs that give advice on operational, managerial or strategic issues (Spitzeck and Hansen, 2010).A total of 14 companies, representing 27 per cent of our total sample, made use of JMSCs. The practices of these 14 companies were analysed in more detail, and JMSCs show impacts in monitoring and measurement, policy development, dialogue, reporting as well as product and service innovations (Table II).Below we present some examples of the data in order to illustrate our findings.Monitoring and measurement\nDiscussion: Our research finds JMSCs to be an effective tool in engaging stakeholders in corporate governance and decision-making processes. In contrast to other forms of engagement JMSCs demonstrate measurable impact, thus translating the dialogue with stakeholders into alterations of governance arrangements. This is particularly important, as the limited impact of dialogue can be a major cause of stakeholders withdrawing from board membership (Hooghiemstra and Van Manen, 2002).We find that companies involve internal as well as external stakeholders in the composition of JMSCs. Engaging internal stakeholders in board decisions has a long tradition in some countries, as in some it is legally mandated, for example Germany (White, 2006).In line with previous research (AccountAbility and Utopies, 2007) we also find that dialogue is often unsubstantiated regarding its impact on corporate governance arrangements, as the earlier example of Tesco illustrates. Engaging stakeholders in the design and structure of reporting seems to be becoming more and more mainstream (Spitzeck and Hansen, 2010).One surprising finding was that engagement of stakeholders in JMSCs not only alters governance arrangements but might also lead to innovation, such as in the example of the Oxford Bus Company. While previous research pointed out that innovations might result from engagement with stakeholders, especially with customers (Ayuso et al., 2006; Holmes and Smart, 2009; Spitzeck and Hansen, 2010), this seems at present an emerging trend.\nConclusion: This paper set out to describe the impact of JMSCs on corporate decision-making. Whilst the experience of this sub-group is over too short a time frame to enable definitive conclusions, the development of JMSCs suggests that, for some companies, this may become a more important instrument of stakeholder governance. The use of JMSCs leads primarily to alterations of measurement, monitoring, policy development and reporting.Theoretical implications\n",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Purpose: - This paper aims to describe the emerging practice of joint management-stakeholder-committees (JMSCs) in which corporate executives take decisions in collaboration with stakeholders.\nDesign/methodology/approach: - To identify firms involving stakeholders in their governance arrangements, the authors analysed 51 companies regularly participating in Business in the Community's Corporate Responsibility Index in the UK. The data provided by the index as well as corporate reports were then analysed to evaluate the impact of JMSCs on corporate decision-making.\nFindings: - The research finds that JMSCs strongly influence corporate governance mechanisms such as monitoring and measurement as well as the policy development of firms.\nResearch limitations/applications: - The analysis builds on corporate responses given to the questionnaire sent by the Corporate Responsibility Index as well as corporate reports. Future research is encouraged to triangulate findings with stakeholder opinions on the effectiveness of JMSCs.\nPractical implications: - JMSCs prove to be an effective tool to involve stakeholders in corporate decision-making processes. Owing to their effectiveness JMSCs are more likely to create trust between firms and their stakeholders.\nOriginality/value: - The paper is the first empirical investigation into the effectiveness of engaging stakeholders in joint management-stakeholder committees, demonstrating the impact and effectiveness of such engagement.\n",
"role": "assistant"
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] |
The impact of HR development on innovative performances in central and eastern European countries
|
[
"Performance",
"Innovation",
"Employee development",
"CEE region"
] |
[
{
"content": "Summarize the following paper into structured abstract.\n\nIntroduction: Today, the success and sustainability of organizations is usually reflected in their ability to innovate their processes, products and services (Drucker, 1998; Heunks, 1998; McGrath, 2001; Shipton et al., 2005; Shipton et al., 2006; Sanchez and Ricart, 2010; Ngo and O'cass, 2013; Nagano et al., 2014; Carayannis et al., 2015; Fu et al., 2015). Innovation relates to new products and services, production methods and procedures, production technologies and administrative changes (Fay et al., 2015), and it is seen as an organization-wide activity that represents the outcome of creative endeavor (Shipton et al., 2017).\nTheoretical background: The relationship between HR development and innovative performances\nResearch methodology: Context of the research\nResults: Table III presents means, standard deviations and the Spearman's correlation test results. It can be seen that there are statistically significant correlations between the rate of innovation variable and hypothesized predictors such as systematic estimation of the need for training (r=0.66), systematic evaluation of the effectiveness of training (r=0.132), the level of training costs (r=0.127), the level of the use of projects to stimulate learning (r=0.184), training on-the-job (r=0.133), participation in project team work (0.159), development centers (r=0.128), international work assignments (r=0.166), formal networking schemes (r=0.212), coaching (r=0.191) and mentoring (r=0.071). This test showed weak statistically significant correlations between variables.\nDiscussion and conclusion: This paper examined the effects of HR development practices on the level of organizational innovation in the organizations from the selected CEE countries. The results provide some useful insights.\nTheoretical and practical implications: The paper is exploring a particular gap, and it can advance the understanding of the importance of HR development to innovation. Although the HRM theory recognizes the relations with innovativeness, yet there is a significant unexplored area for each of HRM practice and their relationship with innovations.\nLimitations: Our research has few limitations. The first one is reflected in our dependent variable - the level of organizational innovation. The CRANET questionnaire does not distinguish innovation variable on sub-levels (marketing, products, service innovation, etc.). We could only explore the level of overall innovativeness of organizations. Second, we reached a low Nagelkerke coefficient (13.4 percent) which indicates that predictors explain a relatively small proportion of the variation between the levels of innovation in organizations from the selected countries of the CEE region. But, p-values in our model still indicate a real relationship between the significant predictors and the response variable. Third, our data derive from single source respondents, and response rates between countries do vary. At the country level, every effort is made to represent the structure of the economy in the country and at the point in which the data are being collected (Morley et al., 2016).\n",
"role": "user"
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"content": "Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to research the impact of one of HRM activities, employees' development, on the level of organizational innovative performances. HR development techniques that organizations use in order to develop employee's knowledge, skills and abilities and their impact on the perceived level of organizational innovativeness was set in the focus of research, with the intent of determining which development techniques influence organizational innovative performance.\nDesign/methodology/approach: The research is based on the data from CRANET project, which has been largely used in exploring the relation between HRM activities and other variables of organizational behavior and performances. Data for this study were collected from a sample of 1,384 organizations from 8 CEE countries (Croatia, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Slovakia, Slovenia and Serbia) for the period 2015-2016. The correlation was used to explore the relations between variables. Ordinal logistic regression was used in order to explore the relations between the employees' development techniques, training importance and training effectiveness and the level of organizational innovativeness.\nFindings: The regression model showed that there are a statistically significant relations between the effectiveness of training expressed by systematic evaluation of training practice, and the methods of employees' training (use of projects to stimulate learning, on-the-job training, development centers, use of international work assignments and mentoring) with the level of innovation. The importance of training practice expressed by the ratio of the annual training budget in the total payroll costs did not show statistically significant relations with the level of innovation. Also, systematic estimation of the need for training of personnel has not shown statistically significant relations with the innovation rate of the organization.\nResearch limitations/implications: The data are derived from single source respondents, and response rates between countries do vary. At the country level, every effort is made to represent the structure of the economy in the country and at the point in which the data are being collected.\nPractical implications: Training and international working assignments have a direct positive relation with the level of organizational performances, while teamwork and coaching and mentoring have not shown the same. Organizations and their HR managers should pay special attention to planning and implementation of HR development programs - coaching, mentoring and teamwork - in order to create space for organizational innovation enhancement.\nOriginality/value: Previous literature seeking to clarify the role of HRM and fostering organizational innovation has made its evident contribution based on theoretical papers. In order to improve the current situation in which empirical evidence is very rare, research on the significance of the employee development program and its impact on the organizational innovative performances is based on quantitative indicators of the conducted research. The relation of HRM and innovative performances in the CEE region was studied in only a few studies. In the previous period, this region has often been omitted in the field of HRM research. Therefore, an additional novelty can be derived from a research sample compiled from the CEE region countries in the conducted research.\n",
"role": "assistant"
}
] |
Choosing high-equity cosmetic brands in bad macroeconomic conditions: evidence from panel data
|
[
"Cosmetic brand",
"Brand equity",
"Price",
"Promotion/feature/display",
"Consumer characteristics",
"Macroeconomic conditions"
] |
[
{
"content": "Summarize the following paper into structured abstract.\n\n1. Introduction: Cosmetics rank among the most popular consumer products (Cliquet and Croizean, 2002; Hill et al., 2012; Lundqvist et al., 2013). Despite two major recessions, the global cosmetics market has grown by 4.5% a year on average over the last two decades (Barbalova, 2011). Research has shown that during a recession, consumers increase their consumption of beauty products in order to feel good (Hill et al., 2012). Overall, the cosmetics market has been resilient in the face of economic recessions. This trend however conceals disparities across market segments as, for example, the global hair-care market, the field of this study, was severely hit during the economic downturn in 2008, with the lowest growth rates among all the mass cosmetics segments (2-3%).Difficult economic situations have led to changes in consumer attitudes and behaviours towards brands (Nunes et al., 2011; Mark et al., 2016). Recession particularly increases price sensitivity and consideration of price fairness (Ferguson, 2014), as well as price consciousness (Lichtenstein et al., 1993). Cosmetics product and brand managers report the difficulties related to consumer choice, especially in times of economic turbulence (Coulter et al., 2002; Hung and Li, 2007). Challenges include tough competition stemming from sales promotion and price wars between competitors aimed at reshaped consumer behaviour, and the high-equity brands' difficulty to use the regular levers, particularly pricing and promotional actions, to induce a favourable response to their focal brand.As a result, during various unfavourable macroeconomic situations, marketers of high-equity brands face considerable challenges that could impede the firm's performance. The L'Oreal group--The Body Shop, Lancome, L'Oreal Paris--has been trying to adjust its brand strategies by offering more products at an affordable price (e.g. cosmetic brand products). However, in mass retailing, these brands have to compete with other available brands (e.g. national brands and retail brands). During the recession, the L'Oreal group strategically decided to strengthen its mass market segment, with the L'Oreal Paris brand, in order to improve its market share in comparison to the main standard brands (e.g. Unilever and Procter and Gamble) and retailer brands (Carrefour, Casino, etc.). L'Oreal Paris is a typical high-equity cosmetic brand positioned by L'Oreal group as a cosmetic brand for diversification. In the words of the group's CEO, Mr Jean-Paul Agon, 'We are here at Cannes not just with our luxury brands, but with our cosmetic portfolio, which includes L'Oreal Paris and The Body Shop. That diversification is underway; and what's interesting is that it represents incremental business' (Mann, 2010). The pricing strategy and the marketing support (promotion and advertising) should ensure the good image of the parent brand is associated with its high-equity brand in the retail sector.Despite the impact of adverse macroeconomic situations on marketing strategy and thus on the firm's performance, research striving to explain how consumers choose cosmetic brands in such situations remains scant. Baker (2009) recommends that marketers avoid 'myopic research' examining the similarities between events (recessions), which have features recurring throughout history. To the authors' knowledge, no prior studies have investigated the marketing effectiveness of offering cosmetic brands in mass retailing under adverse macroeconomic situations. Retailers and manufacturers need to understand how to strategically price and promote cosmetic brands in a tough economic environment. This is especially important considering that during the 2008-2009 recession, cosmetic brands faced competition not only from the usual cheaper brands but also from other premium players, which offered smaller packaged, thus attractively lower priced products, to make themselves more accessible to consumers (Euromonitor International, 2013). A substantive investigation in this field is overdue.The aim of this research is to examine how specific market variables (price and promotion) affect the choice of high-equity cosmetic brands over other competitive brands in different macroeconomic conditions. Thus, this research contributes to the existing studies in two main ways. Firstly, using behavioural panel data, it addresses the effect of price-related variables, promotion tools, and consumer characteristics on consumers' choice of high-equity cosmetic brands compared with both low and medium-equity competitor brands in different contraction periods. Thus, it complements prior studies on perceptual factors (Kastanakis and Balabanis, 2014). Secondly, this research departs from existing studies by establishing the moderating effects of macroeconomic conditions on the relationships between price, promotion, consumer characteristics and high-equity cosmetic brand choice. Therefore, it enriches extant studies on brands over the business cycle (Lamey et al., 2012; Van Heerde et al., 2013).Regarding management, this research helps retailers and manufacturers efficiently manage the pricing policy and promotion of cosmetic brands' tiers and to understand the effect of consumer characteristics on choosing these products. Furthermore, it provides specific guidelines to managers on how to adapt their policies for cosmetic brands in periods of recession.In the next section, the paper reviews previous studies on cosmetic/beauty brand consumption and develops the research expectations. It then presents the research methodology, which is based on multinomial logit modelling using a panel data. Next, it examines the results of the research, and lastly discusses the implications of the findings and suggest avenues for further research.\n2. Literature review and theoretical background: 2.1 Brand equity, cosmetics and theory of planned behaviour\n3. Methodology: 3.1 Sample description: data, product and brand selection\n4. Results and analysis: This research first presents the main results followed by an assessment of the effects of macroeconomic conditions. 4.1 Main results\n5. Conclusion, implications and future research: 5.1 Discussion and theoretical implications\n",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Purpose: This study investigates how price, promotion and consumer characteristics affect consumer choice of high over medium- and low-equity cosmetic brand under different macroeconomic conditions.\nDesign/methodology/approach: The study uses purchase records from MarketingScan's Behaviour Scan panels (a GFK - Mediametrie Company) covering the period from 2008 to 2009. The panel analysed represents a sample of 2,149 households representative of the national population.\nFindings: Results indicate that regular price and relative brand price increase high-equity cosmetic brand choice over both low- and medium-equity brands, while reference price decreases it. Brand feature promotion activity and joint promotion positively affect high-equity cosmetic brand choice, whereas display promotion decreases it. In comparison to medium-equity cosmetic brands, gender and education slightly increase high-equity cosmetic brand choice, while age decreases it. Surprisingly, household income does not affect high-equity cosmetic brand choice. The effect of regular price decreases over worsening macroeconomic conditions. However, the effect of relative brand price decreases between low and moderate contraction periods, but increases between moderate and high contraction times. Feature promotion is effective only when the contraction is moderate, while the negative effect of display promotion is stable over time.\nOriginality/value: The paper underlines the moderating role of macroeconomic conditions on the relationship between pricing decisions as well as promotion activity and consumer choice of high-equity cosmetic brands.\n",
"role": "assistant"
}
] |
Co-creation of value-in-use through big data technology- a B2B agricultural perspective
|
[
"Agriculture",
"Co-creation",
"Big data",
"Value-in-use",
"B2B"
] |
[
{
"content": "Summarize the following paper into structured abstract.\n\nIntroduction: In the era of smart agriculture, farmers are able to take data-driven decisions and generate value through intuition, intelligence and insights (Sundmaeker et al., 2016; Wolfert et al., 2017; Sparapani, 2017; Rands, 2017; and Lioutas et al., 2019). Big data technology applications such as predictive modeling, benchmarking and sensor deployment are enabling farmers to mitigate crop failure, enhance efficiency and also scout for new avenues of value creation (Faulkner and Cebul, 2014; Lesser, 2014; Wolfert et al., 2017). Smart, connected products, which combine hardware, software, sensors, data storage and wireless connectivity enable farmers to take quicker and more optimal decisions on yield and various other aspects of farm management (Porter and Heppelmann, 2014). Digital agriculture, which entails the use of robotics, artificial intelligence and unmanned aviation systems, enables farmers and other stakeholders to enhance food production across the agriculture value chain (UN Global Compact and PA Consulting Group, 2017).\nResearch questions and paper structure: While the extant marketing literature on co-creation has predominantly focused on business innovation, new product or service development, consumers' experiences and branding, there are avenues for further research on how prescriptive solutions provided by suppliers give rise to co-creation in knowledge-intensive B2B sectors, and also how relations and resources enable customers (farmers) to participate in co-creation (Alves et al., 2016; and Payne et al., 2008). Big data technology in agriculture, which entails the deployment of prescriptive crop management tools, is a ripe context for filling the above literature gaps. Moreover, Vargo et al. (2008) point out that co-creation is yet to be researched in diverse socio-technical contexts.\nLiterature review: Mapping out co-creation in digital agriculture\nResearch design: Our research philosophy is based on the constant comparative method wherein we are proposing certain properties of co-creation and value-in-use, which can serve as the basis for further theory building by future scholars (Glaser, 1965). The core concepts underpinning our research design are value co-creation and value-in-use. We commenced the study with a theoretical pre-understanding of these concepts (Komulainen, 2014). During our study, we also drew upon elements of the discovery-oriented, theory-in-use approach, wherein we generated initial insights from the extant value co-creation literature and later corroborated these insights through interactions with digital agriculture practitioners (Terho et al., 2012). To be fair, there already is exhaustive B2B literature on co-creation and value-in-use. However, scholarly work linking co-creation with different forms of value-in-use in a knowledge-intensive B2B context such as digital agriculture is scare and hence, we find the discovery-oriented theory building approach suitable for developing our emergent model (Terho et al., 2012).\nEmpirical setting of our study: As part of our purposive theoretical sampling approach (Eisenhardt and Graebner, 2007), we selected interviewees from a Qualtrics survey data base of 492 farmers used for a previous study on big data in agriculture. We carefully selected interviewees (farmers) to meet the following criteria:\nData collection: The duration of the entire study was for one year, which also included the preparatory work for the interview guides. The interview guides were semi-structured. We included pre-defined questions that were pertinent to our research themes, but our co-author had the flexibility to incorporate more questions during the course of the interview so that the farmer could elaborate more on hihe/sher experiences with big data technology. The core themes of the semi-structured interview guide included:\nData analysis: Our data analysis was based on Glaser's (1965) constant comparative method which consisted of the stages of:\nResults: The results of our study primarily focus on the nature of co-creation and various forms of value-in-use emerging from co-creation. The ancillary concepts such as relational actors, psychological ownership and value co-destruction enable us to further enrich our conceptualization of co-creation and value-in-use. (The overall composition of the different nodes in our study based on the coding analysis is reported in the cross-tabs results of Appendix 1). In this section, we extensively use verbatims to illustrate how the core concepts are applicable to digital agriculture.\nTheoretical implications: Our qualitative analysis paves the way for us to develop an emergent model based on the inter-related categories, which can serve as the basis for more theory building on co-creation and value-in-use by future scholars (Glaser, 1965). We have outlined the various concepts of our study in our emergent model below (Figure 2):\nManagerial implications: Our research can inform policy and also be beneficial to diverse stakeholders in the digital agriculture sector, as discussed below.\nFuture research directions: Our research, which is based on the constant comparative method, can pave the way for more rigorous hypothesis testing by future scholars (Glaser, 1965). As our study focused on entirely on farmers' perceptions of co-creation and value-in-use, we encourage further theory-building efforts that integrate the perspectives of farmers, ATPs, distributors, extension agents and family members on co-creation and value-in-use and explore the dynamics between different network actors. We also encourage more longitudinal research that explores how co-creation through different forms of interaction and autonomy gives rise to different forms of value-in-use. Further research can be conducted on how B2B clients in other knowledge-intensive sectors gain a competitive advantage through epistemic value-in-use and co-creation through indirect interaction. We call for scholars to determine how shared value creation through monetary and environmental value-in-use can impact the relationship between B2B suppliers and buyers and also how it impacts their profitability in the long-run. Another ripe area of future scholarship would be to determine whether B2B suppliers can boost their sales and strengthen ties with customers by incorporating themes on co-creation and value-in-use into their marketing narratives.\n",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Purpose: This paper aims to discuss the concepts of co-creation and value-in-use with a specific focus on big data technology in agriculture. The authors provide a unique narrative of how farmers experience co-creation and value-in-use in monetary and non-monetary forms.\nDesign/methodology/approach: The qualitative study is based on semi-structured interviews with mid-Western farmers. The constant comparative method was used for coding the data. Results were analyzed through open and axial coding, and matrix queries helped establish linkages between different concepts via NVivo 12.\nFindings: The paper provides rich insight into co-creation through direct and indirect interaction, autonomous co-creation and epistemic, monetary and environmental value-in-use in the digital agriculture sector. Interestingly, co-creation through indirect interaction gives rise to epistemic value-in-use. Also, value-co-destruction can undermine co-creation, while relational actors and the concept of psychological ownership are very relevant to the process of co-creation.\nResearch limitations/implications: The authors build on the extant literature on co-creation in knowledge-intensive B2B sectors with the unique findings linking different forms of co-creation with value-in-use.\nPractical implications: The findings on co-creation and value-in-use are beneficial to diverse agriculture stakeholders such as farmers, agriculture technology providers, extension agents and policymakers. Agricultural technology providers can determine how to make the co-creation process more meaningful for farmers and also create suitable technology tools that enrich farmers' knowledge about crop management. Agricultural stakeholders can learn how to develop big data analytic tools and marketing narratives to maximize value-in-use and pre-empt value co-destruction.\nSocial implications: The research can impact policy, as it addresses a very relevant issue of how farmers relate to big data technology amidst growing consolidation and privacy concerns in the digital agriculture sector.\nOriginality/value: Our work is both theoretically and contextually relevant. We incorporate elements of service-dominant and customer-dominant logic while analyzing farmers' perspectives of co-creation and value-in-use.\n",
"role": "assistant"
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] |
Consumers impact on food quality under frozen conditions in Germany
|
[
"Consumer behaviour",
"Germany",
"Survey",
"Frozen foods",
"Food quality"
] |
[
{
"content": "Summarize the following paper into structured abstract.\n\nIntroduction: Food quality has been described differently in literature depending on the purpose of the research. Grebitus (2008) compiled definitions of \"food quality\" from different researchers in her thesis \"Food Quality from the Consumer's Perspective\". In summary, food quality is highly subjective, depending on the point of view. The consumer-orientated food quality, according to Grebitus' summary, is a psychological concept, dealing with the acceptance and perceptions of consumers regarding food. Acceptability of food depends mainly on sensory (taste, flavour, texture, colour, appearance), safety and nutritional properties (Costell et al., 2009). These properties are not only determined by the initial quality of the food, but also by the way in which the consumer handles the food, including storage and preparation. There are several studies analysing consumer behaviour with fresh foods in chilled storage (Albrecht, 1995; Marklinder et al., 2004; Sammarco et al., 1997; Byrd-Bredbenner et al., 2007), often focussing on food safety issues. However, investigations on consumer behaviour regarding freezing food are rare and often limited in the sample size and food categories covered. A study by Damen and Steenbekkers (2007) conducted a face-to-face interview about the habits of freezing meat, interviewing 27 members of young families. When asked about their main reasons for freezing meat, respondents often named saving money because of special offers or having food in stock. Half of them repacked the meat in plastic bags before freezing, most of the rest froze the meat in the original package in which it was purchased. Frozen meat was mainly defrosted in the fridge (n=12) or on the kitchen worktop (n=6). Comparing the self-reported and actual food safety behaviour of the interviewees, Damen and Steenbekkers (2007) revealed a discrepancy and called for extended education. A UK study WRAP investigated the behaviour of UK citizens, questioning frozen storage regarding food waste and sustainability (The Waste and Resources Action Programme (WRAP), 2010).\nMaterials and methods: An online survey was carried out to investigate the behaviour of German consumers in a representative way in January 2018. Single and multiple-choice questions, all of them closed, were asked. The questionnaire was pretested (n=20) regarding, for example, timing, appropriate wording, skip patterns and order of questions. A control question was inserted, asking twice for the age of the cooling appliance used mainly in a slightly different manner to check for reasonable replies. Deviations of one year were accepted.\nQuestionnaire: After the demographic key data and information about the cooling appliances (main and additional appliances) were determined. Questions about the frequency of freezing fresh food and purchasing frozen food, storage time, pre-handling (e.g. blanching), packaging and load-degree were asked afterwards. A total of eight food groups were predefined: fruit, vegetables, meat, fish, bread, pastries, ready-to-eat (RTE) meals and leftovers.\nResults: Load degree\nDiscussion: One of the key findings is the common workload of freezers in Germany. The load degree of the freezing compartment or appliance is claimed as \"maximum load\" or \"average load\" in more than 90 per cent of the cases. Only 6 per cent have an empty or low loaded freezer compartment. In combination, 75 per cent of all participants have the opportunity to use frozen foods and nearly all of them take advantage of this option. This is breaking through all age groups investigated from 18 to 69 and confirms previous expectations, resulting from market information about frozen food. The high utilisation of freezers is a good tool for sustainability and to prevent food waste. As Janssen et al. (2017) shows, usage of frozen food can decrease the food waste at home due to longer shelf life. Nevertheless, there are opportunities to even increase the utilisation of freezers and optimise warehousing in private households.\nConclusion: Freezers are widespread in Germany and many private persons take advantage of this preserving and storage method.\n",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Purpose: More than 50 per cent of all German households own a freezing appliance and so far the market of frozen foods is constantly increasing (1 per cent from 2017 to 2018). Despite frozen foods playing an important role in our everyday life, little is known about the consumer's habits at home. The purpose of this paper is to uncover gaps in the knowledge about consumer behaviour when handling frozen food. Moreover, the impact of consumers on the quality of frozen products should be assessed.\nDesign/methodology/approach: A representative online survey was carried out to investigate different aspects of consumer behaviour concerning frozen foods. Respondents (n=2,053) were questioned about their general handling habits regarding eight different food groups: fruit, vegetables, meat, fish, bread, pastries, ready-to-eat meals and leftovers. The focus was on freezing, pre-handling, packaging and thawing - depending on the age of those questioned and combined with best practice advice regarding quality storage of frozen products.\nFindings: Most Germans have the opportunity to freeze food and keep their freezers full or medium loaded. Older participants act more efficiently towards quality storage, but more education about freezing and frozen storage would be generally helpful to maintain quality of frozen foods and increase utilisation of freezers, using their full preservation potential.\nResearch limitations/implications: No open questions were asked due to the scope of more than 2,000 participants, which, in retrospect, would have been instructive.\nOriginality/value: Consumer handling of frozen food in Germany was investigated in a representative way for the first time, covering age groups from 18 to 69 and household sizes from 1 to >4 people, focussing on eight major food groups.\n",
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Balancing between organizations and society: exploring Chinese organizations' legitimacy efforts
|
[
"Legitimacy",
"Confucianism",
"Organizational communication",
"Public relations",
"Chinese values"
] |
[
{
"content": "Summarize the following paper into structured abstract.\n\nIntroduction: The legitimacy of an organization is often evaluated based on how it operates in a larger external environment, within which certain values drive expectations that are placed on the organization by its constituents. For legitimate organizations, a collectively shared value becomes an intersecting point that represents harmony and balance between how they operate and the desired behavioral norms and expectations that are prevalent in their surrounding environment. One way that organizations communicate their legitimacy efforts is through their Web sites. For example, Branco and Rodrigues (2006) examined how banks disclosed social responsibility information through their online media in an attempt to acquire legitimacy. Waters and Lemanski (2010) discussed how examining organizations' Web content provides insightful information about their communication strategies.\nLiterature review: Organizational legitimacy\nMethods: To identify the core values communicated by Chinese organizations, a systematic content analysis was conducted on the Web content of the Chinese Fortune 500 companies (n=500) as listed by the 2010 Chinese Fortune 500 online magazine. The rationale behind this decision was based on Dowling and Pfeffer's (1975) claim that \"legitimacy can be assessed by an examination of the values and norms prevalent in society\" (p. 124). The sample used in this study was chosen as it represents the most profitable and successful companies in China, all of which have Web sites to communicate with the public. These Web sites also serve as a means of disseminating the strategic outputs described in the literature on the strategic perspective of organizational legitimacy (Ashforth and Gibbs, 1990, Dowling and Pfeffer, 1975; Suchman, 1995), specifically in terms of communication about values.\nResults: Over half (n=273) of organizations examined in the study were manufacturing (54.6 percent) companies while other organizations were 30.6 percent service (n=143), 2.6 percent retail organizations (n=13), and 13.8 percent others (n=69). Organizations coded as \"other\" included holding companies and companies that did not fit with the organizational types in the coding scheme.\nDiscussion: The current study systematically examined the strategic legitimation efforts of Chinese organizations by identifying the values they claim to possess on their Web sites. A benefit of studying cross-cultural legitimacy resides in the fact that reduced trade barriers, advanced technologies, lowered transportation costs, and reduced production costs have increasingly prompted organizations to explore an international focus. When appropriately integrating a company's global initiative with local market differences, the global operation can bring a competitive advantage to the company (e.g. Bardhan, 2013; Curtin and Gaither, 2007; Moffitt, 2011). As China has become one of the most popular host countries for multinational corporations (Pearce, 2012), studying how major Chinese companies communicate their legitimacy through Web content can provide insight on how multinational corporations can integrate local values into their global strategies. Many globalization scholars (e.g. Baraldi, 2006; Jing and Mo, 2012) have emphasized the need to manage global and local cultures for multinationals.\nImplications: Research on legitimacy\nLimitations and future research: The current study only focussed on the most profitable and successful Chinese organizations. The fact that most of these organizations are state-owned may explain why the theme of having national-interest orientation was identified as one main value cluster in the study. Future studies could extend this analysis to examine differences between the values communicated by privately owned and non-profit organizations in China.\n",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Purpose: Based on the literature on organizational legitimacy, organizations must adhere to the value-driven standards inherent in the cultures in which they operate. Organizations' Web sites help increase the public's awareness and understanding of their values and culture. The purpose of this paper is to examine the strategic legitimation efforts of Chinese organizations through their Web content.\nDesign/methodology/approach: To identify the core values and cultures communicated by Chinese organizations, a systematic content analysis was conducted on the Web contents of Chinese Fortune 500 companies (n=500) as listed by the 2010 Chinese Fortune 500 online magazine.\nFindings: The major findings included the following: over half (i.e. 62.2 percent) of the Chinese Fortune 500 companies communicated their organizational values on their Web sites; this study identified some key value clusters (e.g. such as trustworthiness, propriety, benevolence, or self-regulation) for Chinese organizations' legitimacy; Confucianism exerted a strong influence on these Chinese organizations' values; and Chinese organizations relied on cooperation and coordination to achieve harmonic relationships with others.\nResearch limitations/implications: The current study only focussed on the most profitable and successful Chinese organizations. Future studies could extend this analysis to examine differences between the values communicated by privately owned and non-profit organizations in China. Since the current study adopted a strategic organizational legitimacy framework, future research should use an institutional legitimacy framework by actively assessing the relational networks of Chinese consumers to identify the societal standards that make up organizational legitimacy from the consumer perspective. Focus groups or in-depth interviews with various consumers and employees would help identify these expectations and their corresponding values and provide an in-depth examination of how these standards are created.\nPractical implications: This study suggested two key implications. First, Chinese organizations believe that the values (e.g. harmony, truth-seeking, or unity) held by employees have formed the foundation of organizational behavior or image. Second, individual and cultural values have guiding roles in the standards that constituents establish for organizations. Global communication practitioners must counsel managers conducting business with Chinese organizations to recognize the cultural influence on how Chinese companies conduct business.\nOriginality/value: This study represents a pioneering study in a series of studies focussed on conceptualizing organizational legitimacy in Chinese cultures.\n",
"role": "assistant"
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Impact of indoor facilities management on the quality of life of the elderly in public housing
|
[
"Public sector",
"Facilities management",
"Quantitative techniques",
"Elderly",
"Quality of life",
"Public housing"
] |
[
{
"content": "Summarize the following paper into structured abstract.\n\nIntroduction: Public housing is owned by government authorities. It is built to provide affordable accommodation for the low-income population. Public housing is popular in many countries and is seen as a potential remedy for social inequality (Dalgliesh et al., 1997; Hu and Chou, 2015). The global aging population is the most challenging population issue in the twenty-first century. The proportion of the elderly population has exceeded 10 per cent in more than 70 countries (WHO, 2007). Many elderly persons are staying in public housing because of low income and limited savings. The increasingly aging population is causing a sharp rise in the demand for elderly-friendly housing. However, most public housing is not purposely built for the elderly. The elderly, therefore, often have to live in public housing with sub-standard facilities, which directly impacts their daily lives.\nFacilities in public housing: To maintain their lifestyle without changes, 90 per cent of elderly persons prefer to continue living in public housing rather than moving to care and attention homes or nursing homes (Chui and Co., 2009; Hong Kong Housing Society, 2004). The governments of various countries offer different public housing and subsidy schemes to address the housing needs of senior citizens. In North America, the elderly have the priority for public housing and affordable housing subsidized by the government (Akintola, 2005; USA Department of Housing and Urban Development, 2013). In Hong Kong, more than 50 per cent of the elderly population is currently living in public and subsidized housing (Census and Statistics Department, 2009). To tackle the growing housing demand of the elderly population, the Hong Kong Government has developed a few pilot schemes for elderly housing (HKSAR, 2010), and the Housing Authority provides two types of public housing for the elderly, housing for senior citizens and small self-contained flats (Hong Kong Housing Authority, 2014).\nElderly quality of life: QoL refers to the subjective evaluation of individual overall life satisfaction and well-being (Lawton et al., 2000). It is a broad-range concept incorporating objective and subjective evaluations of physical, material, social and emotional well-being together with the extent of personal development and purposeful activity, all weighted by a personal set of values (Higgs et al., 2003). Elderly QoL, thus, consists of multiple dimensions, including physical health, psychological state, level of independence, social relationships and their relationship with salient features of their environment (WHOQOL Group, 1995).\nConceptual model: Previous studies have indicated that FM plays an essential role in increasing the satisfaction of the elderly living in care and attention homes and minimizing common risks (Leung et al., 2012, 2013). Therefore, the influence of facilities on the well-being and QoL of residents in public housing is assumed to be significant. Based on an extensive literature review, the conceptual relationships between FM components and QoL of elderly persons living in public housing are illustrated in Figure 1. Indoor FM components in public housing are assumed to have a direct impact on the QoL of elderly residents.\nResearch methodology: A questionnaire study was used to investigate the relationships between FM components and elderly QoL. The questionnaire was designed to include four major sections:\nResults: Reliability analysis\nDiscussion: The regression results indicate that elderly QoL is accurately predicted by indoor FM factors, such as space planning (Fin1), electricity (Fin3), bathroom (Fin4), indoor lighting (Fin5), noise (Fin7), windows and doors (Fin8), indoor decoration (Fin9), non-slip floor (Fin10) and accessibility (Fin12), as shown in Table IV. Therefore, both designers and facilities managers should pay particular attention to improving these FM factors.\nRecommendations: Practical implications\nConclusion: To cater to the needs of the growing aging population, public housing is expected to provide a comfortable living environment with elderly-friendly facilities to allow successful aging in place. Elderly persons normally spend a lot of time in their flat. An appropriate indoor FM, therefore, plays an essential role in maintaining and enhancing their QoL in physical, psychological and social terms. This study has investigated the impact of indoor FM in public housing on elderly QoL, and 12 indoor FM factors were identified and classified into three major components:\n",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Purpose: The aging population is growing rapidly, causing significant increases in the demand for public housing. Normally, the elderly rely heavily on the facilities available in their living environment to maintain their quality of life (QoL). However, most public housing is not purposely designed for the elderly, and, thus, has inappropriate facilities, which often have a negative impact upon the physical and psychological health of residents. This paper aims to investigate the relationships between the indoor facilities management (FM) of public housing and the QoL of elderly persons.\nDesign/methodology/approach: Based on an extensive literature review, a questionnaire has been designed and distributed among elderly residents of different public housing buildings. To investigate the impact of indoor FM on the QoL of the senior residents in public housing, statistical analysis methods including reliability analysis and multiple regression modeling were adopted.\nFindings: The study identified 12 indoor FM factors and six QoL domains (i.e. overall QoL, physical and psychological health, independence, social relationship and living environment). The results also reveal that space planning and bathroom influence most QoL domains, including overall QoL, physical/psychological health, independence and living environment of the elderly; electricity and noise mainly affect physical health and independence, while noise is negatively related to elderly QoL; and supporting facilities (including windows and doors, indoor decoration, non-slip floors and accessibility) have a positive impact on psychological health and social relationships.\nPractical implications: Based on the current findings, several practical recommendations are made for the designers and facilities managers, including wide corridors for individuals with wheelchairs, the installation of single-lever-type mixers to provide a stable hot water supply and a window designed to get as much natural light as possible.\nOriginality/value: This paper provides a clear picture about elderly special requirements on indoor FM and their QoL. It can assist architects, engineers and facilities managers in public housing to understand elderly needs and improve FM during design and operation stages for enhancing QoL of elderly residents in public housing buildings.\n",
"role": "assistant"
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] |
Managers' learning process during a health-promoting leadership intervention
|
[
"Health promotion",
"Social interaction",
"Learning",
"Qualitative methods",
"Intervention"
] |
[
{
"content": "Summarize the following paper into structured abstract.\n\nIntroduction: For decades, occupational health research has identified risk factors for ill health and generated increased knowledge about factors that influence employee health (Bakker and Demerouti, 2007; Karasek et al., 1981; Kivimaki et al., 2012; Lamontagne et al., 2007; Nielsen et al., 2010). Leadership has been identified as one key factor for improving working conditions and employee health at work (Kelloway and Barling, 2010; Kelloway et al., 2008; Zwingmann et al., 2014). First-line managers have been depicted as playing a key role in regard to implementing change in an organisation (Kompier et al., 2000; Lamontagne et al., 2007; Nielsen and Noblet, 2018). However, there is limited research pointing at health-promoting leadership interventions in the public sector as a factor that succeeds in improving employee health (Dellve and Eriksson, 2017; Eriksson et al., 2010). Despite knowledge and available guidelines on leading successful workplace health promotion (WHP) interventions (Nielsen and Noblet, 2018; Nielsen and Randall, 2012; NIOSH, 2016), there seems to be few health-promoting leadership interventions in public sector that contribute to sustainable employee health (Eriksson et al., 2017). First-line managers in the public sector are themselves often exposed to demanding psychosocial working conditions. They experience high work demands and limited decision latitude, which contributes to limited room for action (Corin and Bjork, 2017; Pousette, 2001; Skagert et al., 2008). They face difficulties in handling workplace stressors, such as informal and formal demands, and experience limited opportunity to communicate work environment challenges to strategic decision makers (Rodham and Bell, 2002; Skagert et al., 2008). Successful health-promoting leadership interventions need to build first-line managers' skills and capacity in handling and improving challenging work environments (Dellve and Eriksson, 2017). There are few studies analysing health-promoting leadership factors as workplace learning processes (Pijpker et al., 2018) and specifically how learning processes contribute to development of a health-promoting leadership in healthcare (Gustavsson and Ekberg, 2015).\nMethods: An exploratory qualitative study was designed since there is limited research on how first-line managers within the public sector learn through interventions targeting health-promoting leadership including educational activities. The study is based on an inductive interpretative perspective (Elo and Kyngas, 2008) that allows the understanding of what lessons to learn for the organisation from a managerial perspective in a health-promoting leadership intervention.\nResults: The results are displayed through the following five analytical categories: work conditions and own-health balance, not knowing what to expect, making room for participation, confirming your knowledge and time for collective reflection and discussion. The Categories 1-3 illustrates how first-line managers' experience their participation in the health-promoting leadership intervention, and Categories 4-5 illustrate obstacles and prerequisites for the individual managers' learning processes.\nDiscussion: This study focuses on how first-line managers experienced a health-promoting leadership intervention including educational activities. The key findings reinforces what earlier studies within the field has shown, that the knowledge exchanged throughout the intervention is experienced as a contradiction since the organisational prerequisites to implement WHP measures seem challenging for the majority of the managers primarily due to an imbalance in their own working conditions and health. These findings will be discussed in light of earlier research in terms of lessons learned for prerequisites for WHP interventions and creating a participatory design in health-promoting leadership interventions.\nMethodological considerations: When interpreting the results, the sample size of participants and that the study was done in a single geographical context in Sweden should be taken into account. Furthermore, interviews have been conducted with managers within the same regional organisation who attended the same educational intervention. A wider and deeper perspective for WHP interventions targeting leadership may have been reached if leaders from different organisations and geographical areas had participated in the studied educational intervention. Moreover, subordinates were not interviewed, something that may have given the study an additional learning perspective and deepened more in-depth understanding. The findings should, therefore, be interpreted with caution. However, the purpose of qualitative research is not to extend findings derived from selected samples to the general population but rather to transform and apply them to similar situations in similar contexts (Polit and Beck, 2004). It is important to recall that a particular interpretation is one of many possible, but the findings in this study could be transferrable to leaders in other public organisations in rural areas. The strength of the study is that the managers represented different public human-service workplaces in the same rural area and varied in terms of gender and age. They were interviewed during the finalisation of the interventions period as an attempt to minimise memory bias during interviews. The purpose of sampling in qualitative research is to ensure the maximum variability that can provide us with information on the relevance of the findings rather than to seek homogeneity.\n",
"role": "user"
},
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"content": "Purpose: The increasingly demanding psychosocial working conditions in Swedish public sector workplaces call for implementation of workplace health promotion (WHP) interventions. There is a need to increase first-line public sector managers' capacities for health-promoting leadership. The purpose of this paper is to investigate first-line managers' experiences of participating in an intervention aimed at strengthening health-promoting leadership. More precisely, the aim is to study what obstacles and prerequisites the intervention have for their learning processes to become health-promoting managers.\nDesign/methodology/approach: A qualitative study in Northern Sweden at workplaces in the county council and municipalities was conducted. The data were gathered through individual interviews with 18 participating first-line managers. Inductive-content analysis was used to analyse the data.\nFindings: The results identify time for reflection and collegial discussions about leadership as prerequisites for learning about health-promoting leadership. Managers experienced the intervention as a confirmation of the leadership behaviours already gained. However, the health-promoting leadership intervention was seen as a contradiction, since organisational prerequisites to implement WHP measures were perceived to be lacking. The managers were not involved in the planning of the intervention and questioned why the organisation did not involve them more when the educational activities were created.\nOriginality/value: When the organisation understands how and when its managers learn, what they need and want to learn about WHP, and what they already know, tailored participatory interventions can be facilitated that consider the unique prerequisites for the particular organisation.\n",
"role": "assistant"
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] |
The uncertain future of globalization: Implications for global consumer culture and global brands
|
[
"Global brands",
"Globalization",
"Consumer culture positioning",
"Global consumer culture"
] |
[
{
"content": "Summarize the following paper into structured abstract.\n\n__NO_TITLE__: The globalization of markets is one of the most important developments in the last half century. One straightforward measure is the value of global exports. Between 1913 and 1950, export volume grew by 50 percent (at constant prices), while the export volume increased 2,900 percent between 1950 and 2014. The sum of world exports and imports as share of world GDP was around 20 percent in 1950 vs 60 percent in 2011[1]. Since the end of the Second World War (approximately), trade grew three times as fast as GDP.\nIs global integration stalling?: Anybody born after the Second World War, which presumably includes most readers of this paper, may be excused if they regard globalization as a unidirectional process toward ever-greater economic integration of the marketplace. Yet, if we adopt a bird's-eye perspective to the passage of time, we observe that global integration is anything but a linear process. In fact, global integration has collapsed at least three times in world history, none anticipated at the time.\nWaning appeal of global consumer culture?: Consumer culture has been called \"an irresistible form of cultural authority\" (Holt, 2002, p. 72). Marketers have long known that they can increase brand equity by imbuing their brands with elements of consumer culture. Indeed, some brands have become veritable cultural icons (Holt, 2004; Kumar and Steenkamp, 2013). As cultural icons, brands can carry and communicate powerful cultural meanings to consumers.\nIs the golden era of global brands ending?: Global brands are an important component of firm value (Table III). For example, the dollar value of Coca Cola as estimated by Millward Brown (2018) accounted for 41.9 percent of the firm's market capitalization and Pampers alone accounted for 10.1 percent of Procter & Gamble's firm value.\nConclusion: As trade and FDI expanded after the Second World War, global living standards improved dramatically, and hundreds of millions of people escaped from poverty. In China alone, rural poverty has been reduced by 94 percent from 1980 to 2015. This is but one illustration of the societal benefits globalization brings, not only to the wealthy (cf. Table II) but also to the poor.\n",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to offer a different perspective on the global consumer culture (GCC) phenomenon and identify new avenues for future research.\nDesign/methodology/approach: The paper is a thought piece.\nFindings: The unprecedented globalization of the marketplace in the last 50 years has given rise to the emergence of GCC, and the rise of global companies and global brands, among others. Yet, as one surveys the globalscape, there are developments on the horizon that might threaten continued globalization. In this paper, the author discusses these developments and their implications around three interrelated, yet distinct, components of globalization: global integration of world economies, GCC and global brands.\nOriginality/value: The paper identifies unique research opportunities to study GCC in an emerging business context in which continued global integration is not guaranteed, and where globalization headwinds could reduce the contribution of perceived brand globalness to brand value.\n",
"role": "assistant"
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Leadership lessons from childhood: Growing up with responsibility pays dividends
|
[
"Leadership",
"Leadership development",
"Experiential learning",
"Youth"
] |
[
{
"content": "Summarize the following paper into structured abstract.\n\nBut parents might unwittingly be discouraging inspirational qualities: When it comes to harnessing and developing leadership qualities, aids such as coaching, feedback and workshops might be emphasised. But what about the rich experiences of childhood and youth? Isn't that where the seeds of great leadership are sometimes sown? If so, parents and guardians have a lot to answer for.Homer Simpson typically told his cartoon character children Lisa and Bart: \"Kids, you tried your best and you failed miserably. The lesson is, never try.\" But parents with a little more child-rearing skill than Homer might also be, no doubt unwittingly and unintentionally, discouraging leadership qualities in their offspring. Take the young man who failed to demonstrate leadership qualities when he was called up for the armed forces and was being assessed for a leadership role. He says:I joined a youth movement with my friends, but when we were old enough to become leaders, my parents said 'It takes up a lot of time. The most important thing is to devote yourself to your studies. And sure enough, I left the youth movement and focused on doing well in my studies.Another said:My mother always said to me 'Devote yourself to your studies, the most important thing is to excel in them, that's the key to success.' She always excused me from tasks and responsibility.Conversely, the following are typical comments from military service personnel who did show leadership qualities during basic training:I learned from the responsibility that my parents gave me (when they went away on holiday, for example) that I was capable of taking care of things, making decisions, not panicking. It helped me a lot later on.When I was a leader in a youth movement I recruited new members, contacted sponsors, organized things from A-Z. It was very successful, a great experience.I saw that I had a lot of experience in the Students' Council and we did many successful things. I liked that feeling very much.I was captain of the handball team. I felt that I was able to influence the morale of the team.\nSeeking unique features in the developmental process of leaders: As part of a larger research project dealing with potential, motivation and development of leaders, funded by the United States Army Research Institute, Karin Amit et al. (2009) questioned soldiers in the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) who were nearing the end of their basic training. Their leadership potential was evaluated by peers and commanders and their early influences were ascertained and compared. Interestingly for the study, unlike many armies in which differentiation between officers and ranks is determined institutionally, differentiation in the IDF occurs \"naturally\", through a selection process of the entire cohort. Starting on an equal footing, all Israeli conscripts undergo an ongoing selection process during their initial training period - providing a unique laboratory for examining leadership.The authors sought the possible existence of unique features in the developmental process of leaders, comparing a group of individuals perceived as leaders with another group distinctly perceived as non-leaders. Significant differences emerged between members of the two groups regarding early experiences. The leaders ranked notably higher than the non-leaders in the categories referring to actual experience of leadership roles (guiding and organizational roles) as well as in their perception of their social status and their tendency to assume organizational roles at school.On the methodological level this finding further validated the original division into leaders and non-leaders. The leaders had experienced more leadership roles, and remembered themselves as liking to use influence and as having high social status. The findings on concrete experiences of leadership, the high correlation of these experiences with the perception of the tendency to undertake leadership roles, and certainly the fact that a particular kind of memory was shared more by one group (leaders) while other memories were shared more by another group (non-leaders) seem to largely negate the possibility that the differences are simply random recollections.\n\"Others see me as a responsible person able to influence others\": The findings that the leaders had more experiences of influencing people than the non-leaders, and that these experiences enhanced self-perception as a \"leader\", strengthened their self-efficacy in the ability to influence people, and gave them knowledge about their personal leadership, can serve as a basis for deeper understanding of the development process of leaders in everyday life (in organizations, the community etc). The evidence collected seems to indicate that theory and research in the psychology of learning, and social and developmental psychology, can provide a firm conceptual base for institutionalized processes of leader development.For example, the knowledge and awareness arising from some of their experiences that \"others see me as a responsible person able to influence others\" is fundamental to, and congruent with theories and research on development of \"possible self\" in general, and development of the self in leadership in particular.These experiences facilitate the individual's internalization of the leadership image and role, and this in turn impacts the motivation to be a leader in the future as well as self-efficacy in the leading. These two aspects are especially important, as noted, during adolescence - the age when the self-identity is a focal issue.Diagnostic knowledge, acquired through analysis of one's own experiences, affords sensitivity to persons and situations, and facilitates \"reading people and their feelings\". This quality is highly relevant to so-called transactional leadership, a style based on the leader's skills in identifying people's feelings, motivations, expectations and inclinations. The effective transactional leader is able to diagnose his or her followers' needs and expectations and to motivate them to act accordingly.In the study some individuals feared being put into a leadership situation in case they failed and would not know how to deal with criticism. (\"I'm not comfortable being in the center. Criticism makes me feel really bad.\") Others relished the idea of assuming a leadership role. They loved it.It's doubtful if the latter group's parents adopted the Homer Simpson philosophy, as expressed to his potentially gifted daughter: \"If at first you don't succeed, Lisa, give up.\"\nComment: This review is based on \"Leadership-shaping experiences: a comparative study of leaders and non-leaders\" by Karin Amit, Micha Popper, Reuven Gal, Tammy Mamane-Levy and Alon Lisak. The authors interviewed members of the Israel Defense Forces, comparing those considered \"leaders\" with \"non-leaders\" to assess the impact of early experiences on leaders' development. They concluded that leaders proved to have had more leadership experiences than non-leaders in their youth.\n",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Purpose: - This article aims to discuss who should take responsibility when it comes to harnessing and developing leadership qualities.\nDesign/methodology/approach: - The authors sought the possible existence of unique features in the developmental process of leaders, comparing a group of individuals perceived as leaders with another group distinctly perceived as non-leaders.\nFindings: - The evidence collected seems to indicate that theory and research in the psychology of learning, and social and developmental psychology, can provide a firm conceptual base for institutionalized processes of leader development.\nOriginality/value: - The briefing saves busy executives, researchers and parents alike hours of reading time by selecting only the very best, most pertinent information and presenting it in a condensed and easy-to-digest format.\n",
"role": "assistant"
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Financial inclusion and social financialisation: Britain in a European context
|
[
"United Kingdom",
"Social policy",
"Financial services",
"Social exclusion"
] |
[
{
"content": "Summarize the following paper into structured abstract.\n\nIntroduction: There is considerable international interest in the contribution of financial services to social inclusion. The European Commission's European Platform Against Poverty And Social Exclusion describes financial exclusion is as an important contributor to vulnerability and disadvantage in Europe (European Commission, 2010, p. 5), and the European Union (EU) has stated that \"access to financial services is essential for citizens to be economically and socially integrated in today's society\". Despite this \"many Europeans - especially those suffering from poverty - cannot access the necessary financial services\" required for participation in contemporary society (European Commission, n.d.). It is estimated that approximately 7 per cent of adults (approximately 30 million people) in the EU are financially excluded, i.e. have no access at all to essential financial services, such as a transaction or deposit bank account, savings, and \"revolving credit\" (a credit card or overdraft facility); among new EU member states this figure rises to 34 per cent (European Parliament Committee on Economic and Monetary Affairs, 2012).\nAims and evidence: This paper sets out findings from a research project which documented and synthesised the state of knowledge regarding financial exclusion in Britain, and considers how the British situation relates to that in other EU members. The research upon which this analysis is based involved an innovative knowledge exchange project which aimed to clarify what was accepted as known among stakeholders about financial inclusion in Britain, what was disputed or remained uncertain, and what the outstanding knowledge gaps were that required further research. The research comprised three stages. The first stage involved rapid research reviews of six aspects of financial inclusion in Britain: access to banking services; to credit; to insurance; household savings and assets; demand for and provision of money advice; and levels of financial literacy and capability (Butler et al., 2005). In the second stage, findings from these reviews were discussed by stakeholders in six evidence evaluation forums held across Britain, where participants were engaged in semi-structured group discussions and encouraged to use their expertise to critically appraise the evidence base to identify areas of agreement, disagreement and outstanding knowledge gaps. These stakeholders represented the different groups and sectors with an interest in financial exclusion, and included participants drawn from the following sectors: central and local government and regulatory bodies; money and citizens' advice services; private sector financial service providers; voluntary sector agencies and social enterprises involved in financial services; and representatives of marginalised service users and financially excluded communities.\nConsensus over financial inclusion: Access to banking\nControversy over financial inclusion: Access to financial services\nComparing financial exclusion between Britain and the rest of Europe: Among the questions which arise from this analysis of stakeholders' views of financial exclusion in Britain is how far these debates are repeated across Europe, and whether policy responses to the challenge of financial exclusion developed in other European countries could be applied in Britain? Answering these questions requires further reflection on the nature of financial inclusion, and ultimately reconceptualising and redefining it. Measured by conventional means, levels of financial exclusion vary widely across EU member states, ranging from 1 per cent or less of the population in Denmark, Belgium and The Netherlands to over 40 per cent in Poland and Latvia (European Commission, 2008). This variation is evident from the standard indicator of the percentage of those without a transaction bank account (Table I).\nConclusion: Financial inclusion is among the most evidence-based areas of social policy activity in Britain (Mitton, 2008). It is evident that consensus exists among British stakeholders on what is known about the key aspects, scale and some of the causes of several dimensions of financial exclusion. It is also apparent that the disputes which persist over other aspects of financial exclusion - such as the need for further regulation of financial services - reflect different values and beliefs about how financial markets and services operate as much as the evidence itself. Disagreement over the causes and appropriate responses to financial exclusion is also evident at the EU level, which is unsurprising, given the variation in the extent of the problem, the conditions which relate to exclusion, and differences between political philosophies and policy regimes.\n",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Purpose: The article aims to discuss findings from a knowledge exchange review of financial inclusion in Britain and compare these to key features of financial exclusion evident from European analyses.\nDesign/methodology/approach: This paper is based on an innovative knowledge exchange project. Rapid research reviews analysed evidence on financial exclusion in Britain in relation to access to banking services; to credit; to household insurance; personal savings and assets; money advice provision; and financial capability. The findings from these reviews were discussed by stakeholders representing the private, government, community and civil society sectors in a series of evidence review forums. The results of these discussions were summarised and reconsidered at a national knowledge exchange conference. Throughout the project, stakeholders exchange opinions about the state of financial exclusion knowledge through an online discussion forum.\nFindings: The research identified agreement among British stakeholders over several aspects of financial exclusion, in particular continuing problems of access to mainstream banking services for low income customers and a lack of appropriate and affordable credit provision. Areas of controversy included whether banks denied services to lower income customers or were withdrawing from deprived communities, and the necessity for further regulation of mainstream financial services.\nOriginality/value: Comparing these findings to research from other European countries raises questions about how financial inclusion should be defined, and whether existing indicators capture this adequately across contrasting social, institutional and regulatory contexts. The research raises challenges for policy transfer between countries.\n",
"role": "assistant"
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] |
A review of employee innovative behavior in services
|
[
"Motivation",
"Services",
"Job characteristics",
"Work engagement",
"Work stress",
"Employee innovative behavior"
] |
[
{
"content": "Summarize the following paper into structured abstract.\n\n1. Introduction: As the introduction of the concept of innovation, it has been widely embraced and applied in various organizations (Axtell et al., 2000; Quintane et al., 2011). For service firms, innovation has become a key factor influencing their performance and development because of the fast-changing environment (Campo et al., 2014; Rodgers, 2007). Among different levels of innovation, employee innovative behavior (EIB) is a cornerstone of organizational innovation (Janssen et al., 2004). It is critical for business success in service industries and examined by many researchers (Yuan and Woodman, 2010; Calantone et al., 2002).\n2. Definition and clarification of key concepts: EIB is an outward expression of the inner creativity of employees; it is a method used to develop creative products and a process through which employees generate and implement new ideas to improve performance or solve work-related problems (Janssen et al., 2004; Zhou and George, 2001). EIB includes all individual behaviors that lead to the generation, introduction and application of beneficial novelty at various levels (West, 2002). It closely associates with employee creativity, although unlike the latter, the former must result in final outputs and produce actual benefits (Larson, 2011). Most researchers view EIB as a process with multiple stages, and creativity is reflected in its initial stage (Janssen, 2000). An employee first recognizes problems at work and generates new ideas (Larson, 2011); then, he/she mobilizes support from others for the new idea(s) (Janssen, 2000); in the later stages, the employee implements the idea(s) and turns it into reality by producing a new prototype or model (Scott and Bruce, 1994). Each stage of the process consists of various behaviors that may altogether bring about new process, product, market or organizational structure (Orfila-Sintes and Mattsson, 2009). In this study, EIB refers to employees' intentional introduction of new products/services or new ways of doing things through the process of idea generation and implementation (Krizaj et al., 2014; Janssen, 2000).\n3. Methods: This study attempts to provide a comprehensive review of EIB in services, following the guidelines provided by Tranfield et al. (2003). According to Tranfield et al. (2003), a systematic review in the management field consists of three stages. The first stage, \"planning the review\", identifies the need for the review and defines and clarifies the topic. It reflects in Sections 1 and 2 in this study. This section explains the second stage: conducting the review. In this stage, the search terms are identified; the studies are searched and selected; and the data are synthesized. Finally, the report and dissemination of the review, the third stage, are detailed in Sections 4 and 5.\n4. Findings: 4.1 Three approaches to research on employee innovative behavior in services\n5. Conclusions and implications: 5.1 Conclusions\n",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Purpose: This study aims to conduct a comprehensive review of the literature on employee innovative behavior (EIB) in services. Based on the review, the conceptualization and operationalization of EIB are summarized, and the relationships between job characteristics and EIB are revealed.\nDesign/methodology/approach: Altogether, 143 papers examining EIB in services published in 56 journals, including top management and hospitality journals, during the period of 1995-2014 were reviewed.\nFindings: Three approaches to examine EIB in services have been identified. The concept of EIB based on the reviewed papers is summarized. In addition, antecedents and consequences of EIB are reviewed. In particular, the role of job characteristics in EIB is discussed.\nPractical implications: This study provides practitioners with a \"one-stop\" paper to enhance their understanding of the relationship among EIB, job characteristics and other relevant concepts. Implications for hospitality firms on stimulating the innovative behaviors of employees are also provided.\nOriginality/value: Owing to the particularity and importance of EIB in services, this review summarizes the current knowledge on this concept and its antecedents and provides directions for future research, especially on the relationship between job characteristics and EIB.\n",
"role": "assistant"
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Guidelines for authors in Croatian scholarly journals
|
[
"Ethics",
"Croatia",
"Guidelines",
"Journal publishing",
"Authorship",
"Scholarly journal"
] |
[
{
"content": "Summarize the following paper into structured abstract.\n\n1. Introduction: Scientific journals have existed since 1665 and have immediately been accepted as the fastest and most reliable means of scientific communication. There were several important reasons for launching the first journals (Journal des Scavants in Paris and Philosophical Transactions in London): faster and broader dissemination of research results and ideas, ensuring protection of intellectual property, encouraging discussion, evaluating and archiving texts. Scholarly communication has the same purpose today - it is a system used by researchers and scholars to create, evaluate, disseminate and preserve their work within the scientific community, most often by formal channels such as scholarly journals (ACRL, 2003). Today, there are a large number of journals, and the process of editing has become demanding and time-consuming. The demanding editing process is the result of high volume of submitted manuscripts, a large amount of information that needs to be evaluated, the immense quantity of journals, the increasing number of research being conducted, increasingly developed scientific fields and increasingly time-consuming peer-review process.\n2. Editing scholarly journals: Scholarly journals are the most common means of scientific communication and are of great importance for all scientists, including peripheral scientific communities such as the one in Croatia. Editing scholarly journals is a time-consuming process. Editors are responsible for many aspects of communication through journals - communicating with authors, choosing high-quality peer reviewers, communicating with peer reviewers, implementing new technologies, deciding on technical details (such as pagination, numeration of issues and proofreading), choosing cost models, dealing with legal and ethical issues, etc. Scholarly journals have had the same main purpose throughout centuries, but the growth of scholarly literature (together with the development of information and communication technologies) is creating pressures for change (Odlyzko, 1994). For editors, it is harder to find high-quality experts to write peer review reports that ensure quality of journals. It is also not easy to improve peer review process (e.g. by implementing open peer review) (Bornmann and Mungra, 2011). Sometimes, new economic models have to be evaluated and implemented (e.g. article processing charges, pay-per-view and crowd funding) (King and Tenopir, 1998; Hebrang Grgic, 2016). On the basis of the new formats, enhanced journals can be created (Bardi, 2014). New possibilities in an electronic environment offer new publishing models - open access journals, hybrid journals, mega journals, etc. (Hebrang Grgic, 2016; Bjork, 2015). Ethical issues are only one, although very important, part of editing. Presenting and using scholarly information in an ethical way is essential for the development of science - editors have to ensure academic integrity (e.g. by detecting and avoiding plagiarism and biases) (Stryker, 1990).\n3. Research aim, sample and methods: The aim of this research is to identify which elements are included in guidelines for authors in Croatian scholarly journals and to establish whether there are differences regarding different scientific fields. Fourteen parameters, divided into two groups, were analyzed.\n4. Results: Looking at parameters concerning formatting and submitting manuscripts, most journals contain guidelines about the manuscript length (183 journals or 91.5 per cent), followed by technical requirements (158 or 79 per cent), while a smaller number of journals recommended the usage of identifiers - the usage of DOI is recommended by 33 journals (16.5 per cent), and ORCID identifier is recommended by three journals (1.5 per cent). Results are presented in Table I.\n5. Conclusion: To edit a scholarly journal, editors need help not only from their colleagues, members of editorial boards and peer reviewers, but also from authors. To make the publishing process more efficient and faster, authors should prepare their manuscripts in accordance with the standards and recommendations of the specific journal. Those standards and recommendations have to be explained in documents such as guidelines for authors.\n",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Purpose: This paper aims to compare guidelines for authors in Croatian scholarly journals regarding six scientific fields (according to Croatian classification) and to show the representation of technical and ethical issues that are explained in guidelines for authors.\nDesign/methodology/approach: The aim of the research is to identify elements that are included in guidelines for authors in Croatian scholarly journals from all scientific fields. Fourteen parameters for 200 journals were analyzed (all the journals that had published at least one 2016 issue by the end of February 2017).\nFindings: The parameter that is explained in the most journals is the length of the manuscript (91.5 per cent). The lowest number of journals explains Open Researcher and Contributor ID (1.5 per cent). The highest percentage of journals that explain plagiarism is in the field of natural sciences (44 per cent). As compared to the results of previous researches, there is an increase in the number of ethical questions mentioned in the guidelines for authors of Croatian scholarly journals.\nPractical implications: This paper provides recommendations and suggestions that could help journal editors make guidelines for authors more informative. That could help in advancing editorial process (e.g. peer review process) and in avoiding misconducts (e.g. plagiarism or false attribution of authorship).\nOriginality/value: This paper is the first detailed content analysis of guidelines for authors in all Croatian scholarly journals.\n",
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Designing with care: Towards a care-centered model for online learning design
|
[
"Care theory",
"Ethics of care",
"Online learning",
"Inclusive design"
] |
[
{
"content": "Summarize the following paper into structured abstract.\n\nIntroduction: The purpose of this study was to explore the phenomenon of care ethics, particularly in the design for inclusive online learning. The importance of developing meaning of inclusion in education has been the focus of institutional professional development (Keller and Lyndgaard, 2017), as well as research on how inclusive learning is implemented and why (Florian and Black-Hawkins, 2011). Inclusive education research has typically focused on students with disabilities and those identified as having special educational needs. Recently, some researchers have pointed out the shortcomings of such approaches as it carries the danger of focusing on discrete categories of learners at the expense of other marginalized groups that do not fit within these predetermined categories, going against the basic tenets and principles that inclusive education calls for (Ainscow et al., 2006; Messiou, 2017). Accordingly, researchers have been called to reshape research and practice of inclusion in a way that focuses on participation and achievement, underpinned by inclusive values. For instance, Gannon (2019) asserts that genuine inclusive pedagogy is not merely a set of classroom practices, but it extends beyond that to serve as lenses through which we understand and relate to our students and our work as educators. Messiou (2017) argued for the need to approach inclusion as a \"principled approach to education and society,\" in which the articulation of inclusive values (i.e., equity, participation, respect for diversity ...) is what guides overall policies, research, and practices. Under this perspective, values and issues of ethics are central to inclusion and serve as a starting point for research and practice in this area.Researchers in the field of online learning and design have raised concerns over its lack of focus on the affective/emotional aspect of the online learning experience, despite a strong research base indicating the important role that emotions play in successful and effective learning broadly (Ch'ng, 2019; Cleveland-Innes and Campbell, 2012). Exploring the phenomenon of care in online learning is an effort to bridge this gap and deepen our understanding of the role of emotions, specifically the feeling of caring and being cared for, in online learning. Care at the core of online learner support and the topic of nurturing, helping, and supporting students in online collaborative learning emerged from our previous research (Robinson et al., 2017). The emerging theme is an under-researched area of online learning. The care perspective, when applied to online learning, is about helping students find their full potential and supporting them by looking for the individual qualities and building upon these strengths to aid in the overall success of the individual. This study adopts the \"principled approach to education and society\" conceptualization of inclusive education as proposed by Messiou (2017) and explores how caring, or in other words \"the capacity to be moved by the affective condition of the other\" (Noddings, 2012b), in online learning can enhance the online learning experience and increase learner participation and persistence in online learning.The topics of inquiry that guided this study included the following:How do online students describe being cared for in an online course?How can care theory guide the design of inclusive online learning?\nLiterature review: Care theory\nMethods: This study is qualitative inquiry and naturalistic research (Ravitch and Carl, 2015). The theories of relational care ethics of Noddings (1984) and moral development of Gilligan (1982) provided the framework for the study and guided the development of the methods and topics of inquiry. This theoretical framework seemed appropriate for this study for three main reasons: (1) the lack of comprehensive theories and frameworks that can describe and explain the role of emotions in online learning (Artino, 2012), (2) Noddings application of the ethics of care philosophy to education, and (3) the successful adoption of this theory in other educational contexts and research (Balmer et al., 2016). The phenomenological methodological approach was used to explore instructor care in online learning through the student lens, in which the lived experiences of online students was used as an entry point to understanding the care phenomenon in this learning space (Moustakas, 1994). The task of the researchers was to uncover the essence or meaning of the shared experiences among participants (Patton, 2005). Convenience and network sampling were purposeful strategies used to locate participants for the study (Merriam, 2009; Patton, 2005). Researchers recruited online students they knew through email and asked for network referrals of other potential participants. Three females were interviewed who presently live in the United States and are fluent in English. Each participant had extensive experience with online learning taking at least 10 courses each.Lincoln's (1985) recommendations with regard to establishing trustworthiness and credibility were followed during this study. The components of this in naturalistic inquiry are truth value, applicability, consistency, and neutrality. Member checking was used to establish truth value, thick rich description of each phase, and an audit trail was used to maintain consistency and neutrality. First-phase coding consisted of structural and in vivo coding methods (Saldana, 2015). Structural coding was used to organize and group topics of inquiry and chunks of transcript data that were examples and definitions of being cared for and inclusivity. Additionally, in vivo coding was used to honor the voice of participants' by highlighting and assigning shortened codes to important words and phrases from the transcripts.Ethics of care theory as proposed by Noddings (1984) was used to guide a second phase of analysis as the \"central core\" in the theoretical coding (Saldana, 2015). A priori code manual consisting of the four elements of Noddings theoretical framework (i.e., modeling, dialog, practice, and confirmation) was developed to guide the interpretation of the data, and chunks of text from the transcripts (indicators) were grouped under each element working toward theme development. Researchers were coding to identify strategies and practices that enhance and further explain each of Noddings' elements specific to an online course experience (Crabtree and Miller, 1999; Saldana, 2015). Researchers kept in mind the need to identify inclusive design techniques and used Noddings' definitions of each element for guidance. Researchers approached the second phase of analysis with a belief that care theory was a key component for guiding-inclusive design in online courses. The researchers highlighted sections in the a priori code manual that did not match among coders and engaged in member checking to discuss and review the assignment of the four elements. Lastly, similar indicators were combined to develop themes under each element, as portrayed in Figure 1.\nFindings: Indicators of all four elements of Noddings framework (i.e., modeling, dialog, practice, and confirmation) were present in all three transcripts except for \"Practice,\" which was absent from one interview. Each of these elements and corresponding themes will be discussed next.Modeling\nDiscussion and conclusion: Researchers in the field of inclusive education have been calling for the need to expand the focus of research to include all learners and to shift the focus to the contextual barriers that hinder their participation, presence, or achievement. In this study, we explored learner perceptions of these contextual barriers in an online learning environment through the lens of care theory. The findings indicated the potential for a care-centered approach to online design in enhancing inclusive online experiences by establishing an environment in which all learners are being listened to and cared for. The findings of this exploratory study highlight specific instructor behaviors and course design elements that support and maintain a climate of care in an online learning environment.Noddings' care-centered education model was used to examine and structure our exploration into the caring phenomenon in online learning environments. The results of this analysis provided promising evidence for the applicability of using this model to understand how caring relations are established, nurtured, and maintained in online learning. All elements of Noddings' care model (1984) were evident in the transcripts, although some elements more than others. For instance, evidence of practicing care was only present in two of the three transcripts analyzed, with one of the themes emerging referring to instructors' need to practice prior to engaging in online teaching, rather than learners as envisioned by Noddings. This finding highlights the need for explicit consideration to the human element and inclusion practices in online learning teacher preparation programs, including professional development opportunities for instructors to practice before teaching online. The researchers understand that a follow-up study will be needed to make additional recommendations in terms of practice.Another interesting finding that seems specifically relevant to online learning is flexibility in deadlines and assignment submissions. This finding is not surprising if we consider other contextual factors such as online learner demographics, which continues to shift as online course offerings expand in formal education, informal learning, and professional development (Allen and Seamon, 2007; Moore and Kearsley, 2005). From a care perspective, considerations for students with full-time jobs, family obligations, and other responsibilities must be echoed in course design and delivery.Research focusing on the emotional/affective domain and its role has not received as much attention as other areas in the field of online learning (Artino, 2012). This study explored how care theory and the ethics of care play out in an online environment in an attempt to shed some light on the factors that are more relevant in establishing and maintaining caring relation in online learning context. The findings of this study highlight some strategies and factors that should be considered such as proper training for online faculty with explicit consideration to the affective/emotional element of online learning, timely communication with learners, and personalized feedback. There are several potential limitations, and the findings cannot be generalized as they may be specific to the participants interviewed. An investigation of personal preferences and social cultural effects was beyond the scope of this study, but these are a worthwhile consideration for future study. A follow-up study is planned with students in another country to gain a deeper understanding of potential language barriers with students who have online course experiences delivered in English and may view some of the concepts differently. While the findings of this research study are based on a small sample and more rigorous exploration of this topic is needed, these preliminary findings are still of value and serve as a stepping stone for further and future investigations.\n",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Purpose: The purpose of this study was to explore how care theory and the ethics of care are explained by students in the online environment to clarify the factors that are more relevant in establishing and maintaining caring relations in online learning context.\nDesign/methodology/approach: Utilizing naturalistic inquiry, the researchers interviewed online students and coded transcripts using multiple coding methods within two phases of analysis. Noddings' framework for ethics of care was utilized to identify strategies and practices that enhance each of Noddings' elements in an online course experience.\nFindings: The findings of this exploratory study provide evidence on how learners perceive being cared for and highlight specific instructor behaviors and course design elements that support the emergence and maintenance of a climate of care in an online learning environment. Indicators of all four elements of Noddings' framework were present in the interviews. Within the themes of each element, strategies and practices to enhance each element in an online course experience are further explained.\nResearch limitations/implications: Establishing a climate of care, whether in traditional or online learning, leads to more inclusive learning experiences that are responsive to the needs of all learners. This study brought to light some of the factors that are more relevant in establishing and maintaining caring relations in online learning context.\nOriginality/value: The findings of this study add to the literature on the role of emotions in an online learning as viewed through the lens of care theory. The findings highlight some strategies and behaviors that promote a climate of care in an online environment from a learner's perspective.\n",
"role": "assistant"
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An Ontology-based Bayesian network modelling for supply chain risk propagation
|
[
"Supply chain risk management",
"Global supply chain management",
"Risk performance",
"Fresh produce",
"Ontology-based Bayesian network",
"Risk propagation"
] |
[
{
"content": "Summarize the following paper into structured abstract.\n\n1. Introduction: Companies traditionally focus risk management efforts within their boundaries (Revilla and Saenz, 2017). As such, previous studies have mostly investigated supply chain risks (SCRs) at a firm level (Swierczek, 2016). However, SCRs do not work in isolation and risk outcome of one firm can be easily transformed into a risk event for another firm (Manuj and Mentzer, 2008). Risk dependency and propagation has thus become a critical issue in today's supply chains, particularly in globally dispersed supply chains where companies increasingly align key suppliers and buyers for competitive advantage. It is thus vital to understand and manage risk dependencies across inter-firm operations as practical examples prove that risk consequences at the inter-firm level may be costly for supply chains (Swierczek, 2016). Knowing how to anticipate risk propagation within and between firms can enable predictive or proactive risk management strategies for risk interdependence, thus creating competitive advantage for firms and the entire supply chain (Ouabouch and Pache, 2014).\n2. Literature review: 2.1 Supply chain risk propagation\n3. Research methodology: This research developed an ontology-based BN model using the knowledge and inference capabilities inherent in a risk propagation ontology, rather than traditional knowledge-based BN. Ontologies which define basic terms and relations of a domain and the rules for terms and relations, can create a potential solution for building an objective BN (e.g. Devitt et al., 2006; Fenz et al., 2009; Bucci et al., 2011).\n4. Application of ontology-based Bayesian network model: An illustrative case of the Australia-China table grape supply chain (ACTGSC) was used to demonstrate the development of an ontology-based BN model for risk propagation in a global food supply chain. The reasons behind this are that: table grapes are vulnerable to cold chain risk and are Australia's largest horticulture export (ATGA, 2012); and China is the largest export market for Australian table grape, where Australian suppliers compete with low-cost southern hemisphere rivals through quality and better customer service (Scott, 2016).\n5. Theoretical implications: The research developed an ontology-based BN for measuring the impact of dynamic risk propagation within and between integrated firms in GFPSCs. This study could contribute for a holistic and dynamic risk propagation analysis in a multi-tier GFPSC by integrating performance and risk. It could also contribute to the SCRM literature by revealing that risks originating in the upstream firm can propagate to increase the downstream firm's customer value risk and business performance risk. This indicates the need of collaborative risk management from the downstream firm's perspective to creating more values to customer.\n6. Managerial implications: The risk ontology-based BN model can assist managers in tracking risk root causes and predict risk propagation, thus leading to the following managerial implications.\n7. Conclusions: A risk propagation ontology-based BN model was proposed for a holistic dynamic risk propagation assessment and for addressing the challenges in building a knowledge-based BN, especially with a large-scale model. The ACTGSC was used to illustrate the application of the proposed model in investigating risk propagation in a GFPSC. The method developed can be deployed for food and especially the fresh food supply chains. When borrowing the developed method, risk events may need to be adjusted or verified given the variation of operational activities and process flow in different supply chains.\n",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Purpose: Supply chain risks (SCRs) do not work in isolation and have impact both on each member of a chain and the performance of the entire supply chain. The purpose of this paper is to quantitatively assess the impact of dynamic risk propagation within and between integrated firms in global fresh produce supply chains.\nDesign/methodology/approach: A risk propagation ontology-based Bayesian network (BN) model was developed to measure dynamic SCR propagation. The proposed model was applied to a two-tier Australia-China table grape supply chain (ACTGSC) featured with an upstream Australian integrated grower and exporter and a downstream Chinese integrated importer and online retailer.\nFindings: An ontology-based BN can be generated to accurately represent the risk domain of interest using the knowledge and inference capabilities inherent in a risk propagation ontology. In addition, the analyses revealed that supply discontinuity, product inconsistency and/or delivery delay originating in the upstream firm can propagate to increase the downstream firm's customer value risk and business performance risk.\nResearch limitations/implications: The work was conducted in an Australian-China table grape supply chain, so results are only product chain-specific in nature. Additionally, only two state values were considered for all nodes in the model, and finally, while the proposed methodology does provide a large-scale risk network map, it may not be appropriate for a large supply chain network as it only follows the process flow of a single supply chain.\nPractical implications: This study supports the backward-looking traceability of risk root causes through the ACTGSC and the forward-looking prediction of risk propagation to key risk performance measures.\nSocial implications: The methodology used in this paper provides an evidence-based decision-making capability as part of a system-wide risk management approach and fosters collaborative SCR management, which can yield numerous societal benefits.\nOriginality/value: The proposed methodology addresses the challenges in using a knowledge-based approach to develop a BN model, particularly with a large-scale model and integrates risk and performance for a holistic risk propagation assessment. The combination of modelling approaches to address the issue is unique.\n",
"role": "assistant"
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Assessing the social relevance of school transport in Flanders (Belgium)
|
[
"Social welfare",
"School transport",
"Social cost-benefit analysis",
"Social relevance",
"Transport appraisal"
] |
[
{
"content": "Summarize the following paper into structured abstract.\n\n1 Introduction: Since decades school transport has been widely used in different school communities worldwide and is still used for a variety of reasons, like underlying social motives, improving traffic safety, etc. In Flanders (Belgium), primary and secondary public education is organized by three big educational networks, recognized and financed by the Flemish Community. One of these is the autonomous organization of \"Community education\" (\"Gemeenschapsonderwijs\", or \"GO\"), which has the constitutional obligation to offer neutral education with respect for philosophical, ideological or religious views of parents and pupils[1]. In this way, one tries to guarantee freedom of choice for parents, another constitutional principle. To guarantee this \"free choice\", parents should have the possibility to access GO schools in an easy way. This constitutional framework provided the impetus to organize school transport on a daily basis[2]. It is indeed cheaper to organize school transport in order to reach a GO school than to finance additional GO schools. GO claims however that, due to an insufficient budget granted by government, it becomes increasingly challenging to guarantee the organization of school transport and thus to meet the demands of their constitutional obligation regarding the \"freedom of choice-principle\".\n2 Social cost-benefit analysis: A social cost-benefit analysis (SCBA) is an evaluation methodology that tries to gauge the efficiency of a specific program, project or policy in monetary terms. A SCBA extends its scope beyond simple economic efficiency by quantifying social costs and benefits (Fah Yee and Tan, 2010; Hanley and Barbier, 2009; Rossi et al., 2004). SCBA has been used extensively in transport literature as an evaluation tool for different types of plans or projects (Prud'homme et al., 2011; Damart and Roy, 2009; Saelensminde, 2004). A full evaluation, though, is not always done with respect to overall environmental and social indicators. In many cases not all different external cost categories are taken into account in the analysis, leading towards an underestimation of the impact (expressed in costs or benefits) of a certain project or plan. Limitations within SCBA are mainly related to the choice of monetization methodologies (revealed preference methods are limited in applicability since they cannot be used to measure non-use values and stated preference methods only produce values for hypothetical changes in environmental quality or risk levels), the selection of required values (time horizon, discount rates, time savings, value of human life, etc.), the types of effects identified and valuated, the estimation of effects in the future, etc. all influencing the result of the benefit/cost-ratio. Hanley and Barbier (2009) discuss the strengths and weaknesses of environmental CBA in detail. Although CBA faces a number of practical and conceptual challenges, it remains a transparent way of aiding policy makers to allocate scarce resources in an efficient manner, taking into account people's preferences. So despite the limitations and challenges, an SCBA still provides very valuable insights when applied properly and remains therefore relevant for studying the social relevance of public investments such as school transport.\n3 The use of SCBA within the context of school transport: 3.1 Identification of the problem and situation\n4 Conclusions and recommendations: This paper deals with the use of a SCBA to examine the social relevance and efficiency of organized school transport. As seen in the results and the benefit/cost-ratio, organizing school transport is socially relevant from a macro-perspective. It creates a positive return for society as a whole: many trips are avoided resulting both in additional time and cost savings for parents, and a reduction of negative environmental and unsafety effects. It can be concluded that the organization of school transport by GO is advantageous from a societal perspective. Since the budget granted to organize school transport seems to be insufficient, an enhancement of the transportation budget for the organizers can be recommended based on this SCBA.\n",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Purpose: The main purpose of this study is to evaluate the social relevance of school transport in Flanders, Belgium, by using a social cost-benefit analysis (SCBA).\nDesign/methodology/approach: The use of a SCBA already showed to be an appropriate tool for the appraisal of transport projects as it generates a large amount of information on the investment and its return for society.\nFindings: This paper clearly shows that organizing school transport is socially relevant, using a SCBA as a tool for evaluation. The analysis also provides insight in potential ways for improving school transport organization and financing and allows assessing whether further gains for society are possible. It reveals that the budget granted for the obligatory organization of school transport is not sufficient and that schools are generally forced to use part of their educational budget to be able to organize the (socially relevant) school transport.\nPractical implications: Findings from this study can assist schools and organizers of school transport in improving their organization. It demonstrates the strengths and weaknesses of the investment.\nOriginality/value: Not many socio-economic evaluations of school transport have been done in literature. This study supports the use of SCBA within this context, further developing its use to answer similar research questions.\n",
"role": "assistant"
}
] |
Authentic leadership and team climate: testing cross-lagged relationships
|
[
"Longitudinal",
"Authentic leadership",
"Cross-lagged",
"Follower-centric",
"Leader-centric",
"Team climate"
] |
[
{
"content": "Summarize the following paper into structured abstract.\n\nIntroduction: The effects of leadership are one of the most examined research topics in organizational behaviour studies. So far numerous studies have shown that leadership is associated with organizationally relevant outcomes such as employee attitudes, performance and motivation (see Chiaburu et al., 2014; Judge and Piccolo, 2004; Wang et al., 2011, for reviews). In addition, studies focusing on the effects of leadership on employee well-being have been on the increase (see Kuoppala et al., 2008; Skakon et al., 2010, for reviews).\nMethods: Participants and procedure\nResults: Descriptive results\nDiscussion: The aim of the present study was to examine the relationships between authentic leadership and team climate through three waves across 22 months. Of the three alternative hypotheses tested, the reversed causation hypothesis (H2) was supported when compared with the normal and reciprocal causation models. Thus positive team climate was related to authentic leadership later on, as in the follower-centric view of leadership (Uhl-Bien et al., 2014). However, the reversed relationship between team climate and authentic leadership was detected only concerning the eight month time-lag between T2 and T3. Thus, more specifically, only our sub-hypothesis H2b gained support. The time-lag between T2 and T3 was shorter than the time-lag between T1 and T2 (14 months). It is possible that this shorter time-lag partly explains the finding, suggesting one possible time period during which this specific relationship may evolve. Although it has been strongly recommended that the timing of (i.e. lag between) measurements should be based on theory (Kelloway and Francis, 2013; Ployhart and Vandenberg, 2010), we lack theories on the nature of change in leadership as well as in team climate (e.g. when a specific relationship should occur, how long a relationship should exist), on which we could base the timing of the measurements. Our study yields new information in this regard about the relationship between team climate and authentic leadership, but in future we still need studies with varying time lags.\nConclusions: Despite its limitations, our study is among the first to test different causal models between authentic leadership and team climate by using three-wave longitudinal data and to show that the relationship follow reversed causation. Thus positive team climate promotes authentic leadership in the long term, that is, across eight months, but not longer. In addition, both team climate and authentic leadership turned out to be reasonably stable across time. Therefore, from the practical viewpoint, our findings suggest that authentic leadership can best be developed by focusing on authentic leadership, and the same concerns team climate. However, beyond this team climate could be improved in order to enable authentic leadership to develop and flourish. Based on leadership interventions, authentic leadership can be promoted by developmental interventions focusing, for example, on improving with different exercises a leader's level of self-awareness and ability to present his/her authentic self to others (Avolio et al., 2009). Improving team climate needs both supervisors and employees. It is important to emphasize that in forming the team climate employees are active agents and not passive targets. From the theoretical viewpoint, our findings suggest that follower-centric theories of leadership merit greater attention in the future. Also, how the effects of leadership and team climate are linked to other individual and organizational level outcomes should be addressed in further research.\n",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to examine the relationships between authentic leadership and team climate across 22 months. More specifically, three alternative causation models (normal, reversed, reciprocal) were tested.\nDesign/methodology/approach: The longitudinal study was conducted among 265 Finnish municipal employees (87.5 per cent women, mean age 48.4 years). The participants completed a questionnaire three times: at baseline (T1), about 14 months after baseline (T2) and about eight months after the second questionnaire (T3).\nFindings: The cross-lagged analyses based on structural equation modelling lent support to the reversed causation model more than the normal causation and reciprocal models. More specifically, team climate at T2 predicted authentic leadership across eight months at T3. Thus the study suggests that positive team climate (i.e. vision, participation safety, task orientation, and support for innovation) may foster authentic leadership in the long term and not vice versa.\nPractical/implications: The findings suggest that - besides improving team climate and authentic leadership themselves - team climate should be improved in order to enable authentic leadership to develop and flourish. It is important to emphasize that in forming the team climate employees are active agents and not passive targets.\nOriginality/value: The study is among the first to test different causal models regarding authentic leadership and team climate. From the theoretical viewpoint, the findings suggest that follower-centric theories of leadership merit greater attention in the future.\n",
"role": "assistant"
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] |
Home and away: volunteering among ultra-Orthodox men in Israel
|
[
"Israel",
"Religion",
"Volunteering",
"Social capital"
] |
[
{
"content": "Summarize the following paper into structured abstract.\n\n__NO_TITLE__: Religion seems an ideal candidate to explain volunteering as most religions encourage altruism and care for others (Wang and Handy, 2014; Bekkers and Bowman, 2009; Brown and Ferris, 2007; Wilson and Janoski, 1995). Religious minority groups often enjoy strong support systems and high levels of trust, providing for volunteering within the community, but under what conditions are members of these groups likely to volunteer outside their community? Or, would they prefer the security, intimacy and commitment to their own communities? To answer this question, we examine the motivations of ultra-Orthodox young men who volunteered for National Civil Service (NCS) in Israel, and compare the choices of volunteer frameworks: separatist-religious volunteering within the community compared to volunteering in secular institutions outside the community. We associate the interest and motivations with different types of social capital, \"bonding\" and \"bridging.\"\nSocial capital, types of trust and social networks: Volunteerism can be defined as a \"freely chosen and deliberate helping activities that extend over time\" (Snyder and Omoto, 2008) is unpaid and given to another person who is not member of one's family (Wilson, 2012). Volunteering is often associated with and explained by community and its characteristics. Communities in which the population's volunteering rate is high are characterized as having significant social capital compared to communities or areas in which individuals' volunteering rate is low (Brown and Ferris, 2007; Putnam, 1995, 2000). Social capital has different definitions and uses, among them the assessment of ties or networks within communities that provide for trust, norms of reciprocity, cooperation and \"civic-ness\" (Putnam, 1993). Consequently, social capital is associated with democracy, economic development and strong communities that support them. Critics of social capital advocates claim that networks might be the result rather than the cause for trust, that questions of power and inequality are ignored, and generally doubt social capital's implications for democracy, institutional performance and development (DeFilippis, 2001; Foley and Edwards, 1999; Levi, 1999; Newton, 1999).\nMotives for volunteering: Volunteering combines altruistic and instrumental or egoistic motives. Instrumental motives relate to potential benefits of volunteering such as acquiring occupational experience, knowledge, social ties and experimenting with different skills that will help the volunteer integrate in his or her work or studies (Clary and Snyder, 1991, 1996). Altruistic motives are an authentic desire to help others and to \"create reform\" in society in general and particularly in their community (Zanber, 2010; Peres and Liss, 1975; Cnaan and Goldberg-Glen, 1991; Clary and Snyder, 1991). Other studies differentiate \"classic\" or \"old\" from new volunteer patterns. In the former, volunteers usually belong to a religious or political group, have high and long-term motivation and loyalty to for explicit organization they belong to, and mainly display altruistic values and motives in their volunteering. Conversely, \"new\" volunteering describes short-term activities, devoid of a deep connection or commitment to particular organization, investment is limited by time and motives largely egoistic (Rehberg, 2005). Volunteer activity, however, may combine different motives, instrumental and altruistic (Hustinx and Lammertyn, 2003) and form an \"ego-truistic\" combination (Brooks, 2002; Yeung, 2004).\nThe ultra-Orthodox and the NCS: The ultra-Orthodox in Israel rank high in volunteering, 38 percent in comparison to the average volunteering rate of 14 percent (Abu-Ahmed, 2010). This high rate is explained by social motives (the norm of donating to others) and religious values (benevolence) that exist in ultra-Orthodox society. The ultra-Orthodox community in Israel developed a complex relationship with state, society and government institutions. Historically alienated from the Zionist idea, the ultra-Orthodox community maintained distance from state and its institutions, not serving in the army for example, and developed their own institutions. As a \"Scholars Society\" (HEVRAT HA'LOMDIM) the community places high value on religious studies and young men enroll in religious institutions, avoiding both military service and the labor market (Friedman, 1991). This arrangement made in early years of statehood was a political compromise that allowed the ultra-Orthodox community, in return for tacit support of state policies, to maintain its distinct way of life. Over the years, this society developed characteristics of a separatist and fundamentalist \"Enclave Society\" that minimized interfaces with modern society and state institutions (Sivan, 1991). Like religious and closed communities elsewhere, the ultra-Orthodox society is a communitarian society with tight and closed social networks and institutions for mutual assistance, based on solidarity that provides many of the spiritual and material needs to the individual (Berman, 1998).\nResearch methods: To assess the different motivations for volunteering and their relation to social capital, 30 interviews were conducted in the Summer of 2012 with ultra-Orthodox men volunteers between the ages of 23 and 28. The semi-structured interviews with volunteers in different organizations and institutions in the Jerusalem area, in different stages of their service, were designed to characterize the interviewees' social capital and examine the influence this capital has on the choice of service framework. The interviews included 15 volunteers in community-religious frameworks in which most workers and volunteers are ultra-Orthodox, most of them served as mentors or instructors for ultra-Orthodox youth at risk; and 15 volunteers in secular frameworks in which most of the workers, customers and managers are not ultra-Orthodox. The first approach to the interviewees was through workers of the association that manages the CNS in the area. Afterwards, volunteers who agreed to participate in the research were briefed in a phone conversation about the research and, later, were interviewed face to face. The hour-long semi-structured interviews were recorded, transcribed and analyzed in order to code central themes and evaluate the social capital of the volunteers. The interviews allowed us to assess the influence of social capital on the choice of volunteering and to examine our hypothesis that differences will be found between those who serve inside and outside the community.\nVolunteering inside the community: The ultra-Orthodox society is an amalgam of different groups who share a strict perception of religious life. The three large groups that constitute the society are the Lithuanians, devoted to religious studies; the Hassidic, less devoted to study but very conservative and strict in everyday life behavior; and the ultra-Orthodox Sephardic, Jews of Middle-Eastern descent, influenced by the Lithuanian movement devotion to Judaic studies. The family and community background of the interviewees has a decisive influence on the volunteers' social capital characteristics, type of trust and, accordingly, on the choice to volunteer within or outside the community. The volunteers who served as tutors and counselors in closed community frameworks grew and were educated in large ultra-Orthodox families (six to ten siblings) and they all belong to the Lithuanian and Sephardic movements. These volunteers constitute the religious core of \"the studying society,\" a relatively closed off groups in the ultra-Orthodox society. Members of this group, concerned with maintaining religious values, usually continue with the Judaic studies parallel to their volunteer work in the service, and feel estranged from the outside, secular world. This is how \"Jacob\"[1] who volunteered in the framework of an ultra-Orthodox yeshiva described his childhood period:I grew up in Sanhedria neighborhood [an Ultra-Orthodox neighborhood in north-Jerusalem] in an Ultra-Orthodox close-knit community. That is the reason why I will always feel like a stranger with a secular person, or in a secular environment.\nVolunteering outside the community: Compared to the ultra-Orthodox volunteers in the community-religious organizations (mostly ultra-Orthodox institutions for special education), the volunteers in secular organizations belong to different ultra-Orthodox communities, including those defined as \"modern Ultra-Orthodox\" (Zicherman and Cahaner, 2012), characterized by greater engagement with the non-Orthodox world and experiences outside the community, as one of the interviewees describes:I grew up in a Religious Zionist settlement and neighborhoods when I was young. Later on, I lived a few years abroad when my father was as an emissary. I studied in non-Ultra-Orthodox religious high school yeshivas. I define myself as a general Ultra-Orthodox(Amiram, 24 Modern-Orthodox volunteer).\nWhy volunteer?: Volunteers within the religious community and those who serve outside the community often have different backgrounds, social capital and trust. Our interviews demonstrate that those who serve outside the community have wider networks of association, more inclusive social capital and to some extent greater trust in strangers. Yet, their trust in the state and its institutions is low and almost similar to that of their brethren who choose to serve within the community. What then motivates ultra-Orthodox to volunteer, in general, and to step outside the safety of the community in particular? In general, the two main motives according to a survey of the Ministry of Economy are contradictory and complementary at the same time and they can perhaps fit the motive expression -\"ego-truistic.\" The main motive (49 percent) is the convenient alternative that NCS offers for military service that provides job skills and provides them, while in service, an opportunity to work unavailable to those who study in a yeshiva. At the same time, however, 37 percent of all volunteers declare that they are motivated by a desire to \"contribute to society and other people,\" though not necessarily to the state. The motives alignment, therefore, is a combination of collective-altruist motives and individual-egotistical motives, influenced to some extent by the character of the NCS that rewards the volunteers continuously through stipends, grants and status, similar to young volunteers in different places and circumstances (Rehberg, 2005; Kna'an and Goldberg-Glenn, 1991).\nVolunteering within the community: Volunteers who chose to stay in their communities attribute their motivations to a world view that ascribes importance to help the weak and the needy, common to the ultra-Orthodox world and the close-knit communities described above. These altruistic and religious motives combine with high level of particularized trust, bonded social capital of closed networks, and a fear of the secular world - a fear that preserves the separation and seclusion of this group. Overall, and in line with the findings described above, the volunteers do not perceive their service as a contribution to the state, but rather as a contribution to society, not as a vague, abstract term but a clear and distinct society - the ultra-Orthodox society. Volunteers described their service in educational institutions as a mission of high importance that enabled them to preserve their lifestyle and values:The service in the yeshiva is combined with a sense of mission and personal satisfaction in a religious framework [...] I was looking for a framework for night studies [a religious framework] a bit differently and with added value which is expressed in work with people and helping somewhat weak youth, but of course I would prefer working and helping my own public. I think everyone should be helped, but personally, I have the ability and the emotional strength to help my own public in particular. Anyone able to help everyone, all the better. My purpose in life is religious study, in both emotional and social aspects, and I intend to help others with it:(Nachume, Lithuanian volunteer in Yeshiva for children with learning difficulties).\nDiscussion and conclusions: Studies and the theories identify a sequence of motives for volunteering, ranging from utilitarian-egotistical (Clary et al., 1996) to social-altruistic pole (Perres and Liss, 1975; Baron and Byrane, 2003; Cnaan and Goldberg-Glen, 1991). The choice where to volunteer, within immediate, intimate communities or in wider associations, we argue here, is underscored by social capital that shapes perceptions and motivations. For members of religious groups, volunteering outside the community has benefits but also specific risks of exposure to different and objectionable lifestyles. Civil National Service offered to ultra-Orthodox men in Israel presented them with the dilemma not only whether to volunteer, but where. Volunteering inside the community would provide them with a familiar and safe environment where the benefits of volunteering would be limited to community members. Conversely, volunteering outside the community could risk compromising their strict religious values, but allow them to help other people and, more importantly, acquire skills for future employment (Table I).\n",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Purpose: Religious minority groups often enjoy strong support systems and high levels of trust, providing for volunteering within the community, but under what conditions are members of these groups likely to volunteer outside their community? Or, would they prefer the security, intimacy and commitment to their own communities. The paper aims to discuss these issues.\nDesign/methodology/approach: To answer this question, the authors examine the motivations of ultra-Orthodox young men who volunteered for National Civil Service in Israel, and compare the choices of volunteer frameworks: separatist-religious volunteering within the community compared to volunteering in secular institutions outside the community.\nFindings: The authors associate the interest and motivations with different types of social capital, \"bonding\" and \"bridging.\"\nResearch limitations/implications: Research based on one case study.\nPractical implications: Guidelines for encouraging volunteering among closed groups.\nSocial implications: Understanding of motivations and concerns among religious groups.\nOriginality/value: An original study of a relatively new phenomenon.\n",
"role": "assistant"
}
] |
Analysis on inter-provincial disparities of China's rural education and convergence rate: Empirical analysis on 31 provinces' (municipalities') panel data from 2001 to 2008
|
[
"Average educational years",
"Educational Gini coefficients",
"Convergence",
"China",
"Education",
"Educational policy",
"Rural areas"
] |
[
{
"content": "Summarize the following paper into structured abstract.\n\n1. Introduction: Coordinated regional development of education is the reflection of educational justice and equality. Uncoordinated educational development among provinces in China has become one of the significant issues of regional development. In 2001, China's government carried out reform of the investment system for compulsory rural education. \"County as principle\" replaced \"classification management\". This reform has promoted the development of compulsory rural education in China and has to some extent alleviated the problem of insufficient investment in education, and inter-provincial differences in rural education have also been significantly reduced. However, recent years' practice shows that the \"county as principle\" investment system still cannot solve the problem of rural education poverty. Under the conditions of farmers' low income and the \"county as principle\" investment system, a county government's finances become the most important determinant of education investment. In fact, most counties cannot ensure adequate investment in education. Counties' governments have assumed the burden of compulsory education inputs, while central government and the provincial government share little responsibility. This investment system discourages the further development of compulsory rural education. It is estimated that at present all of China's investment in compulsory education, the county governments' share is 78 percent, provincial governments' share no more than 1 percent, and central government's share much less. Therefore, inter-provincial disparities and inequality of education development are directly influenced by regional economic differences.On the other hand, because of higher agricultural productivity and rapid economic development, East China is demanding a larger labor force, and the registered system of permanent residence of recent years is not so strict as previously. All of this results in a high level of rural labor mobility. The rural laborers who move to East China mainly come from Central and Western China, and they are better educated than those who stay in local regions. Additionally, in China, the investment system for compulsory rural education has obvious territorial characteristics. This means that the education investment for rural laborers who move to East China comes from the local governments of Central and Western China. As a result, investment and benefit in rural education in these regions are significantly asymmetrical. This phenomenon will eventually reduce local governments' incentives for investment in rural education, and could also enlarge inter-provincial education development disparities and regional inequities.In order to analyze these changes in inter-provincial differences in rural education after reform of the education investment system and how the inter-provincial differences converge, after estimating the rural average education years and education Gini coefficients of 31 provinces (municipalities) beside Hong Kong, Macao and Taiwan from 2001 to 2008, this article in addition applies the method of \"economic convergence\" to analyze inter-provincial disparities of rural education and the convergence rate. The article also comments on the effects compulsory education reform - i.e. \"county as principle\" - after 2001.\n2. Literature review: Since 1978 China's education has been significantly improved, but the issue of unbalanced education development also highlights that scholars are concerned about the issue. Wei and Yang (1997) found that regional differences in education development decreased year by year. Wang et al. (1998) and Wu (1999) pointed out that economic development disparities among regions result in an imbalance in education development. Zhu (2003) calculated the education Gini coefficient of inter-regional investment from 1998 to 2000, with the results showing that the inequality of education investment has increased in recent years. Tu's (2005) study showed that China's regional differences in education could be mainly seen from two aspects:1. the scale of regional of higher education development and educational investment; and2. China's region differences in education has been enlarged.Du (2005) calculated the education Gini coefficient and found that inter-provincial education disparities had been reduced. Zhai (2006, 2007) also found that between 1995 and 2004 basic education disparities declined after his theoretical and empirical analysis. Yang and Li (2007) estimated the education Gini coefficient of China's 31 provinces from 1996 to 2004, and pointed out that China's education inequality had improved not only within regions, but also among regions. Sun (2008) also measured the education Gini coefficient in different periods, and found that China's educational development reduced education inequality within each region.The above research by Chinese scholars show two opposite conclusions, namely that regional differences in education development have been either reduced or enlarged. According to the data used in this literature, research using data from after 2001 tends to see a decrease, while research using data from before 2001 tends to see an increase, because of the implementation of reform of the compulsory education system. However, there are few articles to apply the approach of \"economic convergence\" to analyze inter-provincial education disparities. Until now, only Sun (2008) has taken advantage of this method, and his study pointed out that China's inter-provincial education disparities had gradually been reduced. Therefore, this paper also utilizes the approach of \"economic convergence\" to analyze rural education disparities among China's provinces and the convergence speed after investment system reform of rural compulsory education in 2001.\n3. Calculations on average education years and education Gini coefficient of China's rural areas: 3.1 Methods of measurement\n4. Comparison of rural education development: In order to reflect the changes from 2001 to 2008 in educational disparities among provinces (municipalities), this paper shows four GIS charts of average education years and education Gini coefficient of provinces' (municipalities') rural areas.4.1 Comparison of average education years\n5. Convergence of rural education disparity among provinces: 5.1 s convergence of rural education disparities\n6. Conclusions: After the investment system for rural compulsory education was reformed in 2001, rural education developed significantly, and inequalities in rural education have been greatly reduced. Inter-provincial disparities of the education development and educational inequality show significant convergence. However, the convergence rates of inter-provincial disparities on education inequality have decreased. This is because the new investment system for rural compulsory education still cannot provide adequate funds, especially in Central and Western China. In addition, this investment system has obvious territorial characteristics; local government in Central and Western China cannot receive symmetrical returns because of large-scale rural labor mobility. This phenomenon not only reduces local governments' incentives to invest in rural education, it also worsens inter-provincial inequalities in education. Therefore, China's education input system should be regulated again. In fact, in developed countries, most of the investment in primary education is provided by central government. It is necessary for China's provincial and central government to meet the expenses of compulsory education.\n",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Purpose: - This article aims to analyze inter-provincial disparities of rural education and the convergence rate, and to discuss the effects of compulsory education reform after 2001.\nDesign/methodology/approach: - The article estimates the rural average education years and education Gini coefficients of China's 31 provinces (municipalities) beside Hong Kong, Macao and Taiwan from 2001 to 2008, and applies the method of \"economic convergence\".\nFindings: - The results show that after the reform of rural compulsory education, inter-provincial rural education disparities and educational equality have been significantly improved and trend to convergence; nevertheless the convergence rate on inter-provincial disparities of education equality declines. The defects of the education input system - \"county as principle\" - has been a factor that restricts the coordinated development of rural education.\nPractical limitations: - This paper suggests that it is necessary for China's provincial and central government to afford the expense of compulsory education. China's present investment system would also worsen inter-provincial inequities of education.\nSocial implications: - Education equality is one of the basic social priorities. In China education equality has been improved; however it could be better if China's provincial and central government afforded the expenses of compulsory education.\nOriginality/value: - This paper applies the method of \"economic convergence\" to analyze China's rural education disparities among its regions.\n",
"role": "assistant"
}
] |
Firms as credit suppliers: an empirical study of Spanish firms
|
[
"Credit",
"Trade",
"Companies",
"Spain"
] |
[
{
"content": "Summarize the following paper into structured abstract.\n\n1. Introduction: Trade credit is a form of financing whereby firms act as suppliers of credit to other firms by postponing collection of monies due. Several theories have attempted to explain the reasons for firms choosing to adopt this trading policy, but there is no general theory of trade credit. It is apparent that ordinary trading firms can reduce the role of financial institutions by electing to postpone collection of monies due. In so doing, suppliers permit their clients to continue their daily activities despite any restrictions that the clients might be experiencing in credit markets. For the suppliers, the postponement of collection enhances the likelihood of retaining their clients and securing cash flow in the future. Additionally, suppliers can reduce the transaction costs associated with the liquidation of each individual commercial exchange, resulting in an important decision-making process in the managerial finance field. However, despite the intuitive logic of these motives, there is a paucity of empirical studies of these matters. This is somewhat surprising, given that trade credit can amount to 20-40 per cent of a firm's finance, which is comparable to bank credit and substantially higher than venture capital or other sources of funding that have attracted greater scholarly attention.The literature on the subject of trade credit is growing, but still contains considerable gaps. The present study analyses the motives and determinants of granting trade credit, which is a topic that has attracted even less attention than that of accepting trade credit. In particular, this study analyses the determinants of trade credit extension for a sample of small and medium-sized firms located in the Canary Islands (Spain) during the period 1990-1996. The special characteristics associated with this archipelago, such as the costs associated with an \"island economy\" and the distance from mainland Spain, are important features of the business environment studied here.The remainder of this paper is structured as follows. Following this introduction, the paper reviews the main theoretical and empirical works on trade credit. The sample of firms and the methodology employed in the empirical study are then described. The empirical model is then presented and certain hypotheses are proposed. The results of the study and the testing of the hypotheses are then discussed. The main conclusions of the work are summarised in the last section.\n2. Literature review: Early studies on trade credit linked the effects of government monetary policy with the utilisation of trade credit (Meltzer, 1960; Brechling and Lipsey, 1963; Nadiri, 1969), and more recent works have followed a similar approach (Ramey, 1992; Norrbin and Reffett, 1995; Nilsen, 2002).In a similar vein, other studies have treated trade credit as a financial intermediation device - whereby sellers with greater access to credit markets act as financial providers to their customers through deferred payments (Schwartz, 1974; Emery, 1984).Despite the prevalence of studies that posit trade credit as a financial device, it should be noted that trade credit offers benefits apart from liquidity and risk distribution. In particular, one of the most important advantages of trade credit is a reduction in the transaction costs that are incurred with a system of immediate payment on delivery of merchandise (Nadiri, 1969; Ferris, 1981; Emery, 1987). Trade credit can substantially reduce transaction costs by separating the exchange of goods from the exchange of money, and by enabling the payment of bills to be performed periodically. This so-called \"transaction motive\" is believed to underlie a substantial proportion of all trade credit, even in studies that focus on financial motives (Schwartz, 1974; Nilsen, 2002).Trade credit can also be an effective means of discriminating prices for firms in situations in which other forms of price discrimination are either too costly or illegal (Schwartz and Whitcomb, 1979; Brennan et al., 1988; Mian and Smith, 1992; Petersen and Rajan, 1994). This price discrimination takes the form of discounts for prompt payment to specific customers who would otherwise willingly pay a higher price.It is likely that trade credit would be replaced by other sources of finance if goods markets and financial markets were perfect. However, given the imperfections of virtually all markets, trade credit provides other specific advantages; indeed, it can be argued that trade credit is a more efficient mechanism for resolving market imperfections than other forms of financial intermediation, such as banking. For example, the cycle of order, delivery, and (postponed) payment can generate available information that would otherwise remain hidden from (or would be costly to obtain by) parties not involved in the transaction. Similarly, trade credit can also play a role in identifying information about product quality. The role of trade credit in such conditions of information asymmetry has been the focus of many studies, including those of Smith (1987), Lee and Stowe (1993), Long et al. (1993), Freixas (1993), Biais et al. (1994), Biais and Gollier (1997), Burkart and Ellingsen (2004), DeLoof and Jegers (1996), Petersen and Rajan (1997), and Ng et al. (1999).A more recent stream in the theoretical literature has linked trade credit with financial difficulties and failure - including default payments, debt rescheduling, and the liquidation of firms (Frank and Maksimovic, 1998; Wilner, 2000; Cunat, 2002). Two of these studies (Frank and Maksimovic, 1998; Wilner, 2000) concluded that some suppliers specialise in financing buyers who have low creditworthiness in situations in which liquidation is likely to occur. In these cases, the high interest rates associated with some forms of trade credit are accepted by low-quality firms who choose to accept this form of financing from their suppliers.Another stream of research has adopted a fundamentally empirical perspective in analysing the different policies and terms that have characterised trade credit in various time periods, industries, and countries (Perotti, 1998; Chee et al. 1999; McMillan and Woodruff, 1999; Fafchamps, 1997, 2000; Fafchamps and Minten, 1999; Denisova, 2000; Hege and Ambrus-Lakatos, 2000; Fisman, 1999, 2001; Buduru and Colonescu, 2002; Van Der Wijst and Hol, 2002; Summers and Wilson, 2002, 2003; Cheng and Pike, 2003; Berlin, 2003; Marotta, 2005). Relatively little evidence is available on trade credit for Spanish firms, although some authors (Chulia, 1991, 1992, 1993; Garcia-Vaquero and Maza, 1996; Martinez de Guerenu, 1996; Hernandez de Cos and Hernando, 1999) have analysed trade credit using the database of the Central de Balances del Banco de Espana (in English, the \"Commercial Performance Information Bureau of the Bank of Spain\"). These studies revealed that smaller firms are more likely to resort to supplier finance because they are faced with more restrictions in the credit markets. In contrast, larger firms, which have easier access to external finance, transfer this advantage to their customers.\n3. Empirical study: 3.1. Background to the study\n4. Conclusions: The present study contributes to the relatively scarce empirical literature on trade credit granted by providing evidence regarding the determinants of trade credit granted with respect to a previously un-researched sample of firms located in the Canary Islands, Spain. Most studies on this field have focused on large firms whereas the role played by small and medium-sized firms is highlighted in this study. Using panel data methodology and the GMM, estimations in first differences showed significant findings with respect to all parameters chosen for the study, with almost all showing the expected signs.The results support the proposed hypotheses as follows:* In accordance with H1, firms that had easier access to external funds were found to grant more trade credit. This finding is in accordance with financial advantage theory - which holds that firms with greater credit worthiness act as credit channels for commercial clients who have difficulties in raising finance.* In accordance with H2, transaction motives for the extension of trade credit were confirmed. The most commercially active firms granted more trade credit because transaction costs associated were reduced by using periodic invoice collections and because inventory holding costs were reduced for firms experiencing variable demand on products with high seasonality.* In accordance with H3, the study confirmed the proposal that trade credit can reduce the information asymmetry that can exist between a firm and its financial backers. In particular, this proposal was confirmed by the finding that older firms granted more trade credit to their clients.Despite the importance of these findings for ongoing research into trade credit and associated subjects, some caveats are acknowledged. First, the findings represent correlated inferences, rather than proven causal relationships; the possibility of reverse causality cannot therefore be entirely precluded. Second, some results are interpretive in nature; in particular, the side effects of supply and demand are inferred. More detailed data and analyses could assist in investigating the relationships noted here; unfortunately, these data are unavailable for Spanish and Canarian firms.\n",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Purpose: - The purposes of the study are to: contribute evidence on the role played by ordinary commercial firms in providing finance to other firms by granting trade credit to customers; and test some theories about the motives of small and medium-sized firms in extending such trade credit.\nDesign/methodology/approach: - The Generalised Method of Moments is applied to an unbalanced panel of small and medium-sized firms in the Canary Islands (Spain). Analysis of data from a unique database is used to obtain consistent estimations and to test some proposed hypotheses about the determinants of extending trade credit.\nFindings: - The study finds that: firms with greater access to financial markets can serve as a credit channel for clients that have difficulties in obtaining institutional financing (thus supporting the theory of financial advantage with respect to trade credit); firms can reduce transaction costs through financing clients (thus confirming that \"transaction motives\" are significant in granting trade credit); and that trade credit between firms known to each other reduces problems associated with information asymmetry in financial arrangements.\nResearch limitations/implications: - The findings represent correlated inferences, rather than proven causal relationships. Moreover, some results are interpretive in nature; more detailed data and analyses could assist in investigating the relationships noted here.\nOriginality/value: - The paper contributes to the scarce empirical literature about the motives for granting trade credit by small and medium-sized firms. This is also the first study to analyse this behaviour from a dataset of firms in the Canary Islands (Spain).\n",
"role": "assistant"
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] |
Mediating effects of perceived environment support and knowledge sharing between self-efficacy and job performance of SME employees
|
[
"Self-efficacy",
"Knowledge sharing",
"Employee job performance",
"Perceived environmental support"
] |
[
{
"content": "Summarize the following paper into structured abstract.\n\nIntroduction: Several studies have revealed that employee job performance effectively promotes conduct in the workplace and assists companies to achieve their goals (Hsu et al., 2006; Imran et al., 2018). Employee job performance or individual performance is regarded as the smallest subunit when studying organisational performance as an important and essential factor which influences the ability of employees to operate effectively and gain competitive advantages over competitors (Van Beurden et al., 2018). However, although both companies and human resource developers have focussed on this aspect with investment in the potential of their employees, limited success has been achieved in increasing effective job performances. Researchers and organisational behaviourists are aware of the challenges which present obstacles to successful work operation.\nTheoretical background and the conceptual model: The conceptual model was based on educational research I-E-O system theory (Astin, 1993). Input factors refer to the qualities that a person brings to the table, while output factors are the results that he/she wants to achieve and environmental factors refer to actual personal experiences during interaction processes involving completion of the tasks (Figure 1). The existing literature was systematically reviewed for concepts and theories concerning employee job performance, SE, perceived environmental support and knowledge sharing. Concepts were justified on the basis that an employee with high SE can perform tasks or operate effectively to achieve targeted goals through environmental processes.\nEmployee job performance: Na-Nan et al. (2018a) identify three dimensions of employee job performance as quality, quantity and time. The quality dimension considers the ability to perform tasks according to criteria or standards required by the workplace (Peterson and Plowman, 1953). The quantity dimension concerns the amount of work that an employee can perform according to the time and resources provided (Koopmans et al., 2014; Peterson and Plowman, 1953). The time dimension is regarded as employees' work behaviours in comparison with the allocated time. Some companies also compare quantity and quality against time used for work operation (Peterson and Plowman, 1953).\nSelf-efficacy: SF is an internal sense of a person concerning their self-confidence to confront situations, management and behaviours to achieve target goals (Bandura, 1997). Furthermore, perceived SE represents a person's confidence to perform particular behaviours to achieve the desired outcome (Bhargava and Pradhan, 2018). Successfully delivering the expected results generates confidence. In other words, a person who is confident is more likely to perform well and achieve or surpass expectations (Mao et al., 2019).\nKnowledge sharing: Knowledge is the important process of disseminating knowledge to other members of the workplace or organisation. Knowledge and information distribution is one factor leading to effective job performance (Kang et al., 2008). Moreover, knowledge sharing is regarded as an important management process to distribute implicit and explicit knowledge of a particular person to other members of the workforce (Seba et al., 2012).\nPerceived environmental support: According to Eisenberger et al. (2002), perceived environmental support is the employees' belief that their organisation values their contributions to the work operation and cares about their well-being. Employees perceive such cares through receiving returns from the company such as increases in salary or fringe benefits, promotion, work facilities, welfare or organisation culture. In addition, Yucel and Minnotte (2017) assert that organisational support is very important for fulfilling two basic needs as providing interpersonal help or support on important and necessary aspects and facilitating smooth work operations.\nHypotheses: Employees become the most important driving factor in any organisation by creating productive job performances (Hanaysha, 2016). An employee with SE has the confidence to operate effectively and overcome problems or challenges encountered, resulting in fulfilling tasks to agreed targets. Carter et al. (2016) and De Clercq et al. (2018a) found that perceived SE has a significant positive influence on employee job performance at both individual and organisational levels since employees with high perceived SE have confidence and motivation to operate well. Lai and Chen (2012) agree that people with perceived SE operate effectively with their confidence to complete their tasks. This conforms to the hypothesis of system theory which states that input has an influence on output.\nResearch methodology: Sampling procedure\nDiscussion: Our results extend existing studies showing that SE has an influence on employee job performance. The concept and theory of SE and the relationship between SE and employee job performance is complex. The evidence suggested that perceived environmental support and knowledge sharing play a mediating role between SE and employee job performance. These findings support and confirm the system theory that input (SE) affects output (employee job performance) through the process of knowledge sharing to explain that employee job performance can be improved by increasing perceived SE and knowledge sharing. However, the I-E-O theory supports increasing employee job performance by supporting the perceived environmental support of employees (Astin, 1993). This increases knowledge sharing and employee job performance levels following the system theory.\nImplications: Human resource development and organisational behaviour fields can offer a detailed in-depth understanding of how SE influences employee job performance by increasing, improving and providing perceived environmental support through knowledge sharing.\nLimitations and future research: This research provides empirical evidence that perceived environmental support and knowledge sharing act as mediators between perceived SE and employee job performance. However, there are several limitations, similar to other studies that offer fertile avenues for further research. First, the questionnaires may be affected by individual bias of participants as a consequence of cross-sectional and self-reported data. Aguinis et al. (2001), Na-Nan et al. (2018b) and Na-Nan and Saribut (2019) stated that social researchers should be aware of and recognise that language, culture, technology and economics can all affect the quality of data collection. When conducting surveys, researchers should be aware that language and context can affect questionnaire validation and research findings. Thus, any variations which might occur in other languages, cultures or context settings should also be considered (Na-Nan, 2019).\nConclusions: Our research findings effectively met all four conditions for mediation testing following the method of Baron and Kenny (1986) and presented concrete evidence that perceived environmental support and knowledge sharing mediated the relationship between SE and employee job performance. Thus, as forecast by H7, SE influenced employee job performance through perceived environmental support and knowledge sharing.\n",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Purpose: Currently, small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) concentrate on developing their employees' potential to ensure high job performance. Enhancing the perception of efficacy is important to encourage employees to perform their responsibilities with increased self-confidence. Perceived environmental support and knowledge sharing are also significant factors that boost employees' potential to achieve targets. The purpose of this paper is to examine how self-efficacy (SE) relates both directly and indirectly to employee job performance through perceived environmental support and knowledge sharing.\nDesign/methodology/approach: Empirical data were garnered from a sample of 344 admins working at SMEs in Central Thailand and structural equation modelling was used to test the proposed relationships.\nFindings: SE had a strong positive influence on employee job performance, perceived environmental support and knowledge sharing, while perceived environmental support and knowledge sharing positively influenced employee job performance. Perceived environmental support and knowledge sharing were considered to be partial mediating factors of SE in the employee job performance model.\nOriginality/value: This research extends understanding of the relationship between SE and employee job performance. The findings shed light on mediating roles of perceived environmental support and knowledge sharing regarding the relationship between SE and employee job performance.\n",
"role": "assistant"
}
] |
Values and career behaviours of entrepreneurs and employees
|
[
"Employees",
"Values",
"Career success",
"Entrepreneurial behaviour"
] |
[
{
"content": "Summarize the following paper into structured abstract.\n\nIntroduction: The information technology boost in recent decades has changed the business environment, making it more volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous (Bushe and Marshak, 2016). This boost impacts not only organisations' competitiveness in an external environment, but also the way that work is structured inside the organisation. Employees who are just completing their tasks and duties following prescribed procedures are not supporting the competitiveness of their business because there might not be enough time to follow the hierarchical approval of new practices within the organisation. Anticipated career attitudes are shifting from obedience, to organisational rules, to entre-employment (Duberley and Carrigan, 2012; Gaile and Sumilo, 2017, 2016), whereby the employee assumes the responsibility for his/her career. This approach suggests that employees should focus on their own resource development (knowledge, skills) while creating valuable outcomes for their employer. More and more scholars adopt the notion of a boundary-free career, where an individual builds a career based on his/her resources and life situation (Defillippi and Arthur, 1994; Arthur and Rousseau, 1996; Korotov et al., 2011; Bravo et al., 2017).\nTheoretical background: There is a significant body of research in the field of career studies, but no consensus exists on the definitions of main terms, most appropriate models or theoretical foundations and measurements for constructs (Arnold and Cohen, 2008; Savickas, 2012; Baruch et al., 2015).\nMethodology: For the purposes of research for this paper, a questionnaire containing 72 questions has been developed. There were 2 questions about job satisfaction, 4 questions about relationships in the workplace, 24 questions on career behaviours, 3 questions on reward attitudes, 1 question on career satisfaction, 21 statements of individual values and 17 questions on sociodemographic parameters, applying the following methodology:\nFindings: The career behaviours and individual values model's consistency was measured by the Cronbach a index, which is a=0.803 (see Table II).\nDiscussion and conclusions: The study supports previous research indicating that the relationship aspect is crucial for building one's career. The social recognition, networking within and outside the organisation, self-presentation and seeking feedback have been identified as main competences required for building successful careers (Kuijpers and Scheerens, 2006; Kong, 2010; Francis-Smythe et al., 2012). Interpersonal relations (Gattiker and Larwood, 1986), recognition (Dries et al., 2008; Shockley et al., 2016), social contacts (Ng and Feldman, 2014), social and societal contexts (Poona et al., 2015) and influence (Shockley et al., 2016) have been identified in previous studies as prerequisites for a successful career.\nLimitations of the study: All self-reported studies contain limitations and this study is no exception as it used a survey method. Moreover, it is possible that the study suffers from a self-selection bias as respondents who decided to participate and fill in the questionnaire might be mainly those considering they have more successful careers while the ones unsatisfied with their careers could be reluctant to take part in the study. Another limitation is rooted in the geographical distribution of respondents as the study took place in Latvia. In the future, it would be beneficial to conduct the same study in other countries and to draw conclusions from larger international samples.\n",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to determine the differences in the values and behaviours of employees and entrepreneurs and to develop guidelines for employers to foster entrepreneurial thinking in their organisations.\nDesign/methodology/approach: To determine individual behaviours, the authors used the career adaptability scale developed by Savickas and Porfelli (2012), complemented with the statements regarding relationships in the workplace and reward, designed by Gattiker and Larwood (1986). The individual values were evaluated by Schwartz's individual value framework. The career success of individuals was defined by income level and job satisfaction. Data from a sample of 473 respondents were analysed using structural equation modelling.\nFindings: This paper reveals that there are differences in the behaviours and the values of employees and entrepreneurs. Employees are more concerned with relationships at the workplace, rewards and confidence, whereas entrepreneurs focus solely on relationships. Self-direction value has a direct positive impact. Universalism, conformism, achievement, stimulation and safety have indirect positive effects on career success for employees. There is no specific individual value driving career success for entrepreneurs.\nOriginality/value: This paper follows the recent trends in organisational culture development whereby organisations seek to incorporate the entrepreneurial mindset at all levels of the organisation. Until now, there has been scarce empirical evidence on the differences between entrepreneurial and employee values. This research provides evidence that the value gap between these two distinct groups is considerable enough to question the ability of the average employee to adopt the entrepreneurial behaviour required by modern organisations.\n",
"role": "assistant"
}
] |
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