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Sea fish fraud? A confirmation of Gadoid species food labelling
|
[
"Food fraud",
"Gadidae",
"Gadoid species",
"PCR",
"Sea fish"
] |
[
{
"content": "Summarize the following paper into structured abstract.\n\nIntroduction: Food fraud, including the more defined subcategory of economically motivated adulteration (EMA), is a food risk that is gaining recognition and concern. Regardless of the cause of the food risk, adulteration of food is both an industry and a government responsibility. Food safety, food fraud and food defence incidents can create adulteration of food with public health threats. Food fraud is an intentional act for economic gain, whereas a food safety incident is an unintentional act with unintentional harm, and a food defence incident is an intentional act with intentional harm. Food fraud could be more dangerous than traditional food safety risks because potential adulterants are unconventional, and the current intervention and response systems are not looking for these contaminants (Spink and Moyer, 2011, 2013; Moore et al., 2012).\nResearch methodology: Gadoid fish products\nResearch results and discussion: Impact of processing on DNA amplification\nValidating the research methodology: These methods were validated on the other fish species: mackerel (Scomber sp.), herring (Clupea sp.), sardine (Sardina sp.) and tuna fish (Thunnus sp.) for their specificity. Laboratory is accredited according to CSN EN ISO/IEC 17025:2005 (2005) and successfully participated in FAPAS testing (fish authenticity). Given that no certified reference material was available, the results were determined using internal reference materials (Alaska pollock, Atlantic cod, saithe, Pacific cod and hake).\nThe social implications: EMA of food, also known as food fraud, is the intentional adulteration of food for financial advantage. In contrast to foodborne disease outbreaks, EMA incidents present a particular challenge to the food industry and regulators because they are deliberate acts that are intended to evade detection. Incorrect labelling can pose a human health risk. Other nutritional composition can also be expected. Recommendation for safety of consumers is traceability and knowing the source of their food.\nResearch conclusion: The mislabelling of this sea fish species, whether intentional or not, was observed in the Czech market and in catering facilities. Common reasons for problems with fish authenticity include economic reasons. These results could be useful for improving the effective control of adulterated consumer fish products and violations of labelling requirements. These data are a contributing factor to improving food safety and crucial for health risk assessment. The data were sent to Czech Public Health Authority (provider - control body) in the Czech Republic.\n",
"role": "user"
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"content": "Purpose: Gadoid fish and hake are the species of fishes most frequently imported to the Czech Republic. The purpose of this paper, cross-country hygiene study, is to determine sea fish fraud labelling on the Czech market and catering.\nDesign/methodology/approach: In total, 57 samples of commercial Gadoid fish product from different manufacturers, distributors and catering facilities were gathered. Gadidae family, hake (Merluccius spp. Raf.), saithe (Pollachius virens L.), Atlantic cod (Gadus morhua L.), Alaska pollock (Theragra chalcogramma Pall.), were detected in fish meat, fish products and fish meals by the qualitative PCR method.\nFindings: In total, 47 samples were labelled as a Gadoid fish, which were confirmed in 43 cases. Six samples were labelled as a hake and were confirmed in five samples. Four samples were labelled as a fish fillets. Three samples of fish fillets were identified as a hake and one sample was detected as a mixture of Alaska pollock and Atlantic cod.\nSocial implications: In recent years, due to increasing interest from consumers in the sea fish meat market, accurate Identification of fish species has become more important. The mislabelling of sea fish species, whether intentional or not, was on observed on the Czech market and in catering facilities. Economic factors influence the accuracy of labelling of fish meat, which is a concern as mislabelling can threaten public health.\nOriginality/value: The study was concentrated on the monitoring of hygiene and quality of food products and catering facilities. This study provides greater awareness of the condition and quality of food on the market and to the extent of fraudulent practices amongst dealers and producers.\n",
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Intersectionality, identity and identity work: Shared tenets and future research agendas for gender and identity studies
|
[
"Gender",
"Identity",
"Intersectionality",
"Identity work"
] |
[
{
"content": "Summarize the following paper into structured abstract.\n\nIntroduction: In May 2012, the Gender in Management and Identity Special Interest Groups (SiGs) of the British Academy of Management (BAM) organised a joint research seminar entitled \"Exploring the Intersectionality of Gender and Identity\". This third annual joint SiGs research seminar aimed to explore intersecting interests and theoretical positions and identify current debates and common themes connecting the two fields of interest. Researchers and doctoral students from 11 UK universities attended the seminar, which included four presentations. Gender in management researchers have only recently come to intersectionality, progressing explorations into the interdependence of gender with other identity dimensions. This Special Issue commentary extends the seminar's original aims by offering an introductory literature review of intersectionality for gender in management and identity researchers. We began the literature review by analysing intersectionality research in the Gender in Management: An International Journal and Gender, Work and Organization journals. We also went into contemporary intersectionality research in the journal of Sex Roles. We then focused on three intersectionality Special Issues, two published in Sex Roles (2008, 2013) and one in the European Journal of Women's Studies (2006). From this, we outline intersectionality's key tenets, its connections with identity and with gender and present critiques of the concept.\nWhat is intersectionality?: McCall (2005), Prins (2006), Hancock (2007) and Davis (2008) provide historical reviews highlighting the diverse theoretical drivers of current conceptualisations of intersectionality and the variations in operationalising understandings of intersectionality in extant theorising and empirical research. Atewolugun (2014), in this Special Issue, notes how intersectionalty emerged from a desire to make visible the experiences of African-American women whose voices had been subsumed in women's studies (due to their minority ethnicity) and race studies (due to their minority gender status). Crenshaw (1991) originally proposed intersectionality as a way of changing policies and activist practices to address Black women's unique needs. Woodhams and Lupton (2014, in this Special Issue) outline how Crenshaw (1991) proposed the overlapping of inequalities where the intersection of two minority categories (Black and woman) constitute a distinct social position (Black woman) that produces unique forms of disadvantage which cannot be accounted for by adding together the single categories. Collins (1990) understood categories as historically contingent modes of exercising power. She proposed the notion of interlocking oppressions organised through a \"matrix of domination\" (Collins, 1990, p. 276) comprising structural, disciplinary, hegemonic and interpersonal power relations. Building on this work, authors including West and Fenstermaker (1995, 2002) and more recently Holvino (2010) argue that an inclusive exploration of women's experiences should acknowledge the intersections of gender with other identities, particularly where social positions frame how individuals experience their subjectivities.\nIdentity/identity work: social categories and social identities: From a psychological perspective, identity is understood as an individual's claims of membership of, and meanings associated with, particular social categories (Shields, 2008). Jones (2009) and Bowleg (2012) distinguish between \"visible\" social categories or social identities (such as race and ethnicity) and \"invisible\" ones (such as sexual orientation, social class, religion and disability). From our own sociological perspective on identity/identity work research, we understand self- and social-identities (hyphenated) slightly differently. Specifically, we follow Watson's (2008, p. 131) theory of self-identities as the individual's own notion of who he/she is becoming and social-identities as \"cultural phenomena [which] relate to various social categories existing societally and are, in effect, 'inputs' into self-identities (mediated by identity work) rather than elements of self-identities as such\". Social- identities consist of the self's projections towards others, others' projections towards the self and reactions to received projections (Beech, 2008, 2011) and are \"'sites' in which people draw on and are imposed on by external discourses\" (Beech, 2011, p. 286). As Sveningsson and Alvesson (2003) found, individuals may draw on distinct social groups or \"conventional\" social categories (such as Black, White, man, woman, etc.) and other meaning-making devices, such as metaphors, in constructing their self-identities.\nShared tenets of theories of intersectionality and identity/identity work: The starting point of intersectionality theory: multiple and mutually constitutive identities\nPower and privilege: Intersectionality considers how multiple identities are constituted in the context of power relations (Brah and Phoenix, 2013; Warner and Shields, 2013). Thus, identity work may involve \"social maneuvering and power games [...][and] attempts to establish, legitimate or challenge the prevailing relationships of power and status\" (Ball and Wilson, 2000, cited by Ybema et al., 2009, p. 307). Furthermore, identity work is performed in a discursive context of \"official\" or \"dominant\" discourses (Ybema et al., 2009, p. 307), and these political and historic discourses and related practices form the means through which self- and social-identities are constructed (Ford, 2006; Kondo, 1990).\nGender: the starting point of intersectionality in this Special Issue: Having presented a brief introductory review of intersectionality and identity/identity work literature, we now move to introduce the papers in this Special Issue. Like other Special Issues focused on intersectionality (Shields', 2008, editorial of the Journal Sex Roles Special Issue and Phoenix and Pattynama's, 2006, editorial in the European Journal of Women's Studies), gender was the starting point, at the BAM SiGs seminar which initiated this Special Issue, of our analysis of intersectionality. The papers by Doyin Atewolugun and Ruth Simpson published here and the other presentations (Gina Grandy and Sharon Mavin and Ros Gill), which are summarised for prior publication reasons, offer the potential to consider the intersectionality of gender in terms of both \"gender and\" and \"gender with\" (Broadbridge and Simpson, 2011) other social-identities. This is discussed further in this Special Issue (Simpson, 2014). The intersections discussed include race/ethnicity (Atewolugun, 2014), sexuality (Gina Grandy and Sharon Mavin and Ruth Simpson) and occupation (Doyin Atewolugun, Ros Gill, Gina Grandy and Sharon Mavin and Ruth Simpson). The papers and summaries illustrate how, by taking an intersectionality approach, we can highlight how one's experiences of gender are profoundly shaped by one's social-identities, and vice versa, and how an individual's \"social location\" is reflected in intersecting identities (Shields, 2008, p. 301). As a BAM SiGs seminar participant observed, across the presentations, questions and discussions:\nSummary of seminar presentations and of papers published in this Special Issue: Related to their recent research on doing gender well and differently (Mavin and Grandy, 2012, 2013), Gina Grandy and Sharon Mavin's presentation highlighted the intersections of gender, dirty work occupations and identity. Based on data from Grandy's doctoral research (Grandy, 2008), Gina and Sharon explored how exotic dancers \"do\" gender and manage stigma associated with their work and identities. Drawing on Hughes' (1958), and Ashforth and Kreiner's (1999) notion of dirty work, in conjunction with Goffman's (1963) notion of spoiled identities, identity work is understood as problematic for dirty workers. For instance, how do individuals manage the stigma associated with their work and, therefore, themselves because they perform dirty work? Transferring this challenge to the theoretical notion of doing gender well and/or differently, Gina and Sharon discussed how doing gender well against the sex category can serve as a resource for positive identity construction for dirty workers. For instance, a butcher may emphasise aspects of the work associated with masculinity as an identity work strategy for dealing with or managing the stigma associated with the work (Simpson et al., 2011). However, \"[i]n circumstances where there is incongruence between sex category and gender, identity construction is problematic and the construction of positive identities may be threatened\" (Mavin and Grandy, 2012, p. 220). More specifically:\nCritiques of intersectionality in practice: Those wishing to engage in future research should be aware of the critiques of intersectionality research in practice. Special Issues on intersectionality, in the European Journal of Women's Studies (Phoenix and Pattynama, 2006) and in the journal of Sex Roles (Warner and Shields, 2013) highlight the danger of intersectionality treating all differences equally. For instance, Yuval-Davis (2006) and Verloo (2006) point out the distinctiveness of differences while simultaneously noting their interdependence.\nAreas for future research: In the final section of this commentary, we consider areas for future research.\nConcluding remarks: In summary, the papers in this Special Issue advance gender in management and identity research into intersectional perspectives, while revealing the challenges of researching intersectionality. The Special Issue is important in that it:\n",
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"content": "Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to introduce the Special Issue developed from a joint research seminar of the Gender in Management and Identity Special Interest Groups of the British Academy of Management, entitled \"Exploring the Intersectionality of Gender and Identity\". It also presents an introductory literature review of intersectionality for gender in management and identity/identity work researchers. The authors highlight the similarities and differences of intersectionality and identity approaches and introduce critiques of intersectional research. They then introduce the three papers in this Special Issue.\nDesign/methodology/approach: The authors review the intersectionality literature within and outside management and organisation studies and focus their attention on three intersectionality Special Issues (Sex Roles, 2008, 2013 and the European Journal of Women's Studies, 2006).\nFindings: The authors outline the ongoing debates relating to intersectionality research, including a framework and/or theory for identity/identity work, and explore the shared tenets of theories of intersectionality and identity. They highlight critiques of intersectionality research in practice and consider areas for future research for gender in management and identity researchers.\nResearch limitations/implications: The authors provide an architecture for researchers to explore intersectionality and to consider issues before embarking on intersectional research. They also highlight areas for future research, including social-identities of disability, class and religion.\nOriginality/value: Gender in Management: An International Journal invited this Special Issue to make a significant contribution to an under-researched area by reviewing the shared and different languages and importantly the shared key tenets, of intersectionality, gender, identity and identity work from a multidisciplinary perspective.\n",
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Mid-Atlantic wine tourism consumer preference: an econometric approach
|
[
"Tourism",
"United States of America",
"Wines",
"Econometric model",
"Surveys",
"Consumer behaviour",
"Regression",
"Market segmentation",
"Logit/probit/tobit",
"Survey research",
"Marketing research"
] |
[
{
"content": "Summarize the following paper into structured abstract.\n\nIntroduction: Wine tourism is a special form of agritourism (Wicks and Merrett, 2003), during which participants can taste wines, evaluate the quality, and make immediate purchasing decisions based on their experience and preferences. When offered, wine tourism enables consumers to understand and appreciate the unique cultural and geographical attributes of a winery (Assembly of European Wine Region, 2015) by observing the environment and interacting with winery staff members. Therefore, participants can acquire knowledge and have wine-related experiences, as well as build relationships with other wine drinkers (Shor and Mansfeld, 2009).\nLiterature review: Attributes that influence wine tourism participation\nMethodology: Data source\nResults: Participant profile\nConclusions: With wine production in the Mid-Atlantic growing, industry should focus on better understanding the potential consumer market. As only a few studies have focused on this specific region, our results provide a clearer profile of the Mid-Atlantic wine consumer. Unlike past studies that used exit surveys at selected wineries, we surveyed potential tasting-room visitors who resided in the New York, NJ, and Pennsylvania, including those who responded that they had not visited a winery before. The econometric approach we used to segment the market, which is based on wine consumers' interest in winery or vineyard tours, can make more reliable and cost-effective business suggestions. Effects of each factor on the likelihood of wine tourism participation are carefully examined, evaluated and compared with the most influential factors being identified. Such an econometric model is useful when analyzing consumers in a young, developing industry that lacks information from previous consumer studies.\nPractical implications and future research recommendations: Practical and managerial implications\n",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Purpose: Using an econometric approach, this study aims to examine Mid-Atlantic USA wine consumers' willingness to participate in winery or vineyard tours based on their wine knowledge, wine drinking occasions, demographical factors, past experience with wine tourism and wine purchasing behaviors.\nDesign/methodology/approach: An internet-based consumer survey (N = 977) conducted 22-24 October 2014 was used to collect data. The screening criteria for the survey participants were: 1) being a resident of the Mid-Atlantic region (New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania, USA), 2) at least 21 years old, 3) not an industry member, and 4) having purchased and consumed wine within the past year. In addition to descriptive statistics, a logistic regression was used to estimate consumers' willingness to participate in winery or vineyard tours. Independent variables were categorized into five groups: sources of wine knowledge, wine drinking occasions, demographical factors, past experience and wine purchasing behaviors.\nFindings: With 736 valid observations, the logistic regression shows that males are more likely to be interested in winery or vineyard tours, while young adults (<25 years old) are less likely. Learning about wines from winery tasting room staff members, from wine magazines or from local and regional magazines are the top three positive influencers on interest in these activities. Past wine tourism experience in the Mid-Atlantic region, drinking wine as an everyday beverage and giving wines as gifts also show a positive relationship with likelihood of participating in these activities.\nPractical implications: Study results can help the Mid-Atlantic wine industry understand wine tourists' behaviors and preferences. Advertising in wine magazines and local and regional magazines can be used to target wine consumers interested in winery or vineyard tours. Attributes (i.e. past experience with wine tourism and gaining knowledge from winery tasting room staff) that are related to the quality of wine tourism experience were identified. Participants were also interested in purchasing wine from the winery during or after participating in wine tourism activities; therefore, wineries should focus on guest interactions to encourage such purchases.\nOriginality/value: This survey collected data from both consumers who had or who lacked wine tourism experience, which allowed us to gather input from wine drinkers who had not necessarily visited tasting rooms. This survey instrument can be used to collect data from wine consumers residing in regions where the presence of wineries and wine tourism is low, which can provide insight that otherwise might be influenced by currently offered wine tourism activities. This paper uses an econometric approach to understand consumer interests in wine tourism in the Mid-Atlantic region and provides a comprehensive, clear and informative profile of likely wine tourism participants who reside in a region that has not been studied comprehensively.\n",
"role": "assistant"
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] |
Poem: to June Pallot
|
[
"New Zealand",
"Public sector accounting"
] |
[
{
"content": "Summarize the following paper into structured abstract.\n\n__NO_TITLE__: June\n",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Purpose: - Kathleen Gallagher wrote this poem for June Pallot, her friend of some 25 years, who died as she lived, clearly, simply, with courage, and always in light.\nDesign/methodology/approach: - Written by close friend and poet.\nFindings: - Captures June's optimism and continued work on public policy issues despite increasing physical frailty.\nOriginality/value: - For June's many international friends and colleagues who were unable to see her during the last couple of years, the poem captures her attitudes and activities.\n",
"role": "assistant"
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] |
Process capability in services
|
[
"Service levels",
"Statistical process control",
"Customer satisfaction",
"Service industries"
] |
[
{
"content": "Summarize the following paper into structured abstract.\n\nIntroduction: As stated by Teas and DeCarlo (2004), the frameworks that have been developed to deal with consumer's perceptions of quality can be grouped into two primary categories: performance-based and standards-based frameworks. According to the authors, performance-based frameworks specify perceived performance without any comparative events, while standards-based frameworks specify \"comparative\" performance conceptualization of service quality, i.e. performance is compared to a standard.One of the most famous instruments for measuring service quality is SERVQUAL, which was originated in 1988 and is founded on the conceptual model developed by Parasuraman et al. (1985). The early work of these researchers compares service performance against a single expectation standard, the desired expectation. However, more recently, Parasuraman et al. (1994), as well as other researchers, have advocated that multi-expectation approaches might be more appropriate for service quality models (Johnston, 1995; Wirtz and Bateson, 1999; Walker and Baker, 2000).Under this perspective, Parasuraman et al. (1994) propose two levels for customer's expectations, namely the desired and the adequate levels, separated by a tolerance zone (Figure 1). The desired level is the service performance the customer hopes to receive, being a blend of what the customer believes \"can be\" and \"should be\". The adequate service level is the minimum degree of performance a customer finds acceptable.Berry and Parasuraman, quoted by Johnston (1995), define the zone of tolerance as a \"range of service performance that a customer considers satisfactory. A performance below the tolerance zone will engender customer frustration and decrease customer loyalty. A performance level above the tolerance zone will pleasantly surprise customers and strengthen their loyalty.\"Several authors (e.g. Johnston, 1995; Cronin, 2003) consider that levels of service performance within the zone of tolerance are not perceived as different by customers. Other authors establish a distinction between zone of tolerance and zone of indifference. According to Wirtz and Mattila (2001), \"when performance falls within the zone of tolerance but outside the zone of indifference, consumers might begin to perceive the deviation from mean expectations\". Nevertheless, the authors also state that \"this perception of disconfirmation is likely to be minimal since performance remains within acceptable or tolerable ranges\".The inclusion of expectations when measuring service quality has been questioned by several authors (e.g. Cronin and Taylor, 1994; Teas, 1994). Parasuraman et al. (1994), although recognizing that a performance-based measure for service quality might have better predictive validity, affirm that incorporating expectations provides most valuable information for managers. However, they also admit that further research on customer expectations is needed.Several types of expectation have been proposed, but Wirtz and Mattila (2001) state that \"models to date failed to explicitly treat expectations as distributions\". The authors also pinpoint that \"given the robust findings of performance heterogeneity effects in other fields, it seems surprising that service research has largely ignored the impact of variance expectations on the satisfaction formations processes\".Cronin (2003), who discusses some possible research developments within the service quality field, also stresses the importance of understanding the effect of performance variability in consumer's evaluation of service quality.It seems then clear that a better understanding of the relationships between customer expectations and service performance might provide a new insight into service quality research, while generating useful information for the decision making process.This paper expounds an approach aimed at linking expectations and service performance, which is based on process capability analysis, a concept that emerges from statistical process control (SPC). Process capability can be defined as being the process natural dispersion evaluated in the absence of assignable causes for variation (Zairi, 1989). Although the concept of process capability does not need to make use of specification limits (Montgomery, 1991), it is rather convenient to associate process capability with specifications. In this context capability studies assess how able a process is to meet imposed specifications.The article discusses how process capability can be understood under a service perspective and proposes a process capability index that combines the expectation variance with performance distribution.\nProcess capability in services: Service capability index\nNon-normality of real and perceived performance: Normality assumptions were made earlier in this work, namely with regard to the distribution of real and perceived service performance. The transformation is the usual solution applied to overcome the non-normality of the data. There are several graphical and analytical approaches for selecting the best transformation (e.g. Box and Tidwell, 1962). One of the most efficient methods was developed by Box and Cox (1964), which applies the following equation for y>0: Equation 11 The likelihood function for the transformation is given by: Equation 12 The estimation of the transformation parameter, l, is usually accomplished by a graphical method (Draper and Smith, 1981), in which the Lmax(l) is plotted against l. The best parameter is the l-value that maximizes Lmax(l).It must be noticed, however, that the Box-Cox transformation is applied to the dependent variable in a dependency multivariate technique. When there is only one variable, as process output, it is no longer possible to calculate Lmax(l). In such situations we suggest a combination of the Box-Cox transformation with a Kolmogorov-Smirnov (K-S) test. In order to do it, values for the transformed data must be obtained for a range of l values. The transformed data, for each l-value, is analyzed through a goodness-of-fit test. Then, the K-S statistic is plotted against l and the optimal value for this parameter is the one that maximizes the fitness, i.e. the one that minimizes the K-S statistic.\nConclusions: It has been widely accepted that further research on customer expectations is needed to improve the understanding of service quality phenomena. The importance of treating expectations as distributions and the need for understanding the effect of performance variability on consumers' evaluation have been pinpointed by several authors as critical issues to be addressed in service quality research.In this article an approach rooted in process capability concepts was developed to articulate expectations and performance. It was concluded that if it is assumed that performance levels within the zone of tolerance are not perceived as different by customers, then the Uniform Distribution can be used to model the zone of tolerance.This constituted the basis for the development of the service capability index. However, the transition from a conceptual perspective to a practical approach was not easy to accomplish. In fact, one of the major challenges was to express expectations and service characteristics in a comparable way. QFD principles constituted an excellent framework to approach this problem, establishing relationships between customer perceptions and expectations with service performance. Although some limitations obviously exist, it is believed that a new insight into the understanding of those relationships was launched.Regrettably, applications of Statistical Process Control (SPC) in services are relatively scarce. This is somehow explained by the presence of customers in the production and delivery processes. In fact, as customers take part of the production process, it seems logical to admit that customers should take part of the measurement process, thus creating new frameworks to the application of SPC.The proposed index, articulating internal and external measures, might constitute a contribution to widespread SPC principles to the service sector.\nLimitations and suggestions for future research: Several assumptions were adopted in the development of the Service Quality Index, namely that performance levels within the zone of tolerance are not perceived as different by customers and that the distribution of service performance is normally distributed. Further research is clearly needed, not only to test these assumptions in different service environments, but also to assess the robustness of the index when the assumptions are violated.Furthermore, performance was expressed as a unidirectional concept, i.e. as a \"higher-the-better\" or \"lower-the-better\" characteristic. This was inevitable, as adequate and desired service levels are also unidirectional concepts. In fact, most of service characteristics appear to customers as \"higher-the-better\" (e.g. financial applications return) or \"lower-the-better\" (e.g. waiting time) variables.However, it is not possible to exclude that \"nominal-is-best\" characteristics might also have to be evaluated. The proposed indices cannot be directly applied to these situations. Several adaptations can be considered. For instance, the absolute value of \"distance to target\" can be computed, leading to an artificial \"lower-the-better\" characteristic. Although other adaptations can be considered, it would be very interesting that a new research stream could focus and discuss this framework.\n",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Purpose: - The purpose of this research is to develop an index for assessing service capability when the customer considers satisfactory a certain range of service performance, the so-called zone of tolerance.\nDesign/methodology/approach: - Literature on service research and statistical process control (SPC) was used to develop a conceptual approach that is later worked out for implementation. Some of the quality function deployment principles are used in the approach to articulate customer perceptions and expectations with parameters of service performance.\nFindings: - It is demonstrated that traditional capability indices do not cope properly with service performance characterized by a zone of tolerance and that the new capability index, proposed by the authors, is more than adequate to deal with the specific features of services.\nResearch limitations/implications: - It was assumed that performance levels within the zone of tolerance are not perceived as different by customers and that service performance could be considered as normally distributed. Further research is clearly needed, not only to test the assumptions in different service environments, but also to assess the robustness of the proposed index when the assumptions are violated.\nPractical implications: - Improvement efforts of the organizations can be better allocated if the relation between customer expectations and service performance is understood and characterized.\nOriginality/value: - A new approach to understand the relationship between customer expectations and perceptions and service performance is launched. The approach led to the development of a service capability index and might constitute a contribution to all researchers and practitioners that intend to spread SPC principles within the service sector.\n",
"role": "assistant"
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Efforts to globalize a national food: Market segmentation by reasons for ethnic food preferences
|
[
"Restaurants",
"Globalization",
"Restaurant industry",
"Internationalization strategy"
] |
[
{
"content": "Summarize the following paper into structured abstract.\n\nIntroduction: As food is, in general, closely interlinked with a nation's social practices, dining habits, culinary gastronomy, traditions and history, national food reflects a comprehensive range of societal, cultural and artistic values. Food also plays an essential role in enhancing a nation's image or competitive advantages (Hsu, 2015; Enright and Newton, 2005; Getz et al., 2014; Hjalager and Corigliano, 2000). The globalization of a national food type is synonymous with its \"successful localization\" in foreign cities, because national food is regarded as ethnic food in foreign countries (Inglis and Gimlin, 2009). European cuisines such as those of Italy, France and Spain are already globalized in the USA due to these countries' long history of immigration. More recently, Mexican cuisine and Asian cuisines, such as those of China, India, Japan, Thailand, Korea and Vietnam, have arrived in the USA (Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada, 2012; Ladki and Nomani, 1996). The demand for ethnic cuisines in the USA has remarkably increased because of socio-cultural changes such as increased immigration from Asia and Mexico, the emergence of Generation Y as key consumers and a growing preference for healthy food (Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada, 2012; NRA, 2010).\nLiterature review and conceptualization: Segmentation of ethnic-restaurant customers\nMethodology: Measurement and data analysis\nResults: Demographic profile of respondents\nDiscussion and conclusions: Summary and discussion\n",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Purpose: This paper aims to gain insight into the preferences of US customers regarding Korean food, and to categorize these customers according to the reasons for their preferences.\nDesign/methodology/approach: The study was conducted with a sample of customers in Korean restaurants in the USA.\nFindings: Cluster 1 was a group whose members were attracted to Korean culture; Cluster 2 was a group whose members were passionate about Korean food; Cluster 3 was a group seeking healthy and exotic food; and Cluster 4 was a low-interest group. Each cluster had a different socio-demographic profile, favored a different Korean menu, identified different success factors for Korean restaurants, described different expectations and experiences of Korean restaurants and had different preferences regarding Korean food services.\nPractical implications: Active promotion of Korean food and Korean culture may be appropriate for Cluster 1, while developing a healthy and exotic menu may attract Cluster 3. Maintaining Cluster 2 is deemed important, while a strategic approach is necessary to appeal to Cluster 4.\nOriginality/value: This study will contribute theoretically and practically to understanding food globalization, ethnic restaurants and segmentation by preference reasons.\n",
"role": "assistant"
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Wireless technologies and policies for connecting rural areas in emerging countries: a case study in rural Peru
|
[
"Cost analysis",
"Broadband networks",
"Digital divide",
"LTE",
"Stratospheric balloons",
"Wireless technologies"
] |
[
{
"content": "Summarize the following paper into structured abstract.\n\n1. Introduction: For several decades, the landscape in South America (the Andes Range and the Amazon Rainforest) has posed one of the main barriers to carrying out large-scale infrastructure deployments (i.e. road, power grid, or telecom deployments) in the rural areas. As a result, in Peru, economic, education and health-care indicators show high levels of poverty, school absenteeism and a critical situation in children mortality rate, maternal health and malaria incidences in the country's rural areas (INEI, 2013, 2015). Furthermore, the global trend of the digital and internet era has increased the gap between urban and rural areas. Since 2010, several governments in South America, recognizing the importance of broadband for economic and social development, have been proactive to design and implement national broadband plans (Galperin et al., 2013). To increase the penetration of broadband in their countries, most of these plans have a similar first stage component of deploying national fiber-optic backbone networks to interconnect main urban areas and reach rural areas. Currently, these governments are focusing efforts and resources on designing the national backbones, setting bids for construction, and developing the appropriate regulatory framework for use of the backbone network. For example, Peru is now building a new 13,000 km fiber backbone that will expand backbone coverage to 180 provinces within 22 states including urban and rural areas (FITEL, 2015). The aim is to increase the 7.52 per cent broadband penetration reported in 2012 (OSIPTEL, 2013).\n2. Wireless technology options for rural areas: The access networks to be deployed in the context of the Peruvian National Broadband Plan will extend from the capitals of districts to towns providing fixed broadband service to final customers. The targeted final customers include government institutions (i.e. schools, health posts, police stations.) as anchor customers and residential customers. The use of wireless technologies for access networks, especially in rural areas, is supported by several studies which conclude that wireless technologies are the first viable infrastructure for new deployment to provide broadband services to underserved and unserved rural areas (Brewer et al., 2005; Gunasekaran and Harmantzis, 2007; Proenza, 2006; Singh et al., 2010; Simba et al., 2011). Wireless technologies can be deployed much faster with less initial investment, offer more flexibility in terms of adapting to changing bandwidth requirements and are more efficient in terms of network management and operation. Wireless technology options which can be deployed in access networks to provide fixed broadband services include the following: Wi-Fi, long term evolution (LTE), Worldwide Interoperability for Microwave Access (WiMAX), and Television white spaces (TVWS). These technologies are commonly deployed in terrestrial local access networks. This study also includes analyzing LTE in stratospheric access networks deployed using new and innovative platforms such as stratospheric balloons. The following subsections describe deployments using these technologies in rural areas with emphasis on emerging countries.\n3. Spectrum regulations in Peru: In 2005, the Ministry of Transportation and Communications (MTC) of Peru approved and updated a new the National Spectrum Allocation Plan (MTC, 2005). In the past 10 years, modifications and amendments were added to the plan, recommended to the MTC by multi-sectorial commissions and committees, to refarm and make more efficient and productive use of the spectrum to promote expansion of new networks and services across the country. This subsection describes the current allocation and assignment of spectrum for providing public telecommunication services to final customers using the following wireless technologies: Wi-Fi, TV White Spaces, WiMAX and LTE.\n4. Technical analysis results: This study conducts, first, a technical, and second, an engineering cost analysis to evaluate current and new wireless technologies (i.e. Wi-Fi, WiMAX, LTE and TV White Spaces) and platforms (i.e. stratospheric balloons flying 20 km above the ground) to introduce broadband services in two study areas in the Andes and Amazon regions of Peru in a 10-year period. The two selected areas (based on low broadband penetration, rural remote location, and harsh landscape setting) were the Yauli County, located in the State of Huancavelica in the Central Andes of Peru, and the Samugari County, located in the State of Ayacucho in the Western Amazon region of Peru. The technical analysis evaluates appropriate wireless network design and configuration settings by conducting propagation modeling and coverage simulation using the software EDX Signal Pro (EDX Wireless, n.d.). The technical analysis uses broadband service demand estimations (customer and speed demands) as inputs along with RF equipment technical specifications, spectrum regulation, digital terrain data and land use and land coverage data. The output of the technical analysis includes:\n5. Engineering cost analysis results: The engineering cost analysis estimates deployment and operating costs of the access networks for each technology for the 10-year period. To conduct this analysis, we developed a bottom-up cost model using the software Analytica (Lumina, n.d.). This analysis uses the results from the technical analysis as inputs, along with cost data of the network elements (i.e. RF equipment, infrastructure, towers, energy system) and operating expenses (i.e. personnel, energy bills, interconnection). The output of this analysis includes:\n6. Regulatory and policy implications: 6.1 Subsidy for introducing broadband services in rural areas\n7. Broadband roadmap for a 10-year period: This subsection presents our proposed broadband technology roadmap to provide broadband services to unserved and underserved rural areas in the Peruvian Andes and Amazon regions for a 10-year period. To develop this roadmap, first, in the previous sections, we analyzed and compared technical and cost aspects of using current and new wireless technology options and stratospheric platforms for deploying and operating networks, and second, in this section, we combine the best technical features and cost efficiencies of the analyzed technology options into an innovative roadmap solution for a 10-year period. Sections 4 and 5 present the technical and engineering cost analyses results in both study areas of using current wireless technology options (Wi-Fi 2.4 GHz, WiMAX 3.5 GHz, TVWS 476-786 MHz and LTE 1.7/2.1 GHz) and also stratospheric balloons using LTE 1.7/2.1 GHz. This section shows in the technical analysis that, in the Yauli and Samugari areas, stratospheric balloons would be able to serve the broadband and speed demands for the five and seven years, respectively. In both study areas, stratospheric balloons (both constellation and single balloon configurations) have the lowest initial costs. Section 4 also shows that, in both study areas, among the terrestrial technologies which can serve customer and speed demands for the 10-year period, LTE was the lowest cost option based on the NPV of the deployment and operation costs for the 10-year period. Section 6 presented the engineering cost results of using 1.7/2.1 LTE with a 40 + 40 MHz spectrum, based on a scenario of lifting the 20 + 20 MHz spectrum cap per operator of the 1.7/2.1 GHz band. The results showed that LTE 40 + 40 MHz becomes the lowest cost option in both study areas.\n8. Conclusion: This study addresses RQ1. The broadband technology roadmap comes as a result of conducting technical and engineering cost analyses for deploying and operating wireless broadband access networks using current wireless broadband technologies (Wi-Fi, WiMAX, TVWS and LTE) and innovative unmanned platforms (stratospheric balloons) designed to fly in the lower stratosphere 20 km above the ground. The analyses were based on current spectrum regulations and additional proposed spectrum scenarios which allowed evaluating the most efficient technologies currently working under spectrum constraints, such as the case of 1.7/2.1 GHz LTE. Under current spectrum regulations and based on the NPV, LTE (20 + 20 MHz) is the lowest cost option for the wireless networks in both the Andes and Amazon regions. Under the scenario of lifting the 1.7/2.1 GHz LTE band spectrum cap, LTE 40 + 40 MHz comes as the lowest cost option. Furthermore, when combining using stratospheric balloons, carrying micro-LTE base stations, with complementary terrestrial LTE deployments using 40 + 40 MHz spectrum, the lowest and most innovative solution is provided. Using stratospheric balloons (either using single balloon or constellation configurations) allows fast and low cost initial deployment and operation for at least five years, or up to eight years, and then complementary terrestrial LTE networks are required for the rest of the 10-year period. This is the broadband technology roadmap proposed in this study.\n",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Purpose: This paper aims to compare the costs of deploying different wireless terrestrial broadband technologies in the Andes and Amazon Regions of Peru. These areas are representatives of different and challenging geographic regions throughout the globe that currently are severely underserved or unserved for vital broadband services necessary to bridge the \"Digital Divide\".\nDesign/methodology/approach: The broadband technologies studied include Wi-Fi, Worldwide Interoperability for Microwave Access (WiMAX), long term evolution (LTE), TVWS and new stratospheric platforms (super-pressure balloons). This study conducts a technical analysis (design and simulation) of wireless broadband networks, and a bottom-up engineering cost analysis to estimate and compare the deployment and operating costs of the networks over a 10-year period. The analysis also identifies potential regulatory barriers to deployment associated with spectrum allocation licenses and overbooking requirements intended to improve quality of service.\nFindings: Comparison of the capital and operating expenses of these options over a 10-year period finds that LTE and Wi-Fi can be the lowest cost alternatives, though significantly, stratospheric balloons have the lowest initial costs for the first few years and can factor as a low-cost broadband catalyst early in deployment. Finally, the lowest cost technology broadband roadmap for the 10-year period is presented, which includes using stratospheric balloons (carrying micro-LTE base stations) for the first years and deploying complementary terrestrial LTE networks for the rest of the 10-year period.\nOriginality/value: This study presents detailed technical and engineering cost analysis results of wireless access network deployments, including advanced wireless technologies and new unmanned aerial systems, to expand broadband services to rural areas in mountainous (Andes Region) and rainforest (Amazon Region) geographies to reduce the digital divide in emerging countries. Results aim to aid governments, regulators, internet service providers (incumbents and competitive) and content providers to assess current alternatives to expand broadband service in these rural areas.\n",
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Expectations towards home care re-ablement in Danish municipalities
|
[
"Activity",
"Discourses",
"Elder care",
"Local governance"
] |
[
{
"content": "Summarize the following paper into structured abstract.\n\nIntroduction: Concepts of re-abling care came on the agenda in the field of home care in several countries over the last couple of years, e.g. in Great Britain and New Zealand (Kumpers et al., 2010; Wilde and Glendinning, 2012). In general, the aim of these approaches is to (re-) establish the care recipients' ability to perform personal care and practical tasks in the home themselves, either by the guidance of specific or regular home staff. In Denmark, the \"hottest\" re-ablement concept is called \"every-day rehabilitation\", which mainly focuses on regular home care staff to (re-) train frail older people. This paper sets out to have a closer look at the concept, drawing upon qualitative interviews with administrative leaders and local politicians in two Danish municipalities and discusses their understandings and expectations of the concept by using a discourse analysis approach. The local, municipal level of governance has been chosen because it is here where the responsibility for the provision of elder care lies in Denmark.\nDiscourses on activity in old age and social policy: As the Danish concept of \"every-day rehabilitation\" in elder care focusses on re-establishing self-sufficiency of the frail older people through an active involvement in a broad range of tasks by the home helper (Kjellberg et al., 2011), discourses on activity in old age and social policy appear to be an adequate framework for contextualising the findings of the discourse analysis. In this section, I am presenting and discussing the literature on this topic.\nData, methodology and methods: The data used in this paper has been collected in the context of a research project on differences in the local organisation of long-term care. The project's research design was based on comparative case design logic (Antoft and Salomonsen, 2007). The interviews used for this paper originate from two cases, that is, two municipalities, which resemble each other with regard to several structural characteristics, including the tax base, level of debt, degree of urbanisation and the percentage of frail older people who have chosen a private home-care provider. The two cases have been selected on the basis of \"most similar\" design criteria (Lijphart, 1975). Differences can be found, however, regarding population size and how much money the municipalities spend per senior per year on long-term care. The two municipalities also differ from each other when it comes to local policies, organisational structures, and practices concerning the introduction of privatisation and choice (Fersch and Jensen, 2011). At the time of interviewing, both of the municipalities were running pilot projects on every-day rehabilitation in the field of long-term care, including every-day rehabilitation using home-care staff and training opportunities outside of the home. However, in neither of the municipalities had the pilot projects been running for long.\nThe local policy context - the degree of fragmentation, steering capacity and the impact of structural reform: As mentioned above the municipalities play a central role in the provision of care to older people in Denmark. This is defined by law, more precisely, by the Social Services Act. Following this legislation, the municipalities must offer care services and support relating to necessary practical work in the home to elder people. In doing so the municipalities have a rather large autonomy concerning the actual extent and substance of the care, as well as the situations in which one is entitled to receive care (Fersch and Jensen, 2011). Thus, the municipal council has extensive authority to define the municipal services for seniors when it comes to quality, coverage, etc. However, the municipality is not only responsible for providing the service but also for financing it, as the municipalities finance elderly care entirely. Danish municipalities have the authority to tax income, which, in combination with user fees, is the most significant source of municipal revenue. Since 2003, the municipalities are obliged to open the municipal home care sector to private for-profit providers. These private providers have to be recognised by the municipality first and the municipality also has the responsibility to check if the private providers fulfil the quality standards by the municipality. The private providers are paid directly by the municipality (Fersch and Jensen, 2011).\nThe concept of \"every-day rehabilitation\" in Danish elder care: Rehabilitation, prevention and the principle of helping people to help themselves are not in the least new ideas in Danish home care. Helping older people to help themselves has been one of the basic principles in Danish national legislation on the delivery of home care since the 1980s (Hansen et al., 2011). Furthermore, as early as 1984 the municipality of Skaevinge introduced an integrated health and social care model, with rehabilitation and prevention as fundamental pillars for the provision of home care (Billings and Leichsenring, 2006). However, it is only recently that the matter has become a priority. Kjellberg et al. (2011) have argued that it was a pilot project called \"As long as possible in their own life\" (Laengst muligt I eget liv), that started 2008 in the municipality of Fredericia that initiated this development. In this pilot project regular home-care staff was re-educated in the field of occupational therapy in order to change their work routine[3]. As described by the authors, the goal of this project was to establish a \"paradigm shift\" (Kjellberg et al., 2011, p. 6) in order to empower frail older people to be self-sufficient. Ideally, this would postpone their care needs (which would have to be met by the public sector, i.e. the municipality in question) to a later time and thereby potentially save money.\nAnalysis: local policy actors' views on rehabilitation: In this section I want to present an analysis of the interviewees' accounts concerning to the topic of rehabilitation. Analysing how they spoke about the topic, I want to trace which elements of the discourses they included, and how and in what ways they utilised certain storylines in order to argue in favour of rehabilitation measures.\nThe storyline of economic rationalities: The reason why many of the interviewees put rehabilitation and training measures at the heart of their ideas for how to solve the future challenges in long-term care is that they expect it to save a lot of money. As the chairman of the senior board in municipality A states, it is the expectation that:\nThe storyline of activity: However, although I stated above that the storyline of economic rationalities is given a lot of importance in the interviewees' accounts, the activity storyline occupies a lot of space too. Many of the interviewees state that rehabilitation measures will improve older people's quality of life by strengthening their self-determination:\nExpectations towards the frail elder people (and the care workers): The local policy actors' discourses contain many moral expectations towards the older people. These are most often formulated in a negative way, i.e. as a problem. The older people and their \"wrong attitudes\" are even identified as the biggest problem for every-day-rehabilitation to unfold its proclaimed great potential. One local policy actor formulates it like that:\nConclusions: With the help of discourse analysis, I have traced the argumentative rationality of re-abling care (every-day-rehabilitation) as a very popular \"do-it-all device\" amongst local policy actors in Denmark. Thereby, I have ascertained that the storyline of economic rationalities seems to provide a stronger argument in favour of the implementation of every-day rehabilitation. However, the activity storyline appears to include the moral basis, as well as the possible solution to the professed obstacles to every-day rehabilitation. In combination, the two storylines have become really \"successful\" in the context of Danish long-term care. Table II provides an overview of the storylines.\n",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Purpose: Re-abling care of frail older people is highly on the agenda in several countries. The purpose of this paper is to have a closer look at the argumentation used for its establishment by local policy actors in the field and the kind of expectations towards the behaviour of frail older people it entails.\nDesign/methodology/approach: The empirical material consists of qualitative interviews with 17 local policy actors in two Danish municipalities. The interviews have been analysed with the help of argumentative discourse analysis.\nFindings: The most important argument for re-abling care appears to be grounded in economic reasons. However, a second, moral argument was found revolving around the older peoples' activity, which contributes to the establishment of moral expectations towards frail older people to be active.\nResearch limitations/implications: As the goal of the study was to analyse understandings and values of key local actors, the implementation of re-ablement programmes and the users' perspective were not studied.\nOriginality/value: The paper contributes to the investigation of the shift from universal entitlement as a right to towards market rationalities in Danish elder care.\n",
"role": "assistant"
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] |
Emotional and social intelligence competencies: cross cultural implications
|
[
"Competences",
"Management development",
"Management skills",
"Assessment",
"Emotional intelligence",
"Cross cultural validity"
] |
[
{
"content": "Summarize the following paper into structured abstract.\n\n__NO_TITLE__: Over the last 40 years the concept of competency, and the evolving area of emotional and social intelligence competencies (ESC), has evolved into a flexible framework for the selection, assessment and development of human talent in organizations all over the world (Boyatzis et al., 2000; Boyatzis, 2008, 2009; Boyatzis and Ratti, 2009). While growth in the application of competencies to applied issues in today's global organizations continues to be robust, sound research continues to be needed to ensure the validity and utility of these constructs across diverse cultures and job roles. Additionally, theory and research from affective neuroscience has increasingly been integrated into modern competency theory, assessment and development.\nWhat are emotional and social intelligence competencies?: The desire to find a flexible framework which could account for additional variance in work performance can be seen as the driving force in the modern competency movement. McClelland (1973) in the early 1970s set out to establish such a framework with the publication of his foundational article \"Testing for competence instead of intelligence\". Since the publication of this article the word \"competency\" has been defined in many different ways, which has often served to cause confusion in both research and practice (Ryan et al., 2009; Young and Dulewitz, 2009).With this being the case, for the purposes of this special issue we build on a general definition of a competency as a capability or ability that leads to or causes effective performance (McClelland, 1973, 1985; Boyatzis, 1982, 2008). In this tradition, competencies represent related but different sets of behavior organized around an underlying construct called the \"intent\". The behaviors are alternate manifestations of the intent, as appropriate in various situations or times. For example, listening to someone and asking him or her questions are several behaviors. A person can demonstrate these behaviors for multiple reasons or to various intended ends. A person can ask questions and listen to someone to ingratiate him or herself or to appear interested, thereby gaining standing in the other person's view. Or a person can ask questions and listen to someone because he or she is genuinely interested in understanding this other person, his or her priorities, or thoughts and feelings in a given situation. The latter would be considered a demonstration of empathy, as the underlying intent it to understand the person. Meanwhile, the former underlying reason for the questions is to gain standing or impact in the person's view, elements which would be considered key to the competence of influence. Similarly, the intent of a more subtle competency like emotional self-awareness is self-insight and self-understanding.Modern competency theory has also been enriched by the integration of theory and research on emotions, motivation, and the field of neuroscience to provide a more holistic theory of competencies that are predictive of organizational outcomes. More recently Boyatzis (2009) has framed competencies as a behavioral approach to emotional intelligence. Using the label ESC in order to make a more explicit link between neuro-endocrine systems associated with clusters of emotional and social competencies and the neuro-endocrine systems involved in the use of cognitive competencies (Boyatzis and Sala, 2004).The use of the word \"intelligence\" within the label ESC also serves to highlight key aspects of these constructs. The literature contains multiple definitions of \"intelligence\", however we believe that for any construct to be labeled an \"intelligence\" the concept should be (adapted from Boyatzis (2009) with the addition of the last bullet):*behaviorally observable;*related to biological and in particular neural-endocrine functioning, that is each cluster should be differentiated as to the type of neural circuitry and endocrine system involved;*related to life and job outcomes;*sufficiently different from other personality constructs that the concept adds value to understanding the human personality and behavior;*the measures of the concept, as a psychological construct, should satisfy the basic criteria for a sound measure, that is show convergent and divergent validity; and*be capable of demonstrating utility and validity across diverse cultures and settings.Since the historical development of the theory of competence has always been focused specifically within the domain of work performance, the integration of emotional, social and cognitive intelligence competencies provides a parsimonious and theoretically coherent framework for organizing the assessment and development of talent in the workplace. Goleman (1998) defined an \"emotional competence\" as a \"learned capability based on emotional intelligence which results in outstanding performance at work.\" Combining this definition with the traditional definition of competency as an \"underlying characteristic of the person that leads to or causes effective or superior performance\" (Boyatzis, 1982), then Boyatzis (2009) claimed that:*An emotional intelligence competency is an ability to recognize, understand, and use emotional information about oneself that leads to or causes effective or superior performance.*A social intelligence competency is the ability to recognize, understand and use emotional information about others that leads to or causes effective or superior performance.*A cognitive intelligence competency is an ability to think or analyze information and situations that leads to or causes effective or superior performance.The fact that ESC are \"learned capabilities based on emotional intelligence which results in superior performance\" is an important distinction as it helps to highlight a key issue essential to the prediction of work performance. Possession of a specific ability is not a guarantee that the ability will be demonstrated with adequate frequency or in appropriate situations which would allow it to enhance performance. For example, a person can demonstrate expertise on an ability measure which assesses their ability to recognize emotions in others, yet that person may not be motivated to apply this skill in a conflict situation. Instead they may choose to focus their attention on non-interpersonal aspects of the conflict (e.g. the content of the conflict) and completely ignore the emotions of others engaged in the conflict. It is for this reason that competency assessment needs to take into account much more than mere ability related to specific behaviors, but also have a method to assess how frequently an individual would actually display these behaviors on the job.Having a theoretical link to motivational systems separates the specific theory of ESC from pure \"ability-based\" models of emotional intelligence (Salovey and Mayer, 1997) and may help account for the additional variance accounted for by ESC when compared to ability-based models of emotional intelligence. Even proponents of ability-based models of emotional intelligence have conceded that broader definitions of emotional intelligence may have enhanced applied utility in comparison to the more narrow definition of ability-based models (Ashkanasy and Daus, 2005). The applied utility of a broader definition of emotional intelligence is supported by a recent meta-analysis which found that \"mixed models\" of emotional intelligence (which would include ESC) where predictive of performance across a wide range of occupations, while the predictive power of ability-based measures of emotional intelligence were inconsistent, often better able to predict performance in jobs higher in emotional labor (O'Boyle et al., 2010). From a practical standpoint such findings support the utility of using a competency-based approach to provide a more comprehensive set of constructs based on a more comprehensive theoretical framework that more fully reflect the behavioral range required across a broad spectrum of occupations and links explicitly to a theory of motivation.As cognitive psychology has evolved, it has become more apparent that information processing can be conducted through various structures, some of which operate outside of conscious awareness. Moreover, research within social psychology has illuminated the fact that attitudes can be processed implicitly (i.e. non-consciously) and can become dissociated from conscious attitudes (Devine, 1981). Neuropsychologists have known for several decades that the brain is made up of several systems capable of becoming disassociated with one another, each having different relationships to observed behavior. For example, a meta-analysis conducted by Spangler (1992) found that operant assessment of motives correlated better with behavioral patterns over time. In other words, assessments of unconscious motives give better insight into how people will respond in unstructured situations (i.e. a better approximation of the \"real world\"), especially if suitable task incentives are present. Whereas assessments of motives using respondent measures prove more predictive of situations where the decision field is limited to specific responses (e.g. other respondent measures).A better understanding of psychological constructs that can be correlated with organizational outcomes requires that we better understand how conscious values and unconscious traits and motives interact with biological systems to lead to specific behavioral patterns and tendencies. Such a comprehensive theory was first synthesized by Boyatzis et al. (2000) and Boyatzis (2008) to provide a more integrated understanding of how physiological, psychological and observed behavior interacts. This theory of personality is shown in Figure 1. The theory incorporates and predicts the relationship among a person's:*neural circuits and endocrine (i.e. hormonal) processes;*unconscious dispositions referred to as motives and traits;*values and operating philosophy;*specific observed competencies; and*competency clusters.The link between behavior and neuroscience has generated a great deal of excitement and early research shows great promise in establishing a more integrated theory of personality. For example, prior research has demonstrated the arousal of an individual's power motive causes and is affected by arousal of his or her sympathetic nervous system (Boyatzis et al., 2006). When the power motive is aroused individuals are more likely to display behavioral competencies theoretically linked to the power motive, specifically influence, inspirational leadership or change catalyst (Winter et al., 1981; McClelland, 1985). Better understanding the neuroscience of leadership both from the perspective of the brain chemistry of leaders and how they influence the neuro chemistry, and over longer periods, possibly the neuro anatomy of those they lead represents a truly exciting avenue for future research (Goleman and Boyatzis, 2008). Such an approach has the potential to produce basic findings which may prove to be generalizable across cultures.\nEmerging challenges for cross-cultural research: Although the field of competencies is now over 40 years old and the newer field of emotional intelligence approaches its 20th year, scholarly interest in cross-cultural issues has only more recently begun to emerge. Of the many questions which could potentially be raised, we consider three questions to be the most relevant for future research and applications: measurement issues related to culture, cross-cultural validity, and the development of emotional and social intelligence competencies.Measurement issues related to culture\nConclusion: The domain of social and emotional intelligence represents a useful and valid approach to the management of human capital in today's modern global workplace. The growing body of research on ESC provides support for the notion of the relationship to performance as universal. However, additional research is needed to strengthen our belief in the universality of ESC as well as investigate the possibility of specific behavioral manifestations of ESC being partially dependent on culture. Additional research will also be needed to validate specific techniques for developing ESC across diverse cultures.\n",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Purpose: - Continued research on the assessment and development of emotional and social intelligence competencies represents an opportunity to further both theoretical and applied applications of behavioral science to the management of human capital. While the field has continued to expand over the preceding decades, research has often trailed application, especially as it relates to cross-cultural validity. The purpose of this introductory essay to this special issue of CCM serves to focus on cultural issues related to applied use of competencies in diverse cultures.\nDesign/methodology/approach: - Emotional and social intelligence competencies are defined and an overview provided for the papers that will follow, with original research linking these constructs to performance in various occupations and cultures, as well as issues related to their development.\nFindings: - Emotional and social intelligence competencies are found to represent a practical and theoretically coherent, reliable and valid approach to assessing and developing individuals in diverse cultures.\nResearch limitations/implications: - As an introductory essay, the paper lays the foundation for the following articles in this special issue.\nOriginality/value: - Although competencies are in widespread use around the world, issues related to cross-cultural validation are seldom studied empirically. This introductory essay and subsequent articles will help clarify emotional and social competencies as a behavioral approach to applying emotional intelligence to the practical needs of organizations.\n",
"role": "assistant"
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] |
Collaborative inquiry and the shared workspace of professional learning communities
|
[
"Collaborative culture",
"Professional learning communities",
"Collaborative inquiry",
"Instructional improvement",
"School culture",
"Shared workspace"
] |
[
{
"content": "Summarize the following paper into structured abstract.\n\nIntroduction: General introduction\nMethod: Qualitative data were collected from and about each participant to investigate perceptions and practices of the lived experiences of educators working in schools as part of the collaborative inquiry process. Educators work in PLCs in schools as part of their school culture procedures needed for the improvement of their practice.\nDiscussion: The purpose of this paper was to explore educator collaborative inquiry in the shared workspace in PLCs. Specifically, this investigation was part of an ongoing investigation and exploration of well-established PLC collaborative interactions and self-directed, job-embedded professional learning of educators as part of the shared workspace and the improvement of schools.\n",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to explore educator collaborative inquiry in the shared workspace in professional learning communities (PLCs). Specifically, this investigation was part of an ongoing investigation of well-established PLC collaborative interactions and self-directed learning of educators as part of the shared workspace as a component of school improvement.\nDesign/methodology/approach: A qualitative design was used for this investigation. Participants were purposefully selected to provide qualitative data on existent, well-established PLCs and their practice as educators in the shared workspace. Qualitative data were collected about participant perception. Data were collected from each participant by conducting semi-structured interviews, observations, and the collection of document and artifacts.\nFindings: Findings from this ongoing investigation point to positive collaborative physical interactions and intellectual discourse that lead to educator learning through the collaborative inquiry process.\nOriginality/value: Theories on PLCs and educator job-embedded professional learning are unique in this paper. The concepts of PLCs and the collaborative inquiry process have been well developed but not in the context of the shared workspace. Recent literature on effective collaborative inquiry educators undergo in PLCs as a continuing professional development model provides a foundation for the work done in this ongoing case study. Sustained collaboration and continued professional development of teaching innovations as a product of the collaborative inquiry process in the shared workspace are underdeveloped as yet but further developed in this paper.\n",
"role": "assistant"
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] |
Knowledge hiding: impact of interpersonal behavior and expertise
|
[
"Knowledge management",
"Human resource management",
"Innovation",
"Expertise",
"Knowledge hiding",
"Co-worker behaviour"
] |
[
{
"content": "Summarize the following paper into structured abstract.\n\nKnowledge management and hiding behavior: Undoubtedly knowledge management has become one of the most crucial activities for any company. Knowledge management includes activities which enable transfer of knowledge amongst employees and saving it in a company repository. Important aspect of knowledge management is promoting knowledge sharing and organizations invest heavily in knowledge sharing training and practices. Knowledge management has been of equal interest to both academics and practitioners. Knowledge is either \"explicit\" which could be codified or \"tacit\" which stays with the individual and is hard to be codified. Knowledge management practices are meant to support innovation, enable the generation of new ideas and put the thinking power of the whole organization to an optimal use. Recently, it has been observed that these efforts of promoting knowledge sharing and transfer for innovative and novel output of an organization are being hindered by certain behavior among employees. The behavior is termed as knowledge hiding and has been defined as \"Intentional concealment of knowledge when requested by others\" (Connelly et al., 2012). This behavior is not opposite to knowledge sharing and thus it becomes important to understand because knowledge sharing practices might not reduce hiding behavior. Since its inception in 2012, the concept has gained popularity among academicians looking at antecedants and the consequences of this behavior. This work is in the same direction and aims to gain an understanding of two factors related to employees' behavior which might contribute to such hiding behavior.\nWhat causes employees to hide?: Every action, invites a reaction\nExplanation through social exchange: Social exchange means that humans engage themselves in a one-to-one transaction interaction and that action is dependent on the anticipation of a favored reaction. Social exchange is largely influenced by the fairness of the interaction. When an employee approaches a co-worker with a request to transfer knowledge, as the social exchange interaction between the two has not been with dignity and respect, the co-worker might engage in knowledge hiding behavior. So here, the anticipated reaction will not be in favor of the employee. Thus, these kinds of interactions being common at workplaces, especially between people from different departments, might lead to such anti-creativity behavior for the organizations. The real challenge lies not in understanding that hiding occurs but to find out ways to prevent it in organizations. There exist certain hurdles when it comes to \"tacit\" knowledge which make it difficult for organizations and managers to prevent knowledge hiding.\nHurdles easing knowledge hiding: There are certain characteristics of tacit knowledge that make the knowledge hiding behavior more difficult to monitor or control amongst employees. Following are the hurdles:\nSuggestions for prevention/control: As the interpersonal (in)justice is here about the overall behavior of employees toward each other, it is challenging to control their interactions all the time. These challenges posed to the managers mean \"knowledge hiding\" requires more attention. Certain suggestions for the executives to manage this behavior are:\nConclusion: Interpersonal interaction involving lack of dignity and respect shown toward others, can result in knowledge hiding behavior, especially when the other person holds higher expertise. This behavior can lead to lack of innovativeness in the organization. Organizations and its managers need to put in their efforts to find ways to prevent this unfavorable behavior by their employees.\n",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Purpose: This paper intends to put forward the role of interpersonal (in)justice among co-workers and their individual expertise as important factors contributing to knowledge hiding behavior. The paper is written with an intent to explain a conceptual model for practitioners' benefit. The work is novel and covers the latest construct in the field of knowledge management and human resource management.\nDesign/methodology/approach: A conceptual framework is elaborated with a brief explanation of the theory that helps explain it. The framework although being novel in itself, the explanation has been drawn from existing literature.\nFindings: If the co-workers do not treat each other with dignity and respect, it hampers their relationship. This in turn makes them hide knowledge from each other and at the same time if one of them holds an expertise power over the other, this behavior would be more enhanced. The whole relationship could be explained using social exchange theory. This holds implications for managers, especially when knowledge management is of paramount importance to a company for its sustenance.\nPractical implications: This work provides new insights into knowledge hiding behavior by employees. Certain ways to reduce this behavior are proposed.\nOriginality/value: This paper is the one of the few written with an intent to bring knowledge hiding and its causes, to executives, in an easy to digest form. The concept is also newly introduced and these factors have not yet been brought up by any other researcher in the field.\n",
"role": "assistant"
}
] |
Cyberoperations and international humanitarian law: A review of obstacles in applying international law rules in cyber warfare
|
[
"Accountability",
"Attribution",
"Jurisdiction",
"Cyber operations",
"Cyber warfare"
] |
[
{
"content": "Summarize the following paper into structured abstract.\n\n1. Cyber incidents and their impacts: The rapid development of information and communication technology (ICTs), its presence in every aspect of human life and the high degree of dependency on cyberspace make cyber security a common objective for a society's proper functioning and the well-being of its citizens. As the European Commission states in its most recent communication on the European Union (EU)'s Cyber Security Strategy (JOIN,European Commission, 2013), cyber security:\n2. The regulatory framework for an \"open, safe and secure cyberspace\": On a multinational level, the first attempt to deal with information technology (IT)-specific offences and the challenges posed by the - often transborder - nature of cybercrime, was the adoption by the Council of Europe of the International Convention on Cybercrime, also known as the Budapest Convention (CETS 185, 23.11.2001, Council of Europe, 2009). The Budapest Convention led to the creation of a reference framework aiming to address computer and internet crimes by introducing not only substantial rules but also (and perhaps mainly) procedural rules and the basis of international cooperation for law enforcement and exchange of respective information. The Convention on Cybercrime addressed direct threats arising from cyberspace, now legally defined as acts aimed toward confidentiality, integrity and availability of computer data and systems (Chapter II, Section 1, CETS 185, 23.11.2001, Council of Europe, 2009). The specific Convention, which dealt with crimes that were mainly, but not exclusively, carried out by private individuals without State intervention, aimed at the protection of private property and public goods, and it laid the ground for the harmonization by Member States of their relevant national laws focusing ultimately on the protection of society against cybercrime.\n3. Updating the current international law framework to address the new challenges: Despite the existence of a broad legal arsenal that can be deployed, at any given time, to the fight against cybercrime and to the protection of the States' CIIs from cyber threats, the legal classification of a cyber attack against an information system as a use of force or as an armed attack is problematic. The difficulty in applying the traditional rules of international humanitarian law to categorize cyber attacks stems from a number of factors. The most important of them is the failure to estimate properly the impact of a cyber attack and to determine the identity, or the political motivations of an attacker, until long after the event has occurred.\n4. Limitations in jurisdiction: One of the most important issues relating to cyber-attacks is the so-called \"jurisdiction issue\". The open architecture of the internet, which allows billions of users around the world to interact with each other and the number of services offered on a global basis (by servers/internet service provider which may be located on the other side of the planet), complicates the issue of jurisdiction for crimes taking place in cyberspace.\n5. The attribution problem: Probably the most crucial problem arising with respect to cyber operations and to the way they are developed, is the technical complexity of determining the perpetrators and of positively identifying the key actor of cyber operations, resulting, thus, in major difficulties to handle the issue of \"attribution\". This is due to the fact that the process of decoding and identifying the location of the system that originated the attack is lengthy and expensive. Determining perpetrator's identity and motivation becomes even more challenging in cases of attacks involving intermediaries who may or may not be willing participants in the attacks. In such cases, determining motivation seems difficult, mainly due to the complex architecture and geography of cyberspace. The identification of the perpetrator's motivation, although extremely challenging, is necessary for making a distinction between cybercrime, cyber terrorism and cyber warfare, given the fact that the actors behind an attack may range from criminal actors to nation States. So, effective attribution is a precondition for determining whether the actor is a criminal, a terrorist or even a State actor posing a potentially greater national security threat (Finklea and Theohary, 2015).\n6. Conclusions: Cyber conflict constitutes a new and challenging problem. For the time being, there are many difficulties, from a technical and institutional perspective, in applying international law rules in cyber operations. In fact, the international community of States needs something more than bilateral agreements which do not bring about any sanctions in case of non-compliance. Despite the fact that some States have adopted measures of a binding nature at the organizational level (creation of a national cyber security strategy by determination of CII) to reduce the effects of cyber-attacks, these measures have a limited scope. Moreover, there are no multilateral agreements or international treaties providing a straightforward definition as to what \"a cyber-attack\" should entail, and as to the sanctions (economic or other) it should induce. In short, there is a lack in universal agreements regarding the process of monitoring, processing and effective sharing of the information required to track and trace assaulters (Lewis, 2009).\n",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Purpose: The increasing number of cyber attacks has transformed the \"cyberspace\" into a \"battlefield\", bringing out \"cyber warfare\" as the \"fifth dimension of war\" and emphasizing the States' need to effectively protect themselves against these attacks. The existing legal framework seem inadequate to deal effectively with cyber operations and, from a strictly legal standpoint, it indicates that addressing cyber attacks does not fall within the jurisdiction of just one legal branch. This is mainly because of the fact that the concept of cyber warfare itself is open to many different interpretations, ranging from cyber operations performed by the States within the context of armed conflict, under International Humanitarian Law, to illicit activities of all kinds performed by non-State actors including cybercriminals and terrorist groups. The paper initially presents major cyber-attack incidents and their impact on the States. On this basis, it examines the existing legal framework at the European and international levels. Furthermore, it approaches \"cyber warfare\" from the perspective of international law and focuses on two major issues relating to cyber operations, i.e. \"jurisdiction\" and \"attribution\". The multi-layered process of attribution in combination with a variety of jurisdictional bases in international law makes the successful tackling of cyber attacks difficult. The paper aims to identify technical, legal and, last but not least, political difficulties and emphasize the complexity in applying international law rules in cyber operations.\nDesign/methodology/approach: The paper focuses on the globalization of the \"cyber warfare phenomenon\" by observing its evolutionary process from the early stages of its appearance until today. It examines the scope, duration and intensity of major cyber-attacks throughout the years in relation to the reactions of the States that were the victims. Having this as the base of discussion, it expands further by exemplifying \"cyber warfare\" from the perspective of the existing European and International legal framework. The main aim of this part is to identify and analyze major obstacles that arise, for instance in terms of \"jurisdiction\" and \"attribution\" in applying international law rules to \"cyber warfare\".\nFindings: The absence of a widely accepted legal framework to regulate jurisdictional issues of cyber warfare and the technical difficulties in identifying, with absolute certainty, the perpetrators of an attack, make the successful tackling of cyber attacks difficult.\nOriginality/value: The paper fulfills the need to identify difficulties in applying international law rules in cyber warfare and constitutes the basis for the creation of a method that will attempt to categorize and rank cyber operations in terms of their intensity and seriousness.\n",
"role": "assistant"
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] |
The search-ification of everyday life and the mundane-ification of search
|
[
"Search engines",
"Infrastructure",
"Everyday life",
"Searching",
"Trust",
"Focus groups",
"Sociomateriality"
] |
[
{
"content": "Summarize the following paper into structured abstract.\n\nIntroduction: This study investigates the role of online searching in everyday life. Online searching - typically understood as the use of general purpose search engines - has developed into a close to naturalised part of most peoples' lives and the dominant search engine Google has gained a prominent status in contemporary culture (Hillis et al., 2013). Google has turned into a commonly used verb and \"to Google\" is now almost synonymous with \"finding out about things\". Studies have shown how search engines in many areas are identified as the premium tool for finding information (e.g. Jamali and Asadi, 2010; Rowlands et al., 2008). Within information science, online searching has been extensively investigated within information retrieval (IR) as well as in experimental laboratory studies on search behaviour (Jansen and Rieh, 2010). However, the knowledge gained from information science has only in exceptional cases been used for enabling an understanding of the role of online searching on the web in and for everyday life (Schroeder, 2015). At the same time, studies on information seeking in everyday life have rarely considered online searching. Thus, as a discipline, information science needs to develop an in-depth understanding of online searching in and for everyday life.\nLiterature review: Earlier research points to how general purpose search engines have come to reduce the multiplicity of how people go about finding information (e.g. Jamali and Asadi, 2010; Rowlands et al., 2008). For example, Rowlands et al. (2008) argue that not only young people but people in all ages rely on Google to such an extent that it is justified to talk of a Google generation. According to Marchionini (2006), there are different types of searches, depending on the complexity of a question. \"Looking-up\" searches are the simplest type, while searching for learning and for investigation requires interpretation as well as multiple searches, sometimes over a longer period of time (Marchionini, 2006). This is a useful distinction and certainly accurate in many cases. Having said that, in the present study, this dichotomy becomes somewhat blurry. Our participants often refer to \"looking-up\", yet it seems as if complex issues are turned into simple question of facts due to what we can call a search engine logic, as we suggest and develop later (see below).\nTrust, authority and everyday life: Information infrastructures and everyday life\nMethod: While most people use search engines daily, studying searching in everyday life is a challenge. This is not least down to the way in which it often occurs spontaneously in short moments and because of the fact that when you observe it - today - all that can be seen is someone looking at a screen. We wanted to collect and analyse peoples' reflections on and experiences of their use of search engines, in order to analyse the attributed meaning to searching, and we therefore turned to focus group discussions. Focus groups involve \"organizing and conducting a series of group discussions with the objective of better understanding the attitudes, beliefs, practices, and values on a specific subject\" (Bertrand et al., 1992, p. 198). Morgan (1996, p. 130) \"defines focus groups as a research technique that collects data through group interaction on a topic determined by the researcher\". This interactional component brings about reflections that single interviews would not do (Morgan, 1996). This is specifically important when investigating a topic often hidden in everyday life.\nFindings: Online searching is embedded in everyday life and in the following, we present how searching is attributed meaning. We propose an understanding of the relationship between searching and everyday life through two interrelated developments: a search-ification of everyday life and a mundane-ification of search. These two narratives organise the following presentation. Under each heading it is discussed how each narrative is expressed through three themes. The two narratives provide us with an understanding of two different aspects of online searching in everyday life, rather than describing what is searched for. In the following, the results from the focus groups discussions are presented combined with an analysis.\nDiscussion: We spend more and more time searching for information. In a way we could talk about a search-ification of everyday life. Online searching has become the most common way of finding information and other ways of finding information, such as through indexes or a table of content have gradually become less important. General purpose search engines, in particular Google, have become so dominant that we tend to use them for finding codified information we previously used more specialised search engines for or in situations where we would have asked another person. The near ubiquity of mobile devices has turned searching into something we live our lives with. We search for timetables, opening hours, news, recipes, job information, symptoms of illnesses or simply for distraction. The smartphone, tablets and other mobile devices have made constant searching possible, thereby providing people with external memory resources always at hand. The dramatically increased access to information, together with the apparent ease with which search engines produce results, makes it possible for most wishes people might have for knowing more about something to be immediately turned into a query posed to a search engine.\nConclusion: This paper elucidates how meaning is assigned to online searching in everyday life. As such, the paper seeks to complement earlier information science research. We have in other publications investigated searching in certain domains (Andersson, 2017; Haider, 2017; Sundin and Carlsson, 2016). A challenge for future research is how to also include more of the actual material doings of people in an ethnographic tradition (e.g. Andersson, 2017). In the present study, we managed to make an often invisible activity such as searching visible with the help of focus group discussions. In the narrative of search-ification of everyday life, the empirical focus has primarily been on participants' descriptions of their searching, while in the narrative of mundi-fication of search, the focus has been on the participants' reflections on their searching. The invisibility of searching is articulated on different levels. When approaching a search engine, the search box is empty and everything is behind the interface. Entering the first letter opens the box, but only a query term at the time. The complexity is built into the algorithms, which are invisible for most of us. With searching becoming a deeply ingrained part of everyday life the invisibility has been reinforced even more. Searching has for many become a routine so intimately entangled across all kinds of everyday life practices it often seems to just happen. Once regarded as something complex, even a professional practice in its own right, searching is now a mundane activity whose complexity is hidden in various algorithmic systems. Online searching has changed from being a professional, often identity creating, practice into an activity, a moment in a series of activities that make up other practices. Yet of course, this applies also to various professional practices where today online searching - more often than not synonymous with Googling - is inserted as just an element amongst others.\n",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to understand how meaning is assigned to online searching by viewing it as a mundane, yet often invisible, activity of everyday life and an integrated part of various social practices.\nDesign/methodology/approach: Searching is investigated with a sociomaterial approach with a starting point in information searching as entangled across practices and material arrangements and as a mundane part of everyday life. In total, 21 focus groups with 127 participants have been carried out. The study focusses particularly on peoples' experiences and meaning-making and on how these experiences and the making of meaning could be understood in the light of algorithmic shaping.\nFindings: An often-invisible activity such as searching is made visible with the help of focus group discussions. An understanding of the relationship between searching and everyday life through two interrelated narratives is proposed: a search-ification of everyday life and a mundane-ification of search.\nOriginality/value: The study broadens the often narrow focus on searching in order to open up for a research-based discussion in information science on the role of online searching in society and everyday life.\n",
"role": "assistant"
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] |
Non-performance of urinalysis among pregnant women in Brazil
|
[
"Pregnancy",
"Prenatal",
"Associated factors",
"Preterm birth",
"Urinalysis"
] |
[
{
"content": "Summarize the following paper into structured abstract.\n\nIntroduction: Urinary tract infection (UTI) is the most frequent clinical complication in pregnancy, and may reach up to 20 percent of women in this period (Ministerio da Saude, 2012; Chalmers et al., 2001). UTI is associated with several unfavorable outcomes, including cystitis and acute pyelonephritis, premature rupture of membranes, chorioamnionitis, preterm labor, low birth weight and miscarriage (Ministerio da Saude, 2012; Chalmers et al., 2001; Duncan et al., 2004).\nMaterials and methods: The municipality of Rio Grande has about 210,000 inhabitants and is located in the extreme south of the state of Rio Grande do Sul, some 300 km from the state capital Porto Alegre and 250 km from the border with Uruguay. Data shown here stem from four cross-sectional surveys, the Rio Grande Perinatal Studies, carried out from January 1 to December 31 of 2007, 2010, 2013 and 2016 in the two maternity wards of this municipality. All pregnant women living in urban or rural areas of this municipality whose newborn weight was equal to or greater than 500 g or with at least 20 weeks gestational age were included in the study. The analysis shown here is restricted to pregnant women who performed at least one prenatal visit, that is, they had the opportunity to perform at least one QUT.\nResults: According to data from the Live Births Information System (SINASC), in 2007, 2010, 2013 and 2016, there were 10,552 births whose mothers resided in this municipality. From this total, it was possible to obtain information on 10,331 of them, representing a respondent rate of 97.9 percent, or a loss of 2.1 percent.\nDiscussion: The prevalence of non-performance of QUT among these pregnant women was 3.3 percent, with a marked worsening between 2007 and 2016. During this period, this rate increased 3.5-fold, from 1.5 to 5.3 percent. Pregnant women who are more likely to suffer unfavorable outcomes showed a significantly higher risk of not performing QUT, which are those who live without a companion, with lower schooling, greater household crowding, with a higher parity, who performed fewer prenatal visits and were not supplemented with ferrous sulfate.\nConclusions: While the rate of QUT performance was very high, 3 out of 100 of them did not do this test, if we included pregnant women who did not perform a single prenatal visit, which we could assume, because, as a rule, these pregnant women evidence characteristics of greater vulnerability than others, the rate of non-performance of QUT would increase to 6.4 percent, which would represent about 660 births. Considering that, of the total studied, about 260 were born with low birth weight (<2.5 kg) or were preterm (<37 weeks pregnancy), it can be verified that not performing QUT has put a substantially higher risk for at least 25 percent of them being affected by these conditions. It is, therefore, a very high exposure rate for two of the most important determinants of child mortality. Thus, increasing coverage for the performance of QUT in this municipality should be addressed as a priority action within prenatal care.\n",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to measure the prevalence, evaluate the trend and identify the factors associated with the non-performance of qualitative urine test (QUT) among pregnant women living in the extreme south of Brazil between 2007 and 2016.\nDesign/methodology/approach: All births occurred in the local maternity wards from January 1 to December 31 of 2007, 2010, 2013 and 2016. Mothers were interviewed within 48h after delivery. The outcome was the non-performance of QUT during pregnancy. kh2 test was used to compare proportions and Poisson regression with robust variance adjustment for the multivariate analysis. The effect measure used was the prevalence ratio.\nFindings: Of the 10,331 new mothers identified, 10,004 (96.8 percent) performed at least one prenatal visit. The prevalence of non-performance of QUT was 3.3 percent (95% CI 2.9-3.7 percent), ranging from 1.5 percent in 2007 to 5.3 percent in 2016 (p<0.001). The analysis showed that not living with a companion, having under four years of schooling, living with seven or more people in the household, having five or more children, having had one to three prenatal visits and not having been supplemented with ferrous sulfate during pregnancy showed a significantly higher prevalence rate to the non-performance of QUT.\nOriginality/value: The rate of non-performance of this test among pregnant women has clearly increased. Mothers at higher risk of unfavorable outcomes in pregnancy were the ones with the highest probability of not performing QUT. Increasing the number of prenatal visits is a high-impact measure toward the performance of this test.\n",
"role": "assistant"
}
] |
Facing contradictory emotions in event marketing: leveraging on surprise
|
[
"Surprise",
"Love",
"Embarrassment",
"Event"
] |
[
{
"content": "Summarize the following paper into structured abstract.\n\n1. Introduction: Since their initial conceptualization (Holbrook and Hirschman, 1982), customer experiences have acquired increasingly broad interest and are now referred to as the core offer in service marketing (Grewal, Levy and Kumar, 2009; Pine and Gilmore, 1999; Zomerdijk and Voss, 2010). Customer experiences require a certain degree of interaction between service providers - using elements of the context that are designed to be engaging, compelling and consistent - and customers (Zomerdijk and Voss, 2010). Organizations craft the potential customer experience using a wide range of tangible and intangible elements (Grewal et al., 2009; Zomerdijk and Voss, 2010) and design it carefully to engage customers emotionally (Sorescu et al., 2011; Triantafillidou and Siomkos, 2014). However, as customer experiences are contextual and symbolic (Berry, Carbone and Haeckel, 2002; Brakus et al., 2009), with the main character being the customer herself, companies' efforts to design and experience must deal with the subjectivity of the individuals involved, which is, by definition, beyond their control (Addis and Holbrook, 2001; Helkkula, 2011; Pine and Gilmore, 1999).\n2. Events as elicitors of contradictory emotions: The engaging social settings that embed consumers during events make these a powerful and useful experiential tool (Raghunathan and Corfman, 2006). Face-to-face interactions generate the dynamic characteristic of the experience (Healy et al., 2007), provoking positive emotions and increasing participants' level of excitement, interest, affection, renewed vitality and emotions during shared moments (Howard and Gengler, 2001), resulting in an increased customer evaluation of the overall experience (Ramanathan and McGill, 2007). However, despite the generally accepted positive effect of emotions on consumers' brand attitudes (Lau-Gesk and Meyers-Levy, 2009), only a few studies have highlighted their role in driving communicative persuasiveness, with the majority of these focusing on advertising (Cotte and Ritchie, 2005) and only a few on experiential settings, such as events (Kaltcheva and Weitz, 2006; Sneath et al., 2005).\n3. Research design and method: 3.1 Study design\n4. Results: 4.1 Pre-analysis: assessing the effect of participation in the event\n5. Discussion: Our study investigates the dark side of emotions in customer experience by focusing on a negative undesired emotional reaction - embarrassment - that consumers might experience when participating in a social event designed to elicit romantic love, and on the moderating role of a neutral emotion, surprise. Our experiment highlights three main findings. First, despite the substantial investments in designing positive customer-centric experiences in an attempt to create brand equity and produce favorable participants' reactions, experiences might also result in undesirable negative situations. Second, consumers' embarrassment and romantic love have effects that are similar in strength but opposite in sign on brand equity, with the former decreasing and the latter increasing both brand attitude and purchase intention. Hence, negative reactions such as embarrassment are a real and concrete risk firms have to take into account and, possibly, try to control. Third, elements of the experience design that may elicit surprise in customers might be useful in managing such a risk because surprise can mitigate the negative effect of embarrassment on brand equity. We argue that such an interaction might be owing to the natural limitation of cognitive resources available to an individual: Consumers are usually highly engaged in dealing with unexpected stimuli. Therefore, they focus on the unexpected elements of the experience and pay less attention to their embarrassment, ultimately reducing its impact on brand equity. In line with previous research (Meyer et al., 1997; Luna and Renninger, 2015), we find that surprise acts as an interruption mechanism, which asks individuals to stop and pay attention to different stimuli.\n6. Limitations: Like almost any study, our research is subject to certain limitations. First, we do not address the role of potential individual differences, such as susceptibility to social and interpersonal influences (Bearden et al., 1989), consumer assertiveness, market mavenism, extraversion (Duhachek and Iacobucci, 2005), hedonic shopping motivations (Arnold and Reynolds, 2012) or consumer knowledge (Roy and Cornwell, 2004). These differences could help explain discrepancies in the extent to which specific emotions are experienced during an experience-centric service. In fact, they could drive the experience of specific emotions, explaining why some people might be embarrassed at experience-centric services designed to induce them to experience romantic love. Second, we do not address cultural differences: Our sample is made up exclusively of participants who belong to a western culture, and we acknowledge that the experience of social emotions such as embarrassment may be deeply affected by culture (Mascolo et al., 2003).\n",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Purpose: This paper aims to explore the role of surprise in reducing the negative impact of an undesired emotion, such as embarrassment, on the attitudes and behavioral intentions of consumers taking part in an event.\nDesign/methodology/approach: In total, 220 consumers took part in a pre-test/post-test quasi-experimental within-subject design. Data were analyzed using structural equation modeling.\nFindings: Findings show that an in-store social event designed to elicit young customers' surprise and feelings of romantic love might also give rise to a relevant negative emotion such as embarrassment, and that surprise can act as a powerful managerial tool in limiting the negative effects of this negative emotion. Moreover, brand attitude and purchase intention are outcomes of positive emotions elicited by the event.\nPractical implications: The study shows that event marketing is an appealing but risky strategy. Evoking surprise is an effective way to manage negative emotions such as embarrassment that can arise unintentionally during an event.\nOriginality/value: The research contributes to the understanding of the role of contradictory emotions in a specific social experience, namely, the event, and focuses on unplanned and undesired the affective contributions of customers.\n",
"role": "assistant"
}
] |
Risk management and managerial mindset
|
[
"Risk governance",
"Decision framing",
"Banking",
"Behavioral risk",
"Managerial mindset"
] |
[
{
"content": "Summarize the following paper into structured abstract.\n\n1. Introduction: Mitigating risk has always been a primary concern for US commercial banking and has taken on greater meaning following the global 2007-2009 Financial Crisis, which exposed extensive failings in risk governance practices (The Financial Crisis Inquiry Report, 2011). Identifying, measuring and analyzing risk is what bankers are supposed to do best. Yet, the results achieved are far from consistent, and as such, it is seen as a mandate for securing a clearer appreciation of the dynamic forces underlying sound risk mitigation practices.\n2. Theoretical support for the model: 2.1 Business risk pervasiveness\n3. Research model: To augment risk management research at the organizational level, we examine the degree in which US community banks (under US$1.5bn in assets) rate their risk mitigation efforts. The testable path model that guided this research is depicted in Figure 1 below. The model was designed to manage uncertainty and to recognize the effect risk has on achieving organizational objectives. In this way, risk is linked inextricably with performance in a manner that allows management to identify, understand, discuss and act on the risk the organization faces.\n4. Research design and data collection: A quantitative approach using a direct mail survey was adopted based on the model in Figure 1. The unit of analysis is a community bank and its risk performance.\n5. Statistical data analysis: Exploratory factor analysis was undertaken to identify composites. The 31 initial questionnaire items yielded a five-factor solution with 22 items, explaining 55 per cent of the extracted variance. All of the factors were above 0.5 with average 0.7 on the pattern matrix, composite reliability (Cronbach's alpha) was satisfactory being above standard 0.7 (refer Figure AI in the appendix).\n6. Discussion: Research on how risk is operationally managed, leveraged and coordinated in community banking organizations has been lacking. This exploratory research speaks to this gap by establishing how an effective risk management process and a related organizational mindset can be a solution for maximizing the risk/reward opportunities. The holistic model evidenced that decision makers deal with risk choices through a \"risk-culture\" that is dependent upon their awareness and understanding of the risk trade-offs. Our analysis showed the synergistic relationship of the risk enablers produces discriminatory value. A complex set of relationships as a unifying operating system was proposed and tested. The research analysis raised the importance of finding alignment with motivational enablers, and balancing the bank's risk capabilities and its risk governance so as to maximize risk management performance. Not surprisingly, non-adherence of this relationship goes a long way to explain why one-third of banks are sitting on the bottom of the performance ladder. The analysis contributes to the risk discussion in four ways as follows:\n7. Limitations: Although this research takes a logical step toward understanding the relationship among cognitive biases that are directed toward managing uncertainty and the operating guidance for overseeing risk performance, the reader should be aware of the need to build upon these results. For example, several limitations should be noted. First, our sample, while considered adequate for our inquiry was small (n = 151), although it was nationally and evenly distributed. We did not include large money-center banks, super-regionals and regional banks with assets exceeding US$1.5bn. These larger banks represent a small proportion of total banks but hold significant asset size advantages and are far more sophisticated in product offerings, and they also operate across greater geographic areas. Consequently, their modus operandi is far different from community banking. Second, while our results confirm the value of the study, it is to some degree exploratory. Our study was conducted on banks and needs to be related to a wider range firms and industries. We chose senior executives as our focus of attention, they had extensive job tenure and experience; however, it could be argued that it supports single-informant data. Regardless, the next level of executive management may have a unique perspective on how well their firm processes risk. Third, models are generally incomplete depictions of real-world phenomena, and our narrowly framed model has likely overlooked some potentially important, relevant relations and issues. Fourth, in designing the study, recall that we did not access specific individual risk taking choices, rather we assumed risk existed as an existing portfolio that was captured in average earnings performance. Keep in mind that the anticipated financial impact of risk decisions is excluded because gains/losses have not yet occurred. However, the philosophical risk/reward approach should be consistent on a past decision basis (Fahlenbrach et al., 2012). Consequently, without strategic change the past is destined to continue. While the study calculated robust findings, other risk/reward measures relevant at the organizational level could be considered for future studies. Finally, the fact that our survey was conducted at a time just after banks experienced an adverse economic climate and organizational activities in reducing risk for performance gains may be somewhat restricted. Accordingly, the study did not address risk management under economic growth periods.\n8. Future research options: Our work offers a novel foundation for understanding what is required to address risk mitigation. We recognize ripe opportunity exists for more focused inquiry on securing a greater understanding of the behavioral influences that drive the risk mindset. Other research paths could include inquiry about risk outcomes experienced by different manager levels within the organization. Others might expand this work by investigating the risk management framework experienced by senior executives in money-center and international financial institutions as well as firms in other industries. Research is encouraged specifically on warning signals that preempt losses and how they are interpreted and addressed (or not) by managers. In the future, scholars should begin to examine effects of other cognitive biases that are of potential for affecting risk behavior, such as \"overconfidence\" (Levinthal and March, 1981; Simon et al., 2003) or effects with \"reward systems\" and so on. Consequently, as risk tolerance influences risk taking, it becomes important to determine what leads to such variations within risk tolerance.\n9. Conclusion: Without doubt, risk management is a constant struggle for banks. This research has attempted to elevate the risk conversation by embracing a more strategic and adaptive behavioral perspective - by interpreting risk as conceptual model of thinking and as a predictable business process, and by offering specific decision enablers to complement the corporate mindset. Collectively, this theoretic detail has been designed to develop a safety net against unsafe risk practices so as to more conscientiously anticipate any imbalances with the risk/reward trade-offs, and to appreciate that current financial performance is direct measure of past risk capabilities.\n",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Purpose: This paper aims to determine why so many banks do not recognize in a timely manner the inherent risks and imbalances with their risk/reward decision trade-offs, to elevate the risk conversation by embracing a more strategic and adaptive behavioral perspective and to show how an effective risk management organizational mindset is a definite solution for mitigating risk.\nDesign/methodology/approach: A direct-mail questionnaire survey was designed with the unit of analysis US community bank (under US$1.5bn in assets) and its risk performance. We used quantitative methods using previously tested scales for main constructs and FDIC bank data for performance measures. To gauge the models capacity for determining discriminatory value, results were also measured against relative peer financial performance.\nFindings: The findings established that an effective risk management process that assimilates risk tolerance, risk propensity and risk practices into a managerial mindset offers a sound solution for mitigating risk. By envisioning risk as a \"conceptual model of thinking\" and interpreting it as a \"predictable business process\", and by offering specific \"decision enablers\" that complement the corporate mindset, it creates a safety net against unsafe risk practices. As a result, it allows for an appreciation that current financial performance is a direct measure of management's risk decision capabilities.\nResearch limitations/implications: The sample size (n = 151), although adequate for our purpose was relatively small, was restricted to US community banks (less than US$1.5bn in assets) and single-informants (CEOs), thereby providing a somewhat narrow focus. Also, the survey was conducted during a slow economic period, and results may be different during a growth period. We see ripe opportunity for further research, especially related to money-center and regional banks and the next level of management as well as the behavioral influences that frame the risk/reward opportunity. Research on other industries, small businesses, etc., would be valuable because risk permeates all decisioning.\nPractical implications: From a practitioner perspective, providing guidance on risk oversight allows for improved financial performance. The findings should be of interest to financial industry leaders, policy makers and regulators as understanding how an active orientation of risk tolerance, risk propensity and risk practices are coordinated across the organization is vital. Also, managers need to understand how characteristics of risk management manifest itself within their organization in terms of productivity and financial performance.\nOriginality/value: This paper is the first comprehensive empirical study that incorporates a conceptual approach that uses outcome history, behavioral influences and operational dimensions to identify risk management capabilities in community banks designed to increase risk/reward awareness.\n",
"role": "assistant"
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] |
What's "knowledge management" when resources are unknowable and deals negotiated?
|
[
"Innovation",
"Deals",
"Knowledge management",
"Managing use of knowledge"
] |
[
{
"content": "Summarize the following paper into structured abstract.\n\n1. Introduction: \"Knowledge management\" is a rarely used concept within IMP, despite the fact that, for several decades researchers in this area directed attention to the relationship among scientific advances, technological development and business renewal (see e.g. Hakansson, 1987; Lundgren, 1994; Hakansson and Waluszewski, 2002, 2007; Waluszewski et al., 2009; Baraldi et al., 2011).\n2. Theoretical point of departure: managing knowledge or managing the use of knowledge: Management literature's answer to the challenge of why economic actors seem to have difficulties gaining total knowledge about resources - which they should have according to the basic assumptions of market theory - was to focus on the limitations of the human mind, and the role that a single firm can play as a compensation for this. The concept of \"bounded rationality\" (March and Simon, 1958) has become something of a common denominator in management theories and refers to how organizations are trying to overcome the restricted ability of individual actors to gain information about all economic resources available through different types of organizational arrangements. This is also the common point of departure for the knowledge management and resource-based schools, where the ability of an organization to provide, protect and utilize knowledge for its own purpose is regarded as a determinant for the creation of a competitive advantage (Prahalad and Doz, 1987; Prahalad and Hamel, 1990; Nonaka, 1991; Leonard-Barton, 1995; Foss, 1997).\n3. Case presentation: managing a science based innovation project: The scientific knowledge advancement behind our focal life science company's engagement in a new analytical product system is a physical light phenomenon called surface plasmon resonance (Otto, 1968) - which was discovered about 80 years before the attempts to commercialize it began.\n4. Analysis: two different management regimes and the impact on the social-material values and deals: The ambition of this paper has been to highlight the managerial challenges that is presented first by the border-crossing use of knowledge (Hakansson and Waluszewski, 2007; Hakansson et al., 2013) and second, by the need for translations of social-material values to deals (Hakansson and Olsen, 2015; Perna et al., 2015).\n5. Conclusions: If the business landscape, as implicitly assumed in knowledge management thinking, should have characteristics close to what is suggested in the traditional market thinking, the basic managerial task identified by the first mentioned school could have been fruitful. That is, new knowledge could easily be stockpiled until an attractive way to utilize it appears - and its use would not interfere with established technological, social and economic structures. However, it is important to note that such a possibility is based on:the assumption that the value of the resources is not affected by how they are combined; that knowledge is construed in a very narrow way, as a specific element in the development of new commercial solutions that can be \"packaged\" as independent components of the innovation process, and implicitly; once commercialized, the social-material value is mirrored in a monetary dimension. This way of treating knowledge, as a defined entity, has a \"clairvoyance\" to the market model - and fits nicely with the great number of approaches that have this as their underpinnings, including the knowledge management thinking (Rider and Waluszewski, 2015).\n",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to investigate the management of the use of knowledge in interfaces stretching across company and organizational borders, including the negotiated monetary dimension.\nDesign/methodology/approach: The research approach is the IMP framework on resource interaction (Hakansson and Waluszewski, 2002), and the distinction among heterogeneous economic resources and a homogeneous monetary dimension, (Hakansson and Olsen, 2015; Perna et al., 2015). A case study on use of science based knowledge in business is utilized.\nFindings: The management regime behind the creation of a user setting including a substantial monetary flow is can be characterized as \"managing collective entities\" (Hakansson, Bakken, Olsen, 2013) and it is argued that the knowledge management regime assumes away the most important process related to use of knowledge.\nResearch limitations/implications: The paper stress the theoretical need for approaching managment in general and managing use of knowledge in particular as an interactive issue.\nPractical implications: The paper stress the practical need for approaching managment in general and managing use of knowledge in particular as an interactive issue.\nOriginality/value: The paper questions the knowledge management regime, which has a strong influence on public policy.\n",
"role": "assistant"
}
] |
Environmental turmoil and firms' core structure dynamism: the moderating role of strategic alliances
|
[
"Strategic alliances",
"Core structure dynamism",
"Environmental turmoil"
] |
[
{
"content": "Summarize the following paper into structured abstract.\n\nIntroduction: There has been a general consensus in marketing literature that many firms create strategic alliances when markets grow dynamic (Wang and Fang, 2012). Strategic alliances refer to voluntary arrangements between firms involving exchange, sharing or co-development of products, technologies or services (Panico, 2017). The mainstream business literature takes strategic alliances as the conduits for facilitating the flow of otherwise unavailable resources and capabilities between collaborating firms and suggests that firms use strategic alliances mainly to share resources, costs and risks (Agarwal et al., 2010; Lin et al., 2009). However, the samples through which much of the evidence supporting this view of main alliance motives were collected involved firms that were competing in relatively stable environments (Li et al., 2013). In recent years, some empirical studies show that sharing resources, costs and risks does not make much strategic sense in hostile environments because it incurs high transaction costs, such as high opportunism and low resource complementarities between partners (Luo, 2007; Yen and Hung, 2017). The contradiction raises an important question: why do firms need strategic alliances in hostile environments if they do not intend to share resources, costs and risks?\nEnvironmental turmoil, core structure adaptation and strategic alliances: The organizational ecology theory posits that individual firms are inert: they cannot change easily or quickly (Li et al., 2013; Mens et al., 2015; Peli et al., 1994). Such organizational inertia results from various sources, including routines, defined as the repeatable patterns of interdependent behaviors, established roles and formal organizational rules (Bresman, 2013; Liang and Mei, 2018). These factors comprise firms' internal structure and are difficult to alter quickly (Yi et al., 2016). The organizational inertia has significant implications for firms in dynamic environments; when environments change, firms can hardly change simultaneously to adapt to environmental changes (Stieglitz et al., 2016).\nHypotheses development: Environmental hostility, dynamism of stated goals and strategic alliances\nMethodology: Setting, sample and data\nResults: The Shapiro-Wilk test is used to examine whether the data came from a normally distributed population. The results show that all of the p values are greater than the 5 per cent level with the lowest statistic being 0.9618 (p = 0.2816). There is evidence that the data tested are normally distributed.\nDiscussion: Following the organizational ecology theory's claim that environmental hostility affects the four dimensions of core structure changes, this study examines how strategic alliances help firms to mitigate such changes. The results based on primary and secondary data are consistent with the proposed hypotheses. Our study contributes to the existing literature on two fronts. First, it identifies an undiscovered effect of alliances, namely, that alliances may enable a firm to outsource external routines and processes, thereby enabling it to survive disruptive environmental changes that might otherwise threaten one or more parts of its core structure. Altering a firm's internal core structure to fit environmental changes can be a slow, difficult and even destructive process, whereas outsourcing new structure through alliances to overcome environmental hostility may be faster, easier and more effective. In short, strategic alliances may help stabilize and, thus, protect a firm's core structure by weakening the effects of environmental hostility. However, it should be noted that strategic alliances and changes in a firm's core structure are not directly related - it is only as hostility increases that the tendency for strategic alliances to reduce structural change comes into play. Second, this study indicates that only some types of strategic alliances (manufacturing, R&D, distribution and promotion) demonstrate such moderating effects on environmental hostility. Other types of strategic alliances do not have such effects.\n",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Purpose: Much of the extant evidence in the marketing literature posits that firms use strategic alliances to share resources, costs and risks as paths to performance improvements. Drawing from the organizational ecology theory, this study aims to propose a different rationale, namely, that strategic alliances protect a firm's core structure - its stated goals, authority structure, core technologies and marketing strategies - by mitigating the need for hazardous changes in hostile environments.\nDesign/methodology/approach: This study collected quantitative data using market survey and analyzed the data with the regression method.\nFindings: Using Chinese firms in three technology industries as the research setting, this research finds a positive and significant relationship between environmental hostility and core structure dynamism. Although strategic alliances themselves have no direct bearing on core structure dynamism, they are found to moderate this relationship negatively, that is, strategic alliances attenuate the relationship between environmental hostility and structural changes.\nResearch limitations/implications: This paper argues that strategic alliances have significant moderating effects on firm performance, that is, firms use strategic alliances to outsource competence to partners and, thus, avoid internal turmoil. However, the moderating effect alone cannot explain the complexity of strategic alliances. There could exist other effects that remain unknown. In addition, individual-level factors could have significant impacts on strategic alliance management. Future studies should look into these issues to advance the authors' knowledge on strategic alliances.\nPractical implications: The findings of this study show that managers should outsource competence to partners when they experience turmoil in markets. Adapting to market turmoil internally could lead to market failure.\nOriginality/value: This study provides a new rationale for strategic alliances, that is, firms use strategic alliances to reduce market uncertainty. This rationale has not been reported in the existing literature.\n",
"role": "assistant"
}
] |
Analyzing the impact of corporate social responsibility on corporate financial performance: evidence from top Indian firms
|
[
"Annual reports",
"Corporate social responsibility",
"Content analysis",
"Financial performance",
"Indian companies",
"Panel data regression analysis"
] |
[
{
"content": "Summarize the following paper into structured abstract.\n\n1. Introduction: Firms, these days, around the world, are expected to generate value for their shareholders while acting responsibly towards society at the same time (Kilic et al., 2015). Recently, Larry Fink, the CEO of \"BlackRock\", which is the world's largest asset management firm, wrote a letter to the companies in which his firm makes investments; demanding every company to deliver not only financial performance but also to show how it makes a positive contribution to the society (Serafeim, 2018). In the present scenario where the importance of the responsibility of business towards the society is growing around the globe, the Government of India has taken a major step in this direction, by making it mandatory for firms in India to spend a fixed percentage of their profits on corporate social responsibility (CSR) activities.\n2. Prior literature: The argument on the social responsibilities of businesses has been going on for decades, thus leading to the development of several theories on the way (Arthur et al., 2017). The proponents of instrumental stakeholder theory (Freeman, 1984; Cornell and Shapiro, 1987; Patten, 1991; Clarkson, 1995; Donaldson and Preston, 1995; Mitchell et al., 1997; Pirsch et al., 2007; Waheed and Jianhua, 2018) advocate a positive relationship between CSR and CFP. According to this theory, the business has a responsibility to create as much value as possible for all its stakeholders by managing their individual interests (Freeman, 1984). This line of thought is, further, supported by several empirical evidences (Waddock and Graves, 1997; Wu et al., 2006; Saleh et al., 2010; Bayoud et al., 2012; Luethge and Han, 2012; Hussain et al., 2018). An entirely conflicting perspective, which criticizes the social involvement of business (Wang et al., 2018), argues the existence of a negative relationship between CSR and CFP. The patrons of this stockholder theory contend that the only responsibility of business is to maximize profits and returns for its stockholders (Friedman, 1970). The studies by Brammer et al. (2006), Mittal et al. (2008); Tilakasiri (2013), Fu et al. (2014), Peng and Yang (2014), Rodrigo et al. (2016), further lend support to this argument. Also, some studies (Aupperle et al., 1985; Hackston and Milne, 1996; Preston and O'Bannon, 1997; McWilliams and Siegel, 2001; Makni et al., 2009; Aras et al., 2010; Luethge and Han, 2012; Kolsi and Attayah, 2018) indicate non-existence of any relationship, either positive or negative, between CSR and CFP. Hence, there is a substantial amount of literature across both, developed and developing countries, offering insights into the ambiguity of the relationship between CSR and CFP (Orlitzky et al., 2003; Crisostomo et al., 2011; Usman and Amran, 2015; Wang et al., 2018).\n3. Methodology: 3.1 Data\n4. Results and discussion: Table II presents the descriptive statistics of various variables used in the study. The mean score of CSR is 1.79, with a standard deviation of 0.25. The mean value of Return on Assets is observed to be 9.65 for the selected time period with 73.79 as the maximum value. Return on Assets assumed a mean value of 20.58 with 18.43 as median and standard deviation of 18.38. Similarly, the Debt Equity Ratio assumed a mean value of 0.99 and a minimum value of 0 and a maximum value of 12.87, for the selected sample.\n5. Conclusion: This paper further extends the study on the impact of CSR on CFP, by using a large sample; three measures of financial performance; and improved statistical tools. Moreover, as most of the research studies on CSR till date have focused on developed countries with limited empirical investigations in developing countries (Tilt, 1994; Bird et al., 2007; Jamali, 2009; Saleh et al., 2010), this study contributes to the body of knowledge by analyzing this relationship in the Indian context. In addition, with the changes introduced by the Government of India in Companies Act, 2013, making CSR mandatory, this study by using data over pre-reform and post-reform years, presents a better picture of the relationship between the two variables under study.\n6. Limitations: Though the present study adds to current literature on CSR, it has some limitations which need discussion. First, only large companies listed on CNX 500, were included in the sample. Therefore, due to the non-inclusion of small companies, the results of the final study cannot be generalized. Second, this study was limited to only three accounting measures of financial performance, while controlling the effect of only three control variables. Third, only annual reports were used as a source of data on CSR in this study, whereas companies also make disclosures through their websites and sustainability reports. In addition, despite efforts to minimize errors, there is a possibility of making at least some errors while analyzing annual reports. Hence, the future research is recommended to overcome these shortcomings to present a better picture of this phenomenon.\n",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Purpose: Despite continuous research efforts, the literature is still inconclusive about the relationship between corporate social responsibility (CSR) and financial performance. With an aim to address this problem, this study aims to analyze the impact of CSR on financial performance in the Indian context.\nDesign/methodology/approach: Using a panel of top 137 companies from CNX-500 for 10 years (2008-2017), the impact of CSR on three indicators of financial performance, namely, Return on Assets (ROA), Return on Equity (ROE) and Net Profit Margin (NPM), is evaluated using the panel data regression analysis. The technique of content analysis is used to collect data on CSR from the annual reports of selected companies.\nFindings: The study finds that the impact of CSR on financial performance may be neutral (with ROA and NPM) or negative (with ROE). The negative influence of CSR on ROE of firms supports the theory by Friedman (1970) that the only responsibility of business is to maximize profits and returns for its shareholders.\nOriginality/value: After amendments in Companies Act, 2013, there is limited literature addressing this scientific inquiry in the Indian context. The study period (2008-2017) includes CSR disclosures from both periods, before reforms and after reforms, which adds to the uniqueness of this research study. In addition, this study uses a research instrument consisting of a total of 178 CSR activities divided across 46 themes for collecting data from annual reports of the companies. The utilization of such a comprehensive research instrument, for the study, also adds to its peculiarity.\n",
"role": "assistant"
}
] |
"Hop on board": the importation and future development of high-speed rail (HSR) in China
|
[
"China",
"Railways",
"Trains",
"High‐speed rail",
"R&D spillover effects",
"Engineering education",
"Innovation"
] |
[
{
"content": "Summarize the following paper into structured abstract.\n\n1 Introduction: China is poised to become the largest economy in the world during the decade of the 2010s. However, in order to make sure that the per capita growth in economic power continues, the country must ensure that it is also growing from an educational and technological perspective. Our recent work in the area has pointed out the significance of education, particularly of creative and talented engineers and scientists, in the growth of an economy and specifically in China (Johnson, 2006; Johnson and Weiss, 2008; Johnson and Chuang, 2010). Furthermore, the economic development literature discusses the effect of foreign direct investment (FDI) and trade in technology spillover effects that appear to be related in large part to the capacity of indigenous firms and institutions to absorb new knowledge and utilize it in different applications (Liu and Buck, 2007).As an example of these trends, Chinese high-speed rail (HSR), a token of its economic and technology development, has caught the attention of the global community. In 2010, the Chinese train CRH380 reached a speed of 486.1 kph, becoming the fastest train in the world. Also, China is building the largest HSR network in the world. While this ambitious development has attracted foreign investments, China is further exporting its HSR technology overseas, competing with major industrialized countries in the arena of advanced transportation technology.In this paper, we explore the effects of the increasing trend towards engineering education in China and the importation and development of national strategic technologies by outlining the case history of HSR in China's recent growth towards technological advancement in indigenous innovation.\n2 Conceptual background: Technological spillover effects of trade combined with the training of a highly educated workforce can help to create the absorptive capacity necessary for being able to learn about foreign technologies and then surpassing that technology in future work. The importance of education to overall innovation within the national S&T system of China has been acknowledged (Liu and White, 2001; Huang et al., 2004). Furthermore, Johnson and Weiss (2008, p. 70) argued that there is a progressive link between evolutionary types of educational stages and innovation practices using a staged model of education and innovation practices. Their predictions suggested that as countries developed technologies that were incremental in nature the national educational processes would be fact-based and the innovation practices would show characteristics of a derivational nature. What this meant was that as technological innovation continued in a trajectory towards creative radical innovation the educational process and technological development required more and more creativity combined with critical-thinking abilities.Liu and Buck (2007) found that international technology spillover sources via FDIs and foreign R&D, along with the indigenous efforts of actors in China, jointly determined the innovation performance of the Chinese high-tech sectors. This suggests that a combination of competencies in a technology along with the availability of foreign technologies is necessary for developing and leapfrogging of foreign-created technologies. Indeed, as resource-based theories of strategic advantage suggest, Liu and Buck (2007) found a strong correlation between absorptive capacity (measured by the share of scientists and technicians in the total number of employees for indigenous Chinese firms in an industry) and innovation performance at the firm level. This would also agree with the basic theory of Johnson and Weiss (2008) that as the need for more creative innovation goes up so does the need for more and better educated engineers and scientists.Given the above considerations, we expect that as the development of HSR advanced from the introduction of foreign-based technologies early on towards the stage in which Chinese companies matched the performance of foreign firms, that there was a corresponding increase in the number and quality of Chinese engineers and scientists in train and transportation-based technologies. In the next sections we describe the case study of HSR development in China and demonstrate that the development of HSR in China has indeed been facilitated both by FDI and the building of absorptive capacity by increases in quantity and quality of engineering and science graduates affiliated with transportation-based technologies.\n3 HSR in China: What is HSR? According to the International Union of Railways (UIC), HSR is a system consisting of rolling stock and infrastructure which normally operate at a speed of at least 250 km/h on new tracks, or 200 km/h on existing (conventional) tracks (UIC, 2010).Economic benefits of HSR. HSR is regarded as an indicator of technology advancement and economic development. Japan and Europe have enjoyed their HSR for a while now. Japan's first endeavour, the Shinkansen Zero series, started its service in 1964 with a top speed of 210 kph, travelling between the cities of Tokyo and Osaka. This marked the start of a regular HSR service, which enhanced the regional and economic development of the area (Sasaki et al., 1997). The German DB Class 103 marked a top speed of 200 kph between Augsburg and Munich in 1965. For the UK, on the other hand, a train named InterCity 125 was put to service with a top speed 201 kph. France's TGV, which served between Paris and Lyon, started service in 1983 with a maximum speed of 260 kph. Spain has shown its ambition in HSR as it has created a network of 2,219 km length of rails, the largest network in Europe (Carrasco et al., 2011). As a result of the systems development, economic spillover effects emerged in areas served by HSR (Haynes, 1997). China has been seen as the next big nation embarking on HSR and, indeed, as this case study shows, Chinese engineers have met the call of technological learning and development well in the area of HSR. As we discuss later, the economics of HSR should create benefits beyond technological achievements but the experience to date has been mixed-sprinkled with technological successes and economic or business mis-management.3.1 Transportation benefits of HSR\n4 HSR development and engineering education in China: China's efforts in engineering education appear to embrace the needed underlying capabilities for HSR development. That is, we can see in the statistics that China has made great efforts in equipping students with expertise in electrical, information, and mechanical engineering, which are the key capabilities that HSR primarily relies on for such technologies as the rolling stocks, electric traction, energy supply, and signaling systems (Campos and de Rus, 2009). On the other hand, civil, architectural, and transportation engineering - the foundations for the planning, designing and construction of HSR infrastructure such as tracks, tunnels, bridges, and stations - has presented only a steady growth pattern. Figure 1 shows the number of students who graduated from Chinese institutes of higher education in different engineering domains related to HSR.According to the Ministry of Education of China, an \"Excellent Engineer Development\" program is initiated to promote HSR education and training. To develop needed expertise for Chinese HSR, numerous higher education institutes are incorporated as a key component of the program's implementation. For example, Southwestern Jiaotong University implements such strategies as the innovation of course,s in education, cooperation with enterprises, direct introduction of foreign technology, and the long-term establishment of new academic organizations (Chen, 2010). The following are details of these implementations.Undergraduate and graduate degree programs are consolidated by course redesign that target HSR expertise and practice. Courses are also re-focused on business operation perspectives to cater to the needs of a diversified body of HSR knowledge, including foreign languages, rolling stock maintenance, rail engineering, rail construction, electrical and mechanical systems, and operations. The education in foreign languages is particularly emphasized as a strategic tool to access global markets.4.1 Affiliation with enterprises for cultivating HSR competencies\n5 Challenges and issues of Chinese HSR: A major complaint of the users of HSR in China is that it is overpriced and beyond the affordability of the passengers who need the transportation the most, such as peasants and laborers. It seems that the railway authority would rather operate HSR trains with a high ratio of unsold seats than lower the price to cater for more passengers (Liu, 2011). For example, even though a new HSR service is being added to the service between Shanghai and Chengdu in 2011, where most transportation needs are concentrated on middle-to-low income passengers, pricing remains an issue. As a result of the fare being raised to almost double the fare of the traditional service, 80 percent of the seats remain unsold. This has caused great waste in transportation capability and operational effectiveness. It has been argued by some that the railway authority lost its sense of the market due to its long-time monopolistic position in the limited mode of ground transportation. While airlines and other public transportation price their offerings based on the market and competition, railways in China still base prices on a cost-based formula - which is a remnant of a central planning economy. It has been suggested that if management fails to bring the market and competition into consideration, China's HSR will eventually lose its ground to air travel (which is faster) and to busing (which is cheaper) (Fu, 2011).\n6 Discussion: Obviously one major factor spurring the development of HSR in China is the result of a need for the Chinese Government to build the competencies of strategic technologies at the national level. This policy direction is typical of countries trying to spur technological development, successfully employed for example, in Japan and Korea, and evident in the practice of China today (Wen and Kobayashi, 2002; Fan and Watanabe, 2006; Rongping and Wan, 2008). The difference may be in the amount of government ownership of the commercial enterprises meant to adapt and develop the new technologies (Meyer, 2011). In this research we found that the major Chinese company selling locomotive and rolling stock had more than 90 percent of the domestic market! The question is whether this level of government control is sustainable or perhaps has more in common with the command control style of management in the now defunct Soviet Union.The case study that we present of HSR development in the Chinese context also points out the relevance of educational innovation needed to accompany the technological innovations. The evidence collaborates empirical findings by Liu and Buck (2007) at the firm level that technological spillovers from foreign technologies requires the absorptive capacity of the recipient country's industries. Cohen and Levinthal's (1990) simple concept of absorptive capacity fits well with the staged model of Johnson and Weiss (2008) in that it suggests that in order to derive incremental technological innovation, fact-based educational practices are required. This, of course, leads to an increase in absorptive capacity and a virtuous cycle of growth. Using the sponge metaphor of absorptive capacity, the more that one absorbs the knowledge of facts, the more knowledge one can absorb in the future. The on-going trajectory illustrated in the staged model (see also the introductory paper for this special issue (Johnson and Weiss, 2011)) also shows this as an iterative process.\n7 Conclusion: We have shown in the Chinese HSR case study that the development of HSR in China went from being an entirely foreign-based technology to what today could be referred to as an incrementally developed Chinese technology. The economic development of HSR technology took the Chinese from being importers of the technology to being exporters and has the country poised to be a major world-class producer of HSR systems. While we would argue that more needs to be done so that the technology moves up the staged model of innovation derived from Johnson and Weiss (2008), clearly this is a Chinese success story. While there is cause for arguing that some of the technology has been copied and that more needs to be done, the total development of the system has given Chinese companies developing HSR systems a potentially potent global competitive advantage.\n",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Purpose: - The purpose of this paper is to describe, as a case study, the recent developments in high-speed rail (HSR) technological development and economic and business development in China.\nDesign/methodology/approach: - The authors use a descriptive case study design examining the factors behind the importation of foreign HSR technology and its development within the Chinese context. Various secondary sourced data are used to build the case that educational development in transportation technologies and strategic focus at the national level have created the ability to pursue the development and creation of a national strategic competency in HSR technology for the Chinese.\nFindings: - The authors find that a major factor behind HSR development in China appears to be the result of a need for the Chinese Government to build the competencies of strategic technologies at the national level. Given present usage levels of HSR, the internal development of HSR systems is not justified by the economic rationales of cheaper and more efficient transportation for the Chinese. However, the case does point out the importance of technological leapfrogging (or \"hopping\" over the competition, to use the analogy in the title). It is apparent in the case that Chinese engineering has advanced in such a way that it is not inconceivable that China may lead advanced technological state-of-the-art designs in the near future. This building of national core competencies appears to be related to the increase in world-class educational efforts. As such, the authors argue that the Chinese efforts in HSR are now described by fact-based education and derivational innovation practices as illustrated in the staged model of innovation by Johnson and Weiss.\nOriginality/value: - The case study is one of the first published in the academic management literature. It demonstrates the process of development of HSR in China and provides preliminary evidence of the importance of the educational and innovation practices in China on the development of an indigenous technological industry in the country.\n",
"role": "assistant"
}
] |
Sharing best practice
|
[
"Knowledge sharing",
"Change management",
"Generation and dissemination of information"
] |
[
{
"content": "Summarize the following paper into structured abstract.\n\nIntroduction: In healthcare we find ourselves at a unique and delicate historical juncture shaped by a more complex system of therapies, interventions and administration and on the other hand by a more educated, informed and demanding consumer. At no time in its history has the growth in knowledge and technologies been so profound. Healthcare used to be uncomplicated, safe and largely ineffective. Now it is complex, effective and potentially dangerous (Chantler, 1999). However, research shows that although our knowledge base has improved dramatically, the ability to structure service delivery all too often fails in its ability to translate knowledge into common practice (IOM, 2001). We are also loath to learn from and share with each other.\nContext: In the current health care system, scientific knowledge about best care is not applied systematically or expeditiously to practice. An average of 17 years is required for new knowledge generated by randomised controlled trials to be incorporated into practice and even then application is highly uneven (Balas and Boren, 2000). The extreme variability in practice in clinical areas in which there is strong scientific evidence and a high degree of expert consensus about best practices indicates that current dissemination efforts fail to reach many clinicians and patients, and that there are insufficient tools and incentives to promote rapid adoption of best practices. Research conducted in 2003 found that American healthcare gets it right 54.9 per cent of the time (McGlynn, Asch, Adams, 2003). How different is the Irish system? It is reasonable to argue that the time has come to invest in the creation of a more effective infrastructure for the application of knowledge to health care delivery.\nSharing knowledge: In order to become a source of knowledge and learning there is a need to establish a knowledge centre. The challenge is not just to create new knowledge as a vast amount of highly valuable knowledge already exists. The problem is that the existing knowledge is poorly organised and catalogued and is often inaccessible. The way forward is to develop a system to establish ways to discover knowledge that already exists and organise it so that by making it accessible, it supports the knowledge base to do the job and, because it does that, incentives are created to share the knowledge and ensure \"spread\".Much of best practice knowledge is tacit - held in people's heads and not always easy to document. Therefore, most best practice programmes combine two key elements: explicit knowledge such as a best practices database (connecting people with information), and methods for sharing tacit knowledge such as communities of practice (connecting people with people). These two approaches are complementary. A database can provide enough information for a potential user of the best practice to find it and decide if it is worth pursuing further. However, the best way of sharing best practices is \"on the job\" and so communities and personal contact with others who have used the best practice is key.Benefits\nDevelop a supporting infrastructure: To successfully implement a best practice programme, there is a need to ensure that the required infrastructure in place. This infrastructure is often developed as part of a wider knowledge management strategy. Typically, several generic aspects need attention:*The people to facilitate and drive the process through its initial stages, until it becomes embedded in the organisation's ways of working (e.g. a best practices team, or a network of best practices co-ordinators).*The technical infrastructure for document sharing and databases.*The content management infrastructure to ensure that best practices are documented and classified electronically in a way that makes them easy to find.*A value system that supports and rewards sharingParticipants in Healthdata commit to the following values and characteristics:*Humility: regardless of how good you are there is always something to be learned from others.*Leadership mindset - learning is valued both from within the organisation and within the overall service.*Corporate citizenship - sharing with the broader community is a core value. Working together for health.*Knowledge management - is a key business resource: Adjust your mindset from \"Knowledge is Power so Hoard it to Knowledge is Power so Share it\".*Aspirations to be the best - search for excellence.\nOther important aspects: As with any knowledge management initiative, one must not forget the importance of motivation and culture. The ease with which good practices emerge and are shared depends on the culture of the organisation. If there is a \"not invented here\" culture, then good practices will be slow to emerge and spread, as each part of the organisation will defend its own way of doing things rather than learning from, and sharing with, others. Where people are generally encouraged to seek out knowledge and learning, best practices are more likely to emerge and spread. It is important to not to focus on capturing best practices for the sake of capturing them but there must be a focus on how they can be used to add value. Who are the users? What are their issues? What kind of knowledge do they need to perform better? How might they best assimilate that knowledge?Best practice resources requires to be actively promoted, otherwise we may end up with databases and people that are under-used and not fulfilling their potential. We must resist the temptation to focus on explicit knowledge - it cannot be emphasised enough that databases of best practices are insufficient. Databases point to examples and people, but it is through people that deep knowledge is transferred. Finally, in identifying services that have been particularly innovative in meeting specific healthcare needs, and encouraging them to share their experience so that others can benefit by using or adapting original ideas to suit their own circumstances we can avoid much rework and waste and achieve transformational change in system performance. We should not ignore the potential of this \"low hanging fruit\" in planning improvement strategies. If we could apply what we know to work, the opportunity for transformational change and improvement is within our grasp. See: www.health-data.info/ for further details.\n",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Purpose: - This article seeks to explore ways in which one can share and spread best practice, that have the potential for transformational change. It describes the cultural and behavioural mindset that is needed to make this happen.\nDesign/methodology/approach: - The overall approach is aimed at documenting the essential features of a best practice, giving pointers to relevant experts in that practice, deducing general guidelines, diffusing basic knowledge, and using subject-matter experts to apply and adapt the practices in a new context.\nFindings: - Best practice resources require to be actively promoted, otherwise one may end up with databases and people that are under-used and not fulfilling their potential. One should resist the temptation to focus on explicit knowledge; databases of best practices are insufficient. Databases point to examples and people, but it is through people that deep knowledge is transferred.\nOriginality/value: - The information provided in this article is the viewpoint of the authors, who are experts in the field. Hopefully, their views will give the potential for transformational change.\n",
"role": "assistant"
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] |
Proposed business and franchising models for primary care in Kenya
|
[
"Kenya",
"Franchising",
"Patient engagement",
"Physician recruiting",
"Retail clinic",
"Social franchising"
] |
[
{
"content": "Summarize the following paper into structured abstract.\n\nIntroduction: Upon becoming a republic and developing constitutional amendments in 1964, the Kenya government made a goal to promote and improve the health status of Kenyans by making healthcare effective, accessible and affordable. The main healthcare concerns in Kenya are: how to best deliver healthcare services and how to finance healthcare services in a way that makes them effective, accessible and affordable (Kimani et al., 2004). The public sector of healthcare in developing countries frequently lacks timeliness and hospitality towards patients, while the private sector can be inefficient and medically ineffective (Basu et al., 2012). In Kenya specifically, there is a lack of engagement between the private and public sectors. Because both sectors have successes and challenges of their own, engagement between the two may solve greater problems in a timelier manner and more effectively (Sood et al., 2011). The model presented in this paper is applicable to private and public healthcare institutions and can be implemented in a variety of settings.\nMethodology: Information to support our theoretical model were collected using PubMed and Google Scholar, as well as some governmental websites. Articles were selected based on their relevance to the healthcare market of Kenya, as well as their relevance to the RCC model. The focus of the search was twofold. Primarily, search parameters included business models that have provided evidence of financial success and sustainability in low-resource countries. Further, these models must be applicable (either in complete original format or in a piecemeal format) and transferable to meet the geographic, cultural and financial demands of this particular market. Second, literature that is informative from the perspective of current epidemiological trends, geographic and physical landscape considerations and cultural barriers was used to assess the feasibility of proposed business models for the production of health and access to primary care.\nModels for practice: Kaiser permanente - per member per month model\nProposed business model: franchising: In a business sense, franchising is a method of expansion with the benefit of risk-sharing. There is not a wealth of literature on healthcare franchising, but experts indicate it is becoming more and more common stateside and internationally (Daley, 2014). Countries such as India, Pakistan, South Africa and Kenya are currently leading the industry in healthcare franchising.\nProposed solutions and strategies for implementation of retail clinic concept: Physician shortage in rural Kenya and recruitment strategy\nConclusions: The RCC model, when implemented while considering the needs and wants of patients and physicians, can be successful in low- to middle-income settings. The model increases community engagement through franchising and market opportunities for local sellers and by increasing health awareness and healthy behaviors. By including communities in the development of the RCC, acceptance of the RCC will increase, and community members will be more willing to seek out healthcare from the medical center. This can lower burden of disease and spread of disease in high-risk areas. The model is applicable for urban and rural areas but specifics of each community must be considered when developing a new RCC. Including an insurance model with the RCC will improve the overall success and reach of the clinic.\n",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to present proposed solutions and interventions to some of the major barriers to providing adequate access to healthcare in Kenya. Specific business models are proposed to improve access to quality healthcare in low- and middle-income countries. Finally, strategies are developed for the retail clinic concept (RCC).\nDesign/methodology/approach: Google Scholar, PubMed and EBSCOhost were among the databases used to collect articles relevant to the purpose in Kenya. Various governmental and news articles were collected from Google searches. Relevant business models from other sectors were considered for potential application to healthcare and the retail clinic concept.\nFindings: After a review of current methodologies and approaches to business and franchising models in various settings, the most relevant models are proposed as solutions to improving quality healthcare in Kenya through the RCC. For example, authors reviewed physician recruitment strategies, insurance plans and community engagement. The paper is informed by existing literature and reports as well as key informants.\nResearch limitations/implications: This paper lacks primary data collection within Kenya and is limited to a brief scoping review of literature. The findings provide effective strategies for various business and franchising models in healthcare.\nOriginality/value: The assembling of relevant information specific to Kenya and potential business models provides effective means of improving health delivery through business and franchising, focusing on innovative approaches and models that have proven effective in other settings.\n",
"role": "assistant"
}
] |
Great expectations: Recruiting and retaining the Millennial generation
|
[
"Job satisfaction",
"Working conditions",
"Work values",
"Millennials",
"Work-life balance",
"School-to-work transition"
] |
[
{
"content": "Summarize the following paper into structured abstract.\n\n__NO_TITLE__: Everyone has to grow up and pass from childhood and adolescence into the adult world. But for each generation, the state of the world and the events they experience at a particular life stage are different. This affects how individuals see themselves and influences their social, cultural and work values. So for employers to recruit and retain the best people as they enter the workforce, they need to understand - and appeal to - the attitudes, values and aspirations of each successive generation.\nFrom baby boomers and Generation X to the millennials ...: The popular press and the academic literature regularly discuss differences in outlook between generations. They compare and contrast the outlook, values, preferences and even the personalities of workers from:\nThis generation takes longer to become adults: One feature of Millennial life is the length of time that many young adults spend growing up. Compared with earlier generations, more people in the developed world:\nMillennials have clear priorities on what they want from work ...: These factors prompted an investigation comparing the work values of pre-career and working Millennials. By contrast, some earlier studies on Millennials' work values were conducted exclusively on student populations - missing the opportunity to see if these changed as this generation began to work in their career.\n... and only a few change over time: Employers might like to think that, once in the workforce, Millennials would adjust their expectations as they encounter the realities of working life. Longitudinal studies of earlier generations reveal that they did change, though changes were not big or widespread. Extrinsic work values increased and intrinsic values decreased in importance for the Baby Boomers - and exactly the opposite pattern occurred for Generation Xers.\nWhat does this mean for employers?: Work values influence job satisfaction and organizational commitment, playing a key role in career decisions. Millennials also appear to have higher rates of job mobility compared with earlier generations, reportedly following their own values rather than those of the employing organization.\nComment: This article reviews \"Millennials' work values: differences across the school to work transition\", by Kuron et al. (2015). Unlike much earlier research, it separates out changes in work values attributable to life stage rather than generational effects. This enables the authors to offer advice to employers on the aspects of working life most important to the Millennial generation, as they first enter employment and on how these may alter as the Millennials progress in their careers.\n",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Purpose: This paper aims to review the latest management developments across the globe and pinpoint practical implications from cutting-edge research and case studies.\nDesign/methodology/approach: This briefing is prepared by an independent writer who adds their own impartial comments and places the articles in context.\nFindings: Everyone has to grow up and pass from childhood and adolescence into the adult world. But for each generation, the state of the world and the events they experience at a particular life stage are different. This affects how individuals see themselves and influences their social, cultural and work values. So for employers to recruit and retain the best people as they enter the workforce, they need to understand - and appeal to - the attitudes, values and aspirations of each successive generation.\nPractical implications: The paper provides strategic insights and practical thinking that have influenced some of the world's leading organizations.\nOriginality/value: The briefing saves busy executives and researchers 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"
}
] |
Measuring retail customer experience
|
[
"Retail experience",
"Scale development",
"Retail store",
"Emotion",
"Cognition",
"Consumer behaviour",
"Retailing"
] |
[
{
"content": "Summarize the following paper into structured abstract.\n\n__NO_TITLE__: Contemporary retailing has evolved from being a buying ritual in the exchange process to delivering a joyful shopping experience (Jin and Sternquist, 2004). It is described as an integrated series of events leading to a pleasurable, involving, relaxing, rewarding, delightful retail customer experience in the shoppers' life (Jones, 1999; Cox et al., 2005; Arnold et al., 2005; Backstrom, 2011). Past researches have largely approached retailing from shopping value (utilitarian and hedonic) perspectives (Babin et al., 1994; Jones et al., 2006; Kaul, 2007; Arnold and Reynolds, 2009; Carpenter and Moore, 2009). A number of studies have also focused on exploring the buying motives, store choice criteria and determinants of retail experience adopting economical, psychological and sociocultural approach (Terblanche and Boshoff, 2001; Burns and Neisner, 2006; Carpenter and Moore, 2009; Jain and Bagdare, 2009). Emergence of experience economy and experiential marketing have brought forth an experiential approach to retailing (Mehrabian and Russell, 1974; Holbrook and Hirschman, 1982; Pine and Gilmore, 1998; Schmitt, 1999; Grewal et al., 2009; Verhoef et al., 2009).\nCustomer experience: Customer experience has been mentioned, discussed and theorised by scholars and practitioners, mostly in the past three decades. In one of the earlier studies, Holbrook and Hirschman (1982) described consumption experience as involving various playful leisure activities, sensory pleasures, daydreams, esthetic enjoyment, and emotional responses. It was later defined as the aggregate and cumulative customer perception created during learning about, acquiring, using, maintaining and disposing of a product or service (Carbone and Haeckel, 1994). In a seminal work, Pine and Gilmore (1998) described experiences as \"economic offerings\" which are \"inherently personal responses occurring only in the mind of an individual who has been engaged on an emotional, physical, intellectual, or even spiritual level\". Berry and Carbone (2007) proposed that \"organisation needs to create a cohesive, authentic and sensory-stimulating total customer experience that resonates, pleases and differentiates organisation from the competition to build an emotional connection with customers\".\nRetail customer experience: Contemporary retailing is characterised by emergence and development of \"Experience Stores\" around the world (Verhoef et al. 2009, Jones et al. 2010). These retail stores act as retail theatre or experience factory for creating a pleasant shopping experience to improve customer satisfaction and loyalty (Baron et al., 2001). Terblanche and Boshoff (2001) defined retail customer experience as all the elements that encourage or inhibit customers during their contact with a retailer. Customers engage themselves into a variety of activities while selecting a retail store, shopping and post shopping stages, leading to a complete experience determining their satisfaction levels and repeat visits. There are enough evidences that retail customer experience has a significant impact on retail sales, satisfaction, more frequent shopping visits, larger wallet shares,loyalty, profitability, word of mouth communication, and image formation (Donovan and Rossiter, 1982; Lucas, 1999, Wong and Sohal, 2006; Grewal et al., 2009; Verhoef et al., 2009).\nDimensions of retail customer experience: Experiential outcomes have largely been explained as a combination of cognitive, emotional, behavioural and sensorial responses by the customer, however, hedonic and emotional benefits have been reported to play a more dominant role in shaping customers' experiences (Babin et al., 1994; Jones et al., 2006; Carpenter and Moore, 2009). In a study dealing with measuring emotional dimensions of shopping experiences, using the scales of Mehrabian-Mehrabian and Russell (1974), Izard (1977) and Plutchik (1980), it is reported that positive emotions are strongly associated with the shopping outcomes (Machleit and Eroglu, 2000). Earlier conceptualisations and characterisations of customer experience suggest retail customer experience can be described in four dimensions: Joy, Mood, Leisure, and Distinctive.\nMethodology: Scale development\nData analysis and results: The final data was analysed using Exploratory Factor Analysis technique for obtaining initial factor structure of Retail Customer Experience. Factors structure was further tested for reliability and validity using Cronbach's alpha and Confirmatory Factor Analysis. Results of the analysis are presented under sub heads.\nDiscussion: It has emerged from the results that retail customer experience is a multidimensional construct incorporating four dimensions - joy, mood, leisure, and distinctive. The first dimension, joy, is expressed with measurement items relating to satisfaction, pleasure, and engagement. Literature on retailing and customer experience supports that joy related elements are integral to the journey of the shopper. Customers expect to derive feelings of fun, fantasy, enjoyment and pleasure from shopping trip (Holbrook and Hirschman, 1982; Jones et al., 2006). Responding to the customers' evolving desires and increasing competitive pressures, creating a pleasurable experience has become imperative for retailers.\nConclusion: The present study was aimed at developing a reliable and valid measure of retail customer experience. Adopting the prescribed guidelines for scientific process of scale development, the study has conceptualised the construct of retail customer experience and developed a four dimensional multi item scale for its measurement. The scale is tested for reliability (Cronbach's Alpha and Composite Reliability) and validity (Content and Convergent). The construct is supported by other conceptualisations of customer experience, retailing and retail experience describing it as customer's cognitive, emotional, sensorial and behavioural responses produced as an outcome of interaction with retail clues during the entire buying process. The present measurement is different from earlier related measures on customer experience or retail service quality as it focus on capturing the experiential expressions of internal subjective responses produced as a result of living through moments in retail store (Meyer and Schwager, 2007; Schmitt, 1999). All the four dimensions (joy, mood, leisure, and distinctiveness) of retail customer experience are adequately supported by relevant theories and previous studies. In many previous studies, positive customer experience has also been found to be associated with customer satisfaction, loyalty, word of mouth communication, repatronage behaviour and perceived value. Therefore, the present study makes an important contribution by conceptualizing, developing and validating a measure for retail customer experience. This is a first step in the effort towards building a comprehensive framework for retail customer experience management.\n",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Purpose: This study aims at developing a reliable and valid measure of retail customer experience.\nDesign/methodology/approach: Scientific scale development process has been followed. Survey methodology was used to collect data. The results are tested for reliability and validity using Confirmatory Factor Analysis.\nFindings: The study conceptualizes retail customer experience as a reliable and valid multidimensional construct, explained in four dimensions: leisure, joy, distinctive and mood.\nResearch limitations/implications: It was confined to only \"brick and mortar\" personal lifestyle retail stores. Mediating and moderating effects of contextual variables and the influence of antecedents have not been studied. It provides insights into the \"delivered\" retail customer experience as perceived by the shoppers for future research.\nPractical implications: The scale can be used to measure the experiential responses of retail customers and provide directions for retailing strategies.\nOriginality/value: The study presents psychometrically valid scale to measure retail customer experience scale.\n",
"role": "assistant"
}
] |
Standardized food safety management: the case of industrial yoghurt
|
[
"Food safety",
"Quality standards",
"Dairy products"
] |
[
{
"content": "Summarize the following paper into structured abstract.\n\n1. Introduction: Dairy products traditionally constitute a prime source of human nutrition. Today, many dairy varieties are consistently consumed throughout the world either directly or as ingredients of other foods (e.g. pastries, pies, etc.). In this context, yoghurt, which is the focus of this paper, is a basic element of everyday nutrition in several South European and other countries. Note that, in recent years, the consumption of yoghurt and its derivatives follow a continuously increasing trend all over the EU (Tamime and Robinson, 2004; Valli and Traill, 2005).Because of their importance, the safety of dairy products has received particular attention by several official bodies. It is worth mentioning that the implementation of HACCP has been enforced to all EU members by the 92/46 directive (for dairy hygiene). Safety specifications were further enhanced by regulations 852/2004 and 853/2004 (Komorowski, 2006). It is partially due to such measures that most dairy products present good safety records in the EU. Nevertheless, occasional outbreaks involving Listeria monocytogenes, Salmonella spp., Escherichia coli and other pathogens have occasionally been recorded in some countries (examples for yoghurt are given in Varnam and Sutherland (1996) and Motarjemi (2002).Focussed on HACCP implementation, several studies have addressed various dairy products, such as: pasteurized or condensed milk (Dijkers et al., 1995; Ali and Fischer, 2002), a variety of cheeses (Mauropoulos and Arvanitoyannis, 1999; Arvanitoyannis and Mavropoulos, 2000; Evrensel et al., 2003) as well as milk cream and butter (Ali and Fischer, 2005). Possibly due to its robust nature, relatively few studies have addressed yoghurt production. Shapton and Shapton (1994) presents CCPs and a HACCP system for yoghurt with fruit and nut puree, while Varnam and Sutherland (1996) gives safety specifications for set and stirred yoghurt (see also Sandrou and Arvanitoyannis, 2000).All the above studies are based on the HACCP approach, as described by its seven principles in the Codex Alimentarius (Codex, 1993), which is referred hereafter as classical HACCP. The recent introduction of the ISO 22000 international standard (International Organization for Standardization - IOS, 2005a) has somewhat modified this approach; namely, by strengthening managerial elements and refining safety controls. Following established trends, ISO 22000 regards food safety as an integral part of a wider standardized management system. This approach is identical to that previously followed for addressing other specialized managerial (and technical) issues such as quality (ISO 9001), environmental management (ISO 14001), occupational health and safety (OHSAS 18001). In this context, an organization can voluntarily decide to implement ISO 22000 and then seek certification by an authorized certification agency, thus obtain an independent third party verification of its food safety practices effectiveness (very efficient marketing tool in certain occasions).The purpose of this paper may be described as follows. First, we present the main principles of the ISO 22000 standardized safety management system and provide practical guidance for the development of the associated safety plans. In doing so, we also describe the major differences between ISO 22000 and classical HACCP. Moreover, we provide specific interpretations of some of the ISO 22000 requirements that, as given in the standard, appear inconsistent and not directly implementable. In the absence of previous published research on this issue, this constitutes a first step towards its resolution. Second, we provide an ISO 22000 implementation scheme for industrial yoghurt, considering all major product varieties, namely set, stirred and strained (stragiston in Greek), with or without flavourings.The remainder of this paper is organized as follows. Section 2 briefly presents the ISO 22000 standard and the specified safety plans. It also discusses issues that are inconsistently described in the standard, providing interpretations necessary for successful implementation. Section 3 describes the product, identifies the major production processes and gives a process based typical production flow. Section 4 presents the hazard analysis considering all major production processes in turn. Section 5 presents in detail the proposed safety plan developed for industrial yoghurt. Finally, Section 6 discusses the main findings and draws conclusions with respect to ISO 22000 application in the food industry.\n2. Standardized food safety management: In this section we present the key features of the ISO 22000 standard, focusing on the main elements that differentiate it from classical HACCP. We also provide an interpretation of the standard specifications to determine the safety plans required for food safety implementation.2.1 Process-based system\n3. Product and production specifications: In this section we present the description of industrial yoghurt, including its intended use. This is followed by an analysis of yoghurt production flow, providing all the major specifications of the processes involved.3.1 Product and intended use\n4. Hazard analysis: We now present the results of the hazard analysis. Hazards are identified throughout the production chain presented in the previous section. Hazards (with references giving the associated critical limits) are presented in the order of the production flow.4.1 Raw materials receipt and storage\n5. Proposed safety plan: We now present the safety management plan for industrial yoghurt production, developed on the basis of the identified hazards in the respective analysis using the ISO 22000 logic. The plan consists of both O-PRPs and the HACCP plan given in Tables I and II respectively, while the corresponding CCPs are shown in Figure 1.Before discussing the plan, the content of the tables need to be explained. Both tables are similarly structured. Each row corresponds to a particular control measure imposed to reduce or eliminate one (or more) identified hazard. Each control measure has a given scope referring to a production process, only related with a particular CCP for the HACCP plan (according to ISO 22000). Turning to hazards, all are classified according to type: biological (B), chemical (C) or physical (P). Each hazard is related with one (or more) specific critical parameter for which the exact action limits are specified. These are developed on the basis of the hazards critical limits (given in Section 4) or the production process specifications (given in Section 3.2). Finally, each control measure is related with specific corrective actions, taken if any of the respective parameters is found out of control during implementation (see below).Another point for clarification concerns the control measures used in the plan and for which no specifications are given in ISO 22000. We have applied three general control measure types as outlined below:1. Process control. This is the continuous monitoring of a process during realization. It is applied in two different modes; direct and indirect process control. The first is the closed-loop version of process control that uses direct hazard measurements as control parameters. The second is the semi-closed loop version of process control and is applied when direct hazard measurements cannot be timely achieved. It implicitly assumes that, when process parameters (e.g. temperature) are at the required level, process hazards are under control.2. Acceptance control. Applies to batch-processes in order to control hazards associated with individual output batches. It takes place at the end of a process and leads to decisions for batch acceptance or rejection. Note that storage and raw materials receipts can be directly regarded as batch-processes for the purpose of safety control.3. Periodic verification. The regular conformance testing of products and processes which are under the control of suppliers or retailers. Respective specifications should be commonly agreed and fully outlined in the respective contracts. It primarily concerns hazards whose timely control by the production organization is not possible or with relatively low occurrence risk.We can now briefly discuss the proposed safety plan. As hazard analysis indicated, yoghurt is not really favouring the growth of most pathogens. In this context, most hazards to be controlled mainly relate with incoming raw materials not undergoing heat treatment or with substances (such as heavy metals and somatic cells) not affected by this process. Provided that heat treatment is effectively accomplished and appropriate storage conditions are maintained, few hazards (such as air-born pathogens and foreign bodies) may affect product safety (see also van Schothorst and Kleiss (1994), for a similar discussion).Referring to the proposed HACCP plan in Table I, all but three CCPs relate to raw material receipts and storage conditions. It is worth noting the two-level acceptance control scheme applied to incoming raw milk (CCP 1) and cream (CCP6). Thus, incoming supplies are first tested for temperature and only if found acceptable are other tests of these acceptance control measures conducted. Otherwise these supplies are directly rejected. A similar two-level scheme applies to the use of raw milk and cream after storage (CCP 2) where microbial growth is tested only in case where actual storage temperature has deviated from standard specifications. Also note that starter culture undergoes acceptance control before actual use (CCP 4), since pathogens may grow if storage conditions are violated. While most other controls of the HACCP plan are self-evident, it is worth clarifying the final product storage (CCP 8). Here an acceptance control is imposed after the product maturing period (that also acts as quarantine) just before shipment. This control is mainly associated with air-born pathogens not covered by previous control measures throughout production. The maturing period allows these pathogens, if present, to grow at detectable levels and so be eliminated.Turning to the O-PRPs in Table II, many relate to suppliers and the periodic verification of their conformance to agreed specifications. Of these, note those related to hazards that cannot be timely detected (O-PRP 1, O-PRP 2 and O-PRP 4) and whose control can best be achieved though the conditions that affect their occurrence, effectively at the first stages of the respective supply chain (i.e. in this case at the farm). It is finally worth addressing the programs related with logistics and retailing (O-PRP 5 and O-PRP 6). The first ensures the required conditions during transportation (particularly for long distances). The second imposes a control on retailers to ensure product safety at the retailers disposal.A final issue concerns the corrective actions in the proposed safety plan. Notice that all respective actions directly relate to ensuring product safety by effectively disallowing hazards propagation throughout the production flow. In fact, no other actions could have been prescribed at this level since this presupposes foreknowledge of all cause-effect relationships, not really available beforehand (see also Untermann (1999), for a criticism of the practice of including various prescriptive maintenance details in applications of classical HACCP). In the context of ISO 22000, if a hazard is identified, the exact causes need first be established and the appropriate actions decided according to causes though the established SOPs.\n6. Discussion and conclusions: The introduction of the ISO 22000 standard will eventually seriously impact food safety practices. According to the most recent official data (IOS, 2007), more than one million ISO 9001 and ISO 14001 certificates were awarded by the end of year 2006 worldwide, while yearly certification growth rates still remain high. Even allowing for the specialized scope of the food safety standard, if only part of these standardized management systems certification trends find application for ISO 22000, numerous food companies will sooner or later seek certification worldwide.It can be expected that the first candidates for implementing ISO 22000 will be companies already certified by the ISO 9001 quality standard. There are two main reasons for this. As it was previously found for environmental management, enterprises already certified for their quality system were the prime adopters of ISO 14001, effectively building on their experience with standardized management systems and the certification culture they have developed (see discussion in Lagodimos et al., 2007). Perhaps more important, however, is the chosen design for the ISO 22000 standard, which has adopted a structure (as well as systemic characteristics) virtually identical to those of ISO 9001. As a result, users of the later can easily integrate food safety within their quality system. A quick and effective method for achieving this is by treating food safety specifications as an additional element of product and process quality. Under this approach, operation according to ISO 9001 will implicitly satisfy the requirements of ISO 22000 implementation as well.One feature that differentiates somewhat ISO 22000 from other standardized management systems are the requirements for specific food safety controls. The standard has adopted and refined the regulatory specifications of classical HACCP, effectively introducing one additional level of operational control (i.e. O-PRPs) which, together with the HACCP plan, constitutes the respective safety plan. In the absence of an established state-of-the-practice for the implementation of these control specifications, this research effectively constitutes a contribution in this direction. Using a particular interpretation of the standard specifications, we provided a practical approach for deciding whether a hazard is controlled by the O-PRPs or the HACCP plan. This was subsequently applied for the development of the standardized safety plan for industrial yoghurt production.In doing so, we have considered all main varieties of the product (i.e. set, stirred and strained yoghurt) with or without fruit flavouring. Hazard analysis was based on a typical production flow which was presented in a generic form covering all product varieties and types. Following the ISO 22000 logic, assuming that the necessary PRPs to implement GMP and GHP safety requirements already exist, the hazards associated with all processes in the production chain are identified and its severity determined. After specifying the particular control measures required, the respective HACCP plan and O-PRPs are proposed.A final issue concerns the operationalization of the proposed safety plan in real manufacturing. By separating PRPs from operational control according to ISO 22000, the proposed plan is generic and can be applied to any yoghurt producer without or with only minor modifications, provided that the production flow used corresponds to that analyzed hereF. In this context, operationalization will primarily consist of defining the control measures details (such as analytic methods, sample sizes and sampling frequencies) and the development of the infrastructure necessary for implementation. If the food producer is already ISO 9001 certified, there is only need for determining PRPs (on the basis of technology and practices employed) and modify existing SOPs accordingly. Otherwise, there is also need for developing the SOPs to cover all ISO 22000 systemic requirements (highly unlikely to be done for the purpose of food safety alone).\n",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Purpose: - The recently introduced ISO 22000:2005 modified the classical HACCP approach by embedding food safety into the wider context of a standardized management system and refining the required safety control measures. There is little guidance regarding ISO 22000 implementation as well as inconsistencies regarding definitions and control measures specifications. This paper aims to provide a structured approach for the implementation of ISO 22000, applied to the case of industrial yoghurt.\nDesign/methodology/approach: - The approach consisted of two stages. The first primarily comprises the interpretation of the ISO 22000 specifications. The second includes the application of these requirements (as interpreted) to industrial yoghurt manufacture, considering all major varieties (set, stirred and strained) and types (with or without flavourings).\nFindings: - The paper reveals a managerial perspective of ISO 22000, overcoming existing inconsistencies for determining the necessary control measures, as applied to industrial yoghurt.\nResearch limitations/implications: - This research is limited to the case of industrial yoghurt considered. However, the methodology used is general and can apply to any other product.\nOriginality/value: - This paper provides an interpretation of ISO 22000, based on other standardized management system practices and widely accepted managerial principles. The findings can help in the development of the necessary state-of-the-practice tools to facilitate future ISO 22000 implementations, in conjunction with the ISO 9001 quality standard.\n",
"role": "assistant"
}
] |
Identifying work value patterns: cross-national comparison and historical dynamics
|
[
"Work values",
"Latent class analysis",
"Human resource management",
"Cross-national comparison",
"Patterns",
"Quantitative analysis"
] |
[
{
"content": "Summarize the following paper into structured abstract.\n\n1. Introduction: The concept of work values has gained more and more interest in organization and employment relations studies (Gahan and Abeysekera, 2009). Besides the analysis of the relative importance of specific work values in different countries, especially the question of work value change is highly relevant for international human resource management (HRM). It can provide HR managers with valuable information for customizing their instruments and incentives. In this regard, previous debates often concentrated on shifts from extrinsic values (e.g. income, security) to intrinsic values (e.g. to work independently), implicating that an increase in one dimension leads to a decrease in the other (Ester et al., 1994; Yankelovich et al., 1985). This is because many theorists and researchers assume that values are organized hierarchically in accordance with their relative relevance for an individual (Meglino and Ravlin, 1998). Against this view, it can also be assumed that single values are held independently from others (e.g. Kluckhohn, 1951; Klages, 2002). An individual's values could be equal in intensity and thus uniformly high or uniformly low (Meglino and Ravlin, 1998). If values are independent of each other, combinations of values can lead to different \"value patterns\" each representing a specific value constellation (Roe and Ester, 1999).\n2. Theoretical background: 2.1. Work values\n3. Data and method: 3.1. Data\n4. Results: 4.1. Pattern characteristics and covariates effects\n5. Discussion and conclusion: The empirical investigation identified four work value patterns: \"moderate demanders\", \"high demanders\", \"post-modern demanders\" and \"income and security demanders.\" By describing these four work value patterns, the findings strongly support the idea that there are systematic interrelations between different work values which constitute particular patterns. At the same time, it becomes clear that the dichotomy between extrinsic and intrinsic work values does not account for all of the heterogeneity of work value patterns. For example, moderate demanders rate job security relatively high only, while the other extrinsic aspects are less important. Also, for the income and security demanders pattern only two of the extrinsic work value dimensions are highly pronounced, while the importance of the third extrinsic aspect (career opportunities) is lacking. Accordingly, a definite extrinsic work value type cannot be found. Instead, there is much more heterogeneity which needs to be taken into account in future studies on work values and HR practices.\n",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to identify and characterize different work value patterns empirically. Furthermore, it is analyzed how these patterns are distributed in different countries and how they change in the course of time.\nDesign/methodology/approach: Latent class analysis as an advanced clustering procedure was applied. The empirical analysis is based on data from the International Social Survey Program from three time periods (1989, 1997 and 2005), covering five countries (USA, Great Britain, West Germany, Norway and Hungary).\nFindings: The analysis reveals four distinct work value patterns among employees: \"moderate demanders\", \"high demanders\", \"post modern demanders\" and \"income and security demanders.\" The affiliation to these patterns depends on gender, generational membership, education, occupation and nationality. The historical analysis reveals considerable variety in cross-national developments.\nPractical implications: The work value patterns identified have implications for recruitment, employee motivation and international HRM strategies. Management needs to be aware of work value patterns in the workforce in order to avoid mismatches and their negative consequences. If mismatch is unavoidable, the paper highlights the need to proactively manage mismatches between work value patterns and workplace situation.\nOriginality/value: The authors argue that different work values are not independent of each other. Instead, they seem to have systematic interrelations and exist in specific patterns. Accordingly different segments within the labor force can be characterized by specific combinations of work values. This is highly relevant because it could help to customize HR instruments and incentives.\n",
"role": "assistant"
}
] |
New study examines why bridge employees are underperforming and concludes they are demoralized by "unmet expectations"
|
[
"Self-determination theory",
"Unmet expectations",
"Bridge employees",
"Poor performance",
"Psychological contract theory"
] |
[
{
"content": "Summarize the following paper into structured abstract.\n\n__NO_TITLE__: The importance of bridge employment, which is when retired workers return to the workforce often in part-time roles, has grown rapidly in recent years. However, research has shown that the outcomes can be disappointing. A recent study from three academics at Canadian universities examined the existing research to examine why levels of personal satisfaction and work productivity are lower than expected. The researchers concluded that when the bridge workers' \"expectations\" of the working conditions were \"unmet\", it had a detrimental effect on their performance and morale.\n",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Purpose: The authors wanted to analyze why bridge employees have such a poor experience of coming back to work from retirement. Morale and performance are often disappointing.\nDesign/methodology/approach: The authors studied the existing research using the framework of two theories - self-determination theory and psychological contract theory. Both theories suggest that unmet expectations have a detrimental effect on bridge employees' performance and mood. The authors analyze what the returning workers' motivations might be and why bosses might be so poor at satisfying them.\nFindings: The previous research suggests that, apart from financial drivers, three factors are key. They are the need for personal fulfillment, the opportunity for mentoring the younger generation, and the need for meaningful social relationships. The research indicates that stereotypical views about older employees often hold organizations back from providing work that fulfills these needs.\nOriginality/value: Previous research has looked at the disappointing outcomes of bridge employment but has not analyzed why that might be the case. The authors of the present study use of the two theories to provide understanding of why bosses might be undermining the returning workers, who are often relegated to \"non-standard\" roles.\n",
"role": "assistant"
}
] |
Are all signals equal? Investigating the differential effects of online signals on the sales performance of e-marketplace sellers
|
[
"Consumer behaviour/choice/demand/empowerment/reviews/consumerism",
"Customer satisfaction/service",
"E-commerce (B2B/B2C/B2G/G2C)",
"E-tailing"
] |
[
{
"content": "Summarize the following paper into structured abstract.\n\n1. Introduction: E-marketplaces are online transaction platforms hosted by a third party to facilitate exchanges between sellers and buyers (e.g. Amazon and Taobao). They serve an increasingly important function in e-commerce. For instance, in China in 2013 over 60 percent of online retailing (worth about 180 billion USD) took place via e-marketplaces (Statistica.com, 2014). The staggering growth of e-marketplaces has been accompanied by intense competition among e-marketplace sellers. For example, more than nine million sellers were competing on Taobao, China's dominant e-marketplace, by the end of 2013. This represents an increase of nearly 50 percent from 2012. While millions of sellers grow their businesses by operating e-marketplace storefronts, potential customers still face the problem of information asymmetry, which deters them from purchasing (Bockstedt and Goh, 2011; Bolton et al., 2008; Ghose, 2009; Mitra and Fay, 2010; Schlosser et al., 2006; Wells et al., 2011). For sellers, the key to e-marketplace success is be better than competitors at addressing such information asymmetry, in order to entice customers to buy.\n2. Theoretical foundation: 2.1. Signaling theory\n3. Hypotheses development: Signals can be an important way for sellers to convince consumers of their product quality and persuade them to buy; however, prior studies have suggested that their effects may vary significantly, depending on consumer perceptions of signal cost (Srivastava, 2001). In the e-marketplace, buyers infer the quality of a product based on their perception of the cost of the signal to the seller. Accordingly, we examine the signal cost, as perceived by buyers, of each of the aforementioned five signals, and theorize their relative effects on the actual sales performance of sellers.\n4. Research methodology: This section describes our sampling method, operationalization of model variables, and data analysis results.\n5. Discussion and conclusion: 5.1. Discussion of findings\nAcknowledgements: This study was partially supported by the National Science Foundation of China (71072006 and 71371056), Program for New Century Excellent Talents in University, the Ministry of Education in China, and the Zhuoxue Program, Fudan University. The work described in this paper was also supported by grants from Centre for Social Media Marketing and Business Intelligence, City University of Hong Kong (Project No. CityU 9360147) and Hong Kong University Grant Council (CityU 142512).\n",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Purpose: In the competitive e-marketplace today, sellers are using an increasing number of signals to entice customers to make online purchases. However, how differential these signals are in terms of their capacity to improve sales performance has not yet been investigated. The paper aims to discuss this issue.\nDesign/methodology/approach: Drawing on signaling theory and grounded in the context of China's largest e-marketplace, Taobao, this study investigated the different effects of five commonly used signals on the sales performance of e-marketplace sellers.\nFindings: The authors find that warranty has the highest effect on sales performance, followed by overall rating, mean detailed seller rating, percent of positives, and web site quality.\nOriginality/value: First, this study builds on signaling theory and contributes to the e-marketplace literature by providing new insights into how specific signals differentially affect sales performance in the e-marketplace (with evidence from a large-scale empirical analysis). Second, the study extends the applicability of signaling theory to the e-marketplace domain by incorporating distinctive features of the e-marketplace into the original signaling theory. Finally, the findings lend practical support to e-marketplace sellers' investment decisions on signals and provide guidelines for deployment of such signals.\n",
"role": "assistant"
}
] |
Prioritizing warehouse performance measures in contemporary supply chains
|
[
"AHP",
"Fuzzy sets",
"Priorities",
"Performance categories"
] |
[
{
"content": "Summarize the following paper into structured abstract.\n\n1. Introduction: In today's business environment characterized by increasing globalization, intense competition and customer sophistication, firms continue to change their global business operations to improve overall performance. In this context, warehouse operations play a significant and critical role in achieving better performance through various improvement methods such as manufacturing postponement and centralized distribution (Nair, 2005; Tse et al., 2012), adopting autonomous vehicle-based storage and retrieval systems (Roy et al., 2012) and optimally coordinating and integrating the interrelated decisions of production sequencing and vehicle routing (Park and Hong, 2009). It is apparent that many smaller warehouses are being replaced by fewer large warehouses to realize economies of scale (de Koster et al., 2007). Furthermore, Bowersox et al. (2013) emphasize the need for integration of global manufacturing with logistics operations including service capabilities and transport support for efficient and effective business performance. The need for integration is exacerbated by increasing competition among businesses, in particular for maintaining required levels of competitive advantage through responsiveness, cost leadership and differentiation (Zailani and Rajagopal, 2005; Cagliano et al., 2006). In addition, businesses are faced with increasing trends of strategic partnerships, outsourcing, virtual logistics and green logistics (de Koster and Warffemius, 2005) for improving overall performance - implying the need for integrating global operations is much more needed than ever before.\n2. Literature review: Improving warehouse performance in global operations is a demanding task, particularly within an environment of increasing competition, customer sophistication and uncertainty in demand and supply in large supply chain networks. This is evident from recent trends in increasing demand for value-added services, automated processing and information technology (IT) (Min, 2006). In addressing competitive pressures of business, Nair (2005) claim that firms are adopting policies such as manufacturing postponement and centralized distribution to improve their operational performance. By using a conceptual model of operational policies and performance, the study of Nair (2005) shows that there is a positive relationship between operational policies and performance.\n3. Research methodology and data analysis: The proposed research methodology comprises of three stages. The main focus of the first stage was to determine the potential performance measures applicable in managing warehouse operations. This stage involved, content validity analysis using identification of performance measures from a comprehensive literature review on broader supply chain performance and categorizing those measures using Q-sort method (Rajesh et al., 2011) through interviews of practitioners involved in managing warehouse operations. The second stage involved prioritization of performance measures within categories using fuzzy AHP method. At the third stage, priorities/ranking of performance categories are validated using judgments of multiple decision makers. The three-stage research methodology outlined above is summarized and is presented in a schematic view as shown in Figure 1.\n4. Research findings: This section discusses the findings of our study from several perspectives. First, the study highlights the dominant performance measures in four dimensions using the literature review. Second, the study summarizes the reflections of practitioners about grouping performance measures under various dimensions. Finally, the study presents the findings of prioritization with respect to dominant dimensions and influencing performance measures.\n5. Discussions and conclusions: This study set out to achieve three key aims; first, to identify and categorize performance measures; second, to investigate and establish relative importance of individual performance measures within the context of performance categories; and third, to validate priorities of performance measure categories using judgment of multiple decision makers selected from three industries. Using integrated research methodology, the study was able to categorize 19 performance measures into four categories based on Q-sort analysis. Perhaps, the key issue is not the measures that were chosen but the measures that were not chosen by the experts. For example, if considering the \"financial outcome\" category, a number of seemingly important measures such as inventory obsolescence, maintenance cost, number of stock-outs and stock turnover were not selected. Clearly, all warehouse operations would incur a maintenance cost and would be subject to a stock turnover. In addition, depending on the organization and industry involved, obsolescence and stock-outs could be an issue. The exclusion of these measures could imply one of a number of things. First, it could imply that the costs associated with these measures are not large enough for the measures to be seen as important by the experts. Second, it may be because the importance of these costs could vary from industry to industry and, therefore, the collective perception of importance is not as high as the factors that were chosen. Third, it may be that some of the costs are \"hidden,\" not immediately obvious or are not perceived as attributable to warehouse costs. For example, stock turnover and obsolescence may have significant financial implications but can be argued to be \"hidden\" costs. However, the fact that they are also not associated with other performance categories (e.g. obsolescence and stock turnover may also affect resource utilization) raises an interesting question about the perception of performance measures and corresponding practices in the industry. Most of the measures that were not chosen are bottom line measures which may not influence process performance (Ganesan et al., 2009). The key suggestion here is that there is no clarity about why some performance measures are associated with certain performance dimensions and others are not. There may be several influencing factors such as individual company systems, industrial sector practices or even national cultures.\n",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Purpose: Due to the importance of efficiency and responsiveness measures rather than just efficiency measures, this research recognizes both measures when considering overall performance of warehouse operations. Thus, the purpose of this paper is to prioritize overall performance measures associated with warehouse operations in manufacturing, third-party logistics service provider and retail industry supply chains.\nDesign/methodology/approach: The study uses an integrated approach that involves the Q-sort method to group measures into four categories. Fuzzy analytical hierarchy process was then used to prioritize individual performance measures within each category and integer liner programming model was used to validate prioritized categories, using the judgment of multiple decision makers across three industries.\nFindings: The result shows that the financial category is a dominating performance category in managing warehouse operations across all three industries selected. Within the financial category, cost of insurance accounted for 25 percent of total weight of the category, and is considered to be a powerful measure. The financial category is verified by multiple decision makers across three industries, as the most important performance category.\nResearch limitations/implications: As part of adopting the proposed methodology in practice, it needs to be guided by overall methodology appropriate for industry-specific contexts.\nOriginality/value: Key novel aspects of this study are to categorize warehouse operations measures and analyze their perspectives in different industries, understand dominant categories of warehouse operations measures in the contemporary supply chain and finally to explore to what extent current practices lead to achieving efficiency and responsiveness in the selected industries.\n",
"role": "assistant"
}
] |
Do managerial ties support or stifle open innovation?
|
[
"Malaysia",
"Open innovation",
"High-tech industries",
"Managerial ties"
] |
[
{
"content": "Summarize the following paper into structured abstract.\n\n1. Introduction: Open innovation has captured the interest of academics and practitioners alike. However, despite its many benefits such as faster innovations, greater technology acquisition and exploitation and greater resources (Chesbrough, 2003b), adopting this model does not seem to be easy as several challenges beset the open innovation process.\n2. Explication of constructs: Open innovation\n3. Methodology: Sample and procedures\n4. Hypothesis testing: Table IV presents summary of the regression results. Instead of lumping together all the industries and testing the hypotheses in general, we tested all the hypotheses for each industry[1]. Since the data were collected from four industries, multiple regression was run four times. As is shown in Table IV, H3, hypothesizing a positive relationship between in-bound open innovation and ties with universities/research centers, is supported in all the four industries surveyed in this study. H5, hypothesizing a positive relationship between in-bound open innovation and ties with government officials, is supported in all the industries except in the Aerospace industry. In addition, H1, that hypothesized a positive relationship between in-bound open innovation and ties with managers at other firms, found no support in any of the four industries.\n5. Discussion: Managerial ties and in-bound open innovation\n",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Purpose: Research investigating the role of factors affecting open innovation remains scarce. The purpose of this paper is to examine the role of managerial ties in facilitating the two types of open innovation - in-bound and out-bound.\nDesign/methodology/approach: Data are collected using the questionnaire survey method from 339 middle and top managers working in four high-tech industries in Malaysia.\nFindings: Results show that in most high-tech industries in Malaysia, managerial ties with universities and with government officials facilitate in-bound open innovation, while ties with managers at other firms do not significantly relate to it in any high-tech industry. Further, managerial ties are not found to relate significantly to out-bound open innovation in any high-tech industry except in the aerospace and electronics industries wherein ties with government officials relate negatively and positively to out-bound innovation, respectively.\nPractical implications: This study provides empirical evidence about the managerial ties practitioners should and should not forge to succeed in the open innovation paradigm.\nOriginality/value: This study is probably the only study so far that gauges the impact of managerial ties on open innovation. The results of this study fill a major gap in the current open innovation theory besides providing insights for practitioners.\n",
"role": "assistant"
}
] |
A review of the North American Society for Sport Management and its foundational core: Mapping the influence of "history"
|
[
"Business history",
"Historical research",
"Management history",
"Organizational analysis",
"Sport management"
] |
[
{
"content": "Summarize the following paper into structured abstract.\n\n__NO_TITLE__: According to Chelladurai (2005) and Costa (2005), three items contributed significantly to the growth of sport management into its own academic discipline: the development of degree programs and academic standards; the production of peer-reviewed academic journals; and the creation of professional or scholarly associations. Within this, Chelladurai (2005) argued the presence of a professional or scholarly member association most importantly supports and maintains the maturation of a society because it provides opportunities for scholars and practitioners to exchange ideas, construct theory, engage in peer mentorship, and develop models and/or policies for self-regulation and member participation. To support this point, Costa (2005, p. 117) highlighted that Sport Management's academic growth in the mid-1980s was primarily buttressed through the \"founding of the North American Society for Sport Management (NASSM) in 1985\". Several other foundational textbooks (e.g. Crosset and Hums, 2012; Parkhouse and Pitts, 2005; Pedersen et al., 2011) and articles also highlight the significance of NASSM and its \"profound influence\" on the development of Sport Management as a stand-alone discipline (Pitts, 2001, p. 5).\nThe early foundation of sport management: The founding and development of sport management and NASSM was analyzed through use of the organization's historical documents currently housed at the Bowling Green State University. The organization's archives include a variety of organizational correspondence between founding members prior to NASSM's formation, executive council meeting minutes 1985 to present, and all drafts of the organizational operating and ethical codes, constitutions, and conference programs. Some documents in the archives also cover the creation of the Journal of Sport Management and identify key dissertations in the field. Additional archived items are digitized videos of multiple conference panel discussions in which the original NASSM founders review the organization's history and reflect on its early formation. Collectively, these sources were incorporated into the development and results presented. Interestingly, this work honors Carraher's (2012a, 2012b) call for more records regarding management history and the histories of significant people within a discipline. However, instead of the Academy of Management, this study examines a subdiscipline of Sport Management and NASSM.\nNASSM and sport management's foundational core: On September 20 1985, in Windsor, Ontario, Canada, Earle F. Zeigler, Robert Boucher, Janet Parks and Beverly Zanger met to discuss the possibility of regularly convening a group of sport management scholars and practitioners (\"Reflections,\" 1998). Within that meeting, their main objective was to create a community which might help establish a professional member association. Shortly after that initial meeting, Zeigler, Boucher, Parks, and Zanger invited numerous other sport management faculty members from Canadian and American institutions to join them for a follow up discussion on the item. Individuals included in that October 4 1985 meeting involved Gordon Olafson, Garth Paton, Zeigler, Carl Schraibman, Joy DeSensi, Janet Koontz, Ted Coates, and Rick Quain (\"Reflections,\" 1998).\nConclusion: Sport management successfully created a place in academia, away from other sport-related disciplines through the creation of an organization (i.e. NASSM) which sought to initially serve as an interdisciplinary location for a growing number of sport scholars centered on the management of its associated activities. Interestingly, the desire to be unique drove initial founders to increase \"legitimacy\" within their initial peer group by embracing \"history\" through some of its founding members. This work adequately provides evidence of this phenomenon. However, that same need for \"legitimacy\" was quickly replaced with a preference to fit in to the more well-respected management domains that featured an increasing fondness for quantitative based work. This too was also demonstrated in this work. Thus, NASSM has moved away from history and more toward quantitative methods as a result of individual choices and collective actions influenced by desires for social acceptance with a new peer group (i.e. management).\n",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Purpose: The aim of this paper is to explore the development of the North American Society for Sport Management (NASSM) and to map the foundation that specific individuals, historical works, and historians provided the founders of that organization and the field of sport management in general. The paper also aims to track the early beginnings of sport management and present sport as a viable area for business and management historians to conduct their research and discuss theory.\nDesign/methodology/approach: Following the initial work started by deWilde et al., this study drew on a wide range of primary and secondary sources and took an antiquarian and reconstructionist approach. Specifically, time-specific sport-related/focused dissertations, research articles, and archives from NASSM, along with published books and archives, were used to work toward the purpose of the study.\nFindings: This paper illustrates that some of the critical founding members of sport management and NASSM drew upon the training of historians, with special emphasis from business history, and reacted to specific prompts to create the field (i.e. sport management). \"History\" and trained historians directly impacted the field of sport management by helping to establish NASSM, the Journal of Sport Management, and graduate study programs, in addition to fashioning the first field accreditation standards and seminal textbooks needed to educate the generalist or specialist sport management student.\nResearch limitations/implications: This research only tracks the beginnings of sport management and focuses on the contribution of \"history\" toward its development. This work recognizes there were other influences that were critical to the development of sport management.\nPractical implications: Over time, sport management scholars have moved away from their small historical base and more toward true quantitative preferences. While this has helped the field gain some respectability within contemporary preferences, the re-utilization of historical methods and/or perspectives can help serve the future of sport management and business/management history research toward the study of emerging topics. Through collaboration sport management's leadership can realize the potential of the historical approach/orientation and management historians can enjoy another outlet to communicate their thoughts regarding management topics and theories.\nOriginality/value: The paper highlights that sport is rich in context and available to use for the study of management theory and behaviors.\n",
"role": "assistant"
}
] |
Openness and collaboration in the food sector: mapping the field
|
[
"Collaboration",
"R&D",
"Open innovation",
"Food industry",
"Networks"
] |
[
{
"content": "Summarize the following paper into structured abstract.\n\n1. Introduction: In recent years, both researchers and practitioners started to show interest in understanding the drivers of innovation and the features of new product development in the food and beverage (F&B) sector. Although significantly important for the economy, the sector is characterized by low investment in research and development (R&D) and a failure rate of new product launches that differs from other more promising sectors. Previous research dealing with food industry conducted within business and management fields has much focused on the determinants of innovation (Avermaete et al., 2004), its barriers and drivers (Kuhne et al., 2007) or consumer behavior (Siegrist, 2008). More recently, studies initiated explorations and discussions on the potential benefits that innovation approaches that have been applied and studied more often in other contexts could also add value to the field of food science and technology. Among others, the role of cooperation and alliances in the innovation activity (Ciliberti et al., 2015), industry-academia collaboration (Saguy, 2011) or the involvement of users in the innovation processes (Costa and Jongen, 2006; Olsen, 2015).\n2. Openness and collaboration: Institutional openness and its varied form of collaborations have become popular since Chesbrough (2003) introduced the concept of open innovation as the knowledge flow and collaboration across organizational boundaries. If companies have historically focused on creating and maintaining knowledge internally, the open-innovation paradigm describes the awareness that ideas and knowledge do not have to originate and stay only within the organization. As pointed out by Ollila and Ystrom (2017), this overall new approach to innovation, whether labeled open innovation, cross-industry collaboration, alliances or networks, it involves \"combining knowledge, technologies, and other resources across organizational boundaries\" (Ollila and Ystrom, 2017, p. 363). A decade later, research in this topic grew rapidly and the concept developed into an established research field (Gassmann et al., 2010). Its rise in importance is natural to understand: in a world where relationships and partnering become more critical for business, defining the most appropriate way to organize for innovation belongs to organizations' strategic agenda.\n3. Methodological approach: This paper attempts to review existing research related to institutional openness in the F&B sector. The author seeks to identify overarching themes that have been explored in the extant literature and compare it to the research conducted in the field in general. By doing that, the paper aims to understand the fragmented literature and identify possible perspectives where the food sector would benefit from further investigation.\n4. Framework: With the aim to further develop the open-innovation research field, Gassmann et al. (2010) found it useful to organize the growing body of literature into nine categories. These categories represent the extant research streams dealing with institutional openness and are summarized in Table II.\n5. Analysis and discussion: According to the classification presented previously in Table III, there is evidence that topics related to the system perspective (J) have attracted significant attention so far. The role that innovation systems and networks play in innovation is fairly well researched (e.g. Gronum et al., 2012; Rogers, 2004; Hanna and Walsh, 2002). The attempts to further analyze this topic in the food context are, however, comprehensible. The latest changes in the landscape of the industry and the external pressure for innovation outcomes have forced food companies to be aware of their resource gaps and see the external knowledge seeking as a possibility to close their competence gaps as well (Chesbrough and Crowther, 2006). Commonly known for being a sector characterized by low investment in R&D, collaborative innovation approaches open up new chances in the search for external capabilities and knowledge, especially for small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). Cluster organizations, networks and innovation systems play an important role in facilitating the access to this knowledge (Gellynck et al., 2007) and is apparently the area mostly being investigated so far having the food industry as a context (e.g. Beckeman and Skjoldebrand, 2007; Kuhne et al., 2007, 2013; Omta and Fortuin, 2013). Moreover, the possible benefits from alliances with universities and other research institutions (Saguy, 2011; Lazzarotti and Manzini, 2013a) in the development and use of technologies is believed to have a positive effect on the innovation performance of food companies.\n6. Conclusion and implications: This paper combines a systematic literature review with the application of an expanded open-innovation framework to map and analyze the extant research in institutional openness and innovation having the F&B sector as a context. The analysis suggests that open-innovation research in the food sector heavily concentrates on the role of clusters, networks and innovation brokers as enablers of innovation activity. This finding presents an interesting aspect, as recent reviews have highlighted the importance of incorporating network, user and communities' perspectives for the general advancement of research in the field of OI (Randhawa et al., 2016). The importance of outsourcing R&D activities and the establishment of alliances is also a topic frequent explored in this sample. Besides the importance of involving the customers in the early phase of opportunity recognition and product development, organizations in the F&B sector are also paying attention to the integration of suppliers, what has been less intensively explored in the general research in open innovation (Gassmann et al., 2010; Randhawa et al., 2016). As a result of the present analysis, the author argues that there are areas which require further investigation in the general area of open innovation, but where the research in the food industry would also benefit immensely. One important topic in this proposed research agenda is the managerial capabilities necessary for the implementation of open innovation activities, as well the formulation of strategies for that goal. Similarly, relevant seems to be the understanding of how firms open up their business models as they change their value chains and involve external actors to capture value from the innovation. The tools used by organizations to integrate outside knowledge are also an interesting opportunity for future research.\n",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Purpose: Research in institutional openness and collaboration-based innovation has advanced considerably in the last decade. The complexity and heterogeneity of innovation, however, turn the one-fits-all approach questionable and unveil the need to address several and different settings and industries. The purpose of this paper is to address this demand by mapping the themes covered in the research under the collaborative innovation umbrella having specifically the food and drink sector as a context.\nDesign/methodology/approach: The paper is based on secondary data sources, namely, a literature review of open innovation in the food and beverage (F&B) sector.\nFindings: This paper builds upon a framework to classify the extant research in open innovation in the food industry and position the advancements in comparison to the general literature in the field. The categorization of the publications shows that topics like the role of networks, innovation systems, user-innovation and research and development alliances have attracted mostly attention so far, but there is still a demand for deeper and more comprehensive investigations. The field would also profit from inquiries that deal with mindset and managerial capabilities, cross-industry partnerships, converging value chains and globalization of innovation, among others.\nOriginality/value: To the authors' knowledge, this is among the first papers to map research topics and research designs that have been covered to date on the field of open and collaborative innovation in the F&B industry.\n",
"role": "assistant"
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] |
Competitive analyses for men's clothing retailers: segmentation and positioning
|
[
"Segmentation",
"Correspondence analysis",
"Positioning",
"Menswear",
"Rasch tree model"
] |
[
{
"content": "Summarize the following paper into structured abstract.\n\nIntroduction: Due to the perception that fashion is a female-dominant industry, men's clothing has traditionally failed to receive as much attention from fashion practitioners and researchers as women's wear (Molloy and Larner, 2010). However, men have increasingly become a more involved demographic in contemporary fashion culture (Fibre2Fashion.com, n.d.). Traditionally, men's clothing was predominantly purchased for work-related practicality; formal attire was strictly purchased for corporate dress code while casual wear was reserved for the weekends. This norm is shifting with the rise of new age work environments and tech industries that are increasingly embracing more creative and casual wear (Bailey, 2018). More than ever before, male consumers desire to look fashionable (Lear et al., 2009) and want to shop for individual fulfillment (Gustafson, 2015). In particular, clothing sales from millennial male consumers are expected to grow significantly (Alvarado, 2016). In response to these trends, designers and brands have shown growing interest in this neglected market. However, the literature fails to reveal statistics about where men shop frequently and why.\nLiterature review: Retail patronage\nResearch gap: Previous research shows strong evidence that generation and store types can be important segmentation bases. However, relatively little is known about the menswear market. This study will fill this void by identifying target consumer segments of menswear retailers and positioning strategies that would attract each target consumer segment. To achieve this goal, we employed correspondence analysis (CA), a mapping technique that uses cross-tabulation data as input and converts the data into a joint space map (Greenacre and Hastie, 1987). A Rasch tree model will further test items of each factor in their relative importance to each of the store types and generations for shopping men's clothing. CA and Rasch tree model are relatively new in the retailing area and therefore will provide new insights into researchers and practitioners pertaining to segmentation and positioning strategies.\nMethods: Data collection and sample\nAnalyses and results: Using SAS 9.4 software, we conducted a CA with multi-way table to segment consumer groups based upon retail store type and generation, and to discover what retail attributes are reasons for shopping at the retail store they most frequently shop at. CA is a multivariate perceptual mapping technique that determines relationships among categorical variables and cases (Hair et al., 2009). The mapped variables allow researchers to identify and interpret consumer segments (Greenacre and Hastie, 1987).\nConclusions: The menswear industry has been growing steadily globally (Geoghegan, 2017) with the USA and Europe as major markets. In the UK, the forecast for 2015-2020 shows 4.1 percent sales growth for menswear compared to -0.9 percent for womenswear (Pragma, n.d.). In this increasingly competitive market environment, menswear retailers must determine ways they can compete with other retailer types to attract more customers. Retailers can accomplish this goal by segmenting existing customers via CA and identifying appropriate positioning strategies to further evaluate the market needs of each segment via GLM. They can also enhance their image by identifying their retail attributes that received low ratings and create strategies to improve on these key attributes. Furthermore, retailers could use segmenting and positioning techniques to analyze competitors' weaknesses to identify areas of opportunity within the marketplace. This study addressed these issues by identifying market segments of menswear based on store type and generation and further market positioning strategies based on retail attributes. The results of this study lend important theoretical and practical implications as follows.\n",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to identify men's clothing market segments based on store types and generational cohorts and the retail attributes.\nDesign/methodology/approach: A total of 2,808 US male consumer data from Predictive Analytics survey were analyzed with correspondence analysis (CA) (to identify segments based on store types and generations), general linear model (GLM) (to determine what retail attributes were important to target each segment) and a Rasch tree model (to test items of each factor in their relative importance).\nFindings: The CA produced three segments: Segment 1 (Gen Y male consumers who frequently shop at specialty stores), Segment 2 (Gen X males who frequently shop at discount stores and online stores) and Segment 3 (Baby Boomers and Seniors who frequently shop at department stores). GLM shows that fundamentals were important to all segments; experiential was most important to Segment 1, while promotion was most important to Segment 3. Rasch tree analysis provided specific information on retail attributes for each store type and each generation.\nResearch limitations/implications: Future research could employ both the importance and performance of retail attributes that are measured on a rating scale to understand consumers' attitudes toward each retail format.\nPractical implications: This study provided men's clothing retailers with current insights into the male consumer segments based upon generational cohorts and store types from which they can better develop appropriate positioning strategies to satisfy the needs of each segment.\nOriginality/value: This study addressed the men's clothing market, a growing but largely ignored market in the clothing industry and the retail literature.\n",
"role": "assistant"
}
] |
Obstacles of innovation and institutional support in the cooperation agreements: The Spanish case
|
[
"Incentives",
"Spanish firms",
"Cooperation agreements",
"Obstacles of innovation"
] |
[
{
"content": "Summarize the following paper into structured abstract.\n\nIntroduction: Cooperation for innovation between firms and institutions is becoming increasingly important because this can create reciprocal benefits for all parties involved and for society in general. Defined as the union of two or more parties, institutions or individuals, which jointly pursue innovation objectives (Doz et al., 2000; Serrano-Bedia et al., 2010; Milesi et al., 2017), cooperation for innovation has attracted considerable attention from academics, entrepreneurs and policy-makers since the pioneering work of Hagedoorn (1993). In addition, from the 1990s, scientific and technological policy in Europe, the USA or Japan has advanced decisively towards the promotion of cooperation in R&D and innovation projects between companies, universities and other research institutes (Takayama et al., 2002; Archibugi and Coco, 2004; Lopez, 2008; Abramovsky et al., 2009; Poutanen et al., 2016).\nLiterature review: Cooperation agreements and the obstacles for innovation\nEmpirical study: The unit of analysis in this research is the firm, and the data come from the PITEC. This survey has been conducted bi-annually by National Statistics Institute since 2001 and replicates for Spain the questionnaire used by the Community Innovation Survey, following the guidelines of the Frascati Manual and Oslo Manual (OECD, 2005) for using a standardised questionnaire. PITEC contains firm-level data and provides information about the company (e.g. employment, sales, geographic market and industry sector) as well as detailed information about its innovation activity (e.g. innovation expenditures, kinds of innovation output, cooperation between firms, public financial support, barriers to innovation and so on).\nResults and discussion: In accordance with PITEC, 43.1 per cent of 5,461 innovative companies have established cooperation agreements. From a descriptive point of view, Table I shows the percentage of companies that cooperate in product, process, organizational and marketing innovations. In general, approximately 50 per cent of the innovative developments were made through cooperation agreements. These results confirm that cooperation agreements are a key element of innovative developments, as noted in previous studies (Hagedoorn, 1993; Lopez, 2008).\nConclusion: The objective of this paper has been to analyze the effects of obstacles and institutional factors in the cooperation for innovation. These aspects have important implications both from a theoretical point of view and from a managerial perspective.\n",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to analyze the effects of obstacles and institutional factors on the cooperation for innovation. The collaboration between different types of organizations has been seen as a strategy that allows the firms to obtain reciprocal benefits, and that incentivises innovation. However, following D'Este et al. (2012) and Antonioli et al. (2017), the authors assume that the decision to cooperate is perceived as a strategy to overcome the obstacles and barriers of the innovation process.\nDesign/methodology/approach: The authors analyze these questions in the frame of the PITEC-2013 data that covers the period 2012-2013 and includes 5,461 Spanish innovative companies.\nFindings: The results support that an important drive for the firm's cooperation is to overcome the obstacles of the innovation process. Moreover, the type of partner for cooperation is influenced by the different perception that those companies have on the obstacles to innovation. Additionally, results contribute to the regional literature with new empirical evidence to characterize regions in terms of innovation. Such factors shed new light about the intensity of regional innovation and variables of the cooperation pattern.\nOriginality/value: Considering that a fourth of the Spanish companies develop technological cooperation agreements (PITEC, 2013), it is still observed that the level of cooperation and their results are lower with respect to other countries in the environment, therefore to analyze the role of cooperation agreements, evaluating the factors that characterize the dynamics of these agreements, is a critical research question for the Spanish economy.\n",
"role": "assistant"
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] |
Understanding the relationships between social media influencers and their followers: the moderating role of closeness
|
[
"Social media",
"Closeness",
"Celebrity branding",
"Influencers"
] |
[
{
"content": "Summarize the following paper into structured abstract.\n\n__NO_TITLE__: Influencers - they're the best thing since sliced bread. But forget bread; they're selling like hot cakes. They're creating huge returns, and they're only set to keep growing!\nIntroduction: From unknown to well-known, social media influencers are changing how marketing is conducted and how consumers interact with products and services by launching themselves on social media as relatable and accessible experts. These social media influencers create a new marketing tool for brand managers. Brand managers considering a digital marketing strategy need to understand the importance of social media and the significant role it plays in communicating with current and potential customers. While companies are shifting their marketing budgets away from traditional mass media advertising channels, such as print and radio, social media has become a cost-effective and viable alternative for brand managers to quickly reach more targeted and specific market segments (Phua et al., 2017). Social media is not only a popular channel for companies to advertise their products, but it is also home to a growing population of social media influencers.\nConceptual background: Influencer marketing and social media influencers\nMethodology: An online survey was developed and distributed via Qualtrics to 301 respondents. The majority of the respondents who completed this study were students in upper level business courses at two large state universities (one in the south and one in the west) and received extra credit for their participation. Other respondents were asked to volunteer to participate via snowballing technique, which has been adopted in prior academic research (Brady et al., 2012). The students were asked to complete the online survey themselves and then to recruit up to five friends to participate in the survey in exchange for extra credit points. A total of 74 respondents who answered \"no\" to the question if they follow a celebrity or influencer via a social media platform were removed from analysis. In total, 26 respondents failed an attention check question, resulting in a final sample of n = 201 for analysis (55% female; 69.2% Caucasian, 11.9% Hispanic/Latino, 10% African American; Mage = 22.61, SDage = 4.61).\nMeasures: Independent variables\nResults: Relationships among study variables\nGeneral discussion and implications: Social media has fundamentally changed the way consumers get their information and how they interact with brands and companies. Consumers are turning to social media for information and relationship building with brands in new ways (Hair et al., 2010; Booth and Matic, 2011). Consequently, companies are shifting their marketing budgets away from traditional marketing channels and pursuing relationships with social media influencers (Phua et al., 2017). Influencer marketing is considered an effective strategy that uses the influence of key individuals to increase consumer brand awareness and purchasing behavior (Ahmad, 2018). The rapidly growing number of social media influencers, and the transformation of regular individuals into social media influencers, create the need to better understand how consumers engage with social media influencers. Further, more research is needed on how social media influencers can effectively manage their human brands. The focus of this research is on the role of influencer characteristics of attractiveness, likeability and similarity and how perceptions of closeness affect attitudes and behavior. The increase in the number of social media influencers online, as human brands, supports the importance of this research. This research expands the knowledge about consumers' perceptions of influencers on social media, including the role of closeness on consumer and influencer relationships.\nLimitations and future research: This study exploring consumers' attitudes and perceptions of social media influencers is not without limitations, but the findings do provide additional opportunities for research. First, the primarily college student sample limits generalizability to the general public. While millennials have been found to follow more social media influencers than other generations, extending the study to a more diverse age group would strengthen the contribution.\nConclusion: This research examined the role of likeability, attractiveness and similarity and the effects of closeness on attitudes, WOM and purchase intentions. This study found that closeness serves an important role in attitude toward the influencer and purchase intentions and should be carefully considered by brand managers and social media influencers. In the future, research assessing the impact of closeness on other known predictors of attitudes and behaviors and advertising effectiveness would assist social media influencers in their effort to more effectively manage their human brands and brand managers in their effort to better identify effective social media influencers. The growth of social media sites and the persuasive personalities of social media influencers are reshaping consumer relationships with brands in ways that are changing today's consumer-brand dynamics.\n",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to better understand the role of closeness and the relationships between social media influencers and their followers, and, more specifically, how social media influencers can effectively manage their human brands.\nDesign/methodology/approach: Two studies were conducted to explore social media influencers. Qualitative content analysis and modeling with path analysis were used to analyze the data.\nFindings: Results found attractiveness and likeability to positively predict attitudes toward the influencer, word-of-mouth and purchase intentions, whereas similarity only predicted word-of-mouth from the follower. Closeness served as a moderator but had different effects. Closeness positively moderated the effect of attractiveness on purchase intentions; however, it had a negative effect with similarity on purchase intentions. Moreover, closeness moderated the effect of likeability on attitude toward the influencer.\nResearch limitations/implications: This study was limited by the student sample as well as the students' self-identification of a social media influencer. Future research should include experimental design manipulating well-known/followed or fictional social media influencers on different social media.\nPractical implications: This paper explores the characteristics of social media influencers as well as the potential outcomes associated with influencers on social media. The implications for marketers and advertisers include a better understanding of how consumers engage with influencers on social media.\nOriginality/value: The role of closeness is identified as a moderator of consumers' behaviors toward social media influencers.\n",
"role": "assistant"
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] |
Leadership management: Why educators should plan their courses carefully
|
[
"Leaders",
"Managers",
"Education",
"Leadership",
"Strategic management"
] |
[
{
"content": "Summarize the following paper into structured abstract.\n\n__NO_TITLE__: With the aim to beat off increasing competition for the key roles in business, more and more people are applying for educational business courses, from the high school course to the MBA. It is sometimes difficult to know just what the relative benefits of these courses are, and how they will lead to real progression back in the business world, given that there are now so many. But of course education is a business too, and marketers for business courses are well tuned into to how to best sell their courses.\nComment: This is a review of \"The re-branding of management development as leadership development - and its dangers\" by W. David Rees and Christine Porter. The article considers the implications of the increasing emphasis on leadership as opposed to management education and development. The authors argue that though there is considerable overlap between management and leadership, rebranding to highlight leadership at business schools leads to unrealistic expectations and, sometimes, inappropriate training. They identify four concerns in particular: undue emphasis on generic qualities, not distinguishing between process and task leadership, confusion about pathways into leadership and management, and seeing too sharp a distinction between operational and strategic management.\n",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Purpose: - This paper aims to review a paper on the potential dangers of the current rebranding process in business education, which is emphasizing leadership over management.\nDesign/methodology/approach: - This briefing is prepared by an independent writer who adds their own impartial comments.\nFindings: - With the aim to beat off increasing competition for the key roles in business, more and more people are applying for educational business courses, from the high school course to the MBA. It is sometimes difficult to know just what the relative benefits of these courses are, and how they will lead to real progression back in the business world, given that there are now so many. But of course education is a business too, and marketers for business courses are well tuned into to how to best sell their courses.\nPractical implications: - Gives four specific points for educators and employers to think about when it comes to business leadership courses.\nOriginality/value: - The paper offers a timely and necessary counter-balance to the bandwagon effect of the use of the term leadership in the generic area of management education.\n",
"role": "assistant"
}
] |
Knowledge management in monastic communities of the medieval Irish Celtic church
|
[
"Knowledge management",
"History",
"Religion",
"Ireland"
] |
[
{
"content": "Summarize the following paper into structured abstract.\n\nIntroduction: The purpose of this paper is to consider the management of knowledge in the early medieval Irish Celtic church as a means of improving our level of reflexivity in relation to contemporary knowledge management (KM) theorising and practice. I argue here that the emerging field of KM has largely ignored its deep historical background and in so doing it has lost a key learning opportunity. While clearly entering new waters, KM theorising and practice is also traversing old ground (Burrell, 1992). It is this \"old ground\" that I want to highlight and reflect upon here. The paper uses the historical case of early Irish monasticism to present a loosely framed \"church metaphor\" of KM focusing on three interrelated viewpoints:1. KM as the development and usage of pragmatic skills;2. KM as the development, cultivation and control of an intellectual elite; and3. KM as control and social positioning.These viewpoints are presented as important historical inputs in current debates with the field of KM.I argue in this paper that the medieval monks were subjected to and engaged in a systematic process of KM. This stance requires immediate justification before progressing in the paper. A precise definition of the term KM is difficult to pin down as it is acknowledged to encompass a wide array of tasks and activities - technological, cognitive and social - in and around the creation, acquisition, sourcing, mapping, measuring, sharing and protection of knowledge (Nonaka and Takeuchi, 1995; Davenport and Prusak, 1998). Indeed, Alvesson and Karreman (2001, p. 1004) go so far as to suggest that the broadly defined term can mean almost anything. To avoid the problem of using a meaningless label, the definition of KM adopted here follows that proposed by Tsoukas and Vladimirou (2001, p. 990):(Knowledge Management is) ... the dynamic process of turning an unreflective practice into a reflective one by elucidating the rules guiding the activities of the practice, by helping give a particular shape to collective understanding, and by facilitating the emergence of heuristic knowledge.The \"heuristic knowledge\" mentioned here is the informal, improvisational knowledge generated in action that operates alongside formal organizational knowledge. It is in this narrow sense that I argue that the medieval Irish monks were subjected to and engaged in a deliberate process of KM. Through a range of systems and practices, they developed an unreflective practice into a reflective and collective one, gradually unveiling and making explicit the governing rules and principles, shaping collective understanding in a very deliberate manner. The heuristic knowledge they developed among themselves is most clearly seen in the numerous accounts of the highly tacit and improvisational activities of the wandering Irish monks as they spread across Europe (O'Croinin, 1995).A final introductory note of importance is that the following description and analysis of KM within early Irish monasticism is not designed to present an idyllic pre-modern recipe for contemporary problems, for, as Kieser (1994, p. 619) correctly points out, history does not repeat itself. However, in adopting a retro or deep historical approach, duly contextualised, it may act as a catalyst for imaginative reconceptualizations, providing interesting viewpoints and contrasts from which to consider and question current practices and future trajectories within the emerging and contested field of KM (Wensley, 2002). By focusing on the somewhat hidden history of early medieval Irish monasticism (at least for a management and organization studies perspective), an historical voice and a pre-modern sensitivity is brought to bear on the KM concept.\nMethodology and approach: The use of history in organization and management studies remains an under-utilized and under-explored resource (Tsoukas and Cummings, 1997; Burrell, 1997; Clark and Rowlinson, 2004). While facing a range of methodological and epistemological challenges (Kieser, 1994; Fear, 2001; Rowlinson and Carter, 2002), the use of historical interpretation to improve reflexivity and provide new perspectives into contemporary developments holds considerable promise. In following and fostering this \"historical turn\" in organizational and management studies, the focus of this paper is the early medieval Irish Celtic church between the sixth and eleventh centuries. This hybrid organizational model has witnessed an increasing appreciation across a range of fields of the sophistication of its mode of organization and of the multifaceted nature of the work of its ecclesiastical intelligentsia (Sharpe, 1984; Etchingham, 1999, p. 1). During this period, a period typically referred to as Ireland's \"Golden Age\" (O'Croinin, 1995, p. 196; Cahill, 1995), Ireland was a significant contributor to the re-establishment of organized religious, intellectual and cultural life on continental Europe in the early middle ages, providing a crucial stimulus to the Carolingian revival in Europe during the seventh to ninth centuries (Bieler, 1966; O'Corrain, 1995). While leaving an enduring intellectual legacy, the early Irish Celtic church had largely disappeared as a distinct organizational grouping by the end of the twelfth century as a result of a range of internal and external changes and reforms.In terms of methodology, the case presented in this paper conforms to what Skocpol (1984, p. 362) refers to as \"the use of concepts to develop a meaningful historical interpretation\". This approach pays careful attention to the culturally embedded intentions of the actors in the given historical setting under investigation. By increasing the visibility and understanding of one structure or process by contrasting it with another, it tries to develop arguments that are culturally and politically relevant to the present (Skocpol, 1984, p. 368). Such an approach, more metaphor than theory (Skocpol, 1984, p. 372), typically fails to meet the \"normal\" standards of causal validity and generalisation. However, it is important to note that the approach does not set out to meet these standards in the first place. The paper relies almost exclusively on secondary source data and interpretation and can be seen as an integration of the interpretation of others. This material was used in a cautious, sensitive and critical manner with viewpoint confirmed across a variety of disciplines (history, Celtic studies, feminist studies, and archaeology) and with due regard for revisions within the literature (Etchingham, 1999). The intention of the study is not to contribute to or reinterpret existing knowledge of this historical period but to gather and integrate existing documentation and to use it as a lens to examine contemporary events. Owing to the limited and changing nature of knowledge on early Irish monasticism, what is presented here can only be seen as a provisional, imperfect though reasoned interpretation of activities at that point of time drawn from the studies of others.\nKnowledge societies, knowledge management and the neglect of history: The concept of an information or knowledge society (Bell, 1973; Castells, 2000) is an issue that continues to exercise much sociological, political and, more recently, management discourse. While clearly a contested concept (Kumar, 1995; Webster, 1995), the debates over the emergence of and nature of a knowledge society have captured the idea of a complex and simultaneous coalescing of advanced information and communication technologies, of the increasing irrelevance of time, distance and place, of a growing concern with symbolic or knowledge-based inputs and a general increase in indeterminacy (Stehr, 1994, p. 158). This portmanteau concept (Blackler et al., 1993, p. 853) has, in turn, blended seamlessly into the equally contentious managerial and organisational literature on knowledge work, knowledge workers and the knowledge-intensive firm (Starbuck, 1993; Alvesson, 2001; Maister, 1997).A common theme running throughout the knowledge society literature is the strongly contemporary and technologically rooted nature of the concept. One exception to this tendency is Stehr (1994) who notes the enduring historical significance of knowledge as an organizing principle and basis of authority (e.g. the Tora-Knowledge of ancient Israel and the religious, astronomical and agrarian knowledge of ancient Egypt) (Stehr, 1994, p. 9). In keeping with this theme, I suggest here that Ireland, during its \"Golden Age\" represents an equally interesting example of a distinctive though elitist pre-modern knowledge society. Central to this society was the gathering, development, preservation and dissemination of a peculiar mix of ecclesiastical and secular knowledge, in large part, by the monastic communities of the early Irish Celtic church.Turning to the contemporary KM literature, one finds, with some notable exceptions (Nonaka and Takeuchi, 1995; McInerney and LeFevre, 2000; Fuller, 2002), that most discussion is clearly ahistoric. The phenomenon is clearly rooted in the information explosion of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century (McDermott, 1999). While the contemporary knowledge epoch has some clear differences compared to periods in the past (Stehr, 1994), as do pre- and post-enlightenment conceptualisations of knowledge (MacIntyre, 1981; Wilber, 2001), this paper takes issue with the bland linearity of many of the claims concerning the relatively recent emergence of \"knowledge work\" and the closely associated set of managerial activities encompassed under the term KM.\nManagement of knowledge within early medieval Irish monasticism: While the monastic component of the Irish Celtic church and their internationally recognised schools remained a distinct and rigorous one, the success of the church rested on the totality of the arrangements and not on any one specific component. Irish monastic communities followed the general monastic model of monasticism \"Militia Christi\" and the monk as \"miles Christi\". Their mission was to secure eventual entry into everlasting life and this was ensured through the pursuit of moral and religious perfection while on this earth (Ryan, 1931, p. 407). The operationalisation of this mission and the primary motivation underlying much of the daily life of a monk focused on the learning, perfection, and protection of Christian religious knowledge. In an unusual approach for a strongly anachoretical system, the Irish monks saw their role as one of applying this knowledge for the benefit of the wider Christian community and engaged in extensive apostolic travels across Europe.Monastic intellectual centres and their curriculum\nDiscussion and conclusions: This paper has aspired to highlight the importance of looking to the past, a retro-view (Burrell, 1997), as a means of enriching current debates about KM. In their reflections on the contemporary field of KM Chumer et al. (2000, p. xvii) pose the questions \"Why knowledge? and Why now?\". While clearly important questions for contemporary debate, this paper suggests these questions need to be rephrased in light of history. A more appropriate format may be \"What form of knowledge now? And To what purpose now?\"In this historical case study we see a deliberate, top down process of KM where an elite, educated set of knowledge workers were encouraged to deepen their powers of reflexivity and selectively share knowledge within an environment of life long learning. They practiced a sophisticated system of KM in a manner that encompassed, but was also more than just the creation of, good social relations and a positive learning environment (Brown and Duguid, 1991; Fuller, 2002, p. 8). The story of early Irish monasticism presents a number of discrete viewpoints from which to consider the nature and in particular the history of KM. These interrelated viewpoints are explored briefly below and strike me as pertinent and largely under-explored issues within contemporary KM debates.KM as the development and usage of pragmatic skills\n",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Purpose: - This paper aims to use the case of early medieval Irish monasticism to highlight the implicit a historicism of the knowledge management (KM) literature and to show how such a historical study can be used to increase the level of discourse and reflection within the contested and increasingly fragmented field of KM.\nDesign/methodology/approach: - The author uses secondary source analysis from a diversity of academic fields to examine the relatively sophisticated processes through which the monks gathered, codified, created, interpreted, disseminated and used religious and secular knowledge. The author then draws out a number of insights from this literature to aid current thinking on and debates within the field of KM.\nFindings: - The paper presents a church metaphor of KM operating at two levels. Internally the metaphor highlights the deliberate but politically contentious nature of knowledge creation, a process of developing both explicit and tacit knowledge among the monks, revolving around ideologies and cults, and primarily concerned with the avoidance, constraining and settling of controversies and debates. Externally, the metaphor highlights the political use of and the mediation of access to knowledge for the purposes of social position and influence.\nOriginality/value: - This paper is original in providing a detailed consideration of KM activities within a specific early medieval historical context and in drawing from the study to contribute to current thinking within the field of KM.\n",
"role": "assistant"
}
] |
A three dimensional knowledge management framework for hospitality and tourism
|
[
"Knowledge management",
"Human capital",
"Knowledge transfer",
"Hotels"
] |
[
{
"content": "Summarize the following paper into structured abstract.\n\n1. Introduction-knowledge management and tourism: Up until the late 1990s the longer-standing economies strived to be competitive through the best allocation of traditional resources such as: land, labor and capital. In the new economy one of the primary factors of production is knowledge and not machinery or financial capital as in the old industrial economy. This coupled with the fact that the main value driver comes from services and not from goods, means that the sources of competitive advantage are intangible and not tangible assets (Grant, 2000, p. 27; Caraca, 2004). After the publication of the \"1998/99 World Development Report on Knowledge and Development\" (World Bank, 1999), the bridging of the knowledge gap and the digital divide between and within countries has become a priority (Evers, 2005). The market crisis of 2007 has already changed the modus operandum of economic activity for ever forcing new business models to evolve. In order to survive, some of the new emerging global economies are transforming into \"knowledge economies\" (Chen and Dahlman, 2009). In these economies knowledge is used strategically to develop intelligent action (Zeleny, 2005) as part of competitive activity within companies and as part of anticipatory policy making in governments (Loveridge and Street, 2005). According to leading knowledge management (KM) thinkers (Sveiby, 2001; Spender and Marr, 2005), KM is entering its third stage in its evolution. This stage has a social perspective orientation and is concerned with the generation and sharing of new knowledge. The complexity and relative newness of this stage has undoubtedly created opportunities for new KM model development.Grant in his book, Shifts in the World's Economy (Grant, 2000, p. 27), outlines some of the reasons that have led academics, managers and government officials to focus on knowledge management models. According to Grant, communications enable rapid and expanded networking, which has improved the potential for coordinated action and collaboration not only between companies, but also between industrial sectors, regions and even countries. Moreover, he stresses that economies are subject to rapid change, primarily due to information being readily available through the new communications technology. Such speed and movement he argues results to more discerning customers and the curtailment of product/service-life cycles.At a micro level, almost a decade earlier Drucker (1993) in Post Capitalist Society, introduces the idea of the knowledge worker and the knowledge intensive firm. Company employees that drive organizational performance and success through the effective use of the knowledge they possess are defined as knowledge workers (McFarlane, 2008). Knowledge workers are key to a company's survival as they are expert users of technology and networks. Knowledge workers in a conscious and multitask fashion use these tools in order to generate positive action from new information and in turn, increase their company's productivity (Kaplan and Norton, 2004). They, in essence represent a company's human capability. In other words, knowledge workers embody human capital that has been transformed into unique human capability. In this light, Spender (2006) defines knowledge management as the process of creating a common pool of knowledge which essentially represents the sum of the employees\" intellectual capital. When the pool is properly managed then it promotes the more economical achievement of a company's objectives.Companies that employ a relatively high percentage of knowledge workers and consider knowledge as being central to their competitive strategy are defined as knowledge intensive companies (Miles, 2005). Knowledge intensive companies make maximum use of their intangible assets (explicit and tacit), work smarter by learning from past experiences, operate through networks (Zeleny, 2005) and create new knowledge which transforms into innovation. The workforce of a knowledge intensive company generates \"smart\" action and is better at anticipating future environmental changes. The service industry and tourism organizations in particular are characterized by the existence of a high human element and have the potential to operate as knowledge intensive companies.Nevertheless, while knowledge is from the outset considered to be \"the one sure source of lasting competitive advantage\" (Nonaka, 1991; Caraca, 2004), tourism as an industry has been slow in adopting knowledge transfers (Cooper, 2006). As Buhalis and Cooper (1998) observe, tourism lags behind other industries due to a strong lack of synergy between KM researchers and tourism practitioners and this appears to be a challenge. Also a challenge is the issue of identifying an alternative competitive strategy for tourism's underperformers. Especially for niche markets such as tourist destination islands which are long lagging behind competition due to their insistence on the three S's, \"all-inclusive\", mass tourism model (Briassoulis, 2003). Facing up to these two challenges, the latter part of the paper explores how tourism companies on islands can best use intangible assets and knowledge per se, in order to increase their market adaptability, become more intelligent and develop unique, difficult to imitate capabilities.The aim of this paper is to make a contribution to tourism management thinking by combining the relatively newer discipline of knowledge management (Darroch, 2003) with the well-established disciplines of business strategy and marketing. The paper's novelty therefore lies upon its knowledge-based and multidisciplinary perspective. Through this approach we develop a conceptual framework that introduces a competitive niche strategy for tourist destination islands. Therefore, the proposed KM framework expands on other frameworks, through its multidisciplinary approach and is possibly the first attempt to build a KM construct especially for the service industry. To date even the more recent KM studies have limited their theoretical focus to one dimension (Serenko and Bontis, 2004).The proposed framework interconnects the management of employees' knowledge and the management of tourists' experience. For the purposes of this study we define \"employees' knowledge\" as part of the company's internal knowledge and \"tourists' experience\" as part of the tourism company's external, market knowledge. The conduit in the proposed framework is a KM system that manages both internal and external knowledge, holistically. The extrovert characteristics of the system (external knowledge management), can have a major impact on thinking about and anticipating the future needs of tourists (Van der Meulen, 1999), thus placing the company in an advantageous position in respect to competition. The KM system can be successful only when it is endorsed at a strategic level.The paper is structured in four sections. In the first section, we will engage in a cursory review of the latest theories surrounding the three disciplines that formed the starting point of the proposed framework. In the second section we will demonstrate how these disciplines interconnect within a service setting environment to form a knowledge management framework. In the third section we present initial findings of the framework's applicability in the hotel industry and then explain how applying a knowledge strategy in tourism organizations can potentially offer an alternative competitive strategy for islands that heavily rely on tourism for their survival. The fourth and final section will discuss the future of KM and present possible practical implications of employing the proposed knowledge management framework in tourism and more generally in the service industry.\n2. Modern theories surrounding knowledge management, business strategy and marketing: 2.1 Knowledge management theory\n3. Interconnecting knowledge management, business strategy and marketing to form a new framework: In the part that follows we demonstrate how the three disciplines of knowledge management, business strategy and marketing interconnect and form the proposed framework in a service environment setting. We define knowledge as an organizational asset needing to be embedded into a company's strategy and viewed holistically and will therefore build our framework with a particular focus on how knowledge of the company's internal and external environment is put into action at a strategic rather than at an operational level. In agreement to modern marketing scholars\" philosophy, we support that the \"experience-based\" service offering underpins a sustainable competitive strategy for service organizations (Pine et al., 1999) and we conclude that it is important for a company to manage their customers' experiences rather than the product or the service. This \"external\" need for a company to manage knowledge, this time market knowledge becomes apparent within the previously identified post-modern trend.We now interlink our theoretical perspectives of the three disciplines by employing Spender's (1996) \"dynamic knowledge-based activity system\" described earlier and build the conceptual framework. Vectoring in on the knowledge produced by cultivating a company's human and market capital, it is possible to achieve long-term wealth creation by relying on a dynamic path (Spender and Marr, 2005), position and process dependant role of knowledge (Teece et al., 1997) in the creation of customer value. Knowledge is often embedded in organizational routines, processes, practices, and norms and is path dependent. We demonstrate the framework's main premises in Figure 1.In the framework, market capital is defined as knowledge sourced from the external environment (Zack, 1999; Ketchen et al., 2007). Customers, competitors, suppliers, strategic partners, universities, research centers, industry bodies and related events, advisory councils, all can be useful \"knowledge suppliers\". Bontis (1998) maintains that the essence of human capital is human intellect. Human capital also includes concepts such as experience, educational level, professional skills, attitudes, personal networks, values, motivation, even ability to learn and adapt to change (Mayo, 2001).We define \"customer value\" using Kotler's (2000) four dimensions: product or service functionality, experiential benefits, symbolic benefits (such as brand strength) and networking opportunities for customers. Berry and Yadav (1997) describe customer value as the advantages perceived in exchange for the charges borne. Finally, we need to define the concept of \"a sustainable competitive advantage\". In a related detailed review, April (2002) elucidates this by maintaining that \"a company is said to have a sustained competitive advantage when it is implementing a value creating knowledge strategy which generates returns and benefits at a level not enjoyed by current competitors and when other companies are unable to reach an \"equilibrium level\" with the company enjoying the advantage\".We note that in this framework knowledge management acts as the conduit that transforms human and market capital into unique capabilities as a result of which employees' knowledge has a positive impact on customers' experience, thus creating higher customer value and increasing competitiveness. Weick and Roberts (1993) comment that knowledge is both an outcome of situated action as well as an input to it. Accordingly, in our framework, the knowledge needed to produce the total service experience and the knowledge generated from managing the total service experience, are both valuable knowledge assets that, if captured and systematically managed, can form a significant part of a service company's unique capability (high customer value). Many scholars have proven that superior value leads to customer loyalty, the real driver of financial performance and long term profitability (Reichheld et al., 2000; Heskett et al., 1997).Nevertheless, it is necessary to point out that knowledge is dynamic, so an innovation today may not be an innovation tomorrow. \"Thus defending and growing a competitive position requires continual learning and knowledge acquisition\" (Zack, 1999). Similarly, Cook and Brown (1999) point out that what is required is an epistemology of practice and not so much an epistemology of possession. In its application therefore, the framework needs to be constantly monitored and evaluated against a set of pre-agreed targets and as part of the company's overall knowledge management strategy (April, 2002).\n4. Application of the knowledge management framework in tourism: 4.1 Tourism industry in need for a new knowledge-based competitive strategy\n5. Practical implications, prospects and future research agenda: 5.1 Practical implications and future prospects\n",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Purpose: - In pursuit of an alternative competitive strategy for tourism's underperformers and particularly for niche markets such as tourist destination islands, this paper aims to introduce a framework that caters to the post-modern tourist.\nDesign/methodology/approach: - Through a pilot study, the framework was introduced to senior hotel managers on the island of Crete. The framework explores how hotel managers can best use their employees' knowledge in order to increase their market adaptability and develop unique capabilities.\nFindings: - The results demonstrated that managers scored highly in their ability to leverage knowledge gained from the market, whereas they gave less importance to their employees' valuable, internal knowledge. In the majority of cases tested, senior managers lacked an overall knowledge strategy. Although the pilot study's findings cannot be generalized, they can help us anticipate the maturity levels of hotel managers towards knowledge management and contribute towards building a future research agenda for developing the framework further.\nOriginality/value: - The paper introduces a framework that caters to the post-modern tourist. It is three dimensional, as it combines the disciplines of knowledge management, business strategy and marketing.\n",
"role": "assistant"
}
] |
Linking disaster risk reduction, climate change, and the sustainable development goals
|
[
"Risk",
"Climate change",
"Sustainability",
"Law"
] |
[
{
"content": "Summarize the following paper into structured abstract.\n\nInternational agreements: Several major international agreements related to sustainable development were signed in 2015 including:\nThe Paris Agreement and disaster risk reduction through SFDRR: Kelman (2015) analyses the 15 mentions of climate change in SFDRR yielding three main conclusions. First, climate change's influence on disasters and disaster risk is overplayed because vulnerability is the main cause of disasters and disaster risk yet climate change affects mainly hazards. Second, SFDRR appropriately offers disaster risk reduction ideas and expertise to climate change and SDG activities, but supports the artificial separation of climate change, disaster risk reduction, and sustainable development. Third, climate change as one hazard influencer amongst many receives too much attention compared to other hazard influencers. Overall, climate change's impact on SFDRR has been mainly to regress to a hazard-centric viewpoint thereby downplaying the political root causes of disaster vulnerability, even while SFDRR appropriately highlights vulnerability and root causes, as per the definition of disaster risk reduction.\nThe Paris Agreement and sustainable development through the SDGs: SDG Goal 13 is \"Take urgent action to combat climate change and its impacts*\" with the asterisk referring to a note reading \"* Acknowledging that the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change is the primary international, intergovernmental forum for negotiating the global response to climate change\". Although the text of UNGA (2015) mentions climate change frequently prior to listing the SDGs, just two other targets mention climate change explicitly:\nResolution: place climate change within wider contexts: Climate change mitigation entails pollution prevention activities which have long been enacted for many other human emissions. Examples are persistent organic pollutants (e.g. PCBs and dioxins) and acid rain forming compounds (e.g. sulphur dioxide and nitrogen oxides). Each substance, including each greenhouse gas, requires its own social and technical approaches for reducing emissions or increasing uptake. The principles and categories are the same for all, such as physical, chemical or biological capture; product or process substitution; and people reducing their consumption of products and services. Climate change mitigation is pollution prevention which itself has long sat within sustainable development endeavours.\n",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to better link the parallel processes yielding international agreements on climate change, disaster risk reduction, and sustainable development.\nDesign/methodology/approach: This paper explores how the Paris Agreement for climate change relates to disaster risk reduction and sustainable development, demonstrating too much separation amongst the topics. A resolution is provided through placing climate change within wider disaster risk reduction and sustainable development contexts.\nFindings: No reason exists for climate change to be separated from wider disaster risk reduction and sustainable development processes.\nResearch limitations/implications: Based on the research, a conceptual approach for policy and practice is provided. Due to entrenched territory, the research approach is unlikely to be implemented.\nOriginality/value: Using a scientific basis to propose an ending for the silos separating international processes for climate change, disaster risk reduction, and sustainable development.\n",
"role": "assistant"
}
] |
Main dimensions that impact knowledge management and university-business-government collaboration in the Brazilian scenario
|
[
"Knowledge management",
"University-industry-government collaboration",
"Triple helix"
] |
[
{
"content": "Summarize the following paper into structured abstract.\n\n1. Introduction: The increasing relevance of information and knowledge for economic and social development and for strengthening competitiveness of organizations has made the diffusion of knowledge and the search for innovation primordial to public and private institutions, resulting in competitive advantage and strategic positioning.\n2. Literature review: In this topic, a literature review on the main topics addressed in this work is presented: knowledge management and university-industry-government collaboration. It also addresses the most relevant dimensions that influence these two topics concomitantly.\n3. Research method: This study is of an applied and descriptive nature adopting a qualitative approach and includes case studies in order to understand the dimensions that have an impact on knowledge creation and management in university-industry-government collaboration in the Brazilian context.\n4. Case study: This paper focuses on institutes representing the INCT Program, launched in 2008 with the aim of promoting innovation through scientific and technological development in Brazil with a focus on the real needs of society. Initially, in 2009, 120 institutes were created and, in November 2016, the Coordinating Committee of the INCTs announced the definition of 101 projects (new or continuity of previous ones) to receive resources under the 2014 call. The program is an initiative from the Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation (MCTI in Portuguese), through the National Council for Scientific and Technological Development (CNPq in Portuguese), in partnership with the Coordination for the Improvement of Higher Education Personnel (CAPES in Portuguese), the Sao Paulo Research Foundation (FAPESP in Portuguese) and other state research support foundations (FAPs in Portuguese).\n5. Final considerations: The comparative results presented show the importance of creating the INCTs for Brazilian scientific and technological development by giving rise to institutes with their own structures and coordination that integrate the most renowned researchers of important fields in the country, as well as fostering integration with companies and, thus, transferring technology, innovation and development in our country.\n",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to investigate how certain characteristics of the university-industry-government collaboration facilitate knowledge creation and management, hence innovation focusing on particularities of the Brazilian scenario.\nDesign/methodology/approach: As a conceptual basis, there are correlations between theories of knowledge management and the Triple Helix, a model referenced to university-industry-government cooperation. The research was conducted through a multiple case study at two National Institutes of Science and Technology (INCTs in Portuguese).\nFindings: The main results show the importance of participation in the INCT program, as it enables the creation of an organizational structure with the coordinator's leadership, who directs the flow of knowledge among organizations and stimulates innovation.\nOriginality/value: The choice of the topic is justified by the lack of studies on the identification and analyses of the main aspects of this type of collaboration in an integrated way.\n",
"role": "assistant"
}
] |
Making things personal: a project promoting the wellbeing of older residents and staff in sheltered housing and care homes
|
[
"Communication",
"Care",
"Dementia",
"Person-centred care",
"Care transitions",
"Personal information documents"
] |
[
{
"content": "Summarize the following paper into structured abstract.\n\nIntroduction: Being known and recognised as an individual matters crucially to each of us. Our likes, dislikes, values, joys, fears and hopes are central to our unique identity (Oyserman et al., 2012). But ageing may bring changes - health problems, loss of family and friends, cognitive decline or a need for residential care - all of which can disrupt or make fragile our social and personal identity.\nMethods: In September 2018, MMs were presented to an All Managers meeting of NorseCare, part of the Norse Group, which manages 34 residential care homes and Housing with Care schemes across Norfolk. Within a week of this meeting, 28 homes had requested training and \"Train the Trainer\" workshops were delivered over a period of 12 months to 136 activities coordinators, care staff and managers to enable them to make and use MMs with their tenants and residents.\nImmediate outcomes: All participants were asked to complete and submit a written evaluation at the end of each workshop. The initial part invited them to rate, as excellent, good, average, poor or very poor, six elements of the training: content, materials used, mix of trainer input and activities, exercises to practise making MMs, knowledge of the trainer and ability of the trainer. All elements of the training were rated either excellent or good by 100% of the participants. A further question was asked whether they would recommend the training to others, and 100% opted to say \"yes\".\nLonger-term outcomes: Written feedback on progress in the workplace during the three months post-training showed that methods of implementation had varied. However, there was clear evidence of the positive impact resulting from the training and subsequent implementation of both MMs and the improved skills, knowledge and confidence of the staff.\nDiscussion: Making MMs valued and tapped into carers' unique understanding of their residents and tenants. Sharing experiences and memories helped to sustain individual identities and strengthen relationships between those living and working in care.\nImplications for practice: As numbers of older people and those with dementia in residential care settings continue to rise there is a pressing need to create person-centred ecologies of care both for them and for those caring for them (Chenoweth et al., 2013). Low-cost personalised non-pharmacological interventions are needed which can easily be implemented to improve symptoms of depression and anxiety and potentially to increase emotional well-being (Van der Steen et al., 2018).\n",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Purpose: This paper aims to present findings of a project implementing training to enable care staff to create simple audio-biographical resources with older tenants and residents in sheltered housing and care homes.\nDesign/methodology/approach: This paper draws on written evaluations by participants of training workshops delivered to 136 care home staff within 28 care homes of the NorseCare group in Norfolk, UK and of their experience after three months in the workplace.\nFindings: The evaluations showed a high degree of satisfaction with training and impact of the intervention. Successful implementation of training in the workplace depended on factors of time and leadership within individual homes and housing schemes.\nOriginality/value: Making innovative personal information documents valued carers' unique understanding of residents and tenants. This creative co-production may have benefits in personalising and enriching the experience of care for both staff and residents.\n",
"role": "assistant"
}
] |
A systematic approach of partner selection for open innovation
|
[
"Text mining",
"Open innovation",
"Patent analysis",
"Technological cooperation",
"Generative topology map",
"Morphology analysis"
] |
[
{
"content": "Summarize the following paper into structured abstract.\n\n1. Introduction: As the complexity of knowledge on technology innovation has increased, firms are urged to extend beyond their existing boundaries in order to complement their own capabilities (Hung and Chiang, 2010). The increasing extent of changes in customer needs and the shorter product life cycle lead firms to widen their technology base (Nijssen et al., 2001). Recently, open innovation has been highlighted to reinforce innovation management, covering a broad range of disciplines such as economics, psychology, and sociology (Chesbrough, 2003). Applying the input of outsiders and searching for outside commercialization opportunities of existing products and technologies can improve internal innovation processes and expand the utilization of current capabilities. Thus, innovation cooperation activities are considered an efficient means for the industrial organization of complex R&D and innovation processes. Cooperation with other firms provides opportunities to access complementary technological resources for R&D projects (Cassiman and Veugelers, 2002). Since firms aim at maximizing profits by utilizing available resources of both the firm and partners, cooperation among firms is critical for successful R&D activities. However, many benefits of R&D collaboration are not risk-free. Many firms have failed to meet the objectives of their partners due to mainly the collaboration development process (Das and Kumar, 2007). Therefore, a process for partner selection should be implemented to find appropriate partners that can support weak points of technological capabilities.\n2. Background: 2.1 Partner selection in open innovation\n3. Proposed approach: 3.1 Basic concept\n4. Case study: thermal management (TM) technology of light emitting diodes (LEDs): A case study is performed to illustrate how our proposed approach could be applied in practice, selecting the TM technology of LEDs for three reasons. First, the LED industry has been growing dramatically as LEDs have emerged as a substitute for traditional light sources with remarkable advantages including higher energy efficiency, longer lifetime, small size, greater reliability, and environmental friendliness (Schubert and Kim, 2005). Second, it is a high-tech industry with rapid technological development and fierce market competition. Last but not least, the TM is a major issue in crystallizing the potential of LEDs since the junction temperature of an LED has a negative effect on the performance of LEDs such as lifetime, lumen output, and color stability and quality. The problems are especially critical for high-power LEDs that are used for illumination and outdoor signage applications (Marongiu, 2009). As such, the TM technology of LEDs is a crucial area of research and development.\n5. Conclusions: Recently, the open innovation paradigm has been irresistible in R&D management because technology has become more complex, and moreover, market needs have been dynamically changed. Thus, technological cooperation should be considered a main process to obtain additional technological capability. In this perspective, partner selection for successful cooperation must be a key concern in the process of open innovation. Therefore, this paper tackles the important issue of exploring appropriate partners by applying a systematic approach that utilizes text mining, MA and GTM. The LED case was illustrated to demonstrate that the proposed approach can be employed to implement technological cooperation.\n",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to propose a systematic approach to exploring potential partners for open innovation in order to facilitate the process of technological collaboration.\nDesign/methodology/approach: The proposed approach utilizes patent information that is considered the most effective data to investigate innovation activities by applying morphology analysis (MA) and generative topology map (GTM) to the process to identify the configurations of technologies and visualize the collected patent information. In particular, diverse informative indices can assist researchers in deriving appropriate partners for technological cooperation.\nFindings: The hybrid approach that combines MA, GTM, and indices is useful to discover technological opportunity, identify necessary technologies and explore potential partners. The systematic process can overcome the limitations of existing approaches that depend on the insights and strategic decisions of top management, reflect a superficial relationship among firms and mostly fail to consider both theoretical and practical approaches to retrieve potential partners.\nPractical implications: The results of this paper will help practitioners, academic researchers, and policy makers link a pair of partners who can maximize the synergy of collaboration in a systematic manner. The proposed approach is illustrated to show the validity of the process with a case of light emitting diode (LED) technology. In addition, the social cost for collaboration can be reduced by applying the proposed approach in open innovation.\nOriginality/value: This paper tackles the important issue of exploring appropriate partners by applying a systematic approach that utilizes text mining, MA and GTM because existing research mostly deals with ad-hoc processes. The proposed approach utilizes multiple methodologies of data mining and technology forecasting to derive promising technology areas in a systematic manner and then employs critical indices to explore proper partners. Thus, this approach considers both quantitative and qualitative methodologies to suggest a sophisticated tool for successful open innovation. Moreover, a real case - LED case was illustrated to demonstrate that the proposed approach can be employed to implement technological cooperation.\n",
"role": "assistant"
}
] |
The nature of workplace boundaries between Australians and Singaporeans in multinational organizations: A qualitative inquiry
|
[
"Australia",
"Singapore",
"National cultures",
"Multinational companies",
"Workplace"
] |
[
{
"content": "Summarize the following paper into structured abstract.\n\n__NO_TITLE__: The signing of the Singapore-Australia Free Trade Agreement (SAFTA) in 2003 reflected the long standing and close relationship between Singapore and Australia. The two countries enjoy close economic links, and cooperate extensively in a wide range of multilateral commerce and trade, education, defense, regional and security issues. Indeed, the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS, 2008) noted that Australian merchandise exports to Singapore were estimated at $7.4 billion. In an address to the Australia-Singapore Chamber of Commerce and Industry (2004), the Minister of State for Foreign Affairs and Trade and Industry of Singapore reported that Australia was the preferred educational destination for many Singaporean students.The first review of the SAFTA reported increased trade opportunities and intercultural exchanges between Singapore and Australia. For example, Downer-EDI (Australia's second largest engineering services firm) reported successful new business ventures in Singapore. Similarly, a growing number of Singaporean-owned companies were successful in establishing new business opportunities and networks in Australia (Australian Government Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, 2004). Despite the close relationship between the two countries, very little is known about how Australians and Singaporeans interact or communicate in the workplace. Therefore, the present study provides an exploratory investigation of the intercultural experiences of Australians and Singaporeans working in multinational organizations. In this study, we propose that cultural differences between the two countries will influence how boundaries are constructed. Specifically, different types of boundaries and boundary permeability will influence how Australians and Singaporeans interact and communicate with each other.One of the major considerations to bear in mind when individuals from different cultures interact together is to realize that they may have very different cultural assumptions, beliefs and values about how to work together. Culture refers to a set of ideas, behaviors, attitudes, and traditions that exist within large groups and distinguishes members of one human group from another (Hofstede, 1980). In essence, culture provides a set of standard norms to help individuals separate, define and draw boundaries between stimuli (Freeman and Bordia, 2001; Zerubavel, 1993). By examining how these boundaries are drawn and maintained, different societies reveal how they generate meanings for themselves, members of their groups and members outside their groups (Zerubavel, 1993). For example, Australia is considered an individualist society where people value autonomy and democracy (Freeman and Bordia, 2001; Irwin, 1996). People are encouraged to be assertive and to prioritize personal goals over group goals (Samovar et al., 1998). In contrast, Singapore is a collectivist society where group consensus and group goals are paramount (Hofstede, 1980, 1991). People are expected to respect authority, value formal regulations and to abide by strict social restrictions (Hofstede, 1980, 1991). Therefore, we propose that the differences in cultural expectations between these two countries will influence how boundaries and boundary permeability are created.A social identity approach to boundaries and boundary permeability\nMethod: Participants\nResults and discussion: The qualitative analysis yielded seven interrelated but distinct categories of boundaries (see Table I). The extracts as a group indicated that Australians and Singaporeans constructed relatively similar types of workplace boundaries. However, the permeability of these boundaries varied as a function of nationality (i.e. Australians vs Singaporeans). More importantly, cultural differences, such as collectivism-individualism, power distance and uncertainty avoidance were found to influence the permeability of these boundaries. The following sections provide a detailed discussion on the description of these workplace boundaries.Cultural boundary\nGeneral discussion: In this study, we aimed to identify different types of workplace boundaries and the permeability of these boundaries which were created by Australians and Singaporeans working in multinational organizations. The results indicated that Singaporeans and Australians created different types of workplace boundaries with varying levels of boundary permeability. In terms of cultural boundaries, Australians were perceived to construct more permeable boundaries than Singaporeans. The varying levels in permeability may be influenced by the different cultural expectations Australians and Singaporeans have. For example, Singaporeans living in a high power distance country are more likely than Australians (living in a low power distance country) to accept the unequal power distribution in society. They expect less powerful members (e.g. low status) to abide by the authorities and to stay in their respective places. Thus, boundaries are created in such a way to ensure that mobility can be easily restricted. Singaporeans also feel greater anxiety about uncertain or unknown matters than Australians (Hofstede, 1980). One strategy for managing and minimizing uncertainties is to create tighter or less permeable boundaries around entities to ensure safety and security. In countries where strict rules and regulations are the norms, boundaries become the medium not only to organize how people should think, feel and do things, but also as a mechanism for regulating people's mobility. Indeed, Tajfel (1978) noted that, \"boundary permeability is created by laws, rules, sanctions and social norms designed to prevent members of a lower status group to penetrate into the higher status group (p. 51)\". Therefore, boundary permeability provides the rules for establishing social hierarchies and separating people into different social classes. Boundaries and boundary permeability are essential means through which people acquire membership, status and resources.Singaporean society may be characterized as inherently \"Confucian\" in its conceptualization of interpersonal interaction (Ho and Chiu, 1994). Confucianism emphasizes the need to maintain harmonious personal, social and work relationships. For example, Smith and Schwartz (1997) found that people from Asia often find it difficult to refuse the requests of others because doing so may ruin the harmony that exists in their relationships (Smith and Schwartz, 1997). This has important implications when you consider that Singaporeans live in a tightly knit society where individuals are embedded within cohesive in-groups (Hofstede, 1991). As a result, Singaporeans may find it extremely difficult to separate their work and social roles. Our results supported this finding and found that Singaporeans were more likely than Australians to integrate their work and social roles. This is consistent with past cross-cultural research which found that individuals from Asia (e.g. Singaporeans) tend to have a heightened awareness of others and their relationships with them. Thus, such individuals aim to relate well with others, to act appropriately in social situations, and to promote and value conformity and cooperation (Markus and Kitayama, 1991). In contrast, Australians being more independent are less constrained with the ties that bind them to their social roles and obligations. Therefore, they are more likely to focus on work issues at the workplace rather than blurring work and personal issues together.Results for the category of communication boundaries found that Singaporeans had a less direct mode of communication, preferring communication to be more implicit and non-verbal. In contrast, Australians tend to have a more explicit communication boundary. This is consistent with previous cross-cultural communication research (Gudykunst and Nishida, 1994; Hall, 1976), suggesting that Singaporeans tend to create less permeable communication boundaries than Australians. Maintaining an appropriate level of boundary permeability is important because communication boundaries that are too rigid can impede communication, while boundaries that are too permeable can blur social or personal identity. Indeed, the results of this study showed that impermeable communication boundaries (i.e. implicit) created many communication problems between Australians and Singaporeans.Finally, the results indicated that racial characteristics were regarded as highly salient and meaningful for both Australians and Singaporeans. Both Australians and Singaporeans perceived each other's racial boundaries to be highly impermeable. This made crossing these boundaries extremely difficult. These results are in accordance with Pelled (1996) who argued that visible racial diversity, as a source of visible difference, tends to incite intergroup bias and results in negative outcomes for work groups.Limitations and future research directions\n",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Purpose: - This paper seeks to explore the nature of intercultural experiences of Australians and Singaporeans working in multinational organizations. Cultural differences are expected to influence how boundaries and boundary permeability are constructed which in turn affect how Australians and Singaporeans interact and communicate with each other.\nDesign/methodology/approach: - Qualitative interviews were conducted with 23 employees (ten Australians, 13 Singaporeans) working in multinational organizations in both Australia and Singapore. Grounded theory methodology was used to analyze interviewees' intercultural experiences to determine the nature and composition of relevant boundary categories and permeability.\nFindings: - Seven workplace boundary categories of varying degrees of permeability were identified. Singaporeans were perceived to create more impermeable boundaries than Australians. Impermeable boundaries were found to also restrict intercultural interactions.\nResearch limitations/implications: - The qualitative nature of the study, small sample size and interviewer's ethnicity could limit the generalizability of the results. Another limitation is that the data were based on self-reports and participants may have reported socially desirable responses.\nPractical implications: - The findings of this study have important practical implications for managers who seek to promote the value of shared group membership and group identity.\nOriginality/value: - This study integrates social identity theory with cross-cultural theories and extends its application into a collectivist culture (e.g. Singapore) to provide an in-depth understanding of the nature of workplace boundaries and boundary permeability between Australians and Singaporeans.\n",
"role": "assistant"
}
] |
BHSF carries on training: It makes more sense than ever in a recession, says director
|
[
"Training",
"Recession",
"Health services",
"Insurance",
"Quality awards",
"United Kingdom"
] |
[
{
"content": "Summarize the following paper into structured abstract.\n\n__NO_TITLE__: Improved efficiency, smarter working, faster pace and improved service levels can all be achieved through training, says a UK not-for-profit health-insurance company that gives each of its 123 employees the opportunity to enrol on a National Vocational Qualification (NVQ).\nRetain and improve the skill base: \"With a challenging employment market, upgrading transferable skills and gaining nationally recognized qualifications make more sense than ever,\" he explained. \"When business starts to come out of the economic downturn, companies will be struggling if they have not retained and improved their skill base. Business leaders need to prioritize their investments through employee NVQ programs, apprenticeships, partnerships with schools, colleges and universities and graduate recruitment. These activities are key to improving productivity and competitiveness for businesses both large and small.\"BHSF, which also provides companies with such HR support as absence management, employee-assistance programs, personal-accident insurance, annual travel insurance and life insurance, is a past winner of the Birmingham Chamber of Commerce and Industry SME of the Year award and an Investor in People.\"Everyone at BHSF has a personal-development plan and is encouraged to develop and upgrade his or her skill set while gaining a nationally recognized vocational qualification,\" Michael Chapman continued.Through a partnership with Sutton College, qualified assessors make weekly visits to BHSF to help staff to compile their portfolio of evidence within six months. The assessor gives support and coaching, assigning tasks, guiding learning and developing skills.On completion, each person receives an NVQ certificate presented by Peter Maskell, the chief executive, and PS50 recognition. Employees who finish their training successfully are also featured in the company newsletter.\"The individual develops skills and gains a recognized competency standard and there is probably a higher level of motivation, sense of commitment to the business and scope to make a greater contribution,\" said Michael Chapman, who joined the business in 2001.As an example, the co-ordinator of the company's NVQ program, Barbara Brant, has achieved eight NVQs, including a level 4 in training and development. She also has customer-service, call-handling and NVQ assessor qualifications.She joined the company in 2000 on the customer-service help-desk and has progressed to her current role as the organization's training officer. In that capacity, she provides induction and initial product training for new recruits and support in their first few weeks, when everything seems strange.\"Barbara's energy, empathy and enthusiasm for new challenges makes her a real asset to the business and a role model for others, giving them the confidence and support to develop their own skills,\" Michael Chapman enthused. \"There is no doubt that taking ownership for her own learning has improved the quality of training and convinced others of the importance of personal development.\"\nCorporate and social responsibility projects: The company, which covers more than 400,000 people under its 265,000 health insurance policies, uses corporate and social responsibility projects for staff development. Each employee has the right to at least five days a year for such projects. A corporate social responsibility co-ordinator helps to make the projects happen.In one project, graduate trainee Geoff Guerin spent one day a week working with Birmingham's Queen Alexandra College (QAC) - a registered charity for people who are blind, vision impaired or have other disabilities.He helped QAC to produce the All Formats charter mark, which organizations can display to show that they accommodate people with visual impairments. The main part of the project was to research the charter mark and to identify the best way to develop and market it, as well as get it to the stage where it could be sold to the target market.Geoff Guerin, who is now BHSF business improvement officer, said that researching and following up the project formed a major part of his personal development. It also enhanced the CSR relationship between QAC and BHSF, boosted QAC's funds and helped to raise the profile of the college.The BHSF management team communicates the business plan to colleagues, addresses priorities and resources and strives to gain the support of employees. Management planning meetings and \"cascade\" team briefings help to keep everyone up to date on the key issues.BHSF, which was established in 1873 as a charity to help to fund Birmingham hospitals, operates a flexible-working policy as well as home working. It has a well-being program that provides information about healthy lifestyles, as well as occupational-health initiatives such as stop-smoking clinics, company-funded health screening and a \"pedometer challenge\".BHSF has been recognized with a Star Excellence employer award from Sutton College, which has provided the company with mentoring and short-course programs as well as NVQs.The company was rated \"one to watch\" in The Times' Best Small Companies survey.Each employee has the right to at least five days a year for corporate social responsibility projects.\nNote: David Pollitt, Human Resource Management International Digest editor, wrote this article.\n",
"role": "user"
},
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"content": "Purpose: - This paper aims to highlight the emphasis placed on training at UK not-for-profit health-insurance company BHSF.\nDesign/methodology/approach: - This paper presents the views of the firm's HR and quality-management director.\nFindings: - This paper advances the view that upgrading transferable skills and gaining nationally recognized qualifications makes more sense than ever because, when businesses start to come out of the economic downturn, they will need to have retained and improved their skills base.\nPractical implications: - The paper argues that National Vocational Qualifications, apprenticeships, partnerships with schools, colleges and universities and graduate recruitment are key to improving productivity and competitiveness for all sizes of business.\nOriginality/value: - The paper suggests that employees who take advantage of training opportunities are likely to be more motivated, committed to their employer, and capable of making a greater contribution to the business.\n",
"role": "assistant"
}
] |
Workplace bullying: The interactive effects of the perpetrator's gender and the target's gender
|
[
"Gender",
"Workplace bullying",
"Interactive effects"
] |
[
{
"content": "Summarize the following paper into structured abstract.\n\n__NO_TITLE__: Workplace bullying is a special type of aggressive behaviour (Einarsen et al., 2011) that occurs worldwide in a broad range of industries (Gonzalez-Mule et al., 2013; Sansone and Sansone, 2015). Workplace bullying comprises a range of behaviours that can be violent or non-violent, as well as direct/overt (e.g. humiliating someone in front of others) and indirect/covert behaviours (e.g. spreading malicious rumours about someone) (Hoel et al., 1999). Furthermore, targets typically believe that the bullying to which they are subjected is an intentional effort to undermine, disparage, or injure them either physically or professionally (Lutgen-Sandvik et al., 2009).\nThe gender interaction on workplace bullying: The inadequacy of considering only main effects can be illustrated by scrutinising the findings from Bjorkqvist et al.'s (1994) study on the role of sex in rational-appearing workplace aggression (note that we retain Bjorkqvist et al.'s use of the term \"sex\" in this section, though it is unclear from their reporting whether biological sex or gender was the actual measure used). The findings from this study revealed that male perpetrators use rational-appearing workplace aggression more frequently than do female perpetrators (i.e. a significant main effect for perpetrator's sex) and that male targets and female targets are subjected to a similar frequency of rational-appearing workplace aggression (i.e. a non-significant main effect for target's sex). A limitation of these findings is that they cannot reveal whether the frequency of rational-appearing workplace aggression to which targets are subjected depends on their sex and the perpetrator's sex, because a significant main effect for perpetrator's sex and a non-significant main effect for target's sex can apply not only to a non-significant interaction but also to two different types of interaction, as shown in Table I.\nHypothesis development: Gender plays an important role in workplace bullying partly because the perceived effect-danger ratio is influenced by the gender of the perpetrator. The perceived effect-danger ratio was developed by Bjorkqvist et al. (1994) and refers to perpetrators' judgements of the potential benefits (i.e. effect) and costs (i.e. danger) of bullying a particular individual; perpetrators aim to maximise the harm done to the target and minimise the danger to themselves. Perpetrators potentially face various dangers including loss of job, being reprimanded by relevant authorities, and a damaged reputation (e.g. being perceived as a deviant) due to violations of workplace laws and normative expectations. Female perpetrators associate higher costs to themselves with bullying (Rutter and Hine, 2005) because they are more likely to believe that behaving aggressively will result in them experiencing guilt and anxiety (Eagly and Steffen, 1986; Bettencourt and Miller, 1996) due to societal pressures.\nMethod: Participants\nResults: Hoel and Cooper's (2000) NAQ measures four types of bullying: organisational harassment, personal harassment, work-related harassment, and physical intimidation. The items for the four bullying sub-scales were treated as formative indicators for the following reasons: the items define the type of bullying rather than represent manifestations of the type of bullying because removing an item from any of the sub-scales would alter the nature of the type of bullying represented by the sub-scale; an increase or decrease in value in any of the items in a sub-scale does not necessitate an increase or decrease for all of the other items in the sub-scale; and the items in the sub-scales do not have the same antecedents and consequences (see Podsakoff et al., 2003). The averages of the items for each sub-scale were used as overall scores for the different types of bullying. Factor analysis and internal reliability analysis were not conducted for the bullying scale because it is not appropriate to conduct such analyses for formative indicators.\nDiscussion: Workplace bullying has generally been regarded as a gender-neutral phenomenon and gender effects have subsequently received relatively little attention. The issue addressed in this study is whether the perpetrator's gender and the target's gender have interactive effects on how often targets are bullied. The sample was restricted to cases of downward bullying because downward bullying is the most commonly reported form of bullying and doing so allows a control for the possible influence of hierarchical status on bullying.\n",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to examine if the gender of the perpetrator and the gender of the target have interactive effects on the frequency of downward workplace bullying to which targets are subjected.\nDesign/methodology/approach: A cross-sectional design was used on a sample of 125 schoolteachers in Uganda. Self-report data on downward workplace bullying were obtained using the Negative Acts Questionnaire.\nFindings: The perpetrator's gender and the target's gender have interactive effects on the level of downward bullying to which targets are subjected. Although targets in within-gender dyads reported higher levels of overall downward workplace bullying than did targets in between-gender dyads, a significant gender-gender interaction was found for personal harassment and work-related harassment but not for intimidation nor organisational harassment.\nResearch limitations/implications: The generalisability of the findings is limited due to the sample consisting entirely of schoolteachers in Uganda. Self-report data are a limitation as they are subjective and thus susceptible to various perceptual biases (e.g. social desirability, personality of the respondent). Examining the interactive effects of gender on workplace bullying helps to provide a better understanding of the potential influence of gender in bullying scenarios. The findings from research that considers only the main effects of gender whilst ignoring interactive effects can misinform any theory or policy development.\nPractical implications: Organisations need to resocialise their members so that they learn new attitudes and norms regarding aggressive behaviour in the workplace.\nOriginality/value: This paper contributes to the literature on workplace bullying by examining the interactive effects of gender on the frequency of downward workplace bullying.\n",
"role": "assistant"
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] |
Exploring sensings in practice: affect and knowledge sharing
|
[
"Information management",
"Generation and dissemination of information",
"Phenomenology",
"Knowledge organizations",
"Information research",
"Information organizations"
] |
[
{
"content": "Summarize the following paper into structured abstract.\n\nIntroduction: The successful sharing of disciplinary knowledge is central to the work of project teams operating in local, state and federal governments as they seek to address the issues of economic and environmental sustainability. In these organisational contexts, knowledge sharing relies on contributions from a diverse range of subject specialists including engineers, waste management experts and environmental managers. In the information studies field, debate has periodically emerged around the application of the terms information or knowledge to sharing activities such as those documented by Wilson (2010), Budd (2011) and Pilerot (2012). Some researchers employ the term \"information sharing\" while others refer to \"knowledge sharing\" depending on the phenomena researchers consider shared. These perspectives encompass that \"which makes sense\" as used by Veinot (2009, p. 2314), the intangibles of data, information and knowledge as used by Haythornthwaite (2010, p. 4837), and the materiality of information such as that described as \"information as thing\" by Buckland (1991, p. 314). Savolainen (2017) adopts Sonnenwald's contention that sharing involves:[...] a set of activities by which information is provided to others, either proactively or upon request, such that the information has an impact on other person's image of the world [...] and creates a shared, or mutually compatible working understanding of the world.\nLiterature review: The following literature review surveys previous research in the information studies field as well as other selected social sciences disciplines including organisation studies and sociology. It also explores the theoretical approaches applied to the investigation; that of contemporary practice theory.\nMethodology: Budd (2005) provides a useful summary of some of the applications of phenomenology in the information studies discipline. Although all information studies Researchers, such as Ingwersen (1995), Dervin (1977, 1989), Erdelez (1996) and Gross (1999), acknowledge the need to consider the individual in the assessment, interpretation and encountering of information, Budd suggests they do not fully embrace the phenomenological \"attitude\" described by earlier phenomenologists such as Heidegger and Husserl (Budd, 2005). He does conclude, however, that the phenomenological approach and its focus on the lifeworld, or lived experience, of individuals as they perceive and interpret information offers a useful philosophical framework for information studies research methodologies (Budd, 2005, p. 57). Although unusual in the information studies discipline, phenomenological approaches have more recently been applied to knowledge research. For example, Suorsa and Huotari (2014) developed a framework for understanding knowledge creation through hermeneutic phenomenology based on an analysis of recent knowledge creation research and key phenomenological texts. Because of its orientation to the concerns of professional practices in professional fields, van Manen's (2014) phenomenology of practice approach was adopted for this study which is specifically oriented to the personal and social practices of everyday living (van Manen, 2014), such as knowledge sharing. The application of van Manen's (2014) approach combined with the practice theoretical approach was thought capable of bringing the researcher in closer touch with the \"real world\" of knowing processes; assisting in recognising the heterogeneous dimensions involved; and providing an antidote to partial views and reductionist methods (Kupers, 2009).\nFindings: A foundational observation on the part of the researcher was that knowledge sharing, as perceived, defined and reported by team members, was accepted as a normative activity. That is, in descriptions of knowledge sharing by team members at meetings and in interviews, knowledge sharing was acknowledged as a desired, anticipated and assumed requirement of the project. Most project team members referred to the necessity of sharing their knowledge and to collaborate across their teams to successfully achieve their project goals.\nDiscussion: The findings of the study strongly support Lloyd (2009) and Bonner and Lloyd's (2011) research highlighting the importance of the epistemic, corporeal and social modalities of knowledge and information practices. During their meetings and in interview accounts, project team members demonstrated the sharing of disciplinary and organisational cognitive, or epistemic, knowledge in the form of subject-related knowledge arising from their education and training as well as organisational knowledge arising from their workplace experiences. Similarly, participants used their bodies as a component of knowledge-sharing practice through \"acting out\" their knowledge, such as Peg's demonstration of hacking noxious weeds with a spade; the bodily interactions required to emphasise significant points during reporting and presenting knowledge; and the physical interactions involved in the setting up and rearranging meeting venues. The social modality of knowledge sharing was also strongly supported by the social bonds reported and observed between team members in the study. These social aspects of knowledge were also impacted by the power relations arising from project and organisational hierarchies as demonstrated by Flick's creation of an \"executive team within a team\", as well as the significance of trust in interactions between Team Members as described by Gemma and Col.\nConclusions: The study highlights the usefulness of the practice theoretical approach for the investigation of knowledge sharing. This approach, combined with a phenomenological methodology, offered a systematic and nuanced means of revealing the richness of knowledge-sharing practice and participant affect. Indeed, this combined practice and phenomenological approach offered the opportunity to \"re-assess, re-think and further investigate the deeper relevance of embodied and emotional processes of knowing and acting in the life-worlds of organisations\" (Kupers, 2009, p. 144).\n",
"role": "user"
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"content": "Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to investigate the nature of knowledge sharing and what is experienced as being shared as knowledge sharing unfolds. In particular, the paper explores affect as a key aspect of knowledge sharing in an organisational context.\nDesign/methodology/approach: A practice theoretical approach is applied to the study combined with a phenomenological research methodology that focusses on the \"lived experience\" of participants.\nFindings: Knowledge-sharing practice was found to encompass cognitive, social, bodily and affective dimensions. Affect was found to be a significant component of the practice as revealed by participant emotion and the use of conversational humour.\nResearch limitations/implications: In light of the findings, the researcher recommends a focus on participant sensings in practice theoretical research, in combination with sayings, doings and relatings.\nOriginality/value: The approach to the study is significant in that, in contrast to previous practice-based research in information studies, it applied a methodology adapted from phenomenology. This combination of approaches opened the investigation to the multi-dimensional experiential nature of knowledge-sharing practice highlighting the significant role of affect in knowledge sharing.\n",
"role": "assistant"
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] |
Gender wage gaps in Australian workplaces: are policy responses working?
|
[
"Gender",
"Women",
"Public policy",
"Equal opportunity",
"Glass ceiling",
"Wage gap"
] |
[
{
"content": "Summarize the following paper into structured abstract.\n\nIntroduction: A report by the Equal Opportunity for Women in the Workplace Agency (EOWA) indicated that, in 2012, the Australian gender wage gap stood at 17.4 per cent in favour of male workers (Equal Opportunity for Women in the Workplace Agency (EOWA), 2012). Although this figure is unchanged from 2011, it increased from a low of 14.9 per cent reported in 2004 (which is the same as the gender wage gap reported in 1974). This situation is contrary to most other OECD countries, where gender wage gaps have decreased over time (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), 2010a). In addition, the Australian Workplace Gender Equality Agency (Gradstats, 2012) reported that, in 2012, the gender wage gap between male and female university graduates starting salaries more than doubled from 2011, increasing from A$2,000 to A$5,000 per annum. Moreover, the Australian Bureau of Statistics (2012a) survey of full-time adult earnings conducted in August 2012 shows that males earned an average of A$1,490 per week, while females earned an average of A$1,188 per week. This reveals a gap of A$302 per week or 20.3 per cent in favour of males, a gap that has been persistent over the past decade, rising from 17.5 per cent in 2002 (see Table I).\nWhat are the reasons for the gender wage gap?: The (Workplace Gender Equality Agency (WGEA), 2013) suggested six reasons behind the persistence of the gender wage gap in Australia, being\nGraduate starting wage inequality: The issue of increasing gender wage gaps and commencing salaries in Australia is starkly illustrated by the Gradstats (2012) report that is produced by the Australian Government's Workplace Gender Equality Agency. This report indicates that the median for full-time commencing salaries for male university graduates increased to A$55,000 in 2012 from A$52,000 in the preceding year, while that of their female counterparts remain unchanged at A$50,000. This amounts to a 250 per cent annual increase in the pay gap from A$2,000 to A$5,000 per annum, with men earning 10.0 per cent more than women. While this gap is not as pronounced as the 17.4 per cent gap reported for the general workforce (EOWA, 2012), it is still problematic, because the frequently reported structural issues - such as career breaks and part-time work do not explain this gap. Also, the \"glass ceiling\" does not apply in such cases as the report refers to entry-level jobs (i.e. graduate and not postgraduate level), which also makes the wage diminishing effect of women's caring responsibilities unlikely. Furthermore, the data only covers full-time work, so the effect of lower wages in female dominated casual and part-time work is not included. According to the report, the sector with the widest gap in favour of men is architecture and building at 20.9 per cent, followed by Dentistry at 18.6 per cent, Optometry at 9.3 per cent, and Law at 8.5 per cent (Table II). The largest annual increases were recorded in the field of Dentistry and Optometry. These two sectors also pay substantially more than the others and the gender wage gap is more pronounced. However, female graduates earned slightly more than men in seven out of the 23 occupations listed. Only three occupational categories had no gender wage gap evident in the starting salaries: Education, Humanities and Medicine. Thus, on average, females in Australia can expect to start their careers on lower commencing salaries than men within the same occupation.\nGlass ceilings and glass escalators: The Australian Bureau of Statistics (2011a) reports that only three per cent of CEOs among the top 200 Australian Securities Exchange (ASX) companies are female. Eagly and Carli (2007) also highlight the paucity of women in senior management, with women representing only two per cent of CEOs among Fortune 500 companies, describing how, to get to the top, women have to navigate through a \"labyrinth of leadership\". Evidence suggests that women are frequently confronted by an invisible obstacle that prevents them from rising to leadership status known as the \"glass ceiling\" (Storvik and Schone, 2008; Campbell and Vera, 2010; Purcell et al., 2010), while men (particularly those in female dominated professions) have been found to be more likely to ascend into management positions by way of a \"glass escalator\" (Williams, 1992). Maume (1999) supports the notion that a glass escalator exists for working men reporting that, when there is a higher percentage of women in the workplace this increases the chances that men are promoted to management positions, but decreases the chances that women are promoted to such positions.\nPart-time employment and its costs: The Australian Bureau of Statistics data (2011b) shows that female workers dominate part-time work and part-time casual work, which are generally not career jobs, consequently they have limited advancement opportunities compared to those in full-time work. Preston and Yu (2013) recently found that part-time workers earned 6.9 per cent less than full-time workers, even after controlling for qualifications, experience, gender, industry, method of pay setting and casual status. This shows that the growth in part-time female employment is a contributory factor explaining the widening gender wage gap in Australia. The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (2010b, p. 215) reports that Australia ranks third highest among member countries in terms of the proportion of the workforce in part-time employment. In common with other OECD economies, women dominate part-time work (Crompton, 2002; Ngo, 2002; Warren, 2004; Sheridan, 2004; Pilcher, 2007; Tomlinson, 2007; McDonald et al., 2008; Atkinson and Hall, 2009). In particular, Tomlinson (2007) found that part-time work is highly gendered and often low-status, which can have serious consequences for women's economic independence, financial security and quality of working life. Similarly, Sirianni and Negrey (2000) point out that part-time female employees may be limited to jobs that pay poorly, provide few benefits and offer few opportunities to gain new skills. The OECD report and other research data suggests that working mothers may accept inferior terms and conditions to accommodate their domestic obligations (Brockbank and Airey, 1994). Consequently, a trade-off exists in that flexibility gains by employees may be lost in the reduced terms and conditions of their employment (Negrey, 1990; Ferber et al., 1991; Brockbank and Airey, 1994). The findings presented in Table III are drawn from the Australia at Work (2009) data and show that the majority of women with dependent children occupied part-time positions (56.6 per cent), with most of these part-time positions being permanent, indicating an ongoing commitment to part-time roles balanced with child care responsibilities. Conversely, men with dependent children strongly dominated permanent full-time roles (90.7 per cent), indicating that the majority undertake the role of career-oriented breadwinner.\nAddressing the gender wage gap at the policy level: Although there has been an active policy program to address gender equality in Australian workforces, it has not yet served to lessen the gender wage gap. Recent policy developments concern occupational wage cases and the provision of paid parental leave. Whittard and Burgess (2007) point out that the traditional way to reconcile work and care is through part-time work. However, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (2010c, p. 2) reported that Australian part-time workers have poor financial incentives to move into full-time work because benefits in the welfare system are means-tested and \"clawed back\" as incomes rise. This implies that the popularity of part-time work in Australia's employment structure can be attributed to a lack of work and family reconciliation in Australian industrial agreements (Burgess et al., 2007), which can be expected of a liberal market economy with an emphasis on market-based resource allocation (Connell et al., 2008). However, conditions should change as a result of recent policy reforms in Australia such as the National Employment Standard, which enables employers to introduce more flexible working arrangements and leave for parents and carers (National Employment Standard, 2010). Also the Australian Government's Paid Parental Leave scheme, which took effect from 1 January 2011, provides working parents with 18 weeks of paid parental leave at a minimum wage (Paid Parental Leave Scheme, 2011). Since 2009, there has been further policy development relating to women and work, signifying a reframing of the policy debates around women, work and family in Australia (Baird and Williamson, 2009, 2010, 2011; Baird et al., 2012).\nAddressing the gender wage gap at the workplace level: In order to mitigate the gender wage gap, there are steps being put into place by statutory bodies (e.g. FWA and the Workplace Gender Equality Agency) to address pay and other gender inequalities in the workplace. In others, such as the group that appear to be under the most financial and work related strain, that is female single-parents, solutions are not readily evident. As discussed previously, this may be because single-parent females often opt to undertake part-time work but, if they are working part-time due to child care responsibilities, potentially they are not only paid less, they also have to take on more child care responsibility than two parent families do. However, this situation is not unique to Australia, being recognized as problematic in many other westernized countries. Other research has noted that working mothers appear to have been particularly discriminated against in terms of wages (Budig and England, 2001; Cuddy et al., 2004; Blades and Rowe-Finkbeiner, 2006; Gungor and Biernat, 2009; Ortiz and Roscigno, 2009). In countries where substantial pay gaps exist, there are a number of initiatives that human resource directors, governments, trade unions and employer organisations can introduce. That said, it has been argued that managing diversity takes a more positive stance than the preventative laws that have been introduced through equal opportunity. Diversity management as part of an organisation's human resource strategy concerns the business case for improved organisational performance (Pilch, 2006), which may also involve the need for organisational culture change (Singh, 2002).\nConclusion and recommendations: Clearly, the evidence provided here indicates that the gender wage gap persists in Australia, despite the policy responses that have been introduced to address it. Current policy responses encompass issues such as work flexibility, paid parental leave, pay transparency and mandatory reporting. While these policies address gender equality in Australian workforces, they do not yet appear to have lessened the gender wage gap. Rather, they have the potential to exacerbate the wage gap if employers consequently avoid hiring women, or choose to pay women less due to costs incurred covering parental leave entitlements and more. Additionally, current policy initiatives do not cover the more than doubling of the gender wage gap among university graduates (Gradstats, 2012) because the report only samples full-time work and fresh graduate (not postgraduate) positions, which are largely unaffected by issues such as work flexibility, parental leave, and \"glass ceilings\". Given this review of current data on the topic, it is argued that one of the largest contributions to the gender wage gap was found to be gender discrimination. Thus, despite the array of remedial policy actions, which include anti-discrimination and equal opportunity legislation, the pay gap has remained and women are still faced with inferior pay, conditions and prospects.\n",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to focus on the implications of the gender wage gap in Australia, before considering policy responses and their effectiveness at both the government and workplace levels.\nDesign/methodology/approach: The method concerns an extensive literature review and an examination of secondary data and reports relating to workplace gender equality and data.\nFindings: While the gender wage gap in most OECD countries has decreased over time, in Australia the gap has increased, with the largest contributory factor identified as gender discrimination. Consequently it is proposed that current policy responses supporting women in the workplace appear to be ineffective in closing gender wage gaps.\nResearch limitations/implications: Further research is recommended to identify the impact of gender equality policies on hiring decisions and whether such decisions include an unwillingness to hire or promote women. As findings were based on secondary data, it is recommended that future research include workplace surveys and case studies.\nPractical implications: It is suggested that articles such as this one can assist in guiding public policy and workplace decisions on gender wage equality issues, in addition to providing human resource leaders with the information to make better decisions relating to gender equality.\nOriginality/value: This paper suggests that current policy responses may not only be ineffective in closing the gender wage gap, but may even exacerbate it as employers may avoid hiring women or continue to pay them less than men, due to costs incurred when attempting to meet policy directives.\n",
"role": "assistant"
}
] |
Post popularity and reactions in retail brand pages on Facebook
|
[
"Social networking sites",
"Social media marketing"
] |
[
{
"content": "Summarize the following paper into structured abstract.\n\n1. Introduction: Social media and social networking sites (SNSs) are a part of everyday life with billions of active users around the world and new platforms emerging every day, affecting directly consumer behavior, regardless of the socio-demographic group or the country they are living in. The wide adoption of social media and SNSs has revolutionized the way brands reach out to consumers and communicate with them, creating significant challenges for the marketing strategies of firms (Belch and Belch, 2014).\n2. Social media and consumer engagement in Facebook and retail: Social media and social media marketing have been described and defined by a number of studies (Kaplan and Haenlein, 2010; Hanna et al., 2011; Alves et al., 2016). The main characteristics of these platforms enable interactions between individuals or among individuals and organizations (Berthon et al., 2012), establishing them as a fundamental tool for creating and strengthening the bonds with customers (Trainor, 2012), through enhanced customer engagement (Van Doorn et al., 2010). In that respect, social media and particularly Facebook can be used innovatively in order to achieve basic marketing goals like sales, brand awareness, brand loyalty, etc. (Gummerus et al., 2012; Sakas et al., 2015). Communicating and engaging directly with customers through brand pages/accounts in social media offer firms and organizations, with valuable marketing information and data about current or future performance (Hanna et al., 2011; Brodie et al., 2011; Kim et al., 2015; Kavoura and Koziol, 2017).\n3. Theoretical framework and hypothesis development: Our study aims to explore the post characteristics that influence online engagement of brand posts in Facebook brand pages, and therefore their popularity (De Vries et al., 2012), measured by brand interactions as suggested by numerous papers in the literature (Schultz, 2017). The factors that affect the overall engagement level of consumers with posts in social media have been examined by a number of researchers (De Vries et al., 2012; Cvijikj and Michahelles, 2013; Sabate et al., 2014; Jayasingh and Venkatesh, 2015; Chua and Banerjee, 2015a; Schultz, 2017). Four main categories of factors that influence post engagement are examined: type and content of posts in terms of vividness and interactivity, level of activity in the page/post, the amount of information included in a post and finally the time of posting.\n4. Research methodology: 4.1 Data collection and sample characteristics\n5. Empirical results: Table IV presents the results of the estimated OLS regressions for the posts in retail brand pages examined. The estimated regressions have an explanatory power (adjusted R2) that ranges from 0.189 for the like model (2) to 0.350 for the comment model (4). The overall engagement model (1) has a value of adjusted R2 of 0.215, the share model (5) adjusted R2 is 0.250, while for the reaction model (3) the value is 0.194. Although the values of both R2 and adjusted R2 are comparable to the ones reported by similar studies in the literature (Schultz, 2017), they provide some evidence that there are more variables that influence the popularity of posts, additionally to the ones used in this study.\n6. Conclusions and implications: This paper has examined the factors that affect post popularity in Greek retail brand pages on Facebook, to provide suggestions and identify links, that may develop the interaction between consumers and retail brands on Facebook. After examining the relevant literature, we have identified a number of important variables that affect engagement and appropriate measures for post popularity and engagement. Using regression analysis for 18 retail brand pages, and a total 2,621 posts we provide marketers and academics with guidelines concerning the role and links of post content, reactions and timing of post with consumer engagement behavior of fans on Facebook. These findings can be utilized to optimize social media marketing strategies aiming at higher levels of engagement and virality by consumers enhancing ROI of social media marketing campaigns.\n",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Purpose: Social networking sites and Facebook have grown to become an important channel of interactive marketing communication with consumers for retail. The purpose of this paper is to examine the ways posts characteristics and reactions affect post popularity and engagement in retail brands Facebook pages.\nDesign/methodology/approach: In total, 18 retail brand pages out of the 120 most popular brand pages on Facebook in Greece are examined for a three months' period (April-June 2016). In all, 2,627 posts are analyzed with the use of OLS regressions in order to identify the characteristics of posts that increase consumers' engagement, including the newly introduced reaction feature.\nFindings: The results suggest that richness of content (images and videos) and message length increase the engagement levels and the popularity of posts. Reactions have a positive effect on engagement, and negative reactions stronger than positive reactions, except in sharing. On the other hand, posting time does not seem to have a statistically significant impact on the engagement and popularity of a post.\nResearch limitations/implications: The study was conducted during a period that reactions were only recently introduced by Facebook, therefore users and brands may not have been familiarized with their use.\nPractical implications: The study contributes to the understanding of consumer engagement with retail brands' pages on Facebook and social media, and the ways they use reactions and other ways of interactions with brand posts. The results can provide some insight to retailers on how to achieve higher levels of engagement for their brands through their Facebook pages, improving the effectiveness of social media marketing campaigns.\nOriginality/value: The findings contribute in understanding the ways users interact with brand posts in Facebook using reactions, using a number of popularity measures, providing useful insights about reactions, engagement and e-WoM, extending prior research.\n",
"role": "assistant"
}
] |
Assessing disciplinary differences in faculty perceptions of information literacy competencies
|
[
"Assessment",
"Information literacy",
"Perceptions",
"Disciplinary differences",
"Faculty members",
"Information competencies"
] |
[
{
"content": "Summarize the following paper into structured abstract.\n\nIntroduction: The understanding of perceptions, and subsequent attitudes and behaviors, of faculty members in relation to the emerging paradigm of Information Literacy (IL) is an interesting question of which little is known. This is partly due to the fact that scientific papers addressing the relationships between IL and university teachers are rather scarce. Nevertheless, the importance of understanding the states of awareness of teaching faculty with regard to this topic within our information society is apparent, as this should be the actual starting point for future improvements aiming to master IL competencies among teachers. In an academic environment where IL instruction evolves into a major issue, we must recognize the key role of faculty as facilitators of learning processes, \"Higher education cannot produce information literate students if it does not first have information literate teachers\" (Frier et al., 2001). One has to acknowledge that for faculty and other academic professionals to be proactive rather than reactive consumers in the information society, they must become information literate. If the faculty have limited skills, how do they train students to become proficient in information usage (Amstutz and Whitson, 1997)? In short, faculty ought to possess some basic competencies in IL which allow them to support both classroom instruction and, ultimately, students' autonomous and meaningful lifelong learning.\nLiterature review: This literature review covers the set of publications related to the perceptions of faculty members on the wide and complex phenomenon of IL. The first circumstance that cannot be ignored is the dual perspective to which this issue has been historically subjected, as it is located at the convergence of academic knowledge and library practice. For this reason, much of the existing literature refers to the faculty-librarian relationship. McGuinness's (2006, p. 575) work is \"based on the premise that faculty-library collaboration is one of the critical elements for establishing successful IL programs in undergraduate education.\" That historical relationship has tended to lean toward either of these two sides. As an example, Van Helvoort (2010) has given greater importance to the contribution of librarians stating that IL, being mainly defended by librarians and educational researchers, is not accepted by all faculty members and students. Collaborative initiatives between libraries and teachers have also been found dealing with the topic of student research education. Miller (2010) fostered a three-year ongoing project in which librarians work with faculty members from selected departments to aid them in articulating and integrating IL skills into their curricula.\nMethods: Instruments\nResults: The survey starts by asking faculty who is an information literate person, with three options to choose from: \"One with a set of skills needed to find, retrieve, analyze and use information\"; \"One with an ability to carry out independent and ongoing learning\"; or, \"One who masters Information and Communication Technology (ICT).\" The first choice is the more conventional, comprehensive and also more academic of the three responses. The other two options are misconceptions, as they are partial, biased and perhaps erroneous from the conceptual perspective of IL - they refer either to the domain of ICT, or to independent and lifelong learning.\nDiscussion: Regarding the three proposed views of IL, one of which had to be chosen by the faculty surveyed, the percentage of those having a skewed interpretation of the concept is highly significant. This circumstance simply reflects the conceptual gap with regard to IL among a considerable number of faculty members, and this misconception should be tackled as soon as possible.\nConclusions: As for the various conceptual perceptions of IL among faculty of Granada's University, the results demonstrate the primacy of the academic concept of IL, as the set of skills needed to find, retrieve, analyze and use the information. But there is also a significant percentage of faculty members who have a misconception of IL, as their ideas about the topic are biased and erroneous. The implementation of appealing courses aimed exclusively at faculty with the idea of increasing and channeling its understanding of IL as a comprehensive set of key tools in the handling of information is proposed.\n",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Purpose: Uncovering faculty members' conceptions of Information Literacy (IL), as well as exploring their perceptions with regard to the importance given to a previously defined set of core IL competences grouped into four categories: searching, evaluation, processing and communication and dissemination. Ascertaining the possible differences among the five knowledge branches (arts and humanities, sciences, social and legal sciences, health sciences, and technical disciplines); and understanding the importance granted to a set of learning improvement initiatives by the faculty. The paper aims to discuss these issues.\nDesign/methodology/approach: The survey was completed by a set of faculty members from the University of Granada (Spain). Data were collected using the IL-HUMASS survey. The research is based on subjective data, first approached from a descriptive point of view. Later, data correlation, analysis and non-parametric tests were used with the goal of finding significant differences of faculty perceptions among the relevant academic areas.\nFindings: Results suggest that more than half of the surveyed faculty have what the authors define as an Academic Concept of IL. The IL categories of communica\\tion and dissemination and searching were graded in significance by the staff as being \"very important,\" while those of evaluation and processing were assigned a slightly lesser rating of \"important.\" Results suggest that IL awareness falls into two broad groups differentiated by subject discipline: those from health sciences, social and legal sciences and arts and humanities representing the first group, and sciences and technical disciplines the other.\nResearch limitations/implications: This approach address the subjective status of faculty concepts in a single university, but also in all knowledge branches. Future research is needed.\nOriginality/value: This is one of the few papers regarding faculty perceptions of IL.\n",
"role": "assistant"
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The "dark side" of food banks? Exploring emotional responses of food bank receivers in the Netherlands
|
[
"The Netherlands",
"Food waste",
"Food banks",
"Emotional responses",
"Poverty allevation"
] |
[
{
"content": "Summarize the following paper into structured abstract.\n\n1. Introduction: Improving the management of food waste is becoming a key issue in many countries worldwide (Parfitt et al., 2010). However, specific policies to reduce or better use food waste are still lacking behind (Hodges et al., 2011; Buzby and Hyman, 2012). Food waste can be generated at different stages of the food supply chain, and involve several supply chain actors. Also defining food waste is not easy, because food waste can assume different features according to the specific stage in which it is generated (Buzby and Hyman, 2012). Mostly food waste is generated at the retail and consumer stages, where agricultural products are more clearly used as \"food\" for human consumption (Parfitt et al., 2010). Moreover food products are made of biological materials which are subject to several forms of degradation, while differing in terms of nutritional composition and values (Parfitt et al., 2010).\n2. Emotions and poverty in food banks: Shame is often considered one of the most destructive inflictions of poverty in affluent welfare societies (Sen, 1985; Starrin et al., 2009), affecting the individuals as well as the social cohesion of a society. Stigma related to visible poverty, feelings of inferiority and dependence on income transfers or in-kind provisions are regularly identified as causes for such shame. Shame is not just considered an effect of poverty, it is even being seen as one of the causes for the persistence of poverty, even across generations. Shame is furthermore identified as a main source of violence in societies (Scheff, 2000). And lastly poverty related shame in childhood, has been suggested to negatively affect lives long into adulthood (Macleod, 1987; Gasker, 1999).\n3. Methods: Similar to previous studies, in this paper we use an ethnographic approach to preliminary and qualitatively explore issues of emotional responses in food bank receivers due to features of the food parcels, interactions and social status (Tarasuk and Eakin, 2003, 2005). More specifically we interviewed four professionals referring to food banks, five food bank volunteers and 17 food bank clients.\n4. Findings: 4.1 The content of the food parcel\n5. Discussion and concluding remarks: Of all emotions that were expressed during the interviews, shame appeared as the most prominent. We have addressed the emergence of shame in relation to three food bank related experiences: the content of the food parcel, the interaction with volunteers and lastly the understanding of one's positioning in a social hierarchy. While shame can be a very private emotion - even talking about being ashamed can be shameful - the genesis of emotions is not a private affair, but a socially structured phenomenon. The social dynamics leading to such emotions are best understood with a combination of the perspectives that we addressed in the beginning of this paper.\n",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to address how food, social status as well as the interactions at the food bank induce emotions in receivers, such as shame, gratitude and anger. Since early 2000s a steadily growing number of low-income and/or over-indebted households in the Netherlands alleviate their situation with food donations from local food banks. Such food banks collect from companies edible food that would otherwise have gone to waste. The growing demand for food assistance indicates it is a welcome contribution to the groceries in many households. However, receiving food assistance as well as eating the products forces the receivers to set aside embodied dispositions towards food and norms about how to obtain food. Furthermore, it places them in interactions of charitable giving that may be harmful to the self-esteem of receivers.\nDesign/methodology/approach: The paper is based on a qualitative study at a food bank in the Netherlands, consisting among others of in-depth interviews with 17 receivers of food assistance, observations and several interviews with volunteers.\nFindings: Of all emotions that were expressed during the interviews, shame appeared as the most prominent. Particularly issues of shame emerged in relation to all three food-bank-related experiences: the content of the crate, the interaction with volunteers and lastly the understanding of one's positioning in a social hierarchy. While shame can be a very private emotion - even talking about being ashamed can be shameful - it is also an utterly social emotion.\nOriginality/value: This research is among the few ones explicitly addressing emotional emotions related to receivers in food bank.\n",
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Supporting students to succeed in open and distance learning in the Open University of Sri Lanka and Universitas Terbuka Indonesia
|
[
"Open and distance education (ODE)",
"Online learning",
"Flexible learning"
] |
[
{
"content": "Summarize the following paper into structured abstract.\n\nIntroduction and literature review: Higher education systems are confronted with the tasks of addressing the differing needs of students using learning technology that allows them to learn in a more open and flexible manner, and share common goals relating to access, retention, flexibility and employability (European Commission/EACEA/Eurydice, 2014). In Asia, higher education systems are expanding to accommodate more students at undergraduate and post-graduate levels, and now increasingly focusing more on continuous quality improvements (UNESCO, 2014). Advances in technology challenge higher education further to transform themselves into addressing the changing needs of the world of work and to provide access and quality education in more flexible fashions. New approaches and technologies have been using distance and blended learning and increasing roles of open universities in widening of participation in higher education (Latchem and Jung, 2010). Online learning is viewed as one of the effective instruments for widening access and providing flexibility for continuous professional development and lifelong learning. Student learning success poses a constant challenge to open and distance education institutions.\nResearch method: This qualitative study involved interviews and focus group discussions with administrators, academic staff, and students, which lasted for about one hour each sessions, and was conducted in OUSL Head Office and three Regional Centers (RC) in Colombo, Kandy and Jaffna. Brief observation of teaching and learning and support service activities was conducted in the OUSL Head Office and in the three RC to have insights into how the various aspects of student support were implemented. Analysis of documents included institutional documents such as annual reports, research publications and internal policy documents and procedures. This study aimed at revealing insights into the provision of student support services, taking into accounts other supporting aspects related to student instructional design and development, engagement and motivation, policy and strategy in reducing dropout rates, use of OER/MOOCs, and quality assurance in ODL.\nFindings and discussion: OUSL and UT were examined and analyzed in terms of good practices, challenges and rooms for improvement in student support as described in the conceptual framework, including instructional design and development, learner motivation and engagement, policy and strategies to reduce dropouts, OER and MOOCs, and quality assurance. Findings of this study were the results of the focus group discussions with people consulted during the study at OUSL (see Appendix) and analyses of documents.\nOUSL and UT as institutions: OUSL and UT are single mode open universities established in the 1980s to address demands by the society for access, equity and participation in higher education, following up the success of the UK Open University. As open universities, both OUSL and UT have made significant contributions to human resource development of their respective countries. Large number of students coming from various backgrounds and locations have studied and graduated from both institutions. Employers and stakeholders acknowledge the quality and competence of graduates from the two open universities. It is useful to analyze higher education systems as academic institutions characterized as having six elements of cultures, namely collegial, managerial, developmental, advocacy, virtual and tangible (Bergquist and Pawlak, 2008), in which one character has evolved from negotiating to advocacy element, and two more elements of virtual and tangible have been added from earlier four elements (Bergquist, 1992). These expanding elements of cultures of academic institutions, namely virtual and tangible, have indicated how fast academic institutions have transformed themselves in recent times.\nStudent support: Open and distance education students need student support to facilitate, engage and motivate students to learn. These student support needs include areas academic, administrative and other matters needed by distance students to succeed in learning. As earlier noted by Tait (2014), student support for distance learners are further challenged as the result of the digitalization and the need for integration of learning, assessment, and student support in online learning environment.\nInstructional design and development: Instructional design and development are the foundation of any education system, and it is particularly challenging for ODL that have physical, temporal, and transactional distance between students and their teachers. In any educational process, instructional design and development need to be carefully prepared for effective implementation, and for open and distance education it must be accurately delivered with systematic supply chain management and logistic support.\nEngagement and motivation to learn: Engagement and motivation in learning for distance students play crucial roles in ensuring student learning and they may involve a variety of teaching and learning as well as assessment activities. Learning engagement and motivation is the essence of teaching and learning process that need to be closely monitored in terms of its implementation and progress.\nPolicy and strategies to reduce dropouts: Open universities suffer from dropouts, and there needs to be systematic effort to prevent students from dropout. New strategies need to be tried out and carefully evaluated. Further studies need to be conducted so that findings can be used to better understand why students drop out. Open universities need to further explore new ways and methods to prevent students from dropout.\nOER/MOOCs: OER and MOOCs are new trends in higher education thanks to advances in digital interactive technology and invention of the internet. Higher education institutions vary in terms of adoption and integration of both advances into teaching and learning process. Awareness about OER and MOOCs and their potential effectiveness to support teaching and learning need to be continuously introduced constructed to academic staff, tutors, students and the society as parts of the effort to promote lifelong learning. Clear policies by the government and higher education institutions including open universities must be well stated for effective implementation supported with continuous evaluation and improvement so that OER and MOOCs benefit student learning.\nQuality assurance: Quality assurance has become serious attention of stakeholders and educational institutions. Quality assurance in open universities have been implemented referring to standards published by relevant organizations of open and distance education. Many ODL institutions have adopted the principles of continuous improvement and established a dedicated unit to coordinate implementation of quality assurance system. Mechanisms for quality audits and reviews, internal and external, have been implemented to ensure that their practices meet certain international quality standards and criteria and to secure stakeholders' trust in open and distance education system.\nViews from OUSL regional centers, academic staff, students and alumni: Regional centers\nConclusions: Findings of this study are expected to improve our understanding of open and distance education in theory and practice, particularly in the areas of student support services that ensure successful learning, based on the experiences of OUSL and UT. These findings are expected to help both OUSL and UT and probably other open universities improve the provision of student support services to facilitate distance learners. Many open universities have been established by the governments in contexts with the specific goals to address challenges confronted in those certain contexts. Yet there are commonalities and differences from which institutions may be able to learn from each other in terms of good practices, challenges, and rooms for future improvements.\n",
"role": "user"
},
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"content": "Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to reveal how support services for open and distance students are designed, developed and implemented to ensure successful learning to take place, with specific references to the Open University of Sri Lanka (OUSL) and Universitas Terbuka (UT) Indonesia. Success in distance learning is one major challenge for open universities to respond to expectations of students and stakeholders. This study focuses on the strategies of student support services in OUSL and UT, investigating related factors including instructional design and development, learning engagement and motivation, policy and strategy in reducing dropouts, use of OER/MOOCs, and quality assurance.\nDesign/methodology/approach: A qualitative study was employed involving analyses of documents; interviews and focus group discussion with senior administrators, academic staff, students; and on-site observation in locations of teaching and learning.\nFindings: This research is exploratory in nature. Findings of the study are expected to improve our understanding of student support in distance learning, in which analysis is based on good practices, challenges and rooms for improvement of both OUSL and UT.\nPractical implications: Findings of this study reveal practices and lessons learnt that may be useful as reference to open universities, taking into considerations the fact that each open university has been established to address specific challenges in its own unique circumstances.\nOriginality/value: This research may be adopted as baseline framework for analysis of student support for open universities. Further in-depth study is needed to understand how various aspects of student support contribute to success in open and distance learning.\n",
"role": "assistant"
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Training takes root when the boss has been, too: Vancouver Island Health Authority study shows what makes learning "stick"
|
[
"Leadership development",
"Organizational culture",
"Health services",
"Motivation (psychology)",
"Canada"
] |
[
{
"content": "Summarize the following paper into structured abstract.\n\n__NO_TITLE__: Having secured a not-inconsiderable budget for leadership training, the human resource department sends the chosen personnel off on their courses with high hopes that more competent, confident people will return. Not only will the new skills and practices they have learned benefit them and the organization as a whole, those benefits will be recognized by management as an excellent return on investment, totally justifying the HR department's initial budget request.\nAligning training to the strategic focus of the organization: It is the stuff of nightmares for HR departments and that is why what supports, and what inhibits, the transfer of leadership training in an organization needs to be identified and understood. Despite high spending on leadership training, there is evidence - some of it anecdotal, but nevertheless worrying - that only a low proportion is translated into the transfer of training. If that sort of gloomy perception persists, guess where financially-stretched managements are going to start looking for cutbacks?In future, in order to convince those who hold the purse strings of the necessity of leadership training, HRD and training providers recognize that they will have to shift the focus. Rather than view it as a stand-alone class or event, they should take a long-term focus and align training and related programs to the strategic focus of the organization.A study of the amount and type of transfer taking place from the Leading in a Learning Organization training program, designed for leaders, managers and supervisors at Vancouver Island Health Authority, Canada, revealed that, even though every trainee in the sample believed he or she had learned useful skills that could improve leadership success, the actual use of the training seemed to be affected by the need to believe that the trainee's actions were understood and acceptable to others. The barrier the trainees felt they faced in using their new leadership behaviors in the organization were, in a word, its culture.\nPhysical proximity of other trainees: Managers felt far more willing to try using the skills when they believed they would be accepted, and much less willing when they believed they would be ridiculed or shot down, for instance when others involved in the interaction had also taken the course.Respondents emphasized that physical proximity to other trainees not only increased their motivation to transfer, but also created an avenue for peer support, the development of mentoring relationships and the fostering of an open and safe environment to share the common language from the training course.Trainees were particularly strong on transferring their training when their bosses had been through the program and were actively engaged in practicing its skills and concepts. They described how discussions, coaching and personal engagement from their bosses facilitated continued learning and engagement with the new skills. The success of their transfer of soft skills was strongly affected by whether they were surrounded by others who had been through the training. Verbal encouragement was appreciated but could not necessarily overcome fears of violating peer-group norms.\nMotivational result of the organization \"investing\" in them: A significant impact on utilization was the common idea that since the organization had spent money on them, they were obliged to use what they had learned. The size and scope of the Vancouver program were unprecedented in trainees' experience. Several of them made a point of saying that they were motivated to transfer their training because the organization had \"invested\" in them and, given resource constraints facing health care, showed commitment to their development. It is as though norms of reciprocity are engaged when training is seen as lavish or top-quality and this motivates trainees to use it.The only completely non-cultural post-training variable that appeared to affect utilization was simply having the time to apply what had been learned. Fewer than half of the trainees gave an absolute \"yes\" answer when asked if they had time to apply their training. However, it seems that if people are comfortable using their new skills they will create opportunities to transfer what they have learned.Cultural support for new skills and social support are actually two different things and appear to affect transfer differently. It is less the conscious or planned attempts to support trainees' use of the skills, and more the unconscious, unplanned patterns and norms surrounding trainees, that encourage or inhibit the use of newly-learned soft skills at work.\nComment: This review is based on \"Leadership development training transfer: a case study of post-training determinants\", by Yabome Gilpin-Jackson and Gervase R. Bushe. Based on a study of a Canadian health authority's leadership-development program, the authors investigate what contributes to the transfer of leadership training - and discover how organizational culture, notably the fear of embarrassment or ridicule, can hinder that process.\n",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Purpose: - This paper seeks to understand what contributes to the transfer back to the workplace of soft-skill leadership training.\nDesign/methodology/approach: - The study draws on information from a study carried out at Vancouver Island Health Authority, Canada.\nFindings: - The paper reveals that the greatest inhibitor to transfer appears to be the fear of breaking cultural norms and the most important remedy, the number of other managers who receive the training. In particular, having one's boss take the same training is strongly associated with post-training utilization.\nPractical implications: - The paper points to the need to plan for the rapid diffusion of training, and for cultural-change processes to run in parallel with leadership-development courses.\nOriginality/value: - The paper shows that some people are motivated to transfer their training back to the workplace because the organization has \"invested\" in them.\n",
"role": "assistant"
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] |
Gender diversity in expatriation: evaluating theoretical perspectives
|
[
"Women",
"Gender",
"Equal opportunities",
"Expatriates"
] |
[
{
"content": "Summarize the following paper into structured abstract.\n\nIntroduction: Research into gender diversity within expatriation is reaching the end of its third decade. The extant literature began in 1979 with Nancy Adler's call to consider the potential of women as expatriates. Over the past 30 years although many studies have been conducted to explore various aspects of women's participation in expatriation, there is little evidence of an agreed, accepted theoretical framework within which researchers' hypotheses may be tested and findings built upon to create a knowledge base for this field of enquiry. As women's involvement as expatriates steadily increases, scholarly interest in their participation and the volume of research in this arena grows (Altman and Shortland, 2008), so the importance of establishing such a framework becomes ever more paramount.There are no definitive statistics on the numbers of expatriates within an organisational context. However, women's participation rates are thought to range from around 30 per cent in more female-friendly sectors, such as non-profit and charitable organisations and 25 per cent in media and publishing, to as low as 6 per cent in construction and engineering (ORC Worldwide, 2007), with an average of 15 per cent across all industries (ORC Worldwide, 2008). Women are increasingly - albeit slowly - gaining a foothold as expatriates even in heavily male-dominated sectors such as mining and oil. This sector is particularly important as it not only represents a major employer of expatriates but is also one in which their use is growing faster than almost all other industries. Nonetheless, women's participation as expatriates here remains modest, reaching an average of 7 per cent by 2006 (ORC Worldwide, 2007), having risen from 4 per cent in 1990 (ORC/CBI, 1990). Publicly available data on gender diversity in expatriation is very limited. However, as examples, Schlumberger has a 15 per cent female intake at field engineer, research scientist or product engineer entry level, (Gould, 2003) while at BP, women comprise less than 7 per cent of the drilling function (Werngren, 2007).The extant literature pertaining to female expatriates is set within a variety of theoretical domains. While theoretical diversity might be considered to be a healthy state of affairs, it can create a patchwork of knowledge lacking a strong foundation to help shape future research. A quarter of a century on since Adler's (1984a) pioneering work in this field questioned why there were so few women, we still cannot predict with any certainty why this is so. Systematic evaluation of the theory used to underpin research into women's participation as expatriates could therefore be a useful starting point to this end. This paper therefore sets out to examine various theoretical perspectives that could be used to underpin research into gender diversity within expatriation, to identify the potentially most fruitful of these for future female expatriate research and to suggest a theoretically-based research agenda.\nMethodology: The literature in respect of theoretical explanations of women's participation in the workplace and in relation to their involvement in international assignments was identified using a mixed methods approach. The first step made use of the Delphi study technique. The aim of this was to seek opinions on relevant authors/literature (books, chapters in books and peer reviewed journal articles) in respect of theoretical frameworks that might be used to explain women's participation in the workplace and to identify key empirical research studies and authors in the field. To do this, a community of experts carefully selected by the author was approached and their views sought. As suggested by Collis and Hussey (2009), responses received were summarised and then discussed again with the members of this expert community. The process was repeated several times to enable further identification of appropriate authors and studies, enabling review and re-evaluation until a point of repetition (or saturation) was reached. On an on going basis, the identified literature was read and summarised in notes form with the theoretical frameworks articulated being highlighted, thus enabling classification of these works. To supplement this reading and to explore fully the literature in respect of the key authors identified in the Delphi study, a library database search was conducted within the author's institution to capture any further relevant work by the identified key authors that had not been specifically expressed through the Delphi approach. Again, this was summarised in notes form with the theoretical backdrops used identified.With regard to women's participation in expatriate, international and flexible style assignments, a systematic library advanced database search was conducted within the author's university. Where possible this was taken back to 1980 to follow up on the first identified paper on women as expatriates (Adler, 1979). The search terms used were women, gender, female, expatriate, international assignment and flexpatriate and these were run either singly or where possible in combination within the following databases: Applied Social Sciences Index and Abstracts, Business Source Premier, Emerald Fulltext, IngentaConnect, International Bibliography of the Social Sciences, Sage Journals Online, ScienceDirect, Social Sciences Citations Index and ZETOC (the British Library's Electronic Table of Contents). The peer reviewed journal articles identified were read and theoretical frameworks, where articulated, were noted. Where it was found that authors had written several papers drawn from the same empirical dataset, only illustrative examples were selected in line with the theoretical domains identified, primarily reflecting those papers with the highest citation rates. In addition, books and chapters in books written by the most prominent authors in this field were also followed up via the references given within the journal articles identified through the database search. Hence, an iterative process of reading, reflection and discussion together with systematic library database advanced searches informed the critique of the literature used to underpin this paper.\nTheoretical explanations for women's continuing low representation as expatriates: Classifying theoretical backdrops\nDiscussion: The spectrum of theoretical approaches that might be used to underpin future research into women's participation as expatriates clearly is very wide. While such diversity provides a kaleidoscope of knowledge concerning various aspects of women's involvement in the workplace as expatriates, it does not present a firm foundation upon which we can attempt to understand the factors that limit (or indeed might enhance) it.Much has been written based upon the human capital, supply and demand backdrop. This line of enquiry had its roots in the very early days of female expatriate research through Adler's pioneering studies in the 1980s. These highlighted that although women reported that they chose to pursue expatriate careers, they were thwarted in so-doing, in the main by employer views on their unsuitability. This early research has been replicated and re-tested over the years, with little change in the results (Stroh et al., 2000). Of course, we cannot negate women's preferences entering the expatriate decision-making process. Women's lifestyles and their career paths are linked to their need to balance home and family life to a greater extent than men's. Dual careers do mean than the partners in a relationship must determine whose career will lead and whose will follow at particular points in the couple's career lifecycles. Women's choices are borne from constraint to a greater degree than men's and they typically do not hold the greatest family power. Yet, women's preferences, their career paths and family power roles are by no means predictable, leading us to consider these theoretical groupings as remaining worthy of further enquiry.In relation to women's choices within an employment context, the compensating differentials model suggests that women will seek occupations with good working conditions, rather than high monetary rewards. The work-life balance within expatriate roles is known to be demanding (IRC/ORC Worldwide, 2007) and industries with tough images are even less likely to attract women (Werngren, 2007). Making an industry appear more attractive to women could potentially help in this regard but this requires breaking away from traditional institutional practice, out of line with acknowledged prior successful behaviours. Both evolutionary psychology (Nicholson, 2000) and institutional theory (DiMaggio and Powell, 1983) would predict this to be unlikely.A wide range of studies across the globe over the past quarter of a century have also explored the notion that many receiving societal cultures will deem the supply of female expatriates unsuitable simply due to their gender. Yet these various researches, across a broad gamut of receiving countries and cultures all appear to indicate a similar finding - home country prejudice based upon cultural stereotyping of pre-supposed norms in the host county outweighs actual host country prejudice.As globalisation has intensified, skills shortages have emerged, yet expatriate packages have become less rich and repatriation has become more hazardous (Altman and Shortland, 2008). To respond to these pressures it would be predicted that employers would turn to women to fill expatriate roles. Queuing theory (Reskin and Roos, 1990) suggests that poorer conditions and male flight would result in feminisation - yet this has not been overly apparent in the expatriate world as evidenced by only a gradual increase in their participation. This suggests that this theoretical backdrop is not best positioned to provide an explanation of women's involvement in expatriation.Dual labour market and labour segmentation theories predict that women's exclusion from the primary labour market and lower continuity of participation resulting in vertical segregation will exclude them from expatriate roles. These therefore appear to present a credible explanation of women's low assignment participation. However, expatriate roles do not all require lengthy employment continuity. Perhaps, the answer lies more convincingly in statistical discrimination theory: the cost of identifying employees capable of filling expatriate roles being higher for women than for men. This argument is weakened though by the majority of employer-driven expatriations being drawn from an existing employee selection pool (in contrast to self-initiated migration for employment purposes). The cost of identifying women should therefore be no greater than for men.Promising theoretical lenses\n",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Purpose: - The purpose of this paper is to examine the range of theoretical underpinning used to explain women's participation as expatriates with a view to identifying the most promising theoretical lenses for future research.\nDesign/methodology/approach: - Drawing upon theoretical explanations in the \"women in management\" and \"women expatriates\" literature, four main theoretical domains are identified that are used to understand and explain their continuing low representation as expatriates: women's choices, assignee characteristics, social and societal norms and institutional aspects. Key theories within each domain are evaluated to suggest a future theoretical research framework.\nFindings: - The most promising theoretical explanation of women's low participation as expatriates is identified as being linked to gender stereotyping reinforced within an isomorphic institutional framework.\nResearch limitations/implications: - Research into women's inroads into management and into expatriation has generated considerable volumes of theorising in the literature. Thus, only representative examples have been selected here. In terms of future research, gender, identity and sex role theories potentially provide the most promising theoretical lenses set within the institutional framework of organisational policy and practice.\nPractical implications: - Organisational approaches to international assignment policy/practice supporting female corporate expatriation are mediated by how diversity and equal opportunities policies are embedded within policy implementation.\nOriginality/value: - There is little evidence to date of an accepted theoretical framework to test hypotheses relating to women's participation as expatriates. This paper evaluates the options and presents those with the most promise for generating an agreed and accepted framework for future female expatriate research.\n",
"role": "assistant"
}
] |
Exploring parents' responses to their child's deliberate self-harm
|
[
"Youth",
"Parents",
"Public health"
] |
[
{
"content": "Summarize the following paper into structured abstract.\n\nIntroduction: The term DSH is used to describe a non-fatal act in which an individual deliberately intended to cause self-harm through injury, ingestion of a substance in excess of the prescribed or therapeutic dose, ingestion of an illicit or recreational drug that was an act the individual regarded as self-harm or ingestion of a non-ingestible substance or object (Hawton et al., 2002). For the purposes of this study the definition DSH excludes self-harm in response to an underlying psychiatric disorder such as schizophrenia or depression, since those individuals are likely to be receiving on-going treatment for their underlying mental health problem either from a hospital consultant or a general practitioner.DSH is common in young people and is a serious public health problem (Hawton et al., 2000), indeed there are an estimated 25,000 annual presentations to general hospitals in England and Wales (Hawton et al., 2002). Furthermore DSH is one of the top five reasons for acute medical admissions to hospital costing the National Health an estimated PS45-50 million annually (Melville and House, 1998). The Government White Paper The Health of the Nation stated a need for \"professional awareness and expertise\" in those caring for this patient group (Secretary of State for Health, 1992). However, health professionals are reported to feel ambivalent, helpless or frustrated when working with people who self-harm (McAllister et al., 2002). Although the White Paper referred to health professionals when caring for DSH patients there is a strong possibility of parental influence and involvement due to DSH being an adolescent or early adult phenomenon. As such parents have an important role to play alongside health professionals in the therapeutic process (Morgan et al., 1994).When discussing the special issues surrounding children[1] and young people under 16 years the National Institute for Clinical Excellence (NICE) guidelines (2004) discuss advice to carers of young people but they do not address the special needs that this group may have in helping them to care for the young person. DSH affects the whole family and a crucial factor in its successful management is the involvement of parents in the therapeutic process (Morgan et al., 1994). Despite this health professionals have been reported as speaking of parents as a \"nuisance\", \"they get in the way\", \"they ask too many questions.\" (Piacentini, 1993). Such attitudes suggest a lack of understanding of parental concerns and risks alienating parents from the therapeutic process at the very point that health professionals need to engage with and secure parental co-operation (Jeffery, 1995). A review of the literature revealed only limited information on the impact of DSH in young people on other family members (Brown, 1989; Hill, 1995; Smith et al., 1998; Wolk-Wasserman, 1985). As a result parental response to DSH is unlikely to be well understood. Therefore we aimed to explore parent's responses to DSH by their child in an effort to understand better their concerns, experiences and support needs in order to inform education and training about self-harm for health professionals.\nMethods: The study\nFindings: The two interviews allowed for exploration of the ways in which parents' emotional attitude had changed between the two interviews. For example at the first interview some parents had difficulty speaking and appeared to be inhibited about talking about the DSH whereas at the second interview they appeared to welcome the opportunity to speak openly and freely. Figure 1 illustrates some of the major concepts that formed the categories, and indicates how they were then reduced to form the three main themes. The three main themes identified were titled:1. Emotional responses.2. What to do next? Where to find information and support.3. Health professionals.Theme 1: Emotional responses\nDiscussion and conclusions: If parents are to engage effectively in the care of their son or daughter the attitude of the health professional is vitally important. Parents reported that they felt excluded from the decisions being made surrounding their child's care. In some instances this was related to the confidentiality issue- many health professionals felt that it was not appropriate to include parents which resulted in parents feeling that they had not been given any guidance or advice. However, the parents interviewed acknowledged that they were highly emotional and, in some cases, angry following the DSH and this may have sometimes resulted in them misinterpreting the actions of health professionals.Parents reported a perceived a lack of skills and training amongst health professionals to deal with the impact of DSH that would doubtless make it difficult to successfully engage parents in the therapeutic process. Although some of the health professionals included in this study were clearly very sympathetic and understanding towards DSH patients and their families wished to help but many felt at a loss when dealing with DSH patients and their families.The health professionals interviewed expressed a desire for more information and training to help them deal more effectively with this group. This need for further training in this area has been reported recently in the NICE Guidelines (NICE, 2004, p. 9) which point out that self-harm is poorly understood by many staff working within the National Health Service and recommends dedicated training to improve the treatment and provision of care through better understanding of self-harm. This need for information and training is clearly an issue that needs addressing.This study attempted to provide an in-depth exploration and clarification of the experience of DSH by young people from the parents' perspectives. In doing so it illustrates parents' responses to DSH and the range of emotions; concerns and difficulties they experience and some of the difficulties they may encounter. Although parents reported a need for support and information the timing of the help appears be crucial. Parents needed time to come to terms with their own emotions; most notably their feelings of grief, anger and self blame. Furthermore, due to their embarrassment and the perceived stigma of DSH the parents may have felt a reticence to discuss the situation with health professionals. This reticence to talk to health professionals could appear to be a rejection of help leading to a misunderstanding between health professionals and parents. Due to the paucity of information and the need for parents to have time to deal with their own distress one effective method for doing this would be to design an information leaflet providing basic facts about DSH, support groups and book lists. The results of this study could form the basis for such a leaflet.Our data suggest that on occasions health professionals lack the information and skills to deal with DSH patients and their significant others. Our findings have the potential to help health professionals to better communicate with parents and to engage them more fully with the therapeutic process. Moreover, our findings can be used to educate and encourage health professionals to reflect on their attitudes towards parents and begin a process that will equip them to develop trust and understanding between themselves and parents. This is a key issue as involving parents in the therapeutic process and in the care of young people once discharged from hospital is known to be essential in preventing recurrence of DSH (Morgan et al., 1994). This study has highlighted that as well as the need to provide training and education in respect of the DSH patient it is important to consider the needs of parents.The level of distress and helplessness felt by parents after their child had DSH is profound. Engaging with parents and carers may provide health professionals with a more nuanced and in-depth understanding of the family's behaviours, emotional and power dynamics, which would help to define the components of a therapeutic process. Finally, for those cases where the triggers for DSH lie outside of the family, parents may be able to minimize future episodes of DSH if they feel that they are included and sensitively supported by health professionals. Our findings provide examples of the areas and issues which health professionals need to address in order to offer help to DSH patients and their parents. As such DSH needs to be addressed during nursing and post graduate training.\n",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Purpose: - Deliberate self-harm (DSH) is a serious public health problem and, although in the past research has focused mainly on the DSH patient, it is now recognised that parental involvement in the therapeutic process is beneficial. This study aimed to understand parents' concerns, expectations and experiences following an episode of deliberate self-harm in young people in order to identify their support needs.\nDesign/methodology/approach: - This was a qualitative study using a phenomenological approach. Data were generated primarily from face-to-face, in-depth interviews with parents of young people who had self-harmed and with health professionals directly concerned in the management of DSH patients.\nFindings: - The study suggests that an incident of DSH by their son or daughter is an extremely traumatic experience for parents. Parents reported being deeply distressed with feelings of helplessness, they had concerns regarding coping with their child on discharge from hospital and were worried about the possibility of future incidents. These anxieties were exacerbated by a perceived lack of information and support from some health professionals. These results suggest that parents need more support and if given this they might be enabled to better contribute to improving the long term prognosis for their child.\nOriginality/value: - The information reported here may help health professionals to engage more fully with parents as they have a key part to play in the success of the therapeutic process. The findings could be used to increase awareness and understanding amongst health professionals and so facilitate the development of mutual trust and understanding between all parties involved in the therapeutic process.\n",
"role": "assistant"
}
] |
Mediating effect of knowledge management on organizational learning culture in the context of organizational performance
|
[
"Organizational performance",
"Mediation",
"Knowledge management",
"Organizational learning culture"
] |
[
{
"content": "Summarize the following paper into structured abstract.\n\n1. Introduction: A successful organization is an organization that is able to learn and keep on learning to face the ongoing changes and bigger challenges. Therefore, the learning process should be part of the culture of organizations in such a way that the daily activities and actions of all members reflect the sustainability of learning process. When the learning process strongly becomes part of the organizational culture, organizational capacity is expected to increase, which would surely affect the organizational performance. The same thing is explained by Malik et al. (2011): \"A Good Learning Culture will not only help employees to show high level of performance but also keep those good employee in the organization.\" Organizational culture as referred in this paper pertains to organizational learning culture (OLC), which is a culture/value adhered to in an organization that supports the sustainability of learning process to develop the organization's capacity as a whole. OLC is a form of culture that supports the learning process, so that the organization can obtain, develop and transfer the knowledge easily.\n2. Theoretical background: 2.1 OLC\n3. Material and method: In general, there are three approaches to measure organizational performance: objective measurement, which has a quantitative nature; subjective measurement, which has a qualitative/judgmental nature, and is most often based on respondents' perception; and, finally, triangulation. According to Lee and Byounggu's (2000) classification, there are four performance measurement categories: financial measure, intellectual capital, balanced scorecard, and tangible and intangible benefits. Wood et al. (2001) defined organizational performance as a brief measurement of the quantity and quality of the contributed tasks carried out by personal/group for the organization that depend on efforts put in, capability and compatibility from the superior's perspective on job requirements. Based on the opinion of experts as discussed above, it can be concluded that organizational performance is the achievement of an organization which is measured on the basis of a certain standard in a certain period.\n4. Result and discussion: 4.1 The measurement table\n5. Discussion: Organizational learning culture in the Study Program (SP) of exact science, non-exact science and exact-non-exact science is still in the quite strong category. This condition occurred due to the fact of problems showed that continuous learning is in quite good category, especially related to appreciation for activity and demand for learning which has not reach a high level. Dialogue and inquiry is in a quite good category, especially due to a custom that allows open and honest feedback. Team learning is in a quite good category, especially because sometimes organization did not appreciate the team recommendation. Embedded system is in a quite good category, especially in relation to SP efforts to measure development activity results, ability to create information system, and ability to create easy accessible teaching materials. System connection is in a quite good category, especially related to cooperation with parties within or outside the organization and the ability of the study program (SP) to risk to encourage a different point of view. Empowerment is in a quite good category, especially due to support from study program (SP) to risk activities, and ability to control to all resources and recognize individuals who has initiatives, which is in a quite good category and provide leadership that still in a quite good especially due to head of SP did not wish to be a mentor.\n6. Conclusions, recommendations, and limitations: In the exact science, non-exact science, and exact-non-exact science, OLC has a significant positive effect on KM. This means that when an OLC is strongly implanted, the KM shall be well implemented. Therefore, to carry out the KM well, a suitable organizational culture is very important, which is OLC in this case. The OLC has the biggest effect on achievement of organizational performance. Meanwhile, there is significantly indirect effect through a KM in relationship between OLC to organizational performance in both exact-science SP and non exact-science SP.\n",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to determine the mediating effect of knowledge management (KM) on organizational learning culture (OLC) in the context of organizational performance of the State Organization for Higher Education (PTN) in South Sulawesi.\nDesign/methodology/approach: The unit of analysis in this study includes a study program of exact sciences, non-exact science scholars, as well as the study population. Sample size is 138 units/respondents. Analysis method used to test the research hypothesis is partial least square (PLS) by employing XLSTAT.\nFindings: The results of analysis show that the exact science, non-exact science, and exact-non-exact OLC have a significant positive effect on KM. This means that when an OLC is strongly implanted, the KM will be well implemented. Therefore, to carry out the KM well, it is imperative that there should be a suitable organizational culture. In this case, an OLC has the biggest effect on achieving organizational performance.\nOriginality/value: KM in organizations has been researched by performing case studies on sub-companies of a selected corporation in the city of Esfahan and on OLC in a public service organization of Pakistan. This paper claims originality on the basis of the following: variables used are mediating variables of KM, learning organizational culture, and organizational performance; the method used in this research is PLS and the locations used in this study, sites at the State University of Makassar in Indonesia, are unique as they have not been used in any previous studies on this topic.\n",
"role": "assistant"
}
] |
Personal values as underlying motives of shopping online
|
[
"Internet shopping",
"Consumer behaviour",
"Motivation (psychology)",
"Store ambience",
"South Korea"
] |
[
{
"content": "Summarize the following paper into structured abstract.\n\n1. Introduction: Most of the previous research into online shopping has focused on identifying the attributes of online stores that promote success (Davis, 1989; Liu and Arnett, 2000; Muylle et al., 2004; Shih, 2004). Some of these studies have developed more abstract concepts - such as shopping values, system quality, information quality, perceived usefulness, enjoyment, and ease of use - to improve predictions about purchase behavior (Hoffman and Novak, 1996; Novak et al., 2003; Shang et al., 2005; Childers et al., 2001; Mathwick et al, 2001; Sweeney and Soutar, 2001). Although such concepts are useful in enhancing scholarly understanding of the attributes and benefits that consumers consider important in choosing an online store, they do not address the question of the underlying motives of customers - that is, why such attributes and benefits are important to online shoppers in making their purchase decisions. Only a few studies have explored personal values in attempting to identify the underlying motives of customers (Swinyard, 1998; Erdem et al., 1999; Brunso et al., 2004; Lages and Fernandes, 2005), but these studies have not attempted to provide a comprehensive model of how personal values might be related to motivation to seek certain benefits and evaluate certain attributes, and hence how motivation by personal values might ultimately affect re-patronage intentions.To address this gap in the literature, the present study posits personal values as the critical factor in the underlying motives that lead an individual to shop online. Using means-end chain theory as a basis for the research framework, the present study attempts to describe how the personal values of consumers provide motivation to seek certain shopping benefits, and how this desire for particular types of benefits causes customers to evaluate particular attributes of an online store in determining their patronage.Following this introduction, the next section of the paper reviews the literature on personal values, online shopping benefits and attributes, and re-patronage intention. Section 3 reviews means-end chain theory, which is adopted as a basis for the theoretical framework of the present study; certain hypotheses are also proposed concerning relationships among the constructs of the theoretical framework. Section 4 presents the results of the empirical tests of the hypotheses. Section 5 discusses these results and compares them with the findings of previous studies. Section 6 presents conclusions and addresses the theoretical and managerial implications of the study.\n2. Literature review: 2.1 Personal values\n3. Conceptual model and hypotheses: 3.1 Conceptual model\n4. Methodology and data analysis: 4.1 Measures\n5. Testing of hypotheses and discussion: 5.1 Testing of hypotheses\n6. Summary, implications, and future research: 6.1 Conclusions\n",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Purpose: - The purpose of this study is to investigate the motivational effects of personal values on benefits, attributes, and re-patronage intention in the context of online shopping.\nDesign/methodology/approach: - Using means-end chain theory as a basis for the theoretical framework, the paper proposes and tests a conceptual model of the relationships among the constructs of personal values, benefits, attributes, and re-patronage intention. Hypotheses are proposed, and these are then tested using structural equation modelling on data from 279 experienced online customers in South Korea.\nFindings: - A personal value of \"social affiliation\" acts as an enduring belief in motivating a customer to seek hedonic and utilitarian benefits, whereas a personal value of \"self actualization\" produces motivation to seek only utilitarian benefits. The seeking of hedonic and utilitarian benefits leads customers to evaluate certain attributes of online stores - such as visual design, product assortment, information quality, and after-sales service. The attributes of online stores have a positive effect on re-patronage intention.\nResearch limitations/implications: - Limitations include problems associated with convenience sampling (dominated by extrinsically oriented shoppers) and measurement errors (with respect to the construct of personal values). Future studies could examine a more diverse range of personal values and online shopping benefits and attributes.\nOriginality/value: - The present study is the first to investigate personal values as enduring and underlying sources of motivation with respect to online shopping. The paper presents an original conceptual model of personal values, shopping benefits, shopping attributes, and re-patronage intention.\n",
"role": "assistant"
}
] |
"[T]here are known knowns ... things we know that we know": Some reflections on the nature and practice of interpretive accounting research
|
[
"Methodology",
"Interpretive research",
"IAR",
"Knowledge accumulation"
] |
[
{
"content": "Summarize the following paper into structured abstract.\n\n__NO_TITLE__: [T]here are known knowns; there are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns; that is to say there are things that, we now know we don't know. But there are also unknown unknowns - there are things we do not know we don't know(US Secretary of Defense, Rumsfeld, 2002).\n1. Introduction: Most interpretive researchers are aware of the notion that any research situation is typically far from a \"normal\" situation in which informants are inclined and perhaps even able to provide \"actual\" or \"factual\" information (Alvesson, 2003, 2010; Chua, 1986; Walsham, 1995). Where interpretive research is deployed, such as in accounting, the use of conversations, narratives, and stories from \"the field\" often provide the objects around which representations are constructed (Ahrens and Chapman, 2006). These representations are subject to the interpretive ability and \"biases\" of a researcher (Silverman, 2011; see also Alvesson, 2003, 2010; Armstrong, 2008).\n2. Foundations of interpretive enquiry: A good place to start our discussion of interpretive research in accounting is with Hopwood (1983) and Scapens and Arnold (1986). They were among the first researchers in accounting to acknowledge that accounting-as-practice was hardly ever researched (see also Scapens, 2006). Scapens and Arnold (1986) note that:[...] the general nature of management accounting [...] [has been such that research has been] influence[d] by [...] the methodology and political philosophy of neoclassical economics - neither of which is unproblematic. Alternative political philosophies are available and the methodological issues are far from settled(p. 96/99).\n3. Claims and constructions of interpretive research in accounting: Even though many researchers will accept that all research involves interpretation (Armstrong, 2008; De Loo and Lowe, 2011), the adjective \"interpretive\" is commonly used to describe a specific philosophical position (Chua, 1986). These different uses of the label \"interpretive\" ought not to be mixed.\n4. Illustrations of \"things that we know and things we know we don't know\": In this section, we focus attention on the part played by the research interview in the construction of interpretive research. We take this route in part in order to illustrate the central role of interviews in the interpretive management accounting literature (see also Parker, 2012). In examining the research interview we are also seeking to highlight the necessarily diverse nature of IAR, as we have previously indicated. The analysis of two papers that follow, aims to give the reader specific and practical examples of how interpretation is affected by how interpretive research is actually carried out. Such issues are only rarely addressed in accounting research papers.\n5. Concluding comments: In the introduction of this paper, we noted two broad concerns relating to the IAR project: first - an insufficient appreciation of the complex interrelationship between method and methodology; second - claims about our ability, as a research community, to produce a unified body of research, which presumes a specific position of the researcher in the (interpretive) research act. We suggested these concerns could be seen in some of the IAR literature in: a tendency to routinely make overly specific claims for what it is possible for interpretive research to achieve; the promotion of a somewhat reductionist view of what the bounds of interpretive research are.\n",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Purpose: The starting point for this paper is that the researcher is intimately bound up in all aspects of the research process. This idea of what is a critical aspect of much interpretive methodology has been challenged by some proponents of the interpretive accounting research (IAR) project. The authors suggest that adopting some of the views expounded in the IAR project may lead to the accounting research community becoming isolated from other interpretive methodology inspired disciplines. The paper aims to discuss these issues.\nDesign/methodology/approach: Currently popular views on IAR are informed by selective theoretical insights from interpretive sociology. The authors argue that these insights cannot provide a general frame with which to encapsulate accounting research that may be reasonably termed \"interpretive.\"\nFindings: The authors' reading of the literature suggests that the some of the IAR literature exhibits: a tendency to routinely make overly specific claims for what it is possible for interpretive research to achieve; the promotion of a somewhat reductionist view of what the bounds of interpretive research are. The authors suggest that these tendencies detract from the strengths of (adopting a broad view of) IAR.\nResearch limitations/implications: In expressing the authors' concerns, the authors do not wish to make an exclusive argument for what IAR is and is not. This would not be in line with writing an interpretive paper. While the authors do not eschew the possibility of a limited building of knowledge by applying interpretive methodological stances neither do the authors see such activity as a central plank of interpretive research.\nPractical implications: The authors believe that positivistic commentaries on qualitative enquiry should not be taken as exemplary of interpretive research (in accounting - or elsewhere). The authors feel that IAR needs to be more open to an array of subjectivist motivations, if it is to provide useful critique of the nature of day-to-day accounting practice.\nOriginality/value: The authors seek to go beyond the rather unhelpful debate about whether IAR should be seen to possess both objective and subjective elements. The authors argue that IAR suffers more from a lack of engagement and debate than it faces dangers from areas of interpretive methodology that adopt positions considered to be too subjectivist.\n",
"role": "assistant"
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] |
Emotional brand attachment: a factor in customer-bank relationships
|
[
"Satisfaction",
"Service quality",
"Loyalty",
"Brand attachment",
"Emotions towards the bank"
] |
[
{
"content": "Summarize the following paper into structured abstract.\n\nIntroduction: Strong and intensive business competition, escalating marketing costs, lack of financial knowledge, and lack of trust among customers, as well as customers' switching intentions have led banking service providers to change the way they perceive their marketing policy. Moreover, the focus of marketing efforts has also changed - from transaction-based relations to the initiation, establishment, and maintenance of long-term relationships with customers. Special emphasis is now placed on developing long-term bonds with customers, thereby building trust, commitment, and loyalty - a type of brand-based emotional attachment - due to the guiding paradigm of relationship marketing (Morgan and Hunt, 1994). Currently, banks as brands are investing a vast amount of financial resources in customers' long-term welfare in order to build a unique sense of value and generate emotional brand attachment in customers. This, in turn, has enabled great brands to establish a strong emotional connection with their customers. These emotional bonds go beyond general service quality, generating strong customer-brand relationships. Furthermore, the emotional values of sympathy, empathy, and love could also help in creating brand differentiation. Thus, one of the potential objectives of this practice is for customers' brand emotions to influence their behavioral decisions. In other words, being emotionally involved means having a trust-based relationship with the brand, as well as being committed to continuing this relationship, praising, and supporting the brand (Thomson et al., 2005).\nTheoretical background: Creating and maintaining customer loyalty has increasingly become a strategic necessity over the last decades (Ganesh et al., 2000). Consumer loyalty plays a central role in the relationship marketing literature (Christopher et al., 2004) and is connected to the company's business continuity and profitability (Ganesh et al., 2000), as it predicts future purchase behavior (Reichheld, 1993; Knox and Denison, 2000).\nMethodology: Sample: data were collected through a survey among customers of Israeli bank service providers. A key criterion for participation was being a service bank customer. Questionnaires were e-mailed through convenience sampling, using undergraduate students who distributed the questionnaire among various bank customers. Confidentiality and anonymity were assured. Participants were all experienced customers who use various bank service providers; most (56 percent) of the survey participants belong to relatively large banks, 28 percent belong to medium-sized banks, and 16 percent belong to small banks. Overall, 436 usable responses were analyzed in this study (displaying a response rate of 55 percent). Participants included males and females (54 and 46 percent, respectively). More than 84 percent of the participants were between 22 and 42 years of age, and the mean age was 32 (SD=10.3). Most respondents were well educated: more than 61 percent of the participants have a college or university degree. As for income, 35 percent have a below-average income, 33 percent earned an average income, and 32 percent have an above-average income.\nResults: Validity and reliability: first, the items were subjected to an Exploratory Factor Analysis with Varimax rotation; items that did not demonstrate high internal validity (acceptable loading) were eliminated. Next, a factor analysis was run using principal component analysis with Varimax rotation, for the remaining items. Although loyalty and satisfaction are treated as different constructs, the items were scored in the same factor. Thus, loyalty and satisfaction items were separately checked using Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA). The results confirm the two-construct treatment (kh2 value (9)=19.38, p\nDiscussion and conclusions: In this study, we suggested a conceptual framework and empirically examined the role that customers' emotional attachment with their branded bank has on their bank loyalty. We found that emotional attachment has a direct and indirect positive effect on bank loyalty, demonstrating a total effect of b=0.312; which means that emotionally involved customers are more loyal to their bank. This is consistent with findings from previous studies showing that loyal customers are more likely to be satisfied with their service provider, maintain long-lasting relationships with their bank, and spread positive remarks and comments about their bank by word-of-mouth (Bloemer and de Ruyter, 1999; Ladhari, 2007; Marinkovic and Obradovic, 2015). This study also suggests that bank loyalty is directly and highly affected by satisfaction (see e.g. Bhattacherjee, 2001a; Srinivasan et al., 2002; Floh and Treiblmaier, 2006). As indicated, the more satisfied customers increase their emotions toward the bank, the more loyal and committed to the bank they become. This perception is associated with the direct positive relation found between satisfaction and both emotional attachment and bank loyalty. The direct positive relationship between emotional attachment and bank loyalty also indicates that positive emotions toward the bank might temporarily retain dissatisfied customers and maintain their loyalty. In line with previous studies, we also found that emotional attachment and satisfaction are results of service quality (Oliver, 1980; Oliver and Westbrook, 1993; Liljander and Strandvik, 1997) and trust (Moorman et al., 1993; Morgan and Hunt, 1994; Singh and Sirdeshmukh, 2000).\n",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the relationship between customers' emotional attachment toward bank service providers and bank loyalty. In particular, the study examines the impact of the emotional attachment factor while treating established effecting variables by employing a new conceptual framework that integrates these variables.\nDesign/methodology/approach: The study employs data collected from a survey involving 436 participants. The study employs Exploratory Factor Analysis and Confirmatory Factor Analysis methods following a path analysis method and structural equation modeling for testing research hypotheses.\nFindings: The empirical results support the claim that the conceptual framework applied in this study better explains the relationship between customers' emotional attachment toward bank service providers and bank loyalty. Specifically, the findings show a significant, direct and positive relationship between the customer's emotional attachment and bank loyalty; an indirect positive relationship also exists through the connection of customer satisfaction. The study distinguishes between two integrated pathways consumers possibly follow when making decisions about services: the conscious decision-making process path and the emotional process path.\nPractical implications: The paper provides managerial and planning implications to bank service providers who seek to achieve excellent performance and a positive brand personality, thus maintaining long-lasting relationships with their customers.\nOriginality/value: The study is among the few empirical works to specifically examine the impact of customers' emotional attachment on bank loyalty and contributes to the available literature in that it suggests a systematic conceptual framework that evaluates the impact of key factors on bank loyalty.\n",
"role": "assistant"
}
] |
Achieving service quality through service innovation exploration - exploitation: the critical role of employee empowerment and slack resources
|
[
"Service quality",
"Service innovation",
"Employee empowerment",
"Exploration – exploitation",
"Organizational ambidexterity"
] |
[
{
"content": "Summarize the following paper into structured abstract.\n\n1. Introduction: Service innovation offers an effective path to drive new service development and refine existing services, and improve service quality (Berry et al., 2006; Cheng et al., 2012). The long-term viability of service firms depends on how well they embody service innovation in their effort to deliver quality services to customers. Jansen et al. (2006) suggest that there are two types of service innovation - service innovation exploration, which is defined in this study as a service firm's activities directed toward the introduction of new services and service innovation exploitation, which is defined in this study as a service firm's activities toward the improvement or refinements of existing services.\n2. Theoretical framework and hypotheses: 2.1 Exploration vs exploitation manifesting combined vs balanced service innovation\n3. Research methodology: 3.1 Sample and data collection\n4. Analysis and results: The factor loadings of all items were greater than 0.50, providing support for convergent validity. Further, as shown in Table I, the average variance extracted (AVE) of all constructs was greater than the recommended level of 0.50, providing further support for convergent validity (Fornell and Larcker, 1981). Moreover, the composite reliability (CR) of all constructs was also greater than the recommended level of 0.70 (Nunnally, 1978), demonstrating that our measures were robust and reliable. Furthermore, no interfactor correlations are above the 0.65 threshold, suggesting that our estimations are not likely to be biased by multicollinearity problems (Cao et al., 2009). Particularly, the correlation between combined service innovation and balanced service innovation is found to be insignificant (r = 0.13), which provides a strong preliminary indication that combined and balanced service innovation represents two distinct dimensions of organizational ambidexterity. Discriminant validity was evaluated by comparing the square root of the AVE and all corresponding correlations. As shown in Table I, the square roots of the AVE values are consistently greater than the off-diagonal correlations (Fornell and Larcker, 1981). On the basis of the result of the reliability, convergent and discriminant validity tests, we concluded that the constructs exhibited good psychometric properties.\n5. Discussion: Organizational ambidexterity theory underpins our examination of service innovation exploration - exploitation. We focus specifically on two forms of service innovation exploration - exploitation - combined and balanced innovation, and their effect on PSQ and service firms' financial performance. We reasoned that applying the organizational ambidexterity theory in services marketing may shed light on the path to achieve service quality and financial performance through the pursuit of combined or balanced service innovation. Our findings provide support for our cross-level framework encompassing managers - employees - customers.\n6. Limitations and future research: Our study has specific limitations that should be taken into account when considering the findings and avenues for further research. First, our inability to use objective firm performance data because of confidentiality requirements of respondents, combined with the dearth of archival data on firms necessitated reliance on self-reported performance. Future research may focus on trying to identify sources objective data to use in service innovation research. Future studies should test the robustness of our findings in relation to differences in ambidexterity, market competitiveness and PSQ using objective performance indicators. Second, longitudinal work on the processes of service innovation exploration - exploitation and the resources and capabilities required by firms to engage in innovation-service quality levels could be pursued. The use of resources and capabilities over time in achieving combined vs balanced service innovation and customer responses to this effort via their PSQ is a worthy pursuit. Finally, our focus on managers, employees and customers is a critical step in advancing service innovation and ambidexterity theory. While we focus on the individual, our study could be extended by researchers trying to uncover unique and complementary practices that motivate not only the individual both personally and collectively, but also the service team/group. For instance, service team management may need to identify individual differences that help drive individual team members' meeting innovation requirements and service quality levels, as well as the best combination or configuration of employees with specific traits/characteristics in a service delivery team that is seeking to deliver exploratory and exploitative service innovation.\n",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Purpose: This paper aims to investigate the effects of service innovation exploration - exploitation on financial performance through the delivery of quality services. Additional emphasis is also given to examining the extent to which employee empowerment and slack resources enhance or suppress the performance benefits of service firms engaging in service innovation exploration versus exploitation.\nDesign/methodology/approach: Data were drawn from a multi-informant survey of service firms using a drop-and-collect approach. The survey gathered data from managers, customer service employees and customers to test the hypotheses.\nFindings: The results show that excelling at both exploitative and exploratory innovation helps enhance the quality of services, which, in turn, yield superior financial performance. Further, empowering employees enhances the relationship between exploratory and exploitative service innovation and service quality. We also show that the extent managers' perceived their market to be competitive influences in the pursuit of high levels of both service innovation exploration and exploitation and that this relationship is impacted by the extent they believe they have available slack resources.\nPractical implications: The findings suggest that service firms need to pursue both exploitation and exploration at high levels simultaneously and empower their employees to stay ahead of competitors in delivering quality services, which ultimately contributes to the achievement of superior financial outcomes. Also, the findings highlight the importance of employee empowerment, market competitiveness and slack resources in the pursuit of high levels of both service innovation exploration and exploitation.\nOriginality/value: These findings and our theory indicate that this study is the first to empirically examine organizational ambidexterity in the context of service innovation exploration - exploitation adopting the principles of combined and balanced innovation. The study provides insights into the critical role of customers' perceptions of service quality in contributing to firms' financial performance. Our insights are unique in that the study incorporates managers, employees and customers in an integrated service innovation model.\n",
"role": "assistant"
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] |
A foresight study on urban mobility: Singapore in 2040
|
[
"Transportation planning",
"Transport policy",
"Scenario analysis"
] |
[
{
"content": "Summarize the following paper into structured abstract.\n\n1. Introduction: As cities grow and develop, having long-term land use and transportation plans become an inevitable requirement for city planners. The need to pre-empt and plan for the future means that planners should not only address daily operational issues but also develop a well-informed long-term understanding for the evolving mobility system to address challenges that lie beyond the five- or even ten-year horizon (Inayatullah, 2003; Auvinen et al., 2012). What would future mobility be like in the city? How would technologies disrupt urban travel experience? How could we plan for changing social behavior and norms that would affect travel demand and preferred travel modes? These questions cannot be reliably addressed by simply extrapolating past and current trends. Further, mobility itself is a complex system that evolves and is continuously shaped by various driving forces and prospective uncertainties prevalent in our social, economic, technological, political and environmental situations in the future.\n2. Study methodology: We conducted a foresight study to develop scenarios for the future of urban mobility in Singapore. Foresight studies assume that the future is not an extrapolation of a set of predetermined trends and innovations. Instead, it builds on the principle of an uncertain future that can be shaped by today's actions. The intention of foresight studies is not to predict the future correctly. Rather, these studies using participatory approaches can help stakeholders overcome surprising and challenging futures. Moreover, the participatory approach can cultivate \"scenario thinking,\" exposing the stakeholders to a variety of policy decisions, efforts, and the potential outcomes of those decisions (Rickards et al., 2014).\n3. Scenario planning workshop: Scenario planning techniques have demonstrated the capability to systematically explore the complex interplay among various key drivers of change to provide insight into the uncertainties of the future. Events and trends affecting the future can have cascading effects. Such effects are hard to be understood intuitively, let alone forecasted (Schultz, 2015). Yet, forecasting techniques remain dominant in transportation planning and travel demand management to support policy decisions. Policymakers and stakeholders have to deal with deep uncertainty in exercising judgment when they plan for the future. Over the past few decades, scenario planning has emerged as an important tool for decision-making under such circumstances (Bishop et al., 2007). Accordingly, we used a scenario planning process to inform our long-range mobility foresight study.\n4. Urban mobility scenarios for Singapore in 2040: The scenarios discussed in this section are a glimpse of alternate futures of 2040. There are some key trends common in these scenarios that we call \"common projections.\" These are traits that, according to workshop participants, will highly likely happen and influence the future greatly. The degree of influence might vary in each scenario, but they are nonetheless expected to play a significant part in shaping the future of urban mobility.\n5. Discussion and conclusion: This foresight study considers various drivers of change that could influence long-term urban mobility, and produce visions that may indicate the kind of mobility services we might need in the future. These visions are captured as scenarios, which were produced in a participatory scenario planning workshop. The scenarios developed are intended to portray the future of urban mobility in Singapore holistically, which means that we considered both people and goods mobility in the urban context. By using a participatory scenario planning approach, we intended to prepare stakeholders for uncertain futures that are continuously shaped by our decisions today.\nAcknowledgement: This material is based on research supported by the Singapore Ministry of National Development and National Research Foundation under L2 NIC Award No. RGL2NIC1402. We thank the Singapore Land Transport Authority for their inputs, as well as the numerous experts from academia and industry for sharing their insights with us. We also thank researchers at the Singapore University of Technology and Design - Professor Chan Heng Chee, Waqas Cheema, Christopher Choo, Corinne Ong, Hou Yuting, and Tina Kambil for their inputs in the project. Jude H. Kurniawan was supported by an Energy Policy Research Fellowship awarded by the Energy Council of Canada and a University of Waterloo Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council Institutional Grant. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of authors alone.\n",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Purpose: The transportation system in any city is complex and evolving, shaped by various driving forces and uncertainties in the social, economic, technological, political and environmental situations. Its development and demands upon it cannot be projected by simply extrapolating past and current trends. This paper aims to present a foresight study examining the future of urban mobility, focusing on the dense Asian city-state of Singapore. The objective is to develop scenarios for the future of urban mobility, to facilitate future policy implementation by highlighting long term challenges and opportunities for transportation planning in cities.\nDesign/methodology/approach: To create future scenarios, the authors first sought to identify key drivers of change through environmental scanning, expert interviews, focus group discussions and technology scanning. These drivers of change were subsequently used in a scenario planning workshop, organized to co-create alternative future visions for urban mobility 2040 with experts and local stakeholders.\nFindings: Two scenarios emerged, called the Shared World and the Virtual World. For each scenario, the authors described the key features in terms of dominant transport modes for the movements of passengers and freight. Subsequently, the authors discussed possible implications of each scenario to the individual, society, industry and government.\nOriginality/value: As cities grow and develop, city and transport planners should not only address daily operational issues but also develop a well-informed, long-term understanding of the evolving mobility system to address challenges that lie beyond the five- or even ten-year horizon. By using scenario planning approach, the authors hope to prepare stakeholders for the uncertain futures that are continuously shaped by the decisions today.\n",
"role": "assistant"
}
] |
Supporting learners' STEM-oriented career pathways with digital badges
|
[
"Lifelong learning",
"STEM education",
"Informal learning",
"Digital badges",
"Media in education",
"Human-computer interface",
"Learning pathways"
] |
[
{
"content": "Summarize the following paper into structured abstract.\n\n1. Introduction: Despite rising demand, the USA continues to face a shortage of workers skilled in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) fields (Deming, 2017). At the same time, too many youth experience a disconnect between what they study in school, what genuinely interests them and the career opportunities that are open to them upon graduation (Ito et al., 2013). Moreover, a substantial portion of these youth never even get a chance to seek career opportunities because they do not make it to graduation.\n2. Related work: 2.1 Rethinking the school-to-workforce pipeline\n3. Method: 3.1 Research participants\n4. Results: 4.1 Stakeholders' familiarity with and perceptions of digital badges\n5. Discussion: In this study, we examined college admissions and employer stakeholders' perspectives on the potential for digital badges to support learners' STEM-oriented career pathways across settings. This work closely interrogates the concept of the oft-mentioned STEM pipeline and how multiple-pathway models can better accommodate the diverse range of experiences and interests that students bring to STEM education and career opportunities (Bricker and Bell, 2014; Cannady et al., 2014). To that end, our perspective is informed by the more flexible learning ecologies and cultural learning pathways models that allow for multiple entry points to STEM fields (Barron, 2006; Bricker and Bell, 2014), unlike a pipeline that can be both exclusionary and \"leaky\" (Cannady et al., 2014). Information behavior theories also provide insight into the challenges of using digital badges as boundary objects (Bowker and Star, 1999; Star and Griesemer, 1989) across different informal learning settings that might not wish to accept outside credentials (Chatman, 1999, 2000; Fisher et al., 2004; Fisher and Naumer, 2006; Savolainen, 2009).\n6. Conclusion: Prior work has explored how learning pathways can be supportive of students' STEM learning and how digital badges can be a method of visualizing learning pathways across contexts (Davis and Singh, 2015; Klein and Davis, 2016; Riconscente et al., 2013). The current work investigated how stakeholders in academia and the job market view the potential of digital badging as a support for STEM learning pathways and how these pathways can promote equity for a more diverse group of learners. Stakeholders were generally enthusiastic about the prospect of incorporating badges into the college admissions and hiring processes, but they nevertheless identified several notable challenges that must first be overcome. They also surfaced thoughts about using badges as a sorting tool for applicants that would seem to reify rather than disrupt the school-to-workforce pipeline model. The findings from this study reveal that while digital badging systems have strong potential to support STEM learning pathways in a more equitable manner, allowing more entry points to STEM careers, there are still both logistical and ideological barriers to stakeholders fully embracing digital badges.\n",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Purpose: This paper aims to investigate the potential for digital badges to support alternate learning and career pathways in formal and informal learning environments. Stakeholder groups in higher education and industry discussed how digital badges might transform current processes of admitting undergraduate students and hiring young professionals.\nDesign/methodology/approach: This research uses a thematic analysis of in-depth interviews with 30 stakeholders in higher education and the technology industry.\nFindings: Interview participants expressed optimism about the potential for digital badges to make learning pathways visible to learners and external audiences and to promote equity in STEM (STEM: science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) education and careers. Participants noted several obstacles, largely focused on issues of credibility and logistics of working with badges across settings.\nResearch limitations/implications: Though the research approach is limited in geographic scope, the findings have broad applicability and insight for the use of digital badges in general.\nPractical implications: Education policymakers, employers and scholars will be able to use the insights from this investigation in their efforts to find innovative ways to expand and diversify the STEM workforce, as well as support a wider range of learners than is currently supported by initiatives aligned with the school-to-workforce pipeline metaphor.\nOriginality/value: This paper directly confronts issues of real-world applications of digital badges by discussing practical implications with college admissions officers and employers. The current study fills a need for research that investigates the use of digital badges across - as opposed to within - contexts.\n",
"role": "assistant"
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] |
Central and Eastern European countries and North Africa: The emerging clothing supplying countries to the EU
|
[
"Garment industry",
"European Union",
"International trade",
"Outsourcing",
"Eastern Europe",
"North Africa"
] |
[
{
"content": "Summarize the following paper into structured abstract.\n\nIntroduction: Today the clothing industry is globalized in nature, patterned with surging cross-border production activities and accelerating trade flows all over the world. The increasing importance of globalization and trade liberalization has brought intense challenges to the clothing industry of developed countries in recent decades. In the European Union (EU), clothing production has been considerably threatened by the fierce price competition from low-cost developing countries and the opened-up trade policies in Eastern Europe. Plentiful low-priced clothing products exported from the developing countries have exerted competitive pressure on the EU domestic companies. The degree of import penetration[1] of clothing products in the EU has increased substantially, from 30 percent in 1990 to more than 50 percent in 2004.Faced with a massive inflow of low-price clothing products from developing countries, the EU clothing industry strived to restructure her sector. By shifting from mass production to niche-fashion items with high technological level and modern styling, the EU clothing sector attempts to maintain her competitive edge in the global clothing sector. To counteract the high production cost problem, since the late 1970s, the EU clothing industry has started to delocalize the most labour-intensive processes of garment assembly abroad, especially to the proximate low-cost Central and Eastern Europe countries (CEECs) and North Africa[2] in order to rationalize production cost (Mersch, 1997; Scheffer, 1994).An intensified trend of delocalization to the CEECs and North Africa was observed in the EU clothing production industry since the 1980s. This emerging trend is a result of the wide practice of outward processing transaction (OPT) pursued by Western European countries, under which EU clothing manufacturers subcontracted or relocated the labour-intensive garment production sector to proximate developing countries in the CEE and North Africa in order to rationalize the production cost. In addition, the respective national trade policies have further facilitated the delocalization of the EU clothing production sector. Under these trade agreements, member countries enjoy privileged access to the EU market, thereby enhancing the growth of clothing production and exports of the CEECs and North Africa to Western Europe.This paper will start with a discussion of the EU's trade regimes and OPT practices. Next, the delocalization of the EU's clothing production to the CEECs and North African countries is identified and will be supported from clothing export statistics of these developing economies. The present study will also evidence a further delocalization pattern within the CEECs and North African countries, presented with empirical support from different aspects.\nTrade regimes and outward processing transaction (OPT): EU's trade regimes and OPT strategies have facilitated the growth of the clothing manufacturing industry in the developing CEECs and North Africa. Under their privileged trade policies agreements with the EU, member countries in the two developing regions have been granted market access and hence enjoyed trading advantage over the non-member nations in EU's clothing imports. In addition, there was an increasing OPT practice pursued by Western clothing firms, apparently to the proximate countries in the CEECs and North African region. Subsequent to this, their scales of clothing production sector have been growing in importance, combined with an increasing share in EU's clothing imports.EU's trade regime on clothing\nShift in EU's clothing production: empirical findings from CEECs and North Africa: EU's clothing production system has undergone a substantial regional shift in the last few decades, with the emergence of new clothing producing countries in the CEECs and North Africa. Along with the privileged trade regimes and OPT arrangements, CEECs and North Africa have become the apparent locations for EU's delocalized clothing production. In the following section, empirical analysis is conducted to reveal the shift in EU's clothing production.The changing clothing export patterns to EU\nFurther delocalization within CEECs and North Africa countries: The empirical analysis from the previous section has inferred that the EU's clothing production has delocalized to her neighbouring CEECs and North African countries. The clothing export shares to the EU from the high cost western countries were losing ground at the expense of the low-cost exporting countries, particularly those in the CEECs and North African regions.However, there also exhibits an evident relocation pattern within these developing regions. The delocalization of the EU's clothing production has gradually shifted from the relatively high-cost 1st-tier supplying countries to the less-developed 2nd-tiers.From the EU's clothing import statistics during 1995 to 2004, those 1st-tier countries demonstrated a significant drop in market shares from 7.3 percent to 4.8 percent (Figure 3). The major decline was largely caused by the significant fall in clothing imports of Poland and Hungary, plummeted from 3.03 percent and 1.41 percent to 1.33 percent and 0.91 percent respectively between 1995 and 2004. In marked contrast to 1st-tier economies, countries in less-developed 2nd-tiers for instance Bulgaria, Romania and Turkey, registered dramatic growth in EU's clothing imports and assumed the major clothing suppliers to the EU. Their aggregate clothing exports to the Union achieved a record high of EUR18,237 Mn in 2004, representing an 122 percent increase from that of 1995. Among these developing 2nd-tier countries, the most spectacular export performance was Turkey and Romania, which assumed the 2nd and 6th supplier positions respectively in EU's major clothing importers in 2004; their clothing exports to EU skyrocketed from EUR4,418 Mn to EUR11,754 Mn over the last decade, with an average annual growth rate of 11.5 percent.From the average prices of the EU clothing imports, it is witnessed that those less-developed 2nd-tier countries are generally lower than the 1st-tiers. It was mainly contributed to by the relatively low labour wages in the 2nd-tiers. For instance in Poland and Hungary, their average labour wage in the clothing production sector is around US$670 per month while the corresponding wage is only US$200 per month in Bulgaria and Romania. As a result, the Western European clothing firms are likely to be attracted to shift their clothing production to these less-developed 2nd-tiers than the higher wage 1st-tier countries. Thus, the low-cost advantage in the 2nd-tiers culminates in the emerging beneficiaries in EU's delocalized clothing production.Moreover, the parallel expansion in textile and clothing trade between the EU and CEECs and North Africa also reveals the common OPT flows in the regions. In terms of trade balance, majority of the 1st-tier clothing exporters in the CEECs and North Africa exhibited trade deficits. This was mainly attributed to the decreasing OPT flows between the EU and the 1st-tiers. In contrast, the less-developed 2nd-tiers have witnessed growing trade surplus in textile and clothing trade, which reflects that EU has a tendency to delocalize their clothing production.While the TSC analysis provides a reflection of the trend record of clothing trade in CEECs and North Africa, the findings are consistent with the change in delocalization pattern with respect to the EU's clothing production. The trade competitiveness of the 2nd-tier CEECs and North Africa have improved while the relatively developed 1st-tier countries have declined in their competitiveness in clothing supply to the EU market. Performance-wise, the results of the TSC analysis indicate that Turkey was the most competitive in clothing export to EU. This was closely-followed by other 2nd-tier clothing exporting countries in the CEECs and North Africa including Egypt, Morocco, Romania and Tunisia. It indicates that Western European firms have delocalized their clothing production more to the less-developed 2nd-tiers (such as Romania and Turkey etc.) in the CEECs and North African countries over the last decade.In sum, there is an evident relocation pattern within the developing CEECs and North African clothing supplying countries in the EU's clothing import market. In recent years, an intensified trend of delocalization to the relatively low-wage 2nd tier countries in the CEECs and North Africa is observed in the EU clothing production industry. This further delocalization trend reflects the accelerating trend in clothing exports from the emerging exporters, such as Bulgaria, Romania and Turkey to the EU market.\nConclusion: This paper has indicated that the Western Europe clothing producers have increasingly shifted the labour-intensive clothing production process primarily to the neighbouring low-cost CEECs and North African clothing supplying countries as a result of rising domestic wages and intense competition from other developing countries. The clothing firms in the developed Western European countries thus outsourced their clothing manufacturing parts to the low-wage countries in the CEECs and North Africa in order to enjoy cost advantages. Thus the delocalization process has enabled the EU clothing industry to maintain their competitiveness in light of the increasing globalization challenge and rationalization contexts.The empirical results also support the delocalization process, which are consistent with those of other prior theoretical researches. Essentially, this study also reveals the further delocalization pattern in that EU's clothing production sector has further shifted to the less-developed 2nd-tier countries in the CEECs and North African regions. The analysis also indicates that the clothing industry in the 2nd-tiers had outperformed the 1st-tier clothing producing countries. In other words, Western European firms have been shifting their sourcing from the 1st-tier countries (such as Poland and Hungary etc.) to the lower-wage 2nd-tier clothing suppliers (such as Romania and Turkey etc.) in the CEECs and North African regions. As a result, these less-developed 2nd-tiers are gaining significance in the EU's clothing import markets with the popular practice of OPT flows.Since the global clothing market is expected to revert to liberalized trade as from 2005 with the ending of the Agreement on Textiles and Clothing (ATC), most Asian countries would have free access to the EU market and hence might threaten the privileged positions of the CEECs and North Africa regions despite their locational proximity to the EU market. With increasingly shortened fashion cycles, a higher demand for flexibility and reduced lead time, clothing production in these developing regions would still face with intense competition among their counterparts.\n",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Purpose: - The purpose of this study is to examine the delocalization trend of the EU's clothing production to Central and Eastern European Countries (CEECs) and North Africa, focusing on the geographical shift of outsourced clothing production pattern within the two developing regions.\nDesign/methodology/approach: - In total, 14 CEECs and North African countries were selected and classified into 1st-tier and 2nd-tier regions according to their GDP/capita values. Clothing trade statistics were obtained from the Eurostat database, and the clothing trade pattern was examined during 1995 to 2004. Trade Specialization Coefficient (TSC) was employed to measure the international competitiveness of clothing exports of the selected CEECs and North African countries.\nFindings: - Results concluded that the EU's clothing production had significantly delocalized to the proximate CEECs and North African regions, with further geographical shift to less-developing 2nd-tier clothing supplying countries in recent years. The TSC analysis reflected that the competitiveness of clothing industry in 2nd-tiers had outperformed the 1st-tier economies, indicating Western European firms had shifted their sourcing practices to those lower-waged countries.\nOriginality/value: - This study gives insight into the EU clothing production industry and their delocalized pattern to the CEECs and North Africa.\n",
"role": "assistant"
}
] |
Dealing with environmental uncertainty: The value of scenario planning for small to medium-sized entreprises (SMEs)
|
[
"Corporate strategy",
"Organizational planning",
"Marketing planning",
"Small to medium‐sized enterprises",
"Uncertainty management",
"Supply chain management"
] |
[
{
"content": "Summarize the following paper into structured abstract.\n\nIntroduction: Most firms operate in uncertain and dynamic environments. To remain competitive they need to anticipate changes in their external marketing environment and be prepared to adapt business activities accordingly. Managers need to be prepared and have some outline plans for dealing with different eventualities so that they are less likely to be exposed to loosing business. This commentary focuses on how managers learn to \"know\" what is happening and what may happen in the marketplace, and discusses the use and value of scenario planning in the context of small to medium-sized enterprises (SMEs).\nFormulating a marketing strategy: Every firm has to anticipate how its external environment might change over the short-, medium- and long-term. Such anticipated changes will have a direct impact upon marketing and managerial decision making, and firms will try to anticipate the effect of decisions against desired objectives. The process of strategy formulation allows firms to take decisions regarding actions and activities with the purpose of matching its internal competencies and the external environment it anticipates in the future.In a dynamic environment where change occurs in unpredictable ways, the challenge for a firm is to have relevant information on which to base its decisions (Duncan, 1972), and to engage in adaptive sense making of the environment (Bogner and Barr, 2000). Wang and Chan (1995), propose that there are three sequential steps: determination of the scope of information that will be sought; searching for information; and its interpretation. All of this suggests that a firm's ability to adapt to its external environment, as part of the strategy formulation process, is based on obtaining appropriate information, and interpreting it, as a precursor to strategic decision making (Beal, 2000; Analoui and Karami, 2002). However, the strategy formulation process includes a future orientation, in that the matching process is based on an external environment that is anticipated in the future. This additional dimension creates a \"tension\" between the need to adapt to what is happening in the external environment, and the need to anticipate a future environment (Bukszar, 1999). It also highlights the issue of predicting the future configuration of the external environment and its relevance to the firm.Environmental uncertainty\nOvercoming uncertainty: ways of knowing: Obtaining relevant information about the external environment is the first stage in the process of understanding, and, therefore, in the process of linking strategy and the firm's external environment (Hambrick, 1982; Daft et al., 1988). Environmental scanning is a necessary prelude to strategy formulation to enable the firm to understand its external environment in terms of factors that are influencing change, so that it can develop responses to secure or improve its future position (Gable and Topol, 1987). Various definitions of environmental scanning have been proposed, for example, Choo (1999), Daft et al. (1988), Lenz and Engledow (1986), and Morgan and Hunt (2002). These definitions illustrate that the essence of environmental scanning is subjective, in that it is carried out by individuals; that these individuals have to recognise and sense the information that is relevant and important to the firm; that it is an active process, in terms of gathering and acquiring information; and that having obtained information, the subjectivity of the process continues with interpretation and influencing managers' perception of their firm's external environment.However, the process of a firm \"knowing\" its external environment is about more than simply collecting data through environmental scanning. Decisions have to be made about what data is collected, and how it is interpreted. In a dynamic environment, changes occur that are unanticipated, and which cause uncertainty for the firm. The way in which a firm views its external environment is a composite of the World views or mental models of its executives (Klimoski and Mohammed, 1994). An individual's World view, sometimes referred to as their mental model, but also referred to as a cognitive framework or schemata, determines how they see and make sense of the world, and also how they act (Senge, 1990; Daft and Weick, 1984; Morgan and Hunt, 2002). Holyoak (1984, p. 193) has defined a mental model as \"a psychological representation of the environment and its expected behaviour\". An individual's mental model determines what they see in the external environment (Ingvar, 1985), how they interpret the information (Daft and Weick, 1984), and the action they take, based on their interpretation (Daft and Weick, 1984; Addleson, 1996; Morgan and Hunt, 2002). In other words, it is through their mental model of the external environment that an individual senses and gives meaning to signals from the environment in terms of events, trends, changes and relationships.A range of factors can influence an individual's mental model of the external environment, including experience, managerial level, age, values and beliefs, and strategic focus (Ireland et al., 1987). Mental models are not static, but change in response to interpretation and further understanding of the environment. This notion of iteration in the development of mental models is captured by Weick (1990) in likening mental models to cognitive maps, where people will interpret what they see to conform to what is on the map, as far as possible. A cognitive map will outline their perceptions, what they expect to see. However, as discrepancies gather they will pay more attention to what is in their immediate experience, and look for patterns in it. In doing so they create a new cognitive map, which will be used to interpret what they see.So, it is through a mental model of the external environment that an individual senses and gives meaning to signals from the environment in terms of events, trends, changes and relationships.Interpretation is an important aspect of the process of understanding a firm's external environment. It has been described as \"the process of translating events (in the firm's external environment), of developing models of understanding, of bringing out meaning, and of assembling conceptual schemes among key managers\", (Daft and Weick, 1984, p. 286). The application of an individual's mental model to environmental information imbues it with meaning and understanding, and this process is interpretation (Morgan and Hunt, 2002).However, the notion that obtaining information, and its interpretation are separate stages in an overall process of \"knowing\" the external environment, is challenged by Addleson (1996), who posits that the hermeneutic perspective of knowing suggests that obtaining information and its interpretation are iterative, as opposed to distinct. Daft and Weick (1984, p. 286) recognise this also, suggesting that scanning and interpretation are prerequisites of organisational learning, or action, (where learning is defined as \"the process by which knowledge about action outcome relationships between the organisation and the environment is developed\"), and that the act of learning also provides new data for interpretation. This suggests that in the overall process of \"knowing\" a firm's external environment, an individual applies their mental model in various ways: in selecting which elements of the environment to monitor; in sensing events, trends, changes and relationships; and in interpreting information to give it meaning and understanding. Therefore, the process of \"knowing\" the external environment is subjective, and iterative; and the environment that is \"known\" is that which is perceived by the individual.In relating this to the focus of a firm's external environment in the strategy formulation process, this suggests that the perception of environmental uncertainty results from a combination of incomplete information about events, trends and changes; lack of understanding of what the information means; lack of understanding of the causal relationships; and the inability either to develop a response to environmental changes, or to predict the effect of a response. Therefore, managers have to make decisions of a strategic nature with varying degrees of incompleteness of information about, and understanding of their firm's external environment.\nOvercoming uncertainty: scenario planning: One option for dealing with the future is anticipatory action based on awareness of possible futures (Morgan and Hunt, 2002). This is the essence of scenario planning which enables the firm to evaluate the effect of changes in multiple variables, and the uncertainties that each holds, thereby allowing the firm to consider strategic actions (Morgan and Hunt, 2002). Other writers (Godet and Roubelat, 1996; Schwartz, 1991; Beck, 1982; McNulty, 1977) have offered varying definitions of scenario planning. Schoemaker (1993), suggests that scenarios provide a conceptual framework within which the individual can know and understand the external environment as it unfolds, since the process influences the individual's mental models to give more incisive pattern recognition and understanding. This notion is supported by Verity (2003) who views the benefit of scenario planning to the individual being that their understanding of the environment is improved, in terms of trends that may influence the firm in the future, and the uncertainties within the external environment.However, scenario planning has not been without criticism. Becker and van Doorn (1987) suggest that firms have difficulties in communicating the outcomes of scenario planning to those not involved in the process; techniques for evaluating the effectiveness of the method are not well developed; and a lot of resource and expertise is needed, due to its complexity. Verity (2003) suggests that scenario planning is not widely used because methodologies are confusing to an infrequent user; matching the methodology and the level of analysis to the business issue is difficult; and a large amount of resource, both people and financial, is required.\nThe value of scenario planning for SMEs: Despite the cost and complexity of the process that could put it beyond the reach of some firms, the essence of scenario planning, rather than the practice, may be applicable to SMEs. The act of carrying out the scenario planning process challenges and changes an individual's mental model of the external environment (Verity, 2003; Morgan and Hunt, 2002; Schoemaker, 1993) and this in itself can be beneficial. The influence of scenario planning does not stop there as once a scenario has been thought through, a future has been rehearsed. Wright and Goodwin (1999, p. 318) contend that:When early events in a scenario occur the decision maker will be able to anticipate how the future will unfold. These \"trigger\" events will be seen as information amongst the stream of data that impacts on the decision maker, which in turn can lead to early contingency action towards an unfavourable future, or more quickly grasping new business opportunities.This builds on Ingvar's (1985) concept of conscious awareness as a combination of memories of the past, the experience of actual events in the now situation, and concepts of events that have not yet taken place. He describes the capacity to retain and to be conscious of concepts of the future as \"memories of the future\", which contribute to anticipatory programming as well as storing information to be used later, to control behaviour. He goes on to suggest that once a future has been rehearsed, as in scenario planning, these concepts of the future provide a template against which future events and stimuli are compared. If there is a correspondence between the two, the input is understood and its meaning perceived. In this way the individual (for example, the owner/manager of a small firm) can select and perceive meaningful messages from the barrage of information emanating from the external environment. So rehearsing a possible future, as in scenario planning, provides \"memories of the future\", which influence the owner/manager's mental model to better identify important signals from the external environment, interpret and understand them, as a precursor to taking appropriate action. This is a means of applying scenario planning in its broadest sense, allowing individuals to explore possible future developments in the firm's external environment, and may be of particular relevance in an SME context.In a recent study (Johnston, 2004) it was found that SME owner/managers use non-competitive networks that are internal and external to their firm, as informal forums for rehearsing possible futures of the external environment. This had a number of functions:*it allowed owner/managers of firms to develop memories of the future so that he/she could better understand its external environment as it evolved;*it allowed owner/managers of firms to consider options for dealing with possible futures;*it allowed owner/managers to consider options for their firms' market positioning, so that it would be in a better position to take advantage of future opportunities; and*it allowed the owner/manager to test plans against worst-case scenarios.In other words, rehearsing possible futures has a number of roles, and each helps SMEs develop their understanding of their evolving external environments, and gives them confidence to make future oriented decisions. Therefore, SMEs practice the essence of scenario planning, but without the formality, and costs associated with its practise in large firms.\nConclusion: The strategy formulation process is about matching a firm's internal competencies with the external environment it anticipates in the future. Since the future external environment cannot be predicted, especially in volatile markets, the challenge for managers is to make strategic decisions under varying degrees and types of uncertainty. A way of dealing with future environmental uncertainty is through scenario planning, a technique that had been used mainly by larger firms. The essence of scenario planning is that it enables a firm to evaluate the effects of changes in multiple variables in its external environment. The scenario process challenges an individual's mental model of the external environment, and allows them to rehearse a possible future, which then becomes a \"memory of the future\". This hermeneutical process assists an individual identify signals from the external environment, interpret, and understand them. However, the scenario planning process has disadvantages, such as its complexity and cost, which has tended to make it unattractive to SMEs, at least in the form practised by large firms. But there is evidence to suggest that the essence of scenario planning, rehearsing possible futures, and the interpretation and understanding that results, is practiced by SMEs. Using their non-competitive networks, owner/managers of SMEs rehearse possible futures, which helps them better identify key signals from the external environment, and interpret and understand these. Therefore, scenario planning, at least in its essence, is practiced by SMEs as a way of dealing with uncertainty in their future oriented decisions.But on the basis that there is nothing new, a quotation from Napoleon, perhaps the greatest military strategist of all, is illuminating:If I always appear prepared, it is because before entering on an undertaking, I have meditated for long and have foreseen what may occur. It is not genius which reveals to me suddenly and secretly what I should do in circumstances unexpected by others: it is thought and meditation.\n",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Purpose: - The purpose of this commentary is to discuss environmental uncertainty and to illustrate the value of scenario planning for small to medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) operating in a volatile environment.\nDesign/methodology/approach: - The literature regarding strategy formulation, environmental uncertainty and scenario planning is reviewed and considered in the context of managerial decision making.\nFindings: - Given the way managers learn to \"know\" what is happening in their business environment, scenario planning can be adapted for use by SME owner/managers.\nOriginality/value: - Although scenario planning was developed for use by large companies, this paper illustrates that it can be used by smaller firms.\n",
"role": "assistant"
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] |
Accounting for leases: telling it how it is
|
[
"Accounting",
"Leasing",
"Accounting standards",
"Off balance sheet finance",
"Assets",
"Liabilities"
] |
[
{
"content": "Summarize the following paper into structured abstract.\n\n__NO_TITLE__: In the definitions of SSAP 21 (August 1984): \"Accounting for leases and hire purchase contracts\", a lease is \"a contract between a lessor and a lessee ... \" (neither is defined) \"... for the hire of a specific asset. The lessor retains ownership of the asset but conveys the right to the use of the asset to the lessee for an agreed period of time in return for payment of specified rentals.\"\n",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Purpose: - The purpose of this paper is to express a viewpoint in respect of proposed changes to accounting for leases. It aims to present a summary of accounting principles and behaviours in the property leasing markets.\nDesign/methodology/approach: - The paper reflects analysis by the author conducted as part of an MBA project (which, in its entirety, dealt with the lease versus own decision) and is summarised as follows: in the definitions of SSAP 21, a lease is \"a contract between a lessor and a lessee ... \" and a distinction is drawn between an operating lease and a finance lease. The almost arbitrary treatment of leases has never been satisfactory but dealing with the shortcomings has proven awkward to the International Accounting Standards Board (IASB).\nFindings: - The value of reflecting leases on the balance sheet can be determined by close analysis of the work of Lasfer and other proponents of the advice that leasing real estate is better than owning it. The purpose of financial reporting is to show an accurate picture of the trading and health of the business in question. If significant parts of the picture are missing, perhaps it is not surprising that markets struggle to comprehend the true nature of assets and liabilities. Leasing is an activity whereby the use of an asset is separated from the ownership of that asset. The Accounting Standards Board, in its Statement of Principle, defines assets as \"rights or other access to future economic benefits controlled by an entity as a result of past transactions or events\". Liabilities are defined as \"obligations to transfer benefits as a result of past transactions or events\". Ownership of property would appear to fall into the category of asset; any borrowings against that asset would be categorised as a liability. A lease would appear to fall into both liability and asset categories.\nOriginality/value: - It may not be comfortable for occupiers to adjust to the new accounting regime. It is, in the author's judgement, in the best interests of all stakeholders and, since it will require more active management, of the business itself.\n",
"role": "assistant"
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] |
Amplifying staff development through film: The case of a university staff visit to a sixth form college
|
[
"Experiential learning",
"Student",
"Educational development",
"University",
"Transition pedagogy",
"Academic staff development"
] |
[
{
"content": "Summarize the following paper into structured abstract.\n\nIntroduction: In 2006, Harvey, Drew and Smith reviewed student transition literature on the first-year experience in Higher Education (HE), commenting that this had been an area for research in the UK and elsewhere for more than forty years. One aspect highlighted was the time needed for the process of transition and adjustment to occur. This, together with the isolation of a mass experience, and an unfamiliar didactic teaching style of instruction rather than of facilitated learning were given as factors that could lead to a high incidence of withdrawal. A further conclusion was that: \"there is no first-year experience; there is a multiplicity of first-year experiences\" (Harvey et al., 2006, p. 106).\nProject outline: Induction into HE can be so focussed on a \"deficit\" model of students in the HE context, that it largely ignores students' prior experiences of learning and staff perceptions of these. The project thus aimed to create a space for colleagues and college students to better understand their experience of the L&T that they encounter in the two environments. To this end, we arranged for academic staff from a large metropolitan university to visit a sixth form college in Greater Manchester. The resulting film of student and staff observations and reflections provided the trigger material for subsequent ED workshops to promote a consideration of pedagogies for student transition.\nAnalysis of colleagues' perceptions and reflections: Table I shows a summary of the themes from the analysis of the post-visit perceptions of colleagues. Staff participants expressed surprise regarding both similarities and differences in the L&T environments of the college and the university. Similarities included, superficially at least, the likeness of some college classes with seminars in university; views about the role of the teacher (in some humanities based classes, as a facilitator of learning rather than didactic expert); and the informality of interactions. Differences included attendance (higher in the college); monitoring (much more pervasive and at the \"micro\" level in the college); focus on preparation for assessment (for most colleagues, this appeared to be the sole focus in college); level of student attention in the classroom (higher in college); the provision of resources (\"everything\" provided in college); class size (smaller in college) and structuring of many classes (generally much more structured in most college classrooms).\nPrompting changes in practice: Colleagues had many ideas for changes prompted by the visit, which included: looking again at topic coverage in the Level 4 undergraduate curriculum in relation to Level 3 (A level/BTEC) syllabus content; experimenting with problem-based learning approaches; and focussing more on the structure and sequencing of learning activity and re-consideration of processes around recruitment and pre-entry activity.\nED workshops: The film (CELT, 2015) was then constructed from the reflections of participating colleagues and from the college students' perceptions and expectations, and used for ED. To date, the film has been shown at four internal MMU events, as well as at three external events, between December 2015 and June 2016 (c. 200 participants).\nStaff responses to the film: Because the film presented critical reflections of colleagues, this tended to encourage a critical reflection in the second audience. For example, in one staff workshop (about 75 staff), observations, questions or suggested actions relevant to this staff group were made in response to the first of the above prompts via Padlet (www.padlet.com) (Table II). The Padlet offerings from this workshop were tabulated to relate observations to the questions and actions that appeared to connect these, keeping as closely as possible to the language used by Padlet contributors. Although this did not represent formal data collection, researcher categorisation of responses showed more than half of all responses in the REFRAME (R) quadrant with about a quarter having elements of the TAME (T) quadrant indicating a high degree of critical reflection.\nDiscussion: The literature, the visit to the college, filmed reflections and ED workshops taken together provide good insights into perceptions, expectations, processes, structures, behaviours, communications and the perceived locus of responsibilities as seen by staff. Communicating the benefits to fulfilment that a university education can bring is was seen as an important message for students, as well as a reminder to staff of this important function of a university education.\nConclusion: This method of filming colleagues as they experience student reality (in this case, the transition gap) and recording their reflections for presentation to another set of staff has provided benefits for a much larger number of staff than could have been realistically accommodated in the original experience. Staff commented on the efficiency of this method, of vicarious experience and/or learning from the reflective experiences of their colleagues. One potential downside could be that staff may not form relationships with college counterparts, which in the case of some of the participating colleagues has been another highly valued outcome.\n",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Purpose: The literature on student transition to university commonly investigates student expectations, perceptions and experiences and rarely focusses on university academic staff viewpoints. The purpose of this paper is to explore the staff development potential of a filmed visit of university academic staff to a sixth form college.\nDesign/methodology/approach: The project created a space for eight university colleagues from a wide range of discipline areas in a large metropolitan university and ten college students from one local sixth form feeder college to observe and reflect on their experiences of learning and teaching (L&T) in the two environments.\nFindings: Staff development episodes were subsequently designed to allow staff who had not attended the visit to comprehend the experiences of L&T in colleges and promote a consideration of pedagogies for student transition. Observations and reflections from this \"second audience\" are presented.\nResearch limitations/implications: This was a case study of a visit of a small group of university academic staff to one Roman Catholic sixth form college who selected students to speak on film. The visit occurred just prior to final exams at the end of the academic year.\nPractical implications: Packaging the visit via film and workshop activity enabled university staff to hear their own colleagues' reflections on how students learn in college and the step up to university study. This combination of vicarious/peer learning could be used in a range of staff development and training settings.\nOriginality/value: This study explored a practical way of extending a small-scale episode of experiential staff development to a much larger staff audience via the use of filmed reflections of participants, combined with workshop activity and online comment and discussion.\n",
"role": "assistant"
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] |
If Kate voted Conservative, would you? The role of celebrity endorsements in political party advertising
|
[
"Politics",
"Advertising",
"Celebrities",
"Political parties",
"Elections",
"United Kingdom"
] |
[
{
"content": "Summarize the following paper into structured abstract.\n\n__NO_TITLE__: The question of engaging voters in political elections in the UK has gained an increasing amount of attention (BBC1, 2001). This is to a large extent due to a historical drop in voter turnout at the country's general elections, a fact that was highly documented during the 2001 election by political analyst Tony King, claiming that; \"There are certainly absolutely no signs in the voting figures out tonight, that this is a government that has successfully re-connected the people with politics\" (BBC1, 2001). In 2001, the excitement at the general election was at its all time low, with turnout going under 60 per cent for the first time since the First World War, the result of a 12 per centage point drop from its 1997 level. Furthermore, the 1997 election was the first time turnout had dipped below 72 per cent since 1935. The elections in May 2005, showed an increase of 1 per cent, rising to just about 61 per cent, signalling continuous voter apathy in the United Kingdom (ESRC Society Today, 2005).\nTheoretical background: Political endorsement\nMethodology: The study design employed was a 2 (political salience: high; low)x2 (endorser: celebrity; non celebrity) between-subjects factorial design. A total of 316 responses were collected from adults in the English cities of Bath and Bristol. Participants were restricted to only those who are eligible to vote and who had lived in the UK for two or more years. Manipulated questionnaires were randomly ordered with the same coversheet. Researchers were unaware as to which questionnaire was given to each participant allowing for a blind random assignment of treatment conditions. Responses were collected at public libraries, medical centres and on public trains. Although controlled experimentation dictates that all outside interference should be eliminated from the study (Hair et al., 1998) the settings chosen for data collection were often quiet and without major distraction to ensure full concentration on the task at hand. The total sample was represented by 43 per cent male and 57 per cent female participants. Half of all respondents were under 28 years of age.In order to choose appropriate endorsers for the research a pretest of 46 postgraduate students from a South-West English university was employed. Participants were first asked to rate photos of 23 different celebrities on their likelihood of appearing in a political campaign advert. All pre-test participants were also asked to name the celebrity being assessed. Ratings for celebrities that were not recognized by participants were removed from the pre-test analysis. Three females (Helen Mirren, Kate Winslet, and Lily Allen) and three males (David Beckham, Anthony Hopkins, and James Blunt) were rated by pre-test participants as being the most likely to appear in a political advertising campaign.From here photos of three male and three female non-celebrity endorsers were chosen to match the photos of three male and three female celebrity endorsers identified by the participants. Ads were created using the photos with the slogan \"I vote Conservative, do you?\". The Conservative party was chosen as a suitable test party as it avoids the political bipolarity associated with the current Labour government as well as represents a large enough party to be seen as a credible user of celebrity endorsement. Participants' party affiliation was measured and controlled for in the main study.Participants were then asked to complete Ohanian's (1990) tri-component model of trustworthiness, knowledgability and persuasiveness. Participants were also asked to rate each endorser based on familiarity and attractiveness. From the pre-test Kate Winslet was chosen to best represent an adequate endorser as she scored significantly higher on all three factors than other shortlisted celebrities (p <0.001). A female non-celebrity endorser was chosen based on participants rating her as being significantly more attractive than the other female non-celebrity endorsers (p <0.001). Again, any participants who failed to recognize the celebrity endorser had their responses removed from subsequent analysis. It should be noted again that these ads have been created by the researchers and that the political affiliations of the endorsers is neither known nor implied in this research.In order to manipulate political salience two articles were created of equal length and readability. Ten experimental participants received an article outlining the importance of voting and poor voter turnout at the 2001 elections. Ten control participants received an article about the history of Bath city. As no measure of political salience is available participants were asked to complete two measures of identity salience which had been adapted to focus on political issues. All responses were measured on a five-point Likert scale (1=Strongly disagree, 5=Strongly agree). First, participants completed Fenigstein et al.'s (1975) private self-consciousness scale which included the measures of \"I reflect about politics a lot\", \"I am always trying to figure politics out\", \"Generally, I'm not very aware of politics\", \"I am generally attentive to politics\", \"I'm constantly examining my political motives\" and \"I'm alert to changes in the political scene\". The second measure was based on Callero's (1985) study and included the following measures: \"I would feel a loss if I were forced to give up voting at political elections\", \"I really don't have any clear feelings about politics\", \"Politics is something I rarely even think about\", \"For me, being a voter means more than just ticking a box\" and \"Voting is an important part of who I am\". These scales were also used in the main study as manipulation checks for the two articles. The results from the pre-test show that experimental participants reported significantly higher levels of political salience than control participants (p <0.001).Procedure\nDependent variables: Attitudes and voting intentions\nResults: Manipulation checks\nDiscussion: The results show that celebrity endorsements can be effective in driving voter intention if politics is not salient for the eligible voter. However, if the voter is engaged with politics and is actively thinking of politics and political issues then the effect of the celebrity endorsement is negated. Identity salience has been shown to impact consumer decision making and attitudes in the past (Reed, 2002, 2004). However, this research shows that salience about political issues, not necessarily aspects of one's personal self, has a powerful effect on determining attitudes and voter intention. Similarly, the effect of celebrity endorsements has been shown to be effective in driving favourable product and brand attitudes (Ohanian, 1991; Erdogan, 1999) and political issues in the USA (Payne et al., 2007; Jackson and Darrow, 2005). However, this research has shown that celebrities could be used to encourage votes for a British political party for people who are not interested in politics. The results do concur with previous research in that the celebrity endorser was seen as being more likeable and more familiar than the non-celebrity endorser. However, using the celebrity did not show a significant increase in voter intention.This research offers significant insight for political campaigners looking to use celebrity endorsers to promote a political party and drive votes. The use of celebrities in isolation of other factors has been shown to be an ineffective way of encouraging eligible voters to vote for a political party. It is only when the target population is represented by low levels of political salience and low interest in political issues that celebrity endorsers would be able to encourage votes. This could be a reason for the high impact of celebrity endorsers in the USA with only 26 per cent of young Americans believing that keeping up with political affairs was important (Sax et al., 1998). A similar trend is seen in the UK with only 10 per cent of young eligible voters turning out at local elections and only 40 per cent at the 2005 General Election (Stoker, 2006). It is these groups in particular that would most likely respond to celebrity endorsers.The danger therefore, exists that politics begins to focus on the glamour of the endorser and less on the issues being debated. A solution to this would be the use of celebrity endorsers to encourage eligible voters to engage with political issues, to improve their levels of political salience as it were. From here the results from the research show that the high political salience participants are less likely to be swayed by affective cues and will focus far more on processing other information about the party (Petty et al., 1983).\nLimitations and avenues for future research: This research was conducted in a geographically restricted area of the UK. True representation of the total eligible voter population would require a far larger examination across the UK as well as across age groups, education levels and gender. However, it should be noted that it is expected that levels of political salience may vary from person to person, but the way in which people with similar levels of political salience react to celebrity endorsers is likely to be similar to that shown in this study. That is, low political salience voters across the UK would most likely favour a celebrity endorser over a non-celebrity endorser. Further examination of levels of political interest across the UK would help researchers and political campaigners to understand which demographics and geographical areas would suit the use of celebrity endorsement best. Replicating this study across different cultures and countries may also offer insight into the role that political salience plays in the effectiveness of celebrity endorsers. One aspect that should also be investigated further are the reasons beyond voter apathy that may cause a person not to vote in general elections. The assumption made here is that non-turnout is due to a lack of interest in the political system; however, it could equally be true that non-turnout be a result of non-belief in the parties or members vying for election.The current study could be extended by investigating the impact that susceptibility to personal influence and self-concept clarity play in affecting a person's voter intention upon viewing a celebrity endorsement of a political party. Self-concept clarity (SCC) refers to how clearly defined, stable and internally consistent ones beliefs about oneself are (Cambell et al., 1996). Therefore, a voter with low levels of SCC should be more susceptible to the influence of celebrity endorsements, similar to the effect that persons with high levels of susceptibility to personal influence would have (Cohen, 1967).Finally, political parties are often unable to choose an ideal celebrity endorser due to both the ban on paid political advertising in the UK as well as the potential risks to a celebrity's career through aligning him or herself with a political movement. However, this research is still able to show that a significant effect is evident with low political salience respondents. Further research should investigate the impact that real celebrity endorsements have had on actual campaigns, such as George Clooney's endorsement of Barak Obama, as well as the effect that making political statements can have on the celebrity's image by the general public.\n",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Purpose: - This research has been conducted with the aim of determining if celebrity endorsers in political party advertising have a significant impact on UK voter intentions. The use of celebrity endorsements is commonplace in the USA, but little is known about its effects in the UK. This research also aims to incorporate the use of celebrity endorsements in political party advertising with the political salience construct. Political salience represents how prominent politics and political issues are in the minds of the eligible voter.\nDesign/methodology/approach: - A 2 (endorser: celebrity; non-celebrity)x2 (political salience: high; low) between-subjects factorial design experiment was used. The results show that celebrity endorsements do play a significant role in attitudes towards the political advert, attitudes towards the endorser and voter intention. However, this effect is significantly moderated by political salience.\nFindings: - The results show that low political salience respondents were significantly more likely to vote for the political party when a celebrity endorser is used. However, the inverse effect is found for high political salience respondents.\nPractical implications: - The results offer significant insights into the effect that celebrity endorsers could have in future elections and the importance that political salience plays in the effectiveness of celebrity endorsement. If political parties are to target those citizens that do not actively engage with politics then the use of celebrity endorsements would make a significant impact, given the results of this research.\nOriginality/value: - This research would be of particular interest to political party campaigners as well as academics studying the effects of advertising and identity salience.\n",
"role": "assistant"
}
] |
Entrepreneurial orientation, entrepreneurial education and performance
|
[
"Business performance",
"Entrepreneurial orientation",
"Survey",
"Entrepreneurship education",
"Nascent entrepreneurs"
] |
[
{
"content": "Summarize the following paper into structured abstract.\n\n1. Introduction: Korean economy is demanding to change from an industrial society to an entrepreneurial society (Bahn et al., 2014). It is asking for a generational change from the preexisting paradigms of such as labor consciousness, the concept of work and company management. With more production focused small and large businesses lose the ability to employ more workers, the scale of mass unemployment increases with it. Youth unemployment is one of the most critical social issues in Korea (Park, 2017). However, the development of Information technology and networking is lowering the expenses and entry barriers for entrepreneurs. Increasing the number of entrepreneurs will not just simply improve the economy and produce more profits for the economy. Creating more businesses and hiring more people can provide a social safety net for society. That is why all OECD countries have placed great emphasis on entrepreneurship.\n2. Theoretical background: 2.1 Entrepreneurship and entrepreneurial orientation\n3. Empirical research: 3.1 Research model\n4. Conclusion: Korean economy is demanding to change from an industrial society to an entrepreneurial society. It is asking for a generational change from the pre-existing paradigms of such as labor consciousness, the concept of work and company management. Youth unemployment is one of the most critical social issues in Korea. Increasing the number of entrepreneurs will not just simply improve the economy and produce more profits for the economy. Creating more businesses and hiring more people can provide a social safety net for society. That is why all OECD countries have placed great emphasis on entrepreneurship.\n",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Purpose: Korean economy is demanding to change from an industrial society to an entrepreneurial society. It is asking for a generational change from the preexisting paradigms of such as labor consciousness, the concept of work and company management. Entrepreneurship is one of the key elements that will lead to a successful business performance under highly uncertain business conditions. The purpose of this paper is to examine the relationship between entrepreneurial orientation and business performance. Also, the authors look for the role of entrepreneurship education in the influence of entrepreneurial orientation on financial and nonfinancial business performance.\nDesign/methodology/approach: To accomplish the purpose of this study, the authors carried out a survey targeting nascent entrepreneurs and total early-stage entrepreneurs with less than seven years of experience. Based on the Miller's (1983) definition, a group of questions for entrepreneurial orientation, similar to Covin and Slevin (1989), were developed.\nFindings: First, among the subfactors of entrepreneurial orientation, it was clear that innovative progressiveness affected nonfinancial business performance. Second, risk-taking propensity did not influence both financial business performance and nonfinancial business performance. Third, entrepreneurship education had no connection with entrepreneurial orientation or business performance.\nPractical implications: Nonfinancial business performances are related with long-term goals and growth potential. Innovative proactiveness affects nonfinancial business performance. Thus, entrepreneurs should look for ways to promote their innovative proactiveness. Entrepreneurship education for experienced entrepreneurs is not as effective as that for students.\nOriginality/value: In the authors' study, survey questionnaires were sent to 200 nascent and total early-stage entrepreneurs searching for business angel investments or entrepreneurship consultants in Korea. A total of 180 entrepreneurs answered the survey questions online. There are not so many valid studies examining the effect of entrepreneurship education for nascent and total early-stage entrepreneurs in Korea.\n",
"role": "assistant"
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] |
Commentary: vulnerable consumers in service settings
|
[
"Transformative service research",
"Discrimination",
"Quality of life",
"Disabilities",
"Consumer vulnerabilities"
] |
[
{
"content": "Summarize the following paper into structured abstract.\n\nIntroduction: The service marketing field is a relatively young discipline, with its first harbingers as a distinct subfield within marketing emerging in the late 1970s and early 1980s (Fisk and Grove, 2010). As the service marketing field has evolved in the past half century, researchers sought to understand broad concepts, such as service quality, service design, service failure, fostering and organizational service culture or market orientation, and the influence of perceived service quality on relevant managerial outcomes, namely, satisfaction, word-of-mouth and loyalty.\n",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Purpose: This commentary aims to introduce a collection of articles that highlights the experiences, needs and challenges of vulnerable consumers within a variety of service contexts. As a research collection, the investigations reveal that service researchers have overlooked how service design and processes affect vulnerable consumers.\nDesign/methodology/approach: The commentary is a conceptual perspective based on the investigations put forward in this special issue, extant literature and the editors' perspectives.\nFindings: Many consumers enter service contexts in some type of vulnerable condition. These conditions may include those relating to deafness, hearing impairments, older age, sexual orientation, immigration status and acculturation, participation in sexual exploitation, geographical remoteness, mental health challenges, obesity, natural disasters, language barriers and being the brunt of service provider discrimination.\nResearch limitations/implications: Service researchers are encouraged to consider how the service marketing's foundational theories, frameworks, concepts and axioms generalize among vulnerable consumers.\nPractical implications: Service practitioners need to realize customers often enter service contexts owing to some type of vulnerable condition that influences their expectations and perceptions of service quality.\nOriginality/value: This special issue expands the discipline's understanding of vulnerable consumers and exposes an array of conditions that affect their experiences and journeys within service settings. Service organizations dedicated to enhancing consumer well-being must understand how they can help remedy, or lessen, the consequences associated with vulnerable conditions.\n",
"role": "assistant"
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] |
Seeking reward or avoiding risk from restaurant reviews: does distance matter?
|
[
"Effort",
"Heuristics",
"Asymmetry",
"Online reviews",
"Reward-seeking",
"Risk-avoidance"
] |
[
{
"content": "Summarize the following paper into structured abstract.\n\nIntroduction: The competitiveness of the restaurant industry is intensifying as new substitutes for the dining experience emerge. People can enjoy a restaurant-style meal without leaving their homes through Uber Eats and other food delivery services. Even if restaurants participate in this distribution channel, their profitability declines due to third-party charges (Keng, 2018). Moreover, people expect their food within a short period, so restaurants cannot expand their geographic reach through food delivery distribution (Keng, 2018). Why then, with convenience at their doorstep, would consumers venture out to dine at a restaurant some distance away?\nLiterature review: Decision processes for online reviews\nMethod: Design\nResults: Data were analyzed using SPSS. Three-way ANOVAs (Base review valence x Target review valence x Distance) were used to test the main effects and interactions of the independent variables on all scale measures. Simple effects tests were employed to identify the source of significant interactions (Keppel and Wickens, 2004). Effect size measures (eta2) are reported for significant ANOVA results, where values of 0.01, 0.06 and 0.14 are considered small, medium and large effects (Cohen, 1988). Logistic regression was conducted to evaluate the effects of the independent variables on binary restaurant choice (Pampel, 2000).\nDiscussion: Conclusions\n",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the extent to which consumers will exert more effort to avoid risk (negative reviews) versus seek reward (positive reviews) when making a restaurant decision.\nDesign/methodology/approach: This study investigates the influence of distance and review valence on restaurant decisions. A 2 (base restaurant review valence: negative, neutral) x 2 (target restaurant review valence: neutral, positive) x 2 (distance: 30 min, 60 min) between-subjects factorial design was used.\nFindings: People exert more effort to seek a reward versus avoid a risk. People will drive any distance to dine at a restaurant with positive reviews. However, the tendency to avoid a restaurant with negative reviews declines as distance increases.\nPractical implications: This study emphasizes the critical role of positive reviews in the restaurant industry. This research provides guidance to operators to manage online reviews effectively. The marketing strategy taking into account review valence and distance allows the business to attract new customers and grow its customer base.\nOriginality/value: This research synthesizes asymmetry effects and prospect theory with the level of risk associated with the outcome. This research is theoretically noteworthy since the finding of a reverse asymmetry principle is in contrast with the traditional belief of risk-avoidance when comparing gains and losses.\n",
"role": "assistant"
}
] |
A review of security assessment methodologies in industrial control systems
|
[
"Cyber attacks",
"Vulnerability analysis",
"Power systems",
"SCADA systems",
"Security assessment",
"Vulnerability analysis"
] |
[
{
"content": "Summarize the following paper into structured abstract.\n\n1. Introduction: The progress in telecommunication technologies and the need for enhanced functionality and efficacy that is cost-effective in modern industrial control systems (ICS), for instance, the supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) networks appear to have undergone evolvement towards adapting the Internet-of-Things and cloud computing technologies (Sadeghi et al., 2015). However, the present implementation practices of ICS/SCADA systems have introduced a wide range of security vulnerabilities (Sajid et al., 2016). Cyber-attacks on ICS/SCADA systems can be performed from the internet or devices connected to the business or enterprise networks, which have access to the field-level devices (Sahu et al., 2016). As a result, ICS turn into obvious targets for cyber-attacks. The impact of these cyber-attacks can range from disrupting or damaging critical infrastructural operations to causing major economic losses or even more dangerously, claim human lives.\n2. Overview of SCADA systems: A typical SCADA system is comprised of control centre(s), along with several distributed devices of remote field, for example, remote terminal unit (RTU), programmable logic controllers (PLCs) and intelligent electronic device (IED), which are linked with a certain medium of communication (Singh et al., 2015). Commonly, sensor reading information in analogue format is received by the RTU fed from field devices, which is later converted into digital format to be sent to the corresponding control centre(s). Additionally, the RTU, apart from receiving commands in digital format from control centre(s), also generates alarms (Cherdantseva et al., 2016). Similar to the RTU, the PLC is a digital computer system with specific functionalities that monitors the sensors of field devices and decides by adhering to pre-programmed commands to regulate solenoids, actuators and valves. On the other hand, the control centre, which includes the SCADA server, receives data from and gives commands to RTUs, apart from processing and storing information to be presented to the human operators in supporting the decisions made. In fact, the system is observed and controlled by human operators by using a human-machine interface (HMI) at the control centre (Cherdantseva et al., 2016). Moreover, varied computer software applications are integrated with the SCADA server, which are inclusive of billing and inventory management applications, to manage corporate and business functions (Larkin et al., 2014). Typically, data exchange amongst these software applications is performed by adhering to software interface standards (e.g. OPC), database interaction (e.g. ODBC) or through an API (Dayal et al., 2015). A variety of data protection and recovery mechanisms are used in the SCADA systems, such as intrusion detection and real-time data backup, mainly to hinder interception or loss of critical telemetry data.\n3. Review of security assessment methodologies: A security assessment is a commonly used practice that estimates the present cyber security posture of an information system. It identifies security weaknesses and loopholes that may be utilised by an attacker to execute cyber-attacks against the target system (Cherdantseva et al., 2016). Generally, the security assessment offers recommendations and guidelines to enhance its security and protection mechanisms to mitigate risks and avoid potential security threats.\n4. Comparative analysis of vulnerability assessment methodology: This section presents the findings of the comparative analysis performed to compare varied SCADA cyber security standards and guidelines. The methodologies were evaluated based on the supported security assessment methods, including vulnerability assessment, penetration testing, vulnerability prioritisation, risk assessment and patch management.\n5. Discussion: Managing the security of today's critical infrastructure and ICS poses many challenges. In addition to the new vulnerabilities that are discovered every day in these systems, there are some issues related to: their operational requirements, the utilisation of legacy systems and blurred boundaries between the cyber and physical networks (Alcaraz and Zeadally, 2015; McLaughlin et al., 2016; Ozturk and Aubin, 2011). The lack of resources and proper assessment tools become the biggest obstacles to maintaining a reliable and an up-to-date security measures. Historically, these systems were physically isolated from other computing resources (such as business and enterprise networks) and have used proprietary hardware components, software and communication protocols (Sheng et al., 2011). Nevertheless, the current trends in ICS implementations are embracing the new IT technologies for cost reduction, minimal maintenance efforts and easier accessibility, in addition to improved efficiency (McLaughlin et al., 2016). Therefore, these challenges must be handled to minimise the attack surface on the system and reduce the impact risk that may be caused by potential cyber-attacks.\n6. Implications for further research: This study was being of an exploratory and comparative in nature, raises a number of challenges found in existing security assessment practices and identifies a number of opportunities for future research, both in terms of method development, enhancement and concept validation. Additionally, the reported findings in this work present potentially useful information to practitioners engaged with compliance with the NERC-CIP standard. More research will, in fact, be necessary to refine and further elaborate the findings of this work.\n7. Conclusion: The escalating interconnectivity of ICS networks is exposed to a wide range of vulnerabilities and security threats. Thus, ICS have become a target of cyber-attacks, hence posing significant risks to the nation's critical operations. Besides, lack of viable ICS security measures and inadequate security mechanisms could eventually lead to severe disruption of the normal ICS operations, upon being attacked. These may result in catastrophic consequences on the physical world. As such, security analysis and countermeasure planning are deemed as mandatory. The ICS security analysis aids in detecting vulnerabilities, threats and possible attacks that may target the ICS and their underlying components. These tasks are essential to protect and to secure the system against cyber-attacks. Nevertheless, due to the scale and the intricacy of ICS, as well as the communication technologies linked with planning, executing and reviewing cyber and physical vulnerability assessments, are rather difficult. Therefore, several standards and guidelines have been proposed in the literature. With that, this work has reviewed several ICS security assessment methodologies and carried out detailed analysis of the examined methodologies so as to explore the sufficiency of these existing methodologies in meeting the needs and requirements of cyber security evaluations meant for power networks. Furthermore, the literature showed that the security assessment techniques in ICS and IT systems are quite similar, as both rely on performing vulnerability analysis and risk management techniques to identify and to fix loopholes within the system. From the findings, most of the examined methodologies seem to concentrate on vulnerability identification and prioritisation techniques, whilst other security techniques received noticeably less attention. This is because these two techniques have been considered as the essential steps towards implementing a secure system. The review also displayed that the least attention is devoted to patch management process due to the critical nature of the ICS. Additionally, this review portrayed that only two security assessment methodologies exhibited absolute fulfilment of all NERC-CIP security requirements, whilst the others only partially fulfilled the essential requirements.\n",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Purpose: The common implementation practices of modern industrial control systems (ICS) has left a window wide open to various security vulnerabilities. As the cyber-threat landscape continues to evolve, the ICS and their underlying architecture must be protected to withstand cyber-attacks. This study aims to review several ICS security assessment methodologies to identify an appropriate vulnerability assessment method for the ICS systems that examine both critical physical and cyber systems so as to protect the national critical infrastructure.\nDesign/methodology/approach: This paper reviews several ICS security assessment methodologies and explores whether the existing methodologies are indeed sufficient to meet the cyber security assessment exercise required to validate the security of electrical power control systems.\nFindings: The study showed that most of the examined methodologies seem to concentrate on vulnerability identification and prioritisation techniques, whilst other security techniques received noticeably less attention. The study also showed that the least attention is devoted to patch management process due to the critical nature of the SCADA system. Additionally, this review portrayed that only two security assessment methodologies exhibited absolute fulfilment of all NERC-CIP security requirements, whilst the others only partially fulfilled the essential requirements.\nOriginality/value: This paper presents a review and a comparative analysis of several standard SCADA security assessment methodologies and guidelines published by internationally recognised bodies. In addition, it explores the adequacy of the existing methodologies in meeting cyber security assessment practices required for electrical power networks.\n",
"role": "assistant"
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] |
Taming the Tasman: international interlending under the Southern Cross
|
[
"Interlending",
"Document delivery",
"Australia",
"New Zealand",
"National libraries",
"Resource sharing"
] |
[
{
"content": "Summarize the following paper into structured abstract.\n\nPart A: Trans Tasman Interlending: the prelude: 1. Introduction\nPart B: Trans Tasman Interlending in review: The second part of this paper reviews the first six months operation of Trans Tasman Interlending and offers insight into some of the issues this has raised.Additional benefits from the service include:* increased opportunities for customers to seamlessly request from libraries across the Tasman;* an increased level of co-operation and sharing of ideas between services using the same system;* exploiting functionality in the software that both countries use; and* building on a similarity of configurations and user base.1. A new trend emerges\nPart C: conclusion: In conclusion all authors agree that the implementation of Trans Tasman Interlending was a successful business development. From a technical perspective it runs smoothly. It is the non-technical issues such as billing and practices that are more complex to resolve. Trans Tasman Interlending also has a place in reviving a faltering service as traffic volumes on Te Puna Interloan begin to climb again.Where issues have arisen they are most commonly centred on education.Users responding to the Trans Tasman Interlending survey had this to say:The New Zealand libraries have been very quick in supplying articles and books to us - faster than most Australian libraries!I think it's a fantastic thing to have Trans Tasman interlending with our NZ cousins. I haven't actually had the opportunity to request from NZ as yet but have supplied quite a few and don't mind in the slightest.There is also an extremely good working relationship between the system administrators of New Zealand and Australia.\n",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Purpose: - This article seeks to provide an update of two papers presented to the VDX Users Group of Australia and New Zealand during 2006. It aims to explore the issues associated with the implementation of Trans Tasman Interlending and its subsequent success, and is written primarily from a technical perspective.\nDesign/methodology/approach: - The first part describes the issues addressed, processes used and resolutions adopted in the period leading up to the go-live of Trans Tasman Interlending. The second part provides a review of the first six months of operation.\nFindings: - Trans Tasman Interlending has produced interesting results and is clearly more significant for interlending in New Zealand than it is Australia. This article looks at a variety of result areas and delves into the issues the linked service has highlighted.\nResearch limitations/implications: - While both countries have based their analysis on readily available report data, it is only in the Australian context that a formalised user survey was used. New Zealand reporting relies more on anecdotal evidence.\nPractical implications: - In highlighting the issues involved in linking two utilities this article potentially provides a checklist for others to follow and a yardstick against which to measure success.\nOriginality/value: - Trans Tasman Interlending is a first for the linking of two national interlending utilities.\n",
"role": "assistant"
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] |
Learning from failure: A study of failed enterprises of self-employed African migrants in the UK
|
[
"Recovery",
"African migrant",
"Culture’s impact",
"Interactive dialogic method",
"SME failure"
] |
[
{
"content": "Summarize the following paper into structured abstract.\n\nIntroduction: The arena of African small businesses is a maze of complexities. As Fairlie and Robb (2008, p. 3) argue \"Racial inequality in education, income, and wealth are well known. Less understood are the large and persistent racial disparities in business ownership and performance\". There is a need to understand the fabric and nature of African small businesses to ascertain why there are business ownership disparities between minority ethnic groups. To do so, this paper attempts to look into the mosaic of cultures Africans live with and do business in the diaspora. These complexities are often exacerbated not only by the size of the family (see Lwango et al., 2017) but also by the impact of cultural interactions with host countries. For example, Africans in the UK do not only come from a multiplicity of national and other backgrounds but also face cultural competition with other equally foreign minority groups, e.g. Asians, Latin Americans, Eastern Europeans, etc. (Hack-Polay, 2008). They equally face the challenge of survival under the aggressiveness and often the opacity of the host culture (see Mendy, 2017). The foresaid complexities are compounded by forces linked to the cultural make-up of the host country, though not necessarily purely cultural. In this respect, technology, financial arrangements and legal regulations can also have an impact on the success or failure of such types of businesses.\nLiterature review: Small and medium enterprises are a significant part of a nation's economic landscape. Both in the developed and developing worlds, SMEs generate revenue, enhance employment and provide access to commodities for remote communities (World Bank, 2004; Wiklund and Shepherd, 2005). In the UK, ethnic minority small businesses represent around 7 per cent of all small businesses (HM Treasury, 2008). However, they make up in excess of 55 per cent of national gross domestic product (GDP) in advanced economies and 60 per cent of GDP in less wealthy countries (Keskin and Senturk, 2010). It can be extrapolated that the life and employment well-being of the nation depends as much on the vitality of its SMEs as on the vivacity of large companies. Small enterprises bear more significance among ethnic minority communities in many countries and their proliferation in those communities is well documented, being historically linked to disadvantage - actual or perceived. This disadvantage includes employment, education and general status in society.\nMethodology: The research's main framework is the interpretivist paradigm. Interpretivism entails that the researcher attaches meaning to the participants' actions and narratives. Interpretivism is part of a process of theorisation, legitimately based on drawing meaning from data. This research is a piece of empirical investigation using dialogic methodology which is embedded in the broader qualitative approach. Dialogic methodology seeks to generate data whose intelligibility (i.e. in terms of meaning) will predominantly depend on the interlocutors' own assessment of meaning. The use of the dialogic methodology is to assert that other investigation possibilities are open. In this study the researchers played a facilitators-of-dialogue role between the participants and the audience, bearing similar characteristics to Mendy's (2015, p. 15) \"third way\". This necessitates a different way of collecting qualitative data. The use of interviews provided the foundation for dialogue and data generation. This approach transcends traditional semi-structured or in-depth interviews; in this investigation, the researchers framed the questions in a way to invite the participant to talk directly to stakeholders who would benefit from the findings, i.e. existing African migrant businesses, future generations of migrant entrepreneurs. For example, major questions were formulated as follows: \"How would you explain to those reading this document the reasons why your business failed? Why would they accept this as a key cause? As your interlocutors finish reading or listening, what is the one thing you think they should retain? If you were able to change people's perception of your business experience what would you say?\" (see Dessi et al., 2014) Such questions are live questions similar to documentary makers'. In addition, they create a sense of interactive dialogue between the sender and the receiver of the message or narrative being explored.\nFindings and analysis: The emergence of African businesses\nDiscussions and conclusions: Ethnic minorities have experienced disadvantages, which are captured in the literature (Garner and Bhattacharyya, 2011). The road to recovery is a long way away since the underperformance of black African businesses stems from deeply rooted real or perceived historical prejudice and disadvantage. These could be explained from complex angles and contexts, e.g. race, ethnicity, and a colonial legacy that undermine the validity of African creativity. African small entrepreneurs felt they had to assert their membership to British national identity and contribution to wealth creation. The voices of the \"dead businesses\" in this research demonstrated that there are significant endeavours to embrace for a brighter future for black African businesses in the UK.\n",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to investigate the high failure among African entrepreneurs post-2008 financial crisis. It evaluates the evidence of actual and perceived disadvantage and endogenous and exogenous factors affecting black and minority ethnic businesses.\nDesign/methodology/approach: The research is based on an interpretivist frame which uses a dialogic methodology. It uses in-depth interviews. The researchers framed discussion questions so as to invite the participants to articulate directly their experiences for the benefit of the readership, other existing African businesses and aspiring entrepreneurs.\nFindings: The findings from the interviews with 20 leaders of \"dead\" businesses indicate the impact that place, people and poverty have on business failure and identify reasons for African business failure rates compared to other minorities. This study reveals that culture, an often understated variable, is critical in understanding the deeper reasons for the under-performance of African small entrepreneurs and its impacts on individual and collective lives.\nPractical implications: Recovery solutions ought to be formulated from participants' call for diversification, inter-cultural learning and integration as potential remedies. The research addresses the socio-economic problems encountered by owners of \"dead\" businesses. Policymakers and financial organisations ought to pay heed to the skills and resources that minorities offer as part of remedies for future enterprises.\nOriginality/value: Studies on failed African businesses are under-represented in the literature. This study identifies the important role of culture on the failure of small businesses owned by African migrants in the UK. It highlights the significant socio-economic and situational barriers that they navigate in quest for recognition and cultural integration through business endeavours.\n",
"role": "assistant"
}
] |
Living wages: a US perspective
|
[
"Labour",
"Living wage",
"Minimum wage"
] |
[
{
"content": "Summarize the following paper into structured abstract.\n\nIntroduction: The USA has had a federal minimum wage since 1938, but the initial legislation, the Fair Labor Standards Act, contained no formula for setting the wage level; neither did it contain a mechanism for adjusting it in the future. Instead, the wage was increased only with an Act of Congress - something unlikely to happen without strong pressure from social movements or trade unions (US Department of Labor, 1988; Waltman, 2000). The wage was raised at various times in the first 30 years, but peaked in 1968, and was raised infrequently afterwards. By the early 1990s, the federal minimum wage had fallen far below the hourly wage a worker with a family needed to meet the federal poverty line (Bernstein and Schmitt, 2000). Advocates appeared unable to pressure Congress to raise wages at the national level.\nConclusion: The last few decades have seen a sharp increase in attention to minimum wage and living wages in many countries. As inequality continues to rise, and low-wage work expands even in the context of economic growth, policymakers and activists look for solutions. The US living wage movement attempted to challenge this burgeoning low-wage labor market growth in the 1990s. It had some success in passing local ordinances, but for the most part, these covered a very small fraction of workers and did little to slow the growth of low-wage jobs. The emergence of Occupy Wall Street, and then the \"Fight for $15\" movement, created an opportunity to raise wages to much higher levels and for many more workers. The National Employment Law Project estimates that in four years, from the first fast food strike in November 2012 to November 2016, over 19 million workers won raises via local and state increases, for a total of almost $62 billion (National Employment Law Project, 2016).\n",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to provide background on the US living wage movement, with particular attention to recent victories, and also the ways in which the US movement differs from living wage movements in other countries. It begins with some technical distinctions of terms, then analyzes the campaigns and movement for higher wages, and considers some of the challenges the campaigns have faced. It will conclude with some discussion about the future of the movement.\nDesign/methodology/approach: This is a general review of living wage campaigns in the USA. This is based on a review of existing literature and the author's own prior research and participant observation.\nFindings: The author argues that the initial living wage movement that began in the early 1990s was limited in scope but successful in building coalitions and political power to launch a much more expansive movement to raise wages in 2012.\nOriginality/value: This paper is a general summary of the last 20 years of living wage campaigns. It does not include new research.\n",
"role": "assistant"
}
] |
Psychographic characteristics affecting behavioral intentions towards pop-up retail
|
[
"Retail marketing",
"Consumer behaviour",
"Innovation",
"Shopping"
] |
[
{
"content": "Summarize the following paper into structured abstract.\n\nIntroduction: Authors (Florida, 2002; Pine and Gilmore, 1999; Postrel, 2003; Richards, 2001) agree that a growing number of consumers are looking for more than quality products at a low price. Consumers increasingly desire products that express their unique, personal identity. Moreover, consumer crave innovative, engaging experiences in all aspects of their lives including recreational sports (Florida, 2002), restaurant environments (Gilmore and Pine, 2002; Postrel, 2003), tourism venues (Richards, 2001), shopping environments (Sit et al., 2003; Snell, 2006), and marketing campaigns (IXMA International Experiential Marketing Association, 2004). According to a survey by experiential marketing leader, Jack Morton Worldwide (2006), retailers and marketing units/firms are allocating more resources towards experiential strategies, which entail amplifying a brand's essence \"into a set of tangible, physical, interactive experiences\" (McNickel, 2004, p. 1) that allow audiences to interact with a brand face-to-face. These interactive efforts, including a new strategy called \"pop-up retail,\" may foster sensation-rich and unique experiences that appeal to the growing desire for innovativeness and open-mindedness towards diverse, unique experiences, measured by consumer innovativeness (Engelland et al., 2001; Midgely and Dowling, 1978; Steenkamp et al., 1999).Pop-up retail should not be confused with unwelcomed online pop-up advertisements. Pop-up retail entails marketing environments that are highly experiential, focused on promoting a brand or product line, available for a short time period, and generally in smaller venues that foster more face-to-face dialogue with brand representatives, which is a top factor attracting people to the experience (Gordon, 2004). Firms large and small have embraced pop-up retail to provide an experiential environment desired by consumers, build brand image, and attract attention. According to a leading trend service, pop-up retail is found worldwide and has been used to market an array of products from Meow Mix cat food in Manhattan (Trendwatching.com, 2005) to Levi's jeans in Milan (Trendwatching.com, 2006). For instance, GAP transformed a 1960s school bus into a traveling pop-up store that appeared at local beaches, festivals, and other summer events in Los Angeles and New York (Maul, 2008). Such unique marketing environments offered by pop-up retail may appeal to consumers seeking diverse, innovative experiences.A distinguishing feature of pop-up retail is its temporary nature, intentionally springing up, and disappearing quickly. Pop-up stores are designed to be open a few days to a year and may not sell products at that location. For example, Target, the recognized retail leader in the use of pop-up retail, markets products ranging from new apparel product lines showcased for six weeks in New York's Rockefeller Center to outdoor furniture and accessories presented in a lifestyle setting for five weeks in an inn in the Hamptons, the Long Island community where many well-to-do New Yorkers have summer homes (Trendwatching.com, 2005). Likewise, fashion retailer, Mulberry, opened a pop-up store in the Hamptons and sold exclusive products during the Memorial Day weekend (Maul, 2008). The temporary nature of pop-up stores may appeal to consumers seeking diverse experiences.Pop-up retail offers an interactive environment where consumers may communicate with knowledgeable brand representatives to not only gather information but also share their perspectives. This experience may appeal to a growing number of consumers who see their role in the retail experience transforming; consumer and producer roles now intermingle (Fiore, 2007, 2008; Solomon, 2005). Accordingly, consumers contribute to the shaping of brand identity and the physical product through shared information during face-to-face interactions with brand representatives and proactive online communication with companies and other consumers (e.g. online product reviews, blogs, and consumer created product commercials). The present study examines the appeal of pop-up retail to these proactive consumers, who initiate discussions with other consumers and respond to requests for market information. This trait is captured in the present study by market mavenism (MM) (Feick and Price, 1987).As mentioned above, many aspects of life may offer innovative and engaging experiences for individuals with general tendencies towards innovativeness. These individuals may vary in particular outlets sought to provide such experiences. Some may find shopping experiences to be a major source of enjoyment, whereas others may find restaurant experiences or tourist venues to be more important outlets. Research on sensation- and arousal-seeking tendencies (Fiore et al., 2003, 2004; Steenkamp and Baumgartner;, 1992) supports variability among consumers in desired outlets for innovative, engaging experiences. To this end, we examine the appeal of pop-up retail to consumers who find shopping experiences to be a source of pleasure, measured by shopping enjoyment (Ellis, 1995).Whereas an increasing number of retailers and marketers are using pop-up retail (Trendwatching.com, 2005, 2006), we have found no research that explores how psychographic characteristics of consumers, such as consumer innovativeness, MM, and shopping enjoyment affect perceived appeal of pop-up retail, which may lead to effectiveness of this new experiential marketing strategy.Theoretical framework and research model\nLiterature review: Psychographic characteristics affecting acceptance of pop-up retail\nMethod: Sample and procedure\nResults: A total of 1,000 responses were obtained from the online survey, resulting in a 24.4 percent response rate. Using a listwise deletion technique, responses were omitted if they contained missing data for any variables included in the analysis and 869 were complete, usable questionnaires. The mean age of participants was 44 years, with a range of 18-81 years. About 87 percent of participants consisted of Caucasian Americans and 73 percent were female. Nearly, 63 percent of participants were married, whereas about 36 percent were single, divorced, widowed, or lived with significant others. Approximately, 34 percent of the participants earned between $25,000 and 49,999 and about 26 percent earned between $50,000 and 74,000 annually. About 22 percent of the participants held a bachelor's degree and about 30 percent answered that they have attended college, but do not have a degree.Preliminary analysis\nDiscussion and managerial implications: In this study, we examined associations between consumer psychographic characteristics, and beliefs, attitude, and behavioral intentions toward pop-up retail. Findings of this study suggest that pop-up retail may be an effective retail format for marketing to consumers who exhibit higher innovativeness tendencies and who consider shopping to be an enjoyable activity.The present study found that consumers exhibiting higher innovativeness and enjoyment from shopping were likely to appreciate the positive hedonic aspects of pop-up retail, including the excitement of the experience and the exposure to new, unique products. This finding supports past research; consumer innovativeness and shopping enjoyment are related to the desire for new and unique experiences as well as novelty seeking (Engelland et al., 2001; Steenkamp and Baumgartner, 1992; Venkatraman, 1991). Goldsmith et al. (2003) emphasized that highly innovative consumers should be the target of marketing efforts, as they have a quest for knowledge, are typically less price sensitive, and more likely to be heavy product users. This focus on consumers with innovativeness tendencies appears to be sound advice for experiential marketing efforts, such as pop-up retail.Whereas past research has found positive associations between MM and variables such as need for uniqueness (Clark and Goldsmith, 2005), desire for brand uniqueness (Williams and Slama, 1995), value and brand consciousness, and desire to communicate with sales associates (Engelland et al., 2001; Williams and Slama, 1995), MM did not significantly influence related beliefs about pop-up retail. Perhaps, the focus of market mavens on general knowledge and expertise with markets rather than knowledge and expertise with a particular product category (Feick and Price, 1987) makes for uncertainty in expectations regarding this new retail venue, which is keenly focused on one product or brand. In addition, these unexpected results may reflect market mavens' apprehension towards pop-up retail because they may feel that pop-up retail and its brand representatives are usurping their unique role as information provider.Consumers exhibiting higher innovativeness and shopping enjoyment showed a more positive attitude toward pop-up retail, considering it to be good, appealing, interesting, and pleasant. Since there is a positive relationship between a consumer's emotional experience and attitude (Wood and Moreau, 2006), marketers and retailers may be wise to ensure that pop-up retail emotionally engages the customer in a positive manner. The goal of pop-up retail should be to begin a long-term consumer relationship, resulting in growing emotional attachment to the firm's products, services, or brands.Whereas both hedonic and utilitarian beliefs were related to attitude toward pop-up retail, standardized path coefficients revealed that beliefs about hedonic aspects (novelty/uniqueness (0.56)) more than utilitarian aspects of pop-up retail (facilitators of purchase decisions (0.09)) seem to be the appeal for consumers. Thus, it is more important that pop-up retail offer consumers desired novelty/uniqueness of experience than facilitate purchase decisions. This intimates that pop-up should downplay or eliminate the selling aspect and focus on the relationship building aspect of the experience.This study revealed that beliefs affected attitude and attitude predicted patronage intention towards pop-up retail, supporting the theory of reasoned action (Fishbein and Ajzen, 1975). Attitude toward pop-up retail was positively associated with intentions to recommend, try, and buy products from pop-up retail. Thus, retailers and marketers should thoroughly understand the beliefs that affect attitude toward pop-up retail to help ensure patronage intentions.Lastly, literature (Florida, 2002; Midgely and Dowling, 1993; Goldsmith and Hofacker, 1991; Pine and Gilmore, 1999; Postrel, 2003) suggests growth in the number of consumers looking for innovative products and experiences and preferring active, engaging, and enjoyable shopping and life experiences. Therefore, pop-up retail may be an important strategy for marketers and retailers given the growing number of consumers looking for innovative and interactive experiences. To satisfy these consumers, pop-up retail must create an environment that:* is highly authentic and experiential;* focuses on promoting new product or brand attributes; and* enables more face-to-face dialogue with brand representatives, a top factor attracting people to the experience (Gordon, 2004).These observations support the need for not only knowledgeable brand representatives in pop-up retail, but also those who can assist in creating and delivering an authentic and distinctive customer experience.\nLimitations and future research: This research aids in the understanding of the effect of psychographic characteristics on desired features of and attitude towards a new experiential marketing tool, pop-up stores. This information is beneficial to professionals who are allocating increasing resources towards new experiential marketing strategies in response to a growing consumer segment focused on innovative and engaging experiences. However, caution in interpretation of the results is in order, because few respondents had first-hand experience with pop-up retail. The present study captured features of pop-up stores perceived to be important after reviewing a written description and examples of pop-up stores. This limits the study's generalizability to actual pop-up store shoppers. As the number of venues continues to grow, national sampling of consumers with actual pop-up retail experience may become feasible. Future research may examine the characteristics and responses of experienced pop-up store shoppers to determine the most effective features of an experiential marketing strategy.Nevertheless, consumer innovativeness appears to affect beliefs and attitudes towards pop-up retail. Further understanding of the relationship between consumer innovativeness and behaviors important to the success of pop-up retail is in order. For instance, does opinion leadership associated with consumer innovativeness (Collins, 2004) manifest as word-of-mouth advertising, which is central to pop-up retail? Does the need for novelty associated with consumer innovativeness lessen brand loyalty, a desired outcome of the customer relationship focus of pop-up retail?Consumer innovativeness appears to share common traits with a burgeoning demographic group, the creative class, coined by Florida (2002). The creative class prefers unique products that express their identity and prefers more active, innovative, participatory, and authentic consumer experiences that \"reflect and reinforce their identities as creative people\" (Florida, 2002, p. 166). Future research could examine if cities identified by Florida as more attractive to the creative class make for better pop-up retail locations, in terms of number of shoppers, and word-of-mouth and purchase intention behaviors.Future research on consumer innovativeness and shopping enjoyment may compare the appeal and effectiveness of various experiential marketing venues, such as pop-up retail versus co-branded concerts (e.g. Wal-Mart and Hannah Montana concerts). This line of research may tap specific features of the venue attractive to different consumer groups, including brand representative training needed to deliver the most effective experiential offerings.The high correlation (0.87) between consumer innovativeness and MM resulted in a spurious effect (i.e. reversed signs) in the structural model. Goldsmith et al. (2003) found that both consumer innovativeness and MM are important to retail success of new products and services and that these traits help distinguish consumers with greater purchasing potential. Future research should investigate whether distinguishing characteristics between consumer innovativeness and MM exist and their effect on the success of experiential marketing strategies.\n",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Purpose: - The purpose of this paper is to explore relationships between consumer innovativeness, market mavenism, shopping enjoyment, and beliefs, attitude, and patronage intentions toward pop-up retail.\nDesign/methodology/approach: - A survey technique using a national sample of consumers resulted in 869 usable responses. Structural equation modeling is used to test the hypothesized relationships among variables.\nFindings: - Findings show that consumer innovativeness and shopping enjoyment influence beliefs about the importance of hedonic elements of pop-up retail (novelty/uniqueness factor) and attitude toward pop-up retail, which affects patronage intentions.\nPractical implications: - Findings provide support for the effectiveness of pop-up retail, an experiential marketing strategy, at enhancing the appeal of a retail venue to consumers exhibiting higher tendencies in innovativeness and shopping.\nOriginality/value: - This paper provides an investigation of consumer psychographic characteristics and their effect on attitude and behavioral intentions towards a new experiential marketing format, pop-up retail. This paper demonstrates empirically how consumer innovativeness and shopping enjoyment, noted as growing tendencies among consumers, affect beliefs, attitude, and behavioral intentions towards pop-up retail.\n",
"role": "assistant"
}
] |
The youth market for internet banking services: perceptions, attitude and behaviour
|
[
"Virtual banking",
"United Kingdom",
"Customer satisfaction",
"Customer services quality",
"Market segmentation",
"Young adults"
] |
[
{
"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: It has been over a decade since the mass internet revolution, transforming mundane house-hold chores into point-and-click activities: internet banking services (IBS) was one of them. However, many customers are still not using IBS (Gerrard et al., 2006). For those who do, they are not necessarily fully satisfied with the quality or experience of use (Walker and Johnson, 2005), and there is a whole host of reasons for use relating to demographic and self-awareness concerns as capacity to engage, perceived risks, and potential advantages of use (Walker and Johnson, 2006). For the banking industry, the internet provides excellent opportunity for attracting a specific segment of customers, particularly the young, who hold the greatest prospect for loan and mortgage borrowing in the future (Lewis and Bingham, 1991). This paper focuses on the youth market (we regard this as the age-group 16-29) with a good educational background. The success of a financial service hinges on identifying the right segments and then targeting its marketing programs to reach the selected segments (McKechnie, 1992). The importance of segmentation in the financial institution sector has been well documented (e.g. Gwin and Lindgren, 1982; Speed and Smith, 1992), but it is still not fully understood why some segments are not attracted by it (Polatoglu and Ekin, 2001; Rotchanakitumnuai and Speece, 2003; Sathye, 1999).This paper explores specifically young customers' beliefs, attitude and behaviour towards the adoption of IBS. We start by establishing some research hypotheses, based on extant literature, in the areas of services and banking marketing and service quality. With this research framework, we draw findings from data collected from a questionnaire aimed at an institution where the respondent group is most likely to fall within a sample group of being young, educated, and have close vicinity to internet services - a university.\nSegmenting banking customers: Demography is a popular basis for segmentation, and is easier to recognise and measure than most other variables (Meidan, 1996), particularly the age of the consumer (Stanley et al., 1985). Financial institutions have responded to age segments with the development of a number of different products and services (Lewis, 1981; Lewis and Bingham, 1991). Lewis et al. (1994) suggest that young people have been characterised as emphasising the importance of material possessions, being more concerned with consumption than saving, and seeing money as vital for personal success. This inevitably leads to a variety of credit behaviours and borrowing requirements. With the increasing use of new technologies in marketing, traditional methods of segmentation are not adequate and efficient predictors of future buyer behaviour (McDougall and Levesque, 1994). Benefit segmentation is proposed as a more effective method, which partitions customers according to the benefits they seek when purchasing a product or service (Minhas and Jacobs, 1996). For banking services, four core customer segments exist: the branch segment, the telephone segment, the PC segment and the internet segment (Mols et al., 1999). With the widespread use and adoption of the internet, it is suggested the future retail banking structure will consist of a few banks and many banks will rely on the internet as their main distribution channel (Jayawardhena and Foley, 2000).Alfans and Sargeant (2000) find that it is possible to relate perceived product/service benefits to one or more general observable characteristics such as gender, age, and income, etc. McDougall and Levesque (1994) confirm this finding proportionally younger customers belonging to the convenience segment, such as the PC/internet segment (Katz and Aspden, 1997) and internet and e-commerce users, are predominantly young (cf. Crisp et al., 1997). In relation to internet banking in the youth market, we hypothesise that:H1a,b. There is a negative association between age and attitude/intention towards using internet banking services (IBS).\nAttitude and behaviour: Being able to predict customers' future behaviour is a critical aspect of developing successful marketing strategies. It is therefore important for a marketer to understand and influence consumers' behaviour. We focus on the theory of reasoned action (TRA) and the technology acceptance model (TAM) to postulate an internet banking adoption research framework to guide the study.Theory of reasoned action (TRA)\nService quality, customer satisfaction and customer loyalty: E-commerce changes the relationships between sellers and buyers dramatically. One of the business sectors most heavily affected is banking (Methlie and Nysveen, 1999), and as the web becomes more mainstream and increasingly larger proportions of the population become web users, the more complex the challenge of establishing and maintaining customer loyalty becomes (Windham, 2000).The relationship between service quality and customer satisfaction\nMethodology: Sample and data collection\nFindings and data analysis: Dataset A: segmentation\nDiscussion and managerial implications: The significance of segmentation\nConclusions: We conclude that there is a significant difference in the perceptions, attitude and behaviour of young customers (aged 16-29) towards IBS than any other age group in the study. We therefore argue that there is value in focussing marketing effort on this segment of the financial services industry, particularly as they provide the greatest promise of future profitability. As we find that customers are more likely to be retained once they use IBS, so similarly marketing effort should also be asserted to retain existing customers as well as attract new ones. The research has confirmed prior expectations about service quality and loyalty, and we continue to advocate such a need for the continued development of IBS website quality for the long-term benefits of the bank and retention of young customers.We are aware of the obvious limitation of the study of having only a sample of 164 respondents, of which only 84 were relevant to research framework 1, and of which only 41 for research framework 2, and that data collection took place only within one location over one period of time. Nevertheless, the study still provides valuable insights on young customers of the IBS context. We suggest further research in the segment of experienced IBS users, possibly in the form of a longitudinal qualitative approach (e.g. Chau and Witcher, 2005) that can track the changing views of customers as IBS strategies are modified over time. This is likely to enhance our understanding of customer retention strategies.\n",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Purpose: - This paper aims to investigate the perceptions, attitudes and behaviour of the youth market for internet banking services (IBS).\nDesign/methodology/approach: - A survey was carried out to acquire data from 164 respondents. The respondents were competent computer users and studying for a degree at a university. Three additional in-depth interviews were subsequently carried out on interesting cases.\nFindings: - The authors find that young people (age 16-29) have more positive attitudes and behavioural intentions towards using IBS than other user-groups. It has also confirmed that there is a positive impact of IBS quality on satisfaction and loyalty.\nResearch limitations/implications: - The study focused on an isolated convenience sample of university students in the UK. The findings might not therefore have worldwide significance despite a large proportion of the students were international and from a good representation of minority ethic groups.\nOriginality/value: - The research focused on a specific segment of the internet banking services market - younger students at a UK university. The findings are useful for bank services marketing as the young are likely to become the most important segment of users as the worldwide web and banking services become more advanced in the future.\n",
"role": "assistant"
}
] |
Nursing experiences of clinical governance implementation: a qualitative study
|
[
"Nurse",
"Clinical governance",
"Healthcare",
"Safety",
"Quality",
"Qualitative research",
"Experience",
"Professional performance"
] |
[
{
"content": "Summarize the following paper into structured abstract.\n\nIntroduction: The ever-increasing public concern over quality and safety in health services was the key motive to develop clinical governance (CG) (Roland et al., 2001; Wright et al., 1999; Wilson, 1998). The concept of CG was introduced by the White Paper \"The New NHS: modern, dependable\", to provide a focus for raising the quality of care (National Health Service Executive, 1999). CG is defined as: \"[...] a framework through which NHS organizations are accountable for continuously improving the quality of their services and safeguarding high standards of care by creating an environment in which excellence in clinical care will flourish\" (Department of Health, 1998). It shells out attention equally upon accountability for current services and improving future care (Allen, 2000). The concept seeks to combine and encode managerial and professional approaches to measuring and improving quality of care (Pietroni, 2001; Scally and Donaldson, 1998; Buetlow and Roland, 1999; Smith and Harris, 1999; Baker et al., 1999; Sheaff, 2001). A wide range of concepts and activities, to ensure safe and effective healthcare, are under the term \"clinical governance\" (Nicholls et al., 2000). CG framework had been implemented in several developed countries and it had a positive effect on health services quality. Furthermore, recently, quality improvement initiatives were employed by developing countries (Sadeghi-Bazargani et al., 2014). Since the last decade, some efforts were done to improve health services quality in Iran (such as TQM, FOCUS PDCA and EFQM), but most often of them had been implemented incompletely (Manouchehri Moghadam et al., 2010; Mosadegh Rad, 2005).CG implementation became a statutory requirement in Iran's hospitals from November 2009, with particular reference to guarantying quality by healthcare providers (Sadeghi-Bazargani et al., 2014). To be successful, CG needs effective leadership by clinical staffs that have responsibility for improving quality. It must engage the physicians and nurses who provide care on a daily basis; and get enough commitment and support from hospitals managers (Campbell et al., 2001).\nMethod: Sampling and data collection\nImproved safety: Creating a good atmosphere to report and share medical errors led to reduced medical errors. Using high-risk medications with the approval by two nurses was a great achievement. Also hand hygiene deploying in hospitals was salient.\nDiscussion: Nurses had a variety of responses to CG. Poor commitment and contribution of managers and physicians was discussed vs a compulsive climate for nurses to CG implementation. However, it was cleared that chief managers' cooperation, in some hospitals, was caused mostly by attracting funding for the hospital. As a definition of CG, it is a system by which the governing body, managers and clinicians share their responsibility of quality improving and are held accountable for patient care, minimizing risks to customers and for monitoring and improving the quality of clinical care, continuously (Maureen, 2005). Encouraging staff to take on the responsibility for the provision of safe and high-quality care, in their daily activities, requires embracing CG leadership role at all levels of the management (Balding, 2005). Physicians' resistance toward quality improvement efforts is common across all countries. However, if the health systems create a culture of learning from mistakes stead of blame, clear the quality measures and provide good structure and adequate resources, physicians could take role in CG (Shekelle, 2002). Previous studies had reported that, in some cases, CG was not as a priority for physicians. They belief that, CG was something that physicians get involved in if they had the time (Currie and loftus-Hills, 2002). Achieving effective CG seeks a collaborative effort between physicians, nurses, CEOs, executive and middle managers (Plochg and Klazinga, 2005). Hospitals have to do more to ensure that all the staffs understand and accept their responsibility for CG and it must be embedded into every-day activities (Currie and loftus-Hills, 2002; Balding, 2005).\n",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Purpose: Clinical governance (CG) was used as a driver to improve safety and quality of healthcare. CG implementing is a change in health system and all the stakeholders must be participating. The purpose of this paper is to study nurses' experience about CG movement in Tabriz hospitals.\nDesign/methodology/approach: A qualitative study using Focus Group Discussions (FGD) was done. Purposeful Sampling was used to select the objectives including 65 participants. Actually seven FGD's were held. Content analysis was used to extract the meaningful themes.\nFindings: It is revealed that nurses are the focal point in CG implementation in hospitals. Low commitment of managers and lack of physicians' contribution was experienced by nurses. However, personnel education and development and patient safety have got more attention. Blame culture and increased work stress was reported as challenges.\nOriginality/value: CG as a change in healthcare system, especially in low- and middle-income countries, is faced by several challenges and its implementation would have different experiences. Nursing staff, the major group in hospitals, would be having interesting experiences through CG. Their practical opinions could guide the policy makers to employ proper plans to effectively implement CG. Considering the result of this study in practice would lead to improve CG implementation.\n",
"role": "assistant"
}
] |
Transport for London travels the extra mile to strengthen the mental resilience of its workforce: Absence drops significantly following award-winning e-learning
|
[
"United Kingdom",
"Employees behaviour",
"Occupational health and safety",
"Mental health",
"Public transport",
"Computer‐based learning",
"Awards",
"Value analysis"
] |
[
{
"content": "Summarize the following paper into structured abstract.\n\n__NO_TITLE__: An award-winning course on mental resilience, developed for Transport for London, delivered a PS7.8 million return on investment by reducing paid absences. It also tackled taboos around stress, depression and anxiety and helped to change the organization's culture for the better.\nVerbal and physical abuse of Transport for London employees: Transport for London (TfL) is responsible for the planning, delivery and day-to-day operation of London's public-transport system. It manages London's buses, London Underground, the Docklands Light Railway as well as London Overground and London Tramlink.Every day, around 24 million journeys are made on the TfL network. In 2012, TfL became a key actor in the London Olympic Games. Every spectator was encouraged to use public transport, cycle or walk to the games. On the busiest days, more than 4.5 million journeys were made on the Underground.Over the past five years, TfL has seen a downward trend in the number of employees assaulted. Nevertheless, around 1,500 London Underground staff were verbally or physically abused at work last year.To cope with this, TfL has a far-reaching occupational-health program. It includes training on stress awareness, a workplace-violence reduction plan and an in-house counseling and trauma service.In April 2003, the occupational-health department employed a consultant - Emerald Turner, of EJT Associates - to work one day a week to help TfL to identify what else occupational health could be doing to contribute to the overall success of TfL and run classroom workshops to help staff to build their mental resilience.The workshops were very successful. Room-size constraints, however, meant that TfL was not able to reach more than 12 staff members in each session. There was also concern that individuals would be put off by the fact that they would need to refer themselves to the workshop and request their manager's permission to attend. Moreover, some people do not wish to discuss their mental well-being in a classroom with colleagues.Alison Dunn, London Underground's head of trauma, commissioned a project to develop an online solution that mirrored the success of the classroom workshops. In her view, people are intrinsically psychologically healthy; problems occur when the demands placed on an individual are not matched by their psychological resilience at the time. She needed a solution that would help staff to develop mental-resilience skills and techniques to cope with the difficulties that everyone faces from time to time.Following a tender process, TfL selected Saffron to create a 45-minute non-mandatory e-learning course to replace the existing classroom workshops on mental-resilience skills.\nEncouraging honest reflections and reducing biased responses: The course is based on a booklet designed by EJT Associates and TfL's occupational-health team, which contained resilience theory and a questionnaire. Saffron's team decided to turn this structure on its head and move the self-assessment diagnostic to the beginning of the course. This reduces bias by ensuring learners begin the course with as few preconceptions as possible about what counts as resilient behavior. It is also made clear to learners that their scores are not monitored so that people feel comfortable responding honestly.The diagnostic is a highly interactive version of the existing, paper-based resilience questionnaire in which learners indicate how much they agree or disagree with 24 statements.Learners then receive a score for each of the six areas of mental resilience. They can print the questionnaire results and can gain access to their score from a toolbar at the bottom of the screen at any time during the course.The output is a resilience matrix, which Saffron based on TfL's original graphics and redesigned to include representative and memorable cartoon icons. TfL is now using Saffron's version of the graphic in all of its resilience literature.\nA fresh design aimed at changing attitudes: Stress-management training is often illustrated with photographs of people in suits frowning at their desks. This is not usually very helpful. Instead of the normal imagery, Saffron used light-hearted comic-strip designs to challenge stereotypical attitudes towards mental health.Realistic and relevant scenarios, combined with an action-orientated learning strategy, make the learning more likely to be applied immediately and effectively. The diagnostic is used to target \"true-story scenarios\" at learners, based on the analysis of their need. For example, those who score poorly in the sector concerned with choosing positive life habits are directed to stories and resources to help them to develop habits that are healthier and likely to promote well-being. The stories are then told in the first person, with actors narrating the different characters. Following the learning activities, learners can add tips and selections to a printable \"resilience basket\".\nPerformance improvement and lasting impact: One year after launch, around 1,000 people have taken the course. Saffron surveyed 60 end-users. The results indicate that:* 76 percent of learners applied the suggestions and techniques recommended for building resilience;* 85 percent found the scenarios realistic or could personally relate to scenarios used;* more than 80 percent enjoyed taking the course and felt that it was a valuable investment of their time; and* 70 percent of staff implemented the items that they put in their resilience basket.People are not just using the techniques once or twice and then forgetting about them.The course also achieved cost savings. A key aim for any mental-resilience program is to reduce paid absence - unplanned sick leave - which is often caused by mental difficulties. The mental-resilience training produced some significant business gains by addressing this area. Of the 70 percent who said that they have implemented items from their resilience basket, more than 60 percent are still implementing some of the techniques one year on. More than half of people agree or strongly agree that the course has made them feel better able to deal with the challenges they face while working for TfL.Since the launch of the course more than 12 months ago, there has been an average reduction in sickness absence of one day per worker, per year. Each day's paid absence costs TfL PS290 in wages and overheads. The result is a saving of PS7.83 million a year across a workforce of 27,000. As more TfL employees take the course and apply its lessons to their behavior, this saving is likely to rise to upwards of PS20 million a year.One employee commented: \"The course was worth doing because it enables you to see light at the end of the tunnel.\"Another said: \"I will return to the course regularly to improve my professional resilience.\"TfL uses a metaphor to explain stress: \"You can't stop the waves but you can learn to surf.\" TfL employees are learning to surf by building their resilience to the stresses of life so that when the next big wave comes, they are less likely to go under.\nNote: David Pollitt, Human Resource Management International Digest editor, wrote this article.\n",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Purpose: - The purpose of this paper is to describe an award-winning course on mental resilience, developed by digital-learning and communication specialist Saffron Interactive, for Transport for London.\nDesign/methodology/approach: - Explains the reasons for the training, the form it takes and the results it has achieved.\nFindings: - Reveals that the course has delivered a PS7.8 million return on investment by reducing paid absences by an average of one day per worker per year.\nPractical implications: - Demonstrates that: 76 percent of learners applied the suggestions and techniques recommended in the course for building resilience; 85 percent found the scenarios used in the course to be realistic or could personally relate to scenarios used; more than 80 percent enjoyed taking the course and felt that it was a valuable investment of their time; and 70 percent of staff implemented the items that they put in their \"resilience basket\".\nSocial implications: - Comments that the course tackled taboos around stress, depression and anxiety and helped to change TfL's culture for the better.\nOriginality/value: - Gives the inside story of a highly successful course designed to strengthen mental resilience among TfL's 27,000 employees.\n",
"role": "assistant"
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] |
All together now: strategy mapping for family businesses
|
[
"Alignment",
"Strategy maps",
"Strategy",
"Implementation",
"Family businesses",
"Familiness"
] |
[
{
"content": "Summarize the following paper into structured abstract.\n\nIntroduction: Across the globe, family businesses contribute, on average, 80 per cent of GNP while also employing the majority of the work forces in almost all nations (Family Firm Institute). The ubiquity of the family enterprise is reflected in the US market as well, where 95 per cent of businesses are owned or managed, or both, by a family. Even among publicly traded companies, family businesses, large and small, make up 30 per cent of the S\nIn vino veritas: If there is one company that can be credited with placing American wines on the world map, it is surely Mondavi Winery. Born in the 1960s from feuding brothers, the Mondavi Winery was older brother Robert's embodiment of New World wines to rival Europe's finest vintages. Early on, Robert introduced modern technologies to traditional wine-making techniques, with the resulting product quickly building a name not just for the vineyard but for Napa Valley as a region as well. By the late 1970s, Mondavi's reputation for innovation and excellence drew the attention of one of France's most prominent and established producers, Chateau Mouton Rothschild, whose ensuing joint venture resulted in Opus One, a limited-production winery occupying the high-end price category. In 1993, as the Mondavi Winery prepared to go public, its brand was synonymous with the best that California wines had to offer. Indeed, for Robert Mondavi and his two sons, Michael and Tim, the sky was the limit.\nThe FESM: Since its introduction over a decade ago by Robert Kaplan and Norton (2004), the strategy map has found widespread application across companies large and small. Much of its managerial appeal is derived from its format: a one-page visual representation detailing the strategic architecture needed to realize an organization's strategic intent. While at first glance, the activity of strategy mapping may seem simple, it is far from simplistic: both at the individual and team level, participants are prompted to systematically tease out four distinct perspectives. The four perspectives are: financial, customer, internal process and learning and growth perspectives. Aside from drawing management's attention to the content underlying each perspective, as well as how the perspectives reinforce one another, the strategy map also helps to communicate the organization's strategic priorities throughout its ranks. Kaplan and Norton maintain that the odds of successfully implementing a strategy increase considerably, the tighter the alignment between those four perspectives.\nConclusion: According to a study from consulting firm Accenture, the next few decades will witness a generational wealth transfer of over US$30 billion, with a significant amount of this wealth tied to family businesses. To avoid Mondavi's fate and instead secure their legacies to future generations, family enterprises can turn to the FESM as a starting point. While we will never know if the Mondavis could have avoided losing their family business, a systematic evaluation using the FESM framework may have provided the family indispensable insights on how to retain control and ensure its legacy across many more generations. For one, the incompatibility of Michael's desire to grow the business into a high-volume, low-margin juggernaut with Tim's intent to migrate up-market into lower volume, higher margin territory would have become readily apparent. Likewise, an assessment of their professional and personal wants and needs may have shown two very different aspirations for these co-CEOs: Michael's desire to lead the company and Tim's as craftsman behind the label. Underlying these aspirations were also diverging risk appetites, with Michael pushing to take the company public and Tim resisting, fearful that resulting growth expectations would erode the quality of the wine. The misalignments in the family business objectives and family alignment perspectives reflected also in family systems, where the absence of clearly defined roles and decision-making domains coupled with deficiencies in leadership training and communication skills hastened the company's internal breakdown. From the perspective of the family business foundation, Robert Mondavi built an empire by taking on Old World wineries and pioneering new techniques, engaging grassroots marketing campaigns and creating a dynamic, competitive yet cooperative wine-producing region in Napa Valley. By revisiting Mondavi's roots, leveraging its unique resources and capabilities and drawing on its extensive social capital and goodwill, management may have had much more clarity about the company's strategic opportunities and its limitations.\n",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Purpose: This paper aims to introduce a supplementary strategic mapping tool designed specifically for family businesses. The authors extend the popular tool of strategy maps into the family business arena to address potential misalignments arising from the family imprint on a business. The resulting family enterprise strategy map (FESM) aims, both literally and figuratively, to get internal stakeholders on the same page in their pursuit of family business objectives. Using the FESM, family managers can enhance strategy design and implementation, thereby increasing the viability and longevity of their enterprises for future generations.\nDesign/methodology/approach: The framework draws from previous work on strategic maps, from scholarly research on family businesses and from the authors' experiences consulting with family enterprises. The framework addresses four distinct but interrelated perspectives requiring managerial attention: family business objectives, family alignment, family systems and family business foundation. The case of Mondavi Winery is used to illustrate the prescriptive value of the FESM.\nFindings: The FESM is meant to be used cooperatively among internal stakeholders to tease out potential challenges that can hinder the effective design and implementation of a family business strategy. The FESM makes explicit the primary objectives of the family business, prompts stakeholders to voice professional and personal ambitions in the business and brings individual risk propensities to the dialogue. Systems and activities necessary for successful strategy implementation are also underlined in the FESM. Lastly, the framework helps to identify the strategic foundation that can be leveraged to achieve the family enterprise's objective.\nOriginality/value: The value of the FESM is threefold. First, having family members and non-family managers engage in this activity can make known individual, family and non-family functions, desires and goals. In doing so, the FESM also effectively highlights misalignments among and between various internal stakeholders that may otherwise go unnoticed. Second, the FESM draws management's attention to specific family-related resources and capabilities within the company and, just as importantly, those that need to be cultivated to achieve strategic objectives. Third, the FESM can serve as a valuable reminder during those times when family systems begin to malfunction or to diverge from intended objectives.\n",
"role": "assistant"
}
] |
A methodology for the assessment of experiential learning lean: The Lean Experience Factory case study
|
[
"Case studies",
"Lean production",
"Assessments",
"Learning",
"Adult education",
"Experiential learning"
] |
[
{
"content": "Summarize the following paper into structured abstract.\n\nIntroduction: The purpose of this paper is to present a framework to assess the experiential learning processes of learning lean in an innovative learning environment: the lean model factories. The framework could be used to design training courses or to assess existing experiential learning courses. The question guiding this research is: How is it possible to assess an experiential learning process?\nTheoretical background: Learning can be defined as \"the process whereby knowledge is created through the transformation of experience. Knowledge results from the combination of grasping and transforming experience\" (Kolb, 1984). In other words, learning comes through experience.\nMethodology: The present work is meant to help widen the knowledge basis on experiential learning and lean management and propose a methodology for evaluation based on experiential learning literature. It aims to understand how to evaluate lean management education done with experiential learning processes. This paper attempts to answer to the following research questions:\nA proposal of a methodology for evaluating lean experiential learning: The methodology (Figure 1) grounds on learning literature and lean management literature, in particular a learning model labeled eight-phase learning path and on the lean management model. We propose to assess both process and content, and to assess them contemporaneously. The methodology is based on two main phases:\nThe test of the methodology: LEF case study: The methodology has been tested to the formative modules supplied by the LEF of Pordenone (Italy). At LEF, a lean transformation is simulated through a productive process reconfiguration, passing from a departmental configuration (as-is state) to an optimized cellular layout (to-be state). LEF delivers different catalogued courses spanning from 1 to 22 days, content-focused courses from 1 to 3 days and courses on contract.\nDiscussion: The proposed methodology permits to verify the appropriateness of the learning processes of LEF according to the models derived from the literature. The test highlights that the methodology is feasible from an operative point of view because of its simplicity and effectiveness. The analysis confirms how LEF's learning processes follow the path and how LEF was able to assess and revise \"learning process lacks\", according to the assessment results.\nConclusions: The present study allowed for building a solid theoretical ground for the learning and training processes that occur in the model factories. A methodology for assessing learning lean by means of experience has been developed from the literature analysis. It will allow trainers to oversee each step of the \"learning tour\" with more focus.\n",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to present a methodology to assess the experiential learning processes of learning lean in an innovative learning environment: the lean model factories.\nDesign/methodology/approach: A literature review on learning and lean management literatures was carried out to design the methodology. Then, a case study methodology was used to test the framework.\nFindings: The methodology permitted to asses learning processes and course contents of educational dynamics carried out in model factories and to theoretically ground such learning processes. The test showed that learning lean management is supported through a complete coverage of the eight phases of the learning path.\nResearch limitations/implications: The methodology contributes to the literatures of lean management and experiential learning, proposing a methodology of assessment. Part of the framework could also be applied to other disciplines.\nPractical implications: The methodology could be used for two purposes: to design training courses or to assess existing experiential learning courses.\nOriginality/value: Due to its intrinsic complexity, learning literature presents few practical framework or tools. Among them, none have provided practical and theoretical-based advice on how to use experiential learning precepts to teach lean management.\n",
"role": "assistant"
}
] |
Investigating suicide as a career response
|
[
"Careers",
"Suicide",
"Work",
"Life-stage",
"Purposive self-determination",
"Withdrawal",
"Career failure"
] |
[
{
"content": "Summarize the following paper into structured abstract.\n\nIntroduction: While the study and diagnosis of risk factors associated with mental illness and suicide have increased significantly over the last hundred years since Durkheim's (1897/1963) seminal work on suicide, little progress has been made on reducing suicide over this period. Globally, suicide is the cause of death for 1 million people annually, accounting for 11 deaths per 100,000 people in the US, 11.4 in Canada (including 14.8 in the province of Quebec), and 24.4 in Japan (St-Laurent and Gagne, 2008; World Health Organization, 2011). Suicide rates globally have increased 60 percent over the last 45 years (World Health Organization, 2011), with rates remaining relatively stable in the US and Europe, declining in some Asian countries (e.g. Japan) and increasing in others (e.g. China) (Kessler et al., 2005; Levi et al., 2003). Additionally, while women are more likely than men to attempt suicide, men are four times more likely to die by suicide (Moscicki, 1999).\nTheoretical development - purposive self-determination: While the medical and psychology literature has focused on the relationship between genetic make-up and mental illness as influences of suicide, \"few theoretical models have been offered to help understand self-injury in the manner that other manifestations of psychopathology have been examined\" (Mitchell, 2008, p. 2). The two noted exceptions are; the theory of suicide as an escape from self (Baumeister, 1990) and the interpersonal theory of suicide (Joiner, 2005). The theory of suicide as an escape from self (Baumeister, 1990) suggests suicide as a response to an unbearable awareness of perceived deficiencies of self. In essence, this theory suggests that suicide is a response to self-loathing. Alternately, the interpersonal theory of suicide (Joiner, 2005) suggests that thwarted belongingness, perceived burdensomeness and the acquired capability to suicide interact to enable suicide. In essence the interpersonal theory of suicide suggests that because people have a fundamental need to belong (Baumeister and Leary, 1995), when one feels that he/she is a burden to others and develops the physical and psychological capability to take their own life, these provide the necessary conditions for ending one's life.\nCareer success or failure: The present study, by considering work influences as an impediment to not only career but also life success builds on the extant research considering career success or failure (Baruch and Bozionelos, 2010; Heslin, 2005a, b; Sullivan and Baruch, 2009). The works of Hall and Chandler (2005), Heslin (2005a, b) and others have developed theory suggesting that the determination of career success may be based on a variety of objective and subjective factors. Objective career success has been suggested to be a function of wage and promotion success (Blau et al., 2013). Subjective career success may be a function of whether a worker is satisfied with their career and/or whether it aligns with their perception of success. This subjective appraisal may be in relation to one's own standards or to the success of referent others. For example, one may be satisfied if one's career lives up to one's expectations (self) or is positive relative to the career experience of one's friends and family (other) (Slay and Smith, 2011). Career success, then, may be a subjective evaluation of career outcomes and trajectories relative to personal and socially-constructed idealization of career interest and potential. However, while the extant careers literature has considered career success and what contributes to career success, our understanding of career failure and its consequences has received less research focus.\nMethod: Grounded theory is an inductive qualitative research aimed at developing theory grounded in the phenomenon in question (Buse et al., 2013; O'Neil and Bilimoria, 2005). Grounded theory is informed by extant research in the area of investigation which helps inform the research question. Sample selection is determined based on theoretical sampling, with participants identified specifically for their potential to provide detailed insights into the research phenomenon. This study's deliberate selection of close friends or family members of suicide victims as informers to recount the life stories of those who died by suicide is intended to obtain the most accurate understanding of antecedent life situations influencing suicide. This approach differs from other qualitative studies which have focused not on suicide deaths, but rather suicidal thoughts or failed suicide attempts. While other qualitative studies have interviewed people with suicidal ideation or who have subsequently committed suicide (for review, see Lakeman and FitzGerald, 2008), these studies have not captured the antecedent factors influencing those who die by suicide, since most people who think of or attempt suicide do not die by suicide (Levi et al., 2003; Spirito and Esposito-Smyther, 2006). As such, third-person accounts from witnesses of those who died by suicide is expected to provide a more accurate account of the work and career influences of death by suicide than alternate samples such as interviewing those who survived a suicide attempt.\nResults: The key findings from this research contribute to our understanding of suicide within the context of work emphasizing the importance of career and work in people's lives (Dutton et al., 2010) and how threats to work and career impact well-being (Paul and Moser, 2009). This work makes a contribution to the extant literature by identifying the different influences of work and career on suicide at three different life stages; those preparing for or early in their careers (n=7), those in mid-career (n=7), and those at the end of their careers (n=2).\nDiscussion: The findings from this study have important implications for the conceptualizing of the subjective interpretation of career success (Heslin, 2005a, b). While the works of Heslin and others have developed theory suggesting that the determination of career success is a subjective evaluation of career outcomes and trajectories relative to personal and socially-constructed idealization of career interest and potential (Dries, 2011; Slay and Smith, 2011), the findings of this study lend potential to the consideration of career failure too as a subjective phenomenon. Idealized work identity has been suggested to be influenced by both self and other-referent comparisons (Heslin, 2005a, b), through the subjective interpretation of social norms as it applies to career and work (Krumboltz, 1994), the subjective interpretation of the work characteristics associated with different career trajectories (Gattiker and Larwood, 1988), and personal interests and aspirations (Gattiker and Larwood, 1988). While the subjects of this study had work and career experiences which were misaligned with their subjective conceptualization of career success, most people faced with similar experiences do not die by suicide. Such would suggest that career failure, like career success is also a subjective experience, and so too is the reaction to this experience. Alternately, this may suggest that coping (Mazzola et al., 2011; Pearlin and Schooler, 1978) may provide insights into mediating influences on subjective career success. Coping has conceptualized as a critical process which supports perseverance through periods of identity/career misalignment. While this study may not directly point to career failure as a subjective experience or how the manner in which people cope with identity/career misalignment may act as an important moderating mechanism, it suggests that these areas provide interesting opportunities for further theory development and research.\nConclusion: The life situations of persons who take their own lives is a complex phenomenon, with a variety of factors at play including self-esteem, love and marital loss, mental illness and depression, drug and alcohol abuse, tragic life situations, and many others (Cavanagh et al., 2003; Laliberte and Tousignant, 2009; McAndrew and Warne, 2010; Takada et al., 2009). However, in 16 of 21 third-person accounts of persons who died by suicide work and career influences figured prominently. Through the use of a grounded theory methodology, theory emerged suggesting that work and career influences on suicide differ based on life-stage. We did see, however, that purposive self-determination, comprised of sense of work/career purpose, sense of work/career autonomy, sense of work/career competence, and the influence of work/career on social relationships, provided a framework for understanding the complex influence of work and career on a person's decision to take their own life. It is hoped that this work provides a building-block for future research and theory development, with the goal of assisting in the reduction of suicide.\n",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Purpose: To empirically consider work and career as potential influences of suicide.\nDesign/methodology/approach: In this qualitative study we conducted in-depth semi-structured interviews with 16 individuals who were survivors (i.e. family members or intimates) of individuals who had committed suicide. Data was analyzed using a grounded theory methodology.\nFindings: This exploratory study used purposive self-determination as the theoretical framework for analyzing their life histories. Factors of purposive self-determination, including lack of purpose, feeling controlled, experiencing failure, and social exclusion all figured prominently but differentially according to life-stage. Distinct work and career themes for early-career, mid-career and late-career suicides emerged. Early-career suicides were attributed to educational or work-related contexts, leading to a sense of hopelessness. Mid-career suicides emphasized despair based in failure. Finally, an attempt to escape from challenges associated with transitioning roles in retirements emerged as a key theme in late-career suicides.\nOriginality/value: Although suicide has been studied extensively from medical, psychopathological, sociological, anthropological, philosophical and religious perspectives, there is a dearth of research considering why certain individuals choose to end their own lives as a result of work and career related reasons. This study sought to contribute to our understanding of this under-researched phenomenon. Additionally, while extant careers theory and research has considered positive notions of career such as career success or careers as a calling, this work presents an alternate lens, the consideration of career failure and careers as a sentence.\n",
"role": "assistant"
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] |
EFQM model's application in the context of higher education: A systematic review of the literature and agenda for future research
|
[
"Higher education",
"EFQM",
"Quality management",
"Systematic literature review",
"European excellence model"
] |
[
{
"content": "Summarize the following paper into structured abstract.\n\n1. Introduction: Recognized as a critical issue in human capital and innovation development (Dill and Van Vught, 2010), higher education is facing, in the last decades, a revolution marked by significant changes both in scope and diversity (Altbach et al., 2009). Higher education is nowadays characterized by high expansion and wide participation (Guri-Rosenblit et al., 2007), a greater internationalization and competition (Tremblay, 2002), the emergence of new types of institutions, as alternatives to traditional universities (Altbach et al., 2009), accelerated pace of communication and educational technological change, and a wider adoption of integrated technologies (Schofer and Meyer, 2005; Altbach et al., 2009), as well as growing pressures on costs control and new forms of financing (Eggins and West, 2010; Sanyal and Johnstone, 2012).\n2. About the EFQM excellence model: 2.1 The essence of the EFQM framework\n3. Research design: This paper analyses the most significant issues concerning the use of the EFQM excellence model in HEIs, explored in published academic journals, by systematically reviewing the literature.\n4. Results: 4.1 Descriptive analysis\n5. Managerial implications and research agenda: 5.1 Contributions to HEIs practitioners\n6. Conclusions: This paper provides an SLR about the use of the EFQM excellence model in HEIs, identifies and characterizes 25 relevant journal publications, and provides a broad overview of the main issues explored so far in literature. Increasingly in social sciences research, systematic reviews are considered applicable to contribute to a reliable knowledge stock and to develop context-sensitive research (Rousseau et al., 2008; Tranfield et al., 2003).\n",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Purpose: The European Foundation for Quality Management (EFQM) excellence model has been widely used by higher education institutions (HEIs). However, knowledge about the state of the art concerning its application in the context of HEIs is still reduced. The purpose of this paper is to provide groundwork able to boost coordinated research efforts toward the development of the knowledge body in the field.\nDesign/methodology/approach: This research is based on a systematic literature review (SLR) of 25 papers identified in the ISI Web of Knowledge and SCOPUS databases, and considered relevant for analysis.\nFindings: The paper provides a broad overview of the main issues explored so far in literature: potential benefits, potential barriers and critical success factors. By highlighting the main shortcomings of current research and the corresponding opportunities for additional research directions, the authors hope to boost further research efforts in the field.\nOriginality/value: To the authors' knowledge, this is the first SLR in the field.\n",
"role": "assistant"
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] |
The impacts of final delivery solutions on e-shopping usage behaviour: The case of Shenzhen, China
|
[
"Structural equation model",
"E-shopping usage behaviour",
"Final delivery",
"Shenzhen"
] |
[
{
"content": "Summarize the following paper into structured abstract.\n\n1. Introduction: The last decade has witnessed great advancement in logistics driven by the rise of e-retailing. E-retailers, parcel express firms (PEFs) and other stakeholders are all striving to address the challenges facing final delivery (from the last upstream transshipment point to the end consumer) (Boyer et al., 2009; Morganti, Dablanc, and Fortin, 2014; Morganti, Seidel, Blanquart, Dablanc, and Lenz, 2014; Honeycomb, 2014). For instance, some e-tailing giants and PEFs seek to intensify the deployment of direct-to-home delivery network and then downsize the service area of each station (Janjevic et al., 2013). The improved delivery capabilities within each catchment area serve to enable multiple delivery attempts and timely response to customer demands. Simultaneously, many innovative solutions have emerged as alternatives for PEFs and consumers to deliver and collect packages respectively, including automated parcel stations (APSs) and collection and delivery points (CDPs) (Partridge, 2011; NICHES, 2015; Morganti, Dablanc, and Fortin, 2014; Morganti, Seidel, Blanquart, Dablanc, and Lenz, 2015). APSs are unattended and equipped with smart lockers, and CDPs refer to stores that provide package drop-off and pick-up services. Driven by the global boom in e-retailing, APSs and CPDs are expanding rapidly worldwide.\n2. E-shopping usage: a perspective of final delivery: 2.1 E-shopping usage, logistics and final delivery\n3. Study area and data collection: 3.1 Study area\n4. Descriptive analysis: 4.1 The demographic profile of respondents\n5. Modelling estimation analysis: 5.1 Method and variables\n6. Concluding remarks: The rapid expansion of e-shopping has created many challenges on final delivery which is responsible for shipping parcels to end consumers. By comparing the e-shopping usage behaviour of residents in neighbourhoods with different final delivery facilities, this study demonstrated the heterogeneous effects of final delivery solutions on e-shopping behaviour. Taking AFDF as a built-environment contextual determinant to explain residents' e-shopping usage, it incorporates a geographical perspective to study e-shopping decisions. This inter-discipline approach enables us to further acknowledge how e-tailing/e-shopping interact with physical space (Murphy, 2007). It also confirms the importance of geographical space in virtual business (Cho, 2010).\n",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to examine the effects of final delivery solutions on e-shopping usage behaviour by modelling their interaction across residents living in different neighourhoods with availabilities of different facilities, including automated parcel stations (APSs), collection and delivery points (CDPs), and the direct-to-home delivery stations of parcel express firms (PEFs).\nDesign/methodology/approach: The study is based on a survey on e-shopping behaviour and delivery awareness. A mixed structural equation model is used to predict the interactions among availability of final delivery facilities (AFDF), level of satisfaction with delivery services and e-shopping usage after controlling individual socioeconomic attributes and retail environment.\nFindings: Compared with AFDF, individual socioeconomic attributes are the most influential factors contributing to e-shopping spending and frequency. Improving AFDF has only a slight effect on e-shopping spending, while a larger impact on e-shopping frequency and perceived satisfaction to delivery services is observed. The quantity of PEF delivery stations has a relatively large influence on e-shopping usage but the effects of APSs and CDPs are not as strong as expected.\nResearch limitations/implications: The causality between final delivery solutions and e-shopping behaviour can be further tested by using social experiments or longitudinal data.\nPractical implications: All findings will help business and public policy decision makers to derive a balanced and effective deployment of final delivery solutions, which is also referential for other emerging markets similar to China.\nOriginality/value: This study theoretically contributes to the international literature by examining the heterogeneous effects of final delivery solutions on different aspects of e-shopping engagement.\n",
"role": "assistant"
}
] |
A positioning strategy for a tourist destination, based on analysis of customers' perceptions and satisfactions: A case of Kashmir, India
|
[
"Positioning",
"Customer satisfaction",
"Kashmir",
"Destination positioning",
"Customer perception"
] |
[
{
"content": "Summarize the following paper into structured abstract.\n\n1. Introduction: Destinations are the centrepiece of tourism and are acknowledged to be one of the most difficult entities to manage and market. The multiplicity of components that make up the destination product, the complexity of the relationship that exists between them and the involvement of large number of stakeholders are the factors that make a destination more complex. The complexity is further increased when consumer is taken into consideration. Consumers of the destination product often differ in their perceptions, expectations and desired satisfaction of the tourism place. It is the customer who decide how and when they access their travel and tourism information and how and through what process they access and purchase their travel and tourism arrangements. Therefore, for destination to be a success, it requires to be positioned in the mind of the consumer through eliciting consumers' perception. Ries and Trout (1986) assert that marketing is more a battle of perceptions than of products and that the customers mind is more important than the market place and it is better to be first in the mind than to be first in the market place. It is, thus, imperative to understand the psychology of the consumers' i.e. consumers' perception.\n2. Literature review: It is generally agreed that conceptually, practically and strategically positioning has become one of the fundamental components in modern marketing management, both from the academic point of view (Aaker and Shansby, 1982; Blankson and Kalafatis, 2004; Boatswain, 2015; Fuchs and Diamantopoulos, 2012; Urde and Koch, 2014) and from the practical or business point of view (Ries and Trout, 1986; Trout and Rivkin, 1996). It is because of its inevitable effect on profitability and long term success of the firm it has been applied to tourism destinations (Botha et al., 1999; Claveria, 2016; Echtner and Ritchie, 1993, 2003; Evren and Kozak, 2018; Fyall, 2019; Ibrahim and Gill, 2005; Pike, 2012; Pike et al., 2018; Pike and Ryan, 2004; Pike and Page, 2014; Tasci, 2011; Tasci et al., 2007; Walmsley and Young, 1998; Zins, 2014).\n3. Method: We administered a survey consisting of the 37 items and demographic variables to tourists coming to Kashmir region at five famous tourist nodes of region (Pahlagam, Gulmarg, Sonamarg, Srinagar and Kokernag). For the present study, Comrey and Lee (1992) sample guidelines were followed. In total, 500 questionnaires were distributed and returned. After excluding cases with missing values, a total of 479 responses were retained for analysis. The participant profiles are shown in Table I.\n4. Analysis and discussion: The two key variables of the study (customer perception and satisfaction) were analysed for the functional and psychological dimensions. The analysis of the open-ended questions was based on the approach of Finn et al. (2000). This required the grouping of similar responses from the open-ended questions and the categorising and labelling of the various descriptions provided by the respondents. This technique was used to identify the most frequent words or phrases used to describe the destination (Kashmir) and its image in the customer's mind. The analysis of the open-ended questions showed that the image of \"breathtaking scenery\" and \"exotic beauty\" is closely associated with Kashmir. The \"friendly attitude\" of the residents was another factor that was prominent as a destination image in the customer's mind, which supported the findings of Echtner and Ritchie's (1993). The most outstanding psychological attributes representing holistic image of the Kashmir region was its relaxing, friendly and laid-back atmosphere. The distinctive and unique attractions (functional attributes) perceived by the tourists were the \"Majestic Mountains\", \"Dramatic Lakes\", \"Meadows\", \"Mughal Gardens\" and \"Flowing Water\".\n5. Results of the study: 5.1 Positioning strategies\n6. Managerial implications: The results of present case study will provide academics, researchers and practitioners working in tourist destination with new insights towards the attributes of the destinations and their role in destination positioning. Since the results indicated that the most important factor that influenced tourists' satisfaction was the safety, it is recommended that tourism managers should ensure the provision of safety accompany the selected niche markets. It will also help tourism marketers to better understand their customers and hence contribute significantly to the process of planning a destination's positioning strategy, i.e. it will help the destination to position it differently from the competing destinations and gain a competitive edge.\n7. Limitations: A number of limitations should be acknowledged here to inform future research:\n",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to measure the perception and satisfactions of consumers of the tourism product of Kashmir region and identify potential niche markets that could be used in the development of the destination's positioning strategy.\nDesign/methodology/approach: The author used a case study methodology. Self-completion questionnaires were distributed to tourists visiting Kashmir region at the peak of the 2018 tourism season. The scales used were adapted from two authoritative sources. Data from 479 completed questionnaires were analysed quantitatively by a variety of statistical techniques, including factor analysis.\nFindings: Four possible niche markets are identified that can inform the development of the destination's positioning strategy: nature based, adventure, cultural and culinary. The overall conclusions and discussion of the findings should provide a case-based framework for the practical planning and implementation of positioning strategies in the tourism context.\nResearch limitations/implications: The time frame of the study was five summer months in one year, and only actual visitors completed the questionnaire. The study did not assess their evaluation of the quality of the services provided and consumed.\nOriginality/value: The overall conclusions and discussion of the findings should provide a case-based framework for the practical planning and implementation of positioning strategies in the tourism context.\n",
"role": "assistant"
}
] |
Globalization and Alfred D. Chandler's modern (American) firm: an essay
|
[
"Globalization",
"Business history",
"Industrialized economies",
"United States of America",
"Western Europe"
] |
[
{
"content": "Summarize the following paper into structured abstract.\n\nIntroduction: Alfred D. Chandler, Jr defined the modern American firm, an enterprise of immense effort and significance, making him the most important business historian of the last century. His works described and detailed how large industrial firms were organized and managed in the USA from the late nineteenth to late twentieth centuries, when the USA was the world's largest and most powerful economy.At the beginning of the twenty-first century, however, Chandler's writings suggest nothing more than how much time, place, and people matter. Three of the world's five largest economies are now found in Asia, and their industries and large firms are organized and managed quite differently than Chandler's iconic American ones. As a result, theories of the firm - how firms behave, are organized and managed - are not universal but specific to particular times and places.Chandler's modern American firm is dead, but long live the firm.\nGetting the story right: Chandler often said, \"Getting the story right\" was a scholar's most important task[1]. This is much harder to do than most people realize. First, history is often thought of as the \"simple past.\" Anything that dates from a few years to several decades or centuries ago is history. There is little appreciation of the labors, imagination and insight required to produce a full, accurate, and verifiable account of past times.Second, because there is little appreciation of good history, one story is as good as another. And if one person's stories are as good as anyone else's, then why read or listen to anyone in particular? Good history devolves into mere good story telling. \"Getting the story right\" in such circumstances takes on a rather diminished meaning.Chandler sought to provide a full and accurate account of the rise of big business in America over a considerable period of time. To do so, he had to situate the emergence of large industrial firms amidst a boom-and-bust, quickly moving, legally, politically, socially, technologically, and economically changing America. Doing so is where Chandler's efforts shone.Writing good history is also hard because the method is inductive. All sorts of information from all kinds of sources are potentially valuable. Reading, parsing, understanding, verifying, and writing up good history requires prolonged, often solitary efforts. The long cycle times required to process the information and to craft an accurate, insightful, and well written product may be repeated by others, but hardy ever are and almost never result in the same stories. This too - the difficulties of replication - contributes to a misunderstanding of the methods and uses of history.\nChandler's methods: To work around such difficulties and make his work more accessible, Chandler employed a number of classificatory tools and methods in The Visible Hand (Chandler, 1977), relied on several models of economic and organizational analysis in Scale and Scope (Chandler, 1990), and employed what might be called a group biography mode of exposition in Strategy and Structure (Chandler, 1962). A small number of America's largest and most successful firms were analyzed separately and together to investigate the interrelated sources of their success.In Strategy and Structure, Chandler laid out his best known and most widely cited treatise with respect to firm strategy and structure. The so-called M-form hypothesis argued that there were limits to how large firms could grow employing a centralized, formal management structure that combined day-to-day and long range planning. In this premise, Chandler was echoing the work of leading economists of the day as well as addressing a pivotal issue of organization and management during the Cold War (Arrow, 1974).Centralized or functional forms of business organization were common in owner managed firms that dominated the US economy at the turn of the twentieth century. As the economy grew and business expanded, bottlenecks in decision making and management action became manifest in owner managed firms. Chandler tracked the emergence of multidivisional firms as a response to the limits of organization in owner-managed firms. Strategy and Structure did this for a relatively small number of firms. The Visible Hand did this for the largest 200 industrial firms in mid-twentieth century America. Scale and Scope did this for 600 of the world's largest industrial firms.To track changes among an ever increasing number of firms, Chandler developed new methods. The first of these was to earmark certain benchmark years as temporal brackets for when data were collected. This not only simplified the task of collecting and analyzing data but it also made possible comparisons within and between years. In some ways, this method was an extension of the small group biography seen in Strategy and Structure, in that benchmark years allowed firms to be grouped together for the periods under review.A second was to base his comparisons, within and between benchmark years, on the standard industrial classification (SIC) code. The SIC grouped products together by industrial category, such as food and beverage products and stone, glass, and ceramic products. Each industry was given a discrete two-digit number and products within the industry were given additional digits to categorize them in ever greater, finer detail. Chandler used SIC codes not only to group companies together by industry but also to track shifts and movements in the product lines of individual firms and for industries as a whole. Combining such information with data collected by benchmark years enabled Chandler to speak authoritatively on the changing nature of industrial organization in the USA and the central role of large industrial firms in that transformation.The two methods were essentially classification tools. They sorted but did not explain. For this, we had the M-form hypothesis. With publication of The Visible Hand, how-ever, Chandler began to focus more on the consequences of adopting the multidivisional structure; he saw these as increasing speed of throughput and decreasing costs of production and distribution. Throughput is a surrogate measure of efficiency which, in turn, connects to increasing economies of scale and scope.With efficiency, Chandler had a widely recognized rationale and model of explanation. Models minimize the amount of story telling needed by offering modes of explanation that are readily accepted. For example, entrepreneurs, managers, and organizations that enabled speed of throughput were catapulted to the top of the SIC groupings for selected benchmark years.By employing economic and organizational models in The Visible Hand and Scale and Scope, Chandler's explanations shifted from the active to the passive tense. He was no longer able to speak with detailed, almost personal knowledge of the managers and firms that anchored the American economy, as he did in such works as Henry Varnum Poor (Chandler, 1956), Pierre S. Du Pont and the Making of the Modern Corporation (Chandler and Salisbury, 1971) and Strategy and Structure (Chandler, 1962). Chandler's explanations became more impersonal, more economic and organizational, necessitated by a shift in writing about a handful of firms to categorizing and writing about the 200 largest industrial firms.Chandler called America's largest industrial firms \"modern\" and, even now, his descriptions of large industrial firms are benchmark models for the USA, the UK and, by extension, Western Europe. Modernity was rooted in their organizational and managerial efficiency, enabling rapid throughput and quick decision-making. In Chandler's later writings, transaction cost economics, which marries economic efficiency with certain ways of economizing on organization costs, became a default explanation for why certain firms prospered. \"Modern\" became a term of art in Chandler's writings.\nSelected writings: Such generalizations did not appear overnight, however. Instead, they emerged over the course of three eras in Chandler's work. Different writings are touchstone pieces for capturing the evolution of Chandler's thinking. Henry Varnum Poor (Chandler, 1956) represented the early years. Strategy and Structure (Chandler, 1962), Pierre S. Du Pont and the Making of the Modern Corporation with Stephen Salsbury (Chandler and Salsbury, 1971), and The Visible Hand (Chandler, 1977) bracketed the middle years, and Scale and Scope (Chandler, 1990) and two more monographs that appeared in Chandler (2005a, b), Inventing the Electronic Century and Shaping the Industrial Century, came during the later years.The early years\nChandler's legacy: The paradox is that empiricists, like Chandler, care about data quality and validity, and are generally open to the discovery and interpretation of new data. Theorists, often removed from data, care less about data. Chandler was an empiricist, enmeshed in data. His full and rich descriptions became in time high-level generalizations about the nature and structure of America's leading industrial firms in the twentieth century.High-level generalizations are something called middle-level theories. But given Chandler's concern with \"getting the story right,\" in my opinion, he would be much more comfortable with characterizations of his work as high-level generalizations rather than middle-level theories. He strove to understand the wider picture within which entrepreneurs, managers, and firms operated, and in doing so, he understood better than most how generalizations are time-, place-, and people-dependent.In the social sciences, generalizations are always context dependent, situated in data that are defined by time, place, levels of development, institutional, and environmental features. In other words, management theories are not universal. Chandler understood this best early in his career, when he focused on the rise of large, industrial enterprises in the USA during the mid-twentieth century.Chandler's work offered an empirical theory of the firm, a theory that was period specific, evidence based, and grounded in the inductive method. Because his work spanned five decades, it offered an evolutionary view of the rise of big business in the USA, the familiar strategy and structure story, and an impressive treatise on how managerial tasks, risks, and responsibilities changed during the course of the twentieth century. The study of management was never detached from the study of firm strategy and structure.Chandler laid the foundations of modern strategic analysis. In the Visible Hand, for example, issues of sample size and selection bias were handled with new research tools and approaches, enabling Chandler to capture, analyze and describe the rise and fall of many industries and their leading firms. In Scale and Scope, he handled similar themes on a global scale. Throughout his half-century of dedication, focus, and labor, he high-lighted the interdependencies of environmental and institutional change, firm strategy and structure, management's roles and responsibilities. In doing so, he transformed our understanding of the American and world economy, industry and big business, and, ultimately, ourselves.\n",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Purpose: - Alfred D. Chandler was the most important business historian of the twentieth century, who described and analyzed how large industrial firms are organized and managed in the USA from the late nineteenth to late twentieth centuries.\nDesign/methodology/approach: - This paper is a personal memoir and tribute to Dr Chandler and examines his methods, selected writings, and his legacy.\nFindings: - His concepts and models are widely accepted and applied to North America, Western Europe, and most advanced industrial economies, taking on an air of universality. At the close of the twentieth century, however, a rise of high-tech industries and rapidly growing, non-western economies challenged many of the universalistic assumptions embedded in Chandler's work. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, Chandler's writings suggest nothing more than how much time, place, and people matter.\nOriginality/value: - This paper adds a more personal touch to Dr Chandler.\n",
"role": "assistant"
}
] |
Retaining good people through a focus on talent and purpose: Proper inductions make employees feel as though they truly belong
|
[
"Recruitment",
"Retention",
"Communications",
"Performance",
"Employee engagement",
"Career development"
] |
[
{
"content": "Summarize the following paper into structured abstract.\n\n__NO_TITLE__: When good money is invested in hiring the best people, the last thing we want is to loose them and start the process again.\nMaking people feel unique, valued and part of a team: Imagine a new-starter being shown around their new employer's operation and hearing words like:Hello, Mary; welcome on board.I have heard a lot about you.We are very excited about having you on the team.Your experience in [...] will certainly add something to our offering.Tell me a little bit about that project you did last year.I know you won't be working directly with our team but you are likely to work alongside us when [...]I thought it would helpful to give you an overview of what we do and a chance to meet some of the team.I'm sure you'll have more questions when you have settled in, so do give me a call. Maybe you would like to attend one of our team meetings and share some of your first impressions.Dialog such as this is not difficult to initiate and will immediately make someone feel unique, valued and part of the team. To have any chance of managers (and staff) responding in this manner, an awareness of the benefits of doing so must be nurtured.The world's most successful companies re-engage people on an ongoing basis and leave nothing to chance. They systematically train their managers to be effective facilitators of engagement. The PrimeFocus framework and philosophy of talent liberation is one way to engage people at all levels.We all need to understand the fundamental purpose behind our work and the vision that forms when we consider its future direction. Engaging with these \"pictures of tomorrow\" enlightens us as to how we must develop the structures (left brain) and character (right brain) of what we do. While measuring results tracks our progress in the delivery of our vision, it is an understanding of what success means to each of our people (they are all different) that enables us to keep them interested. It is only when we recognize, value, develop and use the talents of all our people in the delivery of our objectives that we can hope to achieve prime performance.\nChallenges and visions of the future: One company specializing in delivering industrial services worldwide considers it vital to align the talents of managers and staff to the corporate purpose in an engaging way, despite the industry norm for more autocratic styles of leadership. It used PrimeFocus as a template for this (see Figure 1).At the annual strategic conference, the chief executive outlined the challenges facing the business and his vision for the future. He gave his directors and advisors the opportunity to consider what this meant to them personally and to share their perspectives. Later they were given the opportunity to consider and share what they and their teams had brought to the challenges the future presented. This included their personal talents and strengths. They worked together on some of the key challenges and made personal commitments, adding value in the context of that future.The company then provided this same opportunity to share at the next level down - repeating the exercise in order that all were given the chance to recognize how they personally could add value in their area of work.The process cascades. At the sharp end of this highly competitive operation, supervisors and staff operate on large-scale industrial plants, forming cross-party teams with client operatives and specialist suppliers. Here it is essential that all parties are aligned with each other's visions and shared objectives in terms that make sense to them and in a spirit of co-operation.The owner of any career is the individual. To give our best, we must first command an insight into what it is we do best and what we have the capacity to do. We must be able to name our talents and understand how each adds value. We should have a plan to develop these into clear strengths and to put them to use in a manner that adds significant worth.This can be done irrespective of what an employer or any other agency does for its employees. However, few people take responsibility for their careers in this way without support.The worst possible experience of the workplace is one in which we sense that the organization is \"doing it to us\"; where we are simply pawns in the great corporate game. The best experience is one in which we feel that the company we work for provides us with the opportunity to do the work we were born to do in a meaningful and supportive context.\nFacilitating personal growth: Organizations can add significant value by putting in place a support structure that does not disempower the individual but facilitates journeys of personal growth.Facilitating personal growth is the clear role of line managers. If they take no personal interest in their staff a competitor probably will. However, an organization cannot rely completely on managers since the ability to facilitate personal growth will vary from person to person. The strategic provision of other processes such as coaching, mentoring and facilitated workshops tailored to an individual organization's needs is essential in ensuring growth can flourish.Pointing the best of who we are at something we believe in is intrinsic to both personal and professional well-being. There is a great deal organizations can do to build this into the corporate story.A key tool is the communication strategy (internal and external). A good communication strategy will enliven the corporate vision in publishing every successful step along the journey and hooking these moments of magic back into the corporate purpose. It will also reinforce the link between these steps and the applied talents of those who made them happen.Step by step, link by link, the message sinks in and gets out: we are a great organization, providing a powerful service to the world through remarkable people who get to do the work they were born for.\n",
"role": "user"
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{
"content": "Purpose: - The purpose of this paper is to examine how best to ensure that good recruits stay with a company.\nDesign/methodology/approach: - The paper explains the importance of proper inductions to make talented people feel as though they truly belong. It also presents a framework that can help companies systematically to train their managers to be effective facilitators of engagement.\nFindings: - The paper advances the view that among the worst experiences of the workplace is one in which the individual feels to be merely a pawn in the great corporate game; the best where he or she feels that the company provides opportunities to do meaningful work in a supportive context.\nPractical implications: - The paper demonstrates that facilitating personal growth is the clear role of line managers, and that the strategic provision of other processes such as coaching, mentoring and facilitated workshops tailored to an individual organization's needs is essential in ensuring that personal growth can take place.\nSocial implications: - The paper highlights how ensuring that each individual thrives can help to improve the lot of society as a whole.\nOriginality/value: - The paper emphasises the importance of a good communication strategy in helping to ensure that employees give of their best.\n",
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Successful brand management in SMEs: a new theory and practical hints
|
[
"Brand management",
"Small to medium‐sized enterprises",
"Marketing",
"Entrepreneurialism"
] |
[
{
"content": "Summarize the following paper into structured abstract.\n\nIntroduction: Brand management is a relatively young field of study, and one in which real interest was shown only during the final decade of the previous century. This was also the time when the most important theories were formulated and the most valuable literature produced.What is striking, though, is that attention was focused only on big companies and multinationals. So it was only on big companies and multinationals that the theories were based and about which the articles were written. Open practically any management book at random and it is a good bet that you will find Coca Cola, Nike, Philips, Unilever, Shell or Procter & Gamble used as the practical examples.This totally ignores the fact that at least 95 percent of all businesses belong to the small and medium-sized enterprise (SME) group (Storey, 1994), just as it also ignores the fact that in the USA, small businesses have taken the lead from the big ones (Thurik et al., 2003). This is something scarcely mentioned in business literature. In fact, when brand management is discussed in books and journals, SMEs are never mentioned as a separate entity, even though there is a distinct difference in having EUR10 million, as opposed to EUR100,000, to invest in your brand, and in having a marketing department of 25 at your disposal as opposed to having to plan and execute marketing campaigns all by yourself.Nevertheless, everyone knows the stories about a relatively small business that knew how to build a well-known brand. The question is, how long does such a business remain a \"small business\"? Microsoft, Philips and Nike all started small and, thanks to enthusiastic entrepreneurs, grew into worldwide brands. The founder of Nike, Phil Knight, started working in his spare time in his garage and had to stretch every cent he owned as far as it would go.So how, as the owner of an SME, do you go about managing your brand? What role does brand management play in such businesses? What problems do SMEs encounter in managing their brands? How do you go about increasing brand awareness? What is the relationship between brand management and marketing? These are all questions that remain unanswered in current brand literature. It is high time, therefore, for a closer study.Objective\nMethodology: To understand the precise role of the entrepreneur and to provide answers to the five questions/undertakings listed earlier, a qualitative study based on in-depth interviews with ten mainly middle-sized companies was undertaken. Striking results were obtained.Typical of SMEs is the often all-controlling and all-deciding role of the owner (director) of the company. And when the role of brand management in SMEs is examined, then it is highly probable that the same owner will take the lead in setting guidelines and making decisions for that as well. Therefore, to guarantee the highest degree of reliability from such a study, it is from this person that the required information needs to be obtained, according to Gilmore and Coviello (1999). And in that, the study eventually succeeded.It is unlikely that, had conventional quantitative investigation methods been used, the investigation would have attained the desired level of insight into the world of SMEs.Interviews\nResults and conclusions: The results of the study, together with the conclusions arising from it, are arranged in order of the questions/undertakings listed at the beginning of this article. This has been done to ensure maximum clarity and readability.What role does brand management play in SMEs?\nRecommendations for entrepreneurs and directors: The entrepreneur plays a key role in the SME and exerts considerable influence on the structure and culture of a company. The value of this study lies in the fact that it places the role of brand management firmly in an SME context and clarifies the influence of various factors.The influence of the market is one such factor. But the influence of the entrepreneur is also extremely important: not just as the personification of the brand, but also as the individual who shapes the company structure. In addition, because of often limited budgets, a healthy dose of creativity is indispensable to the organization of marketing and communications.What follows are a number of concrete recommendations for (successful) brand management in SMEs:* Set the building and management of your brand high on your list of priorities. Make time available for this. A strong brand is an excellent way to distinguish yourself from your competition and, if properly applied, emphasize the quality of your product.* Make a suitable individual within your organization responsible for the daily brand management tasks. Do not keep the management of your brand to yourself but communicate how important it is throughout the entire company. Make your business brand aware!* Do not underestimate the (potential) role that you, as the entrepreneur can bring to achieving brand recognition. After all, you are your brand. Communicate that! It does not cost anything and the impact may well be greater than you think.* Examine the possibility of linking your brand to another (stronger) brand. You would like to be associated with Mercedes or Bang & Olufsen, wouldn't you? So examine the possibilities for cooperation and consider co-branding.* Is your brand more important and better known than your company name? Then consider changing your company name to that of your brand. This prevents loss of attention (and budget) and heightens brand awareness within your organization.* Focus on one brand to prevent consumer awareness (and your budget) being frittered away on meeting the needs of several brands.* Highlight one or two specific distinguishing product features and associate them with your brand. Focus your marketing, in as creative a fashion as possible, on these features.* Make the logo, the packaging, the labels etc. individual enough to help with the building of the brand.* Work consistently and be logical in all your announcements about the brand. Remember that when you begin to get bored with this, that is when the message will begin to be noticed.* Encourage passion for the brand throughout your company. The sparks come from you, overflow onto your employees and outside the firm onto your (potential) clients.* Check that your product displays your brand name. You would be amazed at how often this does not happen. A real missed opportunity!* Your marketing budget is not made of elastic, something the marketers and the advertising industry rarely consider. So be creative. And if you cannot be creative, hire someone who is.* Do you want your brand on television? But you think it is too expensive? That is not necessarily so! Especially not if you're creative and inventive and consider other possibilities than an (expensive) commercial. Think about sponsorship and PR!* Brand management is not advertising or marketing. If you think that they are all one and the same, then take the trouble to spend some time reading the study you have in front of you now. It will be worth your while.Good luck with the building of your brand! Let's hope that the building bricks described above will help you, as the director of a relatively small company, to build a recognizable brand.\nRecommendations for further study: The study of brand management in SMEs is still in the pioneer phase. That is why a start has been made with an exploratory study, one in which the few sparse theories available on the subject were tested in practice.This study lays an important foundation for further investigation, one in which the three models published herein can be tested against groups of companies in the SME and, subsequently, refined. Examples of such groups would include the service sector, business-to-business organizations and small and micro-sized companies.For the model described here, further investigation is necessary to determine an objective way of measuring brand recognition within SMEs. In addition, the ranking of the role of brand management and the weighing of various factors relating to this all call for further study.This study has made a close, practical examination of the only model described in the business literature. Keller's model has been weighed and, in some instances, found to be too light. So new guidelines for the construction of a strong brand in an SME have been added. Only further study will determine whether these new guidelines are more applicable than those which were removed.A study of the success of an SME, in the light of the role that brand management played within it, might well offer increased insight into the problems faced by all SMEs in managing a brand.\n",
"role": "user"
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"content": "Purpose: - Brand management in small to medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) is an area of study in its infancy. Although considerable literature has been published about brand management in general, all theory and case studies are based only on multinationals. This article proposes providing the results and conclusions of exploratory research into this subject, and into SMEs in particular.\nDesign/methodology/approach: - To understand the precise role of the entrepreneur and to provide answers to five research questions, a qualitative study based on in-depth interviews with mainly middle-sized companies was undertaken. Striking results were obtained from this exploratory research.\nFindings: - The paper shows the reader what the role of brand management in SMEs is and all the variables that influence it. It also presents a new model for brand development in SMEs, one that highlights the importance of the internal role of brand management in such an organization. An important finding is that passion for the brand throughout the company is a very important factor, initiated by an active role of the entrepreneur him/herself to achieving brand recognition. It does not cost anything and the impact appeared to be significant. Of course creativity is indispensable in this process.\nPractical implications: - The change that directors of a relatively small company should make is to place brand management in a top position in their daily mind set. Achieving brand recognition starts inside the organization itself.\nOriginality/value: - For the first time in history extensive research in brand management in SMEs has been combined with the creation of various new theories, resulting in many practical recommendations. These are recommendations that can be used by the reader in his or her own organization.\n",
"role": "assistant"
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] |
Classroom collaborations: Enabling sustainability education via student-community co-learning
|
[
"Education for sustainable development",
"Social learning",
"Sustainability education",
"Sustainable development goals",
"Co-learning",
"Community university partnerships"
] |
[
{
"content": "Summarize the following paper into structured abstract.\n\nIntroduction: The sustainable development goals (UN, 2016) are increasingly used as a way of framing contemporary societal challenges within the higher education sector. Universities are well positioned to harness and integrate their education, research, operations and externally facing activities to contribute to the achievement of the goals (SDSN, 2017). A key responsibility for universities in this regard is Education for Sustainable Development (ESD), which is specifically addressed within the SDGs via Target 4.7 within Goal 4, implying a need to embed ESD within taught curricula (UNESCO, 2018). A range of reporting frameworks are emerging at present to incentivise and mark progress against the SDGs in universities, including the United Nations Academic Impact Programme (UN, 2018), the SDG Accord (EAUC, 2018) and the Times Higher Education SDG League (Bothwell, 2018). In the UK context, this broad framing of the purpose of universities offers a timely counterpoint to recent trends towards marketisation in higher education, that is, seeing university study primarily as a route to future employment. In contrast, contributing to collective action for the public good can be viewed as a third core function of universities alongside education and research (Muller-Christ et al., 2014).\nMethods: What was done?\nResults: Participation\nDiscussion: Focus on local sustainability impacts\nConclusion: This project piloted a novel approach to learning for sustainable development, using facilitated co-learning open classes and workshop-style public events. It succeeded in its goal of attracting diverse stakeholders to co-learn, and the two distinctive aspects (of diverse participants and a facilitated workshop approach) were popular with both students and community stakeholder participants. Given this, there is apparent value in further practice and research to explore the potential and limitations of this approach.\n",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Purpose: This study aims to explore co-learning classes, a novel approach to leveraging universities' capacity to contribute to the local sustainable development agenda whilst enhancing students' learning. These participatory classes were piloted within a UK university masters' module focussed on action for sustainability. The classes sought to combine knowledge exchange, reflection and social network development by bringing together students and community stakeholders.\nDesign/methodology/approach: The classes were run as a series of five free events, each focussed on sustainability issues relevant for local practitioners. These were either regular timetabled sessions opened up to the public or additional on-campus public events. Attendance was either face-to-face or online. Evaluation was based upon participation data, written feedback and module leader's post-event reflections.\nFindings: The classes successfully secured participation from diverse community members, including local government staff, voluntary sector workers and interested individuals. Both students and community stakeholders valued the participatory format, linkages of theoretical and practical knowledge and diversity of attendees.\nResearch limitations/implications: Findings are based upon a small-scale pilot study. Further research using a wider range of contexts is required to enhance understanding of the co-learning approach.\nPractical implications: This paper highlights some key practical issues to consider if employing co-learning approaches in other contexts, including using inclusive language, aligning with students' motivations and choosing appropriate focal event topics.\nOriginality/value: Opening up participatory university classes for the public to attend as co-learners is a rarely used approach and has little coverage in academic literature. This small-scale study therefore has value by highlighting some of the potential impacts, strengths and limitations of this approach.\n",
"role": "assistant"
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] |
Shipping surcharges and LSQ: pricing the last mile
|
[
"Logistics service quality",
"Online retailing",
"Price partitioning",
"Shipping surcharges"
] |
[
{
"content": "Summarize the following paper into structured abstract.\n\nIntroduction: Pricing the last mile is a strategic decision that has major implications for the competitive success of online retailers (Koukova et al., 2012). One of the many challenges unique to the online market is increasing consumer expectations of free delivery options (National Retail Federation, 2019). Online juggernauts drive consumer expectations of free shipping and place competitive pressures on smaller retailers to follow suit (Jones et al., 2019). For example, Amazon now offers free two-day shipping to over 100m members of their Amazon Prime subscription service (Amazon Annual Report, 2017). The free shipping trend is echoed by Walmart, who launched free two-day shipping for millions of products in 2017 (Walmart Annual Report, 2017).Despite the prevalence of \"free\" shipping, last mile deliveries represent a major operating expense to the retailer (Gumus et al., 2013), and these expenses are expected to increase in the future (Holcomb and Manrodt, 2015). Although many online retailers may not possess the economies of scale to match the shipping promotions of an Amazon or Walmart, they can frame the delivery as free by allocating the cost of service to an increase of the base product price. Thus, the allocation of displayed charges between the product price and the shipping surcharge can be altered while the total price seen by the consumer remains the same. The current study examines the effects of framing the shipping surcharge on consumer perceptions of logistics service quality (LSQ) both prepurchase and following a logistics disruption. Specifically, we employ a behavioral experiment to contrast the effects of partitioning the shipping surcharge across economically equivalent pricing strategies in which the total purchase price is constant.When considering the framing of the shipping surcharge, online retailers can use either a consolidated price strategy, total price allocated to the product price, or a partitioned price strategy, total price partitioned into the base product price and a shipping surcharge (Morwitz et al., 1998). From a strictly economic perspective, partitioning or consolidating the price should not impact customer behavior contingent on the total price remaining constant (Voester et al., 2017). However, research has demonstrated that price can act as a signal for interpreting quality (Connelly et al., 2011), and partitioning the shipping surcharge shapes consumer preferences and drives purchase behavior (Ma, 2017). Therefore, we propose our first research question: How and under what conditions does partitioning the shipping surcharge influence customer expectations of LSQ?Given the minute switching costs of online platforms, a focus on retaining existing customers is critical to the success of online retailers (Rao et al., 2011a, b). One of the main threats to customer retention is a logistics disruption or failure to deliver on the promised service fulfillment (Rao et al., 2011a, b). Unlike brick and mortar retailing, in which consumers lack saliency of logistics performance (although poor performance can be reflected in product stockouts), online retailing directly exposes the end consumer to logistics disruptions (Esper et al., 2003). Examples of potential disruptions experienced by consumers during last mile delivery include late deliveries, damage in transit or inaccurate order fulfillment. Considering this additional component of risk, we propose our final research question: How does partitioning the shipping surcharge influence consumer LSQ satisfaction given a logistics disruption?Marketing and logistics jointly create and fulfill demand establishing a need for marketing to advise logistics decisions and vice versa. (Esper and Peinkofer, 2017). Our study implements both areas of the firm and contributes to logistics and marketing research. First, our theoretical model provides a more micro view of price as a component of LSQ perceptions applying individual-level cognitive theory to further understand the signals, interpretation and rationalization of the shipping surcharge price in an online purchase scenario. Second, we build on the underexplored area of LSQ expectations and empirically link last mile pricing strategies to prepurchase expectations of an online seller's order fulfillment service. Third, we address a literature gap on postpurchase effects of price partitioning (Greenleaf et al., 2016; Voester et al., 2017). Our research examines the effect of partitioning the shipping surcharge on both the initial purchase decision and subsequent purchase behavior and thus provides a more comprehensive picture of the effects of price partitioning strategies on both the attraction and retention of customers. Finally, we build on the price partitioning stream of research by identifying consumer online shopping experience as a contingency when evaluating the effectiveness of price partitioning strategies. Indeed, given the rapid growth and evolution of online shopping, comparable experience shopping online largely influences consumer expectations and, in turn, receptivity to shipping surcharges.Online retailers should always seek to improve the objective quality of last mile delivery fulfillment while decreasing its associated costs (Rao et al., 2011a). However, small- and medium-sized firms may struggle to match the competitive pressures to offer free shipping (Jones et al., 2019). One such strategy to counter these pressures is to strategically frame the shipping surcharge. This study has strong managerial implications by highlighting the effects and trade-offs of partitioning the shipping surcharge. In particular, we demonstrate how, and under what conditions, partitioning the shipping surcharge can influence the attraction and retention of online customers.\nLogistics pricing and the shipping surcharge: Research has identified logistics pricing as a component of LSQ and customer satisfaction. For example, Stank et al. (2003) divided logistics performance into three categories: relational, operational and cost performance. High-cost performance is achieved by offering the logistics service at the lowest total cost resulting in greater purchase satisfaction (Stank et al., 2003). Rao et al. (2011a) applied this idea to an online B2C context to propose a scale of electronic LSQ. Similarly, the authors found that customer satisfaction with the order fulfillment price resulted in greater purchase satisfaction (Rao et al., 2011a). Collectively, Stank et al. (2003) and Rao et al. (2011a) suggest that retailers should provide the best possible logistics service for the lowest possible price. The combination of high objective fulfillment quality (e.g. on-time delivery, in-stock, etc.) and low price increases customer satisfaction and, in turn, increases customer retention.Researchers have also focused specifically on the shipping surcharge and consumer reaction to how it is priced. For example, shipping surcharges abate perceptions of value and can have negative implications on the purchasing behavior of both current and prospective customers (Lewis, 2006; Lewis et al., 2006). Supporting this notion, shipping surcharges are reported as the number one reason for consumers abandoning online shopping carts (Lunden, 2017). Consumers may perceive the shipping surcharge as unfair (Jones et al., 2019) or as a means for the retailer to increase its profits (Schindler et al., 2005). Thus, online retailers must weigh the marketing benefits of free shipping promotions against the expense recovery of a shipping surcharge (Jiang et al., 2012).Besides true price discounts, retailers tend to increase the base product price if they offer free shipping (Gumus et al., 2013). The price partitioning literature focuses on such pricing strategies in which the price is framed to the customer by differentially allocating the price between at least two chargeable components. Price partitioning differs from research on other multicomponent pricing strategies (e.g. bundled pricing and a la carte pricing) in that all components are mandatory (Lee et al., 2014; Voester et al., 2017) and research on optimal shipping fee decisions in that total price is constant. Price partitioning is especially common in online retailing because of the added expense to deliver the product to the final customer (Lee and Han, 2002). Morwitz et al. (1998) found that a partitioned price containing a shipping surcharge resulted in higher demand when compared to a consolidated price offering free shipping. The authors proposed that consumers anchor on the product price, then fail to sufficiently adjust their perceived cost to include the added shipping surcharge (Morwitz et al., 1998). The results from Morwitz et al. (1998) sparked the use of price partitioning as a competitive strategy to increase demand. Researchers have since suggested that the strategic framing of price can influence consumer behavior by manipulating salience (Bertini and Wathieu, 2008), encouraging the use of heuristics (Morwitz et al., 1998) and reducing the comparability of alternatives (Frischmann et al., 2012). Thus, framing the last mile delivery price is one of the key decisions for online retailers (Yao and Zhang, 2012; Pan et al., 2013).Despite the perspective of price partitioning as a strategy, empirical studies since Morwitz et al. (1998) have found mixed results on the effects of partitioning the shipping surcharge. Some studies have found a consolidated pricing strategy to be more effective in generating demand (Hamilton and Sriastava, 2008; Chatterjee, 2010; Pan et al., 2013), while other studies have found a partitioned pricing strategy to stimulate increased demand (Xia and Monroe, 2004; Volckner and Ruhle, 2012; Lee et al., 2014). Further, the effects of partitioning the shipping surcharge can be contingent on retailer characteristics (Lee and Han, 2002; Cheema, 2008; Pan et al., 2013), product characteristics (Chatterjee, 2010; Pan et al., 2013) and customer characteristics (Schindler et al., 2005; Ma, 2017).To summarize, the quest to identify the optimal strategy of last mile pricing has produced disparate results, and the prevalence of interaction effects suggests there is no single optimal strategy. However, one commonality in price partitioning research is that it focuses on consumer behavior prepurchase while ignoring postpurchase implications (Xia and Monroe, 2004; Greenleaf et al., 2016; Voester et al., 2017). One notable exception is the work of Lee and Han (2002), which found partitioned shipping surcharges not only to lead to lower recalled price at purchase but also to lead to lower evaluations of the retailer once the error recall was revealed. As such, pricing decisions should consider both the immediate effects on generating demand and delayed effects postpurchase as the loss of current customers might outweigh any advantages from attracting new customers (Voester et al., 2017). We aim to further build on this stream and add context to the effects of partitioning the shipping surcharge by, first, investigating the role of the shipping surcharge price in forming consumer LSQ expectations (prepurchase) and LSQ satisfaction (postdelivery). In addition, we employ a behavioral experiment to simulate prepurchase and postdelivery scenarios and, thus, compare pricing effects before the sale and following a logistics disruption.\nTheory and hypothesis development: We draw on relevant theory to hypothesize about the effects of last mile pricing in two specific periods of an online purchase scenario. First, the prepurchase scenario investigates the effect of the shipping surcharge on expectations of LSQ before the initial purchase decision. Next, the logistics disruption scenario investigates the effect of the shipping surcharge on judgments of LSQ satisfaction given a service failure in the logistics process.The prepurchase scenario\nMethodology: wBehavioral experiments are an appropriate methodology when seeking to establish a cause-effect relationship because the researcher is able to control the experimental setting, randomization of treatments and manipulation of variables (Tokar, 2010; Bachrach and Bendoly, 2011; Thomas et al., 2016; Schorsch et al., 2017). Given the complex nature of consumer preferences and decision-making, we implement a scenario-based experiment with the intent to isolate the causal effect of price partitioning the shipping surcharge. Scenario-based role-playing experiments are suitable when the research question seeks to uncover the formation of judgments or mechanisms behind a behavior (Rungtusanatham et al., 2011). Scenario-based experiments have commonly been used in past studies investigating service failures (Oflac et al., 2012). Specifically, \"scenarios have been widely used in the operationalization of expectations by both satisfaction and service quality researchers\" (Oflac et al., 2012, p. 57). To ensure a rigorous design and implementation, we conducted manipulation and realism tests (Knemeyer and Naylor, 2011) and followed a similar framework used by previous experimental consumer studies (e.g. Esper et al., 2003; Oflac et al., 2012; Peinkofer et al., 2015; Peinkofer et al., 2016; Ma, 2017).Experimental design and sample\nAnalysis and results: We utilized PROCESS version 3.0 to test our research hypotheses. PROCESS is an SPSS macro, which utilizes OLS regression-based path analysis and bootstrapping to test simple and complex moderated and/or mediated conceptual models (Hayes, 2013). The results for each scenario are summarized in Table 2.Prepurchase model results\nDiscussion: Research findings and contributions\nLimitations and future research opportunities: Despite the contributions of this study, there are several limitations to note. First, prior research has suggested that the purchase context moderates the effect of price partitioning. The experiment employed in this study allows for random assignment and researcher control of the situational context, which limits the influence of exogenous variables and, thus, allows for an establishment of causality. Despite the strong internal validity of this method, however, there are many elements of the purchase process that are effectively controlled for the experimental methodology yet could influence how consumers interpret signals conveyed by the shipping surcharge. For example, a purchase of greater importance or urgency will likely result in increased saliency of the delivery process and a greater willingness-to-pay higher shipping surcharges. Further, what role do other signals from the retailer such as user reviews, seller reputation or targeted advertisements play in complementing, substituting or enhancing the relationship between logistics pricing and perceptions of LSQ? There is substantial opportunity for future research to expand on last mile pricing research using a variety of products, scenarios and seller characteristics.Another limitation of this study is our operationalization of the logistics disruption. The disruption employed was a late product delivery (one day late). There are several other forms of logistics disruptions that could occur during the last mile delivery including damage in transit or inaccurate order fulfillment. In addition, the magnitude of the disruption plays a role in customer satisfaction and retention (Rao et al., 2011a, b; Peng and Lu, 2017). We encourage future research to build on this study and incorporate a variety of logistics disruptions and disruption magnitudes to examine the variance of consumer purchase behaviors given differing price partitioning strategies.\n",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Purpose: Pricing the shipping surcharge is a major strategic decision for online retailers, and free shipping promotions are becoming more common among online retailers. The purpose of this research is to examine the effect of last mile pricing strategies on customer attraction and retention in the hypercompetitive online retailing industry. Specifically, this paper investigates the effect of partitioning the shipping surcharge on consumer logistics service quality (LSQ) perceptions and, in turn, purchase behavior.\nDesign/methodology/approach: Employing signaling theory and expectation-disconfirmation theory, hypotheses are derived for two specific points in an online purchase scenario: prepurchase and following a logistics disruption. The hypotheses are tested using a scenario-based experiment with manipulations for the level of shipping surcharge partitioning and the presence of a logistics disruption.\nFindings: The results suggest that partitioned shipping surcharges influence prepurchase expectations of LSQ satisfaction and amplify the negative effects of logistics disruptions. This, in turn, drives the purchase and repurchase intentions.\nPractical implications: The findings inform online retailers of the perceptual and behavioral effects of last mile pricing strategies. Specifically, this research demonstrates how and under what conditioning partitioning the shipping surcharge can influence the attraction and retention of online customers.\nOriginality/value: This study integrates pricing and LSQ research to assess the black box of consumer purchase behavior. This is one of the first studies to empirically contrast the effects of last mile pricing strategies on consumer expectations and perceptions of LSQ.\n",
"role": "assistant"
}
] |
Low level mobility in Hungary: advantage or disadvantage to learning and competitiveness?
|
[
"Labour mobility",
"Learning methods",
"Adaptability",
"Social capital",
"Hungary",
"Competitive strategy"
] |
[
{
"content": "Summarize the following paper into structured abstract.\n\nIntroduction: Foreign managers keep complaining about the low level of mobility of the workforce in Hungary. The majority of workers and professionals are equally uninterested in moving, not only to a foreign location of a company, but also even to another region within the country. Not too many Hungarians have been looking for new jobs in the richer European Union (EU) countries after enlargement.Recently, with the introduction of an austerity package in 2007 the unemployment level has increased. The worst hit sectors of the economy have been health care and education. Therefore doctors, nurses and teachers are losing their jobs. Still, the interest in working abroad has not increased dramatically.Why are Hungarians not very mobile? Can we expect major changes in attitudes as the younger generation enter the labor market in the next couple of years? But is it really a disadvantage at all if the majority of the population is not mobile? These are the key questions I tried to answer in my research.\nThe methodology: I selected one group of final year university students, and a second group from among the participants of an evening class in a college. The typical age in the first group was 22-23, and in the second 30-40. In the first sample I had 180, and in the second 200 participants. They all were from different parts of the country, and different social backgrounds. I used a simple questionnaire asking participants to describe which level of mobility they were the most comfortable with. I described the different levels of mobility based on the \"mobility pyramid\" developed by Quelch and Bloom (1999).The five possible mobility levels the participants could choose from were those shown in Table I.\nThe results: The percentage distribution of the participants' answers among the five mobility levels are shown in Table II.If we add up the numbers for the two lowest levels, we get 57.3 and 63 percent. This two numbers indicate the low level of mobility of people in the two samples. In the questionnaire the participants were also asked to explain their choice of the particular mobility level. A few examples are given below.Those who chose the first level said:I do not like changes.I do not like foreign places.The security and the family are very important to me.I like my country and my community.I feel already \"homesick\" on the first day after I left Hungary.To me it is important to see my parents on a very regular basis.I want to work only in Hungary.Those who chose the second level argued the following way:I would be unable to leave the country for a longer time period.I do not mind learning abroad on very short visits, but I would not go for a longer time.I am not really very flexible, therefore I could only leave for a limited time.I would only go abroad to earn more money, but only for a short time.The majority who chose the third level said that they would only go to the neighboring countries or to other EU countries.Reasons given from among the minority who chose the fourth and fifth levels were particularly interesting:Right now I am very mobile, but just because I do not have a family yet.I have a \"global mindset\". I do not care where I am sent to. But only because I do not have a wife and children.I am eager to travel to as many places as possible to work. I can work anywhere, for any time. It is understandable as my father is a \"foreigner\" here. [The student then explained that his father had come from France and had married a Hungarian.]From among this last group, more than 50 percent indicated that after marriage he or she would return and settle down in Hungary.Overall, the university students showed a slightly stronger interest in mobility than the evening class college students. In this latter group, from among those who had a job, more than 60 percent worked for local companies.\nInterpretation of the results: First, it is important to note that the sample was small. Also there were only a few people in the second sample who worked for foreign businesses, and were therefore practically confronted with the opportunity or threat of being sent abroad to work.In spite of this, the results mirror the experiences of foreign managers. They also reinforce the findings of different cultural studies arguing that society habits change very slowly. Hofstede (2001) puts it the following way:Societies, organisations and groups have ways of conserving and passing on mental programs from generation to generation with an obstinacy that is often underestimated.In accordance with Hofstede's research, Hungary is a \"high uncertainty avoidance\" culture, in which he found the following characteristics:* a tendency to prefer more authoritative management;* resistance to change;* a dislike of working for a foreigner as a manager; and* the belief that what is different can be dangerous.These characteristics appear in the sample.\nBut is low mobility a real disadvantage?: Knowledge and learning are keys to individual, company and society competitiveness. Working abroad means learning new things and acquiring additional skills and knowledge. It offers \"benchmarking\" opportunities, opens up one's mind to experiencing better practices. From the companies' point of view, strategic change can be managed more successfully if people are willing to learn. Cunningham (1994) describes a learning-based change model in the following way:\"Learnability\" is part of the starting point for planning change.Therefore open-minded people with strong learning abilities and attitudes are valued more in companies seeking competitiveness based on human talents and abilities.From the individual's perspective, opportunities for promotion may be quickly closed if somebody is not mobile enough, and therefore the person will lessen their own learning chances. Therefore mobility is a desired skill for the individual from the company's and the society's perspective, too. Ulrich and Brockbank (2005) illustrates this the following way:Employees learn from new assignments that stretch them to learn new skills. Some firms have sponsored international job swaps to develop global sensitivity, functional rotations, or postings such as \"deputyships\" to encourage learning.Does this mean then that Hungarians are in a disadvantaged situation? The highest levels of mobility are the fourth and fifth level in the Quelch and Bloom mobility pyramid model, which probably require people to become global cosmopolitans. This can be in the interest of the global, transnational and metanational corporations, but not necessarily that of the individuals and the countries in which the corporations are located.For example in Hungary it is still the small and medium-sized enterprise (SME) sector that creates and maintains the majority of jobs. These businesses do not strive for worldwide presence. They want to build strong market positions at home and in neighboring countries. Therefore, they can efficiently employ people who feel comfortable with the first two levels of mobility. These employees also have a special advantage for the country. They may be interested in being abroad for a shorter period of time. They then bring the knowledge and skills back to their home country, helping its economy to become more competitive. On the other hand, the mobile cosmopolitans' knowledge may be lost for their homeland.Another argument is related to the importance of social capital as a competitiveness factor. Social capital is built through the healthy networks of people and the entrepreneurial activities of local SMEs. If we check again the research results and add up the percentages for the first three mobility levels, then we get 66.3 and 72.5 percent. These are the people who can be helpful in building social capital and creating local knowledge. They do not mind learning from others which represents a \"benchmarking type\", adaptive learning. But they focus more on their own creativity to find new, original solutions to local problems. In other words they learn by changing and change by learning. We can call this process active learning.Active learning which builds social capital and is embedded in a local context can create more \"tacit\" knowledge than the \"benchmarking type\", adaptive learning based on foreign experiences. \"Tacit\" knowledge, as many research findings have proved, offers distinctive competencies and capabilities, and therefore helps build competitiveness.\nConclusions: Based on the findings of different research studies, and also my own surveys, I believe it is not detrimental for any country if the majority of its population is not absolutely mobile. If people are only interested in shorter-term foreign assignments, they can still be strongly committed to learning. Blending short foreign experiences with local entrepreneurship and knowledge creation can be a good source of competitive advantage for any nation - particularly those with smaller economies. Finland is an excellent example. Although it does not have a large economy, and the Finns are also not very mobile, the Finnish economy is extremely competitive. This may be a model for Hungary to study.\n",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Purpose: - The objective of this paper is to test whether the observations of foreign managers about the low mobility level of the Hungarian workforce can also be verified on a sample drawn from among young professionals. Second the paper aims to prove that a low mobility level is not necessarily a disadvantage for the economy in which small to medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) are playing a significant role in creating new jobs.\nDesign/methodology/approach: - The paper uses a questionnaire, which is based on the mobility pyramid developed by Quelch and Bloom, to survey two groups of students in two institutions.\nFindings: - The paper finds a strong correlation between the observations of foreign managers and the opinions of the participants in the samples. Although the sample size is not too large, the arguments of the students about why long-term and far-away foreign assignments are not very desirable for them are powerful and convincing. They prove how slowly society characteristics are changing.\nOriginality/value: - The present low mobility level corresponds with the earlier Hofstede's findings on Hungary being a strong uncertainty avoidance society. However in the paper's view the low mobility is not necessarily a disadvantage, as people still can continuously learn, create new knowledge and strengthen local social capital, which are all important ingredients of national competitiveness.\n",
"role": "assistant"
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] |
Supply chain collaboration and sustainability: a profile deviation analysis
|
[
"Sustainability",
"Supply chain management",
"Survey",
"Learning",
"Buyer-supplier relationships",
"Sustainable supply chain management",
"Supplier collaboration",
"Customer collaboration",
"Profile deviation"
] |
[
{
"content": "Summarize the following paper into structured abstract.\n\n1. Introduction: The increasing focus on sustainable supply chain management has led to a wide-scale adoption of sustainable practices (Linton et al., 2007; Pagell et al., 2010). The need of firms to tackle the increasing sustainability requirements by stakeholders for the whole supply chain has led many firms to collaborate with their suppliers and customers (Klassen and Vachon, 2003). This promotes partnerships and joint initiatives with supply chain partners to develop strategies to improve overall efficiency along the supply chain while meeting organizational as well as environmental objectives. Through such improvements, firms also aim at improving their performance to not only alter customer perception, but also influence their market position. Finally, improved customer perception and the ensuing customer satisfaction are seen as means to improve profitability and result in competitive advantage (Anderson et al., 1994).\n2. Theoretical foundations: Different perspectives of fit and alignment are known in literature according to Venkatraman (1989). These perspectives comprise fit or alignment in the form of moderation, mediation, matching, gestalts, profile deviation, and covariation. In order to use the concept of fit or alignment in theory testing and further develop our knowledge, it is necessary that researchers clearly articulate the type of fit or alignment concept that is being studied. As indicated by Venkatraman (1989), profile deviation is the approach when multi-dimensional constructs are used and they are related to a criterion. Though we use single broad constructs representing supply-side and demand-side collaboration, these constructs in turn measure various sub-dimensions such as cooperation, collaboration, mutual understanding, joint efforts, as well as feedback. Therefore, in order to maintain the richness of our collaboration constructs, we chose not to aggregate the underlying subdimensions into a single supply-side and demand-side collaboration construct. A profile deviation approach helps us to not only maintain the richness of these constructs and include the underlying indicators to come up with the ideal profile, but also to evaluate the degree of adherence to this ideal profile (Venkatraman, 1990; Venkatraman and Prescott, 1990; Vorhies and Morgan, 2003). Accordingly, in this manuscript, we adopt the profile deviation analysis as it has the unique ability to allow us to test how the deviation from the ideal profile will worsen firm-level sustainability practice as well as performance, which is in line with literature on the arcs of integration (Frohlich and Westbrook, 2001). In the following sub-sections, we discuss the theoretical basis for sustainable supply chain collaboration before delving into the theoretical underpinning of our research model.\n3. Hypothesis development: Our hypothesized research model is presented in Figure 1. In the following part we develop our research model step-by-step.\n4. Methodology: 4.1 Data collection\n5. Discussion and implications: The essence of this paper is to analyze the impact of sustainable supply chain collaboration. Particularly we investigate the impact on performance and sustainable production by following extensions of the RBV and drawing on the concept of co-alignment (e.g. Venkatraman, 1990; Venkatraman and Prescott, 1990).\n6. Conclusion, limitations, and directions for future research: The purpose of this study was to analyze the impact of misalignment in supply chain collaboration. Profile deviation methodology was used to empirically derive an ideal profile from the data collected with a questionnaire among manufactures across Europe. The hypothesized relationships were tested using the structural equation modeling approach. Our findings demonstrate that firms need to develop complex internal capabilities in order to be in a position to benefit from sustainability collaboration with suppliers and customers. Interestingly, these effects are similar for market performance as well as sustainability performance.\n",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Purpose: There is only limited knowledge about the performance benefits of the alignment of sustainability-related upstream and downstream collaboration. The purpose of this paper is to analyze the deviation from an optimal profile of supply chain collaboration and its detrimental effect on sustainability performance as well as market performance.\nDesign/methodology/approach: The authors analyze the deviation from an optimal profile of supply chain collaboration and its detrimental effect on sustainability as well as market performance. Using data collected from 259 European manufacturing firms and advanced structural equation modeling approach, the authors empirically test a number of direct, mediation, and moderation effects.\nFindings: The study shows that an alignment between supply chain initiatives does pay off. Furthermore, the results show that the effects of alignment on performance measures are mediated by the firm's internal sustainable production.\nResearch limitations/implications: The paper provides research limitations and implications as part of the research.\nPractical implications: The paper also offers important conclusions for practitioners. Particularly the paper shows that sustainable supply chain collaboration needs to be operated at an ideal profile in collaboration with advanced internal practices to generate improved performance.\nOriginality/value: This work is differentiated from earlier work through the joint consideration of alignment of supply chain collaboration for customers and suppliers, providing in combination with mediation analysis new nuances to the field of sustainable supply chain management.\n",
"role": "assistant"
}
] |
Micro-ecopreneurs and the UK food industry: short-term fad or sustainable reality?
|
[
"Ecopreneurship",
"United Kingdom",
"Eco-enterprise",
"Food retail",
"Entrepreneurial",
"Entrepreneurialism",
"Entrepreneurs",
"Retailing",
"Food industry"
] |
[
{
"content": "Summarize the following paper into structured abstract.\n\nIntroduction: While entrepreneurs bridge the gap between money, people, ideas and resources, the ecopreneur focuses on bridging the gap between environment and sustainability concerns (Dean and McMullen, 2007; Schaltegger and Wagner, 2008). Unlike archetype entrepreneurs motivated predominantly by the single bottom line - profit, ecopreneurs are often viewed as entrepreneurs who aspire to grow profitable, sustainable businesses while changing the world through working for improved social and environmental justice - a triple bottom line (Dixon and Clifford, 2007; Linnanen, 2002). Elkington (1997) defined the triple bottom line into three concepts: economic prosperity, environmental quality and social justice. Although research into ecopreneurship (relative to entrepreneurship) is still in its infancy, current scholars have posed some interesting questions and debates, in terms of trade-offs and conflicts between economic, environmental and social aspects of the concept (Margolis and Walsh, 2003; Kuratko, 2007; Zhang and Avery, 2009).\nEcopreneurship and the triple bottom line: Ecopreneurship is the cohesion of two words: \"ecological\" and \"entrepreneurship\" (Schaltegger, 2002). Ecological is the study of living organisms and their relationship to the environment whereas entrepreneurship, as discussed above, typically focuses on identifying opportunities to create value for customers and yielding profits for founders and investors (Shane and Venkataraman, 2000). Ecopreneurs are emerging as a new breed of entrepreneur and are defined as, \"entrepreneurs who found new businesses based on the principle of sustainability\" (Kirkwood and Walton, 2009, p. 205).\nEcopreneurship and the food industry: Recent discourse on environmental issues has raised awareness of the carbon \"food miles\" issue, and many ethical consumers now appear to be choosing food products with greater sensitivity to environmental issues (Bansal and Roth, 2000; Schaper, 2002; Harris et al., 2009; Ellis and Bastin, 2010). It could also be argued that micro food enterprises are now recognising opportunities to cater for a more environmentally aware consumer base. In addition, the sustainability agenda (Cohen and Winn, 2007) offers incentives to motivate new entrants to become more ecopreneurial (Rodgers, 2010).\nEcopreneurship and the key challenges: Uncertainty challenges faced by ecopreneurs stem from the resistance of potential consumers switching to ethical products, due of lack of awareness and high associated purchase costs (Co-operative Report, 2010; Rodgers, 2010). Pastakia (1998) suggested the resistance to consumers switching to ethical alternatives would remain high, unless consumers perceived a distinct advantage in areas such as price, quality and convenience. Others have highlighted how financing has become a major barrier for ecopreneurial start-ups (Goodall, 2008; Friend et al., 2009), with many financial institutions reluctant to loan, and offer financial support for smaller (ethical) businesses in food retail. Holt (2012) also suggested the widening distribution of eco-food channels has led to increased pressures for micro-enterprises, as larger supermarkets and larger specialist stores are able to undercut prices (see next section). In addition, consumers are now able to shop for eco-food products alongside their mainstream food shop, as well as shop online, instead of having to visit specialist local stores (Holt, 2012).\nRole of supermarkets and the triple bottom line: There is an argument that supermarkets could pose a possible threat to micro food enterprises as they sell around 35 per cent of local, organic and fair trade items (The White Paper, 2009) and consequently have wider financial margins, and so are better able to undercut prices the prices of smaller eco-retailers (Holt, 2012). However, there is an alternative argument which suggests micro eco-food enterprises can co-exist alongside the supermarkets and thus future trends could resemble more of a co-evolution arrangement for longer term sustainability (Hockerts and Wustenhagen, 2010). According to Dixon and Clifford (2007) the most challenging factors ecopreneurs face are balancing the triptych of social, environmental and economic goals - the so called triple bottom line. They believe there is constant pressure for ecopreneurs between running a viable business and remaining true to personal ethics and ideals. However since 2006, the more favourable social, political and regulatory climate has made a significant impact to the issues surrounding sustainability, and Holt and Barkemeyer (2010) now argue the conflicts in maintaining a triple bottom line can be managed more effectively. In addition, consumers are becoming increasingly aware of the key issues, and slowly realising the value of ethical enterprises.\nManagerial skills and personal development: If ecopreneurs are fundamentally passionate and driven by issues pertaining to the environment and sustainability, how do they also develop the personal and managerial skills required for hard-nosed business decision-making? In terms of managing human resources, ecopreneurs are arguably too \"soft\", becoming overly embroiled with local issues, local communities and local supply chains. In addition, employing local people for local jobs and providing crops for community markets are admirable ideas - but perhaps not cost-effective, nor commercially viable over the long term. If ecopreneurs are a new and sustainable breed of entrepreneur, then should developing and encouraging eco-conscious warriors as change agents, also be promoted further through embedding eco-enterprise skills and courses in our universities as well? Alternatively, the concept of the micro-ecopreneur may be a \"flash in in pan\", a short term fad, only to be swallowed up in the mainstream of business, as the UK's super and mini-food retailers carve up emerging eco-markets among themselves.\nConcluding remarks - calls for future research: We suggest future studies should examine ecopreneurship and micro food enterprises, in particular. This type of study is important, firstly because research regarding ecopreneurship is limited, especially when considering motivations for ecopreneurs who consider setting up micro eco-food ventures. Ecopreneurs defined by Isaak (1998), are individuals who found or set-up green businesses. Isaak (1998) suggests ecopreneurs pursue social and environmental goals by means of creating profit-oriented businesses. Current UK initiatives are welcoming ecopreneurs, and social enterprises to start their own businesses, and recognise that a new economic model must incorporate social and environmental measures of performance.\n",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to examine some of the key contextual, personal development and research issues facing micro-ecopreneurs in the UK food industry.\nDesign/methodology/approach: Key literatures and definitions are examined concerning the role of an ecopreneur, as well as the nature of ecopreneurship. Contextual ideas are drawn from arguments concerning the triple bottom line, and economic versus social and ethical trade-offs, as well as a closer examination of the UK food industry and future trends.\nFindings: The UK eco-enterprise market has been growing and dynamic. However, micro-ecopreneurs in the UK food sector are now faced with numerous trade-offs and challenges, not least in terms of educating consumers, overcoming difficult market situations, and gaining access to venture capital. In the absence of widespread data, there have been calls for further research to clarify fundamental conceptual questions, such as: What are the long-term sustainability trends for ecopreneurship in the UK food industry? How will ecopreneurs deliver high-quality produce alongside demands for cheaper and more processed foods, commonly found in many UK supermarkets? What motivations, personal development skills and managerial qualities are required from future micro-ecopreneurs for long-term success in a highly competitive sector?\nResearch limitations/implications: The authors direct future researcher attention to the key managerial and personal development issues facing many small business ecopreneurs.\nOriginality/value: This commentary is intended to explore broad issues and ask pertinent questions, in light of the harsh economic realities in 2013, experienced by many smaller UK ecopreneurs.\n",
"role": "assistant"
}
] |
The interaction effect on customer purchase intention in e-commerce: A comparison between substitute and complement
|
[
"E-commerce",
"Interaction effect",
"Complement",
"Customer purchase intention",
"Substitute"
] |
[
{
"content": "Summarize the following paper into structured abstract.\n\n1. Introduction: Customer purchase intention has gained considerable attention in the e-commerce literature (Oliver, 2009), and as a result, previous studies have addressed the causal relationships between direct and indirect effects on customer purchase intentions (Kassim and Abdullah, 2010; Lee et al., 2011; Liang and Zhang, 2012). For example, while customer satisfaction has been strongly linked to customer purchase intention (Cooil et al., 2007), it may have no impact on purchase intentions for low-involvement or low-income customers or when repurchase is not convenient (Seiders et al., 2005). However, Voss et al. (2010) argued that the interaction effect, which includes substitutes and complements, may alter the original relationship. Thus, a substitution occurs in the interaction between two variables when the marginal benefit of one variable decreases as the level of the other variable increases (Siggelkow, 2002). Thus, substitute interactions with respect to intention suggest that the intention will be increased by allocating resources to either one variable or to its substitute, depending on the marginal return for the respective initiatives. Conversely, two variables may interact as complements, which means that the marginal benefit of one variable increases as the level of the other variable increases. Thus, a complementary interaction reinforces the original effect on the results (Mao et al., 2012). In other words, complementary interactions with respect to intention suggest that the intention will be increased by investing simultaneously in both the variable and the complement. Therefore, the interaction effect may differ from the effect of the causal relationships on the intention. As such, to achieve a better understanding of the factors influencing customer purchase intention, the interaction effect cannot be ignored.\n2. Literature review and research hypothesis: 2.1 Factors influencing customer purchase intention\n3. Research method: 3.1 Framework of the research\n4. Analysis and results: 4.1 The empirical results\n5. Conclusion and suggestions: 5.1 Conclusions\n",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to explore the interaction effect of information richness, retailer brand, and extended offers on customer purchase intention in e-commerce.\nDesign/methodology/approach: Hierarchical moderator regression analysis and simple slope analysis were used to test the hypotheses, also 356 savvy internet consumers in Taiwan were investigated.\nFindings: The findings revealed that information richness, retailer brand, and extended offers are positively related to customer purchase intention. However, the interaction effects may differ in these relationships. While information richness complements both retailer brand and extended offers on customer purchase intention, extended offers may substitute retailer brand for increase in purchase intention.\nResearch limitations/implications: A bias may exist because of the sample from an online survey. The findings suggest that complements are actually synergistic strategies of factors, while substitution is a switching of the alternative.\nPractical implications: Practitioners shall utilize information richness to the complements, such as retailer brand and extended offers, to strengthen customer purchase intention. In contrast, they may provide extended offers for acquiring customers in the short-term period, when retailer brand is relatively low or unknown.\nOriginality/value: The findings of the study provide a new marketing strategy: managing substitutes and complements in adequate factors can give rise to better results for purchase intention increases in e-commerce.\n",
"role": "assistant"
}
] |
Application of the mixed Weibull distribution in machine reliability analysis for a cell formation problem
|
[
"Weibull distribution",
"Cellular manufacturing systems",
"Exponential distribution",
"Machine reliability",
"Mixed Weibull distribution",
"Multi-objective mixed integer programming",
"Weibull distribution"
] |
[
{
"content": "Summarize the following paper into structured abstract.\n\n__NO_TITLE__: Nomenclature\n1. Introduction: Cellular manufacturing system (CMS) is one of the most important applications of group technology that has gained popularity in the last two decades in both academic research and industrial application (Ameli and Arkat, 2008). CMS manages the formation of manufacturing cells in such a way that each part family is processed using a machine cell (Zakarian and Kusiak, 1997). Designing CMS is one of the serious issues in implementing, which includes two main steps: cell formation (CF) and cellular layout design. The second step can be transferred into a general purpose layout design problem by introducing a set of constraint. Therefore, the main step in CMS design is CF (Arkat et al., 2007a).\n2. Reliability consideration in the design of CMS: Machine reliability has to be estimated first in order to determine the effective machine capacity. In other words, reliability usually refers to the ability of some pieces of equipment or components to satisfactorily perform the task for which it was designed or intended, and it is characterized as the probability of an item fulfilling its function along with its life cycle (Lindqvist and Doksum, 2004). The fitting model which was used to investigate the dynamic behaviors of CMS is to distinct state continuous time Markov process, assuming the exponential or Weibull distribution for machine failure times (Diallo et al., 2001; Seifoddini and Djassemi, 2001; Das et al., 2007; Das, 2008). We will try to use mixed Weibull distribution for time failure rate. Consequently, this paper attempts to investigate the effects of more than one failure modes.\n3. Mathematical model: To present the model of CMS with reliability consideration, one must assume the following hypotheses:\n4. Numerical example: This section is intended to illustrate the applicability of the model by a hypothetical example with randomly generated data.\n5. Conclusion: This study used a new CMS design approach which included simultaneous consideration of machine reliability and system cost to obtain effective cell configuration. In this paper, a mixed Weibull distribution is used to explain failure time. Reliability analysis model based on the mixed Weibull distribution approach will give option to a user to select the suitable failure rate and modes for a specific situation. If the user used the exponential or Weibull distribution instead of the mixed Weibull distribution, the cost and reliability are erroneous; which leads the user to make wrong decisions. It also introduced a new reliability index. Furthermore, the derivation of this index shows the hazard function. Finally, the multi-objective optimization explained here is solved by e-constraint method, which provides tradeoff options to emphasize between system reliability and system costs.\n",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to understand the consequence of the use of mixed Weibull distribution in the cell formation problem. In reliability theory, a mixed distribution is used for more than one hazard cause, and the Weibull distribution can be used for ascendant, monotonous and descendant failure rate. Here, the authors mixed these two theme and use it in a common problem in group technology.\nDesign/methodology/approach: In this paper, the authors made a non-polynomial-hard mathematical model based on past research and solved it with an exact algorithm. The algorithm is coded and solved in GAMS to illustrate the model, and the authors use simulation. A common numerical example is solved with the model, and the results are compared.\nFindings: Reliability analysis model based on the mixed Weibull distribution approach will give options to a user to select the suitable failure rate and modes for a specific situation. If the user uses the exponential or Weibull distribution instead of the mixed Weibull distribution, the calculated cost and reliability are wrong; therefore, it leads to user making wrong decisions.\nOriginality/value: The model the authors use is the one used in past research, but in the past, researchers did not use the mixed distribution for explaining failure time. Therefore, the model can be considered as a new and more complete model.\n",
"role": "assistant"
}
] |
Successful IT start-ups' HRD practices: four cases in South Korea
|
[
"Human resource development",
"Communication technologies",
"South Korea",
"Case studies"
] |
[
{
"content": "Summarize the following paper into structured abstract.\n\n__NO_TITLE__: South Korea is recognized among the world's most technologically advanced and digitally connected countries, ranking third in the Information Technology (IT) industry and ninth in networked readiness (Economist Intelligence Unit, 2007; World Economic Forum, 2008). The IT industry creates a growth base for the Korean economy, accounting for 15.6 percent of GDP and 42.5 percent of exports, with a growth rate that doubled from 22.9 percent in 2002 to 46.7 percent in 2005 (Samsung Economic Research Institute, 2006a).\nResearch problem: Much attention has been paid to the IT industry due to its rapid growth and power base in many countries. The growth of the IT industry itself, however, does not necessarily guarantee that organizational issues have been successfully addressed. For instance, IT start-ups in South Korea have been so absorbed in developing new technologies that they may not be paying enough attention to organizational issues and HRD practices (Bae and Yu, 2005; Cho, 2003; Kim and Bae, 2004, 2005; Moon and Kwon, 2001). HRD practices in this study are defined as the integrated uses of three primary HRD areas (i.e. training and development, organization development, and career development) to improve individual, group, and organizational effectiveness (McLagan, 1989).A strong emphasis on global talent, the R&D workforce, performance-based incentives, and government-led HR strategy was observed in the study of IT firms' HRD practices in South Korea through interviews with 12 HR executives and a survey of 51 IT firms (Cho and McLean, 2007). One research topic that emerged from that study was, how did IT start-ups become either large or medium-sized companies over the past ten years?The number one HRD issue IT start-ups have faced is how to continue their noticeable success. Explanations for their growth revolve around not only breakthrough ideas, but also their unique HRD models and practices. It is, therefore, timely to look more closely at IT start-ups' HRD practices to determine if there are steps that were taken to develop and maintain their HRD expertise for continued growth. This study extends the authors' interest in HRD practices in the IT industry, especially in IT start-ups, for rapid growth, using a case study approach. Four companies were chosen for this study.\nLiterature review: Current HRD theory has often been developed in large organizations, and little is known about the extent to which that theory extends to smaller organizations (Heneman et al., 2000). Entrepreneurs in emerging companies have tended to portray \"organization-building as irrelevant\" in a world operating at internet speed (Baron and Hannan, 2002, p. 8). Often founders in the industry spend more time worrying about the scalability of their products and innovations than their culture and practices in managing employees (Cardon and Stevens, 2004).There is an increasing recognition that in-depth case studies play an important role in the study of effective HRD practices, especially in smaller and emerging companies. In order to understand South Korean IT start-ups' incredible growth over only ten years, both large and emerging IT firms' HRD practices in Europe, the USA, and South Korea are discussed here for reference. This section examines the importance of HRD in IT firms, managing human resources in smaller firms, and the growth of high-tech start-ups.Key features of IT firms\nResearch questions and methods: The research questions for this study were: How did four IT start-ups in South Korea become either large or medium-sized firms in just ten years? What HR practices supported the four IT firms' business success in a short period of time? What are the four firms' most urgent issues for continued growth?Case study\nResearch findings: five emergent themes: This section examines five emergent themes found in the case studies of four successful IT start-ups' in South Korea. The four IT start-ups faced common HRD challenges for continued growth. The five themes identified are adjusting to changing markets (globalization), the founder effect, workforce development, organizational culture, and challenges. Table III provides an overview of the four IT firms' HRD practices. Based on this overview, the authors discuss each emergent theme.Adjusting to changing markets: globalization\nDiscussion: balancing innovation and formalization: The importance of organizational culture for IT start-ups' continued growth emerged from this case study; the fast-growing IT companies need to establish the right organizational culture for success. Innovation takes place only in organizations where the organizational culture empowers individuals and accepts risk taking (Garavan et al., 1999). As culture change initiatives were embedded in these four IT firms, there was, however, the pitfall of bringing formalization for efficiency to the organization and losing innovation.As smaller firms grow, they inevitably shift from a reliance on a personal approach incorporating informality and flexibility, to a more formally constituted basis (Marlow, 2006). When companies were very small, there was no need for departmentalization where people worked for their business function only; however, when they became larger and departmentalized, formal routines and organizational units became necessary (Lee et al., 2007). A case study on Neowiz provided evidence that a small group of employees who had a high level of autonomy delivered innovative business ideas, leading the company to rank first among Korean internet companies (Lee et al., 2007). The four companies in this study shared similar experiences in having innovative and creative small groups of people who worked tirelessly to deliver a series of profitable business models and products.Research on smaller and emerging firms has shown that their efforts to formalize in order to revitalize their workforces may actually stifle creativity in return (Bae and Yu, 2005; Baron and Hannan, 2002; Clawson and Clifton, 2005; Marlow, 2006). Rather, innovative learning involves experimentation, risk-taking, and variance-seeking in what is essentially a creative process (Fenwick, 2003). For instance, as HUMAX became larger and established in the industry, its employees were gradually losing their innovative spirit. Too much supervision and control over employee creativity by formalized HRD practices, therefore, may weaken an innovative culture.Flexibility and lack of structure, which enabled these IT start-ups' rapid growth, also produced undisciplined staff and inefficient workflow. The issue, then, is how to balance flexibility and less structure with formalizing and controlled processes that help the company to grow continually. These four IT start-ups faced this daunting task, that is, the balancing act of innovative organizational culture with formalizing HRD practices and routines for continued growth.\nRecommendations for practice: The four IT start-ups in this study faced common HRD challenges for continued growth. The HRD themes that emerged from this case study are these firms' efforts to globalize, the strong effect of their founders, and the importance of workforce development and organizational culture. The leaders of fast-growing IT firms should carefully choose HRD practices to manage and develop their talent because HRD practices may shape the firms' innovative organizational culture, which, in turn, affect the firms' continued growth (Collins and Smith, 2006; Lee et al., 2007).The global talent for IT start-ups is among the critical HRD practices. To fulfill their vision of further growth, IT start-ups ought to recruit global talent to expand their business. NHN recently hired newcomers through a global recruiting channel and HUMAX implemented an open recruiting program for the first time in the companies' history, but it is not clear what selection criteria these companies used, except for technical expertise. By contrast, Infosys, an Indian IT start-up, has been very successful in hiring the best of the best by recruiting candidates who display a high degree of learnability - the ability to derive generic knowledge from specific experience and apply it into new situations (Thadamalla and Mankad, 2006). The company's well-defined HRD hiring practice is highly recognized for its outstanding global presence.Strengthening these companies' technology-based workforce signals that employees are valued in the organization. The four IT start-ups in this study showed that their heavy investment in R&D and workforce development contributed to their remarkable business performance. These firms' investment in training and development is at a high level by industry standards, whereas other small organizations and their HRD practices are reactive and short-term in outlook (Hill and Stewart, 2000). Through various workforce development initiatives, these fast-growing IT firms want to achieve several goals, including:* attracting the best knowledge-workers;* showing that they are valued; and* retaining their talent for many years.As a result of employee-oriented HRD practices, these thriving firms are listed among the best workplaces in Korea. Other IT start-up companies may find such practices to be beneficial as well.\nRecommendations for research: There is limited research on smaller and emerging firms, especially venture firms in South Korea. Bae and Yu (2005) is the only recent large-scale survey study of venture firms identified in South Korea. Their study underscored the importance of HR practices in start-ups of Korea using quantitative analysis, but it lacked qualitative details. This case study contributes to research on South Korean start-ups by detailing how HRD practices have supported the success of four IT start-ups over the past ten years. Although this case study employed multiple cases for comparison, due to focusing only on four cases, the results are contextualized and, thus, are limited in generalization.The debate of whether globalization of markets is leading to a convergence of HR practices has been around for several decades and remains unsettled (Bae and Rowley, 2001; Boyer, 2001; Brewster et al., 2005; Budhwar, 2004; Rowley and Benson, 2002). The authors of convergence theories have found that HR practices across countries are converging toward common patterns of work practice, while others contend that nation-specific HR practices continue to generate significant differences across countries. This debate will continue to be the focus of research going forward.In this context, a combination of national and corporate cultures can be incorporated as a major influencing factor in future comparative HRD studies (Ardichvili and Kuchinke, 2002; Haugh and McKee, 2004; Hofstede, 1993, 2007; Jack et al., 2006), especially when it comes to discuss about the importance of organizational culture as we emphasized in this study. For instance, to understand why employee turnover issues in IT firms are not serious in South Korea, researchers should take into account the influence of the nation's culture and shared values, as well as corporate culture.As this case study indicated, there are common issues to discuss across countries and industries. Indian IT companies, for instance, have shown fast growth and remarkable profits in a short period of time, but managing human resources is challenging and necessary for continued success (Khan and Chaturvedi, 2005; Gupta and Prashanth, 2004; Venkatech and Chakraverty, 2006). Research questions guiding this inquiry are: What HRD practices have supported India's remarkable growth in the IT industry within a short period of time? How do these HRD practices compare between India and South Korea? A comparative analysis of the IT industry between India and South Korea, therefore, will likely present rich data to suggest how to leverage HRD practices for continued growth and add value to international HRD studies.\n",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Purpose: - The purpose of this paper is to identify South Korea's successful IT start-ups' HRD practices to determine whether there are steps that must be taken to maintain their HRD expertise for continued growth.\nDesign/methodology/approach: - A case study approach employing four fast-growing IT start-up cases was undertaken based on semi-structured interviews with HR managers and CEOs, supported by site visit observations and archival sources.\nFindings: - The emergent themes resulting from an analysis of the four cases are adjusting to changing markets (globalization), the founder effect, workforce development, organizational culture, and challenges. These case studies show the importance of organizational culture for IT start-ups' continued growth.\nResearch limitations/implications: - Although the paper employed multiple cases for comparison, through focusing on only four cases, the results are contextualized and, thus, are limited in generalization.\nPractical implications: - The fast-growing IT firms should carefully choose HRD practices to manage and develop their talent because these practices may shape the firms' innovative organizational culture, which, in turn, affects the firm's continued growth.\nOriginality/value: - These case studies contribute to research on South Korea's IT start-ups by detailing how HRD practices have supported the success of the four IT start-ups over the past ten years. The paper adds qualitative details to previous studies' quantitative analysis of start-ups.\n",
"role": "assistant"
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] |
Through the wall of literacy: Transformative practice in social networks among GCSE re-sit Further Education students
|
[
"Literacy",
"Mobile learning",
"Visibility",
"Thresholds",
"Disorientation",
"Peripheral participants"
] |
[
{
"content": "Summarize the following paper into structured abstract.\n\n__NO_TITLE__: Don't go getting at me about them words and tha(Billy, 16).\nContext: Edmodo as social learning network: Edmodo.com is an application available for mobile and desktops that is highly similar in appearance and functionality to Facebook. Teachers can open free accounts, create a \"closed\" social network (i.e. invisible to others not within the network) and invite students to set up profiles, which appear as individual pages. The main posting area is a wall of activity which, on login, shows the latest posts by those in the group. The teacher-researcher's posts tended to be organisational reminders, learning strategies, questions, discussions and resources. Other functions include polls, quizzes and a message service. The teacher-researcher would either post notifications beforehand, in order to draw attention to the forthcoming lesson, or after, as reflective questions, reminders or lesson resources used. Within lessons, the network was used for submitting work, collating student notes and accessing task instructions. A conduct of use was explained to students at the outset of the course and that participation was expected of students in lesson times and that accessing and participating outside lessons could enhance their learning experience and progress.\nThe aim of the research: The notion of \"initiating\" a disorientating dilemma may be ethically controversial when considered in behaviourist terms (Baumgartner, 2001). Here it is based on the assertion that literacy is a social instrument and the educator is responsible for developing a student's language capabilities for cultural participation. This includes the inculcation of personal literacy into social and participatory affinity spaces (Gee, 2004) that technologies provide by design.\nMethods: The network was used by four separate groups of 16-19 aged students and 19+ aged adults, with a constant comparison made of their activity and communication. A content analysis was made of students' posts to the network, with the codes sorted thematically to examine how students used the network to support themselves and each other. Interviews were held with students across the two years to explore perceptions of the network and the community.\nFurther Education context: The current provision for FE offers routes for literacy that are limited by two characteristics. First, the curriculum model is based upon a locus of failure--framed as English GCSE as a re-sit subject. Results nationally appear to accentuate low self-esteem for students leaving school who, on entering vocational training colleges, must re-sit a qualification they have not achieved. It is well known that the GCSE re-sit is beset with practical problems (provision, facilities, staff skills and student engagement) that impede success (Higton et al., 2017). Alternative modes of literacy in FE are in Entry Level 1 and Functional Skills qualifications--both regarded as bridges towards GCSE completion.\nThe affordances of networks and online communities: Networks may serve as contexts suited to Dewey's theories of learning based on transactional relationships between people, environment, action and communication. Biesta (2009) synthesises these as integrated contexts: \"an ever-evolving transactional field\" (62) in which the \"organism\" is not only respondent to stimulus (as in behaviourism), but perpetually active and ready. Biesta goes on to state that organising a transactional context means creating opportunities for participation. If this is the case, through mobile residency--initiated by becoming a network member-a variety of affordances may arise.\nPeripheral members: While vocational, FE colleges also represent social inclusion, particularly among adult students, and are conduits for community integration. FE students are often regarded as having been marginalised by circumstance to social and academic inclusion (Passey et al., 2008). This is acute when the notion of communities of practice (CoP) (Lave and Wenger, 1991) is broached as an approach to organise student communities. Much side-lined in discourse around this social learning theory is the significance of \"legitimate peripheral participants\". In the current setting of education, the peripheral is problematized as not participating, hard-to-reach, or of students in perpetual circular motion (Atkins, 2016) not making progress, leading to debate around how to engage such individuals. Yet apathetic students cannot be equated to latent members in a community: the peripheral cannot be misconstrued as disengaged. A central principle of a CoP is that community assumes \"membership\", as if the peripheral will become naturally drawn to the core (Holmes and Meyerhoff, 1999) and as if everyone regards the learning group as a co-operative community.\nThresholds of engagement: Affective and attitudinal barriers are positively regarded as thresholds in this case study. \"Thresholds\" is a deliberately used term, adapted from Meyer and Land (2003), who describe the process of learning as navigating conceptual stages (thresholds), whereby students experience an epistemological transformation related to the schema of troublesome knowledge on a course of study. Such transformations, it is argued, can be deeply affective and characterised by an internalised resistance by students, though is irreversible once acceded to.\nMethods used to organise data: A coding of the posts to the network wall was made and an organisation made of students' online profiles sorted into user groups according to their frequency of activity. Individual profiles were labelled \"high-engaged users\" (HEU) and \"low-engaged users\" (LEU). HEUs tended to be highly motivated students in the classroom as well as online; a greater range of types of posts were made as a result, e.g. HEU asked and answered learning questions, made self-organisational checking posts (i.e. \"Are we allowed to take texts into the assessment?\"), shared examples of their work and gave feedback and encouragement to others. Meanwhile, LEUs made fewer than five posts altogether in a term, which typically expressed confusion about learning tasks or were notifications of absence or lateness. These codes were clustered together into \"types of posts\" and arranged as a continuum of engagement to show variance in use of the network. It was then possible to identify and invite a cross-section of the participants for interview, to ensure that LEUs views of the network had equilibrium with HEUs. To complement this data and establish naturalistic inquiry, observations were drawn from participants' reactions to use of the network in classrooms where it was blended to learning activity. This was made in order to record incidence of attitudinal references to the network. The resulting data were systemically analysed in an interpretative procedure, using Initial and Substantive coding, clustering codes to themes. These were sorted in varying ways, including a visual representation.\nVignette--Mike (29): Mike was an adult student with dyslexia that had gone undetected in school. He has a high work ethic and on leaving school he started and ran a successful plastering firm for several years. Frustration had characterised his school life, which he pointed to when explaining that he loved the textiles classes, sewing and making creatures from fabric \"with the girls\" but that he kept getting sent back to English. Finally, one day he got angry and asked his English teacher permission to go to the bathroom and kept walking away, leaving school once and for all at 15, and not bothering to collect his exam results for nine months. For several subsequent years he worked before he decided to return to college to improve his reading in order to read his daughter bedtime stories and because he \"didn't want to be the worst reader in my family\". Mike described how he made up the stories when he read children's books at bedtime, but his daughter \"caught him\" out as her own reading improved. This sense of hiding his dyslexia demonstrates the challenges of social literacy facing students such as Mike and entering college was an emotional experience for him. It appears a relief to him that the college diagnosed his dyslexia that his school had not, which helped explain many years of his life history. Throughout the months of the first term he disclosed these difficulties to the teacher confidentially and sought close support. The teacher urged him to be more proactive in the use of the network to improve, but he avoided any action in it, stating adamantly \"I'm not using tha\".\nCollaborative editing: Students were organised into groups of three and given a previous piece of written work, with the grade boundaries shown. The challenge for the students was to re-write the content and improve the grade and quality to a higher level. In this case, the focus was very deliberately set on editing as the basis for improved language control. Discussion with students resulted in a co-created editing framework, based on: syntax clarity and varied lexis. Students' were instructed to divide the piece into sections and re-write their own selected section, check the editing of others writing, ensure fluency between the separate sections and combine to one piece. At the end of the task, the groups nominated one member to login and post the work for the rest of the class to read and grade accordingly, giving feedback on the quality and where it could be improved even further.\nArtefact creation and network as exhibition: Aiming to sustain momentum and promote residence to the network, the next activity was based on language reconstruction from existing artefacts to create new multimodal texts. The course text (Touching the Void by Joe Simpson) was used with pages extracted from the book and students instructed to closely read the page distributed to them. Following this reading, students' selected specific words and phrases to capture mood through emotive language, with the resulting images photographed and posted to the network wall. In this instance a playful form of zooming-in and selection of lexis based on an identification of the text's themes reflects aspects implicit to language development in both writing, as constructed, and reading, as meaning making. The resulting artefacts were posted to the network as an exhibition of remixed creation from existing texts. This visual form allows for a personalised literacy to emerge with diminished conscience about publishing the results, while rendering the network as a gallery.\nOpen publishing: The main network task was made to exploit the growing confidence of all members and build further community participation. Here, the network serves principally as a publishing platform.\nVignette--Aniqah (25): Aniqah was a quiet student who described how her shyness had always led to her not contributing or achieving academic qualifications. This exterior shyness betrayed an intrinsic motivation and inner confidence that needed an outlet and recognition. She participated in the course across two years, failing on the first attempt and admitting that the reasons for it where her own lack of readiness at returning to the classroom. When she came back in the second year, she was a different person both in classrooms as well as online (in Edmodo) to how she had been in the first year. Although she retained much of the same disposition in the classroom as the previous year--quiet, unassuming and seemingly uncertain--a determination arose and was given license where, in the subsequent year, she took a highly self-directed and proactive approach, acting as a digital mentor to the rest of the group when using Edmodo.\nFindings: There was a change in disposition shown in peripheral students perceptions of network, with open statements of resistance (\"I'm not joining that\") followed by a changed view of the network once creative tasks had been situated to it (\"it was good to read over my classmates' thoughts and ideas when they did contribute\").\nConclusions: The network is presented as an arena for the performance of renewed confidence, and the publishing gives the student a sense of authorship with the community assuming the position of readership, creating a shift in identity that re-position literacy as social and of their own capability, rather than accredited. It is posited that the interaction between individual and network (as a tool) facilitates a shift in student's self-perceptions of literacy ability. In the course of the study, the presence of self in the network becomes assimilated to the practice of processes towards objectives (\"momentum\") and peripheral members are drawn in through network operations to interlinked interactions with a community becoming routine, so that conscious acts become unconscious ones (Kuutti, 1996). Transformation arises through a shift in habitus that enables a self-perception of capability, manoeuvring through thresholds from the penumbra towards a community core in ways that were once hypothetical, but have now become operational.\n",
"role": "user"
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{
"content": "Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to explain how peripheral participants contributed to and became more central members of a community of practice based in a social network that was used to support mobile learning approaches among post-compulsory education students. The notion was that in inducing participation through pedagogical strategies, individualised online presence could be increased that would support studentship, confidence and literacy improvements in participants who are normally apprehensive about online and formal learning contexts.\nDesign/methodology/approach: The network was used by four separate groups of 16-19 aged students and 19+ aged adults, with a constant comparison made of their activity and communication. A content analysis was made of students' posts to the network, with the codes sorted thematically to examine how students used the network to support themselves and each other. Interviews were held with students across the two years to explore perceptions of the network and the community.\nFindings: Peripheral participants navigate through ontological thresholds online to develop individual identity presence online. Increased communicated actions (\"posts\") improves participation overall and the interaction of members in terms of developing a community of practice online. The results of communicated actions posted in visible online spaces improved the literacy control and willingness to publish content created by those peripheral participants.\nResearch limitations/implications: The study is taken from a small sample (approx. 100 students) in a case study comparing results across four different groups in an English Further Education college. Most of the positive results in terms of an impact being made on their literacy capability was found among adult students, as opposed to students in two 16-19 aged groups. Research implications identify hypothetical stages of identity presence online for reluctant and peripheral participants. This shows the potential of students to be induced to openly participate in visible contexts that can support further identity development.\nPractical implications: The implications show that blended learning is necessary to improve the opportunity for mobile learning to happen. Blended learning in itself is dependent on and simultaneously improves group cohesion of learners in online communities. When students develop a momentum of engagement (and residence within) networks they exploit further technological features and functions and become more co-operative as a group, potentially reducing teacher presence. Learning activities need to support the peripheral participants in discrete and purposeful ways, usually achieved through personalised supported learning tasks. The notion and attention paid to the difficulties in bringing peripheral participants online has implications for the prescription of online learning as a form of delivery, especially among FE students.\nSocial implications: This paper problematizes the notion of peripheral participants and suggests they are overlooked in consideration of learning delivery, design and environments. Peripheral participants may be considered to be students who are at risk of not being involved in social organisations, such as communities, and vulnerable to diminished support, for instance through the withdrawal of face-to-face learning opportunities at the expense of online learning.\nOriginality/value: This paper makes a small contribution to theories surrounding communities of practice and online learning. By deliberately focusing on a population marginalised in current educational debate, it problematizes the growing prescription of online learning as a mode of delivery by taking the perspectives and experiences of peripheral participants on board.\n",
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Waiting time at a fast-track diagnostic clinic
|
[
"Patient satisfaction",
"Patient preference",
"Patient expectations",
"Appointment and schedules",
"Fast-track clinics"
] |
[
{
"content": "Summarize the following paper into structured abstract.\n\nIntroduction: Cancer patient waiting times have a psychosocial impact, resulting in lower patient satisfaction (Grunfeld et al., 2009; Van Steenbergen et al., 2010; Potter et al., 2007; Korsgaard et al., 2008; Gonzalez-Hermoso et al., 2004; Thorne et al., 2006). Since patient satisfaction is an important quality indicator, pressure to reduce waiting times in healthcare is growing (Pather et al., 2010; Bleustein et al., 2014). To ensure that Netherlands healthcare staff strive for waiting time reductions, the Dutch government, in collaboration with the Dutch Cancer Society (KWF), formulated guidelines stating the maximum waiting time for patients with malignancies (KWF, 2006). However, these guidelines are based on fragmented literature concerning different tumor types. More importantly, guidelines fail to take patients' preferences and expectations into account. Expected waiting time contributes to patient satisfaction or dissatisfaction; the disconfirmation paradigm proposes that dissatisfaction arises when the time spent waiting exceeds expected waiting time (Thompson et al., 1995; Bleustein et al., 2014; Thompson and Yarnold, 1995). Although the disconfirmation paradigm was originally intended to measure customer satisfaction, it has since been validated among emergency department patient populations; i.e., patients who waited shorter than expected were the most satisfied (Thompson and Yarnold, 1995). Although studies assess this paradigm in settings other than emergency care, no studies have evaluated the disconfirmation paradigm in an oncology outpatient setting (Sanmartin et al., 2007; Stahl et al., 2003; Weissenstein et al., 2011). Although studies assessing the disconfirmation paradigm in an oncology setting are lacking, some assessed actors relate to patient satisfaction with waiting time. These studies indicate that a fast-track diagnostic clinic for cancer patients may increase psychosocial stress, suggesting that patients do not have sufficient time to cope with their cancer diagnosis (Harcourt, 1999; Lampic et al., 2001; Poole et al., 1999; Montgomery and Mccrone, 2010). However, the latter studies were conducted among breast cancer patients who are relatively young and may perceive treatment (most commonly mastectomy) as mutilating (Lampic et al., 2001; Poole et al., 1999), so results are difficult to generalize to other oncology populations. Patients with gastrointestinal cancer are often older and tend to have different expectations and preferences regarding diagnostic interventions and treatment (Kornblith et al., 2002; Elkin et al., 2007). Maister (1984) observed that waiting time perception is related to anxiety and uncertainty. In cancer care, this anxiety and uncertainty may change; e.g., when patients receive their diagnosis and treatment plan, their anxiety and uncertainty may decrease (Maister, 1984; Harcourt, 1999). Hence, it is possible that waiting time experience also changes. Our aim, therefore, was to: first, evaluate waiting time expectations and experiences among patients with a gastrointestinal malignancy visiting an established fast-track outpatient clinic; and second, whether expectations and experiences change over time.\nMethods: Ours was a prospective interview study of patients with (suspected) gastrointestinal malignancies, which was approved by the local medical ethics committee.\nSetting: Our study took place in an established one-day diagnostic fast-track clinic (FTC) for gastrointestinal malignancies, located in a Dutch university hospital, which receives gastrointestinal oncology referrals from practitioners throughout The Netherlands. Referred patients have either a confirmed or suspected malignancy. The FTC advertises both a short waiting time (6 working days) for an appointment and a short waiting time (3 weeks) for treatment. However, differences may exist between waiting time before the appointment experienced by the patient and the waiting time defined by the FTC. Patient waiting time is defined as the time between referring physician's first contact with the FTC and actual FTC appointment. Waiting time, defined by the FTC, comprises the time between completed referral and patient appointment. A referral is considered complete when imaging materials and referral letter are present at the FTC. This waiting time definition has a logistic perspective. In our study, both waiting time definitions were used; i.e., waiting time experienced by the patient and waiting time defined by FTC staff. Patients spend an entire day at the FTC where all diagnostic tests are performed on the appointment day, after which the patient's condition is discussed in a multidisciplinary team (MDT) meeting at noon. In the afternoon, physicians discuss the diagnosis and treatment plan with the patient. The FTC has various MDTs: colorectal cancers (CRC); esophageal and gastric cancer (ESOGAS) and pancreatic and biliary tumors (PB). Each team attends a different tumor-specific MDT meeting. In 2014, the median time from referral to appointment was four (IQR 3-6) working days and the median time from first appointment to treatment was 17 (IQR 12-23) working days.\nSample and procedure: Adult patients understanding the Dutch language referred to the FTC were eligible for inclusion in our study. Nurses working at the FTC selected patients using a purposeful sampling strategy. This ensured a representative sample with different gastrointestinal malignancies treated at the FTC (CRC; ESOGAS; PB) and from three different age groups (\nResults: From January 2014 to May 2015, 32 interviews were held with five male and four female patients (median age 65, IQR 48-74) years. Men were interviewed four times and women three times (Table I). The first interview lasted around 07:55 minutes (minimum 04:22; maximum 12:05), the second lasted 06:52 minutes (min 03:16; max 13:58), the third 07:42 minutes (min 06:06; max 14:00) and the fourth lasted 08:37 minutes (min 04:28; 10:15).\nDiscussion: We evaluated gastrointestinal malignancy patient expectations and experiences with waiting time at a fast-track clinic; we provide insights into how patient experiences change. Although all patients in this study expected a short waiting time before the appointment, their short waiting time definition varied between a few days and two weeks. Interestingly, although all patients (except patient 7) initially experienced the waiting time before the appointment as being short, this experience apparently changed over time. In our study, one-third adjusted their perceptions about waiting time before the FTC appointment; this change seemed to be unrelated to disease severity.\nConclusion: Our study provides insights into patient waiting time expectations and preferences. Data saturation was reached in a small sample; however, there were several diagnoses and prognoses and patients expressed differing expectations regarding waiting time. This permits a higher confidence in the study's external validity, which emphasizes the need for a more individualistic and personalized approach to waiting times for which, preferably, patients' expectations and wishes are taken into account. To ensure that patients have realistic expectations, clear information should be available from their physicians (expectation management). Whether implementing such expectation management enhances patient experiences among different patient groups is worth studying. Over the last decade, staff in many healthcare settings focussed on providing patient-centered care and patients are encouraged to participate in the decision-making process; however, they are not yet encouraged to provide input regarding waiting time duration (Elwyn et al., 2014). In our study, all patients wished for a short waiting time before the first appointment. If they report the same reasons, then we should strive for a waiting time that is as short as logistically possible before the first appointment. However, there was no consensus regarding waiting time before treatment. Ideally, patients who wish to wait for treatment to process their diagnosis and put their affairs in order will have time to do so, providing room on the waiting lists for patients who wish to start their treatment as soon as possible.\n",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Purpose: Guidelines stating maximum waiting times fail to take cancer patients' expectations into account. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to assess patients' expectations and experiences with their waiting time at a fast-track clinic.\nDesign/methodology/approach: Patients were selected using a purposeful sampling strategy and were interviewed four times: before the visit; one day after; two weeks after the visit; and one week after starting treatment. Interviews were audiotaped and independently coded by two researchers.\nFindings: All patients (n=9) preferred a short waiting time before the first visit; they feared that their disease would spread and believed that cancer warrants priority treatment. Six patients experienced the waiting time as short, one had no expectations and two felt they waited longer than expected; three patients changed this evaluation during the study. Six patients received treatment - four preferred to wait before treatment and two wanted to start treatment immediately. Reasons to wait included putting one's affairs in order, or needing to adjust to the diagnosis.\nPractical implications: Cancer patients prefer a short waiting time before the first visit but have different expectations and needs regarding waiting time before treatment. Ideally, their expectations are managed by their treating physician to match waiting time reality.\nOriginality/value: This is the first study to assess cancer patients' waiting time experiences and how these experiences change over time. This study paves the way for establishing a framework to better assess patient satisfaction with oncology care waiting time. An important aspect, is managing patients' expectations.\n",
"role": "assistant"
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] |
"A ROSE, by any other name"...: relationship typology and performance measurement in supply chains
|
[
"Performance measurement",
"Governance",
"Supply chain management",
"Relationship marketing"
] |
[
{
"content": "Summarize the following paper into structured abstract.\n\n1. Introduction: Supply chain management (SCM) is a relatively new and dynamic discipline, having emerged in 1980s, and it is still in the process of defining itself (Mentzer et al., 2008; Lambert et al., 2008). This search for identity is complicated because SCM, while originating in Logistics but espousing an integrative vocation, spans several academic disciplines including operations management, marketing, and information systems (Frankel et al., 2008). The domain dispute in the academia is mirrored in the practitioner's world, where supply chain responsibilities are often split into functional \"fortified silos\", sometimes leading to conflicting priorities and turf wars (Lambert et al., 2008, p. 114).\n2. ROSE - a typology of performance measures: 2.1 Performance measurement in the SCM literature\n3. Inter-organizational governance and performance: 3.1 Inter-organizational governance\n4. Contributions, limitations, and directions for future research: This paper makes two significant contributions to practitioners and the academic literature. First, the paper develops a comprehensive classification of supply chain performance measures that includes both financial and non-financial measures. Unlike accounting based performance measures like ROI and ROA which are backward looking (Rust et al., 2002), non-financial performance measures identified in the ROSE framework are forward looking measures thus enabling companies to anticipate problems and take corrective measures before the problems actually occur. For example, customer satisfaction is an important measure of future performance since it captures the likelihood that customers will return to purchase again (Lehmann and Reibstein, 2006).\n",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Purpose: The aim of this paper is to develop a comprehensive framework of supply chain performance that includes relationship, operational, strategic and economic performance measures.\nDesign/methodology/approach: The literature regarding inter-organizational performance including: supply chain management, logistics and marketing performance measures is reviewed. A synthesis of the review provides the foundation for developing a comprehensive model of supply chain management performance.\nFindings: The review and synthesis finds that supply chain performance focuses primarily on operational and economic performance measures while paying less attention to relational and strategic performance measures. The comprehensive framework identifies four major categories of supply chain performance measures: relational; operational; strategic; and economic - hence the name ROSE.\nOriginality/value: This comprehensive framework identifies four types of supply chain measures that can be used as a guiding framework by both academics and practitioners. The paper also offers directions for future work in the form of propositions.\n",
"role": "assistant"
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] |
Brand authenticity leads to perceived value and brand trust
|
[
"Perceived value",
"Brand trust",
"Brand authenticity",
"Craft beer market",
"Individuality",
"Consistency",
"Continuity"
] |
[
{
"content": "Summarize the following paper into structured abstract.\n\n1. Introduction: Nowadays, consumers are faced with increasing commercialization of products and a globalization market (Morhart et al., 2015). Consumers look for brands that are relevant and genuine. They increasingly search for authenticity in brands because of authenticity has overtaken quality as the prevailing purchasing criterion (Gilmore and Pine, 2007). Authenticity begins to capture interest amongst marketers, keen to analyze on consumer preference for authentic offerings (Taheri et al., 2018), which enhances consumer experience (both in terms of the consumer's subjectivity and in relation to their experience with others). Therefore, delivering authentic experiences to consumers is necessary (Kim and Bonn, 2016).\n2. Literature review: 2.1 The BA construct\n3. Research methodology: 3.1 Research methods\n4. Results: The six constructs used in the research were tested for internal reliability. In this case, five of the six scales were found to have relatively high internal reliability. The BI scale was comprised of three items (a=0.85), the BCons scale contained three items (a=0.84) and the BCont scale consisted of three items (a=0.87). Cronbach's a values for the five PV items and three BT items were both 0.88, indicating that these two scales have the highest reliability of the six. The BA scale, comprising six items, was found to have the lowest Cronbach's a value of 0.58. A possible explanation for this phenomenon is the inclusion of two reverse-coded items in the BA scale, which may have instigated comprehension issues among respondents. These two items were eliminated in hope of improving the quality of the scale and it was then re-tested, resulting in a revised Cronbach's a value of 0.82.\n5. Discussion: This study provides some significant contributions to the marketing theory. This research has confirmed that the three antecedents of individuality, consistency and continuity effectively capture and positively influence consumer perceptions of BA and that a higher consumers'perception of brand authenticity resulting in higher perceived value and brand trust. Nowadays, brands' competitive battles for winning the consumer's mind and heart are focusing in forging deep connections with individuals, rather than delivering excellent service or innovative technologies (Napoli et al., 2016). Our findings are consistent with previous researches (Alexander, 2009; Kolar and Zabkar, 2010; Newman and Dhar, 2014) where authentic brands offer consumers an opportunity for establishing a stronger emotional connection with a brand, compared to less authentic brands.\n6. Conclusion, limitations and future research: The positive and significant relationships found in this study provide factual support that BA can and should be considered a critical factor for the success of brands. A positive causal relationship was found among all variables in the study, confirming all five hypotheses. Thus, the individual, consistent, and continuous fulfilment of the brand promise is essential for creating and increasing perceptions of authenticity (Kolar and Zabkar, 2010). This is a particularly important revelation in the craft beer market due to with an immense number of brands employing very similar marketing strategies, it is increasingly difficult to position a single brand as having high individuality, but the yearning for BA is evident.\n",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Purpose: This paper investigates consumer perceptions of brand authenticity (BA), perceived value (PV) and brand trust (BT) into the context of craft beer market. The purpose of this paper is to examine the statistical associations between these constructs as well as the three antecedents of BA: individuality, consistency and continuity.\nDesign/methodology/approach: The survey, delivered in an online format, was completed by 749 respondents from the USA. These respondents were gained through a basic simple random sampling technique. After conducting data analysis techniques such as reliability, correlation and regression, all five research hypotheses were accepted.\nFindings: All three antecedents of BA were found to have significant influence on the first-order construct. Also, BA was shown to have a substantial effect on both PV and BT. The relationship between brand individuality and BA was the most significant of the five, while the association between BA and PV was found to be the least significant.\nOriginality/value: Prior research on BA, the majority of which has involved a qualitative approach, has been severely limited. The authors' work deepens the study of the effects of BA, or its various antecedents, on PV and BT, enhancing the research with an empirical, quantitative analysis. In addition to the shortage of investigation related to these factors, there has been a nearly complete absence of the application of these variables to the craft beer market.\n",
"role": "assistant"
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] |
Green business strategy and export performance: An examination of boundary conditions from an emerging economy
|
[
"Green",
"Export performance",
"Resources",
"Product positioning",
"Contingency theory",
"Resource-based view"
] |
[
{
"content": "Summarize the following paper into structured abstract.\n\n1. Introduction: The growing global concern about environmental issues (Albino et al., 2009; Banerjee, 2002) has resulted in an increased pressure on firms and heightened levels of scrutiny from various stakeholders (Chabowski et al., 2011). In response, companies have begun to incorporate environmental issues in their strategic planning (Aragon-Correa and Sharma, 2003; Buysse and Verbeke, 2003). Nonetheless, extensive research has been conducted in order to address the question: \"does it pay to be green?\" (see reviews, e.g. Ambec and Lanoie, 2008; Etzion, 2007; Orlitzky et al., 2003; Sharma and Starik, 2002). On one hand, there are arguments that addressing environmental concerns imposes additional costs and decreases firm profitability (e.g. Clarkson et al., 2011; Hahn et al., 2014; Li et al., 2017). On the other, several scholars support that by being environmentally friendly, a firm does not only save costs in terms of energy and water management, but also enjoys higher levels of sales and financial performance (e.g. Dangelico and Pontrandolfo, 2015; Hart and Dowell, 2011; Leonidou et al., 2017).\n2. Theoretical framework and hypotheses: The RBV describes the corporation as a bundle of strategic resources that are diversely distributed among firms in the market to achieve sustainable competitive advantage (Barney, 1991). Firm resources are comprised of assets, capabilities and attributes managed with an intent to execute strategies that increase firm effectiveness and efficiency (Daft, 1983). Hart (1995) extends this perspective and emphasizes on the importance of developing new resources and competencies that lead companies to engage in environmentally friendly operations. Hence, the RBV indicates that firms need to possess the necessary resources and capabilities in order to improve their export competitiveness based on green strategies (Chen et al., 2016; Sarkis et al., 2010), which has led to a great deal of interest by both scholars and executives (Leonidou and Leonidou, 2011; Leonidou et al., 2013).\n3. Research methodology: 3.1 Research context\n4. Analysis and results: 4.1 Measurement model\n5. Discussion and conclusion: This study contributes to the growing literature about green business strategy and is stimulated by the question: \"when does it pay to be green?\" More specifically, it draws upon the insights of both the RBV and contingency theory and enhances our understanding of green business strategy's impact on exporting performance when pursued by companies from emerging countries.\n",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Purpose: Building upon the insights of the resource-based view and contingency theory, the purpose of this paper is to investigate the boundary conditions of green business strategy on the export financial performance of firms from an emerging economy.\nDesign/methodology/approach: A quantitative study was conducted to test the conceptual model. In total, 224 questionnaires were collected from exporting manufacturing companies and were analyzed using full information maximum likelihood.\nFindings: The results of the study demonstrate that green business strategy has a strong and positive relationship with export financial performance. Also, environmental orientation and cost leadership play a significant and positive moderating role in this relationship. However, green product differentiation is complementary with green business strategy only when a cost leadership strategy is also maintained.\nPractical implications: The study has practical implications since it identifies green business strategy as an important lever for emerging export managers. More specifically, they have to be aware of the challenges when they operate outside the cost leadership boundaries and should actively seek to develop the environmental orientation of employees and managers.\nOriginality/value: This study reveals the relationship between green business strategy and export success for emerging country exporters that are understudied and face unique challenges. In particular, the authors explore the contingency factors that strengthen or weaken the relationship and provide additional insight to the question: \"when does it pay to be green?\" for exporters from emerging economies.\n",
"role": "assistant"
}
] |
Music subculture as a source of conspicuous consumption practices: a qualitative content analysis of "altered movement" songs and music videos
|
[
"Mexico",
"Conspicuous consumption",
"Qualitative content analysis",
"Music subculture"
] |
[
{
"content": "Summarize the following paper into structured abstract.\n\nIntroduction: In marketing and consumer behavior literature, the study of subcultures revolve around the concepts of \"subcultures of consumption\" (Schouten and McAlexander, 1995) and \"brand communities\" (Muniz and O'Guinn, 2001), which position the consumption of a product, service or brand as the integrative and central element of a subculture. However, a subculture is a broader phenomenon in which consumption practices are governed by shared experiences, lifestyles, identities and ideologies (de Burgh-Woodman and Brace-Govan, 2007). Hence, it is fundamental to develop a broader analysis of subcultures in marketing research. We do so by studying a subculture through music, an important cultural force with the potential of creating and maintaining subcultures (Burkhalter and Thornton, 2014). Music subcultures have recently been acknowledged as relevant entities in the formation of self-identities, shared lifestyles and consumption experiences in contemporary societies (Ulusoy and Firat, 2011).\nLiterature review: Postmodern subcultures\nMethodology: A qualitative content analysis of lyrics and music videos was used to analyze conspicuous consumption practices in \"altered movement\" songs. This research method is a flexible data analysis method aimed at integrating, interpreting and synthesizing qualitative findings (Finfgeld-Connett, 2014). The main priority of this research was to let patterns emerge from lyrics and music videos by using few preconceptions of the topic (conspicuous consumption practices). Hunter (2011) used a similar approach to analyze hip-hop lyrics and music videos.\nAnalysis of results: Based on the analysis of the 78 songs and music videos, 4 predominant narratives of conspicuous consumption were identified: \"from poor to rich,\" \"power through violence,\" \"lavish lifestyle\" and \"power over women\" (Figure 1). All of these narratives depict the current economic and political situation in Mexico, where great levels of poverty and inequality, along with a lack of economic opportunities, have triggered an exponential increase of criminal violence related to drug trafficking (Atuesta and Ponce, 2017). In this context, poor people are more susceptible to adopt conspicuous consumption practices to engage in social comparisons with wealthier individuals (Zhang et al., 2016).\nDiscussion: The identification of these four narratives comprising the sample of \"altered movement\" songs sheds light on the different messages, items and lifestyles projected by the drug subculture to individuals. Adepts of this music subculture find in drug traffickers a role model worthy of admiration and emulation. In addition, the identity narratives strengthen the idea of drug-trafficking as a means to attain a desired and prestigious lifestyle. The drug subculture, through the \"altered movement\" music style, embraces materialistic and conspicuous practices as crucial elements to achieve life satisfaction and gain social recognition. Hence, consumers attempt to emulate narco-lifestyle by either joining a drug cartel or by imitating narco-lifestyle through the consumption of luxurious brands, illegal weapons and expensive alcoholic beverages.\nMarketing implications: The implications of the current research to the marketing and consumer behavior areas are manifold. First, the analysis of identity narratives provides a broader understanding of consumption practices and lifestyles within a music subculture. Thus, this research overcomes the theoretical limitation identified by de Burgh-Woodman and Brace-Govan (2007) about the central role marketing studies had given to consumption in the analysis of subcultures. Moreover, identity narratives may work as demarcating solutions through which individuals can strengthen their subcultural affiliation and maintain a coherent identity (Shankar et al., 2009). Hence, identity narratives may be regarded as important elements to comprehend music consumption and music subculture affiliation.\nConclusions: The main aim of the study was to gain an understanding of the role of music subcultures in conveying conspicuous consumption practices. Music subcultures exert significant influence on the way consumers organize their consumption activities, lifestyles and identities in contemporary society (Ulusoy, 2016). However, there is a dark side in this phenomenon regarding the power of music subcultures to generate and reinforce negative behaviors on their adepts. Hence, the focus of the research was centered on the drug subculture and specifically its new music genre, the \"altered movement.\" The distinctiveness of this music genre lies in the messages it conveys on the lavish lifestyle of drug traffickers.\n",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Purpose: The purpose of this study is to focus on analyzing the role of music subcultures in the communication and promotion of conspicuous consumption practices. The object of study is the \"altered movement\" as the music style of the drug subculture in Mexico.\nDesign/methodology/approach: A qualitative content analysis of 78 lyrics and music videos of \"altered movement\" was carried out between August and December 2018.\nFindings: The analysis of lyrics and music videos leads to the identification of four narratives (from poor to rich, power through violence, lavish lifestyle and power over women) and diverse symbolic markers (luxury brands mainly) that together, display messages aimed at promoting conspicuous consumption practices.\nOriginality/value: The current research expands the body of literature of music subcultures in the consumer research area by contesting the common conception of this phenomenon as a healthy source of self-identity formation and deepening into its role as a source of conspicuous consumption practices.\n",
"role": "assistant"
}
] |
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