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Effect of chemical admixtures on concrete's electrical resistivity
|
[
"Concrete",
"Electrical resistivity",
"Admixture",
"Non-destructive testing"
] |
[
{
"content": "Summarize the following paper into structured abstract.\n\n1. Introduction: Electrical resistivity can be defined as the capacity of a material to resist the passage of electrical current. Therefore, resistivity is the inverse of conductibility. Since the non-destructive test of electrical resistivity is simple, low-cost and has great repeatability, it can be easily used in the field to control the quality of the concrete (Hornbostel et al., 2013). An electrical resistivity test can be a powerful tool to predict the service life of concrete structures and to check the concrete's quality. Therefore, this type of study may help to better implement this technique, aiding in maintenance and rehabilitation projects.\n2. Materials and methods: 2.1 Materials\n3. Results and discussion: Figure 3 shows the electrical resistivity results of the concretes at 28, 63 and 91 days. These results were analysed statistically to check if the differences between mixtures were due to the changes of the variables or due to noise during the tests. The one-way ANOVA variance method was applied (significance level of 5%), followed by a multiple variance analysis to verify the differences between each parameter tested. According to Table IV, all parameters (SP, AE and water/cement ratio) showed statistically relevant differences.\n4. Conclusions: The results of this study showed that the usage of superplasticizer and air AEs has an influence on the electrical resistivity of concrete. It is also possible to observe that producing a concrete with high fluidity by increasing the w/c ratio, instead of using a superplasticizer admixture, generates a substantial loss in the mechanical strength and also in the electrical resistivity, as expected.\n",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to verify the influence of superplasticizer and air entrainment admixtures (AEs) in the electrical resistivity of concrete.\nDesign/methodology/approach: Ten different types of concrete have been studied. Three levels of superplasticizer and air AEs have been used (0.20, 0.35 and 0.50 per cent). Concrete samples were cast and the electrical resistivity was monitored at the ages of 28, 63 and 91 days. Compressive strength and density tests have also been executed.\nFindings: The superplasticizer admixture presented an optimal level of 0.35 per cent that significantly increased the electrical resistivity. The air AEs at the same dosage caused a considerable decrease in the electrical resistivity. The concrete with air AEs showed highest resistivity/MPa ratio.\nResearch limitations/implications: The results should be carefully extrapolated for other materials and admixtures.\nPractical implications: The usage of chemicals admixture in concrete is extremely common nowadays. However, only a few authors have studied the impact of such materials on the concrete's electrical resistivity. Since many other researchers have already correlated electrical resistivity with other concrete's properties, such as strength, setting time and corrosion probability, it is important to better understand how superplasticizers and air-entraining agents, for instance, impact the resistivity.\nOriginality/value: The vast majority of studies only tested the resistivity of cement paste or mortar and usually for short period of time (up to 28 days), which seems not to be adequate since the cement reaction continues after that period. This paper fills this gap and studied the impact of admixture on concrete and for a period of 91 days.\n",
"role": "assistant"
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] |
Critical analysis of smart environment sensor data behavior pattern based on sequential data mining techniques
|
[
"Activity description",
"Behavioral pattern",
"Data mining",
"Intelligent systems",
"Smart space",
"Trajectories"
] |
[
{
"content": "Summarize the following paper into structured abstract.\n\nI. Introduction: Critical analysis of Smart Environment (SE) sensor data is a technological exploration of intelligent system's functionality and performance (Brian and C.J.H., 2007). Sensor technologies are related to human cognitive capture and visualize behavioral patterns, which adopted in almost every modern intelligent system. Personal (smart home), safety (traffic management, military security), healthcare (cognitive behavior), business (sales track) are few domains. Furthermore, industries (architectural control), environmental monitoring, and location-aware services are an additional potential area of smart technology applications. In these applications, sensors captured various properties of physical phenomena become a huge sensor data, which is challenging to explore and mine behavioral patterns in a traditional approach. The problem is more noticeable to analysis the hidden data relationship and searches useful information (Tao et al., 2009; Joelle et al., 2005).\nII. Related work: Many research works in SE or intelligent environments enhancing to the advancement of sensor technologies, which focussed on its applications. The approaches are focussing on researchers endeavor and real supervision of the artifacts and certain assumptions of sensor performances for the smart space. However, the methods are not capable to address the ever growing sensor data handle, store and process challenges. Since the sensor data behavioral pattern developments are demanding more time, efforts, data labeling, and descriptions (Ramakrishnan and Rakesh, 2013; Dong et al., 2005).\nIII. Significant measure of sensor data behavioral pattern mining: Sensor readings are not completely random that correlate to time and space or location on a given sensor record, which captures by sensor devices to analyze the events' behavioral patterns. For instance, the temperature measures in a room can be the heat or cool conditions records, which are two events (or parameters). Therefore, measuring such events patterns are explored in relation to sensor device locations and data capturing-time that shows the temperature turning point, which help to define the intelligent system performance and functionality in the room. Therefore, the significant measure of sensor data is the critical analysis of event sequence patterns as the magnitude of an objects trajectories or behaviors at the specified location and time (Ahmed and Nada, 2013).\nIV. Experiment and discussion: The rapid development of sensor technology has paved the way for SE to provide intelligence sensor-based services, which contains several and advanced interconnect smart devices. The intelligent environment is, therefore, has the abilities of perception, cognition, sensations, reasoning and anticipation about a user's activity, which provide proper reactions (Zhonghong, 2008). In parallel, sensor data generated by such a sophisticated and intelligent system are increasing ever than before, which demand advanced and scalable analytic tool. DM is an effective tool to manipulate in understandable ways as to develop sequential data patterns. Mining sequential patterns as SDM technique has become an important task with broad applications, such as abnormal behavioral pattern detections or fault diagnosis. The objective of detecting and isolating abnormal behavioral pattern is to understand the factors that affect SE performances, which offers an intelligent sensor-based service. The technique implemented DM-based clustering and distance measurements on the sample sensor data.\nV. Conclusion and future directions: In this paper, we discussed the innovative topic of critical analysis of sensor data behavioral patterns, which is pertinent to SE performance optimizations and fault diagnosis. In the first section, we discussed SE or intelligent systems in general in order to understand the applications the smart technologies in relations to sensor data deluge. The large-scale sensor data need to be analyzed to define the trajectories' behavioral patterns, which is the theme of this study. The technique of SDM focussed on in the paper is to explore or mine sensor data behavioral patterns in a smart place to detect the abnormal behavioral patterns for fault analysis and SE performance optimizations in general. In Section III that followed the relative work discussed in details the sensor data behavioral patterns in terms of sensor data ecosystems, characteristics, pattern development and descriptions. Besides to these, the technique of SDM of clustering and distance measurements based behavioral patterns explored, pattern-clustering algorithms proposed, and various distances measurements-based techniques synthesized. In Section IV, the proposed method performance, their outcomes and the need for the approach well analyzed and evaluated using real sensor data. The experiment was conducted to elucidate sensor data behavioral patterns that semantic enrichment can enhance ABPs detections. The results presented in graphs and interpreted for users, and for further development and applications of sensor technologies. Thus, the SDM-based sensor data critical analysis augmented as to sensor data behavioral pattern mining toward ABPs detections, which helps to isolate, identify and accommodate smart space faults as the domain contexts.\n",
"role": "user"
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{
"content": "Purpose: Behavioral pattern mining for intelligent system such as SmEs sensor data are vitally important in many applications and performance optimizations. Sensor pattern mining (SPM) is also dynamic and a hot research issue to pervasive and ubiquitous of smart technologies toward improving human life. However, in large-scale sensor data, exploring and mining pattern, which leads to detect the abnormal behavior is challenging. The paper aims to discuss these issues.\nDesign/methodology/approach: Sensor data are complex and multivariate, for example, which data captured by the sensors, how it is precise, what properties are recorded or measured, are important research issues. Therefore, the method, the authors proposed Sequential Data Mining (SDM) approach to explore pattern behaviors toward detecting abnormal patterns for smart space fault diagnosis and performance optimization in the intelligent world. Sensor data types, modeling, descriptions and SPM techniques are discussed in depth using real sensor data sets.\nFindings: The outcome of the paper is measured as introducing a novel idea how SDM technique's scale-up to sensor data pattern mining. In the paper, the approach and technicality of the sensor data pattern analyzed, and finally the pattern behaviors detected or segmented as normal and abnormal patterns.\nOriginality/value: The paper is focussed on sensor data behavioral patterns for fault diagnosis and performance optimizations. It is other ways of knowledge extraction from the anomaly of sensor data (observation records), which is pertinent to adopt in many intelligent systems applications, including safety and security, efficiency, and other advantages as the consideration of the real-world problems.\n",
"role": "assistant"
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Protecting students and faculty from environmental tobacco smoke: An assessment and rationale for college policies prohibiting smoking in public areas and student residencies
|
[
"Students",
"Tobacco",
"Social welfare policy",
"Health education"
] |
[
{
"content": "Summarize the following paper into structured abstract.\n\nIntroduction: According to the World Health Organization (WHO), there are about 4.9 million tobacco-related deaths each year. This figure makes tobacco use the leading cause of preventable death in the world today (WHO, 2004). Of the 4.9 million tobacco-related deaths, 1.1 million occur in the South-East Asia Region (SEAR), which is the largest producer of tobacco and tobacco products (WHO/SEAR, 2004). The biggest increase in disease is expected in India. In the Western Pacific Region (WPRO), 62 percent of men and 6 percent of women smoke, leaving the majority of non-smokers exposed to second-hand smoke (WHO/WPRO, 2004). The biggest increase in tobacco-related diseases are expected in China, where an estimated two to three million deaths will occur by 2020 (WHO/EMRO, 2004). The Eastern Mediterranean Region (EMRO) is not far from the current trends in China: Egypt has a rise in all tobacco-related cancers including lung cancer, which contributes to 90 percent of all deaths (WHO/EMRO, 2004). The African Region (AFRO) is experiencing the highest increase in the rate of tobacco with a 4.3 percent increase per year (WHO/AFRO, 2004). The longest exposure to tobacco is in the European Region, with only 15 percent of the population contributing to 33 percent of tobacco-related diseases. Russia ranks third after China and the USA in terms of tobacco smoking (Russian Information Agency Novosti, 2004). In terms of the Americas Region, one-third of non-smokers in Canada are exposed to second-hand smoke (CBC News, 2004). The first Surgeon General's Report on Smoking and Health indicated that more than 42 percent of adults in the USA smoked in 1964 (Center for Disease Control, 2004). Today, the number has decreased to 23 percent, but it is still the leading cause of preventable illness and death. Overall, trends indicate that by the year 2030, tobacco will likely be the world's leading cause of death and disease (WHO, 2004), killing close to 10 million people per year (World Bank Group, 2004).Although there is information on smoking from people all over the world, there is limited research on the smoking prevalence among college students globally (Boynton Health Service, 2004). Data from national and local surveys indicate the rate of tobacco use among college students worldwide increased steadily during the 1990s and have remained steady today (Boynton Health Service, 2004). One country where data has been continuously collected is the USA. Research in the USA indicates that with the decrease in the number of adult smokers in the USA, smoking prevalence among college students has risen in the last decade (Wechsler et al., 1998). According to a study conducted by the Harvard School of Public Health and Massachusetts General Hospital, 46 percent of college students use tobacco products (Rigotti et al., 2002) and this percentage continues to increase with this age group while others have remained the same since 1990 (American Cancer Society, 2004b). According to the American Cancer Society's Smoke-Free New England \"Facts about Tobacco Use among College Students\", 28 percent of college smokers began to smoke regularly at or after age 19 (American Cancer Society, 2004b). An additional 8.5 percent of students smoke cigars, and smoking generally is more popular among fraternities and/or sororities (a college club or society in the USA), and at sporting events (American Cancer Society, 2004b).Understanding the impact of smoking among college students is important for many reasons. First, the university or college experience is a time of transition in general behavior from adolescence to young adults for many students. Unhealthy behaviors such as smoking may become a lifetime pattern for many students who begin to smoke during this stage of their lives (Wechsler et al., 1998). This could surely lead to health consequences in the future. Second, smoking has been negatively correlated with educational attainment (Escobedo and Peddicord, 1996; Johnston et al., 2001). Finally, students who smoke are exposing non-smokers to environmental tobacco smoke (ETS) (Wechsler et al., 2001). Smoking policies on college campuses in the USA addressing environmental tobacco smoke (ETS) was the focus of the study.ETS is the most involuntary public health problem that is completely preventable through the establishment of appropriate policies. According to Center for Disease Control (CDC), ETS causes close to 3,000 lung cancer deaths and as many as 62,000 deaths from ischemic heart disease annually among adult non-smokers in the USA (Center for Disease Control, 2004). Short-term exposure to ETS can put healthy non-smokers at risk of developing heart disease and long-term exposure can increase the risk of developing lung cancer (Center for Disease Control, 2004). The Environmental Protection Agency has classified ETS as a group A carcinogen (Center for Disease Control, 2004). A group A carcinogen is a substance that the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) has identified as a substance known to cause cancer (International Agency for Research on Cancer, 2005). The IARC was established in 1965 by the WHO to conduct research on causes of human cancer and strategies for cancer control (International Agency for Research on Cancer, 2005). The Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) has issued regulations that requires employers to provide smoke-free workplaces or separate rooms for smoking due to ETS (Davis, 1998).Health-Promoting Universities (Tsouros et al., 1998) provides case studies of universities promoting and protecting the health of students and staff. The project was developed by the WHO Healthy Cities Project Office and the challenge was to develop health-promoting projects for guidance and growing in the university setting (Tsouros et al., 1998). For example, the University of Newcastle's Healthy Medical School Initiative focused on issues involving the health and safety of students and faculty. One area of policy development was in implementing smoking policies. The smoking policies were developed by a Smoking Policy Working Group (White, 1998). The initiative of the group was to ensure the health of the students and staff of the university was maximized (White, 1998).Another smoking initiative was implemented in August of 2000 by the American College Health Association (ACHA). The smoking initiative was similar in nature to the University of Newcastle's Healthy Medical School Initiative but broader in scope in relation to the number of university campuses it would affect. In August 2000, the ACHA notified all ACHA member institutions about a position statement they were supporting to adopt policies promoting \"campus-wide tobacco/smoke-free\" environments (American College Health Association, 2000). A summary of the ACHA Tobacco Policy Guidelines include:* distributing campus tobacco/smoking policies;* offering prevention, education initiatives, and programs on how to quit using tobacco products;* prohibiting campus controlled advertising (including sponsorship), selling, or free sampling;* prohibiting smoking in all public areas on campus while discouraging the use of smokeless/spit tobacco;* identifying all non-smoking areas with signs; and* enforcement of all tobacco/smoking related policies (American College Health Association, 2000).An ACHA Assessment Matrix of the detailed policies can be found in Table I.The American Cancer Society (ACS) Smoke-Free New England Campus Initiative added one additional guideline. The guideline prohibits the university from holding stock in or accepting donations from the tobacco industry (American Cancer Society, 2004c).\nProblem statement: Although the ACHA and ACS Smoke Free New England guidelines were released, there is a growing concern about colleges and universities not implementing these campus policies supporting a smoke-free environment (Halperin, 2002). This is evident from the examination of the College Tobacco Prevention and Control (CTPC) web site which allows individuals to compare university policies in accordance with the ACHA Guidelines on a national scale (Center for Disease Control, 2004).The number of universities not in compliance with all ten ACHA Guidelines is staggering. For example, according to data in the USA, 64 percent of public universities in the Midwest states (Kansas, Missouri, Iowa, Nebraska, South Dakota, North Dakota, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan, Illinois, Indiana, and Ohio) were not even half-way in compliance with six of the ten ACHA Smoking Policy Guidelines (see Collegetobacco.org, 2004).\nPurpose of the study: Smoking prevalence is currently increasing among college students, yet many public universities are not in compliance with ACHA Guidelines. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to examine a Midwest university over a one-year period on the following:* current smoking policies and programs;* student support for implementing additional smoking policies; and* to do a follow-up report on supporting policies that were approved by administration.This study is important for several reasons. First, the study is intended to create awareness of policies and programs which need to be implemented in order to decrease ETS on campus. Eliminating exposure to ETS is beneficial in some ways:* it may decrease the prevalence of cancer, emphysema, fatal and non-fatal heart disease, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and exacerbated asthma;* it may increase fire safety; and* it may assist students who want to quit smoking (American Cancer Society, 2004a).Second, there is limited research with regards to smoking policies in higher education administration (Patterson et al., 2004). Finally, the steps involved in conducting the study may provide a model for other universities to follow when wanting to implement smoking policies and programs offered on their respected campuses.\nMethodology: Participants\nResults: Demographic data\nDiscussion: Demographics\nImplications: There are several implications this study has to offer to college administrators in implementing appropriate smoking policies for their respective universities. First, other universities may utilize the steps involved in this study to move forward in developing policies for their students, faculty, and staff. Second, universities may utilize this information by stressing that students are less likely to begin smoking if the university or campus offers smoke-free resident halls and apartments. This may increase the demand for smoking cessation classes but create a healthier environment for students and employees of the university. Third, fire safety is increased by banning smoking in resident halls and apartments. Universities are always looking for ways to \"save money\": why not through prevention of fires by establishing policies banning smoking in residence halls? Fourth, universities need to be aware of the harmful effects of ETS. By establishing policies to decrease ETS, universities are taking a stand and supporting their stance of being for the betterment of the individual and society. Finally, the university is inconsistent by offering health education, medicine, exercise science, and physical education majors while not providing the appropriate policies to uphold a healthy environment. In addition, the inconsistencies do not support the Health Promoting Universities initiative to promote and protect the health of students and staff (Tsouros et al., 1998).\nFuture research: The study revealed some interesting areas for future research on smoking policies. First, a study needs to be conducted on the perceptions of the smoke-free apartments on campus following the first year of implementation. How much of an impact did this policy have on smokers and non-smokers? Will students be less likely to take up smoking because of this policy? Will this increase in safety provide financial benefits to the university? Second, a follow-up study on these same individuals in 2004 would be beneficial in seeing whether there were any behavioral changes towards smoking in the last year. Third, a similar study may be conducted on a national and international level. This may provide additional awareness of the ACHA of the need to implement these policies on campuses. Finally, although valuable data were collected, future studies need to address whether the students filling out the survey are smokers or non-smokers. The current study failed to collect these data.\nConclusion: The increase in smoking among college students cannot be ignored. With this increase come the serious health consequences of ETS to students, faculty and staff of many universities. Since research indicates there are serious health consequences from ETS, it is the universities' obligation and an opportunity to implement and enforce policies on campus that will embrace tobacco control.\n",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Purpose: - The purpose of this study is to examine a Midwest university in North America over a one-year period on current smoking policies and programs, student support for implementing additional smoking policies, and to produce a follow-up report on supporting policies that were approved by administration.\nDesign/methodology/approach: - The researchers used a convenience sample from a four-year public university located in the Midwestern USA. A four-year public university is a publicly funded institution of higher learning awarding baccalaureate, Master's and doctoral degrees. Data were collected from administrators (n=6) and on Assessment Day of all freshmen (n=1,743) and juniors (n=643) at the university. Data were collected through document mining, a survey instrument, interviewing, and observation. Descriptive statistics were used to summarize frequency data for this study.\nFindings: - The data produced some interesting findings. First, the study provided college administrators with a model to follow in moving forward in developing policies for their students, faculty and staff. Second, the study offered support for implementing practical policies which may save the universities money, while protecting students, faculty, and staff from harmful environmental tobacco smoke (ETS). Finally, the study addresses the need of the university to implement and enforce policies on campus that will embrace tobacco control.\nResearch implications: - The implications of this study are that other universities may utilize the steps involved in this study to move forward in developing policies for their employees, universities may utilize this information by stressing that students are less likely to begin smoking if the university or campus offers smoke-free resident halls and apartments, and fire safety is increased by banning smoking in resident halls and apartments.\nOriginality/value: - Embraces more comprehensively than previously the situation, treatment and future research regarding smoking among college students in the USA.\n",
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Optimization of robotic assembly sequences using immune based technique
|
[
"Assembly sequence",
"Assembly constraints",
"Feasible assembly sequences",
"Artificial immune system",
"Assembly",
"Production methods",
"Robotics"
] |
[
{
"content": "Summarize the following paper into structured abstract.\n\n1 Introduction: In industries, a very large ratio of products is assembly products. Especially in automobile and electronic industries this ratio is found to be maximum. In order to minimize the throughput and become competitive there has to be a great amount of flexible automation in place. Robotic assembly therefore plays a vital role in such situations. In fact robots have pierced into manufacturing industries in a big way. Although robotic assembly system is smart and competitive, it happens to be cost intensive. This calls for a meticulously determined assembly sequence for the accomplishment of the product. While attempting to mathematically determine the mating possibilities of parts for assembly one may find large number of alternatives and if the number of pats is large, the number of alternatives increases exponentially. It is necessary to apply the various conditions of robotic assembly and assembly constraints thereof to arrive only at the assembly sequences, which are feasible and stable from the perspective of robotic assembly. The process of determination of feasible and stable sequences for the robotic assembly is an iterative one and may result in multiple options. In order to reduce the cycle time, increase the productivity and make the product economically competitive the system designer ought to make a correct selection of the assembly sequence and make the system more effective.The present work is aimed at developing a methodology for determination of feasible and stable sequences for robotic assembly. Further, in order to find out the best of the sequences in terms of throughput and cost of production, artificial immune system (AIS) technique is used to determine the optimum assembly sequence. The implementation of the methodology has been illustrated by an example problem.Luiz and Arthur (1991) have analyzed mechanical assembly sequences based on directed graphs, establishment conditions and precedence relationships. Sugato and Jan (1997) have developed an assembly sequence planner which is used as a tool for finding good plans more rapidly by using high-level expert advice and reusing sub plans for repeated substructures. Wang et al. (1998) have outlined an off-line heuristics to find out sequence plan in order to improve robotic assembly efficiency. Later they applied their algorithm to a Cartesian robot, which can allow dynamic allocation. Barnes et al. (2002) have modeled a computer based tool named design for assembly (DFA) tool, which is useful for computer aided design (CAD) models (Tiam et al., 1999) development and infer/extract relevant information. A mathematical approach called disassembly approach (Mascle and Figour, 1990; Shin et al., 1995; Tiam et al., 1999) has been used to generate stable robotic assembly sequences. These are some of the classical approaches for solving assembly sequencing plan. Besides the above mentioned techniques, researchers have also concentrated on artificial intelligence techniques for solving the same problem but with less mathematical complexity. The most common evolutionary algorithm, genetic algorithm (GA) has been used by Hong and Cho (1999) and Shiang and Yong (2001), to generate robot assembly sequences. Their methodology obtains the optimal assembly sequence by minimizing the assembly cost while satisfying the assembly constraints. Galantucci et al. (2004) have implemented a methodology called hybrid fuzzy logic-GA to plan the automatic assembly and disassembly sequence of products. Recently, Edmunds et al. (2011) have implemented a hierarchical GA, not only for reducing the problem size but also for generating optimal disassembly sequence. Hong and Cho (1993, 1995) have developed a computational scheme based on neural network in order to generate the optimized robotic assembly sequence while satisfying the assembly constraints and minimizing the assembly cost. HongGuang and Cong (2010) has proposed a discrete particle swarm optimization algorithm to solve the assembly sequence planning based on some key technologies including a special coding method. Wang et al. (2004) have developed an ant colony algorithm-based approach to generate optimized assembly sequence for assembled mechanical products. Their approach generates optimal solutions based on the amount of ants cooperating with the least reorientations during assembly processes. Surajit et al. (2008) have implemented ant colony optimization to find out optimized robotic assembly sequence by minimizing iteratively an energy function, which satisfies the conditions: less assembly cost and the process constraints.The objective of the research work aims at developing a methodology to generate a correct set of feasible and stable assembly sequences for robotic application and to optimize the generated sequences with a view to the minimize the assembly cost function and reduce the throughput using the evolutionary computational technique of AIS with a number of assembly constraints. The method is expected to gain more appreciation in robotic assembly sequence optimization problems. In order to make the methodology complete and effective the proposed method considers the interrelationship between the mating parts in every possible directions of assembly.\n2 Methodology: 2.1 Assumptions and liaison connectivity\n3 Objective function of assembly sequence: Energy function, Eseq, is associated with assembly sequence can be represented as: Equation 18 where:Eseq = energy function associated with ASG.EJ, EP and EC =energy related to assembly cost, PCs and connectivity.where, CJ is an energy constant related to assembly sequence cost J. The value of J can be decided as: Equation 19 The energy associated with PCs is: Equation 20 where, CP is a positive constant and mi is the precedence index which is assigned to 0, if it satisfies the PCs, otherwise 1.The energy associated with connectivity is: Equation 21 In a similar manner connectivity index li is inferred on the basis of liaison relationships.The objective of the present work is to generate feasible, stable and optimal robotic assembly sequence with minimum assembly cost, which is linked with affinity values of artificial immune algorithm. The objective function for the robotic assembly is: Equation 22 3.1 Degree of motion instability and the number of assembly direction changes\n4 Applying AIS to ASG: Here two immune based algorithms namely clonal selection and affinity maturation principles are used to find out the best assembly sequence from the possible assembly sequences. When antigens are entered into human body, antibodies are released from the immune component known as B-cells. Then the produced antibodies interact with the recognized foreign invaders and reduce their effect on the human body (Castro and Zuben, 1999). In this way, the immune system protects human body from the wide variety of harmful foreign agents.Similarly, each assembly sequence is considered here as an antibody and each antibody is produced according to the affinity maturation principle. In this study two phase mutation has been taken for generating assembly sequence (antibody). In the first phase, two positions are selected randomly and is called pair-wise interchange mutation. In the second phase, the considered positions are inversed and are called inverse mutation.After generating each antibody, the next step is to calculate its affinity strength in order to select suitable antibody. Since each assembly (antibody) has some energy value that refers to the affinity value of that particular antibody, the affinity value of each antibody can be calculated as follows: Equation 27 where, ESeq is the energy value of an individual assembly. For stable sequence the energy factor is low and for unstable sequence, it is high. Lower the energy factor higher is the affinity value. The cloning of antibodies is directly proportional to the affinity function. More clones are generated on higher affinity values or lower energy values.While generating each antibody using maturation principle, the antibodies are stored in the sequential order, if the affinity value is more than the original one; otherwise, it stores the original one. In receptor editing, worst percentage of antibodies are eliminated and randomly created antibodies are replaced by them. This mechanism corresponds to new search regions in the total search space.\n5 Example problem: A grinder assembly as shown in Figure 2(a) is considered as a case study for determination of the assembly sequence and validating the proposed method. Figure 2(b) shows the directions for assembly or disassembly operations whereas Figure 2(c) shows the liaison diagram of the individual component of the product. Since the product is having five parts, the number of possible sequences is 120. Table I illustrates the parts used in the construction of a grinder assembly product.The liaisons of the components are represented as follows: Equation 28 Similarly the liasisons for connections can be obtained for a-d, a-e, b-c and d-e.While generating antibodies (sequences) according to maturation principle, the system will check weather the generated sequence is obeying all assembly constraints or not. If the generated sequence is not satisfying the assembly constraints then its affinity strength is assigned to be \"0\".5.1 Assembly constraints for product\n6 Conclusions: An efficient immune based methodology has been developed to generate the feasible, stable and optimal robotic assembly sequence with minimum assembly cost. A clear explanation has been given in order to find out the feasible and stable assembly sequence from the possible number of different alternative solutions. Later, immune based algorithms namely clonal selection and affinity maturation have been implemented to determine the optimal assembly sequence. During the implementation, each assembly sequence and its energy value have been considered as antibody and the antibody affinity, respectively. Affinity maturation has been done in two ways, first by selecting two positions randomly and second by considering the inverse of the selected two positions. More clones are generated on higher affinity values and the assembly sequence having more affinity is treated as the best assembly sequence from the possible assembly sequences.\n",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Purpose: - The purpose of this paper is to develop a new methodology to find out the best robotic assembly sequence amongst feasible robotic sequences.\nDesign/methodology/approach: - The feasible robotic assembly sequences were generated based on the assembly constraints and later and artificial immune system (AIS) was implemented to find out the best assembly sequence.\nFindings: - The paper reveals the best assembly sequence.\nOriginality/value: - Robotic assembly has expanded the process capabilities in the manufacturing world because of the fact that it is faster, more efficient, precise and cost-effective process than any conventional mechanized process. Since a robotic system is a cost-intensive one it is necessary to find out the correct and optimal sequence with the constraints of the process in mind while dealing with assembled products with large number of parts.\n",
"role": "assistant"
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The link between perceptions of fairness, job training opportunity and at-will employees' work attitudes: Lessons from US Georgia state government
|
[
"Job insecurity",
"Fairness"
] |
[
{
"content": "Summarize the following paper into structured abstract.\n\nIntroduction: Over the past decade, employees in the USA have been subjected to far-reaching changes, such as at-will employment (AWE) policy. AWE was first established in Georgia during the mid-1990s and later in Florida as well as some selected federal agencies. The attack on the job security of government employees continues unabated today, with states, such as Georgia and Florida, and federal agencies, such as the Department of Veteran Affairs, by promoting AWE as an alternative to traditional job tenure systems (Perry et al., 2010, p. 687; Kellough and Nigro, 2006; Kettl, 2015) in the USA.\nAt-will employment and job insecurity: Traditional civil service structures and associated procedures have been developed until the middle of 1990s to allow civil servants to enjoy employment property interest or job security since the Pendleton Act of 1883. An employment property interest exists when a civil servant has a reasonable expectation of continued employment if his or her performance is satisfactory. In other words, because of Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments or related merit system statutes, public employees will be terminated for just reason only with \"due process of law\" that is constitutionally mandated procedures for termination such as a prior notice and an opportunity for employees to respond to charges before discharge occurs (Kellough and Nigro, 2006). The relative security of tenure in public employment was assumed to be a historic pillar of traditional merit systems that ensure politically neutral competence within the career public workforce providing effective public service, by shielding public employees from political pressure or retaliation.\nTheoretical review and hypotheses development: Job insecurity, powerlessness and uncertainty\nData and method: Data\nResults: Job satisfaction\nDiscussion and conclusion: This research was an initial step toward identifying an empirically validated relationship between organizational practices to increase perception of job security and at-will employees' work attitudes in limited job security protection environment of US state government. The concept of organizational practices applies particularly to employees who felt job insecurity in this study. Thus, the focus of the analysis was on those employees of US Georgia state government that face limited job security protection through AWE policy. State government employees in this study were experiencing stressors associated with 1997 GeorgiaGain civil service reform process such as job security rule change, and they were experiencing lower levels of job security protections.\n",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Purpose: This study aims to investigate the relationship between three organizational practices (distributive justice, procedural justice and potential growth opportunity) and at-will employees' work attitudes (job satisfaction and affective organizational commitment).\nDesign/methodology/approach: The data for the analysis are derived from the 2000 GeorgiaGain Survey. Multinomial logit model is used to examine the relationship of three organizational practices to reduce job insecurity and to promote at-will employees' work attitudes.\nFindings: This study demonstrated that at-will employees responded positively with job satisfaction or affective organizational commitment if they perceived a strong perception of organizational practices fairly and properly, in the form of providing distributive justice (affective organizational commitment), procedural justice (job satisfaction and affective organizational commitment) and offering career development opportunity (affective organizational commitment).\nOriginality/value: By using a unique data set of US public employees who felt limited job security protection through at-will employment policy reform, this study has enhanced our understanding of how at-will employee group in US state government would respond to different organizational practices which is currently limited.\n",
"role": "assistant"
}
] |
Linking QFD and the manufacturing network strategy: Integrating the site and network perspectives
|
[
"Quality function deployment",
"Coordination",
"Configuration",
"Manufacturing networks"
] |
[
{
"content": "Summarize the following paper into structured abstract.\n\n1. Introduction: If a company is not satisfied with the manufacturing performance, a variety of improvement suggestions is available. These improvement programmes are usually on the site level, concentrating on optimising single sites in isolation. The improvement programmes seldom take into account that today's companies are often composed of multiple manufacturing sites, which are connected and affect one another (Manyika et al., 2012). Subsequently, there is a need to jointly manage and optimise these sites as a network (Feldmann et al., 2013; Shi and Gregory, 1998). If done successfully, manufacturing networks can serve as a source for competitive advantage (Olhager et al., 2015).\n2. Constituents of manufacturing networks: The following paragraphs discuss the constituents of a manufacturing network, as found in the literature. To conduct the literature search, we adopt the four-step procedure introduced by Fischl et al. (2014):\n3. QFD in manufacturing networks: A challenge in combining all relevant dimensions of a manufacturing network is their multilevel characteristics. A few of the derived dimensions are on the strategic level, while others, such as configuration and coordination, are on the overall network level, and a third group of dimensions, including structural and infrastructural dimensions, is on the plant level. Furthermore, we propose that there are trade-offs between different dimensions.\n4. Methodology: This research aims at making a theoretical contribution on how to integrate the manufacturing site and network perspective for the purpose of strategy fulfilment. The research is conducted based on middle-range theory development (Merton, 1968), which merges theory with empirical work. Theory provides dimensions for the theoretical framework, which are tested through case study research. In doing so, we adopt a qualitative research approach (Eisenhardt, 1989; Eisenhardt and Graebner, 2007). In this way, we gain a profound understanding of the relationships between the site- and network-level perspectives and the relationships existing between the dimensions. The intra-company network level serves as unit of analysis, as it provides the advantage that one legal entity holds the responsibility for the whole network. It furthermore allows a detailed analysis for the relationship between strategic network targets and its relation to dimensions on network and site level.\n5. Case study: The case company is a chocolate manufacturer with eight manufacturing sites in Europe and the USA, headquartered in central Europe. To guarantee anonymity, we label the company Chocolate Inc. The aim of Chocolate Inc. is to serve the market worldwide with high-quality chocolate and altering tastes depending on requirements of regional markets. To address local requirements, each site has autonomy in developing additional recipe. Subsequently, each site holds the necessary capabilities in R&D and manufacturing. However, the sites have become independent islands with hardly any interaction between them. The only flows of information and knowledge exist between the sites and headquarters. To decrease fixed costs in production, the sites compete on additional production volumes.\n6. Discussion: The subsequent discussion summarises the changes that Chocolate Inc. decided to implement out of the discussed possibilities provided in the houses. This discussion leads to the development of the future network to overcome the identified trade-offs. Additionally, we discuss the strength and weaknesses of the derived framework.\n7. Conclusion: The conceptual model for a manufacturing network assessment bases on the QFD procedure and links the manufacturing strategy, the network level and the site level and overcomes gaps that were claimed by previous research (e.g. Miltenburg, 2009; Rudberg and West, 2008).\n",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to integrate the manufacturing site and network perspectives for the purposes of strategy fulfilment, which has rarely been jointly discussed. By doing this, the site and network perspectives are broken into their constituents and linked to one another.\nDesign/methodology/approach: The paper provides qualitative research; it conducts a comprehensive literature review and merges the results with the concept of the quality function deployment to link the relevant dimensions. The developed framework is discussed based on a single case study.\nFindings: The proposed framework relates the network and site perspectives in different dimensions, which range from the strategic dimension to the network and site dimensions. The paper, furthermore, offers the groundwork of developing relationship maps of the site and network capabilities, network configuration and coordination, and the structural and infrastructural dimensions.\nResearch limitations/implications: The paper contains a single case study and lacks foundation with a broader data set.\nPractical implications: The results support the decision-making process of the manufacturing network managers who assess, design, and develop their manufacturing networks and attempt to gain transparency by using different levels of analysis.\nOriginality/value: The paper is the first attempt to show how the different network and site capabilities contribute to strategy fulfilment, to link the configuration and coordination dimensions of the manufacturing network level, and to link the structural and infrastructural dimensions on the site level. Thus, the authors add to multilevel research in operations management because the authors provide a combined framework for the network- and site-level analysis.\n",
"role": "assistant"
}
] |
Taming enterprise dementia in public sector organizations
|
[
"Middle managers",
"Public sector organizations",
"Knowledge management",
"Canada"
] |
[
{
"content": "Summarize the following paper into structured abstract.\n\n__NO_TITLE__: In public and private organizations alike, executives are faced with enormous challenges as they come to the realization that their organizations do not know what they know. Witnessing the effects of organizational memory loss, they feel the need to act, though few appear to know what should be done. Many feel the need to develop processes to help curtail the flow of knowledge from their organizations, but they do not know what to do.\nThe problem: enterprise dementia: A by-product of the reorganization/re-engineering trends of the late 20th century is that many public sector organizations now boast leaner structures. For example, according to the President of the Canadian Public Service, there was been a 25 percent decrease in the number of executives since 1992 (Serson, 2001). From a knowledge perspective, downsizing creates a number of new and unanticipated tribulations.A second challenge resulting from downsizing is a loss of tacit knowledge transfer previously associated with deliberate redundancy (Nonaka and Takeuchi, 1995). The structure of many organizations in the 1980s and before catered for understudies who would mature to become the next generation. Today this concept has all but evaporated, resulting in a disappointing consequence of knowledge loss. This shortfall necessitates the rediscovery of knowledge that was once resident within an enterprise.The corollary to this is sometimes termed \"organizational Alzheimer's\", which is \"memory loss that occurs when key employees leave an organization, taking their [tacit] knowledge with them\" (Galt, 2002). Research suggests that at least one-half of organizational knowledge is uncodified tacit knowledge (Horak, 2001). The departure of the human repository of this intellectual capital may take months or years of training and experience to replace - in the interim, the middle manager must somehow fill the knowledge void.Further exacerbating the effects of this tacit knowledge loss is the vast increase in retirements that government officials expect in the next decade. A large number of public service executives will depart soon, a rising percentage of which are due to retirements. Across the public service, researchers expect some 82 percent of executives to depart in the decade 1997-2007. For the first five years of this period, the rates remain at historically average levels. However, departures, especially retirements, increase significantly from 2002 (Gorber et al., 1999). Caused by the baby boomer effect, researchers expect this trend to continue until at least 2011. A more recent report suggests that 85 percent of executives are eligible to retire in the next ten years (Siegel, 2001).If organizations wish to seal this unnecessary memory leak and decrease the information overload of managers, they should invest in some sort of knowledge management. One solution is to provide a human understudy or apprentice, perhaps through the initiation of a mentoring program, much as was the norm yesteryear. Alternatively, they may opt for one of the knowledge management solutions introduced later in this paper. The status quo of permitting corporate knowledge to flow freely from the organization and possibly directly to the competition is nonsensical.Although the term \"organizational Alzheimer's\" seems to be gaining in popularity, this research project seeks to prove that the term is unnecessarily pessimistic. Clearly, the analogy accurately captures the memory loss and confusion typically associated with the terribly debilitating disease: however, most physicians agree that, at present, no cure exists for Alzheimer's. Conversely, the more general term of \"dementia\", which includes similar ailments, is very treatable. This subtle difference is especially important for this research project, as there is a cure for the disease that is called \"enterprise dementia\".For the purpose of this project, enterprise dementia comprises two closely related components:1. information anxiety; and2. organizational memory loss.This relationship may go some way in explaining the unexpected and confusing results of a variety of recent research within the field of knowledge management. For example, two recent studies, completed by experts in the field, suggest that the implementation of a knowledge management program did not result in significantly less information overload (KMPG, 2000; Linden et al., 2002).\nA possible solution: knowledge management taxonomies: In 2001, Michael Earl published the results of a five-year study in which he articulated a taxonomy of strategies for knowledge management. Earl's self-confessed purpose was to help guide executives on choices to initiate knowledge management projects according to the goals, organizational charter, and technological, behavioral, or economic biases (Earl, 2001). In categorizing the schools, Earl uses the three biases (technological, behavioral, and economic) as the high-order categories. Dissecting these categories further results in seven unique schools: a summary of each is shown in Figure 1.Earl's (2001) work is not the only project to categorize the types or domains of knowledge management. For example, Xerox researchers at their Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) facility studying knowledge management developed their own categories entitled \"Ten domains of knowledge\" (Xerox, 2001c). These two works provide an excellent conduit to explore the spectrum of knowledge management categorization. As the next stage was to consider each of Earl's seven schools in this research, a brief description precedes an example of a real implementation highlighting the major advantages of the school. The Xerox findings, as well as those of others, supplement Earl's thesis by means of reinforcing his conclusions.Technocratic\nMethodology: As exploratory research, a recent survey of Canadian Public Service middle managers included the following statement:The < blank> school would be a good knowledge management strategy for my organization.The aim of this question was to determine the general views of the sample with a view to sparking interest for future research. For each school a detailed description was available for those who wished additional information. Respondents were asked to rate each school using a five-point Likert scale: however, an option existed to select \"N/O\" for no opinion. A summary of the frequency of responses is shown in Figure 2 and Table I.As the survey instrument was distributed using a snowball sampling technique and the sample is relatively small it was necessary to mitigate the risk of generalizing the research findings. To achieve this aim, the sample's demographic characteristics were compared to those of a large randomly selected government middle manager sample known to be representative of the population. The representative sample was a survey of government middle managers completed in 2002 by the Canadian Public Service Commission (PSC), in which the researchers randomly selected a sample of 9,266 middle managers from the population of approximately 26,000. By the end of the survey 8,576 middle managers could be contacted and 2,650 usable responses were returned, resulting in a 31 percent response rate, a confidence level of 95 percent, and a confidence interval of 1.8 (Public Service Commission, 2002). Both research projects defined a middle manager as a member of the Executive Succession or Feeder Group, which by definition includes three grades of Public Servants (Ex-minus-1, Ex-minus-2 and Ex-equivalents).A series of null hypothesis tests, including gender (t(2747)=0.366, p=0.7143), education (t(2747)=0.659, p=0.5099), and language (t(2747)=0.565, p=0.5724), indicate that this sample is not statistically different from a recent large-scale PSC survey. From this finding, one may conclude that this sample is likely representative of the population. Whilst acknowledging that bias exists in all studies utilizing the snowball sampling technique, the analysis of the demographic data indicates that the sample is not statistically different from the PSC Survey. Such an important conclusion indicates that one should be able to generalize, with confidence, the finding across the population. This conclusion adds value to the findings by permitting their wider application across the Government of Canada.The next step was to examine the data related to each of Earls's schools. A one-factor ANOVA between schools was performed to determine whether there was a significant difference between the means of the schools. The F-statistic was significant at the 0.05 critical alpha level, F(6,605)=14.548, p=0.0000 (see Table II). Therefore, we may reject the null hypothesis and conclude that the difference between schools was significant. A series of post hoc t-tests were completed between all combinations. The most interesting post hoc finding is that the difference between the organizational school's mean and each other school's mean is significant at the 0.05 critical alpha level. In total, there are 12 combinations with significantly different means, six of which involve the organizational school. In other words, the organizational school was rated significantly higher than any other school, whilst the commercial school was rated significantly lower than were the others. Acceptable scale reliability was achieved with a Cronbach's alpha of 0.744\nConclusions: The most interesting conclusion surrounding the knowledge management strategies was that respondents, overwhelmingly, opted for a single strategy. Seven schools or strategies were described to the respondents and yet a single school, the organizational school, surfaced as the strategy most likely to fit respondents' perceived needs. Through collaboration, Earl's organizational school focuses on maximizing the use of social networks with a view to knowledge sharing. The commercial school, which focuses on knowledge assets and commercialization, was rated the lowest while the remaining five schools were somewhere in the middle.The fact that a single knowledge strategy emerged as the clear preference by respondents suggests that it may be possible to develop a single knowledge strategy for government. However, it may be premature to announce such a definite finding based on this exploratory research alone. Corporate experience may suggest that a blended approach is worthy of consideration. Consider Honeywell's recently implemented system with an explicit aim \"to help knowledge flows across boundaries\" (American Productivity and Quality Center, 2003, p. 7), which could be described as Earl's engineering school. However, the system is also \"about connecting people across networks [Earl's cartographic school], enabling collaboration [Earl's organizational school] and getting assistance [Earl's system school]\" (American Productivity and Quality Center, 2003, p. 16). The lesson is clear - some implementations will be blended systems that span the boundaries of the school espoused by Earl.The fact that a single school was important to the respondents demonstrates the importance of that school: however, it does not demand the exclusion of others. In order to tame enterprise dementia in public service organizations a system for creating and sharing organization knowledge is essential, but this system may include components of various schools. The wise executive should consider the work of Earl with a view to determining which schools are most applicable to his or her organization. The Honeywell case demonstrates the value of considering a blended system. That said, if resource limitations only permit the pilot or implementation of a single system, then this research suggests the most advantageous school for the public service is the organizational school.\n",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Purpose: - The aim of this paper is to report the finding of an exploratory research project that considered how public service organizations may conquer the debilitating effects of enterprise dementia.\nDesign/methodology/approach: - Building on the seminal research of Michael Earl, this project sought to solicit the view from the front, which in this case are the middle managers of the Canadian public service. Specifically, the aim was to determine which of Earl's schools of knowledge would be most appropriate in curbing the organizational memory loss and taming the information anxiety that are common place today.\nFindings: - The sample of public service middle managers overwhelmingly opted for a single strategy. The organizational school surfaced as the strategy most likely to fit respondents' perceived needs. Through collaboration, Earl's organizational school focuses on maximizing the use of social networks with a view to knowledge sharing.\nPractical implications: - This paper provides a compendium of knowledge strategies that may be useful for public service executives.\nOriginality/value: - This the first project to consider how Earl's taxonomy of knowledge strategies may be implemented in a Canadian public service environment.\n",
"role": "assistant"
}
] |
Success factors of open-source enterprise information systems development
|
[
"Open source",
"Computer software",
"Information systems",
"Open‐source software",
"Enterprise information systems",
"Success factors of open‐source EIS"
] |
[
{
"content": "Summarize the following paper into structured abstract.\n\nIntroduction: Firms constantly search for the best industry practices to manage the growing volume of information. Enterprise information systems (EIS) are generally considered as applications that focus on managing and integrating whole business processes including accounting, finance, manufacturing, human resources, and inventory management (Davenport and Brooks, 2004). The implementation EIS software, however, is typically a complex process for in-house capability of many small and medium enterprises (SME). Also, EIS application is very expensive, often involving millions of dollars for vendor purchasing price, consultant expertise, in-house development, user education, and upgrades (Olson, 2004). Although the implementation of EIS could be cost-effective in the long run (Frank, 2004), the financial resources required and the inherent risk of EIS make firms hesitate to invest in the system. Additionally, since EIS are widely applied by organizations, it is hard to gain competitive advantage through the implementation of commoditized EIS (Karimi et al., 2007). Recently, EIS vendors have realized that open-source software (OSS) offers capabilities, both as a source of content and as a threat to the proprietary enterprise system market (Grewal et al., 2006). OSS is not a panacea as Goode (2005) showed due to its lack of relevance to business operations, reliable technical support, etc. However, according to Serrano and Sarriegi (2006), there are three major reasons why OSS is advantageous to implement and maintain EIS, especially for the globalized firms:* the increased adaptability to match the business processes and local regulations;* the decreased reliance on a single supplier; and* the reduced costs.These advantages are important for firms that require the information and communication technology (ICT) practices at work places in different business environments through the internet. OSS development involves voluntary participation of individuals in on-line communities to develop computer software codes. The underlying philosophy of OSS is to enhance software reliability and quality through independent peer reviews and rapid evolution of applications. Johansson and Sudzina (2008) also claimed that OSS EIS enable SMEs to implement the system at a minimal cost which often is a critical impediment for EIS implementation.There is an abundance of qualitative or exploratory literature on OSS. An empirical study that measures OSS success would help delineate some success factors. This study develops an OSS EIS success model, which expands a prior IS success model by incorporating the characteristics of EIS and OSS. The overall objective of this study was to examine the relationships between success factors identified in the literature applied to OSS EIS and the net benefits to individuals and organizations that adopt OSS EIS for business purposes.\nIs success model: Few empirical studies have been conducted to develop an OSS success model. However, a large number of studies have been conducted to identify success factors of IS. Prior studies have focused on various aspects of IS success for over three decades (Matlin, 1979; DeLone and McLean, 1992, 2002, 2003; Gable, 1996; Irani and Love, 2000; Thatcher and Oliver, 2001; Rai et al., 2002; Shin, 2003; Sedera and Gable, 2004; Sabherwal et al., 2006; Gable et al., 2008; Lee et al., 2009).Rai et al. (2002) assessed two main IS success models: DeLone and McLean (1992) and Seddon (1997). Their findings support DeLone and McLean's argument that IS success models need to be carefully specified in a given context. Shin (2003) investigated the effectiveness of the three IS success constructs, system quality, information quality, and service quality, on user satisfaction in the context of data warehouse by employing a survey and interviews. The DeLone and McLean (1992) IS success model is most widely cited and applied, thus making contributions to the literature of IS success. They introduced a comprehensive taxonomy of IS success in six major dimensions - system quality, information quality, use, user satisfaction, individual impact, and organizational impact. These dimensions of DeLone and McLean (1992) match Shannon and Weaver's (1949) three dimensions: system quality at technical level; information quality at semantic level; and use, user satisfaction, individual impact, and organizational impact at the effectiveness level.\nResearch model and hypotheses development: DeLone and McLean proposed their original IS success model in 1992 and presented a new framework in 2003. In the first model, they identified six dimensions of success discussed above. A decade later, this model was updated by adding another dimension, service quality. The DeLone and McLean (1992, 2003) model has been applied to OSS in general to measure OSS success (Lee et al., 2009). The research model for this study is distinguished from prior research due to the addition of two constructs: community service quality and organizational net benefits in accordance with the nature of enterprise-level IS (Figure 1). The present study extends the application of the IS success model even further to enterprise software.To evaluate the relationships shown in the model, the end-users of OSS EIS were surveyed about their perspectives on the use of OSS EIS based on their work experience. The measurement instrument was developed by adopting existing validated instruments wherever possible. The hypothesized relationships between variables were analyzed using structural equation modeling to assess the direction and strength of the relationships.Lee et al. (2009) investigated DeLone and McLean's (1992, 2003) model in the OSS context. They dropped system quality from the model since their study focused on the success of OS (e.g. Linux operating system), not on OS-based application systems (e.g. Linux-based sales system). They claimed that OS itself is not an application system and does not produce or process information as an output. Based on a review of these previous studies, the present study used seven dimensions as success factors of OSS EIS: information quality, OSS EIS quality, community service quality, OSS EIS use, user satisfaction, individual net benefits, and organizational net benefits. Figure 1 shows the research model that includes the constructs as well as the hypotheses of this study.Information quality\nMethodology and instrument development: Due to the confirmatory nature of present research, SEM is appropriate to test causal relationships among the variables and test the hypotheses. A survey agency that has a large number of panel members who have work experiences with OSS EIS was solicited for the research cooperation. The agency firm conducted a survey of the panel members by e-mail and received a total of 157 responses. Seven incomplete responses were excluded from data analysis.Relatively few studies have empirically examined OSS from the users' perspective. However, previous studies that focused on user perception in the IS discipline provide a rich literature as a basis of questionnaire development for the present research. The measurement instrument was developed by adapting existing validated instruments wherever possible. The double translation protocol was conducted for the measurement instrument to be translated into Korean.The survey questionnaire collected basic demographic data on respondents and their organizations, and asked general questions about OSS EIS that the user had experienced, along with the main questions to identify the respondent's perspectives on OSS EIS. The research model has seven constructs for which 30 questions are used based on previous studies.The survey instrument for the research is presented in the Appendix. The research model with the measured variables is shown in Figure 2.\nResults: Reliability and validity test\nDiscussion: Prior studies about IS success have identified several variables as antecedents of system use: information quality, system quality (OSS EIS quality in this study), service quality (community service quality), and user satisfaction. The results of this study show that information quality, OSS EIS quality, and user satisfaction have no effect on OSS EIS use. Only community service quality has a direct positive effect on OSS EIS use. This result can be explained by the \"mandatory\" system use argued by DeLone and McLean (2003). Unlike other software, EIS are usually the only software package available in an organization for planned tasks. Once a certain type of EIS is implemented, system use is required across the organization.As prior studies (Pitt et al., 1995; Shin, 2003; Yang and Fang, 2004) pointed out, the present study employed community service quality as an antecedent construct of OSS EIS use and the result shows it has a positive effect on OSS EIS. Upon reviewing the results, the only antecedent of OSS EIS use is community service quality. In previous sections, it has been assumed that OSS EIS use is mandatory. However, users can voluntarily use OSS EIS for a test run before actual implementation. In such a situation, the extent of community service quality can be used as a decision factor in selecting an appropriate EIS for the organization's needs.System use (OSS EIS use) has frequently been employed as a success factor affecting individual impact (individual net benefit) in prior studies. However, the results of the present research do not support the proposition. This issue also can be explained by the \"mandatory\" issue. If it is required to use OSS EIS, OSS EIS use cannot be an antecedent for individual net benefit. As discussed earlier, Seddon (1997) argued for the removal of the system use construct from DeLone and McLean's first model because of its ambiguity. The ambiguity issue was further investigated by later studies and considered unjustifiable because of the nature of the construct in various research purposes. Based on prior studies on this issue, the present study suggests an OSS EIS success model without the EIS OSS use construct.System quality (OSS EIS quality) has a direct positive effect on user satisfaction. Unlike Lee et al.'s (2009) OSS success model, the present research found no significant direct positive effect of community service quality on user satisfaction. This may be explained by DeLone and McLean's (2003) arguments that the role of quality determinants varies from context to context. The users of enterprise software typically follow predefined routines to receive desired outputs from the system. Similarly, when users experience technical difficulties, they follow formal processes of problem solving through the organization. Hence, the quality of service from communities to resolve issues could not be directly transferred to end-users. Instead, users may receive indirect effect of the service quality. Therefore, community service quality may have no direct effect on user satisfaction in the OSS EIS context.The hypothesis on the effect of user satisfaction on individual impact (individual net benefit) was supported as in prior studies (Gatian, 1994; Rai et al., 2002; DeLone and McLean, 2003; Lee et al., 2009). A direct positive effect of individual impact (individual net benefit) on organizational impact (organizational net benefit) was hypothesized and the result of analysis supported it. The results of SEM analysis is shown in Figure 3.The ambiguous definition of system use (OSS EIS use) has been an issue in developing the IS success model and the result of this study also revealed the same issue. The study observed no significant relationships between OSS EIS use and its two antecedents, information quality and OSS EIS quality. Moreover, the hypothesis between OSS EIS use and individual net benefit was not supported either. The results suggest removing the OSS EIS use construct entirely from the OSS EIS model proposed by this research.\nConclusion: The overall objective of this study was to examine the relationships between IS success factors in the OSS EIS context. For researchers, the present research has expanded the IS success model to the OSS EIS context. The developers in on-line OSS communities may take the success factors into account when they develop OSS EIS. Like all studies, the present research has some limitations. OSS is different from proprietary software in terms of its motivation, development process, social dynamics in the development group, and diffusion process, such as licensing issues (Casalo et al., 2009). The present study has focused mainly on the user's perspectives, which are not the only potential considerations when adopting OSS EIS. The small sample size could also be a limitation of the study. Due to the difficulty of collecting data from very small population (OSS EIS users), only a limited sample (n=150) was used in the study. A longitudinal study may supplement this weakness.Future studies could expand the present research by being more inclusive and cover a broader scope of OSS EIS to produce more applicable insights for practice. As Brydon and Vining (2008) pointed out, OSS is causing disruption in many wide-level systems, such as those in the ERP software market. In the OSS paradigm, multiple entities (individuals, organisations, academic institutions, and others) come together to develop a software product. OSS is not confined in the category of software products for \"low-level-system-oriented\", as conventionally recognized. A multi-group analysis is interesting when considering the context-sensitive characteristic of OSS EIS.\n",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Purpose: - The purpose of this paper is to identify the success factors of open-source software in the enterprise level. It expands the application of the information systems (IS) success model in the literature to enterprise information systems (EIS). The paper presents a simplified open-source EIS success model by removing several constructs in the existing open-source software models.\nDesign/methodology/approach: - To test the research model, a survey questionnaire was developed based on previous studies dealing with IS success models and adapting them to the open-source EIS context. The research instrument contained 30 items that represent seven constructs in the research model. Data were collected from 250 open-source enterprise software end-users. Due to its confirmatory nature, this study applied the structural equation model.\nFindings: - The results of the study indicate that only community service quality has a positive direct effect on open-source EIS use, while information quality, EIS quality, and user satisfaction do not. Open-source EIS quality has a direct positive effect on user satisfaction, which in turn has a positive effect on individual net benefits, which also positively affects organizational net benefits.\nResearch limitations/implications: - This study focused on the open-source EIS users' perspective. Future studies could expand the scope by covering a broader open-source EIS aspect such as motivation of its use, development processes, social dynamics in the development group, diffusion process, and the like. A longitudinal study could provide a more concrete trend of open-source EIS use by organizations. The small sample size of this study is also a limitation.\nPractical implications: - The present research provides a practical evidence of relationships in the open-source EIS application model. The developers in on-line open-source communities need to take the success factors identified in this study into account when developing open-source EIS.\nOriginality/value: - There is a paucity of empirical studies in open-source EIS applications. The paper expends the traditional IS success model to the open-source EIS context by collecting and analyzing data from 150 real-world open-source EIS users.\n",
"role": "assistant"
}
] |
Time-to-need: a portfolio tool to balance the time-to-market
|
[
"New product development",
"Product life cycle",
"Time-to-market",
"Portfolio",
"Market demand",
"Balancing"
] |
[
{
"content": "Summarize the following paper into structured abstract.\n\n1. Introduction: The current global macroeconomic environment has been pressing companies to launch more new products in a shorter period of time (Vesey, 1991). This has generated a mantra among groups involved in new product development (NPD) to intensively reduce the time necessary for new products to be introduced into the market, also known as time-to-market (Cohen et al., 1996). The impact of this mantra on all development sites, from research and development (R&D) to manufacturing, is felt once it is strictly aligned with a company's strategy (Prieto and Carvalho, 2011).\n2. The definition of time-to-need: Several authors have highlighted the importance of time-to-market for new products as a factor in the competitive advantage of many technology-driven firms (Griffin, 2002; Ittner and Larcker, 1997; Cohen et al., 1996).\n3. Comparative analysis between time-to-market and time-to-need: The difference between time-to-need and time-to-market can lead to very different management decisions, even in regard to intuitive results. For example, it may seem like a great scenario when the time-to-market is equal to the time-to-need. However, a market evaluation is required to monitor the movements made or planned by competitors. From a strategic point of view, meeting demand at a time when a product is needed is important. However, it can be considered a risk when a competitor is likely to launch such a solution in advance of the market, getting the attention of consumers or establishing an image of being a technological leader. Therefore, comparison between time-to-need and time-to-market approaches should always be well supported by monitoring and the strategic articulation of how to position itself in the race to launch new products (Cooper, 2009). As part of a competitive intelligence strategy, competitor monitoring identifies the projects that may face a higher or lower risk of becoming obsolete in the face of competitors' development. Thus, that is also especially important for multidisciplinary groups with a global reach the time-to-need approach.\n4. Process proposal: The concepts that have so far been presented focus on the need to have a reference to the time when a market demands or uses certain technologies, i.e. the time-to-need. Following the above definitions, it is possible to implement several ways to accomplish this measurement. Figure 2 illustrates a method of how to achieve this evaluation.\n5. Case study: The results of an analysis performed on the time-to-need vs the time-to-market of projects in a portfolio is not easy to measure in a short term because it is difficult to distinguish between the benefits to the entire portfolio and the benefits experienced by a single project. The successful management of resources permits a good delivery rate of new products to the market. This study presents an example of applying this analysis and its impact on new product launches. The company that implemented a continuous evaluation between time-to-market and time-to-need is an automotive company focused on engine components. This company operates worldwide and is the market leader in their field of expertise. Thus, the development of new products is a worldwide task, with projects developed in more than one region simultaneously. The company's project portfolios are divided by product line. The product development, on an annual basis, launches approximately two to three new products per portfolio. When referring to NPD, projects are related to the development of products with significantly new features and not related to incremental improvements. Figure 3 presents the effects of that company applying the time-to-need analysis to the development of a product since the second semester of 2008. It consisted of a quarterly review of market-need expectation (time-to-need) compared to the expectations of the project conclusion date (time-to-market). After this analysis and a strategic analysis of product positioning, the portfolio of projects was reorganised in terms of resources to increase the company's portfolio output.\n6. Discussion and conclusions: The time-to-need proposal is an additional analysis of the time-to-market approach, integrating NPD and the portfolio perspective to improve efficiency and effectiveness. The multi-project perspective promotes a better distribution or reorganisation of resources among projects. The time-to-need analysis may result in management decisions beyond the balance and allocation of resources, which can even lead to cancelling or re-prioritisation among projects. This analysis looks to an integrated multi-project scenario, understanding the trade-offs among them. It should be considered a balanced tool in addition to other project tools (Takeuchi and Nonaka, 1986; Smith and Reinertsen, 1992).\n",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to provide a management tool to maximise the effective time-to-market of a portfolio given the competitive monitoring activities.\nDesign/methodology/approach: From the constant monitoring of competition and market needs, it is proposed to define a time-to-need, time when the market may consume the product under development and competitor will not provide a solution before. This time-to-need is proposed to be defined by an expert committee in a periodical meeting of the portfolio. Once it is identified the time-to-need and the time-to-market (project management), it is possible to manage resources in order to maximise the portfolio outputs.\nFindings: The application of the mentioned approach in an automotive industry showed improvements on number of launched new products per year (double) and on number of patented product launched (four times more).\nResearch limitations/implications: This approach applies on projects of medium to long term (more than two years) because the resource management can consume set up time. The presented results in this work were based in a single case, which can limit the expected results of the application of this methodology.\nPractical implications: This approach enables a constant alignment among experts and a better deployment of resources.\nOriginality/value: This work provides a practical tool to promote better resource allocation in a portfolio. It can also be an enabler of innovation projects once it finds resources potential to fund the more front end work.\n",
"role": "assistant"
}
] |
Qualitative comparative analysis: justifying a neo-configurational approach in management research
|
[
"QCA",
"Case knowledge",
"Causal complexity",
"Configurational theory"
] |
[
{
"content": "Summarize the following paper into structured abstract.\n\nIntroduction: In the past two decades, management research has developed a significant interest in advancing the neo-configurational approach, which \"enables researchers to theorize and empirically examine causal complexity\" (Misangyi et al., 2017, p. 257). Causal complexity is guided by the three principles of:\nUnderlying arguments for when to use qualitative comparative analysis: Before choosing QCA, the researcher must be aware of whether the method is warranted for the study. QCA is only applicable for studies that seek to offer theoretical contributions from a configurational perspective. It will also be useful only if the intention is to unravel causal complexity relations and if it is based on case knowledge, in which the researcher seeks to observe how different attributes of the cases consistently fit together to produce an outcome. If these three goals are the purpose of the study, researchers may then choose QCA to conduct the study. To make this clear, we give further detail on each of them below.\nProcedure for conducting qualitative comparative analysis: Although the process of conducting QCA has been discussed in great detail elsewhere, we argue that it is useful to provide a brief overview of the process involved when adopting a QCA-based study. The procedure for conducting QCA is made up of four general steps (see Figure 1): designing the configurational model, building the empirical data, calibrating and analyzing the data, and reporting and interpreting the results.\nDiscussion and conclusion: Our aim in this article was to critically reflect and offer insights on how to justify the use of QCA in future research endeavors in the field of management. We have done this by critically analyzing three arguments as to why QCA would be warranted for use in a research study. First, we discussed the need to assume configurational theories to build and empirically test a causal model of interest. Second, we explained how the three principles of causal complexity are assumed during the process of conducting QCA-based studies. Third, we elaborated on the importance of case knowledge when selecting the data for the analysis and when interpreting the results. We contend that these three arguments need to be the underlying goals of the research to justify choosing QCA as the method.\n",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to critically reflect and offer insights on how to justify the use of qualitative comparative analysis (QCA) as a research method for understanding the complexity of organizational phenomena, by applying the principles of the neo-configurational approach.\nDesign/methodology/approach: We present and critically examine three arguments regarding the use of QCA for management research. First, they discuss the need to assume configurational theories to build and empirically test a causal model of interest. Second, we explain how the three principles of causal complexity are assumed during the process of conducting QCA-based studies. Third, we elaborate on the importance of case knowledge when selecting the data for the analysis and when interpreting the results.\nFindings: We argue that it is important to reflect on these arguments to have an appropriate research design. In the true spirit of the configurational approach, we contend that the three arguments presented are necessary; however, each argument is insufficient to warrant a QCA research design.\nOriginality/value: This paper contributes to management research by offering key arguments on how to justify the use of QCA-based studies in future research endeavors.\n",
"role": "assistant"
}
] |
Man vs machine: Relational and performance outcomes of technology utilization in small business CRM support capabilities
|
[
"Marketing strategy",
"Relationship marketing",
"Small firms",
"Customer relationship management",
"Market turbulence"
] |
[
{
"content": "Summarize the following paper into structured abstract.\n\n__NO_TITLE__: \"One machine can do the work of fifty ordinary men. No machine can do the work of one extraordinary man.\" - Elbert Hubbard, Author and Publisher\n1. Introduction: Customer relationship management (CRM) is a \"strategic approach that is concerned with creating improved shareholder value through the development of appropriate relationships with key customers and customer segments\" (Payne and Frow, 2005, p. 168). While specific practices of CRM may take different forms, a technology-based approach is common (Avlonitis and Panagopoulos, 2005; Keramati et al., 2010), and the selling of CRM technology is big business. Revenue from CRM software sales rose from $20.4bn in 2013 to $23.2bn in 2014, a 13.3 per cent increase (Gartner, 2015). Adoption rates among organizations are also on the rise, with over 51 per cent of sampled organizations utilizing such technologies in 2011 (Economics, 2012). These substantial investments are made in the hopes of achieving many benefits, including more precise customer profitability assessment, centralized customer knowledge storage and access and increased customer satisfaction and retention.\n2. A contingency approach to level of technology in CRM capabilities: In this paper, we use a contingency theory perspective to investigate the influence that the extent of technology utilization in CRM support capabilities has on customer relationship and firm performance. A contingency perspective suggests \"that there is no singular structure or strategy that is best for all organizations\" (Ahearne et al., 2012, p. 122) and that examining different business strategies in relation to the environmental variables to which they are contingent can provide \"richer characterizations\" of the complex phenomena (Zeithaml et al., 1988, p. 44). A contingency approach has been used in CRM research both conceptually (Ahearne et al., 2012) and empirically (Daniela, 2015; Wang and Feng, 2012); however, no studies have examined the relationship between the levels of technology in CRM support capabilities and performance using a contingency theory or strategic fit perspective. We assert that there is likely no \"one CRM strategy fits all\" model and that utilizing a contingency approach to study modern-day CRM can provide needed clarity and valuable insight to the literature.\n3. Extent of technology utilization in the CRM capabilities of small businesses: The term CRM is often used synonymously with the technology behind the practice of CRM and studies of CRM often incorporate technology as an important aspect of CRM research (Zablah et al., 2004). We incorporate technology in this research by examining the degree to which a firm attempts to achieve CRM support capabilities along a continuum of technology utilization (i.e. the extent of technology used), framed as \"man\" vs \"machine\". At any stage of the CRM process, computers or other electronic devices may be used to leverage firms' CRM initiatives. We refer to this combination of hardware and software as \"CRM technology\", which is the basis of a machine-based approach to CRM. An example of a primarily technology-based CRM strategy is a sophisticated intranet-based service through which business customers can build customized orders directly through the firm's CRM technology interface without any human interaction. On the other hand, CRM can be primarily human-based. In primarily human-based CRM strategies, frontline employees and service support personnel engage the customer and manage the relationship with little or no aid from CRM technologies. Although we refer to this juxtaposition as \"man vs machine\" in reality the range of CRM strategies that are used in small businesses today likely form a continuum, with firms using both human and machine-based resources to varying degrees in their CRM practices (Ahearne and Rapp, 2010).\n4. Outcomes of the extent of technology utilization in CRM support capabilities: With few exceptions (Palmatier et al., 2006b; Reinartz et al., 2004), CRM \"technology is widely seen as an enabler of an effective CRM system\" (Ernst et al., 2011, p. 292; Payne and Frow, 2005). It has also been suggested that \"CRM technology plays a critical role in the context of leveraging CRM-related activities and thus contributes to improved organizational performance in the market\" (Reinartz et al., 2004, p. 296). Accordingly, we anticipate a positive direct relationship between CRM support capability technology utilization and company performance.\n5. A contingency model of CRM support capabilities: Figure 1 depicts our use of a contingency theory perspective to investigate the influence that the extent of technology utilization in CRM support capabilities has on customer relationships and firm performance. The extant literature in marketing supports a contingency approach to research when studying \"alternative strategies under various environmental characteristics\" (Zeithaml et al., 1988, p 44). This approach is featured prominently in the sales literature when studying salesperson effectiveness (Weitz, 1981) and CRM implementation in business-to-business (B2B) markets (Ahearne et al., 2012). In both of these examples, the authors sought further understanding of the field through the study of salespeople and CRM implementation across differing contexts. Accordingly, our proposed model approaches environmental contingencies of the organization through an interaction approach to fit (Van de Ven and Drazin, 1984), by presenting the extent of technology use in CRM support capabilities as organizational characteristics and customer commitment as the performance outcome that is contingent on micro- and macro-environmental forces.\n6. Method: 6.1 Data collection procedure\n7. Results: 7.1 Main effects and mediating effects modeling\n8. Limitations, discussion and managerial implications: Before discussing our findings and managerial implications, a discussion of the limitations seems warranted. First, approximately 60 per cent of the sample firms had less than 10 employees (Appendix 1); thus, our results are geared toward truly small businesses, aligning with the positioning of this work. Second, our data set was derived from only a single respondent per firm and objective performance data could not be obtained, thus raising potential concerns over common method bias. However, several pre-planned steps were taken to address this concern including the use of a marker variable which was unrelated to our variables of interest. The low correlations of this marker variable to the planned data set increased confidence that common method variance was not a major concern. We also included attention filters within the instrument to ensure that respondents were actively processing the questions - those failing these filters were removed from the data set. Despite these limitations, our results provide insights into different approaches to using the five CRM support capabilities we identified for small businesses, enriching our theoretical and managerial knowledge in this area.\n9. Conclusion: The goals of this research were to examine how different approaches to technology use in CRM support capabilities influences commitment and firm performance for small businesses. Using data from CRM managers across a range of industries, we identified situations when man vs machine approaches yielded differential outcomes under micro and macro environmental conditions and offered theoretical and managerial insights from these findings. This study represents the first to identify human vs machine-based approaches to CRM support capabilities and to link those to performance outcomes, while also suggesting the value of focused future research and thinking in this important area.\n",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to examine the use of technology in customer relationship management (CRM) support capabilities by using an environmental contingency perspective. By examining the moderating effects of micro- and macro-environmental characteristics in which CRM support capabilities are used, the authors seek to extend the literature on CRM technology effectiveness in both customer commitment and overall firm performance. The authors also seek to advance managerial knowledge about CRM support capability technology utilization strategies in various market offering and dynamic market settings.\nDesign/methodology/approach: The authors utilized a questionnaire to collect data from a sample of 276 small business CRM managers across a wide range of industries. Measures were adapted from the existing literature, and these were largely multiple-item measures of latent variables. The hypotheses were tested using a combination of Ridge regression and a bootstrapping test of mediation. In addition, residual centering was used to reduce multi-collinearity in the interaction analysis.\nFindings: The contingency/fit analysis performed in this research highlights the complex nature of the use of technology in CRM support capabilities. The benefits of a man vs a machine CRM support capability depend on the support function (whether marketing, sales, service, data access or data analysis), as well as upon the characteristics of the operating environment. Machine-based marketing support is positively related with customer commitment in turbulent markets, and machine-based service support is preferred in technologically turbulent markets. Sales support, on the other hand, is positively related to customer commitment in technologically turbulent markets when performed by man rather than machine.\nPractical implications: CRM support capabilities differ across firms and markets, thus a \"one size fits all\" approach is not appropriate. This research shows under what conditions a machine-based approach to CRM can be effective for small businesses.\nOriginality/value: This research is the first to consider market offering and turbulence variables as moderators of the relationship between technology use in CRM support capabilities and customer commitment. Taking this contingency approach, the authors find that resource-based competitive advantage is obtainable based on the fit of the resources (e.g. CRM capabilities) to the environmental characteristics of the firm. Through this perspective that is unique to CRM research, the authors are able to provide both general and specific recommendations to managers and researchers.\n",
"role": "assistant"
}
] |
Crossing the generational divide: engaging "young" employees in your organization
|
[
"Job satisfaction",
"Young adults"
] |
[
{
"content": "Summarize the following paper into structured abstract.\n\n__NO_TITLE__: To be engaged is to be wholly committed to action. Whether in our personal or professional lives, when we are engaged, we are viscerally attached to both the process and the outcome. We feel passionate and intensely focused, ready to take on challenges and overcome obstacles. Our passion and focus stems from a perception of meaningfulness: what we are doing matters - to a \"cause\" we believe in, to others, and ultimately to ourselves. In other words, engagement comes from and contributes to an ongoing interaction, a reciprocal process of giving and receiving.\n",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Purpose: - The aim of this paper is to examine how new employees and employers can both contribute to \"committed action\" within employment.\nDesign/methodology/approach: - Outlines ways in which to create the right conditions for equal engagement.\nFindings: - There is no foolproof formula for achieving inter-generational engagement in the workplace: roughly it is one part recognition, one part intentionality, and one part commitment to challenging the status quo. By first recognizing what matters to people (whether young or old), then integrating their answers into the organization's overall strategy and human resource design, and finally by being unsatisfied with stagnation, the feeling of engagement can take root and new, improved ways of thinking and doing can blossom.\nOriginality/value: - The paper provides useful information on encouraging individuals to be wholly committed to action.\n",
"role": "assistant"
}
] |
Effects of extrusion on the properties of shrimp and cassava-based snacks
|
[
"Experimental design",
"Sensory analysis",
"Food extrusion",
"Macrobrachium amazonicum"
] |
[
{
"content": "Summarize the following paper into structured abstract.\n\nIntroduction: The tendency for the consumption of ready-to-eat snacks, which are convenient and cheap, is increasing nowadays, especially in developing countries where many people work away from home and are therefore more dependent on snacks that provide part of their daily nutritional needs (Awolu et al., 2015).\nResearch method: Feedstock\nPrincipal component analysis (PCA) and hierarchical cluster analysis (HCA): The data were interpreted using multivariate statistics, applying the PCA and HCA with the aid of the Statistic 5.0 software. For the HCA and main components, 18 assays were evaluated for the sensory analysis in terms of the following components (overall acceptance, appearance, aroma, colour, purchase intention, taste and texture). The application of the multivariate study provided a clear and objective explanation of the correlation and variance of the samples when submitted to grouping with individuals showing similar characteristics.\nResults and discussion: Physicochemical composition of the feedstock\nResults obtained for the experimental design: Table I shows the independent (X)1, X2 and X3) and dependent (Y1, Y2 and Y3) variables in both their original and coded forms, and Figure 1 shows the Pareto graphs for the standardized effects on EI, BD, SL and SA at a 90 per cent significance level (p0.10). The estimated effects show the impact of each factor on the responses studied - the higher the value, the greater the influence of the factor on the dependent variable.\nPrincipal component analysis (PCA) and hierarchical cluster analysis (HCA): Before starting the sensory analysis, the samples were analysed microbiologically (as described in the material and methods section). All samples submitted to sensory analysis were in accordance with the Brazilian legislation for human consumption in accordance with Brasil (2001).\nOptimal condition for the extruded snack: The shrimp and cassava snack was optimised using the desirability tool (Figure 5), obtaining the optimal conditions for the extruded snack of 7.5 g/100 g of shrimp meal, complemented by 92.5 g/100 g of cassava flour; with 13.5 g/100 g of feed moisture and a temperature of 85degC in the third zone. The results obtained for EI, SL and BD using the desirability tool were 2.76; 121.33 mg / g and 0.27 g / mL, respectively. The extrusion carried out under these optimal conditions (as described in the Experimental Design item), gave values of 2.45 for EI, 120.8 mg/g for SL and 0.26 g/mL for BD, very close to the values obtained using the desirability tool.\nPhysicochemical composition of the optimal extruded product: Table II shows the physicochemical composition of the extruded snack, showing that the addition of the shrimp meal increased the protein content of the extruded product by 6.72 times as compared to the use of only cassava flour. Lourenco et al. (2016) increased the protein content of extruded rice grits by six times by adding 8.95 g/100 g of shrimp meal to the grits.\nSensory analysis of the optimal extruded snack: Table IV shows the mean scores and acceptance rates obtained in the sensory analysis carried out by 65 untrained tasters.\nConclusions: The quest for the development and/or application of technologies that allow for the use of feedstock from the Amazon Basin is a way of aggregating value to the existing wealth of this region, while enabling the diversification of new food products for quick and easy preparation, which are stable, safe and inexpensive. From the results obtained, it appeared that the shrimp meal and cassava were attractive feedstocks for the production of snacks, since, besides being cheaper, no extra equipment was needed for their preparation, which technically could be a positive point for the food industry. It should also be noted that the use of this shrimp, which is considered as accompanying fauna and hence an environmental inconvenience, being discarded in the environment in the wrong way, is also a way of solving this issue by giving direction to this waste, adding value to the feedstock.\n",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to use Amazon River shrimp meal and cassava flour as the raw materials for the production of an extruded product. Both these raw materials are highly consumed foods in the northern region of Brazil, but are not processed industrially, only being used for local consumption and there is little in the literature concerning their use.\nDesign/methodology/approach: The study was carried out using a full 23 factorial central composite rotational experimental design with three independent variables, which were shrimp meal; feed moisture content and temperature, with four replicates at the central point and six axial points. The dependent variables were: expansion index (EI), bulk density (BD) and specific length (SL). The principal component analysis (PCA) was applied for the sensory analysis.\nFindings: Almost all the parameters studied had a significant influence (p<0.10) on the responses analysed. The product was well accepted by 78.11 per cent of the volunteers. Increases in the shrimp meal and feed moisture contents strongly influenced the physical analyses (EI, BD and SL) of the extruded product. In the application of the PCA for the sensory analysis, the influence of the variables aroma, appearance and purchase intention corresponded to PC1, and that of the variables flavour, texture, global acceptance and colour to PC2.\nSocial implications: The development of a product based on animal protein which is more available than common snacks, as a way of reducing the negative environmental impact caused by the disposal of Macrobrachium amazonicum, which is considered as accompanying fauna to artisan fishery.\nOriginality/value: The originality of this paper lies in the quest for the development and/or application of technologies that allow for the use of raw materials from the Amazon as a way of aggregating value to the existing wealth of this region.\n",
"role": "assistant"
}
] |
Developing a safety climate factor model in construction research and practice: A systematic review identifying future directions for research
|
[
"Management",
"Construction",
"Construction site",
"Construction safety"
] |
[
{
"content": "Summarize the following paper into structured abstract.\n\nIntroduction: The construction sector employs around 7 per cent of the world's workforce, but is responsible for 30-40 per cent of fatalities (Sunindijo and Zou, 2011). Despite technological developments and the implementation of robust occupational health and safety (OHS) management systems, the construction industry's chronic level of fatalities, serious injury and ill-health appear resistant to change (Lingard et al., 2010a). This has led researchers and practitioners to focus on organisational and social factors, including safety climate, as an opportunity for influencing positive change to the industry's poor OHS performance (Lingard et al., 2010b). Safety climate has been viewed as employees' perceptions of the values, policies and procedures related to safety within an organisation, as well as the priority that the organisation places on safety vs production (Griffin and Andrew, 2000). Safety climate is an example of a leading indicator of safety because it provides evidence of the psychosocial conditions that may encourage or discourage safe behaviour (Morrow et al., 2010). In particular, safety climate is highly applicable to construction projects because of their characteristics, such as temporality, decentralisation, mobility, high turn-over rate and environmental complexity (Fang and Wu, 2013). Though previous research has sought to explore safety climate factors (Glendon and Litherland, 2001) and ways of improving and measuring it (Zhou et al., 2008), there is little agreement on which dimensions or factors constitute the most common safety climate factor structure. Zhou et al. (2008) argue that improvements in working conditions and innovations in the equipment used in the industry are not enough to improve safety performance because organisational culture and human factors also play critical roles. In this regard, the influence of safety climate has attracted an increasing level of attention in the development of safety practices.\nSafety, safety climate and safety culture: Despite the diversification of research topics in the field of safety, they mainly derive from two research perspectives: management-driven and technology-driven (Newaz et al., 2016). The studies from the management perspective usually involve safety climate, safety culture, worker's competency/behaviour, hazard management, and so on. The other technology perspective focusses on how to use different types of technologies to ensure construction site safety. Technology-driven safety can assist management-driven safety, rather than replace it (Teizer et al., 2010). Both of them are mutually dependent and cooperative (Zhou et al., 2015). Considering these two perspectives, this research project falls under the management-driven aspect as the research gap is more vigilant from this paradigm. Safety climate was first defined by Zohar (1980) as \"a summary of molar perceptions that employees share about their work environments [...] a frame of reference for guiding appropriate and adaptive task behaviours\" (p. 96). Since publication this seminal paper, the concept of safety climate has been developed, and Neal and Griffin (2006) define safety climate as \"individual perceptions of the policies, procedures and practices relating to safety in the workplace\" (pp. 946-947). The notion of safety climate, which is derived from organisational climate theory and serves as a schema for employees to interpret the environment and adapt behaviours accordingly, is central to accident prevention in the socio-technical age (Shen, Koh, Rowlinson and Bridge, 2015; Shen, Tuuli, Xia, Koh and Rowlinson, 2015).\nSafety climate in construction: The nature of construction projects and their delivery poses immense challenges to the safety of construction practitioners. Historically, attempts to reduce accidents in project settings have gone through three overlapping stages, i.e. the technical age, the human error age and, lately, the socio-technical age (Reason, 1993). In the technical age, technical measures were adopted to mitigate or prevent hazards and risks in the project environment, while the human error age focussed on efforts to avoid malpractices of the person (i.e. project participants) in the project delivery process. In the socio-technical age, great importance is therefore attached to both the person and environment and their interactions. The notion of safety climate serves as a schema for employees to interpret the environment and adapt behaviours accordingly, which is central to accident prevention in the socio-technical age (Shen, Koh, Rowlinson and Bridge, 2015; Shen, Tuuli, Xia, Koh and Rowlinson, 2015).\nAim and objectives: The aim of this paper is to develop a research framework for future studies on safety climate for construction sites. The research has identified gaps in the construction industry's safety climate studies that are essential for reducing accident and injury rates. The authors articulated the research questions using the neglected gap defined by Zohar (2010). The research identified the overlooked and underresearched areas in the existing literature of safety climate in construction. The paper examines the ongoing development in safety climate studies in different countries to establish a comprehensive understanding of standardised and common factor structure. To achieve the aforementioned aim, two objectives were proposed:\nResearch methodology: This paper uses a SLR to identify and expand the existing body of knowledge on the concept of safety climate. A systematic review refers to the process of systematically locating and collating all available information on an effect (Davis et al., 2014). Systematic reviews differ from traditional narrative reviews by adopting a replicable, scientific and transparent process; in other words, a detailed technology that aims to minimise bias through exhaustive literature searches of published and unpublished studies and by providing an audit trail of the reviewer decisions, procedures and conclusions (Cook et al., 1997). Indeed, undertaking a systematic review is now regarded as a \"fundamental scientific activity\" (Mulrow, 1994, p. 597). An SLR is conducted of construction site safety climate-related articles published in various journals between 1980 and 2015. The one in 1980 was determined as a consequence of Zohar's (1980) first empirical research in this area and it is regarded as a seminal study that set the current research direction. Accordingly, it was determined to review the literature between then (i.e. 1980) and 2015, which matched the timing of the \"literature review\" stage of this research project.\nFactors of the proposed safety climate structure in construction: Zohar (1980) described what he called a \"climate for safety\" in 20 Israeli industrial organisations. This measure of safety climate was a summary of shared employee perceptions regarding their work environment and the relative importance of safety behaviour (Flin et al., 2000). Based on a survey of over 400 employees, Zohar concluded eight factors of safety climate (see Table II) with organisational practices, procedures and rewarded behaviours linked to an organisation's safety level, whereas Flin et al. (2000) summarised safety climate studies across several industries and through a systematic review that determined a set of five most common factors (see Table II). As Webster and Watson (2002) argued, a review should identify critical knowledge gaps and thus motivate researchers to close this breach. That is, writing a review not only requires an examination of past research, but also means making a plan for research. Highlighting any discrepancy between what we know and what we need to know alerts other scholars to opportunities for contribution. Usually, this roadmap is accomplished by developing a conceptual model with supporting propositions (Webster and Watson, 2002). In addition, Seuring and Muller (2008) stated that literature reviews usually aim at two objectives: first, they summarise existing research by identifying patterns, themes and issues; second, this then helps to identify the conceptual content of the field and can contribute to theory development. Hence, this paper develops a safety climate model/conceptual framework (see Figure 2) by reviewing previous research with a systematic review approach. Whilst the examination and validation of this model is underway, the authors share current findings with other researchers to consider and test this model in order to develop a common safety climate factor structure for construction sites. However, as discussed previously, researchers have identified different factor structures contingent on respective industries, and, more recently, this focussed on the development of an industry-specific common factor structure (Zohar, 2010). In order to add insight into this endeavour, this paper provides a systematic review of safety climate studies in construction and identifies a number of factors (see Table I). As with Flin et al. (2000), this research selected the five most common factors, described below, to capture the basic elements of workers' perception towards safety and intends to utilise them as a safety climate factor structure set as part of the ongoing research. In addition, this research proposes to merge the sixth factor labelled as \"Communication\" and the seventh factor labelled as \"Training\" with the second factor renamed as \"Safety System\", to strengthen the safety climate factor structure which would cover a comprehensive portion of the workers' perceptions. The following sections explain the individual factors of the proposed safety climate model and their significance.\nSupervisor's role: Construction work is largely non-routine, necessitating the exercise of supervisory discretion in the interpretation of formal safety policies/procedures. In this context, the role of supervisors in shaping subordinates safety behaviour is likely to be considerably greater than in work contexts with routine production processes (Cooke et al., 2008). First-level supervisors responses to safety are a key determinant in the creation of subordinates beliefs about the importance of safety to the organisation (Zohar and Luria (2004). Out of the 16 studies identified, 9 studies included the factor \"supervision/supervisor's role\" (Figure 2) as stated in Table I. The implication of these findings is that desired safety values and behaviours should be endorsed across different hierarchical levels of an organisation, and first-level supervisors play a key role in translating top management safety commitment into safety values and practices within workgroups. The importance of supervisors' relationships with workers in construction has been well established and recognised as more significant than any other work settings. Due to multiple levels of organisational structure as well as different roles, responsibilities, and accountabilities at different levels, management behaviours can produce different impacts on workers' behaviour (House et al., 1995; Kozlowski and Klein, 2000). Supervisors have the most frequent contact with workers among the three management layers and are directly responsible for good safety performance on-site. Simard and Marchand (1997) state that senior management commitment has no significantly direct impact on safety performance; rather, the relations with safety initiatives and supervisors' involvement as mediating variables have a higher validity (Fang et al., 2015). The fact that the relationship between top management commitment to safety and workgroup injury frequency rates was fully mediated by perceptions of supervisors' safety expectations highlights the critical role played by supervisors in the safety management process (Lingard et al., 2012). Without supervisors communicating high safety expectations, the influence of senior managers appears to be insignificant. Safety leadership-related research also indicated that safety initiatives implemented on supervisors are often more effective than those directly on workers (Zohar and Luria 2003). However, in a non-positive safety climate environment, employees' safety compliance behaviour will not improve even though supervisors' leadership practices increase (Hon et al., 2014).\nConclusion: Through a systematic review of safety climate studies, the findings of this research proposes a common factor model for safety climate. In turn, this establishes the research agenda in order to examine and validate the proposed factor model on construction site(s). The authors have identified the 5 most common factors in construction: management commitment; safety system; supervisor's role; workers' involvement; and group safety climate. In order to obtain empirical results and examine the factor structure, the research team suggest distilling these into a five-factor model of safety climate structure while surveying and measuring the safety climate in the construction industry. While exploring the safety climate studies, this paper proposes a safety climate factor model for the construction industry and emphasises that a constant examinations of the factors of safety climate can lead researchers and practitioners to attain a common industry-specific factor structure which can help to keep the number of fatalities at minimum levels.\n",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Purpose: Safety climate and its impact on safety performance is well established; however, researchers in this field suggest that the absence of a common assessment framework is a reflection of the state of development of this concept. The purpose of this paper is to propose a five-factor model that can be used to diagnose and measure safety climate in construction safety research and practice.\nDesign/methodology/approach: A systematic review was adopted, and following Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses guidelines, 574 articles were selected at the start of the study based on a developed review protocol for investigating safety climate factors. While examining the factor analysis of different studies, data reliability and data validity of the individual research findings were considered and frequency of factors uploaded was used to determine the significance as a quantitative measure to develop the ranking of safety climate factors.\nFindings: The review identified that, from the established measures of safety climate in construction, there is little uniformity on factor importance. However, management commitment safety system role of the supervisor; workers' involvement and group safety climate were found to be the most common across the studies reviewed. It is proposed these factors are used to inform a five-factor model for investigating safety climate in the construction industry.\nOriginality/value: The findings of this study will motivate researchers and practitioners in safety to use the five-factor safety climate model presented in this paper and test it to develop a common factor structure for the construction industry. The fact that the model is comprised of five factors makes it easier to be used and implemented by small-to medium-sized construction companies, therefore enhancing its potential use.\n",
"role": "assistant"
}
] |
Knowledge management and organizational culture: a theoretical integrative framework
|
[
"Organizational culture",
"Knowledge management",
"Competing values framework",
"Knowledge creation and conversion",
"Ethical and trusting culture,"
] |
[
{
"content": "Summarize the following paper into structured abstract.\n\n__NO_TITLE__: In the era of globalization, knowledge creation and knowledge management have become dominant factors for organizations' global competitiveness (Bhagat et al., 2002), effective organizational performance and success (Martin, 2000; Nonaka and Takeuchi, 1995; Popadiuk and Choo, 2006), and actualizing human capital (Brown and Woodland, 1999). The significance of knowledge creation and management was highlighted by Nonaka (1991) when he noted:Successful companies are those that consistently create new knowledge, disseminate it widely throughout the organization and quickly embody it in new technologies and products (p. 162).\nKnowledge creation and knowledge management: a theoretical framework: Interestingly, while researchers and practitioners unanimously agree on the significance of knowledge, especially with regard to the need of organizations to continuously develop new knowledge to compete in the rapidly changing environment, there is no agreement among them with respect to the concepts and definitions related to knowledge and knowledge management (King, 2000; Martin, 2000). According to Davenport and Prusak (2000), \"knowledge is a fluid mix of framed experience, values, contextual information, and expert insight that provides a framework for evaluating and incorporating new experiences and information\" (p. 5). Davenport and Prusak (2000) further explained that in organizations, \"knowledge often becomes embedded not only in documents or repositories, but also in organizational routines, processes, practices, and norms\" (p. 5). According to Malhotra (1997), knowledge that is contained in the minds of organizational members is the greatest organizational resource. In a 1998 study, Malhotra (1998) defined knowledge management as \"a synergistic combination of data and information processing capacity of information technologies, and the creative and innovative capacity of human beings.\" Rastogi (2000) defined knowledge management as a \"systematic and integrative process of coordinating organization-wide activities of acquiring, creating, storing, sharing, diffusing, developing, and deploying knowledge by individuals and groups in pursuit of major organizational goals\" (p. 40). However, despite the subtle differences between various definitions, scholars agree that effective and efficient knowledge management is central to organizational performance and success (Martin, 2000; Nonaka and Takeuchi, 1995). For the purpose of this study, knowledge is defined as \"justified true beliefs\" derived from accumulated information (Nonaka, 1994), and knowledge creation as the generation of new knowledge (Argote et al., 2003).Knowledge, its creation and conversion\nUnderstanding organizational culture: In the past few decades, the concept of organizational culture has gained wide acceptance as a way to understand human systems. It has been studied from a variety of perspectives ranging from disciplines such as anthropology and sociology, to the applied disciplines of organizational behavior, management science and organizational commitment (Naicker, 2008). Schein (1985) defined organizational culture as a set of learned responses where \"basic assumptions and beliefs that are shared by members of an organization [...] [and] define in a basic 'taken-for-granted' fashion an organization's view of itself and its environment\" (pp. 5-6). Cohen (1993) viewed organizational cultures as complex combinations of formal and informal systems, processes, and interactions. Formal organizational culture components include leadership, structure, policies, reward systems, socialization mechanisms, decision-making processes, etc. Informal organizational culture components include implicit behavioral norms, values, role models, organizational myths and rituals, organizational beliefs, historical anecdotes, and language (Cohen, 1993; Dion, 1996; Frederick, 1995; Schein, 2004; Trevino, 1990; Trevino and Brown, 2004). The contemporary definition of organizational culture includes what is valued, the dominant leadership style, the language and symbols, the procedures and routines, and the definitions of success that characterizes an organization (Cameron and Quinn, 1999; Schein, 1992; as cited in Berrio, 2003). The concept of culture seems to lend itself to very different uses such as collectively shared forms of ideas and cognition; symbols and meanings; values and ideologies; rules and norms; emotions and expressiveness; the collective unconscious; behavior patterns; and structures and practices (Alvesson, 2002).Several scholars have developed integrative frameworks of organizational culture (Allaire and Firsirotu, 1984; Alvesson, 2002; Schein, 1985, 1992; as cited in Zhou-Sivunen, 2005; Hatch, 1993), but there is hardly any consensus with regard to a general theory of organizational culture (Alvesson, 1987; Ashforth, 1985; Smircich, 1983; Zhou-Sivunen, 2005). One of the most recent and elegant frameworks of organizational culture is envisaged by Alvesson (2002), who drew upon the range of relevant literature within organization studies, synthesized it and identified eight metaphors - exchange regulator, compass, social glue, sacred cow, affect regulator, disorder, blinders, world-closure - of organizational culture. Although the eight metaphors do not represent a comprehensive list of ways of using the metaphor of culture, they cover many of the most common modes of thinking culturally (Alvesson, 2002).The author has, however, used the \"competing values framework\" (CVF) in this paper to develop an integrative framework as it is one of the most significant and extensively used models for constructing the profile of an organization's culture (Cameron and Quinn, 1999).Competing value framework of organizational culture\nTheorizing an integrative framework for knowledge management system: According to (Davenport and Prusak, 2000), environment plays a critical role in creation, conversion and transfer of knowledge in organisations as it facilitates communication, examination and experimentation. As discussed earlier, the context or ba in which knowledge is shared generated/created, and utilized \"provides the energy, quality and place to perform the individual conversions and to move along the knowledge spiral\" (Nonaka et al., 2000, p. 14). The integration of Nonaka et al.'s (2000) \"knowledge creation and conversion\" framework with the modified Quinn and Rohrbaugh's (1983a, b) \"competing values framework\" gives an opportunity to expound the effect of organizational culture in the knowledge creation and conversion process.It is important to appreciate that several conceptual similarities underpin the two frameworks: both present analytical models, which endeavor to explain organizational effectiveness. While the \"competing values framework\" attempts to explain organizational effectiveness in terms of the deep structure of organizational culture (Quinn and Rohrbaugh, 1983a, b), the \"knowledge creation and conversion\" framework endeavors to explain that the creation, conversion and transfer of knowledge is fundamental to organizational effectiveness (Nonaka et al., 2000). In addition, both the frameworks endeavor to capture the dynamic processes linked with internal operations and the organizational interactions with the external environment. The comparison between the characteristics of the four quadrants of the \"competing values framework\" and the various components (modes of knowledge creation, ba, and knowledge assets) of the \"knowledge creation and conversion\" framework represented in Figure 5 clearly shows that both frameworks have conceptual similarities.Human relations culture and socialization process\nDiscussion: Nonaka and Takeuchi (1995) and Nonaka et al. (2000) offered a guiding framework in knowledge management research. Similarly, Quinn and Rohrbaugh (1983a, b) provided a framework for organizational effectiveness, which can also be used to understand organizational culture because of its ability to tap into the aspects of organizational effectiveness via different values, assumptions, and interpretations that define an organization's culture. While Quinn and Rohrbaugh's (1983a, b) \"competing value framework\" described values often used for decision making, it did not include specific measures for trust and an ethical work environment, which is critical for knowledge creation and knowledge management. Hence, the author has modified the \"competing values framework\" by adding the dimension, which represents ethical and trusting culture. Based on the congruity between the modified \"competing values framework\" and the \"knowledge creation and conversion\" framework, the author has formulated six propositions about the propensity of organizations of different dominant cultural styles to engage in the four processes of knowledge creation and conversion. The resulting organizational knowledge management framework is depicted in Figure 6. Exploring and understanding the relationships between characteristics of organizational culture and knowledge management in an organization has numerous theoretical as well as managerial implications.Theoretical and managerial implications\nConclusion: The \"competing values framework\" originally emerged from empirical research to explain the intricate and paradoxical nature of organizational effectiveness. Nonaka and Takeuchi's (1995) and Nonaka et al.'s (2000) \"knowledge creation and conversion\" framework endeavored to elucidate knowledge creation and conversion in organizations. Integrating the two frameworks - the \"competing values framework\" with an additional dimension of ethical and trusting culture and the \"knowledge creation and conversion\" framework - can provide the means to understand how organizational culture impels or improves the expansion of organizational knowledge.Despite the limitations discussed above, the proposed integrative framework provides an elegant conceptual model with an integrated set of techniques and tools to understand the linkages between organizational culture and knowledge management in an organization. The author, however, does not claim universal applicability or generalizability of the proposed integrative framework; it only suggests a possible diagnostic or normative prescription. The proposed integrative framework may be used to conduct further empirical studies whose results will provide clearer evidence with regard to the nature of normative statement implied by the proposed integrative framework. In conclusion, by suggesting the integration of organizational culture and knowledge management theory, the author expects to develop organizational interventions facilitating improved knowledge management, to promote development of theory, and to encourage further empirical research into these very important facets of organizational behavior.\n",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Purpose: - Organizational culture is a critical factor in building and reinforcing knowledge management in organizations. However, there is no theoretical framework that comprehensively explains the effect of organizational culture on knowledge management in organizations. This paper endeavors to develop a theoretical integrative framework for organizational knowledge management and organizational culture.\nDesign/methodology/approach: - This is a conceptual paper. It modifies the \"competing value framework\" by adding a new dimension representing ethical and trusting culture, and then integrates it with the SECI model of knowledge creation and conversion by identifying the conceptual parallels between the two frameworks and then analyzing the interaction effects among the dimensions.\nFindings: - Based on the congruity between the modified competing values framework and the knowledge creation and conversion framework, the paper formulates six propositions about the propensity of organizations of different dominant cultural styles to engage in the four processes of knowledge creation and conversion.\nResearch limitations/implications: - The dynamic nature of the framework presented in the paper points to the importance of longitudinal and comparative research in understanding the effects of organizational culture on organizational knowledge management systems in organizations.\nPractical implications: - The proposed integrative framework would facilitate organizational learning and lead to the improvement of knowledge management practices in organizations as it helps managers to understand the linkages between culture and knowledge management.\nOriginality/value: - This paper presents a new framework linking organizational culture to knowledge management. It moves away from analyzing culture only in terms of its positive and negative influences on knowledge management. Instead, it suggests a typology of the kind of knowledge management processes that organizations are likely to focus on depending on the culture that prevails in an organization.\n",
"role": "assistant"
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] |
The "inverse care law" and infant mortality among Whites and Blacks in the United States
|
[
"United States of America",
"Infants",
"Death rate",
"Demography",
"Black people",
"White people",
"Infant mortality",
"Inverse‐care principle",
"Matthew effect",
"Healthcare"
] |
[
{
"content": "Summarize the following paper into structured abstract.\n\n1 Introduction: The relatively high infant mortality rate (IMR) in the USA has been a matter of considerable concern. According to World Health Organization (WHO) (2010, pp. 48-55), the USA ranked below 40 countries in its IMR of seven (per thousand live births) in 2008, and tied with five others (Chile, Malta, Qatar, Serbia, and United Arab Emirates). The countries with lower IMR include not only most of high-income OECD nations, but also many developing or transition economies, including San Marino, Slovenia, Andorra, Czech Republic, Monaco, Croatia, Brunei, Cuba, Estonia, Lithuania, Hungary, Malaysia, Poland, and Slovakia. Moreover, international rank of the USA in IMR, which was 29 in 1990 and 35 in 2000 has been declining.Along with the high overall IMR and low-international position of the USA, the huge Black-White disparity in infant mortality has been discussed by many scholars. US Census Bureau (2010, p. 85) shows that IMR among Blacks in 2007 was 13.2 as compared with 5.6 for Whites, and US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (2007) had articulated the goal of eliminating IMR \"disparities among racial and ethnic groups\" by the year 2010. In this context, it is useful to study how Black and White IMR have changed over the last quarter century. Besides revealing the structure of relative changes, it should indicate the prospects for reducing or eliminating the racial disparities and improving the international position of the USA.Relative to the rate of change of a health indicator, one somewhat natural proposition is the principle of \"diminishing marginal product,\" which implies that the rate of decline in a positive indicator is lower when the level of the indicator is higher. Such a view can be easily rationalized by the consideration that the least costly health-improving technologies and procedures are applied first, and more costly technologies and methods are needed at later stages. Such a scenario is reflected in the general observation that health indicators improve at a declining rate with economic development and increased income.In contrast with the principle of diminishing marginal product, some scholars, including Hart (1971), have suggested that an \"inverse care law\" (or \"Matthew effect\") may operate in the provision of healthcare, and availability of healthcare may vary inversely with the need for it in the population served[1].Therefore, greater improvement may occur in groups or populations where the health indicator is \"better,\" which means that IMR is lower. Hart (1971, pp. 405 and 412) noted that the \"force that creates and maintains the inverse care law is the operation of the market\" and that \"the law operates more completely where medical care is most exposed to market forces.\" He added that the \"more health services are removed from the force of the market, the more successful we can be in redistributing care away from its \"natural\" distribution in a market economy.\"A major objective of this study is to consider whether declines in IMR among White and Black populations in the USA are consistent with the principle of diminishing marginal product or support the \"inverse care law.\" Since Black IMR has been much higher than White IMR, \"diminishing marginal product\" would predict the rate of decline in IMR to be larger among Blacks, but the \"inverse care law\" implies that the rate of decline among Blacks would be lower. The study should also shed light on the prospects for reducing or eliminating racial disparities in IMR and improving the international position of the USA.\n2 Methodology, data, and the main results: Using a simple procedure, rates of decline of IMR in the two groups are compared for the entire country and each state for several periods. The percentage rate of decline is calculated by using the following expression: Equation 1 where IMR0 and IMR1 denote the rates in the initial and the last year of the period, respectively. As noted above, since Black IMR is higher in every case, a higher rate of decline in IMR in that group would support the principle of diminishing marginal product, while a lower rate of IMR decline among Blacks would be consistent with the inverse-care principle.Data on IMR for Blacks and Whites are taken for 1980, 1990, and 2007 for the USA and each state, and the source is US Census Bureau (2010).Table I shows the rates of decline in each group over the periods 1980-1990, 1990-2000, and 1980-2007 for the USA.It is easy to see that while IMR for Blacks has been much higher than for Whites, its rate of decline is considerably lower among Blacks in every period.While data for the USA are useful in conveying the broad position, state-level numbers are of interest in providing a more detailed and disaggregated scenario. Table II shows the rates of decline in IMR in the two groups for each state during the period 1980-2007. The last column in the table is the ratio of the rates of decline in White and Black IMR. Therefore, a ratio exceeding 1.0 implies that the rate of decline in (the much higher) Black IMR is lower than the rate of decline among the Whites.Besides a comparison of the rates of decline over the entire period 1980-2007, it is useful to consider also the disaggregated numbers for the subperiods 1980-1990 and 1990-2000 so as to see if there are any significant state-level temporal variations in the patterns. Following the format of Tables II-IV show a comparison of the rates of IMR decline among Whites and Blacks during 1980-1990 and 1990-2000 for each state.State-level numbers for the three periods in Tables II-IV reinforce the aggregate position revealed by Table I, and indicate a broad consistency across the three periods at the state levels also. In every case, Black IMR has been much higher, and, in a vast majority of the states, rates of decline in Black IMR are lower than those in White IMR.\n3 Significance and implications: Several points are suggested by the patterns indicated in the tables.First, changes in Black and White IMR are consistent with the inverse-care hypothesis, and do not reflect the principle of diminishing marginal product. The observed association of the much higher IMR among Blacks with its lower rate of decline in most cases suggests the prevalence of the inverse-care principle relative to Black-White infant mortality in terms of the criterion used in almost all research on the topic, including Dzakpasu et al. (2000) and Ram (2010).Second, the observed pattern, and the implied operation of the inverse-care principle, probably reflects poorer access of Blacks to prenatal, maternal, and infant healthcare. It seems likely that such a disparity leads to slower rate of improvement in the much higher Black IMR than in White IMR. Although inverse-care principle might not be the only explanation for the observed pattern, no other reasoning appears to have been suggested in the literature for a slower rate of IMR decline in a group that has a higher level of infant mortality.Third, Hart (1971) suggested that the inverse-care law operates more completely where medical care is most exposed to market forces. It is possible that the likely poorer access of Blacks to maternal and infant care is at least partly due to the predominant role of market forces in the provision of such healthcare in the USA.The implications described in the foregoing paragraphs merit further consideration and discussion.One may first wish to ask why Black IMR are so much higher than White IMR. Besides many others, Elder et al. (2011) have addressed that question in their recent elaborate research, and concluded that almost 90 percent of the overall gap is due to differential fitness at birth, which broadly refers to the proportion of preterm and low birth-weight infants.More relevant to this study, the phenomenon of increasing disparity in Black-White infant mortality has been considered by several scholars. That research suggests:* poorer access of Blacks to healthcare technology related to infant mortality; and* a significant role of the market forces underlying new healthcare technology generated through induced innovation.For example, the important study by Cutler et al. (2009) presented a model of induced innovation which predicts that such innovation leads to an increase in mortality disparities between minority and majority groups. Using information on infant deaths in the USA between 1983 and 1998, they noted that the innovation that occurred in response to most common causes of death favored Whites and that induced innovation contributed a sizable fraction of the increase in Black-White disparity in infant mortality during the period. Similarly, Frisbie et al. (2004, p. 773) considered increasing Black-White IMR disparities from 1989-1990 to 1995-1998 and stated that their results are consistent with the view that \"the potential for a widening of the relative racial gap in infant mortality is high when innovations in healthcare occur in a continuing context of social inequality.\" Alexander et al. (2008) also studied increasing Black-White IMR disparity and stated that \"Improvement in the survival of White preterm and low-birthweight infants, probably reflecting advances in and changing access to medical technology, contributed appreciably\" to increasing Black-White IMR disparity. Schempf et al. (2007) studied the contribution of preterm birth to Black-White IMR gap in 1990 and 2000, and stated that the narrowing racial disparity in the preterm birth rate was counterbalanced by greater mortality reductions in White than in Black preterm infants. David and Collins (2007) noted the widening racial disparities in infant mortality and postulated that \"a causal link to class disparities exists.\"In addition to the extensive research findings described above, it may also be noted that DeNavas-Walt et al. (2010, pp. 15, 73-74) show that lack of health insurance coverage in 2009 was 12 percent among non-hispanic Whites, but 21 percent among Blacks. They also report that poverty rate in that year was 9.4 percent among non-Hispanic Whites, but much higher at 25.8 percent among Blacks. Both these factors are likely to imply poorer access of Blacks to healthcare.Therefore, it seems reasonable to say that the pattern of Black-White IMR declines suggests the operation of inverse-care principle and probably indicates poorer access of Blacks to IMR-related healthcare, which may at least partly be due to the predominant role of the market forces in healthcare provision and technological innovation, particularly relative to infant mortality.Fourth, to the extent the observed inverse-care phenomenon reflects the operation of the market forces, which probably exercise a major influence on the nature of induced healthcare technology innovations, increased involvement of the public sector in the provision of healthcare and generation of technological innovations, particularly related to infant mortality, might attenuate the phenomenon. Such a thought is consistent with the recent observations by WHO's Commission on Social Determinants of Health (CSDH) (2008, p. 204). The Commission noted that tackling health inequalities requires a strong public sector that is committed, capable, and adequately financed[2].Fifth, due to the lower reduction in Black IMR, Black-White disparity in IMR increased over the period. In 1980, Black and White IMR for the USA were 22.2 and 10.9, and the ratio was 2.04. In 2007, the ratio increased to 2.36[3].Sixth, the pattern implies that the goal of eliminating IMR disparities among racial and ethnic groups by 2010, articulated by Office of Minority Health & Health Disparities of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (2007), has not been achieved, and is unlikely to be achieved for quite some time[4].Last, as noted above, one reason for the low international position of the USA in IMR is the much higher rate among Blacks. Since Black IMR has been declining more slowly than White IMR, it seems unlikely that international position of the USA will improve significantly in the near future[5].It may be added that this paper follows the existing scholarship in judging the existence of the inverse-care principle in terms of changes in IMR, which, as US Centers for Disease Control (2007) and several scholars have pointed out, are used to compare the health and well-being of populations across and within countries[6].\n4 Concluding observations: In the context of the relatively high IMR in the USA and the huge Black-White disparity in infant mortality, it is of interest to study how Black IMR has been changing relative to the much lower White IMR. Such a study should indicate whether the observed pattern is consistent with the \"inverse-care law\" or reflects the principle of diminishing marginal product. State-level and US data for the period 1980-2007 show that despite the much higher IMR among Blacks, its rate of decline among Blacks is considerably lower in almost all cases. Several implications of the observed rates are noted. First, the pattern is consistent with the inverse-care principle and probably reflects poorer access of Blacks to prenatal, maternal, and infant healthcare. Second, it is possible that, as suggested by Hart (1971) and indicated in several recent studies of increasing Black-White IMR disparity, the observed pattern is at least partly due to the predominant role of market forces in healthcare and induced innovations, particularly relative to infant mortality. Third, therefore, greater involvement of the public sector in the provision and improvement of healthcare might attenuate the phenomenon, which thought is consistent with the role of public sector emphasized by WHO's CSDH (2008). Fourth, the goal of eliminating racial disparities in IMR by 2010, articulated by US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, is still far from being realized. Considering the trend during the last quarter century, it is unlikely that the disparity can be eliminated in any foreseeable future. Fifth, it is also unlikely that international position of the USA will improve significantly in the foreseeable future.\n",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Purpose: - In the context of a much higher infant mortality rate (IMR) among Blacks than among Whites in the USA, the purpose of this paper is to compare changes in IMR in the two groups to judge whether the rates of decline are indicative of the so-called Matthew-effect or the inverse-care principle, which, in contrast with the usual expectation of \"diminishing marginal product,\" suggests that higher level of IMR would be associated with a slower rate of IMR decline.\nDesign/methodology/approach: - Changes in the IMR for each group over the period 1980-2007 are studied. Levels and rates of decline in the two groups are compared for 1980-1990, 1990-2000, and 1980-2007 for the USA. In addition, the levels and rates of decline in the two groups over these periods are also compared for each state.\nFindings: - Despite the much higher level of IMR among Blacks, the rates of decline in IMR over 1980-1990, 1990-2000, and 1980-2007 are considerably lower for Blacks than for Whites when data for the entire USA are considered. Moreover, the same pattern is observed for a vast majority of the states in each period.\nOriginality/value: - This is perhaps the only study that considers the possible operation of the inverse-care principle relative to Black and White IMR in the USA over a fairly long period. The findings suggest several useful points. First, the pattern is consistent with the Matthew-effect or the inverse-care principle, and is not supportive of the usual expectation of \"diminishing marginal product\" in healthcare improvements. Second, the observed pattern seems to reflect poorer access of Blacks to prenatal, maternal, and infant healthcare. Third, it appears likely that, as suggested by Hart and indicated by recent research on increasing Black-White IMR disparity, the pattern reflects a high degree of reliance on the market forces in healthcare provision and innovation, particularly relative to infant mortality. Fourth, in that context, greater role of the public sector in healthcare, particularly relative to IMR, might be given serious consideration. Fifth, given the observed pattern, the goal of eliminating racial disparities in IMR is unlikely to be met for a long time. Sixth, the relatively low-international ranking of the USA in IMR, which has been declining, might not improve for quite some time.\n",
"role": "assistant"
}
] |
Where to now? New directions in supporting new venture creation
|
[
"Small firms",
"Entrepreneurialism",
"Business formation",
"New venture creation",
"Business support services",
"Government policy"
] |
[
{
"content": "Summarize the following paper into structured abstract.\n\n__NO_TITLE__: New venture creation is, undisputedly, critical to the growth and sustainability of every modern economy. It is not surprising, therefore, that considerable attention is paid by academics and policy makers alike to how best to support new venture creation across a range of sectors, communities and countries (Henry et al., 2003). However, the impact of the global recession and the resulting cuts in government expenditure have meant that the huge costs associated with supporting new business start-ups have come under renewed scrutiny, re-opening debates around intervention effectiveness and added-value (Storey, 2008; Henry, 2010). Indeed, it may be that innovative more cost effective mechanisms for supporting new venture creation are now required, suggesting that this particular research agenda is in need of new directions.\nConclusions: The aim of this Guest Editorial was to provide a summary and overview of the papers selected for our special issue on supporting new venture creation in the twenty-first century. Drawing on a range of geographical contexts, and based on studies employing both quantitative and qualitative methodological approaches, three key themes within the new venture support discourse emerged:1. innovation and growth;2. female entrepreneurship; and3. access to and take-up of government/professional support.Related topics discussed in the papers included social entrepreneurship, banking and hidden economy entrepreneurship.Collectively, these papers help further our understanding of the complexities of the new venture creation process as well as the type of support actually required by nascent and early-stage enterprises. Furthermore, these papers have significant implications for the design and provision of support for both new venture creation and the development of existing businesses; given the geographical scope of the studies presented, such implications should be of value to those involved in supporting new venture creation internationally on a number of levels. For example, with regard to innovation and growth, it is suggested that SMEs need to develop an open innovation system where they collaborate with both universities and other small firms in order fully to exploit their innovation capability. In addition, government needs to develop customized supports to help firms identify, respond to and manage effectively the particular trigger points that will enable them to grow.With regard to female entrepreneurship, the need for education and training to improve women high-tech entrepreneurs' level of self-efficacy was articulated alongside the potential benefits of increasing the use of gender as a lens in future research on new venture creation and small business. Education and training were also suggested as having the potential to develop women's enterprise capabilities further in the context of social entrepreneurship, with the significant potential benefits for local communities being especially highlighted.While Delanoe's study demonstrated the positive effect of enterprise support on converting nascent enterprises to actual start-up ones in France, findings by Pickernell et al. in the UK and Lewis and Walker in New Zealand showed that access to and take-up of government/professional enterprise support is influenced by firm/entrepreneur age, suggesting that some type of age-differentiated focus in the provision of government support is needed.We suggest that support for new venture creation in the twenty-first century needs new directions. Current enterprise support continues to be under-utilised (Richard, 2008), under-evaluated (Storey, 2000; 2008; Richard, 2008) and, more importantly, not entirely aligned to the current needs of nascent and existing new venturers. Collectively, the findings of the papers presented in this Special Issue lay the foundation for a possible new research agenda in the area of new venture creation support. Using more in-depth, qualitative, longitudinal studies, future research needs to investigate the reasons why more of the available enterprise support is not availed of. The findings of such studies could help refine the nature of support provided, targeting it more appropriately to those industry sectors and entrepreneur/firm age groups where it is most needed. Given that new venture creation is critical to every economy around the globe, international comparative studies would also be of value; as demonstrated by the papers presented in this Special Issue, there are valuable lessons to be learned from how entrepreneurship is supported in other geographical contexts.At the policy level, as articulated by Williams and Nadin, government needs to adopt a more creative approach and a wider perspective in relation to contemporary public policy measures to support new venture creation. Indeed, the potential increased revenues to be generated for the public purse by supporting legitimate \"off-the-books\" enterprises should surely be attractive to government and thus worthy of further consideration. Beyond public support measures, the fragile relationship between banks and their small-firm clients is certainly in need of investigation to avoid further deterioration and the possible elimination of this vital source of funding for nascent and small enterprises.Notwithstanding the considerable scope for improving current new venture support provision around the globe, perhaps the most significant contribution that researchers could make to this agenda is to encourage and help government to evaluate the programmes and initiatives they already provide. Not surprisingly, for the most part, the taxpayer remains blissfully unaware of the total cost of supporting new venture creation, and somewhat unconvinced of the added value to be gained by continuing to fund enterprise programmes for nascent and existing businesses. Therefore, in terms of \"where to now?\", irrespective of who provides the support, it is time to find out exactly what works and what does not in terms of support for new venture creation. Rigorous effective studies are required; studies that use robust methodological approaches, include pre-, during and post-programme testing, are conducted longitudinally, control for selection bias and, where possible, employ control groups (Storey, 2000; Oldsman and Hallberg, 2001; Henry et al., 2007). In this regard, consistent with Curran (2000), as independent researchers, academics are particularly well placed to deliver objective and technically rigorous programme evaluations for government. This could be a mutually beneficial partnership, where government is regularly informed of the effectiveness of its new venture creation support initiatives, and academics are provided with an opportunity to realise real impact for their research, thus adding an entirely new dimension to Curran and Storey's 'virtuous policy circle' (Curran and Storey, 2002: 169).\n",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Purpose: - The purpose of this paper is to provide a summary and overview of the papers selected by the Guest Editors for this Special Issue on supporting new venture creation in the twenty-first century. The paper seeks to identify key themes platformed in the articles, and to demonstrate how the papers' findings contribute to a possible new research agenda in the area of new venture creation support.\nDesign/methodology/approach: - This is a conceptual paper, providing a thematic editorial overview of the papers contained in this special issue.\nFindings: - The paper helps further the understanding of the complexities of the new venture creation process, as well as the type of support required.\nResearch limitations/implications: - The paper is based on the collective findings of ten articles.\nPractical implications: - Current support for new venture creation continues to be under-utilised, under-evaluated and not entirely aligned to the needs of aspiring and existing new venturers.\nOriginality/value: - The paper should be of value to those researching entrepreneurship and new venture creation support, as it suggests areas upon which scholars should focus. The paper also offers new directions for government to consider when planning future support initiatives, and calls for academics to be involved in objectively evaluating the effectiveness of existing initiatives.\n",
"role": "assistant"
}
] |
The effect of ISO 9001 implementation on the customer satisfaction of the engineering design services
|
[
"ISO 9000",
"Customer satisfaction",
"Quality",
"Saudi Arabia",
"Certification",
"Design management"
] |
[
{
"content": "Summarize the following paper into structured abstract.\n\nIntroduction: Quality assurance is a key factor in the construction industry to prevent problems and their reoccurrence during phases of a project's life cycle. Preventing problems at early stages of the project is essential to avoid risks of not completing the project on time and delivering poor quality to the customers (project's owners). In fact, satisfying project owners' expectation is the utmost critical factor for the success of any construction company. Therefore, there is a keen interest to have a strong built-in quality assurance system to avoid delivering poor quality services for customers. Usually, internal quality systems are built to provide the management of an organization with satisfactory quality levels. The internal quality systems are referred in the literature as quality management systems (QMSs). Companies are expected to improve their quality levels and customers' satisfaction by implementing successful QMS. In many cases, although it is not a must, the QMS is seen as the first step in changing the culture toward the total quality management (TQM).\nISO 9001 in the construction industry: ISO 9001 is a standard that asserts the correct establishment of a company's QMS through offering accredited certification. According to the International Organization for Standardization (2016a) organization, the overall aim of ISO 9001 is to support customers' satisfaction \"aims to enhance customer satisfaction through the effective application of the system, including processes for continual improvement of the system and the assurance of conformity to customer and applicable statutory and regulatory requirements.\" The ISO 9001:2015 approach to QMS is based on ten clauses (used to be eight clauses in 2008 version) as shown in Table I.\nISO 9001 success factors: Abdirad and Nazari (2015) investigated the barriers of implementing the QMSs in the public domain in Iran effectively as expected. The challenges of QMS implementation are identified and validated. Abdirad and Nazari (2015) show the barriers to reach design excellence: general policies and standards, characteristics of clients' organizations, and strategies and organizational factors in design firms. More importantly, although many design firms have ISO 9000 certification, the practice shows contradiction with the principles of QMSs clearly and makes them ineffective. QMSs should address: clear and true definition of design quality standards, true customers of public projects and their expectations, design firm management strategies and organizational structures, prerequisites of learning cycle in design projects, and parties involved in design decision making (culture and interrelation).\nQuality auditing of a construction project: Calder (1997) discusses the quality auditing of a construction project and the means for an effective audit team. Auditing of a construction project could be done through a developed standard, e.g. ISO 9001 to verify that QMS-related elements have been addressed. A QMS is utilized to assure the presence of a system working on the basis of a reference standard, i.e. ISO 9000. For an effective auditing program, four requirements have to exist as per the recommendations of Calder (1997) which are as follows: defined audit procedures, trained and knowledgeable auditors, collaboration of both the contractor and the auditor, and efficient retrieval of information. Chan and Chan (1999) discuss the implementation of ISO 9000 as a tool for quality assurance in the context of statutory agents in construction (usually architects). Other areas, Chan and Chan (1999) have discussed, are the conformance of the practices in the Hong Kong construction market with the criteria of ISO 9001. Chan and Chan (1999) had found that organizations were conducting similar approaches; however, those organizations proceeded to acquire the certification as it was a governmental regulation.\nJoint implementation of ISO 9000 and other standards (ISO 14000, OHSAS 18001): Finally, ISO 9001 standards may also be combined with other ISO standards such as ISO 14001 standards (related to environmental concerns). The joint implementation of both standards is expected to increase the benefits on management systems and may reduce the cost of implementation as construction companies may utilize similarity and compatibility of different ISO standards (Zeng et al., 2005; Ahmed et al., 2005). Pheng and Tan (2005) compare the elements of ISO 9001 and those in the ISO 14001, in order to check the feasibility to integrate the two standards and manage them under one integrated QMS. The findings of Pheng and Tan (2005) indicate that integrating the two standards is generally possible apart from the elements in ISO 14001 that may be peculiar somehow to the respondents, particularly, the environmental aspects, emergency readiness, and the environmental management program. Another issue in integrating the ISO 9001 and ISO 14001 is finding some individuals who possess the adequate competencies and knowledge in various areas of quality, safety, and environment to handle such an integrated system. Pheng and Pong (2003) compare the elements of ISO 9001 and those in the OHSAS 18001, in order to check the feasibility to integrate the two standards and manage them under one integrated QMS. The findings of Pheng and Pong (2003) were backed by a field survey, which indicated a support for such an integration. The benefits of such integration entail an optimized management system, increased competitiveness, and better utilization of resources. ISO 9001 deals with identifying hazards, assessing risks, implementing needed control measures, insuring an acceptable level of quality of products and services, and taking actions to enable constant improvements.\nISO 9001 effect on customers' satisfaction: QMS is essential for the construction companies where the business environment is highly competitive and dynamic. Adopting ISO 9001 standards is not only benefiting the company's quality systems, but also provides benefits in planning, public image improvement, organizations' products and services, decision making and competitiveness (Heras-Saizarbitoria et al., 2011; Tari et al., 2012). The need emerges to measure these intangible benefits to justify the process of ISO 9001 certification. All business improvements would lead to a better customers' satisfaction and, hence, it can be used as an improvement measure for the ISO 9001.\nMethodology: This research suggests customers' satisfaction to be used as the gauge to determine the effectiveness of the ISO 9001 implementation. Indeed, the correct implementation of ISO 9001 is expected to increase the level of satisfaction of provided DS. Several studies were carried out in the literature for assessing the improvement levels of the ISO 9001 certification. In Australia, Rahman (2001) assessed, based on a research questionnaire, the performance of around 780,000 small and medium enterprises (SMEs) that are ISO 9001 certified. The results showed that there was no significant difference between SMEs with and without ISO 9000 certification with respect to TQM implementation and organizational performance. Singels et al. (2001) designed a questionnaire to evaluate the effect of ISO 9001 certification on the organizational performance. Singels et al. (2001) have found that ISO certification in itself does not lead to an improvement in the performance of organizations. This result coincides with the findings of Rahman (2001). In this research, we used similar research instrument (questionnaire) but with the objective to measure the ISO 9001 effect on the customer's satisfaction. The research began with a detailed review of customers' satisfaction and its measuring tools implementation within the construction industry. The research team identified the five dimensions to measure the quality of the service (tangible, reliability, responsiveness, assurance, and empathy). All customers are expected to fill out the questionnaire after fulfilling their DS. The results of the questionnaire were compared between years 2008 (before ISO 9001) and year 2011 (after ISO 9001). Three case studies were undertaken on the DS for large-scale construction projects. A questionnaire survey (based on a Likert scale) was conducted to investigate current customers' attitudes relating to the implementation of ISO 9001 on DS (provided in year 2011). The three case studies are branch offices of DS for a large public organization in Saudi Arabia. All customers should fill out the questionnaire. The total number of filled questionnaires was 77 in year 2008 (for the three offices). The total number of filled questionnaires was 39 in year 2011 (for the same three offices). The satisfaction level is compared among the two years. The main advocate of this research is that the implementation of the ISO 9001 does not guarantee the improvement in customers' satisfaction levels. It is highly expected that the ISO 9001 implementation will positively increase the level of customers' satisfaction but it is not a must. If the satisfaction level does not increase, then the provided service should be revisited for further improvement. The renewable activities of the ISO 9001 certificate give a golden chance to revisit the process and suggest improvements on the process steps (Figure 1). In fact, the new ISO 9001:2015 standard has a dedicated clause for process improvement (i.e. Clause 10.3: continual improvement).\nMeasuring customers' satisfaction to evaluate the QMS: Saudi Arabia is one of the key oil producers in the world. The Saudi Government established large-scale subsidized companies to own and operate most of the oil-related projects. These companies build many large industrial projects worth billions of US dollars. The design of these projects is outsourced to a major design firms that has many joint ventures with world class design companies. In fact, it is mandated that all Saudi design firms should have a joint venture agreement with an international company to be able to submit design bids for these semipublic companies. The company manage these designs by a DS office which mainly act as a liaison between the requirements of the internal proponent (project owner is an internal department within the company under study) and the external design firms. In 2009, the DS office was awarded ISO 9001:2008 certificate by a third-party certification body. The ISO 9001:2008 certificate on DS QMSs is valid for three years. The re-certification requires a considerable amount of money and engineers' involvement during a comprehensive re-certification audit. Thus, management wants to evaluate the improvement effect of the ISO 9001:2008 to proceed with the ISO 9001 re-certification. Many claims are being argued that there is no tangible value of the ISO 9001 certificate except the prestigious status, logo, and wall hanging certificates.\nResults: The results of the QMS review are very noticeable and show two types of gap deficiencies. The first gap is between service delivery and external communication with customers. The assumed expectations are not fulfilled at the time of delivery of the service which can be related to costumer high expectations which is the result of advertisements and marketing efforts from the design firms or design engineers. Such discrepancy between actual service and the promised service occurred due to over-promising from the design firms' side, failure to manage customer expectations from both DS and the design firms, and finally the design firms' failure to perform according to the agreed specifications. The second deficiency gap is between expected level of service and experienced service where customer has presumably misinterpreted the quality level of the service keeping the design firms in awkward position where extended services are provided to compensate for the customer misinterpretations and maybe false allegations. Both of these gaps are reflected in the factor of reliability, and with the increasing number of claims from the customer that the design firms are not reliable, the issues have magnified.\nConclusions: This work is limited to the construction industry. In specific, it addresses only the customer satisfaction related to the design management services. However, Saudi Arabia is known to host many large-scale organizations that are heavily involved in international business trade. Hence, we believe that the Saudi industry can leverage its practices up to the international standards and similarly the international practices can accommodate some of best practices in Saudi Arabia. In this work, an ISO 9000:2008 certified company in Saudi Arabia is examined to evaluate the improvement on customers' satisfaction obtained from the ISO certificate. The time of this evaluation coincides with the time when ISO 9000:2008 is due for renewal (usually lasts for three years). As the renewal will cost the company money and effort, it is encouraged to evaluate the benefits of the ISO 9000:2008 certification over the last three years. The paper provided a brief literature on the implementation of ISO 9001 standards in the construction industry. The literature supported the implementation of ISO 9000 standards to improve QMS of construction companies. This paper suggested the use of a customized survey to measure the customers' satisfaction level. The method utilized the available customer surveys in 2008 (before the certification) and customers' surveys in 2011 (after the certification).\n",
"role": "user"
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{
"content": "Purpose: ISO 9001 is an international specification that provides certification for quality management systems (QMSs) after careful external auditing. However, certified companies rarely evaluate their quality systems after being certified. The certificate needs to be renewed periodically where companies are encouraged to evaluate their gained benefits and improve their QMS's deficient areas. The purpose of this paper is to provide a method of evaluation based on the level of customers' satisfaction over five metrics (reliability, assurance, tangible, empathy, and responsiveness).\nDesign/methodology/approach: The methodology enables to benchmark the current level of satisfaction with prior levels of satisfaction before the ISO 9001 certification. The methodology is applied for the QMS pertinent to the design services (DS) for a large public company in Saudi Arabia. Three case studies were undertaken on the DS for large-scale construction projects.\nFindings: The results were compared between year 2008 (total of 77 projects) and year 2011 (total of 39 projects). The results show that the ISO 9001 certificate may not always demonstrate an evidence of improving customers' satisfaction levels and, hence, a gap analysis should be implemented to define possible areas of improvement.\nResearch limitations/implications: This work is limited to the construction industry. In specific, it addresses only the customer satisfaction related to the design management services. However, Saudi Arabia is known to host many large scale organizations that are heavily involved in international business trade. Hence, the authors believe that the Saudi industry can leverage their practices up to the international standards and similarly the international practices can accommodate some of the best practices in Saudi Arabia.\nOriginality/value: It is a general perception in the industry that ISO 9000 implementation will mean good quality products. This work provides the argument that the ISO 9000 implementation should be tested on a regular basis to validate this perception. It shows that in some cases the ISO 9000 did not improve the customers' satisfaction and, hence, the need arises for gap analysis to modify the QMS.\n",
"role": "assistant"
}
] |
The impact of age norms on career transition intentions
|
[
"Older workers",
"Career transition",
"Age norms",
"Midlife workers",
"Psychological mobility"
] |
[
{
"content": "Summarize the following paper into structured abstract.\n\n__NO_TITLE__: Recent research has found that as people age, many state that they look forward to career change and finding jobs characterized by significance and meaning or \"encore\" careers (Boveda and Metz, 2016; Grossman, 2014). This trend is reflected in changes in profession as well as job changes (Fritzsche and Marcus, 2013). Yet, midlife workers are often stereotyped and deemed less suitable for job transitions encountering gatekeepers who restrict entry to professions that have been traditionally considered appropriate for younger people (Dishman, 2016). AnAARP (2017) study found 64 percent of workers over the age of 50 believed that their age would be viewed unfavorably by potential employers. Despite these important trends, the career change intentions of midlife workers have not received extensive empirical attention. The aim of this research is to examine how age norms or social expectations about age and career choices influence the career change intentions of midlife workers (aged 35 and above). We are particularly interested in how career youth norm (CYNs) perceptions, which we conceptualize as an individual's beliefs that job holders in a particular job or career field are generally younger than they are, influence career transition intentions.\nAge norms and career transition intentions: Age norms are defined as \"widely shared judgments of the standard or typical ages of individuals holding a role or status within a given context\" (Lawrence, 1996, p. 209). Age norms may reflect who is in a career role and perceptions of who \"should\" occupy roles. For example, Oude Mulders et al. (2017) found that \"retirement\" age norms are influenced by managers' personal experiences, values, and stereotytypes (Mulders et al., 2017). Similarly, we contend CYNs are a reflection of widely held stereotypes that younger people (i.e. younger than midlife workers) \"fit\" best in certain jobs. Technology jobs, for example, are often normed as \"young\" because people judge that the most appropriate and typical age for programmers, game designers, and other technology professionals is under 30 (Johnston, 2016; McBride, 2012a, b; Scheiber, 2014).\nMethod: Sample and procedure\nResults: Results in Table I demonstrate simple bivariate correlations along with scale reliabilities.\nDiscussion: I want to stress the importance of being young and technical. Young people are just smarter(Scheiber, 2014).Mark Zuckerberg's comments above are not unique. Ageism within Silicon Valley technology occupations as well as other professions has been discussed broadly in the popular press (Kuchler, 2017; Lahey, 2016). Indeed, research examining careers at midlife and beyond has extensively discussed age discrimination and stereotypes as potential barriers to professional or occupational change. However, few studies have investigated how age norms and the comparisons people make between themselves and those they believe to occupy the jobs they desire may also pose barriers to career transition. We highlight how the relationship between individual differences, job attitudes, and career transition intentions can be impacted by CYN perceptions. In this final section, we discuss the implications of this study for future research and management practice.\n",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to examine how age norms influence the relationship between individual differences, job attitudes, and intentions to pursue career transitions for midlife adults (aged 35 and above). The authors hypothesized that the effects of individual difference variables (i.e. resilience and reframing abilities) on career change intentions in addition to the effects of job attitude (i.e. commitment) on such intentions are moderated by career youth norms (CYN) which the authors defined as perceptions that the typical worker in a career field is younger than midlife.\nDesign/methodology/approach: In all, 206 people comprised the sample which was derived from an online survey. Moderated regression analysis was used to assess the extent to which age norms operated as a moderator of proposed relationships. Control variables were included based on prior research findings.\nFindings: Findings demonstrated that age norms operate as a significant moderator for midlife adults. Specifically, the relationships between resilience, reframing, and commitment on intentions to pursue alternative careers are moderated by CYNs.\nResearch limitations/implications: Data were collected from a single source and assessed behavioral intentions in place of actual career change choice. Future research should derive data from multiple sources and assess behavior beyond intentions.\nPractical implications: Industry leaders' stereotypes about the appropriate ages for specific occupations or professions may impact the psychological mobility of midlife workers. Managers may wish to highlight midlife workers with particular skills (e.g. technological savvy), examine recruitment advertising for language that emphasizes youth, and invest in resilience training for aging workers.\nOriginality/value: Research examining careers at midlife and beyond has extensively discussed age discrimination and stereotypes as potential barriers to professional or occupational change. However, few studies have investigated how age norms and the comparisons people make between themselves and those they believe are occupying the jobs they desire may also pose barriers to career transition.\n",
"role": "assistant"
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] |
Attitudes to other ethnicities among New Zealand workers
|
[
"Ethnic identity",
"Attitudes toward diversity",
"Inter-group behaviour",
"Multi-group ethnic identity measure",
"Other-group orientation (OGO)"
] |
[
{
"content": "Summarize the following paper into structured abstract.\n\nIntroduction: Accelerating workplace diversity has become an international phenomenon due to globalisation, migration trends, demographic changes and technological advances. In New Zealand (NZ), as in various other countries, significant changes in the composition of the population have created a more diverse workforce. There is now a much closer gender balance, much greater ethnic diversity and a greater age range among NZ employees. A substantial body of literature has emerged endorsing the significance of employee diversity for organisations (Bell, 2007). For example, Cox (1991) notes that in order to respond to employees and customers, contemporary organisations need to consider the implications of diversity for business practices. Similarly, Lattimer (1998) has argued that proactive diversity management is now vital for organisations, not simply to promote equity and social inclusion, but also as a business necessity. The view that diversity is an asset to organisations underpins the \"business case for diversity\" (e.g. Prasad and Mills, 2000; Rutherford and Ollerearnshaw, 2002). Advocates of this view believe that diversity brings substantial benefits, such as better problem solving and decision making, greater creativity and innovation and more successful marketing to different types of customers (Harvey and Allard, 2012).\nLiterature review and hypotheses: Social identity theory (SIT) (Tajfel, 1982; Tajfel and Turner, 1986) explains peoples' tolerance of, and attraction towards, members of their own or other groups. SIT and the associated SCT (Turner, 1985, 1987) posits that, in order to make sense of the social world, people employ social categories to identify themselves and others as belonging to the same (in-group) or different groups (out-groups). Tajfel and Turner (1979, 1986) demonstrate that the mere existence of an \"us vs them\" mentality, deriving from in-group/out-group identification, creates feelings of resentment and mistrust of out-group members. In order to bolster their own personal self-esteem, individuals tend to favour their own in-group. As a corollary, people show more interpersonal warmth, attraction and trust towards in-group members and are more likely to work harmoniously with members of their in-group to resolve conflict and misunderstandings (Lott and Lott, 1965; Triandis, 2003). When people perceive each other as different, however, they are more likely to avoid contact and/or show aggression - ultimately leading to a breakdown in communication and inter-group disharmony (Triandis, 2003).\nData and method: We collected data in 2010 using computer-assisted telephone interviews of 500 randomly selected NZ employees, of which 485 responses are useable. The phone survey allowed us to ensure equal numbers of men and women participated, as well as ethnic subgroups that are normally underrepresented in survey research.\nResults: The distribution of responses in Table I suggests that NZ has a workforce with a strong level of OGO with 97.4 per cent agreeing or strongly agreeing that \"people's differences should be respected\" and 92 per cent agreeing or strongly agreeing that they \"like meeting and getting to know people from ethnic groups other than my own\". Where greater spread comes into the responses is around reported behaviour, seen in the two items around spending time, or taking part in activities, with people of other ethnicities. Here, from 63 to 72.6 per cent agree or strongly agree, suggesting something of a gap between attitude and behaviour. However, in general terms, there is a high level of personal engagement with ethnic diversity in NZ.\nDiscussion: In this study, we found that ethnic status does predict higher OGO. Pasifika, Maori and other minority ethnicities all have significantly higher levels of openness to other ethnic groups than NZ Europeans. On this point, our results confirm the general findings in international research cited earlier (e.g. Chen and Hooijberg, 2000; Dandy and Pe-Pua, 2010). They are consistent with Worrell's (2007) assertion that OGO is likely to be higher among ethnic minorities - perhaps because aspects of their ability to succeed in society rest on their ability to \"fit in\" with the dominant ethnic group. At the same time, OGO attitudes may be less important to majority group members because there is less social pressure on them to accommodate the needs and views of minorities (Worrell et al., 2006). This suggests that the pathway to a more inclusive workplace in NZ lies largely in influencing the attitudes and behaviour of NZ Europeans.\nConclusion: This study makes a contribution to our understanding of the role of group membership in out-group orientation. While New Zealanders generally have a high level of OGO, minority ethnic groups and graduates score higher on OGO. As predicted in the international literature, majority-group members (NZ Europeans) have the lowest level of openness to other ethnicities, and thus have the greatest work to do in bringing about more inclusive workplaces. However, NZ women do not, in general, score higher on OGO than men. Gender interacts with age. Among people under 38 years, males tend to have a higher OGO, while among those over 38, females tend to be higher. Our results suggest that attitudes are somewhat more positive than behaviours, and future research could examine this gap, studying the ways in which life and work experiences can create greater openness to diversity.\n",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to examine the \"other-group orientation\" (OGO) of New Zealand (NZ) workers as a way of measuring their attitudes to the growing ethnic diversity in the contemporary workplace.\nDesign/methodology/approach: In all, 500 randomly selected NZ employees were surveyed through computer-assisted telephone interviews. Males, females and ethnic groups were included according to their current proportions in the NZ workforce. Analysis is based on 485 useable cases.\nFindings: While New Zealanders generally have a high level of OGO, minority ethnic groups and graduates score higher on OGO. Among people under 38 years, males tend to have a higher OGO, while among those over 38, females tend to be higher.\nResearch limitations/implications: The study shows the value of studying the attitudes of workers in relation to diversity and OGO. Workers bring their own orientations into the workplace, affecting the way they relate to their co-workers.\nSocial implications: The pathway to more inclusive workplaces in NZ lies largely in influencing the attitudes and behaviour of NZ Europeans. The study suggests that inclusive educational experiences may be a key part of that process.\nOriginality/value: While the research shows that NZ workers are generally very positive about ethnic diversity, it reveals variations among ethnic and educational groups in terms of their openness to others.\n",
"role": "assistant"
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] |
Government policy implications of intellectual capital: an Australian manufacturing case study
|
[
"Public sector",
"Manufacturing",
"Intellectual capital",
"Industry policy",
"Servitisation"
] |
[
{
"content": "Summarize the following paper into structured abstract.\n\nIntroduction: Given the importance of manufacturing for future economic wellbeing in Australia, and given the challenges facing many Australian manufacturing firms, a policy decision has been taken in South Australia to implement a number of industry policy actions (see, DMITRE, 2012) to enhance the managerial capabilities in manufacturing firms. One of the key strategy developments in manufacturing firms that was to be supported was servitisation. Given that the need to change the resource deployment system is a prerequisite for successful servitisation a competence development programme was identified as a suitable policy action in this area. It was decided to test the perceived importance of the intellectual capital navigator (ICN) as a tool to analyse the potential effectiveness of a given resource deployment structure as compared to other issues around the servitisation of manufacturing firms within the competence development programme for firms.\nGovernment industry policy: Unless the politicians in a jurisdiction live in the fantasy world of perfect markets, industrial policy does not lack theoretical justifications (e.g. Dosi et al., 1989; Chang, 1994; Stiglitz, 1996; Lall, 2004; Rodrik, 2004, 2008; Aiginger and Sieber, 2006; Bianchi and Labory, 2006; Cimoli et al., 2009; Spence, 2008; Chang, 2011; Aghion et al., 2012; Aiginger, 2014; Bailey et al., 2014; Cirillo et al., 2014; Crafts and Hughes, 2014; Clydesdale, 2014; Haar, 2014; Mason and Nathan, 2014; Nahtigal, 2014; Salazar-Xirinachs et al., 2014; Warwick and Nolan, 2014; Bailey et al., 2015; Gray, 2015), much of which has been developed during the period since the global financial crisis in 2008.\nServitisation of manufacturing: Manufacturing, like all economic activities, is in a constant state of flux, which requires reactive or proactive adaptation by firms if they are to retain their ability to grow and prosper (Roos, 2014a). The constantly reducing value creating potential in the production phase of manufacturing requires the extension of activities into the pre- and post-production phase, normally in the form of services and hence the increasing importance of servitisation. This and other drivers for the structural change in manufacturing towards servitisation are discussed more in detail below; see also Appendix 2 with its Figure A2 and Appendix 1 with its Figure A1.\nContribution of IC: IC is an extension of the resource-based view, taking into account the dynamics of the firm and its environment. IC has both a resource perspective (i.e. what resources exist and how they behave) and a resource transformation perspective (introduced by Roos and Roos, 1997) capturing the value creation logic of the firm.\nManufacturing importance: The importance of manufacturing for national wealth creation cannot be overestimated. Manufacturing drives up economic complexity through its large networks of suppliers across many industries, forms the basis for high value services, performance a disproportionate and large share of national industrial R\nThe case study: A total of 32 sophisticated manufacturing firms that fitted the characteristics of technocrats, marketeers and Ikeas, as defined by Andersen (2012), were invited to join one of four programmes of business model innovation including a focus on servitisation. The firms were self-selected and on a first come first served basis. The assumption underpinning this approach is that this would generate a sample of firms that were willing to experiment (first mover behaviour), had a high problem understanding (goal oriented with clear problem identification) and were successful (could afford the time and money involved in participating). In addition the firms were demanding (know what good looks like in their mental view of the world and would provide immediate feedback if components of the programme where not valuable), were self-assured (did not mind the research process, e.g. video filming, questionnaire and discourse among peers and in private, did not mind sharing the outcomes with a wider audience) and had a high societal standing (hence high impact of judgemental statement regarding the programme process and outcome).\nFindings and conclusions: This is the first theoretically grounded empirical testing of the usefulness of the IC lens in a servitisation context. The study shows some interesting findings.\n",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to report on an industry policy implementation case involving around 30 manufacturing firms, where the intellectual capital (IC) lens, and especially the intellectual capital navigator (ICN) approach, was found to be very useful for evaluating alternative servitisation strategies. Servitisation is a form of business model innovation and as such involves restructuring the firm's resource deployment system including its IC resources.\nDesign/methodology/approach: The ICN was one of several methods and themes used by a sample of manufacturing firms during a 12 month period. Data capture were through video filming, observation, and formal interviewing during and after the interventions.\nFindings: The ICN is considered to be the third most valuable theme in a strategic and operational servitisation programme for manufacturing firms, primarily in the domain of effectiveness evaluation of alternative resource deployment strategies and as such should be one of the key dimensions in a business model template for manufacturing firms that aim to servitize. This research also illustrates the usefulness of the intellectual capital lens in the policy implementation process.\nResearch limitations/implications: The findings of this study is limited to the servitization process of SME manufacturing firms in an Anglo-Saxon operating environment which very rapidly have gone from low to high cost.\nOriginality/value: The development of service-oriented business models for manufacturing firms suffers due to traditional business model frameworks not having a high relevance for servitising manufacturing firm. Consequently it is important to understand the potential contribution that the IC lens through the ICN can make in the servitisation process.\n",
"role": "assistant"
}
] |
Accommodating nomadism and mobility: Challenging the sedentarist binary approach to provision for Gypsies, Travellers and Roma
|
[
"Planning",
"Europe",
"Exclusion",
"Provision",
"Anti-gypsyism"
] |
[
{
"content": "Summarize the following paper into structured abstract.\n\nIntroduction: This paper presents an argument for a more nuanced approach to provision for Gypsies, Travellers and Roma in Europe that embraces their cultural nomadism. Using empirical data gathered in the UK, the paper evidences the harms experienced by Gypsies and Travellers as consequence of a lack of provision. We relate these harms to the underpinning sedentarist binary logic of policy in England and Wales, and suggest that a similar logic informs policy and practice throughout the European environment. Therefore, the paper recommends consideration of Gypsies, Travellers and Roma nomadism within all aspects of policy beyond a simplistic sedentarist binary approach in the future.\nThe policy environment: In the UK, it has been estimated that Gypsies and Travellers constitute 0.6 per cent of the population (ODPM, 2006), though this estimate has been contested for its reliance on annual \"caravan counts\" that have been criticised for their lack of inclusion of all Gypsies and Travellers, poor accuracy and weak reliability (Niner, 2004). The ability to quantify numbers of Gypsies and Travellers is, therefore, difficult, but a general estimate of the literature in this area might suggest that approximately 1-1.5 per cent of the UK population are Gypsies and Travellers (Greenfields and Smith, 2009).\nMethodological note: The Cornwall GTAA survey was completed between August and November 2015 and included interviews with 187 Gypsies and Travellers who lived in different types of accommodation across the county. This included Gypsies and Travellers who normally resided on approved sites as well as those who lived in illegal spaces and it is important to distinguish between the two. Local authority (or socially rented) sites and authorised privately owned sites are those sites that are officially deemed legal through having some sort of planning permission. The permission may have been granted on a permanent or temporary basis and it could also include the provisions of a Certificate of Lawful Use. These legally recognised sites can be used as residential/permanent living spaces; they can be used as transit sites where Gypsies and Travellers reside temporarily (usually for periods of up to three months); or they can be used as temporary stopping places which are safe shorter stay sites (usually up to 10 days) for Gypsies and Travellers to stop-over as they are travelling. Unauthorised sites, on the other hand, describe settled sites on any land which does not have planning permission and these sites may or may not be tolerated by the local authority. Unauthorised encampments are places that have been occupied, generally on the roadside, for only a short period of time whilst Gypsies and Travellers are in transit. They are distinct here due to their temporary nature and the illegitimate use of space that they often comprise (such as playing fields, car parks and lay-bys).\nOur survey sample: Table I presents the survey profile which has been reclassified from the original GTAA for the purposes of this paper so that all those people who had self-classified in the GTAA as \"other\", referring to themselves as, for example, \"free man\" or \"human being\", but were living as New Travellers are included as such. Please note that due to the small numbers involved we have included the one Irish Traveller and one Welsh Traveller who completed the survey within the \"other\" category.\nAccommodation circumstances: The survey required respondents to indicate from a list of options the type of \"site\" or accommodation they usually occupied. The results are presented in Table II and illustrate that 97 per cent of the English Gypsies/Romany respondents and 100 per cent of the Travelling Showpeople lived in places that were officially deemed legal whereas only 48 per cent of New Travellers did so. Over half (57 per cent) of the English Gypsies/Romany within our sample specifically lived on a socially rented site which contrasts significantly with the profile of the other respondents, none of whom lived on a socially rented site. It is unsurprising that Romany Gypsies have attained approved site provision given the legitimacy provided to Romany Gypsies historically that has resulted in their perception as an authentic Gypsy and Traveller community, conforming to the \"Gypsy myth\" (Holloway, 2005; James, 2014). However, as will be seen below, the provision of limited spaces to some Gypsies and Travellers has meant that those spaces are not necessarily appropriate or well managed. Furthermore, as identified above, the legitimacy of Gypsies and Travellers has been questioned by the Department for Communities and Local Government (2015) given that ethnic groups of Gypsies and Travellers who are less likely to be mobile may potentially lose their right to live on sites that do not have security of tenure.\nTravelling patterns and experiences: As well as focusing on respondents' residential accommodation, the survey explored travelling patterns in order to help understand the requirement for transit accommodation. All respondents were asked whether they had travelled in the last year. Of the 182 respondents who answered the question, 63 per cent stated that they had travelled in the last year, however, the percentages change quite significantly when broken down by the type of Gypsy and Traveller. The data showed that just 28 (33 per cent) of the English Gypsy/Romany respondents within our sample had done so but 77 (87 per cent) of the New Travellers had travelled in the last year. Unsurprisingly given their occupation, all three Travelling Showpeople had done so, along with 70 per cent of respondents within the \"other\" category. These research findings are particularly troubling in light of the new planning policy for Gypsies and Travellers which states that only mobile Gypsies and Travellers will be accommodated. A significant proportion of all Gypsies and Travellers had not travelled in the last year and the majority of them were Romany Gypsies, who, as has already been established, are most likely to be vulnerable and to be culturally nomadic. The new planning policy does not state a measure for permanent desistance from \"travelling\", but given the historic failure to provide sites for Gypsies and Travellers and the assimilationist approach towards accommodation, it is possible that Gypsies and Travellers will be required to move into bricks and mortar accommodation.\nConclusion: This paper has examined the exclusionary experiences of Gypsies and Travellers in a small part of England in order to examine contemporary provision of accommodation for Gypsies and Travellers and the potential future impact of the Department for Communities and Local Government (2015) on Gypsy and Traveller communities. In doing so the paper has suggested that perceptions of nomadism that rely on mobility in the delivery of planning policy have extensive implications for Gypsy and Traveller communities. This example of a disjuncture between the meaning of nomadism to Gypsies and Travellers and policy makers may go some way to explaining the implementation gap between wider European policies for Roma inclusion and delivery of appropriate accommodation for those communities, as well as wider engagement with them.\n",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to examine how and why Gypsies and Travellers are socially excluded in England and how their experience may be reflected in other European contexts. Specifically, the paper explores the impact of planning policies on accommodation provision for Gypsies and Travellers in England and subsequently how their exclusion manifests due to the sedentarist binary definition of nomadism embedded within that policy.\nDesign/methodology/approach: The paper draws on evidence from empirical research carried out by the authors in the South West of England in 2015 as part of an accommodation needs assessment of Gypsies and Travellers. The research was commissioned by a local authority but the analysis presented here was carried out in addition to the core report. The decision to comment further on the research findings in relation to policy and theory was agreed with the project funders.\nFindings: The research findings show that there continues to be a lack of accommodation provided to Gypsies and Travellers in England, despite policy and legislative initiatives to the contrary. The paper identifies that current government policy in England is likely to diminish access to appropriate accommodation in the future for Gypsies and Travellers, particularly for the most vulnerable. Finally, the paper concludes that a sedentarist binary definition of nomadism has failed to recognise Gypsy and Traveller communities' culture or mobility.\nOriginality/value: This paper sets out how an underpinning \"sedentarist binary\" definition of nomadism is used in England to determine policies of provision for Gypsies and Travellers. That definition is based on the sedentary notions of nomadism that are binary, distinguishing only between people who are mobile and people who are not, rather than acknowledging the cultural nomadism of Gypsies and Travellers. The findings are useful beyond the UK context as they help to explain why Gypsies, Travellers and Roma in wider Europe remain excluded within states despite extensive European initiatives for inclusion.\n",
"role": "assistant"
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] |
How relevant is corporate governance and corporate social responsibility in emerging markets?
|
[
"Emerging markets",
"Corporate governance",
"Corporate social responsibility",
"Business ethics",
"Business strategy",
"Trade",
"Investment",
"Economic growth",
"Risk management",
"Development",
"Institutions"
] |
[
{
"content": "Summarize the following paper into structured abstract.\n\nIntroduction: The global economic crisis has considerably raised the importance of a number of emerging markets from Asia, Africa, Latin America and Eastern Europe amongst western companies for promoting their international competitiveness, reducing operational costs and achieving sustained growth, as the prospect for macroeconomic growth in mature markets is forecasted to be less than 3 percent over the next two decades. Nonetheless, the ability to mitigate risk in such relatively unknown emerging market regions and countries has kept large-scale investments by western firms at bay, with China being the exception. One of the major reasons for reluctance shown by mature markets firms to tread into the murky waters of many emerging economies with potentially high pay-offs is the absence of effective corporate governance and CSR mechanisms that would protect their investments.Somewhat ironically, ongoing debates about effective corporate governance and corporate social responsibility have become a major priority for firms, policy makers and the general population in countries across the globe, particularly in light of the major corporate scandals that have emerged from firms in the USA, such as Enron/Worldcom and Arthur Anderson. The theme of corporate governance has taken on much greater significance on account of the 2007-2008 financial crisis, with \"too big not to fail\" casualties in developed economies of Europe and the US rather than in emerging markets. Although corporate governance is not the only factor that provoked the current financial crisis, it can be argued that it has played a major role. The effects have spread globally, with still a lot of uncertainty on a steady recovery. Growth patterns are shifting, with emerging economies becoming the main drivers of global growth. They are in urgent need of acquiring the \"know how\" in advanced activities from western firms and this can also include corporate governance practices. Firms from emerging markets are nowhere in the same league as enterprises from the west, in terms of size and as leading global companies. In 2010, there were only eight companies from BRIC countries in the top global 100 companies. France alone has more companies in the top global 100 companies than BRIC's listed by Fortune (2010). The EU has 41 companies in the top 100 firms followed by the USA with 27. Moreover, out of the 68 companies from BRIC countries in the Fortune 500 list, the vast majority are engaged in extractive based activities (oil and gas) and in banking. In sum, there are no leading dynamic productive enterprises in BRIC countries engaged in advanced activities such as aerospace, biotechnology and genetics that appear on the Fortune 500 list.Emerging markets tend to display weaker measures of corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, protection of property rights of investors and minority shareholders. Thus, an improvement of CSR and corporate governance practices in emerging markets could be especially beneficial to minority shareholders, including western investors. Although there is no direct causal link between development and corporate governance (CG), there are many other influential factors besides CG that could influence development outcomes. Causality studies of this nature nonetheless can be seen as encouraging, as they would clearly make CSR and corporate governance a priority for various actors in emerging market countries. This is especially relevant as emerging market countries are likely to be the driving force of the global economy in the decades to come (see Figures 1 and 2). Therefore, improving development as well as corporate governance means accepting the view that CG reforms are in the general interest of developed as well as developing countries alike.Researchers and policymakers stress that there is no one corporate best practice, yet there is an underlying bias which arises toward a western, especially Anglo-Saxon, interpretation of the role of the firm, including the prioritization of shareholders over other stakeholders, and standards for corporate governance (Wong, 2008). However, different environments and backgrounds give rise to specific governance needs, both in emerging and developed markets. Thus, the discourse around corporate governance, CSR and emerging markets needs to take into account the variables in each country. The global economic crisis has clearly exposed that the models relied upon in the West are not void of serious limitations and are themselves in need of improved implementation and potentially improved design. As argued by Wong (2008), the ideas of \"the supremacy, integrity and veracity of 'western' practices is misguided\" (Wong, 2008, p. 496). Moving toward effective corporate governance in emerging markets may require reconsidering what global corporate governance is as suggested by Wong (2008) and to adjusting concepts of best practice to emerging market realities by looking for models that \"work for the circumstances\" rather than one best way (Wong, 2008, p. 511). More recent research by Chen et al. (2011) also shows that by simply adhering to OECD prescribed best governance practices do not result in better corporate governance in emerging markets, given that corporate governance practices in OECD countries are not designed to solve the conflicts between controlling and minority shareholders.How CSR and corporate governance works in emerging markets in order to identify factors, which may be different from those taken for granted in developed economies, is therefore important. By taking a closer look at both of these concepts, this study offers an analytical framework for understanding emerging markets through and added to existing categorizations of governance structures. In particular, we consider how the taxonomy of corporate governance, as developed by Weimer and Pape (1999) and the cross-national comparison of corporate governance by Gedajlovic and Shapiro (1998) would need to be adjusted in order to making meaningful comparisons between developed and emerging markets as well as between emerging markets.Emerging markets are becoming a growing influence on global growth and the vast majority of internationally oriented company cannot afford to overlook emerging markets when considering investment decisions. Enterprises that enter emerging markets early will need to develop effective corporate strategies to manage risk better and to navigate the complex business landscape in EM's with a different set of lens than those employed in mature markets.\nEmerging markets: How are attractive high growth emerging markets to be identified?\nCorporate governance: Main debates on corporate governance with respect to emerging markets\nConclusion: The subject of corporate governance in emerging markets, at present at least raises many more questions than solutions for effective firm management and protection of shareholder and labor rights. For example, what would be the main drivers of corporate governance in emerging economies? Would the need for effective corporate governance mechanisms and structural reforms evolve in response to corporate scandals as they have in the west, or to an economic crisis, to attract foreign direct investments, due to internal pressure from private elite business groups and politicians, growing privatizations of previously state owned enterprises, trade liberalization, deregulation, technological advancement, international financial integration or to occasional shareholder agitation and popular revolt? How should effective corporate governance be implemented in emerging markets? Focusing on creating new laws and having stable democratic institutions would undoubtedly help, but in practice such ambitious goals may be much more difficult to implement. Moreover they would note guarantee a stable and vibrant entrepreneurial environment. Strong enforcement of laws has to be in place to protect the various stakeholders that make up a firm and the wider society. Cultural differences with reference to how business is carried out will also have to be taken on board when devising rules and regulations.What can corporate governance actually contribute in emerging markets? The quality of corporate governance can enhance investor confidence, provide easier access to finance, lower the cost of capital for emerging market firms and increase firm valuation. It can also improve operational performance through allocating resources more effectively. Investing firms from mature markets have been shown to pay much higher premiums in mergers and acquisition deals in developing countries with greater investor protection. Corporate governance in emerging markets is clearly not irrelevant, but following CG best practices will not ensure that larger goals for EM's such as business growth, an end to corruption or smooth development are met.One of the main objectives of our research is to draw attention to the fact that corporate governance and corporate social responsibility are deeply important for firms, company boards, majority and minority share holders, management and labor to transact transparently and effectively, regardless of environment. This study helps to clarify that one set of standards which seem relatively effective in mature markets may not work at all in emerging markets, but that alternative corporate governance systems which reflect the institutional realities of these emerging economy settings will nonetheless be needed.Policy makers and business in emerging economies need to view corporate governance in emerging markets with the aim to meet the needs of the emerging market company and board, respond to the institutional realities of being an emerging market, address the unique challenges or opportunities posed by the particular market's business culture and governance environment, ally the fears of western investors (ideally by actual protection for the rights of minority shareholders) and contribute to the sustainable development of the emerging market country. Only once such considerations have been taken into account in the context of the rebalancing of the global economy with a more prominent role being played by emerging markets, will the benefits of change in corporate governance systems be noted in a more pronounced manner in both mature markets as well as in emerging economies.\n",
"role": "user"
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"content": "Purpose: - The principal aim of this research is to provide an in-depth analysis of existing practices of corporate governance in mature markets and to compare and contrast these approaches with CG and CSR practices in emerging markets, given the growing influence of EMs on the global economy.\nDesign/methodology/approach: - The methodology employed in the study is to survey the main theoretical approaches for understanding and CG in relation to mature markets and EMs.\nFindings: - The paper makes a small but important contribution to theory building by modifying and expanding the conceptual framework put forward by Weimer, Pape, Gedjlovic, and Shapiro to make a distinction between systems of corporate governance and particularly the \"taxonomy of systems of corporate governance\". This is achieved by identifying an additional set of key variables specifically relevant to EMs as a group of countries. The main finding of the paper is that there is no comprehensive, \"one size fits all\" global corporate governance or CSR system, based on western codes and regulations that can be implemented in emerging markets.\nOriginality/value: - It is proposed that alternative corporate governance systems that reflect the institutional realities of emerging economy settings must be taken into account. The recognition of such alternative standards and codes in the way businesses are organized is original and valuable in practical as well as in social terms for both western investors and EMs. The paper is heretic in that it questions conventional wisdom, which views the OECD-prescribed best governance practices as applicable to EMs.\n",
"role": "assistant"
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] |
Designing incentive pay practices to motivate not alienate: why firms adopt different payment practice configurations in different countries
|
[
"Employee attitudes",
"Employee motivation",
"Incentive pay practices",
"International human resource management",
"Reward structures"
] |
[
{
"content": "Summarize the following paper into structured abstract.\n\n__NO_TITLE__: \"When in Rome, do as the Romans do\" - an old saying but still relevant for the growing number of firms operating in several countries. A well-thought-out incentive scheme encourages employees to think and act in ways that support company objectives. But people in different places can have different ideas about what is fair and appropriate. Human resource (HR) professionals have to decide whether to follow the local norms or to introduce the firm's established practices - and an informed decision can make the difference between having a motivated workforce or making an expensive mistake.\nIncentive schemes are not always effective: Most incentive schemes generally fall into one of three categories:\nCombining different incentive practices: Four clusters of firms emerged, each with a distinctive reward structure. Referring to them as \"contingent rewarders\", \"incentive minimizers\", \"incentive maximizers\", and \"profit rewarders\", the researchers explained that:\nDifferent countries, different norms: What they now wanted to know was whether the combinations of incentive practices in use varied in different countries. Their thinking was very much based on institutional theory - the laws, norms, and values that hold in a particular setting influence how companies and individuals behave. Within an industry or geographic location, this produces a set of expected norms of behavior and pressures to conform to internalized \"institutional rules\". So organizations choose incentive practices that give them the legitimacy and societal support that they need to operate.\nLocal context determines flexibility in incentive practice design: After controlling for these factors, statistical analysis demonstrated some very clear differences in preferred incentive structures. Mapping what firms actually did, country by country, highlighted just how much variation there was - an incentive bundle that was widely used in one place had hardly any take-up elsewhere. And although the prevailing type of capitalism had an effect, it was hard to make generalizations.\nComment: This review is of \"Incentive pay configurations: bundle options and country-level adoption\", by Nicholas et al. (2016). Using firm-level data from the 2009 CRANET survey, the study analyzes the way private-sector companies combine individual bonuses, team bonuses, and profit-sharing to create their preferred bundle of incentive pay practices. It maps these preferences in 14 different countries and discusses the extent to which organizations may find their choices constrained by the external institutional environment and the norms and values of the countries in which they operate.\n",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Purpose: Examines the reward structures used by private-sector firms in different locations.\nDesign/methodology/approach: Analyzes the prevailing incentive pay practice configurations in 14 countries over four continents. Investigates the extent to which local factors constrain firms' use of personal and team bonuses or profit-sharing.\nFindings: \"When in Rome, do as the Romans do\" - an old saying but still relevant for the growing number of firms operating in several countries. A well-thought-out incentive scheme encourages employees to think and act in ways that support company objectives. But people in different places can have different ideas about what is fair and appropriate. Human resource professionals have to decide whether to follow the local norms or to introduce the firm's established practices - and an informed decision can make the difference between having a motivated workforce or making an expensive mistake.\nPractical implications: Observes that organizations in some countries show a strong preference for a particular bundle of incentive options. Warns that introducing a different approach may prove counter-productive unless combined with a careful process of change management.\nSocial implications: Highlights the importance of institutional context and social norms in determining the incentive pay configurations adopted in different countries.\nOriginality/value: Provides an international guide to prevailing patterns of incentive payment adoption. Shows that external constraints specific to individual countries can have a significant impact on the flexibility of incentive system design.\n",
"role": "assistant"
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] |
Evaluating clinical trial management systems: a simulation approach
|
[
"Information technology",
"Health care",
"Information systems",
"Clinical trials",
"Research organizations",
"Healthcare information technology",
"Information system evaluation",
"System dynamics",
"Unified Modeling Language"
] |
[
{
"content": "Summarize the following paper into structured abstract.\n\n1 Introduction: Information technology (IT) is ubiquitous to health care and related activities, given that it has the potential to support health care practitioners, reduce clinical errors, and even increase care efficiency and patient care quality (Ammenwerth et al., 2003). For instance, IT is becoming a core component of the drug research and development process (Augen, 2002).The drug development process is a long, costly, and strongly regulated process, of which the outputs remain uncertain. This process includes a preclinical testing stage followed by four clinical trials phases required to allow the commercialization of a new drug (Alshawi et al., 2003):* phase I involves tests on voluntary healthy individuals;* during phase II, the effectiveness and side effects are assessed on patients;* phase III aims at verifying and confirming results of this assessment on a larger number of patients; and* during phase IV, after obtaining the approval from the national regulatory agency for drug commercialization, patients under medication are watched closely (Robbins-Roth, 2000).The information management process underlying clinical trials is critical for all involved actors, and in particular for the pharmaceutical firm that carries out clinical trial projects. First, it combines a huge number of data, notably given that new potential drugs are tested on a higher number of people: whereas the first phase is usually conducted on a small number of healthy volunteers, the second involves a few hundred patients and the third includes the testing on hundreds and sometimes several thousand patients (Goldhammer, 2001). Second, using information of the highest quality is not only a means of obtaining a competitive advantage for pharmaceutical firms, but also a constraint regarding rigorous regulation (Alshawi et al., 2003). Third, the duration of the information management process may have serious impacts on both the strategic advantage of pharmaceutical firms and individuals who need medication. Nevertheless, clinical trial projects often suffer from a non-respect of deadlines (Rowe et al., 2002).In this context, the use of IT supporting clinical trial projects offers opportunities to optimize the information management process, and notably to improve data quality and reduce both costs and time delays. However, the identification and evaluation of relevant IT options is generally seen as a complex task (Huff and Munro, 1985), and the intricacy of IS evaluation seems to be relatively more apparent in healthcare than in other fields (Ammenwerth et al., 2003; Despont-Gros et al., 2005). According to Despont-Gros et al. (2005), the main evaluation issues in healthcare are the explosive growth of computer solutions, the particularity of communication patterns, the difficulty of measuring impacts such as outcomes for patients, to name but a few. Dymoke-Bradshaw and Cox (2004) argue that there is a need to develop innovative approaches appropriate to the evaluation of IT supporting clinical trials.Thus, this paper aims at looking into the problem of IT evaluation in the special case of clinical trial management. It proposes a mixed-method for integrating qualitative and quantitative evaluation approaches, into a coherent model which finally lead to a system dynamics simulation for assessing the impact of IT on the information management process during clinical trials. Although this research puts an emphasis on the technology choice, it is recognized that healthcare IT is only a part of the overall information system (IS) of an organization (Ammenwerth et al., 2003).The remainder of this paper is organized as follows. The next section reviews existing research related to healthcare IS/IT evaluation, before highlighting the relevance of using system dynamics modeling to support such an evaluation process. Then, the research method based on a case study conducted in a clinical research organization, is explained. Finally, the evaluation models used to analyze the clinical trial management system are described, and some illustrative results are obtained from the simulation runs.\n2 Healthcare IS evaluation and modeling: In this section, some IS/IT evaluation research issues in healthcare are reviewed, before introducing and presenting the system dynamics approach.2.1 IS/technology evaluation in healthcare\n3 Research method: The modeling effort presented below is based on a case study research conducted within a clinical research organization, in which a system dynamics simulation model was designed to support its technology choice.3.1 Execution of the case study\n4 Clinical trial management modeling and simulation results: The results presented rely on qualitative and quantitative models that were developed, and on an illustrative simulation run.4.1 Qualitative modeling of the clinical trial management system\n5 Conclusion: This paper aims to examine the information management process underlying clinical trials. This process is a complex one: it is characterized by numerous interacting feedback loops, which are mostly balancing and trigger non-linear behaviors. Its dynamic behaviors are difficult to understand and anticipate, justifying the need for using innovative and systemic approaches that support ex ante IT evaluations. In this perspective, this research leads to a system dynamics simulation model that works as a decision support system for clinical settings. According to Ammenwerth et al. (2003, p. 133), \"evaluation studies in health care IT take a lot of time, resources, and know-how\". Whereas system dynamics modeling is a systemic and dynamic approach that allows capturing the complexity of the evaluation object, it is also an approach that allows simplifying the tasks of the evaluator without disrupting the real setting. Notably, this model allows for the comparison of software technologies: it can be used to anticipate the costs and benefits of several potential IT investments under different scenarios. For example, simulation results reveal that although the technology has no influence on the duration of a clinical trial project, its impact on the work-tasks intensity, data quality and information treatment capacity can be substantial. Moreover, the application of system dynamics for IS/IT evaluation in this study contributes to debate on two critical issues addressed by IS literature.First, IS/IT evaluation has to take into consideration qualitative and quantitative factors (Asosheh et al., 2010). While system dynamics modeling relies on mathematical representations of problems under investigation and decision rules, the information used in such models is not only numerical in nature, but also qualitative (Luna-Reyes and Andersen, 2003). The quantitative modeling itself relies, in part, on qualitative data as informational sources (Forrester, 1975) and can as well involve soft variables (Luna-Reyes and Andersen, 2003). The mixed-method of evaluation proposed and applied in this research hence offers the possibility to go past the quantitative-qualitative dichotomy, even if the quantification of qualitative variables in a simulation model is recognized to be a fragile task (Coyle, 2000).Second, it was suggested that a key purpose of evaluation in the context of clinical trial management systems concerns the opportunity for organizational learning, and for learning about business dimensions (Dymoke-Bradshaw and Cox, 2004). And yet, system dynamics aims at supporting the learning processes about complex systems for knowledge creation and sharing (Sterman, 2000). In particular, using systemic modeling is needed when the system under consideration has so many components and interrelationships that they may not be easily taken into account by managers' mental models, which are by definition \"elusive\" and often imprecise (Forrester, 1975), and when developing a shared understanding of complex issues is difficult to achieve using unstructured representations. For example, during the modeling effort carried out for the organization under study, the IT manager expressed that the activity and influence diagrams are useful tools not only to understand the interconnected activities performed by IS users, but also to have a global and more justified picture of the organizational business; he realized that before participating in the qualitative modeling process, his knowledge was fractionated and even limited. The issue of IT evaluation is also a behavior and an organizational one: the qualitative and quantitative simulation modeling process conducted in this paper allows also for the development of a shared understanding of the behavioral aspects of the IT evaluation process. Recall, as emphasized by Ammenwerth et al. (2003), there is a need in healthcare IT evaluation to account for aspects such as: the complexity of the IT evaluation object and the complexity of the environment itself (regulation), and that there are deep human resources reluctance to provide the required information richness required to succeed.However, several limitations should be noted. Whereas clinical trial management software are only a part of an IS of an organization, this paper put the emphasis on technology-based dimensions. As the simulation model also takes into account organization-based dimensions, an in-depth analysis of some scenarios representative of different organizational contexts would be interesting for enriching the results obtained in this research. Moreover, although systems that support data collection by fax are still highly used by clinical research organizations, those that support data collection by electronic data capture (EDC) over the internet are increasingly used and modern systems even tend to support both. Indeed, if older physicians and patients may be reluctant to use modern technology (Parravicini and Patterson, 2011), it is recognized that the web-based EDC offers opportunities to improve data quality, increase productivity, and reduce cost in clinical trial management (Sahoo and Bhatt, 2003). Consequently, the evaluation models should be extended to take into consideration an EDC process over the internet.Nevertheless, this study has implications for practitioners. It demonstrates that the selection of efficient technology plays a great role in a business growth strategy, given its capacity to support the performing of multi-projects over the same period. In other words, IT may support the management of multiple projects at the functional level, by reducing the challenge of the resource allocation between simultaneous projects (Engwall and Jerbrant, 2003; Payne, 1995). Furthermore, this research proposes a decision support system that could be used by managers who act in a clinical setting. In particular, such a decision support system may be of a greater interest for small- and medium-sized clinical research organizations given that poor IT investment decisions can dramatically affect the organizational profitability of small- to medium-sized enterprises (Love et al., 2005).\n",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Purpose: - If the use of information technology (IT) supporting clinical trial projects offers opportunities to optimize the underlying information management process, the intricacy of the identification and evaluation of relevant IT options is generally seen as a complex task in healthcare. Hence, the purpose of this paper is to examine the problem of ex ante information system evaluation, and assess the impact of IT on the information management process underlying clinical trials.\nDesign/methodology/approach: - Combining Unified Modeling Language (UML) and system dynamics modeling, a simulation model for evaluating IT was developed. This modeling effort relies on a case study conducted in a clinical research organization, which, at that time, faced an IT investment dilemma.\nFindings: - Some illustrative results of sensitivity analyzes conducted on error rates in clinical data transmission are presented. These simulation results allow for quantifying the impact of different IT options on human resources' efforts, time delays and costs of clinical trials projects. Notably, the results show that although the technology has no real influence on the duration of a clinical trial project, it impacts the number of projects that can be carried out simultaneously.\nOriginality/value: - The research provides insights into the development of an innovative approach appropriate to the evaluation of IT supporting clinical trials, through the use of a mixed-method based on qualitative and quantitative modeling. The results illustrate two critical issues addressed in the IS literature: the necessity to extend IT evaluation beyond the quantitative-qualitative dichotomy; and the role of evaluation in organizational learning, and in learning about business dimensions.\n",
"role": "assistant"
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] |
East Asian cuisine perceptions in New York City between 1997 and 2007
|
[
"Perception changes",
"East Asian cuisine",
"Food products",
"United States of America",
"Attitudes",
"Consumers"
] |
[
{
"content": "Summarize the following paper into structured abstract.\n\n1. Introduction: From consumer press to top-notch culinary schools, Asian cuisines are catching fire. Several key factors are propelling this growth - Asian food's massive variety of exotic and familiar flavors that range from bold to subtle, and its association with healthy ingredients and preparation techniques, as well as a growing US Asian population to help bolster growth (Porjes, 2005). At the end of the 1990s, newspaper, magazines, and television programs announced that America was in the throes of a new cultural phenomenon: the \"Asianization of America\", impacting things such as cartoons, yoga, acupuncture, food, fashion, and more (Tu, 2003).The purpose of this research is to investigate the perceptions of the five most common East Asian Cuisine (Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Thai, and Vietnamese) in New York City. This study chose New York City, aptly known as the \"center of international foods\" and the city that best represents a \"cultural melting pot\" (Kolb, 2009). In addition, New York's densely populated and diverse ethnic demographic creates the perfect backdrop for generalizing trends and evaluating fare amongst a population that continues to be open to culturally unfamiliar foods.Recently, Asian foods have been generally evolving in two directions. One involves the increased focus on specific countries or regional flavors. \"First there was Chinese and Japanese. Now Thai and Vietnamese are going main stream\", says David Kimmel, a creative conceptual developer and designer of food and beverage products, who is based outside New York City. Other Asian regional flavors, such as Indian, Malaysian, Korean, and Indonesian are also beginning to attract more attention. (Porjes, 2005).This growth may also be influenced by the demographic change of the Asian American population. According to the US Census Bureau in 2000, Asian Americans account for only 4.2 percent of the US population, or about 11.9 million people. However, the Asian population within the United States, fueled primarily by immigration, is expected to reach 19.6 million by 2020 - about a 65 percent growth rate from current levels. Currently, Asian immigrants mark the fastest growing population in the United States; the increase was estimated to be 412.5 percent by 2050 compared with 1997 (Muller, 1999). The impacts on the specialty food industry will inevitably be a growing desire for products to replicate the dishes consumers are finding in the growing number of Asian restaurants.The US ethnic foods market is estimated to generate approximately $75 billion in annual sales. It is the equivalent of $1 out of every $7 being spent on groceries. Restaurant food service accounts for 65 percent of the ethnic food sales and supermarkets maintain the remaining 35 percent of the market (Geisler, 2007). In the midst of this popular Asian ethnic trend, it is of utmost importance to understand the changes in perception on each countries' cuisines during past ten years.Driven by consumers who were eager for new experiences, and by new immigrants to the United States, the market for ethnic restaurants and cuisines grew a great deal in recent years. This study attempts to analyze the trends of five East Asian cuisines for the past decade. Specifically, by comparing restaurant's food, decor, service and price, we reviewed the characteristics of each cuisine and the changes in the last 10 years. Utilizing this information can aid restaurateurs in understanding the recent trends of Asian cuisines and provide a view of consumer attitude shifts toward ethnic cuisines from the 1990s to 2000s. As these same trends progress, this analysis can be applied to future restaurant endeavors in years beyond the study's reach.\n2. Literature review: 2.1 Ethnic cuisine development in the USA\n3. Methodology: The Zagat Survey: New York City Restaurants was used to compare and contrast the changes in perception of East Asian cuisines by consumer reviews within New York City. In lieu of a smaller independent sampling of consumers, the Zagat Survey was used as a current guide for New York's general population of restaurant patrons. The Zagat Survey, which is based on rating and comments from restaurant guests, is one of the most popular, reliable and organized guides used by diners in the metropolitan areas of the United States. Reviewers represent varying age groups, genders, ethnicities, and socioeconomic statuses. Popular media such as the New York Times, Reader's Digest, Wall Street Journal and the Los Angeles Times has quoted it as \"indispensable, reliable, the gastronomic bible, and a necessity second only to a valid credit card\" (Zagat and Zagat, 1997; Zagat and Zagat, 2007).The paper analysis consists of all the ratings presented in both the 1997 and 2007 Zagat Survey guides. The mean and the standard deviations are calculated in terms of the existing Zagat categories: food, decor, service, and price. The Zagat guide's ratings are on a 30-point scale covering food, decor and service. The price is represented by the average cost per person.The classifications of restaurants rated in the Zagat Survey are categorized by ethnicity. In 1997, Chinese and Japanese restaurants comprised 65 percent of the Asian restaurants surveyed. Because of Zagat's lengthy history and existence as a restaurant, the t-test (O'Mahony, 1986) can be used to verify whether there have been statistically meaningful changes within each measured ethnic restaurant group for the past ten years.\n4. Results: 4.1 Average ratings\n5. Conclusion: In this paper, a comparative analysis was performed amongst Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Thai, and Vietnamese restaurants in New York City using the Zagat Surveys from 1997 and 2007. This comparison revealed a number of different trends for each respective cuisine. It also showed similarities in the various attributes that were measured, and suggested implications for future restaurant endeavors within New York City.This analysis compared the ratings from each cuisine, and ranked them according to the consumer results from the surveys. The ratings were reviewed in the order of highest to lowest regarding food, decor, service and cost. These ratings reflected popularity, satisfaction and price range. Overall, Japanese food rated highest, followed by Korean, Thai, Vietnamese, and lastly Chinese food, in all categories. More specifically, there was very little variance in terms of food or decor between the Japanese and Korean cuisines; however, a major difference in price and service satisfaction was noted. It is also interesting to note that Korean dining has a very narrow range in food and price, meaning the majority of Korean restaurants operate within similar food satisfaction and price ranges. Another observable result of these comparisons revealed that Japanese and Thai cuisines showed noticeable overall improvements.Chinese cuisine scored lowest in decor both in 1997 and 2007. Service also continues to be the lowest amongst the other Asian cuisines.Japanese cuisine's prominent factor is the increasing price over the past decade. With the apparent rise in popularity of sushi, an increase in price has correlated throughout the years.Vietnamese cuisine presents a contrary situation, with the price range decreasing over the past ten years. The average price of a meal increased, but many options became cheaper, implying that restaurant owners continue to market and serve meals that serve the budget conscious. Here too, the spectrum could widen and give opportunities to viable options in a higher-class environment.Lastly, Thai cuisine has demonstrated improvements overall, and continues to be a popular Asian food choice. Satisfaction among decor and service showed remarkable improvements between the 1997 and 2007 surveys. The majority of Thai restaurants in New York City situate themselves within the more casual environments, however, and therefore may benefit from offering more high-end and low-end options.Further studies should be done to see if historical implications have any influence on the general perceptions on the cuisine. It would also be interesting to see if the numbers of immigrants in a given community affect price and service. Analysis should also be done on specific age groups such as how youth and adolescents perceive the foods and if there are any rises in popularity of these cuisines.Largely, this research information can be used to inform future restaurateurs, investors and proprietors as to what qualities and attributes the urban American public are seeking in food. It can also assist current restaurant owners improve their businesses by utilizing results to measure against their own current business practices, as well as future marketing efforts to maintain East Asian food cuisine's wide-ranging popularity.\n",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Purpose: - The primary aim of this paper is to reveal the changes in perception of East Asian cuisine (Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Thai, and Vietnamese) in New York City between 1997 and 2007. Through analysis of data collected from Zagat Survey food reviews, the research seeks to explore trends regarding each cuisine's social status, quality, and also to observe general comparisons between each ethnicity's cuisine. The secondary aim is to evaluate how each cuisine is currently perceived in the city that is not only beaming with culinary delights, but also deemed the \"Restaurant capital of the world\".\nDesign/methodology/approach: - Using the Zagat Survey New York City 1997 and 2007, quantitative analyses were performed using the scores for comparison purposes. The mean and the standard deviations are calculated in terms of food, decor, service, and price. The t-test was used to verify whether there have been statistically meaningful changes in each cuisine for the past ten years in the Zagat Survey.\nFindings: - In terms of popularity, the number of Japanese restaurants has significantly increased in ten years while that of Chinese restaurants decreased about 30 percent. According to the t-tests, Japanese showed most significant changes in almost all aspects. Thai cuisine also demonstrated remarkable improvements, especially, in decor and service. Korean and Chinese cuisine did not show a noticeable change in food, decor, and service. Only the price showed a little change for these cuisines. Vietnamese cuisine achieved a significant progress in food while no enhancement in other aspects.\nResearch limitations/implications: - Because the scope of the research was \"general\" restaurants in New York City, the discussion on their price range, quality of food, decor, and service, the type of restaurant under observation was inevitably limited.\nPractical implications: - The research can help in marketing and development of new restaurants for it provides some insight into the characteristics of each ethnic cuisine and trend changes of restaurants.\nOriginality/value: - The research presented in the paper can be applied both by practitioners and academics in the fields of food service management.\n",
"role": "assistant"
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] |
Shadow prices of non-performing loans and the global financial crisis: Empirical evidence from US commercial banks
|
[
"Technical efficiency",
"Global financial crisis",
"Stochastic frontier approach",
"Non-Performing loans",
"Shadow prices"
] |
[
{
"content": "Summarize the following paper into structured abstract.\n\n1. Introduction: Financial institutions, particularly banks, are the heart of any economy. The most important function of banks is to mobilize funds, allocate capital and control other non-financial companies (Diamond and Dybvig, 1983; Diamond, 1984; Gorton and Winton, 2003; Merton, 1995). Banks provide some financial services to individuals and companies. They facilitate the access to monetary funds. In fact, banks have a substantial role to stimulate financial system stability, productivity, growth and prosperity of the whole economy (Schaeck et al., 2009). However, mismanagement of banking assets and loans can destabilize the economic and the political situation of countries and even lead to a crisis situation. This is indeed the case of global financial crisis that started in the US subprime sector in 2007 and rapidly spread to affect the world's largest financial institutions. Consequently, many banks underwent unexpected losses and even bankruptcy (Moshirian, 2011; Jin et al., 2011; Chockalingam et al., 2018; Siakoulis, 2018). For these reasons, many theoretical and empirical researches are focused on the banking sector health, especially efficiency during crises. Generally, in the crisis context, individuals and companies are more attracted by the strongest and most efficient banks. For this reason, weaker ones have to modify their balance sheets structure to achieve a more efficient level[1] (Demirguc-Kunt et al., 2006).\n2. Model: In the direction of estimating technical efficiency, the technology frontier, under which banks work, must be defined. To measure efficiency, one can follow two principal methodologies either the parametric or the nonparametric approaches.\n3. Empirical implications: In this section, we first present our sample and the source of used information. Second, we define the inputs and outputs of our study. Third, we embark upon the empirical results and interpretations.\n4. Conclusion: NPLs are undesirable by-products arising from bank lending process. During the global financial crisis, these loans sharply increased and harmfully affected US banks. Accordingly, knowing to what extent NPLs can be costly for banks has become paramount. With the absence of an observable market price for bad loans, the shadow price notion is an adequate solution to evaluate them.\n",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Purpose: This paper aims to determine the opportunity cost borne by US commercial banks to reduce non-performing loans (NPLs) by one unit within the global financial crisis framework.\nDesign/methodology/approach: To achieve this aim, the authors use the directional output distance function to estimate the technical efficiency while considering NPLs as undesirable output. Then, they estimate the shadow prices of NPLs by using the envelope theorem and solving the revenue function.\nFindings: The results indicate that medium-sized banks are the most efficient, while small banks are the most inefficient ones. Moreover, the shadow prices of NPLs of large banks are higher than those of small and medium-sized banks. This implies a more elevated cost when lessening bad loans in large banks. This is more prominent during the crisis given that the shadow prices of NPLs of large banks have risen sharply over that period.\nPractical implications: Shadow prices have important managerial implications given that they display the amounts of required reduced revenues to lessen NPLs. Accordingly, banks' managers are called to reduce these loans by paying more attention when choosing their customers.\nOriginality/value: With the absence of an observable market price for bad loans in financial literature, the shadow price notion offers an adequate measure to evaluate them. To the best of authors' knowledge, this is the first study that provides an estimation of the shadow price of NPLs in the US banking sector.\n",
"role": "assistant"
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] |
Making sense of the market: An exploration of apparel consumption practices of the Russian consumer
|
[
"Apparel",
"Consumer behaviour",
"Market economy",
"Consumerism",
"Russia"
] |
[
{
"content": "Summarize the following paper into structured abstract.\n\n__NO_TITLE__: Prior to the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, the world had yet to witness a developed industrial country in transition from a command economy into a market economy. A necessary requirement for a functioning marketing economy is the consumers, who are willing and able to exercise effective choice (Ennew et al., 1993). In a centrally-planned economy, the marketplace and, therefore, consumers did not exist, at least as they are understood within the Western world (Ennew et al., 1993; Money and Colton, 2000). The emergence of a new consumer is critical for Eastern European transition economies. However, little is known about these consumers (Manrai et al., 2001; Raju, 1995), specifically, about their attitudes and behaviors related to clothing consumption. This study aims to examine how post-socialist consumers in this emerging market have adjusted to the new economic reality after almost fifteen years of transition from a socialist to a capitalist society.\nBackground: Evolution of the Russian consumer\nMethodology: An exploratory study was developed and implemented to address the gap in knowledge that exists regarding apparel consumers in Russia. A qualitative methodology was employed because it allowed tapping the participants' own perspective (Denzin and Lincoln, 1994; Deshpande, 1983). The in-depth interview was selected as the primary data collection tool because it permits a focus on participant's own expression of experience, and at the same time, provides an opportunity for the researcher to ask additional questions and clarify meanings of the responses (McCracken, 1988). For the purposes of this study, in-depth interviews were conducted in Russia and occurred in Russian.College students formed the sample for the study. Data collection was conducted during summer 2004 at three major universities in St Petersburg, Russia. When the research project was introduced, 17 students (four males and 13 females, aged between 20 and 35) volunteered to participate in the study and were interviewed. Younger consumers are known to more readily accept change in consumption practices (Rogers, 2003), and they represent the future of the Russian market, and therefore are of critical interest from a business perspective. In addition, it has been established that young Russian consumers are more interested in their appearance and tend to spend more on clothing and accessories than other segments of the market (Euromonitor, 2003).To ensure a systematic approach to the data collection process, the interviewer followed an outline, containing fifteen open-ended questions. Every question was followed by a number of probes. For example, the first question asked participants to talk about their last apparel shopping experience. The probes associated with it were: \"When and where did you go? Why did you go to that place? Is it where you usually go?\" The meanings the interviewees attach to their own and others' clothing and appearance, the difficulties they experience during apparel shopping, as well as the emotions these topics evoke, were all important to getting at the heart of their perspective as consumers. The interviews were audio-taped with the permission of the participants and lasted on average 45 minutes. The interviews were transcribed with simultaneous development of notations and then translated from Russian into English. To ensure the correct meanings of the translation, two native Russian speaking graduate students were asked to review the transcribed copies in English and in Russian. Their suggestions were incorporated into the final version of the text.The interview texts were then interpreted for significant themes that could be used to describe participants' clothing consumption practices. Multiple exposures to the text before the actual analysis stage, as a result of transcribing, translating, and assessing the meanings, facilitated an in-depth understanding of the data. The hermeneutic approach was used to interpret the meanings of the participant's lived experiences (Denzin and Lincoln, 1994; Van Manen, 1990). This methodological framework allows the significant issues to be culled from the data itself through an iterative part-to-whole process of interpretation. Each interview was analyzed individually in constant relation to the whole data set. The stages of the analysis process were structured as suggested by Spiggle (1994). Three topical areas emerged from this interpretation process, including: Choices and challenges in the marketplace; The decision-making process; and Clothing as non-verbal communication. According to hermeneutical interpretive methodology, each topical area consisted of several themes to further explore in depth the meanings of those consumer experiences that surfaced during the interviews (Van Manen, 1990).\nAnalysis and interpretation: Choices and challenges in the marketplace\nConclusions and implications: The topic of consumer attitudes toward apparel consumption is typically understood via a Western perspective; however, simply applying what is known from research conducted within long-time market economies to other regions of the world can be misleading. Consumers in Eastern Europe and other emerging markets have unique perceptions of companies and products and as a result place different importance on product attributes when making a buying decision (Raju, 1995). The latest overview of the Russian fashion arena in the Financial Times indicated an increasing consumer power and growing interest on the part of Western fashion companies to venture into the market (Treacy, 2005). Consumption in Russia is expected to double by 2011 (Parshukova, 2003), exploding demand for better quality clothing and other fashion-related goods. To date, little research has been done on the Russian consumer (Durvasula et al., 1997; Manrai et al., 2001; Money and Colton, 2000). Lack of knowledge about the needs and wants of this consumer can create difficulties for companies, and foreign firms may be at a disadvantage in competing with local companies that possess intuitive knowledge about Russian consumers' preferences and consumption motivations.Taking into account that Russian consumers' attitudes toward apparel consumption are understudied, this research explored how these post-socialist shoppers who do not have points of reference typical for long-time market economies make choices among wide range of products and brands that recently became available to them. The present study investigated what clothing attributes Russian consumers perceive as important when they purchase apparel and other related products. Overall, it was found that Russian consumers tend to use the same attributes as shoppers in established market economies (Hsu and Burns, 2002). However, the importance they place on them is different. Employing qualitative approach allowed understanding why the participants placed more emphasis on some attributes than others, as well as the meanings they attached to them.This study supported previous observations that young Russian consumers place a great importance on clothing as part of the overall appearance (Argenbright, 1999; Euromonitor, 2003; Levinson, 1999). A relatively low average income and underdeveloped banking system translates into an inability to afford larger purchases such as cars or houses for the majority of population (Belton, 2002). Therefore, when compared to Western consumers, Russians are limited to product categories that can be consumed publicly. Clothing plays a unique role in helping consumers assume and communicate their new roles and identities within a transitioning socio-economic context. The participants reported using clothing to differentiate themselves from others and to communicate their social status, either real or ideal. The ability to exercise free choice when creating one's own appearance is still relatively new in the Russian marketplace, making the consumer decision-making process both exciting and challenging.Confirming previous research findings (Huddleston et al., 2000; Leonidou, 1992), this study showed that Russian consumers view quality as a critical factor when purchasing clothing, but it also suggested an explanation why quality is so important in this post-socialist market. It was found that Russian consumers evaluate quality based primarily on social benefits (e.g. look good to others) as opposed to Western consumers, for whom economic benefits (e.g. durability) are equally important (Hines and O'Neal, 1995; Zeithaml, 1988). Participants reported that they associate better quality apparel with higher socio-economic status. The unique position of clothing for Russian consumers as a means to create and communicate one's identity coupled with the association between better quality clothing and higher position in the social hierarchy explains the perceived importance of quality in the buying decision process.Similar to the Western consumers, retail format, country of origin, company and brand name influenced how the research participants perceived overall apparel quality (Sternquist and Davis, 1986; Zeithaml, 1988). Even though price is often viewed as one of the primary factors to determine product quality (Zeithaml, 1988), it was not found to be the case with the Russian consumers. Overall, participants expressed more positive attitudes toward apparel sold in stores than that sold in street markets. Market clothing is perceived as low quality and, subsequently, low status. Moreover, the association between low-quality apparel sold in street markets and clothing made in China is likely to be the reason for the negative attitude expressed by the majority of the participants toward all Chinese made clothing.Previous studies showed that Western consumers (Hsu and Burns, 2002; Zeithaml, 1988) as well as consumers in some Eastern European countries (Rojsek, 2000) rely on brand name when evaluating quality and selecting products. In this study, even though several participants stated that they look at the labels, none of them indicated that brand name influenced their buying decisions. This suggests that the concept of brand name is underdeveloped in Russia. Even though consumers might recognize foreign brand names (Singer, 2002), they do not necessarily place the same value on them as do consumers in the Western countries. This is particularly the case within apparel market, where wide spread of counterfeits is likely to undermine the value of brand names.This study provided insights on perceived importance of clothing attributes that are critical for marketers (quality, company and brand name, retail channel, and country of origin). This knowledge can be used to develop product positioning and promotional strategies. The finding that Russian men impose a serious influence on their female partners' clothing choices could have important implications for marketing strategies tailored to the Russian market, and specifically that of fashion-related female products advertised to male consumers. Moreover, the present research has important implications not only for understanding how to market to the Russian consumer, but also for those in other post-socialist markets, in that consumers in these transition economies also have gone through an adjustment to a new market economy, and therefore may have similar attitudes toward apparel consumption. This could be explored within further research.This research identified major challenges faced by consumers within the Russian apparel market. The absence of moderately priced, quality apparel in the market indicates an opportunity for apparel businesses to address the needs of the growing Russian middle class. Russian consumers' obsession with clothing and the development of the banking system create potential for on-line retailers in this under-served apparel market. E-shopping could significantly expand consumer choices and reduce time and effort consumers are currently investing in shopping in order to find the items they want. Future research could address how this market could be served by internet-based shopping. Expansion of US retail chains such as Gap or Express to satisfy the Russian consumer demand for fashion-forward apparel also appears to be quite promising. These retail chains could offer more variety and an expanded range of sizes filling in shortcomings of the Russian apparel market. Further research might also focus on older consumers, as well as consumers in areas of Russia that are less cosmopolitan than St Petersburg, as both would shed light on the Russian consumer as well as provide a foundation for understanding the diverse consumer needs within this burgeoning marketplace.\n",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Purpose: - The purpose of this study is to examine and interpret post-socialist consumer experiences in relation to clothing consumption practices when consumers shop, acquire, and wear clothing and other fashion-related products.\nDesign/methodology/approach: - The in-depth interview was the primary data collection tool. Data collection was conducted during summer 2004 in St Petersburg, Russia. College students formed the sample for the study. In total, 17 students (four males and 13 females) were interviewed. The hermeneutic approach was used to interpret the meanings of the participant lived experiences.\nFindings: - In comparison to consumers in an established market-based economy, consumers in this post-socialist market have unique perceptions of clothing attributes (quality, brand name, country of origin, retail channel) critical for buying decisions. Overall, appearance and clothing play a special role in the emerging Russian market as they help construct and communicate new identities more than any other product category.\nResearchimplications/implications: - Identified challenges of the Russian apparel market indicate opportunities for domestic and foreign apparel businesses. The meanings Russian consumers attach to clothing attributes can be used to develop product positioning and promotional strategies. Discussed implications of the research findings can be extended to other post-socialist emerging markets.\nOriginality/value: - This study explored how Russian consumers have adjusted to the new economic reality after almost fifteen years of transition from a socialist to a capitalist society from the perspective of the consumer. Whereas previous research findings were confirmed, the present study provides rationale for perceived importance of quality and unimportance of brand name in the Russian apparel market.\n",
"role": "assistant"
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] |
Immediacy pandemic: consumer problem-solving styles and adaptation strategies
|
[
"Technology",
"Problem-solving",
"Consumer adaptation",
"Immediacy pandemic"
] |
[
{
"content": "Summarize the following paper into structured abstract.\n\nIntroduction: Negroponte (1995) director of the MIT Media Lab, wrote in his book, Being Digital, that the advent of digital technology is not an ordinary phenomenon; digital technology is not a fad and is here to stay. Since then, digital technology has evolved significantly and has become an integral part of everyday consumer life (Luindquist et al., 2014). In fact, the rapid rise of mobile and virtual technology (e.g. mobile apps and cloud computing services) has fundamentally changed the way consumers interact with the world and work through their consumption-related problems.\nResearch background: In today's highly competitive market with diminishing product life cycles and rapid technological advancements, the strategic and financial importance of launching new products is increasingly growing, making it crucial to have a clear understanding of the determinants of consumer adoption and use of new technologies (Moreau et al., 2001). Consequently, marketers, developers and engineers have been fascinated with what causes individuals to accept or reject technology, and how incorporation of new technology alters consumer life (Moreau et al., 2001). These efforts have contributed to three streams of research focusing on distinct, but interrelated, topics. First, researchers have focused on the drivers of technology acceptance and adoption. Second, the consequences of technology use, both positive and negative, have been examined from psychological and socio-cultural perspectives. Finally, researchers have identified the paradoxes of technology by identifying conflicting experiences of technology use by consumers.\nMethod: Due to the exploratory nature of this study, a qualitative approach was adopted. Data were collected in the Southwest USA following two main techniques: in-depth interviews and personal essays. Personal essays comprise a valuable type of textual data, which can be used in its own light or in conjunction with other types of data such as consumer diaries or interviews (Patton, 2005). Personal essays have long been used in a variety of topics in consumer research (Autio and Heinonen, 2004; Hill, Gaines, and Wilson, 2008; Penaloza, 1994; Pentina and Amos, 2011).\nFindings: The Consumer Immediacy Pandemic\nDiscussion and implications: Humans have always had a fascination with technology (Ferkiss 1969). Likewise, researchers have been interested in examining the complexities of human use of technology. As discussed in the research background section, extant research has followed three main approaches to uncover antecedents and consequences of technology adoption and use. Despite their differences, these three research streams (i.e. research on technology acceptance, consequences of technology use and paradoxes of technology) are interrelated topics. Our overarching approach focusing on consumer-technology relationships could prove essential.\nLimitations and future research: As with all studies, the present research has limitations, some that provide fruitful avenues for future research. First, several of the themes identified and presented in this research have been the focus of specific literatures with agendas different than ours. Future research has the opportunity to corroborate and extend our findings by relating them to such literature. Second, given the exploratory nature of our study, a qualitative approach was used. Although qualitative data are suitable for the purpose of this study, future research can confirm and extend these findings using other methodologies. Quantitative methodologies, for example, could allow for testing various moderators, such as individual consumer traits or cultural differences. Finally, the current study focuses on identifying the CIP, problem-solving styles and consumer adaptation strategies. However, the CIP is a major event in human history and in the business world. Thus, future studies should explore the various implications and outcomes of these trends and factors in various contexts such as public policy (i.e. distracted driving), retailing (i.e. omnichannel and mobile) and personal selling (i.e. consumer immediacy expectations), as well as technology-related consumer misbehavior. It is noteworthy, though, that given the focus of the present research on mobile and virtual technology, it would be untenable to suggest that the CIP and/or consumer problem-solving styles and adaptation strategies apply, partially or equally, to all technology. Certain aspects of our findings might in fact be applicable to technology at large, but we shall refrain from extrapolating incautiously. The discussion as to whether, and to what extent, our findings might be applicable to technology in general deserves attention from future research.\n",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Purpose: This paper aims to delve into the complexity and multiplicity of consumer experiences in relation to mobile and virtual technology, and provides a lived-experience account of the Consumer Immediacy Pandemic (CIP) and related consumer experiences and responses.\nDesign/methodology/approach: Using open-ended, in-depth interviews, as well as personal essays, the research questions are addressed through the interpretive hermeneutic approach.\nFindings: The CIP is an important, multifaceted consumer shift, whose ramifications are traceable in consumer behavior. It encompasses three consumer problem-solving styles (i.e. real-time, mobile and virtual problem-solving). Consumers adapt to the CIP through such strategies as unbundling of presence, temporal gain and synchronization, task continuity, work-fun integration and multi-tasking.\nResearch limitations/implications: With conventional theories ineffectively explaining consumer experiences with such products as smart phone, social media and selfie stick, this paper provides fruitful directions for studying consumer-technology relationships.\nPractical implications: The findings point to untapped and novel needs rooted in consumer experience with mobile and virtual technology such as the needs for personal information management and/or professional counseling.\nSocial implications: The paper provides evidence as to a deep-seated shift in the role of technology in consumer life. Underestimating the ongoing and future success and power of mobile and virtual technology can be too costly for society at large.\nOriginality/value: This study exposes the dialogical interplay between consumer agency and structural influences that compels consumers to internalize immediacy as a taken-for-granted expectation. Such pandemic alters the ways consumers go about satisfying their needs and wants. The findings can help understand the twenty-first century consumer, theorize product agency and chart marketing and policy directions.\n",
"role": "assistant"
}
] |
Environmental management strategy and organizational citizenship behaviors in the hotel industry: The mediating role of organizational trust and commitment
|
[
"Internal marketing",
"Organizational commitment",
"Hotel",
"Organizational citizenship behavior",
"Environmental management strategy",
"Organizational trust"
] |
[
{
"content": "Summarize the following paper into structured abstract.\n\n1. Introduction: Hotel customers are increasingly recognizing the importance of environmental awareness and expect lodging firms to follow eco-friendly practices. Indeed, hotels consume significant resources, ranking fifth among all industries in energy consumption (Bohdanowicz and Martinac, 2007; Han et al., 2011). To meet the growing customer demand for environmental friendliness, proactive hotel firms adopt an environmental management strategy (EMS) to enhance their public image and economic benefits (Aragon-Correa et al., 2008; Ham and Lee, 2011).\n2. Literature review and hypotheses development: 2.1 Environmental management strategy\n3. Methods: 3.1 Data collection\n4. Research findings: 4.1 Measurement model\n5. Discussion and conclusions: This study examined how an EMS leads to OCB. For this purpose, we hypothesized that an EMS is a source of employees' OCB, wherein OT and OC account for the relationship between the EMS and OCB. To test the hypotheses, we examined the direct relationships of the EMS with OT, OC and OCB; the direct relationships of OCB with OT and OC; and the mediating effects of OT and OC on the relationship between the EMS and OCB. We used SEM to analyze these three relationships, and it supported all hypotheses given previous findings and theories (Dutton and Dukerich, 1991; Gunlu et al., 2010; Hansen et al., 2011; Podsakoff et al., 1996).\n",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Purpose: Recently, the hotel industry has increased its adoption of environmental management practices. Because the research on hotel environmental management often overlooks organizational factors, this study aims to investigate the effects of an environmental management strategy (EMS) on organizational citizenship behavior and tested the mediating roles of organizational trust and commitment in explaining those effects.\nDesign/methodology/approach: An online survey of US hotel employees yielded 373 complete responses. Data were analyzed with structural equation modeling.\nFindings: EMS positively affected organizational trust and commitment, which ultimately influenced organizational citizenship behavior. Furthermore, organizational trust and commitment fully mediated the relationship between EMS and organizational citizenship behavior.\nPractical implications: The results establish the foundation for applying EMS in organizational operations. The findings can benefit managers, as they show how hotel firms' prosocial practices can enhance employees' positive behaviors.\nOriginality/value: Despite the importance of employee attitudes and behaviors, little is known about the mechanism by which employees perceive the influence of an EMS on organizational citizenship behaviors. Therefore, the study examined organizational trust and commitment as mediators of the relationship between EMS and organizational citizenship behavior.\n",
"role": "assistant"
}
] |
Justifying business intelligence systems adoption in SMEs: Impact of systems use on firm performance
|
[
"Business intelligence",
"Firm performance",
"Systems use"
] |
[
{
"content": "Summarize the following paper into structured abstract.\n\n1. Introduction: In the literature on the business value of information technology (IT), the relationship between IT investments and their effects on firm performance continues to interest academics and practitioners (Devaraj and Kohli, 2003; Hsieh et al., 2011; Liu et al., 2013; Melville et al., 2004; Schryen, 2013). Empirical evidence to unequivocally support the view that IT investments enhance firm performance has been elusive (Bharadwaj, 2000; Kohli and Grover, 2008; Nevo and Wade, 2010; Santhanam and Hartono, 2003). In enterprise-wide information systems (IS) research, the adoption, use and value of business intelligence systems (BIS) and the link to firm performance has emerged as an active research area within the discipline (Audzeyeva and Hudson, 2015; Isik et al., 2013; Popovic et al., 2012). We define BIS as \"quality information in well-designed data stores, coupled with software tools that provide users timely access, effective analysis and intuitive presentation of the right information, enabling them to take the right actions or make the right decision\" (Popovic et al., 2012).\n2. Theoretical framework: Firm performance denotes collective IT-enabled performance across all firm activities, with metrics capturing bottom-line firm impacts such as cost reduction, revenue enhancement and competitive advantage (Melville et al., 2004). Prior research on the business value of enterprise-wide IT adoption has investigated the direct effect of IT implementation and use on firm performance, but rarely how this effect is realized through the partial impacts of IT use on firm performance.\n3. Research model: We propose a conceptual research model (shown in Figure 1) grounded on resource-based theory and diffusion of innovation theory and updated with recent findings from the literature.\n4. Research methodology: 4.1 Measurement\n5. Results: Smart PLS 3.0 (Ringle et al., 2015) was used to test the research model. PLS represents a variance-based structural equation model technique which is suitable for this research since some items in the data are not distributed normally (p<0.01 based on the Kolmogorov-Smirnov test); the conceptual model is considered to be complex; the model has both reflective and formative constructs; adequate sample size, i.e. for PLS estimation, the minimum sample size should be ten times the large numbers of formative indicators (in our model is eight), and the dependent variable with the largest numbers of independent latent variables influencing it (Peng and Lai, 2012).\n6. Discussion: This study offers important contributions to both research and practice. It suggests implications for the IT/IS literature, in particular for the field of BI and BIS, and proposes a validated model of BIS use impact on firm performance in SMEs.\n7. Conclusions: This study explored how post-adoption use of BIS affects the partial BIS impacts on firm performance in the SME milieu. Drawing on the resource-based theory and other IT literature led to the development of the research hypotheses and a conceptual framework that explicates these relationships in the BIS context. We conducted an empirical study among small and medium firms to test the research model and hypotheses.\n",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to provide a better understanding of how post-adoption use of business intelligence system (BIS) affects firm performance. It develops and empirically tests a conceptual model for assessing the impact of BIS routine and innovative usage on firm performance the context of small and medium enterprises (SMEs).\nDesign/methodology/approach: Drawing on the data collected from 181 SMEs we analyzed how BIS usage influences firm performance using the PLS-SEM method.\nFindings: The paper provides empirical insights about how BIS routine and innovative usage affect firm performance.\nPractical implications: The results provide instrumental insights for managers and solution providers to help them understand the influence of various determinants to more effectively conclude the post-adoption process in SMEs.\nOriginality/value: This study represents important progress in the authors' theoretical understanding of the role of BIS routine and innovative usage across different BIS partial impacts on firm performance dimensions.\n",
"role": "assistant"
}
] |
Construction management strategy and developer performance
|
[
"Construction operations",
"General management",
"Outsourcing",
"Real estate",
"United States of America"
] |
[
{
"content": "Summarize the following paper into structured abstract.\n\nIntroduction: According to Noteware's (1989) survey of over 1,000 US real estate firms, the real estate industry is fragmented and its low entry barriers allow many new entrants in each year. In difficult economic times many firms are forced out of the industry although ones that develop prompt and appropriate strategic responses to economic conditions may avoid failure (Arditi et al., 2000). A critical strategic management issue currently facing real estate development firms is how to structure or restructure their organizations in order to improve performance (Hewlett and Kaufman, 2008; Bhambri et al., 1991). In a major review of the management literature, in search of lessons for real estate development firms, Bhambri et al. (1991) note that firms in this industry take on various organizational structures - smaller firms tend to be project-oriented while large firms are project-oriented, functionally-oriented or a mix of the two. Large firms may be groups of partnerships that are highly decentralized or the firms may be integrated with staff in functional areas and therefore more centralized. In the construction sector, the importance of strategic planning based on a comprehensive analysis of the external environment and demand conditions and the need for possible geographic re-alignment has been highlighted (Warszawski, 1996; Chan et al., 2005).Organizational structure, as Bhambri et al. (1991) define it, refers to consistent relationships among positions within the organization. They suggest that the best way to structure an organization is a function of firm size, market location, product emphasis, and strategic choices such as whether the firm intends to handle various activities like construction in-house or use outside firms (i.e., the extent of vertical integration). This paper examines the question of development firms' strategy, with the business unit as the focus on analysis, by investigating whether there is a relationship between a firm's size, construction management strategy (extent of vertical integration) and performance. This issue of strategy and performance is particularly significant for development firms in the US given the current economic downturn that has affected the industry since 2006 and is expected to last for a few more years. There may be some lessons to be learned from the last such prolonged economic slowdown of the early 1980s, when a third of home builders went out of business (NAHB, 1988), since the impact of the current slump will not be fully known for a few years yet.\nPrevious research: Descriptive studies have identified different types of strategies among different firms. Melody and Wagley (1989), Green (1988), and Suchman (1987) found that different strategies and structures exist among successful firms. Although these studies provide important insight into the workings of firm strategy and organizational structure they do not develop empirical generalizations which can be applied to the whole industry. Leinberger (1993) and Hewlett and Kaufman (2008) discuss the strategy of assembling a portfolio of project-oriented (development) and process-oriented (service) businesses to create a viable real estate corporation. When the emphasis is on business unit strategy, the strategic choice requires the decision maker's selection of an organization's specific product(s) and its target market(s) and the appropriate organizational structure needed to implement the strategy. Findings based on a sample of Singapore property developers show that market orientation in another aspect of strategy that has an impact on performance (Tay and Tay, 2007). Anikeeff et al. (1993) found evidence of a cumulative effect between age and size and their impact on performance. Smaller firms outperformed larger ones and smaller, younger firms were the best performers in their sample.Organizational models\nResearch objectives: One issue of interest in this study was to investigate whether a firm's performance was a function of its size. There is a substantial body of research on the relationship between size and performance with some researchers suggesting a positive linear relationship and others finding evidence of a V-shaped one (with smaller and larger firms out-performing the medium-sized ones). Therefore, the first research questions (RQ) is:RQ1. Is there an association between firm size and performance?A second purpose of this study was to examine whether construction management strategy impacts performance. The key strategic issue of interest to developers is the extent of vertical integration. Therefore, our second research question is:RQ2. Are there performance differences between integrated and non-integrated firms?The third research issue was to assess the impact of size on performance given the presence of vertical integration. Therefore:RQ3. What is the relative impact of size and vertical integration on performance?Finally, previous studies showed that the relationship between size, and performance was more clearly demonstrated when the medium-sized firms were withheld from the analysis. Following this methodology, this study also attempted to isolate the confounding effect of these firms when investigating the effect of size, construction management strategy of vertical integration and performance. Therefore, the final research question is:RQ4. Are there differences in performance between smaller firms with a construction management strategy of vertical integration and larger, vertically integrated firms?\nMethodology: Sample\nAnalysis and results: Size and performance\nDiscussion and conclusion: Interestingly, the results show a negative association between size and performance but this finding may be partly explained by the way performance was measured in this study - sales per employee. The results seem to point to the benefits of an entrepreneurial orientation and a lean organizational structure. Since service industries such as real estate development do not usually benefit from cost reductions as a result of economies of scale, there are very few efficiency advantages associated with increasing size. Perhaps in the future size will be justified because it will provide better access to capital markets. Other studies, using multiple performance measures, can investigate the exact nature of the benefits, if any, of size in this industry.Vertical integration is a key strategic decision for developers. Here we investigated the effect on performance of keeping construction in-house versus contracting it out. The study tested the impact of this vertical integration on firm performance and found that there was no significant performance difference between integrated and non-integrated firms. However, the impact of vertical integration on performance may occur through its effect on size. Size was negatively associated with performance but among the smaller firms, the ones that were less integrated outperformed than the more integrated ones. This is in line with Buzzell's (1993) findings that firms with less than 25 percent market share had a lower return on investment (ROI) if they were highly integrated. Other evidence, from the facilities management industry in Finland, also recommends vertical integration only in special situations (Ventovuori and Lehtonen, 2006). The risk in vertical integration is that production is too small to be competitive with independent suppliers or customers. It works better with firms that have a large market share. Perhaps the scale of operation of the industry is such that even large development firms are too small to take advantage of vertical integration. In order to generalize these findings, future studies should investigate these issues using larger samples with different performance measures.The results based on firms in this sample may offer some important insights for developers going through the current economic slump in the USA. It appears that performance benefits accrue to those that contract out their construction activity, thus allowing the firm to stay nimble, keep costs manageable and make the necessary structural adjustments quickly - all steps that boost efficiency and performance and enhance the chances of survival in tough economic times.\n",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Purpose: - Construction and development firms are going through major reorganizations in trying to define a profitable structure - including deciding whether to include construction operations as part of the firm or to outsource it. This paper aims to analyze the relationship between firm size, construction management strategy and performance.\nDesign/methodology/approach: - The paper reviews relevant strategic management literature and reports the results of an empirical survey research study of 80 US real estate developers.\nFindings: - The results showed that there was no significant performance difference between firms that performed construction activities in-house as opposed to those that outsourced it. However, the impact of construction strategy on performance may occur through its effect on size and size was negatively associated with performance. In addition, among the smaller firms, the ones that outsourced construction outperformed those that did construction in-house.\nResearch limitations/implications: - The results are in line with the findings of similar studies from other industries. In order to add to the generalizability of these findings, future studies should include larger samples and non-US firms.\nOriginality/value: - The study links the general strategic management literature to organizational issues of construction and development firms. Findings suggest that the scale of operation of the industry is such that even large development firms have too small a market share to take advantage of vertical integration of construction.\n",
"role": "assistant"
}
] |
Event-Driven Business Process Management: where are we now? : A comprehensive synthesis and analysis of literature
|
[
"Business Activity Monitoring",
"Business Process Intelligence",
"Complex Event Processing",
"Event-Driven Architecture",
"Event-Driven Business Process Management",
"Predictive Analytics"
] |
[
{
"content": "Summarize the following paper into structured abstract.\n\n1. Introduction: 1.1 Motivation\n2. Conceptual background: The EDA is an essential concept for the successful implementation of CEP within BPM. As a consequence, the following paragraph initially describes its basic principles. The subsequent section focuses specifically on the general functionality of the CEP technology.\n3. Integrating CEP with BPM: Based on the objective of this paper and the conceptual basics described above, this section explores and discusses various application possibilities of CEP within BPM. In accordance with the search, which was conducted to build up our literature foundation, these application areas are differentiated into three domains: Event-Driven Business Activity Monitoring (EDBAM), Event-Driven Process Control (EDPC) and Event-Driven Predictive Analytics (EDPA). Subsequently, EDBPM is generally outlined as the overall concept in terms of some combination of these applications that found a paradigm shift in BPM.\n4. Synthesizing and analyzing the current state of research: This section essentially analyzes the current progress in research of the underlying paradigm. In order to reduce the complexity of this task, the examined literature was assigned with dedicated keywords. Based on this keyword coding, the contributions were synthesized into six distinct clusters. After investigating these clusters in a separate manner, the section concludes with an outline on general findings that result from this differentiated analysis.\n5. Research agenda to tackle existing research gaps: Based on the presented findings, this section provides a research agenda with challenges that need to be mastered for advancing the EDBPM paradigm. Hence, it reflects a snapshot of the current state of research, which serves as a guideline for future activities. In order to achieve this, each cluster of the last section has been analyzed for existing research gaps. Afterwards, respective challenges have been derived and consolidated in a common list. Most of the resulting claims are backed with similar statements from literature; others are chiefly derived from the cluster analysis. The following table elaborates the agenda, while indicating the provenance of each challenge in terms of corresponding research clusters. Furthermore, it should be noted that the numbering does not correspond to the importance of the challenges; all of them are considered equally significant (Table II).\n6. Conclusion and future work: This paper investigated the application of CEP in the context of BPM as an enabling technology for the RTE. Most notably, the combination with an EDA allows for an unprecedented agility in terms of transparency and responsiveness. Based on this motivation, the work at hand described fundamental concepts and discussed various application scenarios. Possible use cases reach from pure monitoring of current operations to a direct integration with the execution control of business processes. Especially the last one represents a promising concept for appropriately supporting the next generation of BPM and its fusion with the physical world. Even more innovative is the additional utilization of EDPA, which could path the way to the next step in the evolution chain - the Predictive Enterprise.\n",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Purpose: The business operations of today's enterprises are heavily influenced by numerous of internal and external business events. With the Event Driven Architecture and particularly the Complex Event Processing (CEP), the technology required for identifying complex correlations in these large amounts of event data right after its appearance has already emerged. The resulting gain in operational transparency builds the foundation for (near) real-time reactions. This motivated extensive research activities especially in the field of Business Process Management (BPM), which essentially coined the term Event-Driven BPM (EDBPM). Now, several years after the advent of this new concept, the purpose of this paper is to shed light to the question: where are we now on our way towards a sophisticated adoption of the CEP technology within BPM?\nDesign/methodology/approach: The research methodology of this paper is a structured literature analysis. It basically follows the procedure proposed by vom Brocke et al. (2009). This verified five-step process - entitled \"Reconstructing the giant\" - allowed a rigorous study. As a result, various research clusters were derived, whose state-of-the-art exposed existing research gaps within EDBPM.\nFindings: First of all, the paper provides a concise conceptual basis on different application possibilities of EDBPM. Afterwards, it synthesizes current research into six clusters and highlights most significant work within them. Finally, a research agenda is proposed to tackle existing research gaps to pave the way towards fully realizing the potentials of the paradigm.\nOriginality/value: So far, a comparable study of the current state-of-the-art within EDBPM is non-existent. The findings of this paper, e.g. the proposed research agenda, help scholars to focus their research efforts on specific aspects that need to be considered in order to advance the adoption of the CEP technology within BPM.\n",
"role": "assistant"
}
] |
Fostering interpersonal trust as a norm in organizations: five key starting points
|
[
"Leadership development",
"OD",
"Self-managed learning",
"Engagement and learning",
"Development strategies",
"Team development"
] |
[
{
"content": "Summarize the following paper into structured abstract.\n\n__NO_TITLE__: A great deal has been written about trust, including guidance on how organizations can foster interpersonal trust. And, while this guidance has value, little has been written about how organizations move beyond \"mechanistic\" strategies intended to just increase interpersonal trust. The purpose of this article is to encourage leaders to embrace and live strategies that deeply embed trust into the cultural and fabric of an organization. I believe that trust should be so pervasive within the organization-employee relationship that it becomes an automatic reflex and an organizational norm. Trust should be a work habit.\nContextual cueing strategies: Communicate with your employees and determine what they want and need: Communicate with and empower employees. Most want to be more than \"stake-holders\"; they want to feel as though they are \"full-partners\" in the enterprise (Terez, 1999). Whether its children's daycare, eldercare assistance, educational reimbursement or equitable compensation, find a way, without suspending normal business logic to give it to them.\nConclusion: The list above is a limited example of the types of efforts and behaviors in which organizations can use to cue their employees regarding the nature of their intentions. The strategies are not stand-alone devices to manipulate employee perceptions. They should to be used within a system of employee centric, well designed and sincerely intentioned strategies that when implemented results in what Neal et al. (2006) described as \"repeated performed behavioral sequences\". The presence and frequency of these will cue and motivate an automated response of trust. I believe that once a critical mass of such \"contextual cues\" are deployed, and the resultant affirmations are experienced by employees, the automated response will be interpersonal trust. I believe that interpersonal trust will become the default employee psychological state, an organizational norm and a work habit.\n",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to suggest ways that organizations can foster \"interpersonal trust\". The author explores how the implementation of specific strategies can be used to \"contextually cue\" or \"signal\" the formation of interpersonal trust.\nDesign/methodology/approach: The author reviews two seeming disparate streams of literature: interpersonal trust and the psychology of habit formation. The author shows how the use of \"contextual cuing\" can be used to create dispositions of trust and how that trust can become an organizational norm, expectation or habit.\nFindings: The author identifies five key steps that can be used to foster interpersonal trust.\nPractical implications: Organizational commitment, knowledge sharing and collaboration and organizational learning have all been shown to have significant impacts on the organization's bottom line. Given the demonstrable importance of \"trust\" then must ask, \"what can organizations do to more effectively foster interpersonal trust?\" The author identifies five key steps that can be used to foster interpersonal trust.\nSocial implications: Where there are two or more persons, there is \"social interaction\". And, for that interaction to be civil, positive or productive, trust is required.\nOriginality/value: There is an abundance of literature regarding the importance of interpersonal trust, organizational trust and their implications. Yet, there is very little that speaks to the operationalization of the concepts with specific and targeted strategies. The author proposes five possible strategies.\n",
"role": "assistant"
}
] |
Comparative study on logical analysis of data (LAD), artificial neural networks (ANN), and proportional hazards model (PHM) for maintenance prognostics
|
[
"Condition-based maintenance",
"Artificial neural networks",
"Diagnostics"
] |
[
{
"content": "Summarize the following paper into structured abstract.\n\n1. Introduction: Over the last few decades, the growths in demand, cost and amount of aging equipment in various industries have led to an increased need for reliability in industrial systems (Jardine et al., 2006; Lin et al., 2006; Li et al., 2001). As a result, common maintenance policies have evolved from run-to-failure maintenance to time-based preventive maintenance (TBM) and, more recently, to condition-based maintenance (CBM).\n2. Background and literature review on the models: Jardine et al. (2006) performed an in-depth comparison and review of multiple independent studies on CBM techniques. They concluded that it is typically harder to implement artificial intelligence models because of difficulties in data procurement, but these approaches offer improved performance as compared to more traditional model-based and statistical approaches. To further investigate this conclusion, we compare the results from two artificial intelligence models and one statistical model over the same two data sets. Three models are developed in this research: LAD, ANN and PHM. The following section reviews the basic concepts and provides a brief literature review for each model.\n3. Methodology: The following section outlines the three-step methodology used to compare the three models under consideration: LAD, ANN and PHM. These steps are: preparing the health CM data set; training the models based on the LAD formulation, the ANN design and the PHM testing; and comparing the outputs from the models.\n4. Experimental results and analysis: The methodology outlined in Section 2 is applied on two data sets: NASA's Turbofan engine degradation simulation data set (Saxena and Goebel, 2008) and the SHM data set from a Nova Scotia bridge (Clarke et al., 2014). Results are evaluated using three metrics: error, half-life error and a cost score.\n5. Conclusions: In this research, the application of three approaches to CBM prognostics is evaluated. LAD, ANN and the PHM are applied to the Turbofan engine degradation simulation data set (CMAPSS) (Saxena and Goebel, 2008) and to a Nova Scotia Bridge's CM data set (Clarke, 2014).\n",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Purpose: Condition-based maintenance (CBM) has become a central maintenance approach because it performs more efficient diagnoses and prognoses based on equipment health condition compared to time-based methods. CBM models greatly inform maintenance decisions. This research examines three CBM fault prognostics models: logical analysis of data (LAD), artificial neural networks (ANNs) and proportional hazard models (PHM). A methodology, which involves data pre-processing, formulating the models and analyzing model outputs, is developed to apply and compare these models. The methodology is applied on NASA's Turbofan Engine Degradation data set and the structural health monitoring (SHM) data set from a Nova Scotia Bridge. Results are evaluated using three metrics: error, half-life error and a cost score. This paper concludes that the LAD and feedforward ANN models compares favorably to the PHM model. However, the feedback ANN does not compare favorably, and its predictions show much larger variance than the predictions from the other three methods. Based on these conclusions, the purpose of this paper is to provide recommendations on the appropriate situations in which to apply these three prognostics models.\nDesign/methodology/approach: LAD, ANNs and PHM methods are adopted to perform prognostics and to calculate the mean residual life (MRL) of eqipment using NASA's Turbofan Engine Degradation data set and the SHM data set from a Nova Scotia Bridge. Statistical testing was used to evaluate the statistical differences between the approaches based on these metrics. By considering the differences in these metrics between the models, it was possible to draw conclusions about how the models perform in specific cases.\nFindings: Results were evaluated using three metrics: error, half-life error and a cost score. It was concluded that the LAD and feedforward ANN models compares favorably to the PHM model. However, the feedback ANN does not compare favorably and its predictions show much larger variance than the predictions from the other three methods. Overall the models predict failure after it has already occurred (negative error) when the residual life is large and vice versa.\nPractical implications: It was concluded that a good CBM prognostics model for practical implications can be determined based on three main considerations: accuracy, run time and data type. When accuracy is a main concern, as in the case where impacts of failure are large, LAD and feedforward neural network are preferred. The preference changes when run time is considered. If data can be easily collected and updating the model is performed often, the ANNs and LAD are preferred. On the other hand, if CM data are not easily obtainable and existing data are not representative of the population's behavior, data type comes into play. In this case, PHM is preferred.\nOriginality/value: Previous research in the literature performed reviews of multiple independent studies on CBM techniques performed on different data sets. They concluded that it is typically harder to implement artificial intelligence models, because of difficulties in data procurement, but these approaches offer improved performance as compared to more traditional model-based and statistical approaches. In this research, the authors further investigate and compare the performance and results from two major artificial intelligence models, namely, ANNs and LAD, and one pioneer statistical model, PHM over the same two real life prognostics data sets. Such in-depth comparison and review of major CBM techniques was missing in current literature of CBM field.\n",
"role": "assistant"
}
] |
Addressing the boardroom gender gap: It is time to give more women the opportunities they deserve
|
[
"Boards of directors",
"Women",
"Life sciences",
"Recruitment",
"Employee development",
"Coaching",
"Mentoring",
"Flexible working"
] |
[
{
"content": "Summarize the following paper into structured abstract.\n\n__NO_TITLE__: The issue of gender balance on UK boards has moved quickly up the business agenda following Lord Davies' Women on Boards report. This outlined the benefits that a mixed board brings in terms of skills and different perspectives. It recommended that a minimum of 25 percent of FTSE 100 board members should be female by 2015.\nThe life-sciences perspective: Global life-sciences executive-search and interim-management specialist RSA commissioned Women on Boards: A Life-Sciences Perspective study to find out the situation in the industry. Does the gender imbalance mirror UK plc and if so, what can be done to improve conditions? Is the life-sciences industry a more favorable place for women to progress to the most senior positions and do senior managers believe more balanced boards bring a competitive edge?These are some of the questions we researched in our study of 417 board directors and senior executives, 75 percent of whom were director level. There was a fairly even split between male (57 percent) and female (43 percent) respondents. The boards of these companies ranged from two people (16 percent) to more than 12 (8 percent). Around a quarter (26 percent) had between three and five members. A third (31 percent) had between six and nine. A quarter of our sample had no female representation on the board.Given the high proportion of women in the life-sciences industry, we would expect to see above-average representation of women on boards. However, our research suggests that life sciences is probably neither better nor worse than other industries. Taking the Biosciences Industry Association (BIA) membership as an example, we find that 12 percent of its 348 registered board members are female. While at first glance this appears to be positive, on closer examination women board members are clustered in a few firms.\nAn appetite for change: Three-fifths of those surveyed stated that it is important that men and women are equally represented in the boardroom and that diversity is the key to creating the ideal senior-management team. Some went further. Dr Melanie Lee, Syntaxin chief executive, believes that: \"The boardroom should have a 50/50 split; then you get the best of the particular strengths of male and female behaviors.\"A clear majority (62 percent) recognized that women possess specific, vital skills and provide a different and valuable contribution. For example, three-quarters of managers rated women higher than men for intuition and empathy.\nAddressing the gender gap: While there is widespread agreement that more balanced boards are good for companies in particular and the industry in general, something is holding diversity back. The survey highlighted three major barriers to change: the different work-life choices facing women; the dominant male culture of the boardroom; and the number of qualified female executives in functions represented on the board. When asked to pick which of these barriers alone was most important, dominant male culture was cited by 32 percent of those surveyed.Only 13 percent supported the use of quotas by the European Union or the British Government. Support for quotas was greater among women, a third of whom were undecided on the issue.One contributor commented: \"Quotas are not the best solution but they can be a solution if companies persistently fail to demonstrate a proportional representation of women in the senior positions.\"The lack of female board members is not down to a lack of talent. As Dr Ursula Ney, Genkyotex chief executive, put it succinctly: \"Create an environment that is more conducive to women being involved. It's not that there aren't enough women in life sciences.\"Asked what the industry could do to achieve a better balance in the boardroom, almost half highlighted as vital factors such as more flexible working, mentoring, greater transparency in recruiting, and commitment and endorsement by business leadership.However, while more than half of men suggested more flexible working as the main solution, this was ranked only fourth by women. Instead, nearly two thirds (65 percent) of female contributors saw mentoring as the key way of increasing female board membership. Essentially this demonstrates the need to consult female executives, understand their concerns and act on them, rather than relying on first instincts.\nThree key recommendations: The senior executives interviewed identified three key areas where the life-sciences industry could be doing better:1. Promote a more empathic business culture and working environment. Organizations need to show greater empathy and intuition around decision-making and communications to ensure that the right messages are getting through. There is a need to further break down any remaining institutional chauvinism and provide a more flexible working environment where being present for long periods in the office is not necessarily a requirement.2. Undertake appropriate and sustained learning and development. The industry needs to be planning and investing well ahead. The aim should be to develop the board leaders of the future rather than dropping ill-prepared candidates in at the deep end. To support this, more resources must go into providing women with the necessary skills, coaching, mentoring and supporting them with a personal-growth agenda.3. Coach female candidates to succeed in the boardroom. Making the transition into the boardroom successfully requires experience and a degree of training. Women will need coaching in a new set of skills to ensure they are comfortable in their new roles.\nGreater support from executive search: Solving the gender imbalance involves the whole industry. Executive-search firms such as RSA must work harder to identify, nurture and promote senior female-executive talent. Our respondents identified three key areas where executive search could provide greater support:1. Always look for female candidates and ensure that they are brought into the process. Consider having quotas for the inclusion of women candidates in shortlists for interviewing. Coach them to ensure they understand how CVs and interviews are seen by clients and ensure that job specifications are female-friendly.2. Scout harder for female talent. Men find it difficult to opt out, whereas women find it difficult to opt in. Be aware of the executive potential that is out there from the female population. Head-hunt suitable women because they are less likely to put themselves forward. Consider setting up a network of top females in the industry and create events that showcase opportunities for them.3. Promote the benefits of a mixed board and mentor the business around getting the best mix for their organization. Encourage a diverse senior-management environment by setting an example and putting forward the right mixture of candidates. Strive for greater transparency in evaluating women candidates and keep stating that women need more opportunities until you do not need to say it any more.\nConclusions: It is vital to the success of life-sciences companies that they are led by strong and well-qualified boards, made up of high-caliber members with a mixture of skills, perspectives and backgrounds.The entire industry recognizes that increased female representation is a key element in remaining competitive. Women have the skills; now the industry needs to work to ensure that talented individuals have the opportunities they deserve.Everyone involved needs to review their current procedures, identify barriers and work to dismantle them. This will ensure that the life-sciences sector is vibrant, competitive and successful, built on talent.And the lessons learned by life sciences are applicable to other industries. As Lord Davies said in his report: \"Corporate boards perform better when they include the best people from a range of perspectives and backgrounds.\"It is up to all of us to work together to unlock this performance.\n",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Purpose: - The purpose of this paper is to present the main findings and recommendations from a study into women on boards in the life-sciences industry.\nDesign/methodology/approach: - The paper focuses on such questions as: Does the gender imbalance mirror UK plc and if so, what can be done to improve conditions? Is the life-sciences industry a more favorable place for women to progress to the most senior positions and do senior managers believe more balanced boards bring a competitive edge?\nFindings: - The paper highlights three major barriers to change: the different work-life choices facing women; the dominant male culture of the boardroom; and the number of qualified female executives in functions represented on the board.\nPractical implications: - The paper urges the need to: promote a more empathic business culture and working environment; undertake appropriate and sustained learning and development; and coach female candidates to succeed in the boardroom.\nSocial implications: - The paper highlights the benefits to society as a whole, as well as to organizations and individual women, of having more females on boards of directors.\nOriginality/value: - The paper argues that executive searchers should: always look for female candidates and ensure that they are brought into the process; scout harder for female talent; and promote the benefits of a mixed board and mentor the business around getting the best mix for their organization.\n",
"role": "assistant"
}
] |
Facility managers' responses to user post-occupancy feedback: a conceptual framework
|
[
"Facilities management",
"Post-occupancy evaluation",
"User experience",
"FM response",
"Post-occupancy experience",
"User feedback"
] |
[
{
"content": "Summarize the following paper into structured abstract.\n\nIntroduction: Facilities are put in place to cater for the needs of building users' who in turn should be satisfied with the conditions of their performance. Unfortunately, factors such as ageing, wear and tear, design or construction errors, misuse and poor facilities management (FM) practice can affect the performance of facilities, which influences users' productivity and their satisfaction with the facilities. As reported by many previous researchers, the level of user satisfaction with the performance of facilities depends on their experience of using them (Wang and Zamri, 2013; Abisuga et al., 2016; Kim et al., 2018; Abisuga et al., 2019). Collection of user feedback on facilities can be done systematically by using post-occupancy evaluation techniques (Preiser, 2003). User feedback can also be collected through less formal channels such as face-to-face reporting, internal memos, e-mail, social media and phone calls (Mattila and Wirtz, 2004; Dalton et al., 2013; Goins and Moezzi, 2013). In this paper, the term \"post-occupancy feedback\" is used to cover both formal approaches such as survey questionnaires and interviews with end-users (Vasquez-Hernandez and Restrepo Alvarez, 2017), and informal approaches, such as complaints, repair requests and other ad hoc comments on facility performance.\nResearch approach and theoretical background: This paper's focus is on explaining how the conceptual framework for facility managers' response to user post-occupancy feedback is developed. This conceptual study is based on an integrated literature review and systematic analysis. FM falls into a customer service category so the integrated review starts with critiques of previous studies related to the customer service industry, and then focuses on their application in the FM area. According to Torraco (2005 p. 357), an integrated review can be categorised as \"a form of research that reviews, critiques, and synthesises representative literature on a topic in an integrated way such that new frameworks and perspectives on the topic are generated\".\nCustomer feedback and service organisations' responses: In the service industry, customer feedback can be positive (a compliment or suggestion) or negative (a complaint) (Wirtz and Tomlin, 2000; Wirtz et al., 2010). However, most studies have focused on the negative rather than the positive feedback (Nasr et al., 2018). In this context, Nordin et al. (2018) developed an assessment model to achieve improved complaint handling procedures during a customer dissatisfaction investigation. Stevens et al. (2018) proposed a 3 T framework comprising timeliness, transparency and trust for handling online complaints. It can be deduced that service providers are often confronted with negative customer feedback, making proactive approaches to handling the feedback paramount.\nApplication of the service quality model in facilities management: Various service providers evaluate customer satisfaction with a diverse range of customer satisfaction models. The SERVQUAL model is defined as the measure of the difference between the service expected by a customer and the perceptions of the actual service received (Parasuraman et al., 1985). Similarly, Singh (2013) stated that the SERVQUAL model measures the discrepancy between the expectations of a service encounter and the perceptions of the actual service encountered. A service encounter is defined as any individual interaction between the customer and the service provider concerning the service delivered (Voorhees et al., 2017). Parasuraman et al. (1985) proposed a conceptual model of service quality comprising ten dimensions: reliability, responsiveness, competence, access, courtesy, communication, credibility, security, understanding/knowing the customer and tangibles. However, Parasuraman et al. (1988) also suggested that the ten service quality dimensions can be conceptualised into five dimensions, namely tangibles, reliability, responsiveness, assurance and empathy, which capture the facets of all ten originally proposed dimensions.\nOrganisational justice theory and response dimensions: Justice theory deals with the level of perceived fairness with which a situation is handled. Accordingly, organisational justice refers to employee perceptions of fairness in the workplace (Campbell and Finch, 2004). However, organisational justice has been measured across many dimensions. According to Colquitt (2001) distributive, procedural, interpersonal (interactional) and informational justice are the distinct dimensions that manifest organisational justice.\nDevelopment of propositions for facilities management responses to user feedback: FM responses could have a significant impact on user post-feedback behaviour. It is also vital to understand that complainants are more sensitive to the result of the resolution process than how they are treated during the resolution process (Yilmaz et al., 2016). This makes organisational justice and responses theory an appropriate basis from which to construct a framework.\nConclusions and future research: This research extends the previous work of Campbell and Finch (2004) on finding the relationship between a service provider's response to customer feedback and user satisfaction within a FM context. In addition, it extends Goins and Moezzi's (2013) research by establishing the relationship between the feedback-handling process, facility performance and user satisfaction. As there is no previous study that has investigated the relationships of FM feedback responses and the key dimensions in user post-occupancy feedback, this study contributes new knowledge in FM research and practice.\n",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Purpose: This study aims to explore the various approaches used in the general customer service industry to develop a conceptual framework for evaluating the responses of facility managers to user post-occupancy feedback.\nDesign/methodology/approach: This study uses conceptual analysis based on a comprehensive review of relevant literature.\nFindings: The results of the study established 24 propositions which are categorised under organisational response dimensions specific to facilities management (FM): timeliness, facilitation, redress, apology, credibility of explanation, attentiveness, effort and their relationships with overall satisfaction and post-feedback behaviour, such as word of mouth and acceptance to continue using the facilities.\nResearch limitations/implications: The established propositions are derived from existing theories using a deductive approach. The framework can be further enhanced to suit various applications in FM services.\nPractical implications: This conceptual framework is a generic model, appropriate to many FM scenarios. The framework can be used to develop standard policies and procedures to foster and encourage collaborative relationships between users and facility managers. It reinforces transparency and trust between facility managers and users during the operation and management of the facilities, and improves FM effectiveness, facility performance and user post-occupancy experience.\nOriginality/value: In the FM area, no systematic approach has been previously established to evaluate and improve the response process to the users' feedback. The proposed framework is a pioneer contribution in this area.\n",
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Chasing the golden fleece: Increasing healthcare quality, efficiency and patient satisfaction while reducing costs
|
[
"Evidence-based practice",
"Management",
"Quality",
"Teamwork",
"Clinical governance",
"Healthcare quality",
"Emerging healthcare delivery structures",
"Health economics"
] |
[
{
"content": "Summarize the following paper into structured abstract.\n\nIntroduction: There are a number of global concerns in healthcare today including ageing populations, high cost of developing new drugs, high-risk lifestyles and how to transfer research into practice. However, the overarching goal of healthcare systems everywhere, regardless of the particular issues, is to improve care while at the same time reducing cost. This could be called the \"Golden Fleece\" of healthcare. Just as in Greek mythology, Jason and his Argonauts embarked on a long and risky journey to find something of which they had only heard rumours, healthcare managers seek methods of providing better care more efficiently, yet many fail on the quest. Healthcare workers may suffer from burnout as they struggle to provide more and better care with fewer resources. This results in rapid turnover and low morale in the healthcare sector, while reducing patient safety (Hall et al., 2016).\nIs lean the solution?: A growing number of healthcare institutions believe they have found a solution in lean healthcare management. Lean is variously described as a philosophy, a technique or a process, or possibly all three. Originally a system for improving manufacturing processes, lean was first developed by the Toyota factory in the 1930s when the founder, Kiichiro Toyoda, identified problems in engine casting production. He proposed a solution termed \"Kaizen\" or \"change for the better\". The concept of Kaizen has developed to include ten principles which include: continual improvement, rejecting traditional ways of doing things where there is little evidence of their effectiveness, gaining opinions from the people doing the work and empowering everyone to participate in problem solving. A graduate student, John Krafick, who had previously worked at Toyota coined the term \"lean production\" in an article he wrote from work done on his Master's thesis. The concept was later popularisatised in a book published in 1990 titled The Machine that Changed the World by authors James Womak, Daniel Jones and Daniel Roos (Sorin and Fady, 2013).\nFrom Toyota to healthcare: An early innovator in bringing lean management to healthcare was the Virginia Mason Medical Center in Seattle, Washington. In 2000 the board of directors voted to restructure their systems based on client needs. To this aim, they developed a new system of management modelled on the processes used at Toyota and based on the four pillars of people, quality, service and innovation (IHI, 2005). In the intervening period, lean has been adopted by a number of healthcare institutions and systems, who are seeking the ultimate \"golden fleece\" of higher quality at a lower cost.\nThe Swedish experience: In the articles reviewed for this issue of IJHG, Gadolin's (2019) article on Sweden's attempts to implement lean healthcare and how this affects policy makers is the most directly relevant. One problem in the implementation of lean healthcare is that conflicts can arise between policy makers and those who must implement the policies. Lean healthcare relies on the active involvement of staff at all levels. The cleaner is just as important as the surgeon if he or she can identify areas where improvements could be implemented to save time or costs. This shift in focus requires managers willing to relinquish a top-down management approach, instead empowering staff to become active change makers using a team approach to innovation. Another issue is that for lean to work most effectively, the philosophy and techniques must be adopted across a whole organisation. Improvements in surgical turn-around time, for instance, will be lost if the surgical admissions process is cumbersome, and therefore patients are not booked and prepped for surgery when the operating theatres are ready.\nThe cultural dimensions of lean: In their discussion of three American institutions where lean has been successfully introduced, Toussaint and Leonard (2013) describe lean as a \"cultural commitment\", stressing the requirement for a shift in management thinking from a top-down approach to one that values all levels of healthcare worker, facilitating change through a group process of problem identification and problem solving. Adopting such values may be easier in Japan where lean originated due to cultural beliefs, which embrace harmony, consensus and respect for the individual (Sorin and Fady, 2013).\nCould lean support new governance structures?: Emerging structural models for public hospitals may serve to support the move toward lean management. Lipunga et al. (2019), in their examination of organisational governance in the UK, New Zealand, Ghana and South Africa, explain that traditional hierarchical hospital management exemplifies a top-down decision-making model that ignores the needs of the various stakeholders and reduces clinicians' autonomy. This model focuses on implementation of pre-determined policy and may fail to acknowledge the best research evidence, basing decisions instead on tradition. A more effective method of governance is consensual and transparent, involving all stakeholders. This requires flexibility and the ability to adapt to changing circumstances, whether those are political, cultural or demographic. This is congruent with WHO guidelines which also point out that governance and management are different, with management being just one aspect of governance.\nRationing care and lean governance: Harmful health behaviours including obesity, high-risk activities such as dangerous driving, alcohol, smoking and drug abuse make health governance even more complex. Whether or not these have an impact on lean management has not been explored within the lean management literature. However, the way in which lean management systems engage all practitioners and take stakeholders' needs into account, could stimulate some new solutions for managing care more effectively. Pinho and Pinto (2019) surveyed members of the public to ascertain their views on restricting care for people who may have caused their own illness or injuries through risk-associated behaviours. The researchers wanted to know if Bulgarian citizens would advocate rationing healthcare according to whether or not poor health had been self-inflicted. The first difficulty with the premise that this would be a legitimate money saving exercise is that it is difficult to prove a direct link between behaviour and illness. In addition, rationing care to people who may need it the most could contravene medical ethics.\nThe importance of access to medication in the implementation of lean: There are a variety of factors that can help or hinder the implementation of lean governance in health care. A major factor is the availability and pricing of drugs. According to lean philosophy drugs administered to patients should be the right drug, in the right dose, at the right time. Necessary medication should be readily available when needed. Availability and correct administration reduces the time required to access drugs and prevents wasting drugs when they are not required. Having the right drugs available at the point of need also maximises clinician efficiency thus reducing time-wasting. Access and availability can be a problem in developing countries as their health services are often reliant on imported drugs. Siagian et al. (2019) explain that importing drugs is seen as cost effective because of the expense of creating a home-grown pharmaceutical industry. However, this does not ensure long-term sustainability as prices may rise due to political or economic factors where drug production takes place. Many countries do have the capacity to develop drugs in terms of scientific knowledge and availability of raw materials, but it requires coordination of market factors and political incentives. Siagian et al. (2019) propose a model of predictive drug development showing the relationship between pharmaceutical capabilities, innovation incentives and political factors. However, even when these are in place, drug development can be hindered when pharmaceutical companies are unwilling to invest in research and development. An example cited by Siagian et al. (2019) is Indonesia where the government instigated incentives to develop vaccines, biopharmaceuticals and herbal medicines. However, the lack of commitment to research and development on the part of drug companies is slowing the development of initiatives that could mean the difference between sustainability and reliance on imported medications.\nThe importance of research and lean health governance: Research is an important part of lean philosophy as it supports the use of evidence-based practice and policy development, as opposed to reliance on traditional ways of providing and managing health care. However health research and policy often fails to interact to create research-based policies as Mapalunga et al. (2019) discovered when they collected data from both health researchers and health policy makers in Malawi.\nInformal payments: corruption or social norm?: The final article in this issue of IJHG might, at first glance, seem to have little relevance to lean healthcare governance. Meskarpour et al. (2019) have done a systematic literature review into the problem of informal payments in healthcare settings. For health professionals from a culture where all members of society have equal access to health care, the idea of paying to receive better or faster care smacks of corruption. In other countries it can be seen as a cultural norm. Informal patient payments (IPP) are often associated with developing countries, but the reality is that they happen all over the world, from Peru to Poland, from Hungary to Bangladesh. In some places IPP are illegal, but in others they happen within the law and are often a significant source of financing in developing or transitional countries (Meskarpour et al., 2019). The acute problem with IPP is that they are hidden and thus disruptive to healthcare planning and provision. In a discussion promoting lean health governance, it is a reasonable observation that lean cannot be introduced effectively where aspects of healthcare are impossible to plan for effectively due to the subversive and disruptive nature of undocumented expenditure.\nConclusion: All healthcare providers aim to provide good care at a reasonable cost. The articles in this issue of IJHG have explored the different aspects of health governance. The issues raised have been examined within this review in relation to the use of lean as a tool to improve healthcare while reducing waste and engaging health professionals in contributing to management and policy decisions. Lean is not a magic formula to solve the problems inherent in modern health care. It requires investment and commitment but can be a tool to improve healthcare delivery for both patients and staff while using resources as effectively as possible.\n",
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"content": "Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to develop a common theme between the six research articles submitted for IJHG 24.3.\nDesign/methodology/approach: All articles are read and themes extracted which are used to write a review summarising the key points in each while developing an overarching theme for the issue of IJHG. Other literature supporting the development of this theme is also reviewed and used to contribute insights.\nFindings: The findings consist of the common themes developed. In this issue, the common theme was improving care while saving costs in healthcare and the theme was explored in each article in relation to a lean healthcare management/governance philosophy.\nPractical implications: The review section of IJHG allows readers to gain a quick overview of the content and then select the articles they wish to read in full.\nOriginality/value: IJHG is the only journal in the Emerald portfolio with a review section of this kind. Thus it provides added value.\n",
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Towards a better understanding of sustainability accounting and management research and teaching in North America: a look at the community
|
[
"Academic life",
"North America",
"Education",
"Research",
"Sustainability accounting",
"Sustainability management"
] |
[
{
"content": "Summarize the following paper into structured abstract.\n\n1. Introduction: Our original idea for this special issue was to bring under the spotlight the North American [1] sustainability accounting and management research context. Just as France provided a unique setting to explore (Gibassier et al., 2018), North America has its own particularities. For example, within the USA, there is tremendous tension between various levels of government and society, characterized by opposed views on a plethora of social and environmental issues. Canada seems to be going its own direction on many things (e.g. legalization of cannabis and carbon taxes), but at the same time is in lockstep with many of the individual states within the USA. Mexico faces the massive issues of migration and the \"wall\", while in the Caribbean and other parts of the continent development issues and extreme poverty exist in relatively close proximity to the world of tax avoidance and evasion. There have been recent changes in North America in sustainability accounting and management (Camilleri, 2017; Cho et al., 2014; McElroy and Thomas, 2015; Ramsden et al., 2014) and we can expect more in the near to medium term. Altogether, this context points towards rich research opportunities to develop our understanding of social and environmental accounting and management.\n2. Methods: For this paper, we sought to gain insights from sustainability scholars who actively engage in the North American sustainability academic community, in terms of their activities and their experiences of pursuing sustainability research and teaching in their work context. As such, we aimed to reach scholars who self-identified as sustainability academics by their participation in North American sustainability research centres and conferences. Our intent was to gather circumscribed information about them, which explains our choice of the survey method (Bryman and Bell, 2015). Given the descriptive purpose of our study, we opted for a factual survey approach (Easterby-Smith et al., 2015). This approach allows us to document certain views and activities of our respondents to provide a portrayal of the sample surveyed (Easterby-Smith et al., 2015) [8].\n3. Survey results: 3.1 Academic life\n4. Some reflections on the survey results, limitations, future research and the broader North American context: In this paper, we have endeavoured to provide a portrayal of a sample of the North American accounting and management sustainability academic community as a backdrop for the special issue. As for caveats, we should first note that participation in the survey is skewed towards the northern side of the USA/Canada border with 26 of the 37 survey respondents being from Canadian institutions and no respondents from other North American countries than Canada and the USA. This limited geographical diversity could be due to the facts that the authors are based in Canadian academic institutions; the e-mail regarding the survey came from a Canadian institution; and/or our sampling relied on information from Anglophone research networks and conferences. However, all conferences and organizations used to create the original sample list were open to any and all North American academics and are not located solely in Canada.\n5. Introducing the articles composing the special issue: Now that we have offered some insights into the academic life and activities of a sample of the North American sustainability academic community, we now turn to research conducted in the North American context and present the articles composing this special issue.\n6. Last words: As we bring this editorial to a close, we hope that members of the North American community have gained greater insight into their colleagues' work experiences. In our humble opinion, this special issue and SAMPJ in general, provide a welcome outlet for the North American community focusing on sustainability accounting and management research. For SAMPJ readers outside of North America, we hope this special issue and paper will pique their interest in reaching out to, or engaging further with, the North American community. SAMPJ also provides a venue for cross-disciplinary research on sustainability, which we suggest as a medium for accounting and management scholars to engage. From our collective experience, there are too few examples of scholars working across disciplines to provide a contribution to the sustainability literature. We can do more. Let's make it a collective goal - within North America and beyond.\n",
"role": "user"
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"content": "Purpose: The purpose of this paper is two-fold. The first is to provide insight into the academic life, teaching and research activities of active participants in the sustainability accounting and management academic community in North America. The second is to provide readers with an overview of the papers in this special issue.\nDesign/methodology/approach: To meet the first objective, we specifically sought out those who self-identify as sustainability accounting and management academics, based in North American universities and who actively engage in the sustainability academic community in North America. Using an anonymous online survey, this group was asked to respond to various questions about their academic life, research and teaching activities.\nFindings: Survey respondents report that they choose to focus on sustainability accounting and management because they want to make a difference (change the world). To that end, the respondents identify carbon emissions and climate change, social issues such as inequalities, as well as grand challenges and sustainable development goals, as important research topics to pursue in the future. While passionate about their research topics, respondents generally note that research outlets that will serve to significantly move their careers forward are difficult to find. A relatively small number of respondents teach sustainability accounting or management, however, most courses taught are dedicated to the topic and teaching sustainability was identified as amongst the most enjoyable aspects of their academic lives.\nPractical implications: With study respondents feeling closed out of a number of mainstream journals, career paths at North American institutions could appear somewhat limited for those choosing sustainability accounting and management research as a focus, interest and even passion. This is perhaps even more profound on the teaching side where from a practical perspective, we need to be teaching accountants and managers the significance of sustainability in and for the profession, yes - but even more so for society broadly.\nSocial implications: As we move into the digital age, it is important that professionals bend their minds to sustainability as much as they do to keep up with the \"pace of change\" on other fronts. A potential risk is that \"high-tech\" subsumes equally important social aspects that need to be embedded in the process of generating accounting and management professionals.\nOriginality/value: To the best of our knowledge, this is the first time a survey on the work experiences of a sample of scholars teaching and doing research in the area of sustainability accounting and management has been presented for publication. It is meant to provide some descriptive insights into what drives some active participants in this group of academics and reflect on where the future might lead as sustainability becomes an urgent necessity rather than a choice. These descriptive insights and reflections provide a starting point for future inquiries.\n",
"role": "assistant"
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Evaluating the persistence of subsistence work in contemporary economies: Some lessons from Moscow
|
[
"Russia",
"National economy",
"Production economics",
"Subsistence economy",
"Self‐service economy",
"Domestic work",
"Housework",
"Livelihoods",
"Moscow"
] |
[
{
"content": "Summarize the following paper into structured abstract.\n\nIntroduction: For much of the last century, subsistence work was widely depicted as a leftover from a previous mode of accumulation and the belief was that the small vestiges that remained would eventually disappear as the formal market economy became ever more dominant (Smuts, 1971; Watts, 2001). Over the last decade or so, however, there has been an emergent recognition that subsistence work is not some minor practice but is extensively used by the vast majority of households in their everyday livelihood practices (Bennholdt-Thomsen, 2001; Bittman et al., 1999; Gershuny, 2000; Marcelli et al., 2010; Williams, 2003, 2005, 2007, 2008; Williams and Nadin, 2010; Williams and Round, 2008, 2010). To explain this, a range of competing explanations have emerged which variously depict those engaged in subsistence work either as rational economic actors, dupes, seekers of self-identity, or simply as doing so out of necessity or choice. Despite this, few have evaluated either the importance and prevalence of, or rationale for, participation in subsistence production. This paper begins to bridge this gap. To do this, the results of a survey of the extent of, and reasons for, subsistence production in Moscow are presented.To commence, therefore, the first section will briefly review the various perspectives towards subsistence production in relation to both its prevalence and the reasons for engaging in such work. To evaluate critically these contrasting perspectives, the second section will then report the methodology used to evaluate the extent of, and reasons for, subsistence production in contemporary Moscow, whilst the third section will report the results. This will reveal not only how subsistence production is extensively used in the Muscovite households surveyed but also through a process of induction, how one can differentiate between \"willing\" (rational economic actors, choice, identity seeking) and \"reluctant\" (economic and market necessity, dupes) participants in subsistence work. The concluding section will then call for not only wider recognition of the persistence of subsistence production in contemporary economies but also further studies elsewhere of the extent of and reasons for participation in such work.At the outset, however, \"subsistence work\" must be defined, or what is variously referred to as \"self-provisioning\", \"housework\", \"domestic work\", \"do-it-yourself activity\" or \"subsistence production\". Subsistence work here refers to non-exchanged work undertaken on an unpaid basis by household members for themselves or for some other member of their household that might otherwise be undertaken in the formal economy (Reid, 1934; Williams, 2005). To distinguish between subsistence work and leisure, this definition thus uses a \"third person\" approach. That is, if the activity could be undertaken by somebody in formal employment, then it is subsistence work rather than leisure. As will become apparent later, this issue of whether it \"could\" be undertaken by somebody in formal employment and why it is currently not is very important in understanding the persistence of subsistence production.\nPerspectives towards subsistence work: To review the competing perspectives towards subsistence work, first, the contrasting views on the magnitude of such production in the contemporary economic landscape will be reviewed followed second, by the competing views on the reasons for engagement in subsistence work.Views on the pervasiveness of subsistence work\nExamining subsistence work in Moscow: To what extent is subsistence production used by Muscovites in their everyday livelihood practices? And why do they engage in subsistence work? To answer these questions, in 2005 and 2006, a survey comprising 313 face-to-face interviews was conducted in Moscow, a global city of some 10.4 million inhabitants (Brooke, 2006).Given that previous studies in Moscow (Pavlovskaya, 2004; Shevchenko, 2009), Russia (Clarke, 2002; Kim, 2002), East-Central Europe (Wallace and Haerpfer, 2002; Wallace and Latcheva, 2006; Williams, 2005) and Western nations (Leonard, 1998; Renooy, 1990; Williams, 2010), identify significant variations in participation in livelihood practices across affluent and deprived populations, maximum variation sampling was used to select three contrasting districts of Moscow to survey. First, an affluent district in the west of Moscow okrug, namely Krylatskoe, was chosen, second, one of the most deprived districts located in the South-East okrug of Moscow and third and finally, a mixed area to the west of the Moscow region, about 25 km out from the Moscow ring road (which is the Moscow city border), namely Leshkovo, where \"new Russians\" live in large expensive houses alongside benefit-dependent pensioners and the \"working poor\".In each district, a spatially stratified sampling methodology was then used (Kitchin and Tate, 2001). If there were some 1,000 households in the district and 100 interviews were sought, that is, the researcher called at every 10th household. If there was no response and/or an interview was refused, then the 11th household was visited, then the 9th, 12th, 8th and so on. This provided a spatially stratified sample of each district. In total, 313 face-to-face interviews were conducted in the three districts. The response rate for generating interviews at the original households was 15, 41 per cent when the households on either side are included and 68 per cent when the two households on either side are included. Although this survey of course is not representative of Moscow as a whole, it nevertheless unravels the different subsistence practices used in contrasting districts of this city.To evaluate the extent of, and reasons for, subsistence work, structured face-to-face interviews were conducted. Besides gathering background data on gross household income, the employment status of household members, their employment histories, ages and gender, first, respondents were asked about the relative importance of different forms of work in securing their livelihood. This asked: \"Which activity on this card is the most important for the standard of living of you and your family?\". The categories were: our own self-provisioning (e.g. growing own food, doing own home maintenance and repair); what we get as favours/the help from friends and relatives; cash-in-hand earnings (e.g. from second job/incidental earnings); getting payments from helping out others you know in your community; earnings of regular job in private sector; earning of regular job in public or voluntary sector; pension/unemployment benefits; and do not know. They were first asked to state the sphere on which they primarily rely for their livelihood and the question was then repeated to elicit the second most important.Second, the labour practices that households last used to complete 25 common domestic services were examined, covering house maintenance (outdoor painting; indoor painting; wallpapering; mending a broken window and maintenance of appliances), home improvement (putting in double glazing; plumbing; improving a kitchen; improving a bathroom), housework (routine housework; cleaning windows inside; doing the shopping; washing clothes; cooking meals; washing dishes; hairdressing; household administration), making and repairing goods (making or repairing clothes; making or repairing curtains; making or repairing tools; making or repairing furniture) and caring activities (daytime baby-sitting; night-time baby-sitting; tutoring). For each task, households were asked if it had been conducted and who undertook it the last time it was conducted (a household member, a relative living outside the household, a friend, neighbour, private firm, landlord, etc.), whether the person had been unpaid, paid or given a gift; and if paid, whether it was \"cash-in-hand\" or not. For each task undertaken, the respondent was then questioned about why they had decided to get the work done using that source of labour so as to enable their motives to be understood.Third, the supply of work by household members was examined. The interviewee was asked whether a household member had conducted each of the 25 tasks for another household and if so, who had done it, for whom, whether they had been unpaid, paid or given a gift, how much they had received and why they had decided to do the task. Fifth and finally, and using five-point likert scaling, attitudinal questions were asked concerning their ability to draw upon help from others and their views of the economy, politics, everyday life and their future prospects. Below, the results are reported.\nEvaluating the pervasiveness of, and rationales for, subsistence production in Moscow: Prevalence of subsistence work\nConclusions: Until now, few studies have evaluated either the contrasting views on the prevalence of subsistence work and/or the rival explanations for participation in such endeavour. To begin to do so, a survey has been here reported conducted in the Russian city of Moscow.Analysing the pervasiveness and importance of subsistence work, little support is found for the \"modernisation\" perspective which depicts such endeavour as a residue or leftover from a previous era persisting in just a few minor enclaves of the modern economy. Not only is subsistence work a ubiquitous practice which 10 per cent of all households surveyed rely heavily on to secure their livelihood but across the 25 tasks analysed, 67 per cent were last conducted on a subsistence basis. The clear implication is that the surveyed population is more a \"do-it-yourself\" rather than a \"do it for me\" culture. Some households, moreover, do more on a subsistence basis than others. Indeed, over three-quarters of all tasks are conducted on a subsistence basis in the lowest-income households compared with around half of all tasks in the highest-income households. This, however, is not because subsistence work is purely a product of economic necessity.The finding is that no one explanation for subsistence work is universally relevant but all theories are sometimes valid. Economic necessity, for example, is more common in lower-income households but cannot be relied on exclusively to explain all subsistence production. A fuller and more comprehensive explanation requires a move beyond using one explanation and towards using them all. This has been here achieved by inductively generating a new theoretically-integrative typology which differentiates between \"willing\" subsistence workers who engage either as a rational economic calculation (reflecting the rational utility maximisation model), for pleasure (the choice model) or to seek self-identity from the end-product (post-modern theory), and \"reluctant\" subsistence workers forced into such endeavour either for economic reasons (economic determinism model) or due to problems with finding and using trades-people (a new market failure explanation not so far considered). The finding is that although the likelihood of reluctant subsistence work is twice as likely as reluctant subsistence work amongst the Muscovites surveyed, in higher-income populations, people are markedly more likely to be willing participants, while in lower-income populations they are more likely to be reluctant participants.The limitation of this research, however, is three-fold. First, it has not considered the alternative costs involved in supplying subsistence work. A fixed hours employee and a self-employed person who can spend as many hours as they wish, may have similar incomes, but the alternative cost for the self-employed person of engaging in subsistence work is positive but zero for the fixed hours employee, meaning that it is reasonable to assume that the fixed hours employee may do more subsistence work. This will need further investigation, especially in relation to whether fixed hours employees are willing subsistence workers but such self-employed people more reluctant. Second, this research did not consider the transaction costs involved when outsourcing from the subsistence realm since for many tasks, the time spent finding somebody and waiting for them to do the task might mean that for simple services the costs will be higher than the cost or effort of doing it oneself. Finally, by examining only why they do subsistence work, this paper may have missed a strong association between engagement in subsistence work and having the skills and abilities to undertake the work. This too will require future investigation.Nevertheless, this Moscow survey reveals that subsistence work is not some minor residue leftover from a previous era as the modernisation perspective asserts. Instead, it is a persistent, important and pervasive feature of the economic landscape in this city. What is now required are evaluations of whether this also applies elsewhere in Central and Eastern Europe as well as beyond, and greater understanding of not only the degree to which but also why people engage in subsistence production in different populations. If this paper stimulates such research into the prevalence, importance and persistence of subsistence work along with the rationales for engaging in such endeavour in different populations and places, then it will have achieved its objectives.\n",
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},
{
"content": "Purpose: - Contrary to the view that the subsistence economy is some minor residue persisting in only a few peripheral enclaves of modern economies, the purpose of this paper is to begin to chart the importance and prevalence of subsistence work across the contemporary economic landscape and the reasons underpinning engagement in this form of non-commodified labour.\nDesign/methodology/approach: - To do so, the extent of, and reasons for, subsistence production amongst those living in contemporary Moscow is evaluated using face-to-face interviews with 313 households in affluent, mixed and deprived districts.\nFindings: - It was found that subsistence work is a ubiquitous phenomenon which is relied on heavily by Muscovite households. Until now, those participating in such subsistence work have been portrayed either as rational economic actors, dupes, seekers of self-identity, or simply doing so out of necessity or choice. Rather than depict one as correct and the others as invalid, this survey inductively generates a theoretically-integrative approach which differentiates between \"willing\" (rational economic actors, choice, identity seeking) and \"reluctant\" (economic and market necessity, dupes) participants in subsistence production.\nResearch limitations/implications: - The paper examines only one city. Further research is now required into the extent of, and reasons for, subsistence production in the rest of Central and Eastern Europe, as well as beyond.\nOriginality/value: - This is one of the first papers to identify and explain the ubiquitous persistence of subsistence work in contemporary economies.\n",
"role": "assistant"
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] |
Extending the double jeopardy and duplication of purchase laws to the wine market
|
[
"Marketing",
"Customer loyalty",
"Marketing strategy",
"Wines",
"Consumer behaviour",
"Marketing models",
"Consumer panel",
"Duplication of purchase",
"Empirical generalization",
"Market partitions",
"Europe",
"Double jeopardy"
] |
[
{
"content": "Summarize the following paper into structured abstract.\n\nIntroduction: Many studies in marketing have examined brand loyalty (Griffiths, 2007; Jacoby and Chestnut, 1978; Knox and Walker, 2001; Stocchi et al., 2015; Tranberg and Hansen, 1986) and customer retention (Keiningham et al., 2007; Schulze et al., 2012). Repeated findings confirm that measures of brand loyalty and defection to competing brands are widely used metrics for business across diverse sectors, including wine. For decades, research has explored the factors that underlie brand loyalty (Baldinger and Rubinson, 1996; Bird and Channon, 1969; He et al., 2012), how to increase brand loyalty (Gounaris and Stathakopoulos, 2004), how to keep/retain customers (Veloutsou and Moutinho, 2009), and/or how to grow a brand (Riebe et al., 2014). However, research findings on what should be done to keep consumers loyal to a brand are frequently contradictory, often varying by industry. More recent research has investigated what is a 'normal' rate of customer defection and loyalty, arguing that there are many factors outside the control of the business that would impact customer loyalty (Bogomolova and Romaniuk, 2009; Lees et al., 2007). Benchmarking of customer loyalty has been conducted in fast-moving-consumer-goods (FMCG) as well as many services markets (Dawes et al., 2015). Therefore, investigating metrics for the degree of brand loyalty for a specific industry should be an important starting point in establishing a benchmark reference, as understanding regular patterns of consumer purchase behaviour should underpin marketing strategy development (Graham et al., 2017).\nLiterature review: Within the marketing discipline, questions about consumer retention are regularly addressed and a number of empirical generalisations have been established as a means for facilitating the effective implementation of strategy. Empirical generalisations such as the double jeopardy (DJ) law (Chaudhuri, 1995; Ehrenberg et al., 1990; Fader and Lattin, 1993; Graham et al., 2017; Martin, 1973; McPhee, 1963), the duplication of purchase (DoP) law (for repertoire markets) (Ehrenberg, 1969; Sharp, 2010; Tanusondjaja et al., 2016), and the Hendry co-efficient (for subscription markets) (Wright and Riebe, 2010) can help with strategic decision-making in marketing departments within relevant industries. However, for reasons that are unclear, there are few studies in wine marketing that acknowledge these empirically generalised principles on purchasing patterns. This study aims to extend the application of two of these generalisations, the DJ and the DoP laws into the wine retail market.\nDouble jeopardy law: The DJ law is the name attributed to a pattern of purchase behaviour that has been established and replicated over decades of research (Graham et al., 2017), noting that McPhee (McPhee, 1963) was the first to observe this pattern of behaviour. The established pattern is that smaller brands not only get fewer customers, but that these customers repurchase smaller brands slightly less frequently than they purchase larger brands. The inverse is also true in that larger brands not only have more customers, but these customers buy the larger brand more often than the typical repeat purchase rates for smaller brands within the same category (Ehrenberg et al., 1990). This pattern of purchasing behaviour is likely caused by consumer choice being driven by habit and convenience (East et al., 2017).\nDuplication of purchase law: Consistent patterns of polygamous brand purchasing among consumers were first recognised in the mid-twentieth century (Brown, 1953; Cunningham, 1956). This pattern was subsequently observed in media consumption, where Agostini (1961, 1962) noted it examining reader behaviour of French magazines. Further exploration focussed on television audiences in the UK (Ehrenberg, 1969; Goodhardt, 1966; Goodhardt and Ehrenberg, 1969; Goodhardt et al.,1975) and the USA (Headen et al., 1979), after which the \"duplication of viewing law\" was proposed. Continuing extensions of these findings were conducted through observations of consumer brand purchases, which lead to the development of the 'duplication of purchase law' (Ehrenberg, 1988). This law was thus defined as \"buyers of one brand generally purchase other brands strictly in proportion to that other brand's penetration\" (Ehrenberg, 1988, p. 353).\nContext: the wine industry: There is no shortage of wine producers and industry professionals claiming that the wine sector is different when compared to other fast-moving consumer goods (FMCGs) categories in the retail sector (Beverland, 2004; Frochot, 2003; Reyneke et al., 2011; Riviezzo et al., 2017). This supposed difference is primarily attributed to at least one of two presuppositions. One such supposition is that there is a fragmentation of the offer presented to the consumer at the point of sale (PoS) and/or additionally, because of a perception that customers require a heightened level of wine product and purchasing involvement to complete a sale.\nMarket partitions: Market partitions are described as brands that while related in usage, have something that makes them different from the remainder of the market, such as a functional or technical difference (Wright and Riebe, 2010). Examples of such partitions include children's and adults' breakfast cereals (Hammond et al., 1996), talk and music radio (Winchester and Lees, 2013), media broadcasting in different languages (Barwise and Ehrenberg, 1984; Winchester and Lees, 2013), bank accounts aimed and students or retirees (Lees et al., 2016) and luxury and non-luxury vehicles (Colombo et al., 2000). Normally such partitions can be easily identified using a duplication of purchase table and separating the market at the point where anomalies diverge from predicted values (Colombo et al., 2000; Dawes, 2007; Ehrenberg et al., 2004; Dawes, 2016). Brands that share customers to a greater degree than would be expected from competitors within a market illustrate evidence of a market partition.\nFrom patterns to purchasing behaviours: Research findings contend that wine purchasing motivations are driven by the occasion on which the consumer intends to consume (Hall and Winchester, 1999; Hall and Winchester, 2000; Hall et al., 2001). These findings suggest that consumers will buy from a repertoire of brands based on the underlying motivation(s) of each occasion. Thus, to encourage loyalty to a brand depends on consumers perceiving that brand as able to cater to a variety of different consumption occasions. Such a perception is not consistent with consumer experiences. Past usage does provide guidance on the likelihood of subsequent purchase, but relies on previous experiences being positive, and that the customer experiences reinforcement of their initial preconceptions (Halstead, 2002).\nMethod: One difficulty with researching any application of the DoP law is that large data sets are required to avoid the risk of errors inherent with data captured from smaller brands. In the case of this study, a sample of 25,000 loyalty card-holding customers was analysed from an English-speaking European, independent wine retail chain. The data was taken from a database containing purchasing behaviour on 12 months of purchases for the 2014 calendar year. The retail chain's outlets were located across a range of urban and rural locations, as well as being accessible for high and lower socio-economic customer bases. The data set focused uniquely on sales data for the top-20 wine brands by total volume of sales for the year. Each of these wine brands was broken down into two additional purchasing criteria: total sales of that wine by number of purchasers, and any purchases of all others of the top-20 wine brands for each purchaser. The provision of this information over successive periods provided the researchers with the opportunity to illustrate both the existence, and dynamics of the top-20 wine brands and cross-purchasing rates across a chain of wine retail outlets over time.\nResults and discussion: The full analysis of cross-purchasing data is provided in Table I, below. The leftmost column illustrates wine brands filling the top-20 slots according to each brand's market share from all wine purchases for all customers in this category. For each of the top-20 brands purchased in the left column, the proportion of these customers who also purchased the brands in the corresponding column on the right are subtracted from the predicted duplication value at the base of the column. Accordingly, if the DoP law held, then each cell's value would be exactly zero. To determine whether the DJ pattern holds, the rankings by market share should follow the same order when measured for loyalty in repurchasing behaviour.\nVariations from the aggregate data: For insight into the purchasing behaviour of the consumers responsible for the above, anomalously performing wines, a second-level analysis was conducted to investigate the evidence explaining the repurchase rates of these wines. Cohen and Tataru (2011) performed this analysis on the wine market in France, illustrating that specific cross-purchasing partitions existed for grape varieties and wine-growing regions. Their explanation was that commonly blended grape varieties and neighbouring regions contributed to this observation.\nConclusion: The analysis identifies the cross-purchasing patterns that consumers exhibit within a wine retail setting. The analysis confirmed the incidence of predictable patterns of brand repurchasing based on a brand's market share, consistent with the established DJ law (Ehrenberg et al., 1990; Martin, 1973). Further, the tendency of consumers of a top-20 wine brand was to also purchase other brands within the top-20 at a predictable rate, consistent with the brand's share of category requirements (Fader and Schmittlein, 1993; Keiningham et al., 2007; Labeaga-Azcona et al., 2010). However, the identification of anomalies from the expected rate of cross-purchasing illustrated that consumers are content to substitute wine brands with a common regional identity.\nImplications and limitations: The practical implications of such knowledge are that merchandise assortment and volume can be managed more efficiently with the knowledge of expected partitions in a market based on a DoP analysis. As would be expected given the prior knowledge of the DJ pattern (Barwise and Ehrenberg, 1988), brands with larger market shares have greater loyalty according to numerous empirical studies (Sharp, 2010). However, brands that deviate in the proportion of cross-purchases from what would be expected may indicate a functional difference that can be highlighted in promotion of the brands in question, as a means to increase brand salience.\n",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Purpose: This study aims to understand the market structure and explore the applicability of recognised generalisations to a European wine retail market. The study considers whether brands in European wine retailing follow the established double jeopardy and duplication of purchase laws, with the aim of investigating their limits so as to identify where market partitions are evident.\nDesign/methodology/approach: The researchers conducted a cross-purchasing analysis within the wine category over a 12-month period, using a customer panel of n = 25,000 across a chain of independent retail stores in an English-speaking European country. Analysis was conducted across purchases of the top 20 wine brands.\nFindings: Consumer wine repurchase results confirmed a double jeopardy pattern. These consumers' wine repurchasing behaviour from other top-20 wine brands could have generally been predicted in line with the duplication of purchase law. However, a small number of exceptions to these patterns were identified, suggesting the existence of market partitions.\nResearch limitations/implications: In this study, market partitions were evident for selected brands, a wine region and a common grape variety, Sauvignon blanc. Such exceptions illustrate that consumer purchase patterns can deviate from predictions, for a small number of brands in a consumer goods category than would be expected given duplication of purchase law norms. Such anomalies to empirical generalisations help demonstrate boundary conditions and lead further research on the market conditions required for such anomalies to be evident. Implications suggest that further research should be conducted on the product features creating market partitions.\nPractical implications: The findings suggest that regional wines can appeal to a more clearly partitioned customer group within the clientele, but that substitution is noted among brands within regions.\nOriginality/value: To the best of the authors' knowledge, this is the first study to use a large sample consumer database to determine the generalisability of two well-established empirical generalisations: the double jeopardy and duplication of purchase laws, to the wine retail market. Knowing these are applicable to the wine retail markets allows wine producers and retailers to predict expected repurchase and cross-purchasing norms.\n",
"role": "assistant"
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] |
A qualitative study of Chinese wine consumption and purchasing: Implications for Australian wines
|
[
"Consumers",
"Consumption",
"China",
"Wines",
"Red wines"
] |
[
{
"content": "Summarize the following paper into structured abstract.\n\nIntroduction: Chinese wine production has grown dramatically since the 1980s, with an average annual increase of 14 per cent from 80,000 tons in 1980 to 440,000 tons in 2005 (ASKCI, 2005; Snapshot, 2005; see Figure 1). Wine consumption has risen alongside the wine production. From 2004 to 2005, Chinese wine consumption reached 420,000 tons - 564 million bottles, which brought China into the top ten wine consumption countries (Foodmate, 2007). From 2005 to 2010, Foodmate (2007) estimates that Chinese wine consumption should increase by 35 per cent, or six times the world's overall increase in wine consumption.China's per capita wine consumption of under 0.5 litres is markedly less than the world average of 7.5 litres, and 40 times less than the 20 litres drunk in western countries such as France, Australia, and the USA (Jin, 2004). For the past 10 years, Chinese wine consumption increased from 10-15 per cent annually, grew 20 per cent in 2005, and this strong growth should continue for the foreseeable future (Jin and Zhan, 2006). China's current low per capita wine consumption, augmented by the world's largest population (1.25 billion) and decades of 7-8 per cent annual GDP growth (NBS China, 2004) has foreign wineries keen for a share of this market.In addition, a reduced wine import duty and the Chinese government's preferential policy for foreign wines further entice foreign wineries into China (SinoCast China Business Daily News, 2002). Foreign wines, particularly from France, the USA, and Australia, are pouring into China (He, 2004). From January to February 2006, China imported around 18 million litres of wine valued at E14 million, and its annual wine imports increased 79 per cent in 2005 (Worldbydata, 2006). China's wine market is also becoming competitive, with many local and foreign brands available (Tang, 2005).Despite its huge market potential, academic knowledge about Chinese consumers' wine consumption and purchases is scarce. This paper reviews literature on Chinese wine consumption and then discusses the results of qualitative interviews conducted in early 2006 in Guangzhou, China. The paper closes with managerial suggestions for exporting wine into China and proposed avenues for future research.\nChina's wine history: China has a rich wine history. Towards the beginning of the Han Dynasty, around 206 BC, Chinese started to grow grapes and produce wines in the Yellow River region of northeastern China (Winechina, 2005). Grape wine production, however, lagged other alcoholic beverages such as Chinese spirits due to weather and soil conditions. During the Tang Dynasty, about 500 AD, there was still little Chinese wine production and China began importing wines, mainly from the Middle East. Due to its scarcity, only emperors, senior government officials, and rich merchants drank wine - usually for important occasions such as the emperor's birthday (Winechina, 2005).Chinese spirits are alcoholic beverages distilled from grains and have been the traditional drink for nearly all occasions in China. Furthermore, due to historical and cultural reasons, wine has never gained the same popularity as rice spirits or beer (Li, 2006); tradition still influences who drinks wine and on what occasion. Wine is both a luxury and image product in China. Chinese who drink wine are usually educated, wealthy, and middle or upper class (Wang, 2006). Demographics aside, many Chinese consume wine for important social or business occasions (Tang, 2006b).Wine has a favourable image in China, but most Chinese have little wine knowledge or appreciation, such as judging wine quality or taste (Jin, 2004). Macro-factors also hinder China's wine market. For example, few guidelines for wine advertising have led to many wine advertisements providing exaggerated or false information (Peoplenet, 2006). Yet, despite China's rich wine history and growing wine consumption, few studies have examined Chinese wine consumption and wine purchasing. The next section describes a qualitative study to help bridge this research gap of Chinese consumers' attitudes towards wine.\nResearch methodology: Due to the complex topic and limited literature of Chinese consumers' wine purchasing behaviour, this study adopted a qualitative method (Morse, 1994). Scholars often use qualitative methods in organizational and consumer research in order to help understand \"complex issues that may not be immediately implicit in surface responses\" (Goulding, 2005, p. 301). Furthermore, the qualitative approach is particularly apt for experiences such as consumption (Goulding, 2005, p. 303).This study investigated Chinese consumers' thoughts associated with wine, wine drinking, and wine purchasing. The major research questions were:(1) when and where Chinese consume wine;(2) how frequently they drink wine;(3) how much they drink per occasion; and(4) what factors influence their wine purchasing.For a qualitative approach, this study used in-depth interviews and a semi-structured questionnaire of open-ended questions.\nData collection: All interviewees were friends of the researcher and thus inclined to discuss frankly and openly their attitudes towards wine. Interviewing friends is common in qualitative studies as friends will accept the interview as well as share intimate thoughts (Frankel and Devers, 2000; Pottie and Sumarah, 2004). The criteria for selecting interviewees were availability, that they had consumed wine, and represented a balanced cross-section of age, gender, and income. Table I profiles the nine male and six female interviewees.Four interviewees were in their 20s, four in their 30s, five in their 40s, and two in their 50s. Defining Chinese income levels is difficult; different areas have different income levels and income disparity is a serious problem (Zhou, 2006). China's average personal income per month is around E40, but >E120 in Guangdong, Shanghai, and a few other developed areas. Even within the same area such as Guangdong, people in urban areas could earn approximately four times as much (E480) as people living in the rural areas. Thus, differentiating low and middle income depends on developed or less developed areas as well as rural or urban areas (Sina, 2006).As the interviews took place in an urban area of Guangzhou, the capital of Guangdong and one of China's most prosperous cities (NBS China, 2004), this study classified four subjects earning <E300 a month as low income, seven subjects earning from E300-530 a month as middle income, and four earning >E530 as high income. Regarding education, nine subjects had or were studying towards a university degree and six had a high school diploma. The profiles show that the sample has good coverage in gender, age, income, and education level.The researcher - a Chinese from Guangzhou, conducted and taped one hour in-depth interviews in China's official language, Mandarin. The interviews occurred from 29 January to 12 February 2006, during the Chinese New Year, an official holiday of about two weeks. Choosing this festive period for interviewing had three advantages. Interviewees are generally in a good mood and less concerned with the time spent on an interview. Finally, during Chinese New Year, Chinese have banquets with friends, colleagues, and family once or twice a day and usually drink alcoholic beverages when eating. Interviewees were comfortable and less inhibited answering questions related to wine and other alcoholic drinks.\nData analyses: Transcribing and analysing the taped interviews reinforced and clarified the interview notes. Furthermore, after reviewing the initial narratives, the researcher returned to some interviewees for a follow-up interview and clarifications (Colaizzi, 1978). General findings follow.Wine means red wine\nDiscussion: This is perhaps the first academic study in English of Chinese wine consumption and wine purchasing. Despite the small sample size, the results offer several key findings, future research avenues, and a framework for large-scale quantitative studies.\nIndustry implications: The majority of the sample perceived all wine as red wine. Thus, red wine is far more popular in China than white wine. Just one of the 15 interviewees liked white wine. The colour red has positive symbolic meanings to the Chinese, while white has negative symbolism. Furthermore, the Chinese may perceive white wine as just that, white in colour similar to milk. At the micro level, marketing white wine in China could target a market segment such as young, trendy females who may prefer sweeter and lighter tastes.At a macro level, Australian vintners could consider renaming white wine. While pale green or light green reflect the wine's colour better than white, green seems a bad choice. If a Chinese man's wife has an affair, the man is regarded as wearing a green hat. Two other colours however, light golden or dan jin se, and amber or hu po se, could be good choices. Chinese are familiar with the gem amber and the precious metal gold. Furthermore, when marketing white wine in China, it may be good to advise that white wine is transparent or tou ming. Being transparent indicates good quality to the Chinese.The findings in this study supports that wine is an image product in China, rather than a necessity product in western countries such as Australia (Qian, 2005). Most interviewees believed that drinking wine indicated good social image and that people who drank wine were image conscious. For marketing wine in China, building brand image is important. Brand image should focus on being trendy, successful, and healthy (Tang, 2006a).Another important finding was that consumers drank red wine only in specific occasions such as celebrating the Chinese New Year. Red wine as a product category lags Chinese spirits. In Chinese perceptions, Chinese spirits are for any occasion but red wine is for specific occasions. The growing concern for living a healthy life may help promote red wine. Regardless of gender, middle to upper income respondents noted this health aspect of red wine.Mianzi, or face, is critical with the Chinese and the wine purchasing decision is contingent on occasion and price. The majority of the sample would purchase wines according to the face value associated with the occasion and price. In a private occasion such as a banquet with immediate family, the purchaser would often choose a cheap local wine; face was not a concern. Yet for a banquet with guan xi hu, face was critical and the purchaser would choose an expensive wine, perhaps a foreign wine from France. The decision to purchase a local or foreign wine relates directly to the face value of the price.\nAcademic implications and future research: Consumers differ in purchasing decisions for image and necessity products (Walsh et al., 2001). Consumers are often brand conscious with image products; they tend to purchase more expensive and well-known brands. With necessities, consumers are often price conscious; they tend to purchase inexpensive brands and seek value for money. This study extends that literature, showing that towards an image product, wine, Chinese consumers may incorporate both value and brand consciousness, contingent on the consumption occasion. With a good understanding of Chinese consumers' attitudes towards foreign brands, the Swedish furniture giant Ikea slashed their prices while maintaining their foreign brand appeal in China (Fong, 2006).In this study, all subjects except D only discussed drinking wine in restaurants. Besides restaurants, wine is becoming popular in clubs, discos, and Karaoke (Tang, 2006b). Subject D mentioned that besides restaurants, he often drank wine in clubs with a few close friends. Future research should investigate whether wine consumption differs by place, chang suo.The findings in this study led to a proposed model of Chinese wine purchasing (see Figure 3). The importance of the occasion should influence the price that consumers pay for red wine. Since foreign wine is expensive, income level should moderate price's effect on the purchasing decision. For an important occasion, a consumer may purchase wine costing over E12. However, considering income, this consumer may choose a E6-9 wine. In addition to price, vintage and place of production may influence wine purchasing. The level of wine knowledge may moderate the effect of price, vintage, and place of production on purchasing intention. Demographic variables such as gender, income, and education may be important covariates in the making wine purchasing decision. Quantitative research of this model is one of several fruitful future research avenues.Future research should also investigate how other factors, such as country of origin and consumer ethnocentrism (Liu et al., 2006), relate to Chinese purchasing a foreign or local wine at similar price levels (refer to Figure 2). For example, will Chinese consumers have different perceptions about Australian and Chinese wines and will these perceptions influence their wine purchasing?China's GDP per capita reached US$ 1,000 (equivalent to E720) in 2006 and when a country's GDP reaches this level, consumers tend to shift their consumption from necessity goods to trendy and healthy goods (Jin, 2006). Furthermore, China's per capita wine expenditure is just one sixth of their per capita expenditures on beer, Chinese spirits, and milk (Jin, 2006). Therefore, Chinese wine consumption, particularly red wine, should grow strongly in the next decade. There is a bright window of opportunity for Australia's wine industry and academic community to research and subsequently design marketing programs to reach Chinese consumers.\n",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Purpose: - This research aims to examine Chinese consumers' wine consumption and purchasing behaviour.\nDesign/methodology/approach: - The study, conducted during the Chinese New Year in early 2006, used in-depth interviews with 15 consumers in Guangzhou, People's Republic of China.\nFindings: - The results suggest that Chinese consume Chinese spirits for all occasions, yet consume red wine only for special occasions such as Chinese new year and other holidays. A key point for selling red wine to the Chinese is its positive image; drinking red wine is considered trendy and shows good taste. Another key point is consumer perceptions of red wine as healthier than Chinese spirits because wine contains less alcohol. Two other findings are that most Chinese consumers assume all wine is red wine and have little wine knowledge. Most respondents did not know of white wine or that Australia produces wine. Finally, China's culture of face value, mianzi, plays a key role in purchasing and consuming wine. Chinese tend to purchase inexpensive wine for private consumption and public occasions, yielding more mianzi in front of others. In some important occasions, consumers will purchase a foreign (French) red wine to impress their guests and obtain even more mianzi. In most situations, Chinese purchase and consume wine for perceived health and symbolic - lucky or good face - values.\nResearch limitations/implications: - The small sample size is a limitation. Another limitation is that all the respondents lived in the urban area of Guangzhou, one of China's most developed cities. The findings do not generalize to China.\nPractical implications: - The findings suggest that wine is a symbolic product rather than a necessity product in China; therefore, image is an important attribute for selling wine in China. Furthermore, limited wine knowledge tends to make Chinese consumers rely heavily on price for their wine purchasing decisions, as price relates to mainzi. Chinese consumers' high awareness of France as a wine making country and their deep-rooted positive beliefs about French wines pose difficulties for marketing other foreign wines, such as Australian wines, in China.\nOriginality/value: - This is perhaps the first academic study in English of Chinese wine consumption and wine purchasing. It offers important insights on the characteristics of wine consumption and purchasing in China.\n",
"role": "assistant"
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Boosting engagement by improving an organization's perceived learning environment: A route for unlocking employees' full creative potential
|
[
"Creativity",
"Employee engagement",
"Proactivity",
"Knowledge sharing",
"Learning environment"
] |
[
{
"content": "Summarize the following paper into structured abstract.\n\n__NO_TITLE__: The statistic that almost nine in ten employees across the planet do not perform their work with any enthusiasm makes an urgent case for uncovering the reasons why and for taking corrective action. A research paper by Islam and Tariq (2018) explores how employees' perceived learning environment (PLE) and the extra-role employee behaviors of creativity, knowledge sharing, and proactivity relate to an organization's level of employee engagement. A total of 563 employees from four companies representing the cement, telecommunications, textile, and banking industries in Pakistan confidentially completed survey questionnaires in 2016 to create the study's data.\nThe interplay of learning at work and engagement: The term employee engagement is used to describe a mental state of vigorous absorption in one's work, which stimulates a sense of dedication owing to the positive fulfillment the work provides. It is these feelings of absorption and vigor that are generated when employees are involved in high-quality workplace learning that, based on previous research, builds employee engagement levels and in turn helps with employee retention. Such a positive experience of the work environment may also generate a desire to display extra-role behaviors that see individuals delivering beyond their job descriptions.\nThe engagement-centric questionnaire results: First, the study's prediction that the PLE would positively reinforce employee engagement was supported by the data, as a result of respondents being asked to rate how far they agreed to statements such as \"At my work, I feel I am bursting with energy.\" Second, the hypothesis that boosting employee engagement would have a positive effect on desirable extra-role behaviors such as creativity, proactivity, and knowledge sharing was significantly confirmed by the respondents' questionnaire answers. Therefore, engagement acts as an accelerator of creativity in the workplace, which injects a renewed sense of novelty, joy, and motivation into an employee's work. This in turn stimulates commercially advantageous innovative ideas that have the potential to increase the market share and future profitability of an enterprise. To measure the level of knowledge sharing at the surveyed companies, for example, respondents were asked to rate how far they agreed to statements such as \"I regularly inform colleagues about what I am working on\".\nStimulating improvement through understanding and action: The results punctuate the importance of reciprocity in building employee engagement, as employers who invest time and attention into employees' learning opportunities are openly offering more than the minimum employee experience. This in turn forms a trusting baseline from which employees are given the confidence to generate the kind of creative ideas that tend to emerge from people who experience a sense of energetic joy in performing their work. Such a working environment also encourages generous interactions with colleagues and inspires people to proactively seek better ways to overcome the professional challenges they encounter. Ultimately, employees who receive continual validation that their learning environment is being improved, to directly support them and to boost their skills, are most likely to feel sufficiently valued by their employer to perform their role with a positive, growth-focused mind-set and to an effective self-driven performance level.\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: This research paper concentrates on the relationship between the perceived learning environment of an organization, employee engagement, and the commercially desirable extra-role behaviors of proactivity, creativity, and knowledge sharing. Employees who perceive their learning opportunities and experiences at work to be positive become more engaged in their work, which directly stimulates them to apply their creativity, to share knowledge with colleagues and to perform their roles proactively.\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"
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Do professional sport franchise owners overpromise and underdeliver the public? Lessons from Brooklyn's Barclays Center
|
[
"Public policy",
"Economic development",
"Sport",
"Local government"
] |
[
{
"content": "Summarize the following paper into structured abstract.\n\nIntroduction: Considerable academic research undermines the oft-repeated argument that sports facilities and sporting events create net positive impacts for local economies. This conclusion holds in both the US and international contexts, particularly as it relates to professional sports and the Olympics (Allmers and Maennig, 2009; Coates and Humphreys, 2008; Feddersen et al., 2009; Hagn and Maennig, 2009; Kasimati and Dawson, 2009; Wilson and Pomfret, 2014). Nevertheless, governments across the world continue to spend considerable public resources subsidizing construction and operation of these facilities and events (Jones, 2002; Wilson and Siegfried, 2018; Flyvbjerg and Stewart, 2012). In the USA alone, based on data from 49 subsidies deals collected by the author since 2000, at least $11.8bn (in 2017 dollars) has been spent in direct subsidies to construct new facilities or renovate existing ones for the country's five major leagues, an average of $241m per facility[1]. Moreover, Flyvbjerg and Stewart (2012) report that 69 percent (PS5.83bn) of the London 2012 Olympics was paid by the government, a lower-bound percentage because infrastructure costs were excluded but if representative of all Olympics since 1960 indicates that at least $58bn has been spent by governments. Theories as to why governments continue to invest in professional sports facilities range from collective foolishness and rent-seeking (Coates and Humphreys, 2008) to civic paternalism (Kellison and Mondello, 2014).\nPublic managers and subsidies for sports: Public managers are a salient locus of influence particularly as it relates to policy design and implementation (van der Wal, 2017; O'Leary and Bingham, 2009; Cohen et al., 2013). In the sports subsidy context, the influence of public managers is arguably most obvious in capital public budgeting and finance design and implementation. According to Gianakis and McCue (2002), public managers can impact the public financing and budgeting of capital projects through revenue forecasting, debt policies and capital budget administration. A defining feature of contemporary sports subsidies is the contentious and emotionally laden nature of the policy debate with proponents arguing that the subsidies can spur economic development and opponents labeling the subsidies as corporate welfare (deMause and Cagan, 2008). Public managers are invariably caught between competing professional obligations: on the one hand, a responsibility to their elected principals as public finance and budgeting experts, and on the other hand, a responsibility to serve as an impartial adviser in the public's interest (Wassmer et al., 2016). The conflict arises from the fact that existing evidence indicates the public's return from sports subsidies is minimal at best, and yet elected officials across the globe continue to advocate on behalf of subsidies (Coates and Humphreys, 2008; Kellison and Mondello, 2014; Wilson and Pomfret, 2014).\nExamining four unexamined promises: This case study explores the promises and outputs of a publicly supported sports arena with a particular focus on outcomes that are not evaluable using large-sample statistical analysis, the more common approach to investigating the public's return on investment in professional sports. The promises and outcomes examined are related to arena financial condition, arena construction and operating jobs, events and attendance and ancillary real estate development. These topics are discussed, in turn, in this section. If promises have not been satisfied, further exploration seeks to identify the contributing factors.\nPublic management lessons from the Barclays center: FCR made a number of promises in its pursuit of state and local political and financial support for the Barclays Center and its associated development. Among the promises were claims the arena would be profitable; that the project would create thousands of indirect and direct jobs; that the arena would host over 200 sporting and non-sporting events a year; and that FCR would build 8.4 million square feet of commercial and residential buildings around the arena in order to revitalize the neighborhood. From the foregoing evaluation of the arena's initial years of operation, FCR overpromised and under-delivered on a number its promises-specifically, promises not easily testable ex post through statistical analysis of systematically collected data. FCR failed to deliver with respect to the arena. It is underperforming financially relative to expectations due to underestimated costs. The evidence further indicates that the estimated employment impact was upwardly biased. FCR has only delivered on promised event frequency and attendance levels with the caveat that this outcome may change once the Islanders leave the arena. In contrast, the evidence is stronger that FCR will deliver on most of the promised ancillary development even though it will not be doing so in the timeframe promised when the state and local subsidies were approved. The implication of delayed deliver is a higher opportunity cost to the public.\nConclusion: The purpose of this case study is to evaluate elements of subsidy debates for professional sports facilities that are often ignored by lawmakers and rarely evaluated by public managers using Brooklyn's Barclays Center as a case study. Franchise owners make a variety of promises to citizens and public officials in their effort to secure the public's financial support for new facilities, but the existing scholarly work evaluating these promises focus almost exclusively on economic impacts such as personal income, jobs and property values. These outcomes can be subjected to large-n statistical analysis because appropriate data are readily available. In contrast, this study considered promises for which data are not available across cases or within cases and over time-specifically, facility profitability, event frequency and attendance, both indirect and direct job creation, and ancillary real estate development.\n",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to evaluate a number of promises typically made by owners of professional sports franchises in the USA that are also typically ignored or underevaluated by public bureaus and their elected principals using the Barclays Center in Brooklyn, New York as a case study. Ex post subsidy outcomes are evaluated against ex ante subsidy promises in order to draw lessons that can inform and improve subsidy debates elsewhere.\nDesign/methodology/approach: The case study adopts a pre-post strategy drawing on data from multiple sources over a period of up to ten years in order to triangulate the narrative and build credibility. The franchise owner's ex ante promises and financial projections were obtained from various media including newspaper, video and interviews between December 2003, when the arena was publicly announced, and September 2012, when the arena opened. Data on ex post outputs were obtained from financial documents and government records covering periods from September 2011 through June 2016.\nFindings: The franchise owner is found to have exaggerated the arena's financial condition, under-delivered on its employment promises, and exaggerated the scope and timeliness of ancillary real estate development. Only promises of event frequency and attendance levels, measures of the public's demand for the facility, have been met during the first three years.\nResearch limitations/implications: Because the evaluation is a case study, causal conclusions cannot be drawn and some aspects of the Barclays Center context may not be applicable in other jurisdictions or subsidy debates. In addition, the case study does not evaluate an exhaustive list of the promises franchise owners make.\nPractical implications: Franchise owners have a financial incentive to overpromise public benefits, since subsidy levels are tied to what the public is perceived to receive in return. This case study demonstrates that the public sector should not take owners' promises and projections of public benefits at face value. Moreover, the case study reveals that the public sector should put more effort into ensuring ex post policy and data transparency in order to facilitate benefit-cost analyses of such subsidies.\nOriginality/value: The data required to evaluate promises, other than economic development ones, made by franchise owners are not systematically collected across state and local governments in the USA, making large-n studies impossible. Case studies are underutilized approaches in this area of public affairs, and this paper illustrates their usefulness. By focusing on a single facility, an evaluation of the franchise owner's less acknowledged and arguably more important promises about the facility and its local impact is possible.\n",
"role": "assistant"
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] |
An emergent sectoral innovation system for healthcare services
|
[
"Case study",
"Clinical information system",
"Healthcare services",
"Sectoral innovation system"
] |
[
{
"content": "Summarize the following paper into structured abstract.\n\nIntroduction: There is substantial interest in how development of sectorial innovation systems have supported various technology sectors. The sectors that have been looked at include: motor racing (Henry and Pinch, 2000); inkjet printing (Garnsey and Heffernan, 2005); and biotechnology (Cooke, 2002). However, the healthcare services sector, that spans both the private sector health technology industry and the public-sector service providers, has received much less attention in this regard. The purpose of this paper is to help remedy this by exploring, through a case study and using Pawson and Tilley's (Pawson and Tilley, 1997) notion of context-mechanism-outcome (CMO) configurations, how a sectoral innovation system (SIS) for health technologies has developed. It will do this through use of a case study and Pawson and Tilley's notion of CMO configurations.\nInnovation in the healthcare sector: The healthcare sector is difficult to define as it comprises number of distinct sub-sectors. These sectors include some related to specific types of health technology such as pharmaceuticals, surgical devices, health informatics, diagnostic technologies, therapeutic technologies and the like. It also draws upon technological innovations that are not exclusively related to healthcare, such as those emanating from the construction, IT and biotechnology sectors. One of the benefits of a broad-based sectoral view is that the scope for crossover of technologies between sub-sectors is improved.\nSISs and their components: One potentially very helpful way of looking at the way innovation occurs is by perceiving a distinct SIS in which processes, roles and interactions act together to support innovation. An important contribution to the understanding of SISs has been made by Pavitt (1984) who has used a large data set of UK innovations, mainly in manufacturing, over a period from the Second World War to the 1980s to analyse processes of innovation in a range of industries. His analysis has highlighted several dimensions on which sectors differ and might be compared:\nComponents of a SIS: Malerba (2002) has built upon Pavitt's work. He defines a sectoral system of innovation in terms of a \"set of new and established products for specific uses and the set of agents carrying out market and non-market interactions for the creation, production and sale of those products\". He also identifies the building blocks of an SIS in terms of the structures and processes that help define it. These are:\nThe Patientrack case: The case concerns a collaborative development project between a company and a teaching hospital that was supported by an NHS innovation hub called TRUSTECH. The purpose of the project was to develop a healthcare system called Patientrack. Patientrack is protocol-driven, real-time clinical information system that is designed to improve patient safety and reduce length of hospital stay. Using mobile devices it collates data from routine bedside observations of a patient and uses the data to generate graded alerts if the condition of the patient has deteriorated. It is drawn from data collected as part of a large study that looked at technology innovation and adoption in the UK's National Health Service (NHS) (Savory and Fortune, 2013). The primary data came from interviews and was collected using an interpretive case study methodology (Eisenhardt, 1989; Jones, 2001; Klein and Myers, 1999; Walsham, 2006; Yin, 2003) and reflected a grounded theory approach (Strauss and Corbin, 1998). It also uses secondary data from published sources, including articles authored by members of the innovation team.\nContext, mechanism and outcome: a SIS at work: The high-level CMO within the Patientrack case was concerned with the outcome of creating viable health technology innovations. Beneath this, three subsidiary CMOs that produced lower-level outcomes are of particular interest. These are shown in Figure 2. The outcomes facilitated by each of them are as follows:\nThe emergent SIS: The case provides evidence of an emerging SIS that has developed to support innovation between industry and the NHS. The original technology transfer-based emphasis has shifted to encompass the open innovation principles identified by Chesbrough (2003). This SIS itself also benefitted from a sophisticated innovation-support infrastructure, the central plank of which was TRUSTECH. TRUSTECH deployed its capability in facilitating relationships to help to build a support network that focuses on regional ecologies of health technology innovation. Furthermore, the emergent SIS supports both inward and outward innovation, explicitly addressing the linkage between new product development in the health technology industry, NHS procurement and NHS service innovation.\nDeveloping a revised framework for the healthcare services: The emergent SIS provides useful insights that can be integrated into the Malerba framework to provide a more detailed understanding the healthcare services sector. Three aspects of the emergent SIS are of particular note: role of elements of the framework as components of context and mechanism; the dynamic interplay between the elements of the SIS; and the range of innovation products that are created within the SIS. As noted earlier, Malerba's framework provides a one-dimensional view of the SIS but the case shows the need for an optimal configuration of context, mechanism and outcome. It is therefore useful to consider the framework as having two dimensions: the original elements; and their role within CMO configurations. Table I shows how the elements of Malerba's framework function as parts of a CMO configuration.\nConclusion: The three CMO configurations that are the focus of this paper inform a revised framework by highlighting both mechanism and outcome elements. These include two specific mechanisms: user-centred design and development; and institutional evolution. In addition, service transformation and increased human capital can be regarded as important outcomes of the innovation process. Whereas Malerba's framework focused only on technological products as outcomes of innovation, it is useful to extend this view to include both service transformation and increased human capital. A benefit of this is that it allows the SIS to be described more specifically in terms of a range of outcomes, with each outcome associated with specific configurations of context and mechanism. The SIS can be regarded as a system of interdependent CMOs as depicted Figure 3.\n",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to explore, through a case study, and using Pawson and Tilley's notion of context-mechanism-outcome configurations, how a sectoral innovation system (SIS) for health technologies has developed.\nDesign/methodology/approach: The case study data were collected as part of a large study that looked at technology innovation and adoption in the UK's National Health Service and were collected using an interpretive case study methodology. Primary data came from interviews and secondary data from published sources, including articles authored by members of the innovation team.\nFindings: The paper identifies three specific configurations of context, mechanism and outcome that were important in the case and discusses how these contribute to a broader understanding of a healthcare services SIS.\nResearch limitations/implications: Research conducted through a single case study is open to the criticism that its findings are not generalisable but it has offered an economical way of gaining a deep description of a situation and an understanding of the contextual factors affecting a phenomenon. The paper presents a refined model for understanding SISs that though primarily rooted within the healthcare care sector has potential for application in other sectors, especially those that encompass a significant public-sector component.\nPractical implications: The paper's findings and conclusions have relevance to healthcare service innovation policy development. The findings will also be useful to professionals responsible for innovation projects and their support within the sector.\nOriginality/value: The paper makes an important contribution to the understanding of a SIS for healthcare services as well as refining a general model of SISs.\n",
"role": "assistant"
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] |
National intellectual capital assessment models: a literature review
|
[
"Knowledge",
"Intellectual capital",
"Assessment models",
"Intangibles",
"Intellectual capital reporting"
] |
[
{
"content": "Summarize the following paper into structured abstract.\n\n1. Introduction: Growth is an important objective of governments. In recent decades intangibles that make up intellectual capital (IC) have become the most important resource for wealth creation and national progress (Bounfour and Edvinsson, 2005; Lin and Edvinsson, 2008), even more than the tangibles (Nakamura, 2010). In the current social and economic context, termed the knowledge economy, knowledge and information are the core competencies (Ghitiu-Bratescu et al., 2010) of nations pursuing development, above capital (Pulic, 2005) or labor (Dunning, 2000; Amidon, 2001). According to Foray (2004), knowledge is an essential good for the new economy: the knowledge economy. Empirical works show a strong relationship between intangible assets and national economic development (Stahle and Stahle, 2006; Weziak, 2007; Corrado et al., 2009; Lopez et al., 2011). In addition, intangibles positively affect work productivity (Nakamura, 2010) and provide the future profits of countries and their organizations (Malhotra, 2003; Bontis, 2004).\n2. Conceptual framework and underlying theories: For governments, one of the most important tasks is to provide adequate conditions for economic growth and improve the quality of life of its citizens.\n3. Selection of the sample and method of analysis: In accordance with Tranfield et al. (2003) and Greenhalgh et al. (2004) a systematic literature review was conducted on IC at the country level. The search was aimed at academic information in scientific databases: Web of Knowledge, Science Direct, and Econlit; as well as the five major journals publishing papers related to IC (Serenko and Bontis, 2009): The Journal of Knowledge Management (JKM), The Journal of Intellectual Capital (JIC), Knowledge Management Research and Practice (JMR&P), The International Journal of Knowledge Management (IJKM), and The Learning Organization (LO). Complementary and key literature was also included in order to incorporate other types of documents such as reports and management studies.\n4. NIC: main models: The literature presents several models to measure IC at the national level using different methods to identify intangibles. In general, two approaches were identified (Table I), confirming the findings of Hervas-Oliver and Dalmau-Porta (2006), Alfaro et al. (2011), and Lopez et al. (2011). One originated in the study of intangibles of private firms and is promoted mainly by academics and their institutions. The second, developed by international organizations and business schools, aims to study competitiveness, innovative capacity, and development at the country level. Table I shows the models selected from the literature review for this study.\n5. Findings: 5.1 Differences between models at the country and firm levels\n6. Conclusions, limitations, and future works: The literature review findings confirm the strategic value of intangibles in creating wealth and conferring competitive advantages to countries. However, there are few academic works related to IC at the country level. Around 80 percent of all the documents were published since 2005, mainly in the JIC and the JKM, which published around 80 percent of all the papers identified in the main journals related to IC.\n",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to review the literature on national intellectual capital (NIC) in order to identify and compare the main models to measure and report IC at the country level and to examine the differences from and similarities to the IC approach for firms.\nDesign/methodology/approach: A systematic literature review was carried out using three scientific databases and the five most important journals. Additional information was also reviewed. The search covered the period from January 2000 to December 2012. The models to measure intangibles were analyzed and compared using qualitative and quantitative techniques.\nFindings: The literature review shows that although such literature is still nascent and relatively scarce, there is growing interest in measuring, reporting, and managing IC for countries as a whole. NIC studies have been published in a small number of journals and more theoretical work is required. There are two main types of methods to assess and report on NIC. Despite the differences among models, their findings tend to converge.\nPractical implications: The information obtained contributes to the selection of models. This selection can be based on pragmatic considerations, such as the availability of data.\nOriginality/value: There are several models to evaluate intangibles at the country level and different ways to measure them. The paper offers comparative information about the models to aid in selection for managing intangibles at the country level.\n",
"role": "assistant"
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] |
Cause-related marketing: Led corporate social responsibility in international business-to-business markets: the contingent roles of host-country sustainable development
|
[
"Social responsibility",
"Internationalization",
"Business-to-business marketing",
"Corporate strategy"
] |
[
{
"content": "Summarize the following paper into structured abstract.\n\nIntroduction: Corporate social responsibility (CSR) reflects a firm's actions to address its stakeholders' concerns regarding its ethical and philanthropic objectives (Hadjikhani et al., 2016; Randle et al., 2019; Yim et al., 2019). In recent years, engagement in CSR activities has emerged as an important strategic option that enables a firm to gain both investor and consumer confidence. For example, a study shows that more than 85 percent of the S&P 500 companies published reports that documented their CSR activities in 2017, in comparison, fewer than 20 percent of the S&P 500 companies published such reports in 2011 (G&A Institute, 2018). Cause-related marketing (CRM) is a critical component of a firm's overarching CSR strategy. It focuses on using marketing tactics to publicize a firm's CSR activities (Bronn and Vrioni, 2001; Christofi et al., 2018; Maignan and Ferrell, 2004). In this paper, we use the term \"CRM-led CSR\" to describe an organization's strategic focus on designing and communicating its CSR activities in a way that enhances its organizational reputation and profitability.\nTheoretical background and hypotheses: Literature review\nResearch method: Empirical context\nAnalysis and results: We performed multivariate regression analysis with an ordinary least squares estimator using IBM SPSS version 22. Table II presents the results of our analysis. Model 1 shows a positive relationship between supplier CRM-led philanthropic CSR reputation and foreign customer business engagement (Model 1: b = 0.329, p < 0.010), in support of H1. We reason that a supplier uses its CRM-led philanthropic CSR reputation to legitimate its operations in the eyes of its foreign customers (Hadjikhani et al., 2016; Jean et al., 2016). Foreign customers will have a stronger intention and willingness to do more business with a supplier who appears to have greater legitimacy. Consistent with our reasoning, we find support for the premise that a supplier with higher levels of CRM-led philanthropic CSR reputation is more likely to attract foreign customers to build and maintain a stronger business relationship with the supplier.\nDiscussion and concluding remarks: Theoretical contributions\n",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Purpose: Cause-related marketing (CRM) focuses on the use of marketing tools to publicize a firm's corporate social responsibility (CSR) activities. Drawing on legitimacy theory, the purpose of this paper is to investigate the impact of CRM-led CSR in international business-to-business (B2B) markets. In particular, the authors examine the relationship between supplier CRM-led philanthropic CSR reputation and foreign customer business engagement in an international B2B setting. The authors also test how the foreign customer's host-country sustainable development level moderates this relationship.\nDesign/methodology/approach: The authors collect and analyze dyadic data from multiple sources including: dyadic data from a supplier and its 90 foreign customers; the supplier's internal company records; and publically available data.\nFindings: The authors find that supplier CRM-led philanthropic CSR reputation positively affects foreign customer business engagement. Furthermore, the authors find that this positive relationship is stronger when host-country environments are characterized by achieving higher level of environmental well-being development. In contrast, this positive relationship is weaker when the foreign customer host-country environment is characterized by achieving higher level of economic well-being development.\nOriginality/value: The authors examine that impacts of CRM-led CSR in international B2B markets and differentiate the contingent roles of foreign customer host-country sustainable development in moderating such impacts.\n",
"role": "assistant"
}
] |
Introducing sustainability to interior design students through industry collaboration
|
[
"Sustainability",
"Active learning",
"Design education",
"Industry collaboration",
"Interior design"
] |
[
{
"content": "Summarize the following paper into structured abstract.\n\nIntroduction: The growing concern and increasing interest in sustainable built environments is changing the design education agenda. Design education, which is rich in teaching, learning and communication potential, represents a series of advantages for gaining essential knowledge on technical, social cultural and technological issues through studio teaching. Design studios are assumed to be the core of the curriculum in architectural design education, where designing is a matter of analyzing, synthesizing, evaluating and presenting ideas for a solution to a design issue. Each studio project generally requires studying precedents, creating designs for architectural space and form, using of appropriate materials and construction techniques and presentation in drawings and 3D models. The teaching and practice of sustainability is not a trend; it has become a necessity in design education (Zuo et al., 2010). Despite huge efforts in design teaching and learning, however, students still have difficulty with motivation and self-direction regarding sustainability concepts, especially in non-studio courses (Oxman, 2008; Schneiderman and Freihoefer, 2012; Zuo et al., 2010).\nHow does design learning work in interior architecture education?: Architecture design education is similar to other design educations in how it is conducted in studios. However, it is different than non-design disciplines, because learning is conducted along a design activity, which is \"a form of problem-solving where individual decisions are made toward the fulfilment of objectives\" (Akin, 1984). Problem-solving activities are central to the development of architecture design teaching (Taylor, 2000). Different from other problem-solving activities, however, design problem solving is concerned with ill-defined problems (Simon, 1979; Akin and Moustapha, 2004) searches for an adequate solution within a large space of alternatives by developing a set of 2-D or 3-D (Simon, 1979; Akin and Akin, 1998). Design learning has many variables and complex relationships (Demirkan and Afacan, 2012). The creative process balances purposeful analysis, imaginative idea generation, and critical evaluation. In its otherness or difference from architecture, interior design makes the learning process more complex by requiring a detailed level of the following concepts: furniture selection and layout, sustainable material and finishes, decorative elements, colour theory, furniture design and, fabric selection (Gurel and Potthoff, 2006). Compared to architects and engineers, sustainable interior designers should be active players throughout a project; their knowledge is not restricted to space planning, furniture selection or material specifications (Zuo et al., 2010). Interior design students should be equipped with enough knowledge on sustainability to minimize environmental impact, reduce energy demand and create high-performance interiors.\nThe educational design context: designing a sustainability course: In Bilkent University's, Department of Interior Architecture and Environmental Design, the curriculum is organized around studios that prepare future designers to progressively deal with larger and more complex interiors. The undergraduate education is four years. Concepts of interior architecture, such as material, form, composition, are taught in the first two years, and the last two years provide specialization in areas, such as technology, the humanities, and designing for the disabled.\nFindings: The direct quotes (translated from Turkish by the author) in this section provide evidence of students' shared enthusiasm for the course's active learning environment, group work and, working with industry, as well as some student concerns. At the end of the module, unstructured questionnaires, observations and focus-group interviews provided data on students' attitudes and gathered their feedback. The results revealed that the active learning environment and industry collaboration positively influenced students' awareness of sustainable design, increased their ability to integrate sustainability knowledge into design studio projects and improved academic outcomes. These findings and responses were crucial for the instructors and guest lecturers in terms of improving students' learning quality. Race (2000) defined group learning as two kinds of processes: learning and working with others, and the responses in this study can be analyzed from these perspectives (Afacan, 2012).\nConclusion: The findings contribute to an understanding that working with industry is an inevitable part of teaching sustainability in interior design education. As Salama (2008) suggested, in architecture education the learning environment is more effective if real-life issues are well integrated. The current study highlights the benefits of hands-on industry experiences versus theoretical exercises. Adopting such an approach encourages students' creativity, enhances their cognitive skills within the diversity of project partners and, works across design disciplines (Cassim and Dong, 2007. The Department of Interior Architecture and Environmental Design at Bilkent University is the first to introduce a sustainability course and create a responsive and social learning environment through industry collaboration.\n",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Purpose: The purpose of this study was to introduce a sustainability course to interior design students and explore how working with industry could address challenges with integrating sustainability education into and ensuring student motivation in non-studio courses.\nDesign/methodology/approach: This is a case study presenting qualitative evaluation from the 15-week \"IAED 342 Sustainable Design for Interiors\" course with a sample of 98 third-year interior architecture students at Bilkent University, Turkey.\nFindings: The findings were analyzed from the perspectives of two processes learning and working with industry. The results revealed that an active learning environment and industry collaboration positively influenced students' awareness of sustainable design, increased their ability to integrate sustainability knowledge to design studio projects and improved academic outcomes.\nOriginality/value: This study is a unique effort by the Department of Interior Architecture and Environmental Design at Bilkent University by being the first to introduce a sustainability course and create a responsive and social learning environment through industry collaboration. The results of the study highlighted that better outcomes are achieved by working directly with industry than by performing theoretical exercises.\n",
"role": "assistant"
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] |
The effect of new inclusion criteria on patient selection for reduction mammaplasty
|
[
"Patients",
"Surgery",
"Scoring procedures (tests)",
"Clinical audit",
"United Kingdom"
] |
[
{
"content": "Summarize the following paper into structured abstract.\n\nIntroduction: Reduction mammaplasty is an efficacious procedure for the symptomatic relief of macromastia (Chadbourne, 2001. Mizgala, 2000; Yitzchack, 2000). However it is considered a low priority intervention by the commissioners of health services. As such provision has been rationalized.Each case was previously considered with reference to the clinicians' own experiences, and funding was at the behest of the commissioners of health care services, with local and regional policies dictating availability of funds. Inclusion criteria published in April of 2005 aimed to rationalize and standardize provision based on best evidence and the cumulative experience of the multi-disciplinary panel of authors (King, 2005).The guideline requires that all cases accepted for surgery are symptomatic with back pain, neck pain and/or intertrigo present. In addition, all patients should have a body mass index (BMI) of no greater than 30. Patients should have stopped smoking prior to admission for surgery.The guideline also recommends that pre-operative assessment be supplemented with a nurse-led seminar, which provides information on the procedure and associated complications. This enhances the process of informed consent.Finally patients should have sought advice on brassiere fitting and should have failed to achieve adequate symptomatic relief despite using a professionally fitted bra.The effect of the publication of new inclusion criteria has yet to be evaluated in a clinical setting.\nAim: We conducted a study to establish how the publication of a new and explicit set of guidelines altered our patient selection for reduction mammaplasty.\nMethod: All patients underwent bilateral reduction mammaplasty at a single Plastic and Reconstructive centre in London. Patients were identified by means of a theatre logbook review. The first 33 patients to be placed on the waiting list and undergo bilateral reduction mammaplasty after the publication of new inclusion criteria were studied. A period of 15 months prior to consultations made with reference to the new inclusion criteria was used as a control group.Case note review was performed in all cases. Operative indication was established in all cases by a review of the preoperative clinic notes and subsequent correspondence sent to the general practitioner. Height, weight and body mass index (BMI) were recorded for all patients. In each case the body mass used to calculate BMI was the mass at clinic when the patient was accepted for surgery. This was not necessarily the mass at first presentation, as some patients attended clinic on more than one occasion prior to being accepted for surgery.Smoking status was established, using both the notes taken at clinic and preoperative assessment. For the purpose of this study, patients were considered non-smokers if they had stopped more than four weeks prior to admission for surgery. This is consistent with other studies (Chan, 2006).Attendance at one of our nurse-led breast reduction seminars was established by means of cross-checking patient lists with enrollment lists for the seminar.All statistical analyses were performed using Fisher's exact test and SPSS version 12.0.The results were presented at a departmental governance meeting and the implications were debated.\nResults: A total of 131 consecutive patients were included in the study. Ninety-eight patients were accepted for surgery and underwent reduction mammaplasty based on a clinic consultation made in the 15 months preceding publication of the new inclusion criteria (group 1). Thirty-three patients were accepted for surgery and underwent reduction mammaplasty based on a consultation made in the first nine months following the publication of the new inclusion criteria (group 2). The age range of group 1 was 19 to 69, mean 37.5. The age range of group 2 was 18 to 66, mean 39.0. Ninety-seven of 98 (99 per cent) of group 1 were symptomatic, with at least 1 acceptable indication for surgery according to the inclusion criteria. All 33 of group 2 were symptomatic with acceptable indications. A summary of the complaints is shown in Table I. Note that most patients presented with more than one complaint. Shoulder pain and grooving were common complaints in our series but were not included in the criteria.BMI of group 1 ranged from 21 to 40, mean 29. BMI of group 2 ranged from 20 to 51, mean 29. In group 1 33 of 98 (34 per cent) had a BMI of greater than 30 and hence would have failed to meet the subsequent criteria. In group 2, 8 of 33 (24 per cent) had a BMI of greater than 30 and hence failed the criteria (p=0.143). The prevalence of obesity was low among patients under the age of 30 years and rose sharply thereafter. This was consistent for both groups.Eighteen of 98 (18 per cent) of group 1 admitted to smoking within four weeks of pre-operative admission. Seven of 33 (21 per cent) of group 2 admitted to smoking within four weeks of pre-operative admission (p=0.799). Smoking was found to be more prevalent among the younger age groups, with those aged 40 or less accounting for all patients who admitted to smoking in this study. Among those aged greater than 30 the prevalence of smoking among those accepted for surgery fell from 7 of 68 (10.3 per cent) to 1 of 23 (4.3 per cent) following publication of the inclusion criteria. For those aged 31 to 40 the prevalence of smoking among those accepted for surgery fell from 7 of 31 (23 per cent) to 1 of 11 (9 per cent). Among those aged 30 or less the prevalence of smoking among those accepted for surgery actually increased from 11 of 30 (37 per cent) to 6 of 10 (60 per cent) (see Table II).Seventy-two of 98 (73 per cent) of group 1 attended the breast reduction seminar. Twenty-nine of 33 (88 per cent) of group 2 attended the seminar (p=0.099). The highest attendance was observed among those aged 41 to 50, as 19 of 23 (83 per cent) accepted for surgery attended prior to the inclusion criteria and 6 of 6 (100 per cent) attended subsequently. The lowest attendance was observed among those aged 31 to 40, as 21 of 31 (68 per cent) accepted for surgery attended prior to the inclusion criteria and 9 of 11 (82 per cent) attended subsequently. The improvements in rates of attendance were not significant.Seventeen of 98 (17 per cent) of patients in group 1 would have failed to meet the subsequent criteria on the basis of more than one factor. Seven patients were obese and did not attend the seminar. Six patients were obese and had failed to give up smoking. Two patients had failed to give up smoking and had not attended the seminar. One patient had failed to give up smoking and was not symptomatic. One patient was obese, had not given up smoking and had not attended the seminar. Two of 33 patients in group 2 failed to meet the criteria on the basis of more than one factor. One patient was obese and had failed to attend the seminar and the other patient had failed to give up smoking and had failed to attend the seminar.\nDiscussion: Reduction mammaplasty is an efficacious procedure for the symptomatic relief of macromastia. It is associated with objective and subjective improvements in symptom management and quality of life (Chadbourne, 2001; Mizgala, 2000; Yitzchack, 2000). Patient satisfaction surveys report that between 87 to 95 percent of patients were either happy or very happy following this procedure (Atterhem et al., 1998; Dabbah et al., 1995; Davis et al., 1995). An increase in subsequent exercise tolerance and reduction in the use of analgesia has also been reported (Raispis et al., 1995).Previous attempts at rationing the provision of this procedure have met with severe criticism. For example, the requirement for psychological evaluation was seen by GPs and patients alike as a deterrent (Horlock et al., 1999).The inclusion criteria published by the NHS modernization agency reflects the finite level of resource available to a procedure classified as \"low priority\". It aims to maximize clinical yield by accepting patients on the basis of clinical need and likely outcome. The criteria have been based on best evidence and the opinion of a multi-disciplinary review body. The requirement for patients to have symptomatic macromastia reflects the consensus view that this procedure should not be performed for cosmesis alone.We found that this view was in line with our own practice, as almost all cases prior to distribution of the new inclusion criteria were appropriately symptomatic. There appears to have been one case for which no symptoms were documented but none since publication of the inclusion criteria.Our symptom profile was different to that described by Dabbah et al. (1995) who identified shoulder grooving as the most common symptom of macromastia, present in 90 per cent of all cases. They identified back pain in 82 per cent, shoulder pain in 78 per cent and neck pain in 65 per cent of 185 patients questioned retrospectively. Back pain was the most common presenting complaint among our patients, followed by shoulder pain and grooving, intertrigo and neck pain. Shoulder pain and grooving are not among the inclusion criteria published by the \"Action on Plastic Surgery\" review body.Our figures reveal that one third of all cases accepted for surgery before publication of the inclusion criteria were obese or morbidly obese and would have failed to meet criteria for acceptance. This fell to around one quarter subsequently. The importance of obesity is two-fold. Firstly, obesity is associated with macromastia and with the symptoms of macromastia, such as back ache. It is known that weight loss alone can reduce breast size and provide symptomatic relief, obviating the need for surgical intervention. Secondly, obesity has been linked with post-operative complications following this procedure. BMI has long been used as a quantifiable marker for obesity and has recently been validated as a marker for obesity in patients undergoing body contour surgery (Lahiri et al., 2006). O'Grady and colleagues, observing inferior pedicle reduction mammaplasty, found that patient BMI of greater than 30 was associated with a significant increase in subsequent rates of wound dehiscence and infection (O'Grady et al., 2005). They also reported and increase in rate of dehiscence with larger reductions. However, the link between obesity and complication rate is not uniformly accepted. Wagner and Alfonso (2005), in a series of 186 patients, found no correlation between BMI, volume of reduction and complication rate.The fact there was no significant difference in the percentage of obese patients being accepted for surgery reflects difficulties in applying rigid principles to patient management. For example patients with a BMI of greater than 30 experience the same symptoms as their slimmer counterparts. It is commonly accepted that weight loss can be hindered by the physical and psychological limitations that macromastia places on attempts to lose weight. It is also known that reduction mammaplasty is efficacious throughout the spectrum of BMI. For these reasons the inclusion criteria relating to BMI is perhaps not being as rigidly enforced as it might be.In practice a relative weight loss has often been considered as sufficient attempt on the part of the patient to demonstrate the desire to maintain that loss following surgery.The detrimental effect of smoking on wound healing has previously been established (Sorensen et al., 2003). Chan and colleagues reported a significant increase in rates of wound complications among patients who continued to smoke and those who stopped smoking within four weeks of reduction mammaplasty (Chan et al., 2006). While the guidelines recommend that patients should have stopped smoking prior to surgery, we found a relative increase in patients who were accepted for surgery and who admitted to smoking up to pre-operative admission. Those aged 30 or less were responsible for this finding. What is not clear is whether this suggests that older patients who smoke are being refused surgery in the way young patients are not, or whether this reflects both the incidence of smoking among this population group and their attitude to attempts at changing their smoking behaviour.It is difficult to draw conclusions based on smoking figures as data are based on patient response only. Accurate figures require complete transparency, which is often not the case, particularly as patients are aware that their operation may be cancelled if they admit to smoking within a four-week period prior to surgery.Failure to achieve symptomatic relief while wearing a professionally fitted brassiere implies exclusion in the event that this measure has not been employed. However this has not been considered here as this information was not documented in the course of any prior or subsequent consultation.Within a publicly-funded healthcare system, rationing of procedures by means of the publication of inclusion criteria based on best evidence and committee consensus is likely to become increasingly commonplace. There exist obvious economic implications of accepting for surgery patients who do not meet inclusion criteria. However clinicians must become increasingly aware of the medico-legal implications of such decisions and the consequences for informed consent.\nConclusions: Almost all cases accepted for surgery, both before and since the publication of inclusion criteria, have been symptomatic. Hence the inclusion criteria have made no difference to patient selection on the basis of symptomatology as our patient selection was appropriate and consistent.Relatively fewer obese and morbidly obese patients have been accepted for surgery since the publication of the criteria. However the difference in selection on the basis of BMI was not found to be significant.Relatively more women are presenting for the pre-operative breast reduction seminar. However we have yet to achieve 100 per cent seminar attendance, a goal made difficult by the fact that we book patients for the seminar only after the senior consultation, when in most cases patients have already been accepted for surgery.Smoking is a very difficult measure to assess effectively, but our figures suggest that we are not excluding young people on the basis of their smoking status, despite advising them to stop smoking at the initial consultation. This may reflect a lack of desire on the part of the patient to quit, as the threat of postponing surgery if the patient continues to smoke has not been enforced. It may also reflect pervasive attitudes to smoking among this population. It does, however suggest that surgeons need to work with GPs and other health care workers in order to help patients to stop smoking. In the light of these findings we will re-audit our patient selection process in order to establish how we are dealing with these shortcomings.\n",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Purpose: - To evaluate the impact of rationing guidelines on the practice of reduction mammaplasty, with particular reference to patient selection.\nDesign/methodology/approach: - A retrospective audit was performed. Patients who were accepted for surgery in the first nine months following the date of publication of new and explicit inclusion criteria were compared with patients who were accepted for surgery in the 15 months preceding publication.\nFindings: - Of 131 consecutive patients, 98 were accepted before publication of the inclusion criteria, with 33 after. A total of the 97 of 98 and 33 of 33 were symptomatic. Conformity to criteria for body mass index (BMI) increased from 65 of 98 (66 per cent) to 25 of 33 (76 per cent, p=0.143) Attendance at pre-operative breast seminar increased from 72 of 98 (73 per cent) to 29 of 33 (88 per cent, p=0.099). Incidence of smoking increased from 18 of 98 (18 per cent) to 7 of 33 (21 per cent, p=0.799). Patients under the age of 30 accounted for this increase. The number of cases who failed on more than one criterion fell from 17 of 98 (7 per cent) to 2 of 33 (3 per cent, p=0.155).\nPractical implications: - Demonstrates a non-significant reduction in the number of obese patients being accepted for surgery, and a non-significant increase in uptake of pre-operative nurse led seminars in the practice. Since publication of the inclusion criteria, all but one of the patients accepted for surgery with exclusion criteria failed on the basis one criterion only. Not successful in enforcing abstinence from smoking as a condition for surgery, particularly among younger patients. To help do this objective ways to assess smoking status need to be looked at. A re-audit is required to complete the loop.\nOriginality/value: - This is the first paper to present audit results for the new inclusion criteria for reduction mammaplasty.\n",
"role": "assistant"
}
] |
Fashion and social networking: a motivations framework
|
[
"Motivation",
"Facebook",
"Social networks",
"Instagram",
"Millennial",
"Uses and gratifications"
] |
[
{
"content": "Summarize the following paper into structured abstract.\n\nIntroduction: Over the past two decades, social networking sites (SNS) have attracted millions of users who incorporate this medium into their daily activities in varying capacities (Kemp, 2017; Kerpen, 2016). Social media sites provide web-based services that enable users to create a public profile and a list of contacts with whom they share a social network. Both businesses and consumers are rapidly adopting these platforms due to their potential reach (Mull and Lee, 2014). In particular, fashion marketers are increasingly focusing on using SNS to engage consumers, create interest, and capture real-time feedback (Burke, 2016; Davis, 2018; Kareh, 2017; Schulze, 2016; Wolny and Mueller, 2013). By using SNS, customers communicate directly with one another by sharing information about brands, products and services through word-of-mouth (WOM) communication (Libai et al., 2010).\nLiterature review: Social networking platforms\nMethodology: The study adopted a two-phase approach following the application norms of U&G research to identify and evaluate consumer motivations in a specific media context (Mull and Lee, 2014). The first-phase generated a broad list of consumer motivations and refined the list into a single instrument. The second phase included quantitative application of the instrument among a larger sample of users to evaluate the structure and meaning of the identified motivations to organize and refine the framework.\nResults: Motivations for using SNS platforms\nConclusions and implications: Motivations\n",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to add to the literature concerning potential motivations that drive social networking sites (SNS) for fashion-related behaviors among millennial consumers using a Uses and Gratifications (U&G) perspective. Four SNS platforms - Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, and Twitter - were examined.\nDesign/methodology/approach: The study presents a mixed-methods approach to develop and test a motivations framework among millennial consumers that will lead to practical understanding of both the existence of and impact of different motivations for engaging in SNS.\nFindings: Unique motivations appear to drive use of the four examined platforms. Results indicate that a broad set of common motivations for SNS use among millennial consumers who exhibit an interest in fashion can be determined. Further, the results indicate significant differences among motivations within the respective platform types. Lastly, the results reveal common factors among three or more SNS platforms: \"Fashion,\" \"Connection,\" \"Following\" and \"Pictures.\" The 'Entertainment' factor was common among two SNS platforms.\nResearch limitations/implications: Limitations of the study are the limited sample and SNS selection. A broader representation of the millennial consumer behaviors would provide a more comprehensive picture of the motivations for using SNS platforms.\nPractical implications: The study provides useful information for fashion marketers and researchers who can benefit from an updated understanding of SNS behaviors.\nOriginality/value: The study provides a relevant contribution to SNS research as well as understanding of millennial consumers. Additionally, it adds contribution to the U&G theory concerning new media platforms. It also delivers a replicable research design for other SNS platforms.\n",
"role": "assistant"
}
] |
Potential facilitators and barriers to adopting standard treatment guidelines in clinical practice: An Indian context
|
[
"Evidence-based practice",
"Education",
"Quality healthcare",
"Clinical guidelines",
"Standard treatment guidelines",
"Guideline adoption",
"Guideline adoption facilitators",
"Guideline adoption barriers",
"Rational medicine use"
] |
[
{
"content": "Summarize the following paper into structured abstract.\n\nIntroduction: For optimal and cost-effective medicine use, physicians require up-to-date, objective, unbiased, contextual and readily available medicine information. Clinicians may have difficulties keeping up to date with the overwhelming and fast growing scientific evidence for good clinical practice especially in resource-poor settings owing to insufficient time or weak critical appraisal skills (Figueiras et al., 2000). Clinicians may be uncertain about which treatment to use when the research results or advice from the experts is conflicting (Grol and Wensing, 2004; Grol and Grimshaw, 2003). In response to these findings standard treatment guidelines (STGs) emerged as tools to facilitate research evidence application, overcoming the barriers to research use; and removing the requirement for interpreting scientific studies (Woolf et al., 1999).\nMethods: We surveyed clinicians in India's geographically dispersed areas. We included physicians with at least one-year of experience working in public or private services. Respondents were approached and those agreeing responded either online (sent through a personal link) or self-administered anonymously. The questionnaire was designed and pretested before administration. The study took place between October 2012 and February 2013. The below list depicts the barriers and facilitators to adopting guidelines that were examined at five different levels. Respondents were required to rate the potential adopters and organizational characteristics on a five-point Likert scale. Innovation characteristics and perceptions were scored on a three-point scale. Section five inquired about participant's characteristics, including gender, age, qualification, specialization, experience and organizational set-up (public or private).\nFindings: Demographic characteristics\nDiscussion: This is a first report (to our knowledge in an Indian context) to quantitatively examine the local barriers and facilitators to guideline adoption. In developed countries, guidelines had been implemented decades ago and factors influencing adoption have been well studied and reported. There could be similarities and differences in factor perception; therefore, understanding these factors in an Indian context helps to select an appropriate local implementation strategy. In our study, innovation characteristics, environmental and individual characteristics were among the most frequently mentioned factors influencing guideline adoption. These findings are like other studies, where barriers most frequently mentioned were related to clinicians and the context in which practice occurred (Grol, 1997; Grol and Grimshaw, 2003; Koh et al., 2008). Appropriate knowledge and attitudes are necessary, but not sufficient for guideline adherence (Solberg et al., 1997). Practitioners may still encounter barriers owing to the guideline itself, patient or social/environmental factors (Cabana et al., 1999; Bosse et al., 2006; Ploeg et al., 2007).\nConclusions and recommendations: Barriers to implementing change are complex, multifunctional and influenced on many levels by various interests both inside and outside the healthcare system, and thus are partly within doctors' control. Other prevailing factors in the local context are the key to encouraging innovation diffusion, i.e., environmental context, organizational culture and leadership. Guidelines adoption may be improved by aligning organizational structures and processes to make them compatible with the innovation; providing leadership support to guide diffusion; providing trial demonstrations to increase awareness and enable users to better understand an innovation during undergraduate and pre/in-service training. Third parties (government and insurance companies) restricting reimbursement and misunderstanding liability protection offered by the guidelines emerged as major barriers. Regular feedback can stimulate learning, peer comparisons on outcomes and use. Organizational policy necessitating compliance with STGs and accreditation standards can be important drivers for changing practice.\n",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to assess medicines information sources accessed by clinicians, if sources differed in theory and practice and to find out the barriers and facilitators to effective guideline adoption.\nDesign/methodology/approach: In all, 183 doctors were surveyed. Barriers and facilitators were classified as: communication; potential adopters; innovation; organization characteristics and environmental/social/economic context.\nFindings: Most of the clinicians accessed multiple information sources including standard treatment guidelines, but also consulted seniors/colleagues in practice. The top three factors influencing clinical practice guideline adoption were innovation characteristics, environmental context and individual characteristics. The respondents differed in the following areas: concerns about flexibility offered by the guideline; denying patients' individuality; professional autonomy; insights into gaps in current practice and evidence-based practice; changing practices with little or no benefit. Barriers included negative staff attitudes/beliefs, guideline integration into organizational structures/processes, time/resource constraints. Fearing third parties (government and insurance companies) restricting medicines reimbursement and poor liability protection offered by the guidelines emerged as the barriers. Facilitators include aligning organizational structures/processes with the innovation; providing leadership support to guide diffusion; increasing awareness and enabling early innovation during pre/in-service training, with regular feedback on outcomes and use.\nPractical implications: Guideline adoption in clinical practice is partly within doctors' control. There are other key prevailing factors in the local context such as environmental, social context, professional and organizational culture affecting its adoption. Organizational policy and accreditation standards necessitating adherence can serve as a driver.\nOriginality/value: This survey among clinicians, despite limitations, gives helpful insights. While favourable attitudes may be helpful, clinical adoption could be improved more effectively by targeting barriers.\n",
"role": "assistant"
}
] |
Seasonal anomalies in the market for American depository receipts
|
[
"Emerging markets",
"American depository receipts",
"Seasonal anomalies",
"Market efficiency",
"Developed markets"
] |
[
{
"content": "Summarize the following paper into structured abstract.\n\n1. Introduction: American depository receipts (ADRs) programs have been expanding during the past decades at a remarkable pace. Over the 2014-2016 period alone, 327 new programs were established. According to the Bank of New York Mellon, there are now almost 3,500 ADR programs worth US$152.1bn. In 2016, the combined trading value of listed depositary receipts on US exchanges totaled a staggering figure of US$2.9tn.\n2. Literature review: In the present paper we study a number of seasonality patterns. The literature review that follows focuses on the seminal contributions and on those that deal with the issue at hand mainly in developed stock markets.\n3. Data and methodology: We use four ADRs (S&P ADR, BNY Mellon ADR Index, BNY Mellon Developed Markets 100 ADR Index and BNY Mellon Emerging Markets 50 ADR Index) to study the presence of seasonal anomalies in this market. To make the analysis comparable to the US market, we also conduct an analysis on the S&P 500 index and on the NYSE ARCA International Index. A brief discussion of the indices is as follows:\n4. Empirical results: 4.1 Regression results\n5. Conclusions: While a considerable body of empirical evidence documents the impact of seasonal patterns on stock returns, the literature regarding the potential seasonality in ADRs is almost non-existent. This paper contributes to fill this gap as it provides evidence about the existence of eight seasonal patterns in the market for ADRs for the period from April 1999 to March 2017.\n",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Purpose: The literature provides extensive evidence for seasonality in stock market returns, but is almost non-existent concerning the potential seasonality in American depository receipts (ADRs). To fill this gap, this paper aims to examine a number of seasonal effects in the market for ADRs.\nDesign/methodology/approach: The paper examines four ADRs for the period from April 1999 to March 2017 to look for signs of eight important seasonal anomalies. The authors follow the standard methodology of using dummy variables for the time period of interest to capture excess returns. For comparison, the same analysis on two US stock market indices is conducted.\nFindings: The results show the presence of a highly significant pre-holiday effect in all return series, which does not seem to be justified by risk. Moreover, turn-of-the-month effects, monthly effects and day-of-the-week effects were detected in some of the ADRs. The seasonality patterns under analysis tended to be stronger in emerging market-based ADRs.\nResearch limitations/implications: Overall, the results show that significant seasonal patterns were present in the price dynamics of ADRs. Moreover, the findings lend support to the idea that emerging markets are less efficient than developed stock markets.\nOriginality/value: This is the most comprehensive study to date for indication of seasonal anomalies in the market for ADRs. The authors use an extensive sample that includes recent significant financial events such as the 2007/2008 financial crisis and consider ADRs with different characteristics, which allows to draw comparisons between the differential price dynamics arising in developed market-based ADRs and in the ADRs whose underlying securities are traded in emerging markets.\n",
"role": "assistant"
}
] |
Forecasting project performance considering the influence of leadership style on organizational agility
|
[
"Organizational performance",
"Project management",
"Simulation",
"Agility",
"Modelling",
"Statistics"
] |
[
{
"content": "Summarize the following paper into structured abstract.\n\n1. Introduction: The reaction of organizations when faced with business internationalization has led to different analytical approaches in recent years. Traditional models of organizational process structure aiming at meeting demands of products and services have currently been challenged, since an organizational structure where a close alignment of basic components such as people, systems (hardware and software) and service strategies is required. Nevertheless, people, systems and service strategies are not enough to ensure company success and market survival. Orchestrating all these resources, properly guiding, keeping and improving them is required. The main component to achieve this objective is people leadership.In order to understand the impact that leadership has on organizational performance, recognizing that agility and flexibility affect it is first required. Agility and flexibility represent the way to achieve organizational performance. Although one can infer that the main leadership style in an organization may influence organizational agility, literature fails to clearly establish how this relationship takes place or even the degree of interdependence between these variables. At one end, some leadership analysts broadly mention the impacts on company flexibility and agility. At the other end there are studies on agility and flexibility that do not relate leadership to different assessment and measurement tools developed for these factors. In current literature on agility, people are regarded from a task or manufacturing operation perspective. Studies carried out by Sanchez and Nagi (2001) and Sherehiy et al. (2007), show that there are attempts to describe agility in a more integrated and holistic approach. The conclusion is that there is a lack of a single theory establishing the relationship between organization agility and people.This study aims at providing a more holistic and empirical approach to factors that contribute to agility in organizations oriented by projects. The focus is on the impact of leadership styles upon agility and how these reflect upon innovation project performance. In this analysis, agility is manifested by factors like continuous improvement, continuous delivery, and communication, maturity of the team and people flexibility. Most of the studies in literature focus on an organization's ability to meet these requirements in full, in such a way that at the end of the assessment, an organization is or is not rated as agile and flexible. This present work attempts to contribute to enlightening questions such as: how much, when and how to act on these characteristics. In order to do so, the choice of a suitable modeling tool becomes a very important part of the whole study. Traditional statistical methods, like linear regression analysis, present some limitations in its application to systems like the one analyzed in this study. One of these limitations is the need for attention to the condition of the linearity of the system. Another one is the lack of visualization of the propagation of the effects through the system. It does not allow sensibility analysis. The need to overcome such limitations has motivated us to choose to use Bayesians networks (BN) as a prediction tool of the results. BN offer consistent semantics for representing uncertainty and an intuitive graphical representation of the interactions between various causes and effects. It represents a new approach to the organizational leadership and management studies, since up to now, only few references in the literature considering the application of artificial intelligence (AI) tools in these areas have been found (Somers and Casal, 2009). Thus, a second expected outcome of this paper is the contribution on the advance of the application of AI, especially BN, in such areas. After this introduction, sections on study description are presented. Section 2 describes the research variables. The adopted concepts and components of leadership, agility and organizational factors are shown. Section 3 reports the empirical work, beginning with the description of the framework of the study. An introduction of BN theory and construction steps is shown. The organization under evaluation is presented together with sampling and data collection procedures. Analysis and validity considerations of the results are also described. Section 4 shows the conclusions and implications of this study.\n2. Research variables: 2.1 Leadership\n3. Empirical study: 3.1 The proposed framework\n4. Conclusion: It was possible to characterize the role of people on agility in project-oriented organizations. Validation of theoretical framework was carried out by means of characterizing the influence of leadership style on the factors representing organizational agility and their impact on performance of innovation projects. Relevant contributions from this study are the visualization of the effect propagation chain (interactions) between variables and quantification of individual levels of contribution of each one of the variables along the BN. The AI application, especially BN, to leadership and agility studies, represents an alternative to conventional multiple regression analysis. The nature of the phenomenon in management science makes linear statistical analysis inappropriate in many cases. As BN are able to incorporate quantitative and qualitative data they become a potential application for the integration of environmental, social and economic variables. It is a tool designed for processes that involve adaptive management.Results from this study are believed to offer relevant contribution to studies of agility and flexibility. This contribution might be from an academic perspective through a deeper holistic approach to human contribution to these factors or it might be from the perspective of managerial impact regarding adequacy and alignment of people profile, leadership and projects, direction of training actions, financial resource allocation and analysis of key success factors of the project.\n",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Purpose: - The purpose of this paper is to analyze the influence of leadership style and factors associated with organization agility on project performance.\nDesign/methodology/approach: - It is a case study carried out at a leading corporation driven towards innovation projects. Literature on this subject seems to be mainly focused on the contribution of processes and strategies that lead to agility, and few cases report the influence of people and leadership style on this factor. Upon analysis, a proposed characterization of the relationship between leadership, agility and project performance is presented. A Bayesian Network (BN) model is employed as a modeling tool, enabling both inferences and sensitivity analysis and also visualization and quantification of the propagation of effects between variables.\nFindings: - The main result of this study is the characterization of under which combination of leadership style, agility and organizational factors the highest project performance can be achieved.\nOriginality/value: - The paper helps clear up the mistaken view that high agility only takes place when all constituent factors display maximum values. The leadership style and people contribution to agility is clearly addressed. This kind of approach is original and helps to answer the question found in the literature of how much agility is needed, through the identification of the individual contributions of each of the system variables. The view offered by the model discussed in this paper enables understanding and visualizing how this takes place, thus allowing for gearing more focused and effective actions towards the key variables.\n",
"role": "assistant"
}
] |
Framing strategic communication for the growth-orientated organization
|
[
"Corporate strategy",
"Communication",
"Risk management"
] |
[
{
"content": "Summarize the following paper into structured abstract.\n\n__NO_TITLE__: The framing effect is a phenomenon in decision making whereby decision makers change their preferences for risky options, outcomes or actions to achieve goals as a consequence of the way in which logically equivalent decision problems are presented. This has a number of implications for strategic decision makers. In particular, presentation with an emphasis on gains induces risk-averse behavior and strategic scenarios tend to be seen as threats; conversely, a loss emphasis tends to induce risk-seeking behaviour and future scenarios tend to be seen as opportunities.\nIntroduction: Henry Mintzberg (1973) drew attention to the fact that in reality the experience of management was not the detached, rational process of planning and coordinating that early management thinkers suggested, but was a more confused (and confusing!) cascade of decisions embedded in a nexus of (often informal) communication.The modern strategist knows this. Emphasis has shifted to the idea that strategy creation is an integrated and iterative process. Most aspects of an organization's strategy are created and shaped through its implementation, not prior to it. This shift in emphasis has led to change in the role ascribed to the strategist. No longer a mere engineer of the organization's structure-conduct-performance relationship, the strategist is a communicator of strategic vision. This article concerns itself with one aspect of strategic communication that has received extensive attention from organizational and cognitive psychology: the issue of decision task framing.It is important to emphasize what this article is not about. It is not simply about emphasis in communication: when to accentuate the positive and downplay the negatives, concerns of the psychology of persuasion. Nor is it about how complex messages may be packaged so as to maximize their impact, as dealt with by Barbara Minto (1987).This article's concerns are more narrow, but equally important nonetheless. It is concerned with the framing of messages. The term \"framing\" has a definite meaning. It also has a specific intent - to influence the message recipients' attitude towards risk. The strategist is likely to understand message emphasis and may be aware of general message packaging; he or she is less likely to be aware of message framing, its impact and potential value as a part of the strategic communication toolkit. Attitude towards - acceptance of or rejection of - risk is of course critical to the effective implementation of strategic programs.\nProspect theory and risk attitude: Risk is a perennial and unavoidable aspect of managerial life that impacts on strategic decision making. Yet the notion of risk is far from straightforward. Risk attitude refers to both preference between safe and risky options and our demand for a premium to accept risk (or willingness to pay to offset it). Usually, we are risk averse - we do not like risk - and if we take it on we expect to be rewarded (being sold the bet at less than its expected value) for doing so. Hence insurance companies make a profit.Risk as usually understood in management theory has three parts:1. things that might happen - outcomes (good or bad);2. acts (what you might do); and3. chance - probability - that each outcome might happen.Given these three features, a theory of risk behaviour that predicts what a rational decision-maker will do can be developed.As far as practical decision-makers are concerned, though, this approach has a number of limitations. Outcomes and acts may not be clear-cut: future scenarios and current choices must be imagined. This is the expertise that the strategist brings to the job. Probabilities may not be definite. A professional judgment as to the chance of various things happening must be made.Formal theory of risk suggests the possibility of a good thing happening (gaining an amount of money) should be given equal weight to the possibility of a bad thing occurring (losing the same amount). This is counter to human nature. Strategists are usually more concerned with the downside than with the upside. The theory is also focused on outcomes for which a straightforward monetary value can be placed. This ignores hard to value \"balanced scorecard\" performance involving customer goodwill, employee experience and environmental concerns (see, for example, Gumbus, 2005).The fact that expected utility theory provides a very poor account of the way in which people (strategists included) act when faced with risk led two thinkers - Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky - to suggest a new theory in 1979 called \"Prospect Theory\" (Kahneman and Tversky, 1979). Its aim was to provide a good account of practical risk decision-making. Daniel Kahneman was recently awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics for this contribution.Prospect theory effectively integrates a number of seemingly disparate risk decision anomalies (i.e. actual deviations from the prediction of rational theory) into a comprehensive account. Central to the theory is the idea that decision-makers judge the way in which decisions under risk might change what they have compared to what they have now compared to a reference position. Prospect theory adds that decision makers tend to be risk-averse when considering gains and risk seeking when considering losses relative to the reference position. Rational theory suggests that decision makers are only interested in concrete facts. Prospect theory proposes that the way in which decision problems are presented can influence risk decision making by changing the decision maker's sense of reference and attention to gains and losses, even if the concrete facts in the decision problem are not changed. This can switch a decision maker between risk-averse and risk-seeking behavior.\nFraming strategic decisions: As a general definition, framing might be considered to refer to the process of structuring a decision problem in such a way that its information content does not change (and so a rational decision maker should not be influenced by the framing), but the presentation draws attention to reference points and gain or loss aspects of outcomes. This tends to shift real decision makers' preferences from risky options (when losses are highlighted) to safer options (when gains are emphasized).Decision task framing was first highlighted by Kahneman and Tversky (1979). A major review of framing effects is provided by Kuhberger (1998). However, as Levin et al. (1998) point out in a review of framing effect studies, the idea of framing has been extended from choice between risky options in two important ways: first to include the attributes of outcomes and second to accommodate decision-maker goals. This results in three distinct types of framing:1. risky choice;2. attribute; and3. goal.All share the common feature that what is changed in framing is simply the presentation of the decision task, not its logical content. All impact on decision-makers' choices and all are relevant to the practising strategist in interpreting and constructing strategic messages.With risky choice framing the framing impacts on a set of options offering different levels of risk (probability of desired or undesired outcomes occurring), this framing influences the decision maker's risk preference. Attribute framing focuses on the description of the outcome. This influences the decision maker's evaluation of the outcomes (especially if they are perceived as opportunities or threats). Goal framing emphasizes the consequences of taking particular courses of action and impacts on the persuasiveness of the message about the attractiveness of taking (or not taking) particular courses. Examples will make these distinctions clearer.Risky choice framing\nSignificance of framing for the practising strategist: The study of framing effects is a very active research. Interest ranges from the fundamental psychological underpinning for the effect (e.g. Chang et al., 2002), impact on small group decision making (e.g. Kameda and Davis, 1988) (the effects need not be eliminated and may in fact be enhanced), human resource strategy (Bamberger and Feigenbaum, 1996), ethical decision-making (e.g. Bailey and Alexander, 1993) and the interaction of framing with broader organizational and environmental factors (e.g. Quall and Puto, 1989; Lehner, 2000). However, framing effects on risk decision-making has been robustly demonstrated in a wide variety of decision settings. Expert decision makers are as prone to framing effects as are naive decision makers. They are consistent enough to be adopted as a reliable tool in the strategists' communication toolbox. Framing effects on risk decision making have been robustly demonstrated in a wide variety of decision settings. They are consistent enough to be adopted as a reliable tool in the strategist's communication toolbox. There are three ways in which this tool might be used:1. recognizing the framing of received strategic communications - whether this be inadvertent or deliberate on the part of the sender;2. use of framing to script strategic communications to influence the risk preferences of recipients; and3. being aware of the impact of framing on the strategic decision making of self and other, and if advisable, \"de-biasing\" risk preferences.Each of these will be considered in turn. However, there is a common starting point, which is to recognize when a message might be susceptible to framing effects, and if so recognized, reconstruct the problem so that both frames are made explicit and given equal weight.Decision problems that might be susceptible include those in which outcomes of particular courses of action (risky option framing), the attributes of outcomes (attribute framing) or the goals of particular projects are described (goal framing). These will be associated with some quantification of outcome probabilities or attribute specification, even if presented as a lexical description such as \"very likely\", \"likely\", and \"very unlikely\". For such a decision problem, consider the \"valence\" of the message: are outcomes or attributes described in positive or negative terms? Does the problem imply a gain or a loss?If it does then reconstruct - integrate - the problem so that both frames are made apparent. So if a message is presented in a positive frame, think about how it might be rephrased as a negative frame. So for risky choice outcomes, if the chance of an outcome happening is given, think about the chance of that outcome not happening. This is illustrated for Q2 and Q5 in Table I.If the level of attribute is given, think about the level of that attribute not being present and if the chance of a goal being achieved is given, think about the chance of that goal not being achieved. Similarly for messages in a negative frame, reframe as a positive. If a lexical chance is given, then try to get a numeric handle on the level of chance, either by using own judgment or (better) get the message sender to account in terms of percentage chance for what he or she means by 'very likely' and so on. This is illustrated with an expansion of Q3 and Q6 in Table II. Similar rules apply for goal framing. As an example, Q4 and Q8 are integrated into a single framing in Table III. Don't over-complicate this. The back of an envelope will do! How are your decisions affected by this restructuring?When sending a message, consider which frame will best achieve your aims from the action it is likely to elicit. Remember, frames that imply loss tend to make recipients risk-seeking, but frames that imply a gain tend to make them risk-averse. What do you want them to be? How does risk attitude fit with the strategic plans devised? Sending a message in a negative frame is a little counterintuitive to a strategist who thinks in terms of emphasizing the positives. But it can work if risk seeking is what is wanted. Interestingly, there is evidence to suggest that entrepreneurs in dealings with venture capitalists will sometimes (somewhat against obvious expectations) emphasize some loss aspects of their venture's performance. This imparts a more risk seeking attitude on the part of the funders and can escalate their commitment to further funding.\"Debiasing\" represents a conscious effort of the part of the decision maker to recognize and avoid biases such as framing effects. This usually involves getting the decision maker to actively reflect on the problem rather than simply reacting intuitively to it. The first step has already been addressed: restructure the problem so that both frames are explicit and given equal weight. Complementary to this is to \"elaborate\" the decision problem. Elaboration techniques include developing a causal map of the problem (e.g. Hodgkinson et al., 1999), imagining that you will be called upon to justify your decision (as strategists usually are!) (e.g. Takemura (1994), and/or evaluating the credibility of the evidence that underpins the decision (e.g. Emby and Finley, 1997). These exercises are useful on their own terms and need not be extensive.Succumbing to the framing effect should not be thought of as an error. It reflects the fundamental way in which human mental processes operate. However, the effective strategist has the opportunity to avoid framing biases and to use them in constructing effective strategic communications.\n",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Purpose: - Strategists have always known that how you say something is as important as what you say. We are beginning to understand why. The article discusses the concept of message \"framing\" and how this affects peoples' attitude towards risk. It argues that this can easily form part of the strategist's communication toolkit.\nDesign/methodology/approach: - The study of framing effects is a very active research. Interest ranges from the fundamental psychological underpinning for the effect, impact on small group decision making (the effects need not be eliminated and may in fact be enhanced), human resource strategy, ethical decision-making and the interaction of framing with broader organizational and environmental factors.\nFindings: - Framing effects on risk decision-making has been robustly demonstrated in a wide variety of decision settings. Expert decision makers are as prone to framing effects as are naive decision makers. They are consistent enough to be adopted as a reliable tool in the strategists' communication toolbox.\nPractical implications: - The strategist is likely to understand message emphasis and may be aware of general message packaging; he or she is less likely to be aware of message framing, its impact and potential value as a part of the strategic communication toolkit. Attitude towards - acceptance of or rejection of - risk is of course critical to the effective implementation of strategic programs.\nOriginality/value: - This article concerns itself with one aspect of strategic communication that has received extensive attention from organizational and cognitive psychology: the issue of decision task framing.\n",
"role": "assistant"
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] |
Customer expectations of remote maintenance services in the medical equipment industry
|
[
"Service management",
"Health care",
"Qualitative research",
"Business-to-business services",
"Service technology",
"Customer expectations"
] |
[
{
"content": "Summarize the following paper into structured abstract.\n\n1. Introduction: Changes in markets, customers, and modern technologies are enabling new business models, capabilities, and products, such as the infusion of services into goods-dominant firms, products co-created with customers or network partners, and offerings customized for customer behavior observed over time (Marketing Science Institute, 2010). As a reaction to the infusion of services, more manufacturing firms are shifting their efforts from pure manufacturing to a combination of manufacturing and services (Matthyssens and Vandenbembt, 1998; Wise and Baumgartner, 1999; Brax, 2005; Lay et al., 2010). Original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) increasingly provide services to their customers in order to sustain a competitive position (Oliva and Kallenberg, 2003; Anderson et al., 2007; Penttinen and Palmer, 2007; Holstrom et al., 2010).\n2. Remote maintenance service technology: Medical equipment vendors offer RSs for the maintenance of medical high-tech equipment (e.g. computerized tomography (CT) scanners). Via IT-infrastructure, customer's machines and systems are remotely connected to the service provider. These connections allow real-time remote monitoring of the connected service objects. In the event of technical problems or system irregularities detected by remote monitoring, the service provider is alerted. Immediately, a service provider engineer located, e.g. in India remotely accesses the customer's system (in this example, the CT-scanner in a US hospital) to diagnose and remotely repair system failures without involving the customer's engineer or sending a local field service engineer (FSE) on-site. In about 50 percent of situations, the problems can be solved remotely before they lead to more serious damage (e.g. the cooling of a machine can be intensified before the device overheats) (Paluch, 2011).\n3. Methodology: To explore customer expectations regarding RS technologies for the maintenance of high-tech medical equipment, and recognizing that RSs are highly intangible and complex services, we have chosen a qualitative interview study approach. Using a qualitative research design seems appropriate for answering the research question about customers' expectations regarding the remote maintenance service as it achieves new knowledge and in-depth understanding in addition to questioning the why, the how, and the what of the phenomenon under research (de Ruyter and Scholl, 1998; Carson et al., 2001). A primary aim of qualitative research is to investigate new and unknown phenomena and their influences, so as to generate new theories from the results (de Ruyter and Scholl, 1998; Patton, 2009; Denzin and Lincoln, 2005). The exploration also delivers a complex, detailed understanding of the examined research subject. The openness and flexibility of this method allows the research design and focus to be continually modified during the research process in order to facilitate understanding of new findings and relationships (Maxwell, 2007; Patton, 2009).\n4. Empirical results from the interview study: 4.1 General perception of RSs\n5. Conclusion and implications: As a culmination of this study, we can conclude that people behind the technology still matter. The personal aspect of high-tech environments should not be underestimated nor should the service technology ever completely become a substitute for the human element. RS customers are able to point out their responsibility for the technical maintenance of the hospital medical equipment, although they can no longer explain precisely how the equipment is maintained, because they are not doing it themselves. Thereby, responsible and educated employees have been reduced to the level of functionaries who pushbuttons or telephone an alarm when a problem occurs. An important cornerstone of a fulfilling professional life involves communication and interaction. RSs technologies lead naturally to a minimization of interpersonal relationships with customers. As the interviews revealed, interaction on a personal level between service customer and provider leads to the creation of vision and solutions that are highly valued by the customers. Furthermore, customers appreciate the professional exchange with technicians who are working for their RS providers. In this context, they can enjoy the interchange of technical language and ideas, which allows them to feel relevant as a participant in the maintenance process.\n",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Purpose: Original equipment manufacturers offer maintenance services such as remote diagnostics to extend their portfolio. The purpose of this paper is to empirically investigate requirements and expectations regarding remote services (RSs) for maintaining complex high-tech equipment from a users' point of view.\nDesign/methodology/approach: A qualitative interview study based on 30 interviews and observations at 11 organizations in the healthcare industry was conducted in order to get a holistic understanding of requirements and expectations of the new service technology.\nFindings: This study shows that the focus on providing high-technology services is not sufficient to increase customer's usage, soft factors such as personal interaction, integration, and individualization are main expectations for customers in the medical equipment industry. The expectations are concentrated in seven propositions.\nResearch limitations/implications: The interviews were conducted only in the healthcare industry. Even though is it possible to generalize the findings and transfer them to other sectors, a large-scale empirical survey should be conducted in different industries to verify the qualitative results.\nPractical implications: A framework for manager and service provider is set up that can help to improve the service offerings according to specific customer expectations.\nOriginality/value: The paper provides an original perspective on a new service technology that facilitates remote maintenance of complex high-tech equipment. Through in-depth interviews, the author generates valuable insights that help to advance RS technologies.\n",
"role": "assistant"
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] |
Employee role enlargement: Interactions of trust and organizational fairness
|
[
"Job enlargement",
"Business environment",
"Job satisfaction",
"Trust"
] |
[
{
"content": "Summarize the following paper into structured abstract.\n\nIntroduction: Behaviors outside the normal job description were pointed out as critical for optimal organizational functioning (Barnard, 1938; Katz, 1964; Katz and Kahn, 1978), together with the willingness of the employees to expand their regular work roles (Coyle-Shapiro et al., 2004; Morrison, 1994). Organizations respond to a business environment characterized by unprecedented technological change and increased competition by implementing unconventional solutions such as flexible organizational structures and work roles (Cappeli, 1999; Huber, 2004). Given that role enlargement is an important determinant of valued employee behaviors (Coyle-Shapiro et al., 2004; Hofmann et al., 2003; Morrison, 1994), there is a need to continue this line of research and explore some of its important, but previously untested predictors.While early studies examining role enlargement focused on attitudinal antecedents such as organizational commitment and job satisfaction (Morrison, 1994), more recently researchers have been directing their attention toward the employees' perceptions of the organizational context. Organizational fairness and social exchanges are two important factors emerging with some consistency in the role enlargement literature. Researchers using social exchange frameworks provided support for predictors of role enlargement such as employer-employee commitment (a combination of employee commitment and perceived organizational support, Coyle-Shapiro et al., 2004), or the quality of the relationship with the direct leader (LMX, Hofmann et al., 2003). A related line of research examined and provided support for the importance of organizational justice for enlarged roles (Coyle-Shapiro et al., 2004; Tepper et al., 2001). As prior studies corroborate the relationship between social exchange variables such as trust (Aryee et al., 2002), quality of the relationship with the organization, and the direct leader (Masterson et al., 2000) with extra-role behaviors, and considering that role enlargement is predictive of such behaviors (Coyle-Shapiro et al., 2004; Hofmann et al., 2003; Morrison, 1994), the focus of the present study is on the antecedents of role enlargement. We, therefore, respond to calls for research to identify additional antecedents of enlarged work roles (Morrison, 1994, p. 1564) and to explore why employees engage in broader role definitions (Coyle-Shapiro et al., 2004). The present study also attempts to address some gaps in the literature, outlined as follows.Role enlargement: trust, justice, and their interaction\nTheoretical framework: We briefly describe the social exchange and organizational justice underpinnings of our model before we put forward our hypotheses. Social exchange theory (Blau, 1964; Gouldner, 1960; Homans, 1958, 1961) posits that individuals often decide to enter into social exchange relationships because they perceive that the other party has something valuable to contribute. If the relationship proves mutually satisfying, each party's contributions are expected to increase in time, both in breadth (the range of contributions) and value (the importance of contributions). Trust develops as the parties see that their investments in the relationship are offset by the returns. Parties strive for a balance in contributions made, with balance being judged in terms of the equity norm (Homans, 1961). If one party in a relationship goes beyond the requirements of his or her formal organizational role to provide \"extra\" tangible or intangible contributions to the other, the receiving party subsequently feels obligated to reciprocate. This component of the exchange is known as the norm of reciprocity. Applied to the situation under investigation, we posit that employees respond to leader- and organization-directed trust by enlarging their role definitions in the specific domain of reciprocation, considering the reciprocation principle focused on a specific partner and in light of the fact that roles are malleable, and change on an ongoing basis as a function of the direct leader behavior (Graen, 1976; Ilgen and Hollenbeck, 1991). We also expect this reciprocation to be enhanced by a positive assessment of the organizational justice context (according to the equity norm).\nTheory development and hypotheses: Direct relationships: trust and role enlargement\nMethod: Sample and procedure\nResults: Confirmatory factor analyses\nDiscussion: This study examined relationships between antecedents of role enlargement such as manager- and organization-directed trust together with organizational justice intervening mechanisms. Overall, we found support for most of the hypothesized relationships. Specifically, both manager- and organization-directed trust were positively related to role enlargement for behaviors benefiting other individuals and the organization. More importantly, organizational fairness acted as a moderator on these relationships. Specifically, leaders who were trusted by their subordinates and exhibited high levels of interpersonal justice were likely to obtain greater role enlargement from their subordinates than both leaders who are trusted but did not perform well on the interpersonal fairness component, or were not trusted. This finding underscores the importance of the level of interpersonal justice as a factor of role enlargement; specifically, components of just treatment, such as treating the subordinate in a polite manner, with dignity, respect, and refraining from improper remarks or comments (Colquitt, 2001) contribute to role enlargement for subordinates having high levels of manager-directed trust. One surprising finding is that informational justice did not exhibit the same pattern for the relationship between manager-directed trust and role definitions. A possible post-hoc explanation is that information dissemination in the focal organization takes place through well-established formal channels, which may result in decreasing the importance of the leader in the communication process.Our study also provides support for distributive and procedural justice as boundary conditions for the relationship between organization-directed trust and organization-directed role enlargement. Such findings underscore the importance of fair organizational procedures and fair distribution of outcomes for obtaining enlarged role perceptions from employees with higher levels of organization-directed trust. While prior studies have proposed and confirmed direct relationships between procedural justice and role enlargement (Coyle-Shapiro et al., 2004), we advance the extant research by providing support for an interaction between organizational fairness and organization-directed trust. Specifying moderators expands the nomological net of role enlargement, contributing to building better-specified models.This study does have some limitations. Because of the cross-sectional nature of the data, we cannot make causal inferences based on the current dataset. Future studies should examine such models using a longitudinal design. Also, the data were collected from one source (employees from the focal organization), thus subjecting the data to single-source bias. However, given the focus of our investigation on attitudes such as trust, perceptions of fairness and definitions of roles, the role incumbents were the best source for this type of information. In addition, as demonstrated by prior research, interactions are less prone to common method bias (Evans, 1985) and the effect sizes obtained in our interaction steps are high for a field study (Chaplin, 1991; Champoux and Peters, 1987), thus lending more credence to our findings. Third, our study was conducted in one organization. Generalizability of the present findings to other settings should be treated with caution until established by other studies as well.Despite these limitations, this study is the first to test the interaction of different foci of trust (in the direct leader and in the organization) with the four-fold conceptualization of organizational justice (Colquitt, 2001), and their effect on role enlargement. Thus, the present research contributes to the existing theory in several ways. First, adding to models that test social exchange components such as the quality of the relationship with the direct leader (LMX; Hofmann et al., 2003) and the levels of employer-employee commitment (Coyle-Shapiro et al., 2004) as antecedents of role enlargement, it provides a test using a trust-based perspective. Second, this research provides insight onto some of the mechanisms that operate in the process of role enlargement. Thus, the study confirms that while social exchanges, such as trust, are important for employees' construal of work roles, perceptions of fairness also represent an important factor. To this extent, our study validates prior theoretical propositions cautioning that valued work behaviors are a function of both leadership and contextual factors (Fairholm and Fairholm, 2000) and contributes to a stream of research positing interactive effects of leader-related attributes and organizational justice contextual factors (De Cremer and van Knippenberg, 2002; De Cremer et al., 2004).Such findings have potential application for practitioners, in several ways. Considering the growing interest in the determinants and mechanisms of role enlargement, our findings provide organizational representatives interested in such organizational development and change interventions with a model that can be tested in their particular settings. In addition, the present findings provide insights on possible directions of intervention. As evidenced by our findings, depending on the desired outcome, one direction for intervention may focus on increasing levels of trust in the direct leader and the organization. If we consider our direct effects, this can be done through training managers to increase their trust-related awareness and behaviors, or through organizational development interventions targeting possible antecedents of individual- and organization-directed trust (Shaw, 1997). However, to the extent our findings generalize, in order to increase the effectiveness of such trust-enhancing interventions, they should be combined with organizational fairness-related modifications. On the organization side, this can be done through setting, implementing and monitoring the distributive (e.g. salary and reward allocation) and procedural (overall organizational procedures) policies; correspondingly, individual leaders can be trained to use fairness components that are critical for their subordinates. Indeed, prior research indicates that changes in procedures and policies can influence employee attitudes (Whitener, 2001), while training can increase justice-related behaviors (Skarlicki and Latham, 1996, 1997).\n",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Purpose: - To investigate the antecedents and contingencies of employee role enlargement.\nDesign/methodology/approach: - The hypotheses were tested using hierarchical regression analysis on data obtained by surveying 186 line and administrative employees.\nFindings: - Results indicate that leader- and organization-directed trust are positively related to employees' role enlargement toward individual- and organization-directed citizenship behaviors (OCBOs). In addition, organizational justice moderated the above direct relationships. Specifically, interpersonal justice moderated the relationship between leader-directed trust and role enlargement toward individual-directed citizenship behaviors. Furthermore, procedural justice and distributive justice moderated the relationship between organization-directed trust and role enlargement toward OCBOs, respectively.\nPractical implications: - Practitioners interested in interventions to enlarge the role perception of their employees can use organizational development interventions beyond the enhancement of social exchange factors such as leader- and organization-directed trust. Depending on the desired individual or organizational focus of role enlargement, proper care should be given to fairness-related components such as interpersonal, distributive and procedural justice.\nOriginality/value: - The findings are valuable for those engaged in theory building and testing and for practitioners. From a theoretical perspective, the paper provides support for the interaction between trust and organizational justice and their impact on role enlargement. Practitioners can use these ideas to design organizational development interventions.\n",
"role": "assistant"
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A note on dynamic hedging: Empirical evidence from FTSE-100 and S&P 500 futures markets
|
[
"Futures",
"Basis risk",
"Dynamic hedging",
"FTSE-100",
"S&P 500",
"D8, G1"
] |
[
{
"content": "Summarize the following paper into structured abstract.\n\n1. Introduction: Futures contracts (financial derivatives) affect their profit functions and decision-making processes in very real ways. Empirical studies on hedging with futures markets include Paroush and Wolf (1992), Alghalith (2009, 2006a, 2006b), Mckinnon (1967), Paroush and Wolf (1989), Li and Vukina (1998), Alghalith (2008a), Cita and Lien (1992), Alghalith and Lalloo (2012), among many others.\n2. The estimating equation: Futures contracts involve basis risk, which is the risk that the futures price will deviate from the market price at the delivery time. The dynamics of the spot price are given by:\n3. Empirical results: The model is applied to the FTSE-100 index and Standard & Poor (S&P) 500 index. The data are daily and spans the period February 25th, 2008, to March 14th, 2013, for both indexes[4]. Prices were collected from the Datastream; spot, futures series and basis risk are presented in Figure 1 (FTSE-100) and Figure 2 (S&P 500).\n4. Summary: This paper introduces a dynamic (stochastic) continuous-time hedging model in futures markets by relaxing the statistical-independence assumption between the spot price and basis risk; we extend the recent work by Alghalith and Lalloo (2012). Using spot and futures data from FTSE-100 index and S&P 500 index, we find that the USA and the UK investors, on average, are quite risk averse[5]. We find that an increase in the price volatility reduces the hedged index, while an increase in basis risk reduces the hedged index. We argue that a 1 per cent increase in index volatility leads to a 645.62 (777.07) decrease in FTSE-100 (S&P 500) units. Our approach shows that risk-averse investors should decrease their hedge (i.e. increase their equity allocation) with an increase in index price risk. These results are highly recommended to financial managers and analysts dealing with futures markets, who follow hedging strategies to minimize their risk. Further research should consider:\n",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to empirically test dynamic hedging, using data from the FTSE-100 and Standard & Poor's (S&P) 500 futures indices.\nDesign/methodology/approach: The authors introduce a dynamic continuous-time hedging model in futures markets. The authors further relax the statistical-independence assumption between the spot price and basis risk.\nFindings: The authors show that the investors are, on average, quite risk averse. The authors find that a one unit increase in the price volatility reduces the hedged FTSE-100 (S&P 500) by 645.62 (777.07) units. Similarly, a one unit increase in basis risk reduces the hedged FTSE-100 (S&P 500) by 403.57 (378.54) units. The authors' approach shows that risk-averse investors should decrease their hedge (i.e. increase their equity allocation) with an increase in index price risk.\nPractical implications: These findings are helpful to risk managers dealing with futures markets.\nOriginality/value: The contribution of this paper is that it successfully introduces a dynamic continuous-time hedging model in futures markets.\n",
"role": "assistant"
}
] |
Brand equity's antecedent/consequence relationships in cross-cultural settings
|
[
"Cross cultural studies",
"Brand equity",
"Marketing strategy"
] |
[
{
"content": "Summarize the following paper into structured abstract.\n\n__NO_TITLE__: An executive summary for managers and executive readers can be found at the end of this article.\nIntroduction: Market and competitive pressures in today's domestic marketing environment have challenged practitioners tasked with managing their firms' branded product(s) (Keller, 2003; Contractor, 2007). To help offset these pressures, firms frequently turn to international markets as outlets for their brand(s) (Hsieh and Lindridge, 2005). Although the decision to enter into foreign markets is intuitively logical, firms frequently fail to achieve their performance goals in these markets (Ross et al., 2008).When discussing a firm's success (or failure) in foreign markets, one should consider that a key facet of their brand's success is its brand equity (Brady et al., 2008). Our understanding of brand equity in these markets is inadequate because, at least in part, scholars have been reluctant to conduct studies outside of their home market (Ferraro, 2002). Dant et al. (2008) suggest this has contributed to domestic scholars' and practitioners' knowledge and theories related to foreign markets being based on discussions in the western culture, which often leads practitioners to implement standardized marketing campaigns in cross-cultural settings. Tseng et al. (2007) note this frequently leads to disappointing results. Lin and Lin (2008) capture our need for cross-cultural studies by stating such knowledge is \"... vital for a business to be successful in (a) particular culture ... (while) not having a required level of cultural intelligence could ... be a great hindrance to the success of the businesses\" (p. 37).Social science literatures provide insights which suggest brand equity may have disparate formation and influence on consumers' (re)purchase behaviors in cross-cultural settings. If empirical study supports this view, it would indicate that an emic perspective (each culture is best understood in its own context), as opposed to an etic perspective (potentially generalizable across cultures) is more appropriate for international strategies.To further our understanding of brand equity in the international marketplace, this paper presents an empirical exploratory study that builds upon an antecedent/consequence brand equity model put forth by Broyles et al. (2009). In reflecting on their model and drawing from literatures' discussion of disparities among individuals in cross-cultural settings, this paper asks: \"does the Broyles et al. (2009) antecedent/consequence brand equity model hold up under empirical examination in cross-cultural settings\"?Further, their model reveals there are experiential (the subjective, symbolic, hedonic and psychological facets) and functional (utilitarian, rational and objective facets) (Holbrook and Hirschman, 1982) brand equity elements and antecedents. Some (e.g. Triandis, 1989; Inglehart and Baker, 2000) appear to suggest the experiential and functional aspects have dissimilar significance in cross-cultural settings. An exemplar of such differences is found in literatures' discussion of western and eastern cultures. Social science literatures indicate these disparities between individuals in these cultures stem from the dissimilar teachings of their ancient philosophers, which continue to be reinforced through their educational, religious and legal systems, and level of economic development. The result is that a typical modern westerner has post-materialistic values which drive one's focus to improve their psychological lives through marketable experiences (experiential) (Triandis, 1989; Inglehart and Baker, 2000), while a typical modern easterner has materialistic values that drive their focus to improve the utilitarian (functional) aspect of their lives. Based on these insights we theorize that the experiential facets of brand equity likely have greater significance with individuals in a western culture, while the functional facets likely have greater significance with individuals in an eastern culture.To determine whether there is support for this theory, we offer a study that employed an internationally well-known brand and was conducted with US (i.e. Western) and Chinese (i.e. Eastern) samples. While this study revealed that the Broyles et al. (2009) antecedent/consequence model is robust and holds up in the noted cross-cultural setting, hypotheses testing indicate that some of the study's findings are contradictory to anticipated results, offering new insight into the ongoing standardization versus localization marketing strategy debate (Ryans et al., 2003). The paper closes by discussing the study's potential implications and limitations, and offering future research directions.\nConceptual development: Brand equity\nStudy and hypotheses test results: Respondent and brand selection\nFindings: While the directional path weights between the structural equation model's constructs (shown in Figure 1) are significant at a 95 percent confidence level, the disparate path weights between any two given constructs should not be perceived as being significantly stronger or weaker with either of the groups. Rather, the path weights shown in Figure 1 indicate any given path between the constructs holds up as statistically significant at a 95 percent confidence level with both groups.Rather than present all of the details for all of the hypotheses here, we ask the reader to refer to Table III for a summary of the hypotheses test results. Further, Figure 1 provides the standardized directional path weights between constructs in the structural model for the two participant groups. These path weights were employed for testing the study's hypotheses.As indicated in Table III, the study found that six of the 13 hypotheses failed to be rejected, while seven were rejected. This indicates that some of the social science literatures' suggestions regarding the comparatively dissimilar significance of the experiential and functional aspects of the brand equity phenomenon in cross-cultural settings are statistically supported, while some are not supported.\nDiscussion and concluding thoughts: Recent years have seen notable international scholarly study of marketing topics such as market selection (Brouthers and Nakos, 2005); patterns and pace of multinational corporations' penetration of foreign markets (Buckley and Casson, 2007); and, the relationship between international diversification and performance (Hennart, 2007). However, literature lacks in-depth theoretical conceptualization or examination of brand equity's formation and influence on consumers' (re)purchase behavior in cross-cultural settings. While this study provides new findings about brand equity across cultures, perhaps one of its most notable outcomes is that it demonstrates that cross-cultural studies of topics as vague as brand equity, and with respondents that are significantly dissimilar are viable (Liu and McClure, 2001).With respect to whether the antecedent/consequence brand equity model shown in Figure 1 holds up in cross-cultural settings, the study suggests it does hold up with both sample groups. For example, Table II and Figure 1 depict that the measures and the model's constructs and their relationship paths hold up with Americans and Chinese. Thus, the brand equity model depicted in Figure 1 is supported for each group of respondents. While this suggests that the model may have generalized applicability in cross-cultural settings, it must be noted that this study's findings may not be generalizable beyond the age and socio-economic groups employed here.Regarding the study's theory that brand equity's functional aspects are more significant with Chinese while its experiential aspects are more significant with Americans, the study found mixed results. From a perspective of statistical significance, Figure 1 depicts that the functional antecedent of reliability has stronger influence on brand equity's functional elements of perceived quality and performance with the Chinese respondents. In contrast, it portrays that the functional brand equity element of performance has greater influence on brand equity's consequences for Americans.With respect to brand equity's experiential aspects, the study found that behavioral loyalty has stronger significance with respect to (re)purchase behavior for Americans, while it has stronger influence with regards to perceived quality and imagery for Chinese. Similarly, the experiential antecedent of attitude has stronger significance for Chinese with respect to performance, but it has greater significance with regards to quality and resonance for Americans. Thus, this study does not support the theory that brand equity's experiential aspects have greater significance for Americans while the functional aspects have greater import for Chinese.Strategic implications\n",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Purpose: - This paper aims to test whether an antecedent/consequence brand equity model developed with Americans holds up with Chinese, and to examine whether brand equity's functional (utilitarian) and experiential (emotive) facets have (dis)similar significance in a cross-cultural setting.\nDesign/methodology/approach: - The survey was administered to US and Chinese samples, with data analyzed using structural equation modeling to test hypotheses developed from literatures.\nFindings: - The study found evidence that the model does hold up in a cross-cultural setting, and that some of brand equity's functional and experiential antecedents and components have dissimilar significance with the two sample groups.\nResearch limitations/implications: - Only one brand was employed; the survey was completed with volunteer US and Chinese university students vs a broader range of age groups; and the dissimilar nuances of the English and Chinese languages may lead to divergent understandings of the measures.\nPracticable implications: - The study provides a foundation for future cross-cultural brand equity research and sheds empirical insight that, contrary to social sciences literatures' suggestions, the similar significance of brand equity and its antecedents are such that firms may benefit from employing standardized marketing strategies in cross-cultural settings.\nOriginality/value: - The study is a benchmark comparative cross-cultural brand equity study with the vastly disparate US and Chinese consumers.\n",
"role": "assistant"
}
] |
Developing foresight through the evaluation and construction of vision statements: an experiential exercise
|
[
"Leadership",
"Experiential learning",
"Future thinking",
"Mental time travel",
"Vision statement",
"Vision"
] |
[
{
"content": "Summarize the following paper into structured abstract.\n\nDeveloping foresight through the evaluation and construction of vision statements: The past cannot be changed. The future is yet in your power. - Unknown.\nOverview of the exercises - developing skills to evaluate and craft vision statements: The aim of the first exercise is to familiarize students with the key characteristics of strong vision statements and to provide them with the opportunity to use this knowledge, by assessing the degree to which each characteristic is reflected in the vision statements from six well-established organizations. The material related to these characteristics is derived from two frameworks, developed by Kirkpatrick and colleagues (Baum et al., 1998; Kirkpatrick, 2016, 2017) and Carton and Lucas (2018). More specifically, Kirkpatrick's work outlined four required characteristics (clarity, future focus, abstractness, challenge and idealism) and three optional characteristics (brevity, uniqueness, achievability/definition of success) of strong vision statements (2016, 2017). Additionally, in a recent review by Carton and Lucas (2018), the authors identified four key characteristics - values, specificity, imagery and achievability - that align well with those outlined by Kirkpatrick (2016) and previous research (van Knippenberg and Stam, 2014). This first exercise, therefore, serves to provide an introduction to the characteristics of strong vision statements, as outlined in the literature, by having students use each component to evaluate a list of existing corporate visions.\nDevelopment of and experiences with, the activity: Originally designed in the context of a specialized graduate leadership class taught by the first author, the activity has also been used in two other courses - namely, a different graduate skills-development class and an undergraduate class on organizational behavior - taught by the same author. Given its focus on vision content, it could easily be used as a tool to outline specific aspects of corporate strategy and leadership vision in other courses in which the topics of organizational vision and/or visionary leadership are covered (e.g. strategy, leadership) at the undergraduate or graduate levels.\nDescription of the exercise: Learning outcomes\nMaterials: Prior to class, instructors should:\nRunning and debriefing the exercise: An overview of the steps of the activity and the approximate time required for each, is presented in Table 1. While the two exercises can be completed in a 90-min class - assuming that the background readings have been assigned to participants ahead of time - it is also possible to truncate the amount of time required for the activity by asking students to complete Exercise 1 beforehand. Indeed, this adapted format was used in a 75-min undergraduate class to great effect, such that students worked on the first exercise prior to the meeting and then completed Exercise 2 and all discussions in class.\nEffectiveness of the activity: Data were collected from 87 students (59% women), averaging 25.13 (SD = 9.12) years of age, who participated in the exercises in three different classes (two graduate sections and one undergraduate section) at a large comprehensive university. To examine their perceptions related to the effectiveness of the two exercises, we asked students about their overall evaluations of the activity and whether their learning was consistent with our learning objectives. More specifically, respondents indicated their agreement with six statements (sample item: \"overall, the exercise helped me to learn about vision statements\"), using a five-point scale (where 1 = strongly disagree to 5 = strongly agree). The responses, summarized in Table 2 below, indicate that students were in general agreement about the ability of the exercise to deliver on the key learning objectives around developing vision statements.\nVariations: Given that the activity is separated into two exercises, it would be possible to adapt its delivery in a number of ways to accommodate time constraints. As described earlier in the paper, instructors could streamline the activity by assigning the first exercise to be completed before class, to focus only on the experiential component (Exercise 2) in person. Moreover, though the exercises were designed as a set, instructors could elect to incorporate but one of the activities in a given class, depending on the learning objectives of the course and the time available for the exercise. Additionally, the activity could easily be modified for an online course by having students use collaborative word processing and video chat software.\nConclusion: We present a pair of exercises designed to provide students with a comprehensive understanding of organizational vision statements. Drawing on the characteristics of effective vision statements outlined in the leadership and strategic management literatures, students first reflect on the importance of visions, before working in small groups to create a compelling and effective organizational vision using foresight and futures literacy strategies. Overall, the experiences running the exercise and data collected from participants (N = 87) suggests that the activity is effective at helping students to develop a stronger understanding of the process and importance of developing an organizational vision statement.\n",
"role": "user"
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{
"content": "Purpose: Scholars and practitioners generally acknowledge the crucial importance of visions in motivating and inspiring organizational change. In this article, we describe a two-part activity based on visionary leadership scholarship and theory designed to teach students to cultivate foresight and consider future possibilities through the organizational vision statement development process.\nDesign/methodology/approach: Using an experiential design, the exercise draws on several empirically validated techniques to encourage foresight and future thinking, to help students place themselves in the shoes of the chief executive officer of a hypothetical organization and use dramaturgical character development strategies to craft the vision statements that they will champion.\nFindings: The exercise has been used in three different business courses (N = 87) and has been well received.\nOriginality/value: The content of the exercise is adaptable to a variety of courses in which leadership and vision are focal topics - such as organizational behavior, strategy and leadership - and could also be modified for an online classroom setting.\n",
"role": "assistant"
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] |
Network visualisation as a way to the web usage analysis
|
[
"Web usage mining",
"Social network analysis",
"Information visualisation",
"Information consumption",
"Webometrics",
"Web sites",
"Web site design"
] |
[
{
"content": "Summarize the following paper into structured abstract.\n\nIntroduction: The study of the usage that a web surfer makes of a website, the pages that they visit and how they behave is one of the most important questions that the online marketing sector needs to answer in order to fulfil customer demands (Lee et al., 2000; da Cruz et al., 2004). From market-basket analysis, in which association rules are applied to relate products among them and between client profiles, the study of user needs has grown more and more due to the existence of a huge amount of information on user transactions, and to the incessant need to know the behavioural habits of customers. In this sense, web transaction logs, where the footprint of the user's web navigation is engraved, are the quantitative registers that give most information about the behaviour of website users and their informational needs (Catledge and Pitkow, 1995). Like a shopping ticket, web log files constitute a record of the user's activity and are able to observe information consumption, user groups, task achievement and design failures. Other than user tests (Nielsen, 1993), web usage mining is the only way to understand the needs of users in a web environment and to check the running of a website (Cooley et al., 1997, 1999).The visual representation of quantitative data makes it possible to obtain a rapid understanding of the reality shown. It may help to in the detection of patterns and in the systematisation of complex relationship among various data types (Chen, 2004). Regarding web log analysis, network graphs allow the presentation of frequent navigational paths, web page clusters and the topological structures of a website, which makes possible decision-making on the management of websites, search engine optimisation (SEO) strategies and future development lines. The structure of the website from the viewpoint of users, through their clicks, shows how they access a site and explore its contents. However, these visualisations would be just a graphical view without the support of social network analysis (SNA) techniques (de Nooy et al., 2005). These measurements define the global structure of the network as the value of each webpage in it, which helps to understand how a site is used.\nRelated research: The huge size of web log files and the need to process and to clean this data before a satisfactory analysis demands the employment of advanced data processing techniques. Web usage mining (Cooley et al., 1997, 1999), a type of data mining focused on the analysis of web log files, provides tools to analyse these files, making it possible to identify and locate users, tracking each web session's length and duration (Pitkow, 1997; He et al., 2002), forecasting the user's navigation path (Nanopoulos et al., 2001; Yang et al., 2002) and automatically improving the organisation and presentation of websites (Perkowitz and Etzioni, 1998, 1999). This processing technique has been widely used to group web pages according to the navigational preferences of the users, disclosing semantic relationships between them (Zhu et al., 2004) and introducing new clustering methodologies (Cadez et al., 2003).Visualisation of the website structure as a way of improving content management and design was suggested in 1994. Pitkow and Bharat (1994) proposed WebViz as a 3D graphical tool in order to represent the hierarchical structure of a website, pointing out the web pages visited. Since then, several works have presented different visualisation proposals. Munzner and Burchard (1995) introduced a hyperbolic space in the website structure representation, while Frecon and Smith (1998) developed Webpath, an application that used three dimensions to display the browsing history. Hong and Landay (2001), through the WebQuilt software, presented a graphical way to rebuild the route of the most frequent paths for a given task. Erbacher (2001, 2002) presented glyph-based network graphs to monitor web traffic. Visual software tools and data mining algorithms have also been integrated in web management packages. Minarik and Dymacek (2008) suggested NetFlow Visualizer as an integrated pack to visualise the traffic flows of an organisation at different levels. Other works are more focused on the utility of the visualisation as a way to improve website usage rather than the design of visual metaphors. Thus, Chi (2002) utilised traffic visualisation as a way to detect web design anomalies, and Ting et al. (2004) developed visual graphs to detect and classify browsing patterns. Meanwhile, other authors explored the design aspect of this type of graph (Fry, 2004).SNA has been used to study the relational properties of web pages. Different authors have analysed the relationship between web architecture and the clicks network, finding that the navigational process does not follow a random walk, as PageRank assumes (Meiss et al., 2008), while others claim that the topology of a website is instrumental in guiding users through the site (Borges and Levene, 2006). Several structural models such as Markov chains (Eirinaki and Vazirgiannis, 2007), learning automata (Forsati and Meybodi, 2010) or other probabilistic models (Chakrabarti et al., 2009) have been applied to study users browsing a website in order to improve their functionalities of the website or to plan recommendation services. However, although some works have applied social network measures (Gloor and Zhoa, 2004), there are no studies that have systematically employed social network indicators alongside network visualisations.\nObjectives: This work intends to show the utility of the social network analysis (SNA) and its visualisation as a diagnostic tool for the study of web usage data. Thanks to the visualisation of paths through websites we can rebuild the web structure according to users' behaviour, to detect design flaws and to suggest new ways to develop the web service. We propose adding this type of analysis to the evaluation of website performance and SEO strategies. The following research questions are proposed:* Is it possible to use the SNA indicators on web log files systematically as a way to analyse and to understand the main topological characteristics of a navigational network?* Is visualisation of the browsing patterns a suitable inspection method to describe the use of a website and to complement structural analysis?* Could visual graphs and network measures be important tools that support decision making in web management and SEO strategies?\nResearch design: Web log transactions processing\nResults: The resulting navigational network shows small-world properties, as its clustering coefficient (C=0.194) is slightly higher than the expected for a random network (C=0.003), although its average path length (l=4.06) is slightly high (Watts and Strogatz, 1998). Both the centrality InDegree (g=-4.32) and OutDegree (g=-5.19) frequencies distribution follow a power law, a trend that allows us to state that this network owns scale-free properties as well (Barabasi et al., 2000). The slope coefficients (g) were calculated from Gephi 0.7. They can be extracted from Statistics>Degree Power Law>Directed.Navigational graph\nDiscussion: The employment of social network measurements makes it possible not only to observe the main topological characteristics of the navigational network, but also to identify important web pages in the browsing process. From a topological view, the navigational network presents small-world properties because its average clustering coefficient is larger than the same for a random network (C=0.194). This means that there are transversal links that directly relate remote pages. This characteristic may emerge from search engine sites and the main pages of the site, which link the great majority of web pages, increasing connectivity and web traffic. The skewed distribution of the degree of centrality indices confirms the presence of scale-free network properties as well. According to this, there are a few pages that receive most of the traffic, such as \"/top3000.asp.htm\" and \"/index.html\", which could be considered navigational pages because they distribute the web traffic to the rest of pages. Meanwhile, the remaining web pages, with regional/national rankings or information about each university, scarcely count a couple of visits because they are the pages with the largest content, located in the depths of the site.According to the role or importance of each page in the network, pages with a high InDegree centrality may be consider as the main gateways to the website and the pages with the most popular contents, while the most OutDegree pages are mainly navigational pages that share out the traffic to content pages. Betweenness centrality shows the internal gateway pages that mediate between contents pages and navigational pages. These indicators allow to measure and to point the structural property of each node and precise if they conform to the assigned tasks in the web architecture besides to identify key pages in the web design.The graphical representation comes to complement this structural analysis, offering a visual view of the navigational map with the addition of qualitative variables that enrich the picture. Through a visual inspection, important aspects of web site structure and browsing habits have been observed, such as the double structure of the two language versions; the central position of search engines as hubs that distribute access to every page; how the pages are grouped by their thematic and structural relationships; and which pages are less requested through search engine queries or are less visible. Unlike other studies, in which the visualisations are focused on user behaviour (Hong and Landay, 2001; Herder and Weinreich, 2005) or on the technical aspect of the visualisation of large log files (Chen et al., 2004; Youssefi et al., 2004), the navigational map of this study is used as a way to explore the surfing patterns of the main users, the topological structure of the site, and the site's design faults. In this sense, the works of Chi et al. (2000) and Chi (2002) are in line with our study because they interpret visualisation as a tool for decision-making. Through a longitudinal view of web sessions they extracted conclusions on the success or failure of certain web designs in Xerox web. Ting et al. (2004) implemented a recommendation system by means of the visualisation of web patterns.On the other hand, the query graph has shown that the principal gateways to access to the site are the index pages, perhaps due to the most frequent queries asking for the title of the site. However, there are few queries that search for specific sections. In this sense, we could highlight the queries about the European ranking or the Spanish section.Limitations\nConclusions and further research: The implementation of SNA indicators has made it possible to describe the topological structure of the navigational network and to observe the main structural characteristics, which has allowed us to define the role of each type of page in the network and to explain how the browsing flows are distributed across the website. We can conclude that the systematic use of these measurements is not only a suitable proposal but also would be advisable in order to describe the latent structure of a website and to suggest new improvements.The results suggest that the use of network visualisations is an appropriate and recommended inspection method to explore the behaviour of the users of a website. The navigational graph has shown a picture of the website structure through the route of the users across the web pages. Furthermore, this graphic representation has made it possible to suggest improvements and to detect anomalies such the reclassification of the \"Top 100 universities by continent\" pages or to state the secondary role of the Spanish language version. This allows us to conclude that both the navigational and the query graphs are suitable methods to describe the use of a website and to complement the structural analysis.We conclude that the use of network graphs and SNA techniques could be an important and valuable tool to help in decision-making and advising regarding website construction, design and management. These techniques are highly recommended due to the simplicity of the data processing and the understandability of their results, which readily allow interpretation of how is running a website. Finally, query processing and graphing would be a good tool in the study and analysis of user needs and how users come to a website as well as helping with online marketing and SEO strategies.\n",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Purpose: - The aim of this paper is to present network visualisation as a way to analyse and to test the design of a website.\nDesign/methodology/approach: - A network graph of the access to the webometrics.info site from its web logs was analysed. Several graphs (navigational and query graphs) with different added variables were explored. SNA indicators were used to extract the main findings of these networks.\nFindings: - The results show the double structure of the two language versions, the central position of the search engines as hubs that distribute the access to every page, how the pages are grouped by their thematic and structural relationships, and which pages are less requested through search engines queries or are less visible.\nResearch limitations/implications: - The results are based on the web performance of only one website and therefore generalisation has to be cautious.\nOriginality/value: - The application of network visualisation and SNA indicators allows to explore the navigation of a website by users and to test how it is used. The graph representation makes possible an intuitive way to observe the structure of a website, the behaviour of users and information consumption.\n",
"role": "assistant"
}
] |
Young consumers' responses to suspected covert and overt blog marketing
|
[
"Blog marketing",
"Blogger credibility",
"Brand recommendation",
"Covert marketing",
"Overt marketing"
] |
[
{
"content": "Summarize the following paper into structured abstract.\n\n1. Introduction: The ever-present clutter of advertising messages and increased consumer cynicism towards advertising (Ashley and Leonard, 2009; Rotfeld, 2008) have induced companies to look for alternative ways to reach consumers. Firms have been encouraged to turn their attention to social media, where consumers spend increasing amounts of time (Barger and Labrecque, 2013; Pring, 2012; von Duivenvoorde, 2012), particularly blogs, because firms can reach a large audience efficiently through them (Jones et al., 2009; Wu et al., 2013). Social media, including blogs, are important sources of consumer decision making and measuring the exact effects of these new media, particularly negative effects (Hoffman and Fodor, 2010), is a research priority (Kalampokis et al., 2013; Schoen et al., 2013).\n2. Theoretical background and hypotheses: Blogs are a popular form of user-generated social media. Consumers blog to keep in contact with family and friends, share hobbies, promote causes, and interact with blog readers (Sepp et al., 2011). McQuarrie et al. (2013) suggest that through blogs, regular consumers can become powerful influencers of tastes and acquire an audience with which they maintain relationships. Many blogs are intended for leisure (Cox and Blake, 2010), but these become interesting for marketers when their following increases. Although consumers react differently to recommendations by experts and novices (Chiou et al., 2014), amateurs can also become quite influential. Although little research has studied the effectiveness of blog marketing, the results so far are encouraging for marketers (Hsu et al., 2013; Kalampokis et al., 2013; Onishi and Manchanda, 2012). For example, it has been shown that blogs are an effective marketing channel when compared with online magazines (Colliander and Dahlen, 2011), that opinion-leader blogs add to the effectiveness of traditional media (Ko et al., 2008), that blogs increase the sales of movies (Onishi and Manchanda, 2012), and that travel stories in blogs affect consumers' travel decisions (Hsiao et al., 2013).\n3. Methods and results: An experiment was deemed appropriate for studying the causal effects of covert and overt marketing on consumer perceptions of blogger credibility and behavioural intentions. A food blog was chosen because they are among the most highly read (\n4. Discussion: Because the results of previous studies were contradictory, in this study we investigated young consumers' reactions to overt and suspected covert brand marketing in food blogs.\n",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to study the responses of young consumers to suspected covert and overt product-brand recommendations in a blog.\nDesign/methodology/approach: Experimental design was applied to investigate the effect of covert and overt marketing on young consumers' perceptions of blogger credibility and their behavioural intentions.\nFindings: Overt marketing had a negative effect on behavioural intentions, such as future interest in the blogger, intention to engage in word-of-mouth, and purchase intention. Covert marketing did not affect the intended behaviour. Neither covert nor overt marketing influenced the blogger's credibility.\nResearch limitations/implications: The study was delimited to a small sample; one blog, one type of product recommendation, and a well-known brand. Young, well-educated consumers with experience in reading blogs may be able to filter the brand recommendations and focus on the content of the blog.\nPractical implications: This study has implications for bloggers, companies, and policy makers. Although overt marketing is the most open and the recommended form of blog marketing, the study showed that overt marketing has negative effects. Therefore, bloggers need to carefully consider how they present a sponsorship.\nOriginality/value: The study makes three important contributions. First, it answers the call for research on consumer reactions to covert (deceptive) and overt marketing tactics. Second, it contributes to blog marketing research by studying a case of suspected covert marketing where consumers do not know whether the blog is sponsored or not. Third, the study contributes to knowledge around young consumers, demonstrating that covert and overt tactics do not affect blogger credibility.\n",
"role": "assistant"
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] |
Effects of complaint behaviour and service recovery satisfaction on consumer intentions to repurchase on the internet
|
[
"Service recovery",
"Online purchase behaviour",
"Consumer satisfaction",
"Complaint behaviour"
] |
[
{
"content": "Summarize the following paper into structured abstract.\n\n1. Introduction: Electronic commerce, especially sales in business-to-consumer markets, continues to increase remarkably. In Europe, for example, online sales have increased more than 10 per cent annually, and similar trends are expected at least through 2015, matching the growth rate of online sales in the US (Forrester Research, 2011). Several major European retailers have transformed into online-only providers, such as Woolworths in the UK and Wehkamp in the Netherlands. The sustainable growth of this channel demands that consumers who adopt the internet for their purchases continue using it (Devaraj et al., 2006; Fang et al., 2011; Huang, 2008; Srinivasan et al., 2002; Yen, 2010), which suggests the need to investigate consumers' choices of and loyalty to the internet (e.g. Gensler et al., 2012).\n2. Research objective: Extant literature on traditional, offline retailing (e.g. Dunning et al., 2004; Lariviere and Van den Poel, 2005) indicates that even a dissatisfied customer is willing to repurchase from a retailer if the complaint is handled well (Schneider and Bowen, 1999; Maxham, 2001). That is, effective service recovery actions can win a consumer back - and even may make the customer more loyal than before the negative experience, which reflects the service recovery paradox. Some recent studies examine service failures and recovery in online settings (Chang et al., 2012; Pizzutti and Fernandes, 2010; Sousa and Voss, 2009; Wang et al., 2011), but generally without addressing consumer complaint behaviour or the service recovery paradox (De Matos et al., 2007). Pressing questions for online retail channel thus remain unanswered. What happens to dissatisfied and complaining online customers? Do they intend to buy online again or not? Does the service recovery paradox hold for online purchase behaviours?\n3. Conceptual development: 3.1 Effects of service failure and complaint handling\n4. Research methodology: 4.1 Survey description\n5. Results: The complaint behaviour groups vary substantially in size. Most respondents (83.8 per cent, n=2,464) indicated no negative experiences with online purchases, whereas the group of silent complainants was relatively small (1.5 per cent, n=45), consistent with previous research (Holloway and Beatty, 2003). The number of internal complainants (13.1 per cent, n=386) was far greater than the number of external complainants (1.5 per cent, n=46). Within the group of internal complaints, most consumers were satisfied with the firm's response (9.8 per cent, n=288); a smaller group was unsatisfied (3.3 per cent, n=98). Among external complaints, the two subgroups were closer in size, though the group of satisfied consumers (0.9 per cent, n=27) was slightly larger than the group of dissatisfied consumers (0.6 per cent, n=19).\n6. Discussion: This study provides insights into how consumers' dissatisfaction with online purchases affects their future intentions to buy using the internet channel. In particular, we show that repurchase intentions depend on complaint behaviour. We distinguish groups of consumers on the basis of whether they had negative experiences with online purchases, complained (with the company or elsewhere), and were satisfied with the complaint handling. We find notable differences across these consumer groups with respect to their intentions to repurchase through the internet. Consumers with negative experiences who complained and were satisfied with the complaint handling expressed higher repurchase intentions than consumers with no reason to complain (satisfied customers) and consumers who failed to complain about their negative experiences (silent complainants).\n7. Conclusion: 7.1 Managerial implications\n",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to investigate the impact of complaint behaviour and service recovery satisfaction on consumer intentions to repurchase through internet channels.\nDesign/methodology/approach: Using survey data from large consumer samples from 15 European countries, the authors classify consumers according to: whether they had negative experiences with online purchases, whether they complained, and whether they were satisfied with the complaint handling. A logistic regression analysis assesses the effects of these experiences on repurchase intentions.\nFindings: Remarkable differences arise among the consumers with respect to intentions to repurchase on the internet. Consumers with negative experiences who complained expressed higher repurchase intentions than consumers with no reason to complain and also than consumers who had negative experiences but did not complain. Yet the highest repurchase intentions arose among consumers who complained and expressed satisfaction with the complaint handling, in support of the service recovery paradox in an online setting.\nOriginality/value: This project is one of the first empirical studies of the consequences of dissatisfaction and complaints related to online purchase behaviour.\n",
"role": "assistant"
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] |
Making sense of board effectiveness: a socio-cognitive perspective
|
[
"Sensemaking",
"Decision making",
"Cognition",
"Boardroom effectiveness",
"Board functionality",
"Team mental model"
] |
[
{
"content": "Summarize the following paper into structured abstract.\n\n__NO_TITLE__: Board of directors and board effectiveness have been enduring topics in business literature as well as popular press; however, there seems to be no consensus as to the efficacy of boards in influencing firm performance (Minichilli et al., 2012; Payne et al., 2009; Dalton et al., 1998) or what might be an appropriate measure of board effectiveness, i.e. strategic outcomes or financial performance. Nor is there any agreement about what might be the primary function of the board (i.e. monitoring or resource providing) or even about which aspect of boards is of importance (e.g. demographics, insider-outsider composition, leadership structure, or board dynamics). The fact that practitioners and regulators are leading implementations of \"ideal\" board mechanisms without sufficient evidence or even academic validity of the underlying concepts (Daily et al., 1999; Dalton, 2004) has raised the issue of board effectiveness beyond the level of intellectual curiosity. The spate of recent corporate governance scandals and failures indicate that these practitioner-designed mechanisms might fail to forestall the very incidents that they were purported to prevent. Enron, Worldcom and Lehman Brothers have been the largest ever bankruptcies in corporate America, and all of these corporations had boards assessed to be effective by industry standards right up to their downfall. Therefore it is timely to investigate the mechanisms of boardroom effectiveness in greater detail and to seek clarity in assessing the process and the underlying theoretical concepts of what constitutes an effective board.\nLiterature review: defining the domain: Board effectiveness\nSensemaking as a social decision-making process: Sensemaking has been typically utilized in an organizational context to mean that process that occurs when members confront unanticipated or non-routine events, issues or actions (Gioia and Thomas, 1996; Weick, 1988, 1993, 1995). Weick (1993, p. 635) argues that sensemaking is, in effect, \"an ongoing accomplishment that emerges from efforts to create order and make retrospective sense of what occurs\". Some researchers (Gioia et al., 2002; Gioia and Mehra, 1996), however, argue that the sensemaking process is also applicable for making plans or decisions of future events. Thus, sensemaking is fundamentally a social process of social construction in which individuals interpret their environment in and through interactions with others, constructing accounts that allow them to comprehend the world and act collectively (Maitlis, 2005; Sackmann, 1991; Weick, 1993; Weick and Roberts, 1993). Clearly sensemaking is, then, a social process concerned with decision-making that provides \"clear questions and clear answers\" (Weick, 1993, p. 636) that both precede and follow a decision-making process and involve both leader sensegiving (Bartunek et al., 1999; Gioia and Thomas, 1996) as well as member sensegiving (Dutton and Ashford, 1993; Dutton et al., 1997; Westley, 1990).\nCognitive model as indicator of collective function: I utilize the construct of team cognition as a product, i.e. a shared mental model by a team (Salas and Fiore, 2004, p. 235), which might not only explain the complexity of team processes, but also may be of use in predicting team performance based on the metrics used to explain team processes (Cannon-Bowers and Salas, 2001). In a critical examination of the construct of team mental models, Klimoski and Mohammed (1994, p. 429) conclude that this construct can bring explanatory power to theories of team performance and offer a framework that includes an interplay between team decision-making processes and team mental models as predictive of team performance. Klimoski and Mohammed (1994, p. 431) also stress the linkage of effects of team composition to the existence of team mental models while acknowledging that other factors like communication also influence the development of team mental models. They also stress that team mental models are a group or team level construct (Klimoski and Mohammed, 1994, p. 432), unlike the organizational level phenomenon proposed by Weick and Roberts (1993), and should be utilized in terms of a specific task (function), technology, or training of a team (see Weick and Roberts, 1993)[3]. Other researchers (Cannon and Edmondson, 2001; Ensley and Pearce, 2001; Mathieu et al., 2005; Mohammed and Dumville, 2001; Rentsch and Klimoski, 2001) further develop and test the concept of team shared mental models or schemas as team cognition and the interplay with team processes in predicting team effectiveness and performance. As the focus here is limited to only one aspect, i.e. the functionality of the board, and as boards unlike other teams or workgroups, do not usually interact beyond this singular aspect and only meet episodically and under time and scope constraints, the concern that the content of team cognition may form with respect to a wide variety of other (non-functionality) team-related issues (Cannon-Bowers et al., 1993) is less applicable when studying cognition of a board as a team.\nThe socio-cognitive framework: Consistent with recent literature (Maharaj, 2009), I look beyond the usual demographic measures and propose that the interplay between the decision-making process of a board and the cognitive model of the board will predict the effectiveness of the board as a team, as per the general model depicted at Figure 1. The decision-making process of the board will mediate the board's cognitive model-effectiveness relationship, while the board's cognitive model will also moderate the decision making-effectiveness relationship.\nResearch propositions: The level to which the predictor constructs (namely, leader sensegiving, member sensegiving, monitoring cognitive congruence, and resource providing cognitive congruence) tend to be high or low will define the level of the estimated construct, i.e. board effectiveness as the outcome. I elaborate on each of the decision-making process types individually.\nResearch and managerial implications: This study offers a theoretically grounded model that links team mental models with decision-making processes to assess board effectiveness. The proposed model is exploratory in nature; thus, future studies will be required to operationalize, test, and determine the contextual nature of the mechanisms of this model. As the conceptual model assesses the type of decision-making process by the board member and their team and task-based cognitive model as well as board effectiveness, the operationalization would need board members and board chairs filling out survey questionnaire that assesses each of these constructs. The board members and Board chair/CEO will be asked to reflect on one particular strategic decision in the recent past when addressing all the questions that assess the three constructs. As proposed in the Forbes and Milliken (1999) study, these constructs need to be considered to be latent constructs and thus the responses to survey questions can be utilised by a structural modeling software (e.g. EQS, LISREL, AMOS, PLS) to develop and empirically assess the proposed model.\nLimitations: A concern in this study is the possibility that the conceptually different constructs of decision-making processes, cognitive model, and effectiveness constructs might possibly be attributes of the same latent variable, and thus these constructs might be so close together that such an analysis might indeed become a regress of reductionism (Pfeffer, 1983). I argue that these constructs involve separate settings, and are built on distinctly different premises and theoretic underpinnings, and thus conceptually are distinct and, when assessed together, will enable clarity in understanding the board dynamics. Future studies might operationalize and test these constructs to assess the validity of the socio-cognitive model.\n",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Purpose: This paper aims to investigate a team dynamics based approach to assess board effectiveness, namely the interplay between boardroom decision-making processes and the board members' cognitive mental models.\nDesign/methodology/approach: A socio-cognitive perspective is utilized for analyzing board processes and determining board effectiveness. Utilizing the concepts of team mental models and sensemaking, a theoretically grounded model of board effectiveness is developed, wherein the propositions predict the causality and effect of the socio-cognitive and sensemaking processes on board effectiveness.\nFindings: The proposed model is able to analyze the relationship among the different decision-making processes and members' cognitive models as determinants of board effectiveness, wherein the board's decision making process mediates the board's cognitive model - effectiveness relationship, while the board's cognitive model moderates the decision process - effectiveness relationship.\nResearch limitations/implications: The conceptual model advances a rationale that might explain the mixed or modest findings in literature on the relationship between board demographics, dynamics and effectiveness.\nPractical implications: The model allows practitioners and policy makers an alternative mechanism to assess board effectiveness, that is able to not only integrate the demographic, diversity and dynamics related measures, but also enables a clear understanding of the cognitive influences on board decision making and effectiveness.\nOriginality/value: The conceptual model encompasses most of the relevant constructs and findings of previous studies and offers a parsimonious yet holistic understanding of the boardroom mechanisms that might determine board effectiveness.\n",
"role": "assistant"
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New media-supported learning today and tomorrow: recommendations for the next generation of education and training concepts supported by new learning media
|
[
"Electronics industry",
"Learning",
"Europe",
"Vocational training",
"Learning methods"
] |
[
{
"content": "Summarize the following paper into structured abstract.\n\n__NO_TITLE__: The following discussion and conclusions result from a large-scale project which reviewed all European eLearning projects within the framework of the Leonardo da Vinci programme. - The purpose of this programme is, among others, to encourage innovation across Europe within vocational and educational training (VET) across all existing and future target groups in this field. The results of monitoring have been and are being intensively discussed by the European Commission and in EU member states, and they have been presented to participants of the 2005 International Conference and Exposition of the American Society for Training and Development (ASTD) (see www.astd.org), which took place in Orlando (FL).\nFocal point of discussion: The research team considered it particularly important to find out whether the projects approach eLearning more as a consumer product or consider it as a framework for distance and integrative learning among peers (eCollaboration). Along these lines, it had to be considered whether is the learner or the technology that is the centrepiece of the project.The monitoring framework was one which stimulated discussion of the particular factors affecting the learning environment, such as the learning setting, the social situation, and also the particular requirements placed on the learning facilitator within the context of the project.The information gathering and research was undertaken by a project team of five subject-matter experts from Denmark, Hungary, Slovakia, Great Britain and Germany.In total, the first phase of the thematic monitoring examined 149 projects from throughout Europe. The project promoters from the 149 eLearning projects were drawn from 24 European countries, each one with at least three partner countries and sometimes as many as 25 and more.\nTarget groups of eLearning: The thematic monitoring of European eLearning projects showed that employees seem to be part of the favourite target group of the monitored Leonardo da Vinci eLearning projects - over 41 percent of the projects are targeted towards this group.Other target groups of eLearning projects are managers and entrepreneurs (21 percent), teachers and trainers (17 percent), and students and pupils (12 percent).Among the managers, a particular focus is on managers working in small and mid-sized enterprises (SMEs) and managers of start-up companies, while the target group of students and pupils includes students in vocational training schools (for example in the German Dual System), and trainees preparing for a job.Just 3 percent of the eLearning projects are focused on physically handicapped people and less than 1 percent on those who are socially disadvantaged.\nContent and subject fields of eLearning: Economics and management (21 percent - including different commercial fields and at very different levels), training in technology (29 percent - including training for engineers), language training (20 percent - including language training for new target groups, such as forestry workers) are the main subjects addressed by the eLearning projects. Medicine is a growing subject field (5 percent - including programmes for education in first aid), targeted towards doctors, nurses and medical technicians.\nFocus on learner orientation and the lack of it: The main idea behind learner orientation is - in my view - that the development of learning processes using eLearning as a learning tool should start with the learner himself. In other words, the EU monitoring team was interested in the question as to whether the developers of learning processes succeeded in the reversal of the more common technology-driven development schema: Learning media - Learning environment - Categories of learning - Learning objectives - Learner to a schema driven by the idea of learner orientation: Learner - Learning objectives - Categories of learning - Learning environment - Learning media. This means that instead of starting with the development of technically efficient learning media and looking at the very end for the learners who would be willing and able to use it, the projects should start with the learner himself as the normal case. This requires primary consideration of the needs of learners, of the learner's learning biography, of the learner's aims in learning, of learning content that reflects the interests of the learner, and of the question whether eLearning is more motivating for the learner than traditional learning methods, etc. This focus on the learner should lead to con-sideration of the following issues in developing learning systems (Dichanz and Ernst, 2002):* learner-oriented eLearning systems should offer self-testing opportunities so that learner can find his/her position within the actual learning process;* learner-oriented eLearning systems should be flexible and allow methodological variations for different learning groups;* learner-oriented eLearning systems should provide an information platform to the learner which allows for reflection on his or her position within the learning process in order to develop personal learning strategies;* learner-oriented eLearning systems should take into account that the learning biography of each learner is much more important to the success of the learning process than the technological possibilities of steering the learning process; and* learner-oriented processes, especially the learning processes of adults, should allow for the greatest degree of individual flexibility, since the learning processes of adults are more or less self-guided processes.Learner orientation or \"starting with the learner\" has to change our thinking about eLearning in a very basic manner: While thinking on eLearning in the past has concentrated mostly on technological issues, taking into account fundamental questions such as:* How can we provide reasonably priced training \"just in time\", anytime and anywhere?* How can we determine the degree of learning success in the least complicated manner?* How can learning processes be optimally administered?It can be no longer ignored that in order to make eLearning successful there is a growing need to discuss the quality of the learning process itself. This \"new\" thinking on eLearning also implies new questions, such as (Dichanz and Ernst, 2002):* Are goals actually being pursued that are in the interest of the learner?* Is the selected content really important for the learner?* Are the selected teaching forms actually suited to initiating and supporting the learning processs?* Does the learning programme actually lead to the desired results?* Does the selected eLearning approach actually ensure a higher motivation to learn than traditional learning approaches?And last but not least:* Which understanding of eLearning forms the basis of the eLearning approach?This new thinking about eLearning aimed at the learning process itself is also reflected in the concept of eLearning in the European context, as can be read in the Barcelona Declaration of the European Commission from March 2002:In order to raise the niveau of learning in Europe, the integration of ICT in the educational process is seen as an opportunity to advance the change process and to increase both quality of and accessibility to learning processes.This new thinking about eLearning implies, in this sense, a demand for a solid, objective-driven and methodologically sound foundation as well as a learner-centric approach. These ideas have led to a more critical thinking on learning as a process which helps to define and to determine the success of eLearning processes. This means that the definition of the success of any learning has to be built on a solid decision regarding which category of learning the learner should be addressing when executing a(n) (e)Learning process. These categories of learning can be characterized by means of their description of the central aims of the learning process (Dichanz and Ernst, 2002). In this sense, categories of learning be described as follows:Learning as a process for acquiring information.OrLearning as a process for acquiring information and processing experience.OrLearning as a process for acquiring information and processing experience that effects a long-term change in the consciousness of the learner.OrLearning as a process for acquiring information and processing experience in which the learner integrates new information and experience into his/her current knowledge base.OrLearning as a process for acquiring information and processing experience in which the learner perceives, selects and integrates new information and experience into his/her current knowledge base, thereby changing it.OrLearning as a process for acquiring information and processing experience, in which the learner selects and constructs knowledge that is useful and appropriate for him/herself and in turn uses this to drive and deter-mine his/her own continuous learning process.In this case, learning finally becomes an individual process of interaction between the individual and his/her environment, in which the subjective reality of the learner is actively constructed.By critically analysing eLearning products which have been produced during the period of thinking about eLearning as a more or less technology-driven tool, these products concentrate for the most part on a view of learning in the sense of the first category: learning as a process for acquiring information and this combined with a deeply behaviouristic view of the learning process itself.As a consequence of the technological thinking about (e)learning, the producers of eLearning packages often ignore fundamental pedagogical and andragogical givens (Dichanz and Ernst, 2002), such as:* Learning is in its most fundamental sense a social process.* Learning is an individual process through and through.* Learning is basically a self-guided process.* Adult learners are characterised by rich learning biographies.* Adult learners have clear goals in mind.Keeping these pedagogical and andragogical givens in mind ultimately helps lead to necessary concessions as to what can be realistically accomplished by eLearning processes, taking into account the fact that there is no sure method that will make someone learn! What (e)learning methods can accomplish, however, is for instance:* to make learners curious;* to motivate learners;* to provide for a challenging learning environment; and* to provide individual support for learning.While the consequences of the new thinking about eLearning are based on a switch from a merely technology-oriented thinking about the learning process to a thinking that starts with the learner, the evaluation of the eLearning projects within the Leonardo da Vinci framework at least led to recommendations such as:* Programmes aimed at eLearning should be based on the idea of learner orientation. The recommendation of facilitating more projects with a clearer learner orientation also includes the necessity to postulate in a clear way that the needs of the learners have to be determined in more concrete manner before starting the project (even before applying for a project). This includes awareness of the learning biography, of individual learning styles and of social needs. This also includes the need to develop a clear and transparent learning philosophy behind the project that has to be clearly documented.* Projects in eLearning have to document a clear and transparent learning philosophy which determines the main direction of the project. To develop a learning philosophy implies a clear decision on learning categories, including the general learning objectives (is learning just a process of acquiring information or is it more?) or the formal framework and context for learning (formal learning, informal learning or both?).* Projects in eLearning should train the teachers and trainers. Support for teachers has to include the use of new technologies as well as the pedagogical aspects of teaching, training, coaching, moderating, etc. Teaching science, technology, economics, medicine etc. needs a teaching and learning approach that is as close to the \"real world\" as possible. This can only be achieved with appropriately trained teachers competent in their own subject area, trained in the use of modern learning technology and also trained in methodological and didactical processes.* Design and development of projects aiming at eLearning should include a focus on pedagogy and communications. ICT developers need to explore pedagogical innovation and those who not wish to do so should not take part in such projects. That could help in that new project applications will emphasize educational innovation and reward pedagogic practice.* Projects aimed at eLearning should widen target groups and exploit new contents while using innovative pedagogical ideas. To widen the target groups and to exploit new content for eLearning requires a growing pedagogical competency within the projects. There are some projects focused on less traditional or emerging occupational areas lacking traditional training programmes, e.g. medical technicians and the music industry, and these projects seem to be very successful. One feature of these projects is that they appear to have undertaken more in-depth needs analyses than those projects geared towards more traditional target groups. Secondly, they appear to have a clearer focus towards developing pedagogic approaches synergistic with the learning styles and cultures of members of the groups. Third, a number of these projects have focused on capturing and developing informal learning or learning in informal contexts.The main outcomes of the thematic monitoring on eLearning projects across Europe are based on clear research results which determined that the success of eLearning implementation depends to a great extent, according to human re-sources professionals and potential learners, primarily on the attitude of the learner himself towards the learning situation. All other considerations are secondary: learning processes in which the learner himself does not constitute the primary focus are doomed to failure from the beginning. The value of media-supported learning scenarios, even those that are highly technical in structure, does not depend so much on the technical perfection with which such scenarios are implemented, but rather are dependent upon the essential relationships that are established between learner and learning facilitator. These are necessary to realize the full potential of learning as an individual and as a social process.We have to keep strongly in mind that the introduction of eLearning does not end with the establishment of a suitable learning platform, but it is rather here that the real challenge begins.\n",
"role": "user"
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"content": "Purpose: - The purpose of this paper is to describe the results of a research study on eLearning across Europe. The aims are to identify the main focus of eLearning projects supported by the European Leonardo da Vinci programme and to give recommendations for the future.\nDesign/methodology/approach: - The objectives were achieved in two different steps: First, the projects were categorized by the researchers according to an agreed set of criteria. This in turn led through the so-called funnel methodology to a representative selection of eLearning projects which were evaluated more deeply by means of expert interviews.\nFindings: - The study showed that technical matters and narrowly-defined subject areas still receive the most emphasis by eLearning developers. What is needed, however, is a stronger focus on the learners and their needs. The need for innovation in eLearning is not in the area of technological innovation, rather pedagogical innovation and increased value, for the learners need to play a more important role in eLearning projects.\nResearch limitations/implications: - This thematic monitoring should be seen as only a first step and needs to be continued to help steer the development of eLearning projects financed by the European Commission.\nPractical implications: - The main focus of the outcomes is the necessity of the enforcement of learner-oriented approaches instead of technology-driven approaches in order to create added value for the eLearners.\nOriginality/value: - This project was the first overall European monitoring in the field of eLearning, analysing the actual changes in thinking on eLearning and defining clear recommendations for the future.\n",
"role": "assistant"
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] |
Development of a scale to measure hotel brand experiences
|
[
"Brand",
"Brand experience",
"Scale development",
"Hotel brand",
"Hotel brand experience"
] |
[
{
"content": "Summarize the following paper into structured abstract.\n\n1. Introduction: Over the past three decades, branding has assumed great significance in hotel marketing strategy (O'Neill and Mattila, 2010). Hotel branding is based on the notion that the brand adds value to both guests and hotels and cultivates brand loyalty (O'Neill and Xiao, 2006). Organizations operating within the hotel industry observed that brand identification and differentiation could be achieved through brand development (Prasad and Dev, 2000). Forgacs (2003), on the basis of his observation of various performance indicators, namely, level of occupancy, average price, revenue per available customer, revenue per available room and return on investment, suggested that branded hotels performed better as compared to non-branded ones. However, while the significance of branding has been widely acknowledged by academics and practitioners alike, branding in context of hotel industry has received comparatively less research attention (Kayaman and Arasli, 2007; So and King, 2010).\n2. Brand experience research in hotel industry: a theoretical background: A brand is a:\n3. Scale development and validation procedure: This study followed the systematic scale development method (recommended by Churchill, 1979; DeVellis, 2012). The method has been followed in numerous scale development studies (Brocato et al., 2012). Based on the hotel categories as defined by Federation of Hotel and Restaurant Association of India (FHRAI, 2014), this study used specific examples of four-star, five-star and five-star deluxe hotel brands in India. These hotel categories were chosen for the study because there is immense competition among luxury-hotel brands and brand experience assumes more prominence in this class (Chu et al., 2016; Mohsin and Lockyer, 2010). A detailed description of the scale development process is provided in Table I.\n4. Conclusions: This study offers an insight into the measurement of brand experience in context of luxury hotel brands. Through a multi-stage scale development process, a hotel brand experience scale comprising 17 items across 5 dimensions is developed and validated. The scale so developed has been found consistently reliable and valid across all samples considered in the present study. Results have established that hotel brand experience predicts revisit intention and word-of-mouth. The hotel brand experience scale proposed and validated in this study can be used with confidence to evaluate hotel brand experiences and gain insight into the relationship between hotel brand experience and other constructs of interest. Further, based on findings, hotel brand experience can be defined as a set of feelings, sensations, thoughts and behavioral responses toward hotel brand-related stimuli that are integral to the hotel brand's location, ambience, staff competence, website and social media presence and guest-to-guest interaction.\n",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Purpose: This study aims to develop and validate a scale for measuring hotel brand experience.\nDesign/methodology/approach: Based on existing hotel and brand experience literature, and seven distinct studies carried out as part of this research, a 17-item five-dimensional hotel brand experience scale was developed.\nFindings: The scale revealed sound psychometric properties based on the findings from different reliability and validity tests, as well as from successful scale replications across several different samples. The study found a significant influence of hotel brand experience on revisit intention and word-of-mouth, which confirms nomological validity of the scale.\nPractical implications: The developed hotel brand experience scale can provide hoteliers a way to examine the experiences evoked through hotel brand-related stimuli.\nOriginality/value: This study is the first to develop and validate measures of brand experience in context of hotel industry.\n",
"role": "assistant"
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The impact of supplier performance measurement systems on supplier performance: A dyadic lifecycle perspective
|
[
"Performance measurement",
"Survey",
"Buyer-supplier relationships"
] |
[
{
"content": "Summarize the following paper into structured abstract.\n\n1. Introduction: Suppliers today are increasingly responsible for buyer companies' value creation. For this reason, the careful assessment and monitoring of performance upstream in the supply chain is critical. Hence, supplier performance measurement systems (SPMSs) are critical tools that managers exploit to control and orchestrate suppliers.\n2. SPMS and resource orchestration: A PMS is defined as a set of metrics used to quantify the efficiency and effectiveness of actions (Neely et al., 1995). Similarly, an SPMS is defined as a set of metrics used to quantify the efficiency and effectiveness of suppliers' actions (Hald and Ellegaard, 2011; Maestrini et al., 2017). As the main goal of a PMS is to support the implementation of strategy at various levels (Kaplan and Norton, 1996), the goal of an SPMS is to support the purchasing strategy and align buyer-supplier relationships toward consistent goals (Kannan and Tan, 2002).\n3. SPMS lifecycle: The subsequent four paragraphs address the phases of PMS design, implementation, use and review, identifying the features characterizing the maturity for each phase. Such phases are mostly grounded in the PMS literature and serve as the premise to introduce the SPMS lifecycle framework which is at the basis of this study.\n4. Research framework and hypotheses development: Sirmon et al. (2007, 2011) claimed that resource orchestration requires the following: structuring the resource portfolio (i.e. acquiring, accumulating and divesting resources), building resources (i.e. establishing current capabilities and developing new ones) and leveraging resources (mobilizing and coordinating capabilities). PMSs facilitate this type of orchestration (Melnyk et al., 2004).\n5. Methodology: Given that we rely on research hypotheses that are formulated based on extant literature and that require to be tested on a large sample, we chose to distribute a survey that would allow measuring the SPMS maturity and the supplier performance as a series of latent variables. In particular, data were collected through a dyadic survey process addressing buyer-supplier dyads, in order to solve perception biases (e.g. Aminoff and Tanskanen, 2013; Oosterhuis et al., 2013; Ambrose et al., 2010; Barnes et al., 2006; Kim et al., 1999). The dyadic approach represents an important methodological contribution in respect to previous survey-based single-respondent studies within the SPMS literature (Carr and Pearson, 1999; Mahama, 2006; Heide et al., 2007; Prahinski and Fan, 2007; Cousins et al., 2008). The first paragraph explains the procedures followed to design the survey, select the sample and collect the data. The second paragraph reports the relevant information regarding the constructs' measures.\n6. Findings: The research model was tested using the partial least square approach (Oh et al., 2012) in Smart PLS. The results of the measurement model, based on a confirmatory factor analysis, are reported in the first paragraph. The results of the structural model are reported in the second paragraph.\n7. Discussion: The application of a lifecycle perspective within the research framework provides insights on the relative impact of each phase on diverse supplier performance. Previous survey-based studies separately took into account either design (Carr and Pearson, 1999; Cousins et al., 2008; Mahama, 2006; Heide et al., 2007) or implementation features (Prahinski and Benton, 2004; Prahinski and Fan, 2007). This study jointly includes the design, implementation, use and review of the SPMS. At a high level of analysis, the results suggest that the design, use and review affect supplier performance, thus confirming the need to effectively manage the entire SPMS lifecycle (Bourne et al., 2000; Gutierrez et al., 2015; Lohman et al., 2004; Braz et al., 2011). Nonetheless, going in depth within each single hypothesis, it is possible to gain interesting insights on the impact of each phase and to compare them.\n8. Conclusions: The present study tests the existence of a positive relationship between SPMS adoption and supplier performance improvement, supporting the relevance of the SPMS in orchestrating supplier resources. Several contributions can be recognized as a part of the emergent literature stream regarding the performance impact of the SPMS. Indeed, both sides of the relationship under scrutiny have been investigated. On the buyer side, a lifecycle perspective has been applied to the SPMS, developing constructs for SPMS design, implementation, use and review maturity; on the supplier side, multiple performance dimensions (i.e. quality, delivery, innovation, sustainability and cost) have been considered separately. Along with a dyadic data collection, this allowed the achievement of more insightful and robust empirical evidence. We study buyer-supplier relationships through the lens of ROT, which provides a suitable theoretical framework to explain the role of a mature SPMS in orchestrating suppliers.\n",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to empirically investigate the impact of a mature supplier performance measurement system (SPMS) adoption all along its lifecycle phases (i.e. design, implementation, use and review) on the suppliers' performance.\nDesign/methodology/approach: The research hypotheses have been tested on a final sample of 147 pairs of buyer-supplier responses, collected by means of a dyadic survey involving manufacturing firms and one key supplier of their choice. The research framework has been tested through a structural model using PLS regression.\nFindings: Considering the joint effect of all the four SPMS phases on supplier performance, the findings show that the system use and review play a prominent effect: the former have a positive impact on supplier quality, delivery and sustainability performance; the latter positively affects supplier delivery, innovation and sustainability. A mature design displays a positive effect on supplier sustainability performance, while a mature implementation results to negatively affect supplier innovation performance. Finally, cost performance is not impacted by any of the four phases.\nOriginality/value: This study contributes to the open debate regarding the relationship between SPMSs and actual supplier performance improvement. In particular, the lifecycle perspective is introduced to clearly distinguish among each phase of adoption and assess their relative impact on supplier performance. Besides, the dyadic nature of the study allows to investigate different subcomponents of supplier performance jointly considering the buyer company and supplier company perspective, thus achieving a more insightful and robust information.\n",
"role": "assistant"
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] |
Is America the land of the future? A response
|
[
"United States of America",
"Forecasting"
] |
[
{
"content": "Summarize the following paper into structured abstract.\n\n__NO_TITLE__: Revelations in Perkins' Confessions of an Economic Hit Man on how futures methods (including trend analysis, modeling and forecasting) were deliberately employed by US agents to deceive developing countries hit me like the proverbial truck (Perkins, 2004). Among other things it raised the question of how the American futurist community might respond since, from a wider viewpoint, its credibility was clearly at stake. Not long afterwards I came across Kunstler's The Long Emergency (Kunstler, 2005) and Steffan's Global Change and the Earth System (Steffan et al., 2004). The former unflinchingly described a number of looming threats for the US; the latter placed these in the context of human impacts on the entire global system. It was not difficult to join up the dots. Huge concerns were emerging and yet avoidance and denial seemed rampant, especially regarding the actions and policies of the US. Why had responses there had been so muted and what were the implications? This was the catalyst that sparked a new look at the myth of America as \"the land of the future\". In place of more conventional upbeat views the US began to seem emblematic of a future that looked like an entropic trap largely of its own making.\nResponse to the essays: Most of the responses used the material as a springboard to explore a number of themes. One was solidly in favor of the thesis, adding fresh detail, and one was fully certain that it was misguided, which is pretty much what you would expect. The paper by Richardson and Robinson was distinguished by its complete lack of defensiveness and largely took issue by exploring a variety of progressive institutional changes that they felt offered rather more optimistic future prospects. I really could not disagree with any of their suggestions but I also felt that their account of America's prospects overlooked the evidence of global shifts in natural systems described by Steffan et al. (2004). In so doing they may have missed some key aspects of the fundamental predicament facing the US and, by extension, the rest of the world. Burman's piece focused on geopolitical factors and posited two outcomes for the US - one where it balances a new constellation of factors in the world and another where it fails to do this and declines. Again I felt that, while this analysis was useful and constructive in that it explored some of the dimensions I had not covered, and while it agreed that \"America has overreached itself\", nevertheless the author's preference for \"concrete trends\" had not sufficiently factored in the very same issues emerging from the earth sciences and their increasingly clear depiction of how humanity (not merely the US) overshot global limits some time ago (Meadows et al., 2005). I would have thought it clear by now that the precipitous decline in the viability of many of the Earth's core life support systems in the air, on land and in the oceans comprehensively undermines business-as-usual assumptions.The Godet and Gerber piece was brief and summarily dismissive. They seem to be scandalized by the claim that too much reliance has been placed on the ability of markets to achieve sustainable outcomes and, furthermore, that current \"success\" conceals a deeper longer-term failure. Yet the view I explored was reinforced by a respected Goldman Sachs investment banker who declared that \"markets have failed, we now need intelligent governments\"[1]. It is also congruent with the conclusions of commentators who argue that for markets to work \"properly\" they must be compelled to \"tell the truth\" (about externalities, real costs, future implications etc) (Brown, 2008). From Godet and Gerber's response you would be forgiven for thinking that France was located on a different planet where global dysfunctions that are either caused by, or exacerbated by, widespread market failures have little or no effect. There is clearly a division of views in the field here that merits further clarification.Morgan's paper supported the thesis, deepened and explored it further. He built on the critique of US futures work and tied it back to embedded themes and deficiencies in US culture that are widely overlooked but, in this view, have powerful effects. He skillfully problematized what is meant by \"culture\" in the US and argued that corporatization has indeed led to a real and genuine crisis in democracy. For Morgan the way forward for futurists is the determined pursuit of corporate transformation. This is clearly a theme that requires much more attention from the futures community than it has yet received. To the best of my knowledge Perkins' revelations, and the questions they pose, remain unanswered.Finally there is the long and intriguing piece by Goonatilake, one of the better-informed and most trenchant critics of Western culture and its worldview to be found anywhere. His stock in trade, as it were, is to reframe contemporary phenomena through Buddhist and other non-western epistemologies, thereby highlighting differences, contradictions and possibilities. In the present context he supplies a rich historical perspective and also a corrective to the view that US corporations are the only or most significant players. There are plenty of others around the world who, as other writers here have suggested, must also be taken into account. The current celebration of excess in Dubai, for example, raises major questions about the cultural and corporate agencies responsible for forms of development that appear to go a long way beyond earlier Western models, but in a clearly post-cornucopian age. Is Jumeira Island a design triumph or a hubristic dead end destined to be overcome by rising sea levels?Goonatilake's most interesting and provocative comments expound a Buddhist view of reality that seeks to resolve world issues by dissolving what it depicts as \"the illusion of the self\". This obviously goes way beyond the scope of the essay and raises what may be irresolvable conundrums. How, for example, does one account for the further development of, e.g. nanotechnology, which can only exist through the coordinated action of many rational selves, with the relinquishment of selfhood in a post-human future? This is obviously another debate entirely and perhaps the subject of a different issue of the journal. My default position is that Buddhist influences certainly provide a valuable contrast to, and foil for, Western materialism and its various traps. But the view that the former constitutes an alternative worldview that can successfully support an advanced technological civilization (which may or may not include the transhumanist enterprise) does, for me, stand at the outermost extreme of speculative possibility. That may well reflect my own limitations, but there may be value in seeking further commentary on this from others. We certainly need to be a good deal clearer about the implications of \"re-making the human\" than presently appears to be the case.\nEmerging themes: A number of themes emerge from this review. First, what do all six contributions agree about? All seem to agree that the US - and by extension the rest of the world - faces formidable problems of adaptation to altered circumstances. Though it is not made explicit in all cases no one has argued that the US as it currently operates can anticipate a viable future. The writers differ in their prescriptions of \"what should be done\" but all seem to agree that what might be called the \"current trajectory of development\" requires urgent overhaul.Second, what do they disagree about? To some extent this is, perhaps, more apparent than real for a couple of reasons. The most obvious difference arises from limited space. Each of the writers has picked up themes of their choice and followed them. Also, if we take it as read that \"the map upon which we stand defines our world\", the differences displayed here are also consequences of what each of the writers actually do and the views of the world that emerge from that knowledge and expertise.Third, what is missing from the above? As many readers will perhaps know, I take the view that there is a central fallacy in a great deal of futures work, as in other fields. It is based on the notion that the world can be approached as a singular unitary entity that can be adequately known through one or more standard disciplines. As Goonatilake and Morgan have pointed out, FS was founded on notions of rationality and control that emerged in the (western) enlightenment and were later embodied in the industrial revolution and its offspring. No one who is clear about the modern origins of the field (as opposed to its deeper cultural and mythic origins) can ignore the military-industrial-commercial interests at its core. Yet, as currently constituted, such interests are seldom identified even though they clearly point away from any notion of sustainable futures.The fact is that the dominant tradition of FS draws unevenly on available knowledge and therefore tends to be lop-sided and often superficial. It overlooks other sources of cultural value, other ways of knowing and casts a \"shadow of unknowing\" over the human and cultural interiors from which awareness and action both proceed. This is not an academic issue. It seems entirely possible that there may be very little time remaining before structural deficiencies of this kind undermine the aspiration of all futurists everywhere to explore a variety of \"alternative futures\" and to \"create futures\" according to one or another version of human desire[2].Currently we are facing the forced compression of these aspirations and dreams into one or another variety of the \"overshoot and collapse\" scenario. In this context, for futures work to achieve minimum credibility it has, in my view, to consciously draw in some depth on at least four domains encompassing: the inner individual, the outer individual, the inner collective, and the outer collective. I introduced some aspects of this perspective in volume 1 of Foresight (Slaughter, 1999). Since then the integral perspective generally, and the integral futures one specifically, have both evolved and borne a variety of fruit, including a journal dedicated to integral studies. (Esbjorn-Hargens and Wilber, 2006) A recent issue of Futures summarized some of the implications for futures methods (Slaughter et al., 2008) and a recent research project applied some of these to an international overview of futures activity (Slaughter et al., 2007).The perspective is particularly useful when dealing with complex phenomena because it allows us to recognize how different types of knowledge contribute to a more adequate and differentiated map of the world. It is a map that gives due credit to the powerful, but largely invisible, phenomena of the interior domains (the unique inner worlds of people and cultures) and also better conceptualizes the external domains with which we are more familiar and which are thereby often mistakenly held to be the only and \"real\" world. The interested reader may want to attempt to map each of the contributions discussed here onto these domains and draw their own conclusions. Suffice it to say that each piece, including my own, highlights certain domains and under-represents others. This, therefore, is a new challenge for the field. It is a challenge and an opportunity to expand the scope of our thinking and our vision beyond the limitations of earlier disciplinary paradigms and approaches.\nConclusion: I mentioned above that questioning \"America as the land of the future\" could prove challenging for some. Yet the fact that others wrote in support suggest that it is unhelpful to see such work merely as \"anti-US\" polemic. Rather, it is part of a much larger perspective. At one level the paper can be read as a vote of confidence in the very sources of vitality and deep innovation in US itself and elsewhere that even now suggest ways out of humanity's immanent decline (Hawken, 2008). Lester Brown, a long-standing observer of the global scene who deserves our respect for pursuing these issues over several decades, cuts directly to the chase. He writes:There are many things we do not know about the future. But one thing we do know is that business as usual will not continue for much longer. Massive change is inevitable. Will the change come because we move quickly to restructure the economy or because we fail to act and civilization begins to unravel? (Brown, 2008, p. 265).Clearly the US has failed to use its period of global leadership wisely or apply the benefits of futures thinking and applied foresight. Broadly speaking, it has not acted in ways that would have improved the prospects for the demanding transition to a more just and sustainable world order (Raskin et al., 2002). Instead it has pursued a drastically narrow version of its national interest and the costs of missed opportunities, both to itself and others, are beyond calculation. Frustratingly, the costs of achieving those transitions are much less than those currently wasted on armaments. According to Brown:Combining social goals and earth restoration components into a Plan B budget yields an additional annual expenditure of $190 billion, roughly one third of the current US military budget or one sixth of the global military budget (Brown, 2008, pp. 282-283).Beyond US borders we are witness to a world fraught with unresolved conflicts. Under these conditions I find it difficult to see how the level of international cooperation required to resolve even one global issue - such as reigning in the level of carbon emissions so that global temperatures do not rise above 2 degrees Centigrade - can be achieved in the time available (Lynas, 2008). So, finally, what the essay suggests is that the US is an expression of a deeper problem concerning our species. The latter remains fractured within itself and is insufficiently integrated and clear about who it is and how it could unite to manage a planetary system in deep and continuing crisis. This is the underlying concern that receives so very little overt attention from the futures community.If these essays have gone even part way toward illuminating the underlying problematic of human and cultural development, it will have been worthwhile. But we should be clear that the writing is on the wall for a reckless, short sighted and growth-at-all-costs civilization still intent on replacing natural processes with fabricated equivalents. What the world desperately needs is new, integrally informed and far-sighted leadership accompanied by a quantum leap in effective and ethically sound grassroots action. The roles that futurists and foresight practitioners may play in this process remain open but what some have called a \"new dark age\" is no longer a distant prospect (Berman, 2006).\n",
"role": "user"
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"content": "Purpose: - This article aims to provide a response to the various contributions published in a special issue of foresight on \"Is America the land of the future?\".\nDesign/methodology/approach: - The article is a commentary on the various works in the special issue.\nFindings: - If these essays have gone even part way toward illuminating the underlying problematic of human and cultural development, it will have been worthwhile.\nOriginality/value: - Provides a viewpoint on the special issue \"Is America the land of the future?\".\n",
"role": "assistant"
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] |
The family grilling consumption experience in Mexico
|
[
"Mexico",
"Family",
"Food consumption",
"Rituals",
"Escapism",
"Grilling experience"
] |
[
{
"content": "Summarize the following paper into structured abstract.\n\nIntroduction: In 1956, the food writer Clementine Paddleford noted the popularity of outdoor grilling in America. After the Second World War, houses in America were built smaller than pre-war houses and they were made even smaller with the baby boom. The lack of space along with the feeling of \"togetherness\" produced by fathers' involvement in family activities made outdoor grilling popular (Miller, 2010; Marcus, 2013). As stated by Moss (2014), barbecue grills were built in California houses in 1933, evoking \"Old Mexico\" and its romantic association with \"rancho\" life, where a \"caballero rode the haciendas looking for the great fiesta.\" Because of its geographic proximity to the USA, northern Mexico was strongly influenced by the consumption of grilled food, making outdoor grilling a traditional experience for families.\nLiterature review and theoretical background: Rituals\nMethodology: This research adopted phenomenology as a methodological approach to deepen the understanding of the grilling experience in Mexico using both in-depth interviews to allow participants to explain their perspectives about an event and its meaning for them (Wallendorf and Arnould, 1991) and in situ participant observation to allow the researchers to gather data about the interactions, conversations and experiences at grilling events (Mackellar, 2013; Van Maanen, 1995). Both data sets were collected in Monterrey, Mexico and participants were selected via purposive sampling with the condition that they had experienced the phenomenon under study.\nFindings: Understanding the grilling ritual\n",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to understand the ritual, roles and symbolic meanings of family grilling consumption experiences in northeast Mexico.\nDesign/methodology/approach: This study adopted a phenomenological approach and conducted 73 in-depth interviews and in situ observations during family grilling experiences.\nFindings: Based on an examination of the phases, symbolic meanings, and ritual elements of grilling events in Mexico, the results of this study identify a third type of family food consumption ritual, the escape ritual, which has different characteristics than routine and festive family food consumption rituals.\nPractical implications: The findings indicate the emergence of a more sophisticated family grilling experience that uses new accessories and products. Companies could align their marketing strategies for grilling products and segment their communication messages based on the roles of participants and the symbolic meanings identified in this study.\nOriginality/value: This research studies an experience in light of both ritual and escapism literature.\n",
"role": "assistant"
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Perceptions and attitudes of the Mexican urban population towards genetically modified organisms
|
[
"Consumer attitudes",
"Consumer perceptions",
"Food safety",
"Consumer risk",
"Genetically modified foods"
] |
[
{
"content": "Summarize the following paper into structured abstract.\n\n1. Introduction: A genetically modified organism (GMO) or transgenic is defined as a living organism that is artificially created using genetic engineering (GE) through insertion of genes from other species (virus, bacteria, other plants and animals and even humans) into a plant, animal or microorganism. This engineering is done mainly to produce food and pharmaceutical products (Geoffrey et al., 2014). These alterations to the genome allow scientists to bypass the natural selection process by transferring genetic material from one naturally incompatible species to another. However, this is not new; humanity has changed the genetics of plants and animals indirectly through cultivation and selective breeding over the last 10,000 years (Zohary et al., 2012).\n2. Materials and methods: 2.1 Participants\n3. Results: The results of the perceptions and attitudes for each of the 11 latent factors are presented below, and also the associations with educational level.\n4. Conclusions: In general, the respondents showed a low level of knowledge regarding GMOs. This may explain the distrust, low benefits and high risks of GMOs they perceive. Despite this, it is important to highlight their positive attitude toward technological development, although not particularly toward gene technology. There is considerable sympathy for GMO application in agricultural development in Mexico and in the production of biotech drugs, although there is little consensus on allowing the production and importation of GMOs to Mexico. Most respondents read the labels of the products they consume and believe that GM products must be labeled indicating transgenic content. They also support the idea that the Mexican government should legislate mandatory labeling of GMOs.\n",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to measure Mexicans' perceptions and attitudes about the production and consumption of genetically modified organisms (GMOs).\nDesign/methodology/approach: A questionnaire with 63 questions that encompassed 11 latent factors was used to obtain information. The questionnaire was administered to 14,720 people in Mexico's urban areas.\nFindings: The results revealed important similarities and differences with studies in other countries, showing mainly that the respondents did not have sufficient information about GMOs, they have low level of knowledge about GMOs (31.28 percent), are highly distrustful of GMOs, perceive high risk regarding GMOs (59.13 percent), want transgenic products to be labeled (93.59 percent) and do not perceive GMOs' social values and positive health effects beyond increasing agricultural productivity. Also, it was observed that the higher the educational level of individuals, the lower the acceptance of GMOs.\nResearch limitations/implications: The authors conclude that it is necessary to generate and provide scientifically accurate information on GMOs, so that people are better informed and can give a critical opinion on the use of GMOs.\nPractical implications: The major practical contribution of this research is that it provides empirical knowledge about the perceptions and attitudes toward the production and consumption of GMOs among the Mexican's urban society, which can be of great help for the Mexican government to rethink if it is an appropriate moment to completely open the doors to international companies to cultivate crops like maize and others that have been postponed due to pressure from the environmental groups, farmers and other sectors of the society.\nSocial implications: This is especially important in the context of maize as it is part of the cultural heritage of Mexico since ancient times. However, it is not clear what the overall perception is in the Mexican society on the use of GMOs for cultivation.\nOriginality/value: Southern regions of Mexico are the center of origin of several cultivated plants such as maize and legumes. The introduction of GMOs, called transgenics, in agriculture and food continues to cause enormous controversy in the perceptions and attitudes mainly among environmental groups and farmers in Mexico.\n",
"role": "assistant"
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Resource commitment behaviour of industrial exhibitors: an exploratory study
|
[
"Resource commitment behaviour",
"Market orientation",
"Trade show performance",
"Strategic marketing"
] |
[
{
"content": "Summarize the following paper into structured abstract.\n\n__NO_TITLE__: An executive summary for managers and executives readers can be found at the end of this article.\n1. Introduction: The motives and benefits of utilising trade shows as a marketing communication vehicle have been extensively introduced in the business literature (Bonoma, 1983; Hutt and Speh, 2001; Rosson and Seringhaus, 1995). Trade shows are considered as a cost-effective measure for marketers to make contacts with prospective and current customers (Bello and Barksdale, 1988; Lilien, 1983). In addition, they have been viewed as valuable channels of information collection, product exposure, relationship building and organisational learning for industrial firms (Hansen, 1996; Kerin and Cron, 1987; Li, 2006). Accordingly, American and European firms spend a substantial portion of marketing expenditures annually on trade show activities (Sandler, 1994).From a resource-based viewpoint (Barney, 1991), trade show programmes deserve to be managed within a firm's strategic marketing framework and understood from a competitive advantage perspective. In fact, designing an effective exhibition scheme often requires special know-how to coordinate various inputs and tasks of multiple functional departments. Because skills and knowledge of trade show preparation are embedded with the specific firm's internal procedures and processes, they are generally tacit, dispersed, interlinked, and hence difficult for other firms to duplicate. Superior experience and expertise in the practice might constitute a distinctive capability (Itami, 1987; Reed and DeFillippi, 1990), leading to better business performance (Day, 1994). As a result, successful exhibition programmes could be viewed as a valuable asset for the exhibiting firm.A review of the current trade show literature reveals a different picture. One observation is that trade shows play merely a tactical role for many firms (e.g. product exposure, leads collection). These exhibitors either have no deliberate trade show policy and strategy, nor do they systematically track and evaluate its outcomes (Gopalakrishna and Lilien, 1995; Hansen, 1999; Smith et al., 2004). Another finding pertains to the tendency of top executives involved in trade show decisions. Munuera and Ruiz (1999) reported that top managers would endorse exhibiting decisions without having a well-articulated rationale or providing specific goals for exhibition appearance. Taken together, participation in trade shows appears to be a frequently utilised but poorly managed marketing practice.In addition, previous research has focused on a narrow set of trade show topics, such as exhibiting motives and exhibition performance measurement. With only few exceptions (e.g. Gopalakrishna and Lilien, 1995; Li, 2006), empirical studies on how to leverage trade shows strategically have been rare. As Hansen (2004) suggests, much research is needed to advance our understanding of trade shows and effective ways for managing them. Such research could assist practitioners in improving the benefits they receive from trade shows. A possible venue to enhance trade show payoffs may start from a careful review of the process undertaken to design, develop, and execute exhibition schemes and better knowledge of what factors affect exhibition outcomes.The present study attempts to explore three issues identified above. First, it emphasises on the exhibition resource commitment behaviour of industrial marketers. An investigation in this arena may be justified since resource commitment is essential to any exhibition (Herbig et al., 1996; Hutt and Speh, 2001) and, currently, little is known about its formation, elements and consequences. Thus, the present researchers are to provide evidence for the relationship between exhibition resource commitment behaviour and trade show performance in a context of industrial exhibition.Further, trade shows have both selling and non-selling functions (Kerin and Cron, 1987). However, prior research tends to focus on discrete selling performance (Sharland and Balogh, 1996). Sales objectives, in fact, might not be the primary focus of trade show participation. Non-selling objectives could be also critical, because they tend to have more lasting impacts on the exhibiting firm than a purely selling function. For instance, a prospect's feedbacks on a new product might be more useful to the exhibitor in the long run than if the prospect simply placed a trial order. Therefore, it is important to have a balanced view on both the selling and non-selling consequences of a trade show event. Part of the contribution of the current study is to provide an initial understanding of their relationships with the firm's exhibition resource commitment behaviour.In addition, this research intends to answer the question of why exhibitors differ in their levels of resource commitment. As trade show participation becomes routine, different firms may develop varying attitudes and thoughts toward such events. While some exhibitors might consistently devote extensive resources to the development of trade show programmes, others may keep their investments in these programmes at a minimum. Currently, it is unclear about what determines a firm's level of resource commitment for exhibition programming. Because a firm's marketing strategy and effort are influenced partly by its market orientation (Kohli and Jaworski, 1990; Narver and Slater, 1990), the present study attempts to explore whether a firm's market orientation has a direct impact on its exhibition resource deployment.pattern.The rationale for this investigation is found in previous research on the linkage between market orientation and firm performance (Homburg et al., 2004). Market orientation has been viewed as a business philosophy that emphasises the creation of competitive edges through analysing and responding to information collected from customers and competitors (e.g. Day, 1994). To achieve this purpose, firms must possess and commit adequate resources to acquire useful market intelligence (Hult et al., 2005; Ngo and O'Cass, 2009; Srivastava et al., 2001). Hence, this research assumes that more market-oriented exhibitors are likely to devote greater resources to yield superior exhibition outcomes.In the remainder of this manuscript, the authors first introduce the background literature and provide a research model and hypotheses. Next, the research method of the current study is described, which includes sampling context, study samples, as well as measurement scales. In a following section, the analytic methods and empirical findings are reported. At the end of this manuscript, the present researchers discuss research and managerial implications derived from this empirical study.\n2. Background literature: Market orientation\n3. Hypotheses: Relationships between market orientation and resource commitment behaviour\n4. Methodology: Data collection\n5. Path analysis and results: After confirming the measurement validity and reliability of each construct, a structural path analysis is applied to test the research model and hypotheses. Because the path analytic method is adopted, each variable is assessed by the average score of the measurement items per construct (Song and Thieme, 2006). In addition, when using EFA, it is found that market orientation measures loaded on a single factor. Thus, market orientation is represented by the average score of its measurement items. The fit statistics of the path model appears to be acceptable: kh2/df =2.307, CFI =0.991, GFI =0.982 and RMSEA =0.084. The results suggest that the model provides a good fit with the data. For hypothesis testing, the standardised path estimates of the model are referred. Figure 1 presents the path estimates and their individual significance levels.The first group of the research hypotheses pertains to the relationships between market orientation and the three dimensions of exhibition resource commitment behaviour. The path coefficients are 0.469 for personnel commitment, 0.392 for budget commitment and 0.517 for planning commitment, respectively. All the paths are positive and significant at the 0.01 level. Therefore, H1a, H1b, and H1c are confirmed.A second set of the analysis shows that personnel commitment is positively related to all facets of trade show performance. The standardised path coefficients and p-values are 0.165 (p<0.1) for sales-related performance, 0.170 (p<0.05) for information-gathering performance, 0.234 (p<0.01) for relationship-building performance, 0.175 (p<0.05) for image-building performance, and finally 0.214 (p<0.05) for motivational performance. Thus, the hypotheses of H2a, H2b, H2c, H2d and H2e are all supported.Moreover, another set of hypotheses concerns the influences of budget commitment on four elements of trade show performance. This analysis finds that budget commitment relates significantly to selling performance (0.239, p<0.01) and motivational performance (-0.188, p<0.05). However, the valence of the linkage between budget commitment and motivational performance is negative, opposite to our prediction. On the other hand, budget commitment's relationships to relationship-building performance and image-building performance are both insignificant. Thus, only H3a is supported.The final group of the analysis tests the relationships between planning commitment and four aspects of trade show performance. Specifically, sales-related performance is found to be related to planning commitment. The standardised coefficient of this path is -0.0176 (p<0.05), and its sign is contrary to our prediction. Further, the path between planning commitment and motivational performance is also significant (0.193, p<0.05). On the other hand, the analysis indicates that planning commitment is unrelated to either relationship-building performance or image-building performance. Therefore, while H4d is confirmed, H4a, H4b and H4c cannot be supported by the data. Table II summarised all the path coefficients and hypothesis testing results.\n6. Post hoc analysis: To further clarify the influence of market orientation on trade show performance, we test the moderating effects of market orientation on the relationships between exhibition resource commitment behaviour and trade show performance. A series of multi-group analyses is used to achieve this purpose (Banerjee et al., 2003; Brockman and Morgan, 2003). First of all, the data are split at the median on the variable of market orientation to form two separate groups (i.e. less market-oriented exhibitors/more market-oriented ones). Second, an \"unconstrained\" model is estimated, in which the path coefficients are allowed to vary across the two groups. Third, a \"partially-constrained\" model is estimated in which a specific path coefficient is then constrained to be equal for the two groups. A moderating effect is detected when a significant statistical difference exists between the kh2 value of the constrained model and the kh2 value of the unconstrained model (i.e. Dkh2>3.84, df=1, p<0.05), which shows that parameter invariance is rejected. Finally, the last procedure is repeated for the remaining moderating effects under investigation.Table III provides a summary of the results of the multi-group tests of moderating effects. Significant moderating impacts of market orientation were found for the linkages between:* personnel commitment and relationship-building performance;* budget commitment and motivational performance; and* planning commitment and motivational performance.In specific, the positive relationship between personnel commitment and relationship-building performance is stronger for the more market-oriented group than for the less market-oriented group. In contrast, more market-oriented firms have a stronger negative association between budget commitment and motivational performance than less market-oriented ones. Moreover, more market-oriented firms have a larger positive association between planning commitment and motivational performance than less market-oriented firms. Implications of these findings are advanced in the following section.\n7. Discussion: While the extant literature has amassed a large body of research on industrial trade show performance, prior research was largely centred on identifying facets or creating measures of the performance (e.g. Gopalakrishna and Lilien, 1995; Hansen, 2004). In contrast, relatively little attention has been devoted to its determinants. In fact, the expertise and skills required for successfully planning and implementing exhibition programs would form and represent a distinctive competitive capability of the exhibiting firm (Barney, 1991; Reed and DeFillippi, 1990). In addition, for industrial exhibitors, trade show participation may consist of strategic meanings and impacts within the process of formulation, development and execution (Rosson and Seringhaus, 1995; Sharland and Balogh, 1996). Moreover, trade show appearance has the potential for the exhibiting firms to achieve multiple marketing objectives, which could result in significant consequences on them (e.g. Bonoma, 1983; Li, 2006; Shoham, 1999).Given the importance of industrial exhibitions, it is warranted to develop comprehensive knowledge with regard to their designs, operations, effectiveness and the relationships among these elements. The present study is designed to explore a number of overlooked issues in the domain. Particularly, we are interested in learning about whether a firm's exhibition resource deployment pattern may influence its exhibition performance. Next, numerous studies have tested the market orientation-performance linkage (see Ellis, 2006 for a review). However, less research attention has been paid to the effects of market orientation on a firm's strategic planning and marketing programmes (Ngo and O'Cass, 2009). As a result, we investigate the market orientation - resource commitment behaviour linkage within an industrial exhibition context. To accomplish these objectives, the present study conceptualises and operationalises the notion of exhibition resource commitment behaviour with three dimensions: personnel, budget and planning commitment. Our study results provide both theoretical and managerial implications, which are elaborated as below.Research implications\n",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Purpose: - The purpose of this study is to assist practitioners in improving the benefits they receive from trade shows. This study seeks to investigate the behaviour of resource commitment of exhibiting firms and its relationships with market orientation and exhibition performance.\nDesign/methodology/approach: - Data were collected at the 2007 Suzhou Circuitex Show, which is held annually in Suzhou, Jiangsu Province, China. It is one of the largest international shows for the printed circuit board (PCB) industry. A total of 315 questionnaires were handed out and 185 usable questionnaires were returned.\nFindings: - The results advance the theoretical understanding of the market orientation-resource commitment behaviour - performance framework within the setting of an industrial trade show. This study finds that market orientation is positively associated with an exhibiting firm's resource commitment behaviour, which in turn has varying influences on the different dimensions of trade show performance.\nResearch limitations/implications: - The cross-sectional study suggests that different facets of exhibition resource commitment may have distinct effects on several dimensions of trade show performance. Future research should adopt a longitudinal survey and extend this study domain to a broader range of industrial contexts.\nPractical implications: - The research provides a better understanding of the development process of trade show programmes for practitioners in industrial firms to develop effective exhibition strategies.\nOriginality/value: - This paper fills a significant gap in the literature and offers evidence for the relationships among market orientation, resource commitment behaviour and trade show performance. Furthermore, the current research identifies three aspects of resource commitment behaviour and creates corresponding measures for them.\n",
"role": "assistant"
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] |
Trainers' responses to errors matter in trainees' learning from errors: evidence from two studies
|
[
"Employee development",
"Workplace learning",
"Learning processes"
] |
[
{
"content": "Summarize the following paper into structured abstract.\n\n__NO_TITLE__: While error avoidance is a crucial issue for quality and safety management in organizations, fallibility is part of human nature and errors cannot be completely eliminated (Frese and Keith, 2015; Zhao and Olivera, 2006). Despite the negative consequences of errors (e.g. wasted resources and suboptimal performance), errors offer valuable opportunities to learn and to improve performance (Lei et al., 2016). In fact, learning from errors has been suggested to play an important role in individual career development and success (e.g. Boss and Sims, 2008; Ohlsson, 1996; Rausch et al., 2017; van Dyck et al., 2005). Although the rationale for learning from errors is clear, the requisite motivation is not always present, even in training programs (Heimbeck et al., 2003; Keith and Frese, 2005). \"Errors,\" as a form of negative performance feedback, can dampen self-efficacy and lead to negative emotions and dysfunctional reactions, such as blaming others, rationalizing, or ignoring the experience, thus curtailing the opportunity to learn (Zhao and Olivera, 2006).\nStudy 1: hypotheses: Our research builds on Tynjala's (2013) 3P model of workplace learning (see also Billett, 1995, 2004). The model includes three main components: presage, process, and product. Presage refers to learner factors and workplace context (e.g. organizational structure), which influence learning process. Process refers to learning-related activities (e.g. reflecting on one's experience or seeking feedback from supervisors), and directly determines product. Product is the learning outcome (e.g. knowledge, skills, and abilities acquired as a result of engaging in learning). In this study, we focus on the first two components of the model: presage and process. In particular, we examine the link between perceived learning context and learning-related activities and the mediating mechanism underlying this specific association. The mediating role of affective-motivational adaptivity is supported by affective events theory (Weiss and Beal, 2005; Weiss and Cropanzano, 1996) and by the learning and training literature suggesting that emotion and motivation are more proximate mechanisms of learning than individual differences and contextual factors (e.g. Chen et al., 2000; Zhao, 2011).\nStudy 1: methods: Sampling\nStudy 1: results: Table I shows the descriptive statistics, reliability coefficients, and correlations of the variables. We can see some high correlations between the trainer responses (r>0.54). Yet, variance inflation factors (VIFs) indicated that multicollinearity is no severe problem (VIFmax=2.17).\nStudy 1: discussion: The findings of Study 1 suggest that not all the trainer responses influence trainee learning from errors in the same way. Particularly, we found that negative trainer reaction impedes trainee learning from errors by impairing trainees' affective-motivational adaptability. Trainer tolerance of errors and trainer support following errors were not found to be related to trainee learning from errors via affective-motivational adaptability. However, we found a direct positive association between trainer support and trainee learning from errors.\nStudy 2: hypotheses: Error climate has been suggested as a highly relevant context condition that influences employee responses to errors, including learning from errors (Frese and Keith, 2015; van Dyck et al., 2005). A primary purpose for doing Study 2 is that we want to test the moderating role of perceived error climate in the link between perceived trainer responses and affective-motivational adaptability. It would be interesting to see how employees' emotional and behavioral responses are influenced when trainers exhibit attitudes or reactions consistent with (or contradicting) the organizational error climate as perceived by trainees. The moderating role of a facet-specific or focused climate such as perceived error climate is supported by organizational work climate literature (Kuenzi and Schminke, 2009).\nStudy 2: methods: Sampling\nStudy 2: results: Table II shows the descriptive statistics, reliability coefficients, and correlations of the variables. We can see some high correlations between trainer responses (r>0.51). Yet, VIFs indicated no serious problem with multicollinearity (VIFmax=2.35).\nStudy 2: discussion: The results of Study 2 suggest that perceived error climate is an important boundary condition that affects the relationship between perceived trainer responses and trainee learning from errors. Overall, the findings suggest that a fit is required between perceived trainer responses to errors and error climate in an organization to encourage trainees to engage in learning from their errors.\nDiscussion: Errors, as a form of negative performance feedback, can be de-motivating and discouraging, especially for employees who are still in the learning process. As Steuer et al. (2013, p. 196) put it: \"Although making errors while learning is common, it is also frequently perceived as something negative, shameful and self-threatening.\" While it is commonly acknowledged that constructive instructions offered by trainers facilitate learning from errors (e.g. Frese and Keith, 2015; Heimbeck et al., 2003), little research has been done to examine how perceived trainer responses affect trainee learning from errors in an organizational context. Findings of this study have important implications for research and managerial practice.\n",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Purpose: Learning from errors is important for employees, particularly at early stages of their career. The purpose of this paper is to examine the influence of perceived trainer responses to errors on trainee learning from errors in a workplace setting. In Study 1, the authors test a model that examines the associations between perceived trainer responses to errors and trainee learning from errors, which are mediated by affective-motivational adaptivity. In Study 2, the authors further hypothesize that the link between perceived trainer responses and affective-motivational adaptivity is moderated by perceived error climate.\nDesign/methodology/approach: The authors test the hypotheses using data from 213 Swiss apprentices (Study 1) and 1,012 German apprentices (Study 2) receiving dual vocational training.\nFindings: Study 1 suggests that negative trainer reaction impedes trainee learning from errors by impairing trainees' affective-motivational adaptability. Trainer tolerance of errors and trainer support following errors were not related to trainee learning from errors. Study 2 indicates that perceived error climate is an important boundary condition that affects the relationship between trainer responses and trainee learning from errors.\nOriginality/value: This study contributes to research on learning from errors in three ways. First, it enriches the understanding regarding the role of trainers in enhancing learning from errors in organizations. Second, it extends research on learning from errors by investigating the interaction effects between perceived trainer responses and error climate. Third, it refines knowledge about the role of positive affect in learning from errors. Findings of this study also offer practical insights to trainers and managers regarding what they should do to encourage trainee learning from errors.\n",
"role": "assistant"
}
] |
How green was my valley: Earnings differentials and the changing distribution of wages in Spain
|
[
"Employment",
"Workplace",
"Earnings",
"Pay differentials"
] |
[
{
"content": "Summarize the following paper into structured abstract.\n\n1. Introduction: There is no a priori reason why the structure of wages should remain stable over time. Technological innovations, changes in the structure of product and/or labour markets and changes in the distribution of workers' education can alter the demand for and the supply of different skill attributes and, thus, the earnings distribution. Some explanations that have been advanced for the somehow general trend towards an increase in wage inequality in the last three decades are a shift in labour demand favouring high-skilled labour at the expense of low-skilled labour, primarily caused by changes in technology; the increase of foreign competition; and different socio-demographic factors, such as the change in the numbers of university graduates among the working population, the secular rise in the labour market participation of women and the increase of migration flows (see inter alia\n2. Data description: 2.1. Data set\n3. Econometric methods: As we are interested in analysing the magnitude of wage differentials across individuals over time, our strategy rests upon the estimation of extended wage equations (Mincer, 1974) for each year of the period 2005-2010: (Equation 1) where Y\n4. Wage differentials and dispersion: Table III reports OLS and QR estimates of the effects of individual, job and firm characteristics on mean wages (Equation (1)) and on wages deciles (Equation (2)), respectively, using pool data for the period 2005-2010. While the estimated coefficients of the latter measure the impact of each covariate on different points of the wage distribution, the former are presented to allow a comparison with the effects upon the mean. This table also reports the 90th-10th spread for each covariate.\n5. Evolution of wage differentials and dispersion: Tables AII and AIII provide the results of the impact of the set of individual, job and firm characteristics on wages percentiles using 2005 (an expansion year) and 2010 (a recession year) data, respectively (OLS estimates of the effects of the explanatory variables on mean wages for each year of the period 2005-2010 are not provided but are available from the authors upon request)[14]. Moreover, Table IV summarizes the changes that have taken place in this period of time, making use of the estimates of QR to provide some measures of the marginal effect of the covariates on the dispersion of the wage distribution: it reports the changes in OLS coefficients (column (1)) and in the 90th-10th spread (column (2)), together with the changes at the two extreme deciles (columns (3) and (4)) and the difference in log wages at these deciles in both years (columns (5) and (6)). Our estimates of the marginal impact of the covariates on these measures are obtained simply by computing the differences of the QR coefficients at the relevant deciles. Column (2) can be obtained as the difference of either columns (3) and (4) or columns (5) and (6)[15].\n6. Changes in the wage distribution: After having presented the influence of various personal, job and employer attributes on wages at different points of the earnings distribution and the changes of their effects over time, we move on to analyse the conditional wage distribution and its evolution over the period of study. Accordingly, we pursue two exercises (see Machado and Mata, 2001).\n7. Conclusions: This paper has analysed the changes in earnings inequality and the wage distribution that have taken place across the period 2005-2010 in Spain. We have made use of a large administrative data source (the \"Continuous Sample of Working Life\"), one of whose main advantages is the possibility of matching individual records with jobs and earnings information: while the Social Security provides information on personal, job and workplace attributes, earnings data come from the Tax Administration National Agency. OLS and QR models have been estimated to measure wages differentials for a set of covariates and to examine the evolution of the effect of the regressors at different points of the wages distribution over time. Our results are as follows.\n",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to examine the wage distribution in Spain, its evolution in recent years and the implications for increased wage dispersion. Accordingly, its attention focuses on the following issues: first, the paper investigates how personal, job and firm attributes affect the wages distribution and examine earnings differentials between and within groups of workers according to their individual and job characteristics throughout the conditional wage distribution; and second, the paper analyses whether the business cycle may influence the magnitude of these differentials.\nDesign/methodology/approach: Using administrative data from the Spanish Social Security and the Tax Administration National Agency, the paper estimates OLS and quantile regression (QR) models in order to assess the impact of personal, job and workplace attributes on between- and within-groups wage inequality.\nFindings: Among other things, we find that, although the average wage has been increasing over time (until 2009), changes have not been uniform across the earnings distribution, making the dispersion fall during boom years but rise during downturn years. Furthermore, changes in the impacts of some characteristics (types of contract, education/qualifications, region and employer size) contributed to higher wage dispersion, while others (tenure) made the distribution more equal.\nOriginality/value: The analysis of the paper in novel in that it investigates whether wage differentials respond to the business cycle and what the source of that variation is. Moreover, it analyses wages differentials not only at the mean but also throughout the conditional earnings distribution, making it possible to assess the impact of these attributes on between- and within-groups wage inequality.\n",
"role": "assistant"
}
] |
People management: an imperative to effective project management
|
[
"Human resource management",
"Employees",
"Best practice"
] |
[
{
"content": "Summarize the following paper into structured abstract.\n\nIntroduction: This article describes effective people management which is vital for effective project management. In recent years, people-oriented factors have gained focus in project management apart from technical aspects of the project management profession (scheduling, planning etc.). An important element in managing a complex project is to know how to manage your most valuable asset: your human resources.The present article will lead you through some of the best practices for managing human resources. Probably the greatest challenge that presents over global projects is the management of the human resource pools. This is true at macro (overall staffing levels) and micro (delegation of work to labor pools) levels. Human resource is now assuming a greater role as a strategic business partner. Successful companies realize that true competitive advantage lies in their people. They have been forced to redefine their responsibilities and develop a compelling response for critics who dispute human resource value to the bottom-line.The objective of this paper is to list some key factors/practices of people management which are imperative to effective project management. The factors/practices are listed below:1. Bridge Disconnects and Retain Talent.2. Value \"Uncommon Productive thoughts\" and Create Best Practices.3. Create Ownership.4. The Right to Express Concerns implies an Opportunity to resolve them.5. Seeding Synergy and Team work.6. Build Winning Structures while forming Teams.7. Generate Employee Awareness.8. Hone Employee skills, analyze situations, and co-create strategies effectively.9. Develop Hybrid Skills10. Make Employees Responsibly Accountable.11. Employee Career and Growth.12. Compensation Schemes.\nBridge disconnects and retain talent: Key fact: few organizations have emergent mindset, policies and structure to meet evolving employment needs\nValue \"uncommon productive thoughts\" and create best practices: Success story: revolutionary lighting fixtures adopted by \"Waltham\"\nCreate ownership: Success story: \"John Lewis\" the largest employee owned venture\nThe right to express concerns: Incident example: a \"Resolve Manager\" does wonders\nSeeding synergy and team work: Incident example: \"Virtual Teams\" - order of the day\nMake winning structures: Key fact: a \"small and effective\" team did the job to perfection\nEmployee awareness: Success story: employee awareness program at Canadian Forces Base Halifax\nHone employee skills, analyze situations and co-create strategies effectively: Success story: distant knowledge transfer through \"E-Learning\"\nDevelop hybrid skills: Incident example: a \"Hybrid team experiment\" benefits the Automobile Giants\nMake employees responsibly accountable: Key fact: you always value what is your own\nEmployee career and growth: Key stats: according to an article published in People's Daily (Year 2004)\nCompensation schemes: Key fact: new compensation schemes are emerging for employees\n",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Purpose: - The purpose of this paper is to highlight some of the Best Practices in People Management.\nDesign/methodology/approach: - This article describes effective people management which is vital for effective project management. The present article will lead you through some of the best practices for managing human resources. Case studies, success stories, and statistical examples are used to highlight some of the Best Practices.\nFindings: - Case studies, success stories, and statistics.\nOriginality/value: - This session highlights some of the Best Practices researched/applied in People Management.\n",
"role": "assistant"
}
] |
Enforcement of the purports of binding banking documents in Rastin Banking - part I
|
[
"Law",
"Banking",
"Rastin Banking",
"Banking documents",
"Enforcement of the purports of documents"
] |
[
{
"content": "Summarize the following paper into structured abstract.\n\nIntroduction: Rastin Banking (Bidabad, 2014a, 2014b), through observing Islamic banking principles and eliminating any doubt in terms of usury in the banking operation, while providing health and creating public trust, with the aid of the special designed mechanisms, can lead to positive and important effects on the economic growth and welfare, as well as the money and capital markets[1]. Rastin Banking has been designed based on the operational, financial, economic, ethical, social, legal, international and organizational principles, which all have been resulted from rational, human, Islamic and ethical teachings, based on the latest human scientific achievements in the fields of science and technology, and with the purpose to develop the economy and the banking system of the country. The advantages of Rastin Banking are so widespread in all applicable fields so that it can be considered as the main component in the reformation of the banking structure of the country. Therefore, to protect the obtained achievements, the drafts of the bill (Bidabad, 2012a) and the executive bylaw (Bidabad, 2012b) of Rastin Banking have been compiled.\nThe legal pillars for enforcement of the purports of binding banking documents: As it was cited earlier, all the contracts, which are concluded and exchanged among the parties in banks and along with the enforcement of Rastin Banking, are regarded as the official and binding documents that are executed by the related executive officers. Regarding all the mortgage and conditional transactions, in case the debtor does not pay his/her debt on the due date indicated in the document, the bank can request the notary public office to issue the writ of execution. The notary public office is obliged to send the writs of execution for enforcement of the purports of the document to the BDEU. In case, the debtor does not pay his/her debt within 10 days of the notification date of the writ of execution of the BDEU, the BDEU by evaluating the whole object of the transaction and finalization, within maximum two months, will collect its claims through holding a bid[8] and based on the legal claim, and will return the surplus[9] to the mortgagor. In case a property or an asset is pledged as debt, obligation or guarantee, the regulations of this law will be applied.\nThe executive pillars for enforcement of the purports of binding banking documents and handling complaints against executive operations in Rastin Banking: Issuance of the writ of execution\n",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Purpose: This paper aims to facilitate and accelerate the enforcement of binding banking documents and to decrease the enforcement burden of the registration offices, courts and judicial authorities and to transfer it to the banks.\nDesign/methodology/approach: A new mechanism for \"enforcement of the purports of binding banking documents in Rastin Banking\" is proposed. In the proposed regulations, a part of the executive path for enforcement of the purports of binding banking documents is transferred into a newly established unit located in every bank. The method considers all financial, legal and executive issues.\nFindings: Promotion of practical justice is a main factor to promote social and economic circumstances; the proposed model can prepare a way to improve the social and economic well-being.\nResearch limitations/implications: Codifying the law and regulations is a highly sophisticated task, and the art of codification can be examined after scrutinizing and executing the full text of the law.\nPractical implications: Though this paper presents the concept, the detailed proposed regulations are presented in two drafts of the bill and bylaw for enforcement of the purports of binding banking documents and handling complaints against executive operations in Rastin Banking.\nSocial implications: This procedure is a model that can be adapted for other countries, especially those countries that have a large number of legal disputes and the process of dispute settlement is very lengthy and cumbersome.\nOriginality/value: It fulfils an identified need to solve practical legal problem in vindication of rights that can lead to positive and important effects toward creating public trust in financial obligations and increasing the speed of collecting demands.\n",
"role": "assistant"
}
] |
Change readiness as fluid trajectories: a longitudinal multiple-case study
|
[
"Organizational change",
"Multiple-case study",
"Public services",
"Change readiness",
"Sport management",
"Public leisure"
] |
[
{
"content": "Summarize the following paper into structured abstract.\n\nIntroduction: Although management scholars have increasingly become interested in the issues of organizational change in the public sector, empirical work in this area continues to lag behind insights derived from private corporations (Kuipers et al., 2013; Rainey, 2014; Wright et al., 2013). Constrained by \"a strong tradition of writing about public-sector change under the heading of 'administrative reform'\" (Stewart and Kringas, 2003, p. 675), few attempts exist to document and inductively analyze micro-level change processes within public service organizations. Moreover, of the efforts that have been made to advance public organizational change scholarship, only a small handful of studies have purposely connected change processes to the particularities of public organizations (Van der Voet, 2014, 2015). Thus, for the most part, scholarship in this area has remained largely acontextual and aprocessual (Kuipers et al., 2013; Pettigrew, 1987).\nOrganizational change in the public sector: In the USA, UK, and other Anglo-Saxon countries, changes in public service administration have predominantly manifested as new public management (NPM) (Hood, 1991), an umbrella term for a paradigmatic shift in public management and organizing. Predicated on the explicit rejection of traditional bureaucratic provision of public goods and services, the advent of NPM challenged long-standing tenets of public administration, and the associated professionalization of public organizations continues to affect the nature of public services (Ferlie et al., 1996; Lane, 2000). At the same time, debates regarding NPM's short- and long-term effects persist. On the one hand, it \"introduced the rationale of efficiency, economy, and the coordinated management of services provided\" (Perrott, 2009, p. 40), thus \"ensuring equality in government services, management accountability, and increased responsiveness to the needs of citizens\" (Perrott, 2009, p. 40). On the other hand, some scholars continue to question the appropriateness of private sector management techniques' generic and wholesale import to the public sector (Christensen and Laegreid, 2011; Pollitt and Bouckaert, 2011).\nDifferential change perceptions: Organizational change often leads to new organizational configurations, expectations, and pressures (Bordia et al., 2004; Kiefer, 2005). However, the extent to which such changes in the objective reality of the organization correspond to subjective evaluations of one's actual need to adapt depend on a variety of contextual influencing factors (Kanter et al., 1992; Oreg et al., 2011; Piderit, 2000). For instance, as Judge et al. (1999) pointed out, whether change initiatives are successful depends to a large extent on \"the psychological predispositions of individuals experiencing the change\" (p. 107). As a result, organizational change scholars are increasingly calling for more nuanced explorations of \"employees' subjective experience of change, whether these are negative or positive\" (Jones et al., 2008, p. 206).\nChange readiness: Armenakis et al. (1993) defined \"readiness\" as an individual's \"beliefs, attitudes, and intentions regarding the extent to which changes are needed and the organization's capacity to successfully undertake those changes\" (p. 681). To elicit these favorable responses, leadership in charge of the proposed changes is instructed to craft change messages that address five readiness sentiments: discrepancy, efficacy, appropriateness, principal support, and personal valence (Armenakis et al., 1999; Armenakis and Harris, 2001). The relevance of change readiness is echoed beyond scholarly discourse, for instance by a senior manager working in the UK tourism industry stating that \"the likelihood of an organization to implement and manage change successfully without being change ready is arguably like a toddler trying to walk before being able to crawl: possible for some, impossible for most\" (By, 2007, p. 6). In other words, without readiness, any attempt to change may be doomed to fail.\nMethodology: This research is a longitudinal multiple-case study (Eisenhardt, 1989; Eisenhardt and Graebner, 2007; Yin, 2014) of a major transformation initiative in a large North American public recreation organization. Part of the vast array of contemporary human services provided by local, regional, and national agencies, public recreation organizations are tasked to provide a broad spectrum of essential individual and collective public benefits (Kraus and Curtis, 2000), while at the same time facing immense pressures to take prudent care of public funds and develop additional revenue streams (Pitas et al., 2015). Public leisure and recreation have repeatedly been hailed for their positive impact on civic health (Librett et al., 2007), while access to organized sport and recreation has been linked to lower crime rates (Hartmann and Depro, 2006), as well as improved levels of perceived social support and self-efficacy (Orsega-Smith et al., 2007) among local communities.\nResults: Over the course of the project, participants' attention to individual changes evolved significantly. While some changes lost their importance and others increased in salience, the one change discussed consistently was the structural reorganization of recreation centers and associated efforts to streamline and professionalize operations. To clearly anchor our analysis and avoid comparing apples and oranges when reflecting on employees' differential change experience, we focused our examination on the dynamism of the five change beliefs in regards to the particular challenge of organizational restructuring.\nDiscussion: As successful change depends on the proper execution by individuals within the organization (Choi, 2011; George and Jones, 2001), \"change initiatives may not produce the intended results because recipients are simply not ready\" (Vakola, 2013, p. 96). Yet, while a focus on change readiness has been widely treated as the latest panacea in organizational change management research, various opportunities for theoretical extension and clarification remain, particular in regards to the relative importance and potential dynamism of its five constituent beliefs. As Stevens (2013) pointed out, readiness might be \"better captured by a profile of responses over time rather than a single response at one point in time. To date, little if any research has captured readiness from this perspective\" (p. 349). At the same time, Stevens (2013) based his purely conceptual suggestions on the presupposition that as change projects evolve, so might individual perceptions and evaluations of context and conditions. In other words, change content, context, process, and perceived outcomes might themselves change, sometimes rapidly, and will thus occasion the re-evaluation of previously established change parameters. At the same time, one could argue that if change content or context change, an individual is in fact not re-forming cognitions and attitudes regarding the same change but merely shifting their interpretations from one target to the next and thus blurring the relationship between variables to be analyzed over the course of time. Indeed, the more complex a given change initiative, the more difficult it becomes to formulate clearly what drives participants' readiness perceptions. If an individual employee embraces a particular component of a change project that is widely rejected by the rest of the staff, yet lacks readiness in other areas, it is unclear who is \"more ready\" for the change in general and who is not.\n",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to analyze change process perceptions of public service employees and document how change readiness belief salience fluctuates and evolves throughout the implementation of a major organizational restructuring effort.\nDesign/methodology/approach: This research is a longitudinal multiple-case study of a major transformation initiative in a large North American public recreation organization. Over the course of 15 months, the authors conducted four rounds of personal interviews with 19 participants (65 interviews in total, each lasting 25-45 min). Additionally, the authors analyzed internal e-mail correspondence, memos, and meeting agendas, as well as external stakeholder communication. Finally, the primary researcher spent a significant amount of time collecting field notes while shadowing high-level managers and employees and attending meetings.\nFindings: Overall, the authors documented a clear hierarchy of change readiness dimensions. The relative strength and temporal persistence of these dimensions can be traced back to various public organizing particularities. Moreover, the authors found that an initial focus on some readiness dimensions facilitated subsequent sensemaking processes whereas others hindered such engagement with the change project.\nResearch limitations/implications: This research is the first to empirically document temporal fluidity of change readiness dimensions and salience. Moreover, it offers a rare in-depth look at a changing public service organization.\nPractical implications: This research helps change agents in developing tailored change messages and to better understand potential sources of frustration and resistance to change efforts.\nOriginality/value: No similar efforts exist to document the underlying dynamism of evolving change readiness perceptions.\n",
"role": "assistant"
}
] |
Pervasive sensing technologies for facility management: a critical review
|
[
"Facility management",
"Laser scanning",
"Photogrammetry",
"Videogrammetry",
"Sensor",
"Auto-ID"
] |
[
{
"content": "Summarize the following paper into structured abstract.\n\n1. Introduction: A \"facility\" refers to an asset that is built, installed or established to serve social and economic activities (Kaplan et al., 2004). Facility management (FM) is the \"organizational function, which integrates people, place and process within the built environment with the purpose of improving the quality of life of people and the productivity of the core business\" (ISO, 2016). In a building or infrastructure's \"lifecycle\", which spans from inception, design, construction, operation through to demolition (Xu and Lu, 2018), FM mainly transpires during the operation stage and normally lasts 30 to 50 years if not longer (Atkin and Brooks, 2015). With facilities accounting for nearly 40 per cent of global energy consumption (Bilgen, 2014), the effectiveness and efficiency of FM have become a pressing issue. Moreover, in the era of automation and intelligence, FM is the key scene of many smart and humanized services for users. Data collection of facilities and users becomes increasingly important for facility owners and managers to enhance smart services concerning individual comfort, quick response to requirements, cost-effectiveness of physical assets, and sustainable and environmental performance of facilities (Peng et al., 2017).\n2. Research methods: This study follows the preferred reporting items for systematic reviews and meta-analyses, a standard methodology for systematic review, to collect the literature data (Moher et al., 2009). First, various FM applications are grouped into eight categories based on authors' experience and relevant studies, Wong et al., 2018. Category A1 refers to the conservation of historical buildings and maintenance of facilities; A2 investigates the analysis and management of facilities' energy consumption; A3, the health and safety of users and security of facilities; A4, the quality and ambient comfort of indoor environment, e.g. air quality; A5, the assessment of infrastructures such as pavements, highways, bridges and property assets such as furniture; A6, the access and visualization of facilities' information through two-dimensional or three-dimensional models; A7, the use of interior space; and A8, the monitoring of structural health. The scope of PSTs in this review include sensors, laser scanning, photogrammetry and videogrammetry and auto-ID, as they are the most representative PSTs for FM (Fathi et al., 2015; Wong et al., 2018).\n3. Pervasive sensing technologies: 3.1 Auto-identification\n4. Pervasive sensing technologies for facility management applications: Table IV highlights typical cases of FM applications reported in the reviewed papers. Notably, while some cases rely on different PSTs for separate functions, there are cases demonstrating the deployment of an integration of PSTs. How these PSTs are selected and used to support these FM applications and cases will be further elaborated and discussed in the following subsections.\n5. Challenges: Although auto-ID, sensors, photogrammetry and videogrammetry and laser scanning are promising PSTs for FM, their applications encounter many challenges requiring examination from different perspectives. Five major challenges stand out given the analysis of existing research on PSTs for FM and deserve future research attention.\n6. Conclusion: Efficient and effective FM demands real-time, accurate data, and seamless coordination of people, place and process. New opportunities for FM have become possible as PSTs have advanced. However, it is hard to find appropriate technologies to capture desired data for a targeted purpose, especially for facility owners, managers, and some researchers, who lacked the expertise or paid scant attention to technologies. This study contributes to the body of knowledge by articulating the status quo and challenges in PSTs for FM applications. Several key conclusions can be drawn from this review: energy modeling and management, together with information access and visualization via PSTs received more attention than others, while space management is the least referred; one PST could facilitate many FM application categories and each PST has its own advantages for specific applications; one single application sometimes can be achieved by different PSTs using different data processing methods. These findings can both act as guidances for practitioners to choose appropriate PST to captured desired data and add a new angle for FM researchers who aim to update the theory for facility information management.\n",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Purpose: The practice of facility management (FM) has been evolving with the rapid development of pervasive sensing technologies (PSTs) such as sensors, automatic identification (auto-ID), laser scanning and photogrammetry. Despite the proliferation of research on the use of PSTs for FM, a comprehensive review of such research is missing from the literature. This study aims to cover the knowledge void by examining the status quo and challenges of the selected PSTs with a focus on FM.\nDesign/methodology/approach: This paper reviewed 204 journal papers recounting cases of using PSTs for FM. The reviewed papers were extracted from Elsevier Scopus database using the advanced search.\nFindings: Findings of this study revealed that PSTs and FM applications form a many-to-many mapping, i.e. one PST could facilitate many FM applications, and one application can also be supported by various PSTs. It is also found that energy modeling and management is the most referred purpose in FM to adopt PSTs, while space management, albeit important, received the least attention. Five challenges are identified, which include high investment on PSTs, data storage problem, absence of proper data exchange protocols for data interoperability, a lack of mature data processing methods for data utilization and privacy of users.\nOriginality/value: This paper paints a full picture of PSTs adoption for FM. It pinpoints the promising explorations for tackling the key challenges to future development.\n",
"role": "assistant"
}
] |
The evolution of Industrial Management & Data Systems over the past 25 years: A bibliometric overview
|
[
"Literature review",
"Citation analysis",
"Bibliometric",
"Industrial Management & Data Systems"
] |
[
{
"content": "Summarize the following paper into structured abstract.\n\n1. Introduction: The Industrial Management & Data Systems (IMDS) is an international journal that explores and applies the potential of new technologies to all aspects of management activities such as marketing, management information systems, operations management, business strategy, innovation, organization behavior, business process management and supply chain management. IMDS is published by Emerald and included in the Journal Citation Reports of Thomson & Reuters Web of Science (WoS). The major aims of IMDS are: to provide cross-disciplinary research in the areas of operations management and information systems, to study different range of information systems development and usage in businesses, to promote awareness of new technology and related concepts and their implications in business and to disseminate knowledge for improving operations management practice and to improve the theoretical base necessary for supporting sound management decisions.\n2. Database and methodology: 2.1 Database\n3. Basic bibliometric analysis: 3.1 Publications and citations across the time period\n4. Authors, institutes and countries/regions analysis in IMDS: 4.1 Most productive and influential authors, institutes and countries/regions\n5. Themes evolution in IMDS: 5.1 Descriptive statistics of author keywords\n6. Concluding remarks and limitations: Since the founding, IMDS has given voice to a growing international and interdisciplinary community of researchers in the field of operations management and information systems. The study collects all the publications of the journal between 1994 and 2018, and reviews 1,616 full-length articles in a bibliometric way. A number of highlights can be summarized as follows:\n",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to examine publication characteristics and dynamic evolution of the Industrial Management & Data Systems (IMDS) over the past 25 years from volume 94, issue 1, in 1994 through volume 118, issue 9, in 2018, using a bibliometric analysis, and identify the leading trends that have affected the journal during this time frame.\nDesign/methodology/approach: A bibliometric approach was used to provide a basic overview of the IMDS, including distribution of publication and citations, articles citing the IMDS, top-cited papers and publication patterns. Then, a complex network analysis was employed to present the most productive, influential and active authors, institutes and countries/regions. In addition, cluster analysis and alluvial diagram were used to analyze author keywords.\nFindings: This study presents the basic bibliometric results for the IMDS and focuses on exploring its performance over the last 25 years. And it reveals the most productive, influential and active authors, institutes and countries/regions in IMDS. Moreover, this study detects the existence of at least five different keywords clusters and discovers how themes have evolved through the intricate citation relationships in IMDS.\nOriginality/value: The main contribution of this paper is the use of multiple analysis techniques from a complex network paradigm to emphasize the time evolving nature of the co-occurrence networks and to explore the variation of the collaboration networks in the IMDS. For the first time, the evolution of research themes is revealed with a purely data-driven approach.\n",
"role": "assistant"
}
] |
A new model for service businesses in product-centric firms
|
[
"Business development",
"Profit",
"Service industries",
"Corporate strategy"
] |
[
{
"content": "Summarize the following paper into structured abstract.\n\n__NO_TITLE__: Confronted by lower product sales prospects, increased margin pressures and customer demands for free service support, many firms are entering the service business. Yet most of these firms will be unable to scale their service operations to develop a viable stand-alone services capability. In the rare cases where they are successful in establishing a services business it will often fail to deliver the expected profit margins.\nFrom products to services: hurdles along the way: There are many difficulties that beset the general manager who is moving from leading a product business to leading a product and services business. Being aware of these challenges and addressing them in the planning phase is critical. Key challenges include:*Inability to detach services resources from product support roles. Customers who are used to getting services for free resist paying separately for them, even when the manufacturer launches an independent services business. This causes significant internal friction between the product sales team and the nascent services organization. The product sales team keeps asking for dedicated services personnel to support product sales, but the services group wants to keep key talent to help sell and deliver services independently. Often, such conflicts reach a stage where product and services groups each want their own separate services personnel dedicated to their respective needs.*Misaligned go-to-market model to sell services. Many firms task their historically product-oriented sales teams with selling services alongside products. Since product sales transactions typically generate much higher revenues than services transactions, and the primary sales metric is revenue, it is understandable that services sales receive only limited focus. Yet, expectations are for services to achieve double-digit growth rates and capture new markets. This fundamental disconnect is the primary reason why many firms are not able to scale services business.*Uncompetitive services pricing. Manufacturers' services are often unable to compete against pure-play service providers who offer similar services - typically at 15-to-20 percent lower cost[1]. This causes the services group to stay in a defensive mode, offering only a product-centric services portfolio with minimal value-add. The product-turned-services company has now ceded fertile ground to competitors and has missed out on opportunities to sell those services whereby they could influence their customers' down-stream purchasing decisions.*Organizational paralysis due to perceived channel conflict. Many manufacturers' channel partners offer value-added services. As such, when the manufacturer decides to enter the services business, it is quite normal for the product sales team to anticipate that the newly created services offerings will create channel conflict and not fully support it.*The inability to adopt a different business model (services- versus product-centric business model). Many of the challenges identified above occur in a corporate environment with a strong product-centric legacy. At its core, services require a different business model, as illustrated in Table I. In addition, a services business model requires different selling skills, the ability to develop and articulate a different value proposition, often to a different buying audience, with different buying triggers and cycles and with different pricingThe challenge of embracing this new business model is compounded by managers having to launch this new services business model while protecting and minimizing any impact to their traditional product revenue stream.\nTactics during the products-to-services business migration: A general manager can utilize several tactics to overcome some of the challenges:*Consolidating all services under a single profit and loss (P&L) statement. In one case study, we observed a manufacturer giving away free pre- and post-sale services at a cost of 20 percent of sales[1]. By simply launching a separate services group and chartering this group to manage itself as a free-standing business, dramatic cost savings were achieved. The newly created services group rigorously accounted for free services given to the product sales group. Additionally, this new services group minimized free service give-aways for non-strategic accounts. By taking these steps, they cut their sales operations cost by as much as 20 percent[1]. This simple move brought organizational discipline around free services - using them when and where they were most needed, unlocking services' potential to pursue revenue generating opportunities, and bringing greater transparency to sales support costs. See Figure 1.*Establishing consistent services pricing discipline. Since many services businesses are not historically accountable for true P&L, and are often subordinate to a product group, they do not have established processes for pricing. We have observed that even long after services groups have been established, pricing for various offerings is inconsistent across any given segment, and is dictated by the product sales team. While the product sales team does need to have pricing flexibility in order continue to win product business in the market-place, pricing policy and discipline is needed. This prevents a \"death spiral\" towards free (value-less) services as negotiations continue to result in deeper and deeper discounts.*Providing an independent sales force to grow services. Selling services requires a consultative sales approach that is often very different from a product selling approach that relies more on technology and feature/function discussions. Typically, transaction sizes of these two different types of sale are also quite different - with product sales transactions being much larger. This dynamic naturally causes product sales reps to give away services - a smaller dollar transaction - in order to earn the larger product business. For this reason we recommend that manufacturers who are focused on growing their services business should provide their services group with its own sales force. In our observations it is also best for this new sales force to be independent of product sales and closely aligned with the services delivery team.*Gradually unbundling services by targeting different customer segments. A common objection raised by the product sales teams is that if you unbundle services for strategic accounts, you will lose competitiveness on future product bids. To address this concern, services teams need to gradually unbundle services - first by focusing on new customers and then by offering a new value proposition to existing customers. In essence, you perfect the new value proposition and pricing model on new customers. Once a truly value-add service is created, you can then go back to existing customers and offer them something for which they are truly willing to pay. This is an important point - service unbundling simply is not charging your existing customers for something that they used to get for free. It is about refining the value proposition and getting customers to recognize the value in a service they may not have acknowledged in the past. See Figure 2.Another important point is that even in industries where a manufacturer has an existing customer base where it would be easy to cultivate new service opportunities, we still recommend the path of evolution in Figure 2 since it is better to establish the new services' value proposition with non-strategic customers before coming back to the core strategic customers.It is typical of services sales teams to follow product sales teams and build on existing product relationships at an account. Most services groups in a product-centric firm generate over 75 percent of their revenue from the same clients that buy their products[1]. There are two common issues that arise with this approach. First, the product buyer is often not the same as services buyer. Second, the customer has leverage with the manufacturer during product negotiations. The customer often asks the manufacturer to lower their services price in order to earn the larger product business. We recommend that companies develop a services specific market segmentation model to identify new services opportunities. With this targeted segmentation, manufacturers can more easily create and offer a unique value proposition to new groups of customers, (or at the very least, they can offer their existing value proposition to new groups of customers). This helps manufacturers avoid the negotiation \"leverage trap\", minimizes internal conflict between the product and services sales teams, and causes less disruption to existing business.*Creating a unique value proposition for channel partners. Often, channel partners create a more serviceable product by installing optional third-party modules. An example of this would be a remote monitoring service (software and call center support) added to a \"big-ticket\" medical device. This kind of monitoring service gives the customer (e.g. hospital or large clinic) knowledge of equipment issues, needed repairs, or even training or product usage tips. Manufacturers are best positioned to create this kind of serviceable product because of their deep product knowledge. Additionally, manufacturers have a cost advantage in this process since it is usually most cost effective to install such optional modules at the factory. Finally, certain services, such as remote diagnostics, can be monitored by the manufacturer and branded under the manufacturer's name more effectively. This lowers overall product and service price, gives the manufacturer more flexibility in capturing additional value from customers in terms of additional post-sales services. In return, channel partners can market and push customers to sign up for such services and then deliver those services in the field, sharing value with the manufacturer.Another way that manufacturers can create value for the channel is by capturing product usage information via remote monitoring services. With so many products able to transmit usage data to manufacturers (internet connected televisions, medical imaging devices, office equipment, manufacturing systems, etc.), these data give manufacturers the ability to create new services based on unique customer usage insight. Given channel partners' scope of activity and expertise, it often makes sense for manufacturers to share this insight and partner with the channel to deliver innovative new services to customers. For instance, product usage data can lead to new services that help customers troubleshoot, optimize, customize or train on a particular product. Due to the breadth of these services manufacturers would typically need channel partner help to deliver them.*Developing distinct services processes. Key metrics for mature product businesses are revenue, market share, and COGS, while key metrics for service businesses are revenue growth, signings, and utilization. This fundamental difference in top-level metrics means that different processes must be emphasized. Manufacturing is an intensive business with a focus on research, manufacturing operations and the supply chain while service delivery is a knowledge and resource intensive business with an emphasis on customer insight, knowledge management and resource management.\nExecuting the transformation: Once challenges are addressed with tactics like those described above, there must be a focus on aligning the organization for execution of the new services business. Key execution priorities include:*Ensuring strategic alignment. Companies need to understand the compelling business and emotional needs to create a services division - beyond the CEO's request. Typically, there is a strong desire for a services business, but it is not clear what the underlying reason is. Is it to help sell more products (a \"pull-through\" rationale), improve the customer experience, create a stand-alone services business or improve overall transaction size? Many times it takes a business crisis, or \"burning-platform\" for senior management to think through these issues, articulate the rationale for services, and financially commit to launching the new services business.*Seeking efficiencies from maintenance operations. One of the biggest challenges facing senior management tasked with growing a new services business is where to get funding -especially for the additional head-count needed to sell services. At a corporate level, there is usually a process for reviewing services business plans and then providing a level of seed-funding. Yet one overlooked place for new services venture funding is in the existing services operations. These existing after-sales services operations often contain inefficient processes that have not been closely examined during the past decade. By eliminating inefficiencies and streamlining processes, modest funding can be generated for a new services venture. To do this, a few common levers should be considered. These include entitlement minimization, parts inventory reduction, enabling \"first time fixes\", a closed loop quality feedback, returns minimization, moving after-sales services out of the product groups, and forming a global shared service, and global process standardization.As an example of how such savings can provide real funding for growth, Table II gives a hypothetical illustration.The hypothetical case illustrates how optimizing traditional maintenance services could provide most of the funding needed to support the new Services sales resources.*Selecting a services business model to focus on. There are five different types of services business models: product-centric, professional service, outsourcing, information-based and financial services (Majewski and Srinivas, 2003). Each one is a fundamentally different type of business with a unique set of sales, delivery, and management skills, and back-end support required to run them. One of the common mistakes that service managers make when they launch services is that they try to focus on more than two services models at a time. We recommend that management carefully select which services business model they want to adopt and ensure it receives the required support and attention.*Developing unique value propositions. One reason why value propositions do not resonate with customers is that many managers - while having deep knowledge of what customers want - are too product-centric in their customer thinking. In order to assess the true value proposition of new services, manufacturers must unlearn their product-oriented view of customers and relearn how products and services, as a whole, are utilized by various customer segments.*Partnering with ecosystem players (including competitors) to offer a robust services portfolio and minimize risk. While many firms have outsourced parts of their manufacturing or supply chain operations, these same firms are reluctant to do so for their services operations. Few firms effectively offer their services through channel partners, yet it is quite possible - and sometimes more profitable - to offer services under their own (the manufacturer's) brand, yet sell and deliver the services through channel partners. Another, often overlooked, area of services growth opportunity, yet one fraught with conflict, is forming services alliances with other manufacturers. In essence, this expands the addressable market by offering services for competitors of the manufacturers' own product group.\nLessons learned: Ensure leadership commitment\nConclusions: When managed properly, new services businesses can deliver solid economic value to the top and bottom line. In order to capture this value, managers must look at services through a very different lens, understanding that this is a fundamentally different business model than their existing product business. We recommend managing the entire services value chain to realize the full benefits of creating independent services revenue stream, increased product pull-through, and deeper customer relationships.\n",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Purpose: - Confronted by lower product sales prospects, increased margin pressures and customer demands for free service support, many firms are entering the service business. Yet most of these firms will be unable to scale their service operations to develop a viable stand-alone services capability. In the rare cases where they are successful in establishing a services business it will often fail to deliver the expected profit margins. However, when properly planned and executed, a products to services business transformation generates impressive results. this paper aims to investigate this issue.\nDesign/methodology/approach: - The paper defines how to scale services business. Key challenges and mitigation approaches as well as case studies are provided to effectively execute on services transformation. Various challenges and their effects are examined separately. Several tactics to overcome some of the key challenges identified.\nFindings: - When managed properly, new services businesses can deliver solid economic value to the top and bottom line. In order to capture this value, managers must look at services through a very different lens, understanding that this is a fundamentally different business model than their existing product business. It is recommended managing the entire services value chain to realize the full benefits of creating independent services revenue stream, increased product pull-through, and deeper customer relationships.\nOriginality/value: - By considering various obstacles a company faces in scaling services business, the paper provides insight into what strategies may be effective as established companies deal with balancing existing product-centric business while scaling services business.\n",
"role": "assistant"
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] |
Activating values to stimulate organic food purchases: can advertisements increase pro-environmental intentions?
|
[
"Marketing",
"Environmental",
"Values",
"Consumer",
"Green",
"Organic",
"Activation"
] |
[
{
"content": "Summarize the following paper into structured abstract.\n\nIntroduction: Past research has shown that pro-environmental beliefs, attitudes and behaviors are strongly associated with value orientations (de Groot and Steg, 2007a, 2007b; Schultz et al., 2005). Biospheric and altruistic self-transcendent values have strong positive correlations with pro-environmental perceptions, for example, while egoistic values have negative correlations with most pro-environmental perceptions. Despite this evidence, many companies, government agencies and environmental organizations are increasingly utilizing claims based on self-interest to advertise \"green\" products and promote environmental policies (Evans et al., 2013; Ottman, 2011).\nLiterature review: Although much previous research has focused on assessing static determinants of pro-environmental behaviors (Ha and Janda, 2012; Kalafatis et al., 1999), relatively less work has examined the possibility for dynamic processes whereby individual intention and behavior can vary as a function of context. Some researchers nonetheless have begun to focus on the role of value activation in the context of purchasing products with environmental attributes. Values can be defined as concepts or beliefs about desirable end states or behaviors that transcend specific situations, guide selection or evaluation of behavior and events, and are ordered by relative importance (Schwartz and Bilsky, 1987). Schwartz's original values framework includes ten primary values divided into four general categories - self-enhancement (achievement and power), self-transcendence (benevolence and universalism), openness to change (stimulation and self-direction) and conservation (security, tradition and conformity). One value, hedonism, shares aspects of both self-enhancement and openness to change. Later work distinguishes between biospheric and altruistic self-transcendence (Schultz et al., 2005). Empirical research has validated this framework across a wide range of fields and cultures (Cieciuch and Davidov, 2012; Schwartz, 1992).\nResearch questions and hypotheses: The research discussed above indicates that self-transcendent biospheric and altruistic values, followed by conservation (and particularly security) values, are most commonly associated with pro-environmental behaviors. This insight suggests two primary hypotheses:\nStudy 1: Methods\nStudy 2: Methods\nConclusion: Our results suggest a possible resolution of the divide between the insights of academic research and the practices of sustainability professionals discussed above. Although biospheric self-transcendence values may be most strongly correlated with the purchase of green products in observational studies, efforts to activate them may not be as effective as those focused on conservation, which were the only activated values to have an overall effect on organic purchasing intentions in either of the two studies. The lack of support for H1 contradicts some past literature, and suggests that an alternative logic may be operative instead. Self-transcendent values may already be activated in decision contexts regularly involving pro-environmental choices (such as organic food), and so efforts to activate other values that are less commonly associated with such contexts (e.g. conservation and self-enhancement) may be more likely to have a significant effect on pro-environmental intentions. This suggests a possible novelty activation effect worth further exploration.\n",
"role": "user"
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"content": "Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to examine different strategies for an increasing adoption of \"environmentally friendly\" products. Scholars have consistently shown that consumers with strong biospheric and altruistic beliefs are more likely to purchase these products, while marketers are increasingly appealing to consumers' self-interest in their efforts to sell their \"green\" products. This paper explores this divide and offers a potential explanation for it, using the concept of value activation.\nDesign/methodology/approach: The paper presents results of two survey experiments that test this explanation in the context of organic food advertisements. In a simulated trip to a grocery store, participants were exposed to advertisements designed to activate the six different values in Schwartz's framework. After viewing the advertisements, participants were asked to select among organic and non-organic options in six product categories - milk, bread, eggs, spinach, potatoes and chocolate.\nFindings: The study's results suggest that while advertisements designed to activate values may have limited effect on consumer intentions, those that relate to protecting the health of oneself and one's family are most likely to increase organic purchases.\nOriginality/value: This paper is one of the first of its kind to explicitly test whether advertisements designed to activate a range of human values can increase consumers' intention to engage in pro-environmental behaviors. The two studies reveal that value-based advertisements may have a stronger effect on the organic purchasing intentions of specific demographic groups (e.g. consumers who are aged under 40, lack a college degree and do not identify as liberal).\n",
"role": "assistant"
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Condition monitoring for airport baggage handling in the era of industry 4.0
|
[
"Condition monitoring",
"Time-based maintenance"
] |
[
{
"content": "Summarize the following paper into structured abstract.\n\nIntroduction: Competition between airports throughout Europe, including the UK, is increasing, with approximately 63 per cent of the population residing within 2 h travelling time of two airports. Effective baggage handling therefore contributes to customer choices (Bracaglia et al., 2014; Wiltshire, 2013).\nMishandled baggage at major airports: Costs associated with the extra handling of bags that miss flights needs to be avoided. SITA has been tracking baggage mishandling statistics for the last 10 years, including all bags reported delayed and/or damaged by airlines and/or their handling companies. Over this time passenger volume has increased by more than 1.41bn, leading to additional pressure on airport baggage handling systems (SITA, 2016).\nRole for GPS/radio frequency identification detection (RFID) tracking in helping to find lost bags: Thousands of bags are stranded at airports due to inefficient baggage handling systems that regularly breakdown. Often, airlines and passengers do not know where lost bags are located; they could be stranded in the baggage handling system at the departure airport, possibly in a protection net outside the conveyor line, or alternatively, they could have been accidently placed on flights to destinations different from where their owners will arrive. In some instances they are never found at all (IATA Baggage Services, 2016).\nMaintenance of baggage handling systems: At present, capital airports' maintenance is based on time-based/preventative and run-to-failure maintenance strategies. To reach the target of zero unplanned downtime the maintenance strategy for the baggage handling system needs to change.\nMethodology: Technical action research methodology was selected as \"an approach in which the action researcher and stakeholders collaborate in analysis of the problem and in development of a solution based on the diagnosis\" (Avison et al., 1999; Coughlan and Coghlan, 2002; Wieringa, 2014). It was selected because it is known to be a strong method to assist in rapid problem-solving (Figure 4).\nVibration monitoring: During the 1970s and 1980s the oil industry made considerable efforts to develop vibration damage detection methods for offshore platforms (Fujino, 2002), and the technique proved useful for other building structures. Vibration damage detection aims to identify the exact location of any structural damage, and further development of structural vibration monitoring occurred during the development of missile technology. However, structural health monitoring problems are fundamentally different from those experienced by rotating machinery (Farrar and Worden, 2007; Fan and Qiao, 2010; Gentile and Gallino, 2008) (Figure 8).\nBaggage handling systems: Failure in a baggage handling system can be divided into \"avoidable\" and \"non-avoidable\". Non-avoidable failures are those that occur on a daily basis, with the most common being bag jams when baggage is caught on side guards or belts. Given the nature of the current systems and the huge variation among bags, such failure is common, and airports simply live with this failure and have staff available to clear the problems as quickly as possible.\nPdM of direct coded vehicle systems: The DCV system in Terminal 5 began operation in 2008; as in many other large airports, baggage is transported in carts on rails in order to quickly cover long distances. The design is similar to that of a rollercoaster, with individual carts on wheels running on tracks, each cart being boosted along the rails via a succession of magnetic linear motors positioned at various locations along and beneath the tracks (Heinz and Pitfield, 2011).\nResults: A controlled test was conducted and data from passing carts were collected over a three week period. The data were used to create a dart diagram, as shown in Figure 12. An analysis of this diagram indicates the following:\nDiscussion: For the DCV system the findings demonstrate a clear trend of increasing vibration velocity with age and use of the baggage cart wheels. This vibration is caused by wheel mass unbalanced inertia, which is transmitted to the tracks as vibration. Figure 16 shows the vibration values of all the circulating carts in terminal 5; the Y-axis shows peak-to-peak velocity, whilst the X-axis shows cart numbers, from No. 1 to No. 2016.\nConclusions: Capital airports throughout the world are already operating at full capacity, and it is predicted that passenger numbers will grow at 4.6 per cent annually from now until 2030 (SITA, 2016). This increase in air traffic and the strain it puts on baggage handling systems means that a situation that is already critical could well become disastrous at many levels. System failures are not inevitable since solutions to prevent them are possible, and these very same airports are on the brink of a new era that will be influenced less by what is happening in their own operations, than by developments in the wider digital transformation industry. Smart Airports and Airport 4.0 are already part of this.\n",
"role": "user"
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{
"content": "Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to present the findings of a recent study conducted with the objective of addressing the problem of failure of baggage carts in the high-speed baggage tunnel at Heathrow Terminal 5 by the development of an innovative condition-based maintenance system designed to meet the requirements of twenty-first century airport systems and Industry 4.0.\nDesign/methodology/approach: An empirical experimental approach to this action research was taken to install a vibration condition monitoring pilot test in the north tunnel at Terminal 5. Vibration data were collected over a 6-month period and analysed to find the threshold of good quality tires and those with worn bearings that needed replacement. The results were compared with existing measures to demonstrate that vibration monitoring could be used as a predictive model for condition-based maintenance.\nFindings: The findings demonstrated a clear trend of increasing vibration velocity with age and use of the baggage cart wheels caused by wheel mass unbalanced inertia that was transmitted to the tracks as vibration. As a result, preventative maintenance is essential to ensure the smooth running of airport baggage. This research demonstrates that a healthy wheel produces vibration of under 60 mm/s whereas a damaged wheel measures up to 100 mm/s peak-to-peak velocity and this can be used in real-time condition monitoring to prevent baggage cart failure. It can also run as an autonomous system linked to AI and Industry 4.0 airport logic.\nOriginality/value: Whilst vibration monitoring has been used to measure movement in static structures such as bridges and used in rotating machinery such as railway wheels (Tondon and Choudhury, 1999) this is unique as it is the first time it has been applied on a stationary structure (tracks) carrying high-speed rotating machinery (baggage cart wheels). This technique has been patented and proven in the pilot study and is in the process of being rolled out to all Heathrow terminal connection tunnels. It has implications for all other airports world-wide and, with new economic sensors, to other applications that rely on moving conveyor belts.\n",
"role": "assistant"
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] |
Open courses and MOOCs as professional development - is the openness a hindrance?
|
[
"Openness",
"MOOCs",
"Professional development",
"Workplace learning",
"Open courses",
"Open education"
] |
[
{
"content": "Summarize the following paper into structured abstract.\n\nIntroduction: The need for professional development is increasing both in business and as Life Long Learning for individuals. It is a great advantage if professional development can be coordinated with regular duties and other commitments. Much of the professional development and training currently on offer needs to offer opportunities to study flexibly at any time during the working week, depending on the professional's working tasks. It is an advantage if it can be flexible in all of time, place and scope. E-learning has been implemented through the last decades aiming at increased flexibility and openness, and decreased costs.\nBackground: Higher demands on the competence and skills among personnel and workforce require increased professional development (Hamburg et al., 2013; Milligan and Littlejohn, 2014; Noe et al., 2014). It is also increasingly important to link experience with academic knowledge through collaboration between industry and academia (Andersen et al., 2013). One driving force for business is the possibility of access to professional development that is flexible enough that study really can be conducted in combination with regular duties. Professional development as used in this study includes skills training[2] of personnel organized or encouraged by management or a human resources department or function. It can be provided in-house or by an external organization.\nThe focus of the investigation: A number of challenges exist for professional development based on open courses, both in internally developed and in existing external courses (Weller and Anderson, 2013). Which information and data from the respective companies can be made openly available in a training situation? This can be expected to be even more challenging for MOOCs with many participants than for courses with relatively few participants. Allowing data from the company's operations to be used (for example, a \"case\") in an open course grants competitors access to both the facts of the case and any analysis that is carried out. Does the company really want its employees to be participating in the same courses as other professionals in the same sector? Is it a risk that course participants reveal information that was not intended to be shared? Is the openness a hindrance for using open courses, including MOOCs, as professional development? In this study questions are posed to managers and HR-specialists responsible for professional development at eight major companies.\nResults: The interviewees were surprisingly positive about \"openness\" and saw few problems with the openness in training, even though information such as customer lists, business secrets and innovations must not be revealed. However, it is possible to find a balance. \"You make more money if you are open than if you try to keep things secret, the way society works nowadays\" (CTES). Staff at the firms in question are described as being accustomed to dealing with the question of what is secret or not. From the point of view of \"openness\" there is no significant difference between open professional development and other training, such as participation in conferences. The staff claim that they know what is appropriate to talk about openly and what should be kept within the company. In some cases, a trainee signs a confidentiality agreement not to reveal confidential information outside the company but, overall, trust is placed in the staff. Each participant takes responsibility for the corporate data that she or he puts into case studies and discussions. The challenges of an industry are often shared and an appropriate part of open professional development. In such training, the staff claim combinations of \"openness\" and general information are applied to concrete examples in which a company's own terms are used. Details of each case can then be kept internally in the companies. All interviewees believe that it is possible to find a balance.\nConclusion and discussion: This study indicates that managers and HR-specialists who are responsible for professional development have a positive attitude towards knowledge sharing and collaboration in training situations. The statement from Hamel et al. (1989) that \"Learning from partners is paramount\" (p. 134, italics in original) is met in general. There is, admittedly, information that should be kept secret, but it is possible to find a balance. The employees know what is possible to share and what should be kept secret. Hamel et al.'s (1989) view that the information possible to share is decided by engineers and operation managers day to day seems to be validated. The managers and HR-specialists' responses in the interviews should, however, be interpreted with caution since open courses, including MOOCs, are relatively new forms of education. Several of those interviewed had limited experience of them, despite ongoing collaboration with HEIs in the development of open courses. The interviewees' understanding of open courses and MOOCs varied, which is not surprising since there are significant differences between different types of open courses (Rodriguez, 2014). All the same, the interviewees could relate to courses under development at HEIs in cooperation with respective company.\n",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to analyse if open courses, including massive open online courses (MOOCs), can be used as professional development despite their openness since the openness not only brings together individuals from different organizations but also may make the results of collaboration public.\nDesign/methodology/approach: The setting is eight companies in different sectors and networks, collaborating with Higher Education Institutions in developing open courses in externally funded projects. The opinions of managers and HR-specialists in the companies are investigated and analysed.\nFindings: The managers and HR-specialists are positive to open courses that deliver professional development. They consider the openness in this kind of course to be of no significant problem. The employee knows what can be shared and what can be kept secret. The conditions are, however, different depending on the kind of company and the kind of inter-company relationship that exists.\nResearch limitations/implications: Several interesting questions arise for future research about the use of open courses as professional development in different categories of inter-firm relationship and trust.\nPractical implications: If the openness is not a hindrance open online courses would appear to meet the requirement of flexibility; they have the potential of being suitable for professional development for individuals who want to increase their competence, but also as organized professional development in organizations and businesses.\nOriginality/value: This is one of the first studies of the openness as a potential hindrance when open courses including MOOCs are utilized as professional development.\n",
"role": "assistant"
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] |
Selection biases that emerge when age meets gender
|
[
"Gender differences",
"Employment",
"Discrimination",
"Stigma",
"Ageism"
] |
[
{
"content": "Summarize the following paper into structured abstract.\n\n__NO_TITLE__: The demographic makeup of the American workforce is changing dramatically in a number of ways. In the current article, we consider two of the changes that are leading to a more diverse workforce, namely an increase in older workers and an increase in female workers. Not only is the workforce currently aging, but it is projected to see an acceleration of aging in the future. For instance, it is anticipated that by 2050, 19 percent of the labor force will be comprised by the 55- and older age group (Toossi, 2002). Additionally, the number of individuals who choose not to take early retirement and/or remain in the workforce even after retirement is increasing (Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2009), and estimates suggest increases in the number of older workers who remain in the workforce with full-time employment (Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2009). Furthermore, it is projected that the number of older applicants seeking employment will increase by over 36 percent by the next decade (Toossi, 2009) and some older applicants are even deciding to return to work after retirement (Needleman, 2008). In sum, it is critical to conduct research on the experiences of older people in the workplace as they are an important component of the labor force.\nTheoretical explanations for age and gender interactive effects: We propose two theoretical frameworks that can explain interactive effects of age and gender in selection processes. The first framework is social role theory (Eagly and Karau, 2002) and the second is double jeopardy hypothesis (Dowd and Bengston, 1978). We discuss each in turn as well as the way in which they shape our hypotheses.\nMethod: Participants\nDiscussion: The current study examined the interactive effects of age and gender in evaluating entry-level job applicants who are at one of three different age levels, young, middle aged, and older. Due to a violation of social norms, we anticipated that older men would be evaluated more harshly than both younger men and all female applicants. Indeed, the results revealed that older men applying for entry-level positions face a disadvantage. When men are seeking employment at older ages, people may perceive this as a red flag and have more reservations about their potential and abilities because it violates societal gender normative behavior (see Eagly, 1987). Factoring in age when examining gender may help explain why the negative gender bias against female applicants was not seen in the current study.\nConclusion: The results of the current study support the notion that biases are still present and can have very negative consequences. This study goes beyond previous research by examining multiple group membership and specifically focussing on how gender interacts with age to impact job applicants. This is certainly a step in the right direction, and more research in this area should continue to be done. Posthuma and Campion (2009) outline 14 areas in which future research concerning age stereotypes and biases in employment is needed. We echo this call to action and suggest that researchers follow the recommendations we outlined to continue exploring and addressing questions regarding the intersection between age and gender in employment.\n",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to examine the interactive effects of gender and age on evaluations of job applicants. Given the double jeopardy hypothesis, the authors might anticipate that older women would be denigrated most in hiring evaluations. However, given expectations of normative gender behavior, the authors might anticipate that older men would be penalized most for not already having stable employment. This study aims to examine which hypothesis best describes selection biases based on age and gender.\nDesign/methodology/approach: Stimuli depicting male and female job applicants at the various ages were developed. The stimuli were standardized by collecting facial photos of older White men and women at ages 20, 40, and 60, and morphing these faces onto standardized bodies using Adobe Photoshop. Participants viewed six stimuli, one from each age by gender combination, and made evaluations across job relevant dimensions.\nFindings: Results showed an interaction between age and gender, such that older male applicants were evaluated more negatively than older female and younger male applicants. These findings support for the violation of gender normative behavior hypothesis.\nPractical implications: This study has implications for organizational leaders who can use this information to provide training for selection officers concerning biases against older workers and how to avoid them.\nOriginality/value: Original, novel stimuli are used in an experimental design to examine the effects of age in employment in a standardized manner which controls for extraneous variables such as attractiveness across age.\n",
"role": "assistant"
}
] |
Better knowledge with social media? Exploring the roles of social capital and organizational knowledge management
|
[
"Social capital",
"Social media",
"Knowledge management",
"Knowledge quality"
] |
[
{
"content": "Summarize the following paper into structured abstract.\n\n1. Introduction: Organizations are investing in social media for communicating with customers, promoting employee collaborations and integrating with partners and suppliers (Chui et al., 2012; Bughin et al., 2011). There has been plenty of research on the effect of social media, especially on marketing and corporate communication (e.g. see recent special issue, Duan, 2013). However, to the extent that firms and individuals are increasingly using social media explicitly or implicitly for knowledge sharing (Bughin et al., 2012), there are very few studies on social media's contribution in enhancing organizational knowledge. In this paper, the authors report a study that attempts to fill this gap by investigating the impact of social media on organizational knowledge quality. For this purpose, the study adapted and further developed Tsai and Ghoshal's (1998) seminal framework on social capital to serve as the theoretical base.\n2. Theoretical development: 2.1 Knowledge management and knowledge quality\n3. Research method: Social networks and knowledge management initiatives are inherently field-based. Accordingly, the authors chose to test the above theoretically derived research model with real-world data collected from surveying employees who were familiar with social media technology, social network and knowledge management initiatives in their organizations.\n4. Results: The measurement and structural model are evaluated by the component-based partial least squares (PLS) approach with the Smart-PLS software package (Ringle et al., 2005). The PLS approach is appropriate for this exploratory research, as the phenomenon being studied is relatively new and new theory needs to be developed (Henseler et al., 2009). Moreover, both formative and reflective constructs are used in this study, which made PLS particularly attractive (Chin, 1998).\n5. Discussion: As organizations increasingly use social media for knowledge management, in this study, the authors explored how social media could affect organizational knowledge quality. This study used the Tsai and Ghoshal (1998) framework of the impact of social capital on resource sharing and integration. It refocused the framework on knowledge management and knowledge quality and extended it to include social media, arguing that social media positively affects social capital and organizational knowledge management, which ultimately lead to superior organizational knowledge quality. The framework was tested and confirmed using panel data.\n6. Conclusions: 6.1 Summary of findings\n",
"role": "user"
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{
"content": "Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to explore social media's impact on organizational knowledge quality through the theoretical lens of social capital and resource exchange.\nDesign/methodology/approach: This is a theory-confirming, quantitative study using panel data collected through a Web-based survey.\nFindings: The results show that while social media affects structural capital and cognitive capital directly, it only affects relational capital indirectly through structural and cognitive capital. Moreover, overall social media and the enhanced social capital do help promote organizational efforts in knowledge management, which subsequently leads to a higher level of organizational knowledge quality.\nResearch limitations/implications: All survey respondents were from the USA, which may limit the generalizability of the findings. The authors also call for more research in establishing the time sequence in the proposed causal relations and in the individual-level mechanism through which social media promotes organizational knowledge quality.\nPractical implications: This study highlights both the potential and limitations of social media in promoting organizational knowledge management. Businesses must consciously manage the assimilation and use of social media to benefit from them.\nOriginality/value: The authors position the study at the intersection of social media, social capital and knowledge management and explicate how social media work through social capital and organizational knowledge management efforts to affect knowledge quality.\n",
"role": "assistant"
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Entrepreneurial architecture in UK universities: still a work in progress?
|
[
"Organizational culture",
"Entrepreneurial university",
"Business engagement",
"Third mission"
] |
[
{
"content": "Summarize the following paper into structured abstract.\n\nIntroduction: Changing markets, increased competition, reduced funding, new regulations and shifting purpose are current realities for UK universities. These uncertainties include the impacts of governmental policies and the UK's exit from the European Union, coupled with difficult demographic changes in the home student base (PACEC, 2016). UK universities are expected to change to address these targets by transforming into more entrepreneurial institutions, with support supplied to form strategies to design and implement entrepreneurial architecture (EA) (HEFCE, 2011). This paper explores how entrepreneurial architecture is embodied in core functions in UK universities, through the cultural perspectives of those employed as a key part of that architecture.\nEntrepreneurial architecture: The metaphor of architecture has been used in private sector contexts to describe the management of innovation (Tidd, 2001). Further, according to Tidd (2001, p. 178), \"the sum structural characteristics forming the architecture of the firm\" includes the internal organization of the firm, specifically functional links and the definition of business divisions based on product-market linkages plus links with other organizations, such as suppliers and customers and networks of collaborating organisations (Kay, 1993). Thus organizations need to embed entrepreneurial change at an organizational level, ensuring structures support key aims, as seen in EA theory, where strategic changes aim to deliver an entrepreneurial university able to meet third mission aims (Nelles and Vorley, 2010).\nMethodology: Aims\nResults: The results are discussed as follows: first, the way EA had been demonstrated in physical structures and components is explained, following the format suggested by Nelles and Vorley (2010). Second, the cultural component in terms of practice, the beliefs underpinning these, together with the signals perceived by participants as to how behaviors should occur is explored. Third, the participants review EA in their institution.\nDiscussion: The study was carried out to explore how EA had been established at 15 UK HEIs by mapping physical components and by exploring the perceptions of the cultural component identified by Nelles and Vorley (2010). Previous research (Foss and Gibson, 2015; Hayter, 2016; Howells et al., 2012) suggests the need for organizational structures and processes to support the development of an entrepreneurial institution (Hellstrom, 2004; Marginson and Considine, 2000; Rinne and Koivula, 2005). This study shows the efforts made to embed these structures and processes, but also identifies the gap in soft systems, especially effective internal systems for the sharing and potential commercialization of knowledge (Butera, 2000; Conceicao and Heitor, 2002; Jacob et al., 2003; Shattock, 2003).\nConclusions: The literature on entrepreneurial universities is still emerging and this study represents a contribution in a UK context. This paper's contribution relates to the application of EA to achieve enterprise goals by focussing on soft components and their importance. It also builds on work related to organizational culture and the impact of this on attempts made by institutions to be entrepreneurial. From an overall perspective, the study shows EA partially functioning. It offers a contextualized view of culture set within a climate of change, with investment in EA traceable for at least ten years to deliver third mission aims of knowledge exchange and business engagement. The ability of organizations to change and respond to these potential opportunities resides in their people and their functions, to \"mutually supportive interaction among transforming elements [...] an institutionalized volition, a collective will [...] in responding to societal demands\" (Clark, 2015, p. 2).\nLimitations: This study does not claim to encompass the richness of the work on the entrepreneurial university and academic student actions. Instead, it focussed on mapping progress on EA structures, systems and strategies. While these were in place to some level at all institutions, the cultural component was more varied. The sample comprises small numbers from each university, all in the same types of roles as part of a purposeful sample. The inclusion of different types of staff or the focus on one university as a case study might provide deeper and/or different insights into the university's organizational culture, as might a quantitative approach. Also, this is a UK-based sample so may not have resonance internationally, where universities may have evolved very different cultures to encourage enterprise. Further research might usefully include other staff, other universities and other countries in forming a view of the way culture supports EA.\n",
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"content": "Purpose: UK higher education has faced an unprecedented period of change due to multiple UK governmental policies over a short period - coupled with demographic change and the vote to leave the European Union. This pressures universities to meet third mission aims by engaging effectively with society and business, generating income in the process to address reduced funding. Support from the UK Government includes over 20 years of funding for universities to develop entrepreneurial structures and processes, termed entrepreneurial architecture (EA). While the government regularly collects data on funds generated through third mission activities, less is known about how EA is perceived by those inside the university. The purpose of this paper is to meet that gap by exploring the perspectives of those employed specifically as part of EA implementation, as knowledge exchange intermediaries.\nDesign/methodology/approach: The study takes a phenomenological approach to achieve deeper insights into those routines and norms resulting from the application of EA. This is a purposeful sample with what is reported to be an under-researched group (Hayter, 2016); those employed as internal knowledge intermediaries across 15 universities (two from each). These university employees are specifically charged with business engagement, knowledge exchange and research commercialization; their contracts are funded and designed as a part of the EA rather than for research or teaching. An initial pilot comprising four semi-structured interviews indicated suitable themes. This was followed up through a set of three interviews over 18 months with each participant and a mapping of EA components at each institution.\nFindings: Despite EA strategies, the picture emerging was that universities had embedded physical components to a greater or lesser degree without effective social architecture, shown by conflicts between stated and actual routines and norms and by consistent barriers to third mission work. Power and perceived power were critical as participants felt their own worth and status was embedded in their senior manager's status and power, with practical difficulties for them when he or she lost ground due to internal politics.\nResearch limitations/implications: The benefits of this study method and sample include deep insights into the perspectives of an under-reported group. The purposeful sample might be usefully expanded to include other countries, other staff or to look in depth at one institution. It is a qualitative study so brings with it the richness, insights and the potential lack of easy generalizability such an approach provides.\nPractical implications: In designing organizations to achieve third mission aims, EA is important. Even where the structures, strategies, systems, leadership and culture appear to be in place; however, the resulting routines and norms may act against organizational aims. Those designing and redesigning their institutions might look at the experience suggested here to understand how important it is to embed social architecture to ensure effective actions. Measuring cultures and having this as part of institutional targets might also support better results.\nSocial implications: Governments in the UK have invested resources and funding and produced policy documents related to the third mission for over 20 years. However, the persistent gap in universities delivering on policy third mission aims is well documented. For this to change, universities will need to ensure their EA is founded on strong underlying supportive cultures. Knowledge sharing with business and community is unlikely when it does not happen in-house.\nOriginality/value: The study adds new knowledge about how EA is expressed at individual university level. The findings show the need for more research to understand those routines and norms which shape third mission progress in UK universities and how power relations impact in this context, given the pivotal role of the power exerted by the senior manager.\n",
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Constructing corporate commitment amongst remote employees: A disposition and predisposition approach
|
[
"Job satisfaction",
"Remote workers"
] |
[
{
"content": "Summarize the following paper into structured abstract.\n\nIntroduction: Commitment noticeably underpins contemporary management goals of organisational learning, quality management and employee empowerment and motivation (Linstead et al., 2004, Weick, 1995; Tourish and Hargie, 2004). Consequently, a significant amount of research attention has focussed on exploring and understanding what commitment means, as well as what fosters or undermines it. In doing so, studies and theoretical analyses to date have proposed a range of approaches to and ways of discussing the notion of organisational commitment.The study of commitment in relation to teleworking\nIssues raised by research findings: Findings of this study elaborate on and enhance in a number of ways our understanding of how commitment is defined, interpreted and facilitated, as well as how and under what conditions it might vary.Bivalent definitions of commitment\nImplications: This study and the framework it proposes for understanding commitment adds to existing research into remote workforce commitment in that it suggests new ways in which to conceptualise and examine what studies to date have identified as its constituent elements and antecedents. In particular, it facilitates debate and discussion regarding the ways the range of influences on behaviours identified as \"committed\" interrelate, as well as regarding the way employees' disposition (in Wiesenfield's (1998, online) terms, how \"positively\" they feel toward the organisation) may alter the perceived meaning of such behaviours.This study further suggests and illustrates the significance of distinguishing between:* the needs that underpin employees' choosing to continue the relationship (for example, belonging, mutual support, security), which they may well subsequently rationalise to be consistent with what they experience; and* the mental models of how the relationship should be enacted (for example as a team, a partnership, or a purely functional arrangement), which underpin employees' readiness to act in the organisation's interests and which appear to persist despite what they experience.Furthermore, this paper proposes that categorising the nature of the organisational relationship by identifying employees' mental relationship models may be, if not more useful than identifying types of commitment, at least additionally useful in understanding how organisational commitment in remote workforces is constructed and perpetuated. The advantage of the proposed approach is that it both supports studies to date that identify types of relationship-building management practices that foster commitment in remote work contexts, and is also able to explain variations in the success of these practices. In doing so, it is aligned with scholarly opinion that questions a simple consequential relationship between commitment and performance (Benkhoff, 1997).In addition, these observations qualify the suggestion by Postmes et al. (2001) that employees are more likely to judge the organisation in the light of its policies and strategies than in terms of relationships. While agreeing that organisational policies play an important part in securing commitment to it, this study illustrates more specifically that it is through employees' experience of organisational policies and strategies that they recognise, identify and illustrate breaches of relationship expectations. The relevance of the former does not appear to discount the relevance of the latter.Finally, the findings of this study support the relevance and validity of qualitative approaches to commitment studies, in that they demonstrate the influence on organisational commitment of the way members perceive and rationalise it, and the significance of the subjective and context-dependent meaning they attach to both the behaviours and attitudes that constitute and construct it.\n",
"role": "user"
},
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"content": "Purpose: - This paper aims to propose a framework for examining and understanding corporate commitment amongst teleworking employees that deconstructs and expands upon approaches to date. It seeks to propose a perspective from which apparent tensions highlighted in existing studies can be understood and explored, and to suggest new relationships and combinations of conditions that impact on the communication practices and assumptions of both managers and employees.\nDesign/methodology/approach: - The approach to data collection and analysis is qualitative and interpretive, with primary data obtained by means of semi-structured interviews subsequently analysed using both open and focussed coding. This method was selected because the dimensions and implications of communication practices in this particular context were largely unknown.\nFindings: - This study illustrates the significance of distinguishing between the needs that underpin employees' choosing to continue the relationship and their readiness to act in the organisation's interests. It also demonstrates that categorising the nature of the organisational relationship by identifying employees' mental relationship models may be, if not more useful than identifying types of commitment, at least additionally useful in understanding how organisational commitment in remote workforces is constructed and perpetuated.\nOriginality/value: - This study and the framework it proposes for understanding commitment adds to existing research into remote workforce commitment in that it suggests new ways in which to conceptualise and examine what studies to date have identified as its constituent elements and antecedents. In particular, it facilitates debate and discussion regarding the ways the range of influences on behaviours identified as \"committed\" interrelate, as well as regarding the way employees' disposition may alter the perceived meaning of such behaviours.\n",
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Shopping behavior and the involvement construct
|
[
"Shopping",
"Decision making",
"Behaviour"
] |
[
{
"content": "Summarize the following paper into structured abstract.\n\n__NO_TITLE__: Shopping behaviors explain how and where a consumer shops (McKinney et al., 2004). The comfort level of making clothing purchase decisions for oneself, frequency of purchase, amount of time spent shopping, and amount of money spent for an outfit can be useful to the retailer. If the level of involvement with shopping is also examined as a psychographic descriptor, and a demographic descriptor is also employed, creating a shopper profile becomes even more robust. Consumers shop in different kinds of stores with differing frequencies and spend variable amounts of money for a wide spectrum of products. Therefore, narrowing the focus to a particular demographic and psychographic characteristic to determine shopping tendencies can be particularly useful.\n1. Generation Y: Generation Y is racially and ethnically diverse in that 34 percent of its members represent a minority group compared with 27 percent representation of minority groups among the total population (Wilson and Field, 2007; Morton, 2002). These individuals are characterized by their propensity to use technology and engage in multiple media activities. Ironically, this individualistic group that values their personal identities and the customization of products identifies strongly with group orientations and activities involving friends (Sebor, 2006). They see themselves as special and enjoy such activities as listening to music, eating out, going to the movies, and watching television (Morton, 2002).In recent years, marketers have given considerable attention to this generation because of its expansive size, propensity to have greater discretionary income, and its socialization to the consumption process sooner than earlier generations (Bakewell and Mitchell, 2003). Generation Y is also an attractive consumer segment because its shopping behaviors are considered compulsive, the financial responsibilities of its members are few, and this group has a keen eye for trends (Sebor, 2006). In addition to their own spending, Generation Y influences 81 percent of family apparel purchases (O'Donnell, 2006). This group is described as better educated and more brand conscious than previous generations, and is deemed to have the means with which to purchase higher priced items such as clothing, computers, CDs, and electronics (Wolburg and Pokrywczynski, 2001). Additionally, Yankelovich data indicate that this generation is more optimistic about their future and opportunities that lie ahead of them than are members of Generation X and Boomers (Yankelovich Monitor, 2009). It should also be noted that college students make up a large portion of Generation Y and have been chosen as one of the most desirable market segments of this group. Reasons for this include the size of the college student segment of Generation Y, and the tendency of college students to be trendsetters and to develop preferences and brand loyalties that last beyond college. The high standard of living projected for college students following graduation, and the influence of this group on their parent's choices indicate present and future buying power. College student's propensity to set examples for the remainder of the population to follow provides strong marketing potential (Wolburg and Pokrywczynski, 2001). Further, this generation has identified shopping as a high priority with clothing shopping the top activity (Martin and Turley, 2004).1.1 Involvement\n2. Methodology: Graduate students administered the Shopper Behavior Study questionnaire during undergraduate class sessions in an effort to obtain a convenience sample of Generation Y students enrolled at a university in the southwestern USA. This survey was reviewed and approved by the Internal Review Board (IRB). The research assistants verbally explained the purpose of the study was to learn more about how the participants shop for clothing. The IRB letter of disclosure on the first page of the survey also communicated this purpose in writing.Initially created by Zaichkowsky (1985), the involvement section of the questionnaire consisted of a ten-item bipolar scale (range 1-7) from which respondents were asked to select their level of involvement with regards to shopping. These were the same ten items used by Josiam et al. (2005).Seven questions were asked to find out how often participants ask for opinions from particular persons (spouse or significant other, male or female friends and co-workers) regarding clothing purchases. The list was based on one used by Kinley et al. (2000), but reduced from eleven items to seven in order to eliminate redundancy. Answer choices were provided on a five point scale where 5=Always and 1=Never. To determine advertising influences, participants were asked to indicate on a five-point scale (5=Always and 1=Never) where they get ideas for clothing purchases. The types of promotional formats consisted of 18 items including fashion magazines, catalogs, internet store websites, social networking sites, watching others, and music videos.To determine shopping behaviors, comfort with clothing selection was measured with a single question, \"How comfortable are you with making your own decisions about the clothes you purchase for yourself?\" where 5=Extremely Comfortable and 1=Extremely Uncomfortable. Participants were asked how frequently they shop for clothing (once a week, more than once a week, once in two weeks, once a month, more than once a month, about once every other month, or once a season (four times a year). Additionally, they were asked to indicate the average amount of time spent on a shopping trip (in hours) and how much money they spend, on average, for an outfit in open-ended questions.\n3. Findings: A total of 665 usable surveys were collected. Most of the students were white (67.1 percent), female (75.1 percent), college juniors (42.7 percent) or seniors (39.7 percent), and employed part-time (58.0 percent). The average age of participants was 22 (range=18-44). For more detail, see Table I.Chronbach's alpha was computed to determine the reliability of the involvement scale. The computed score of 0.96 is consistent with the 0.95 alpha reported by Zaichkowsky (1985) in the original study, and 0.96 reported by Josiam et al. (2005). As in Josiam et al., the scale was used to segment Gen Y clothing shoppers into three categories: low involvement (1-2.99), medium involvement (3-4.99), and high involvement shoppers (5-7). In this study, 71.2 percent of the respondents were classified as high, 23.7 percent as medium and 5.1 percent as low involvement shoppers. This is consistent with Seo et al. (2001) who found a significantly high level of involvement among college students. The majority of the sample comprised business and merchandising students who may be more inclined toward the marketplace than some other student cohorts. There was almost an equal distribution of males and females in the low- and medium-involvement groups, but a majority of high involvement participants were female. While the category percentages are consistent with previous research, the unbalanced groups are acknowledged as a limitation of the study.3.1 Seeking opinions of others\n4. Discussion and conclusions: Consistent with research conducted by Seo et al. (2001), 71 percent of the Gen Y shoppers in this study were found to be highly involved with shopping for clothing. Similar to Sebor (2006) and Mallalieu and Palan (2006) this study found that Generation Y values the opinions of others, although overall the frequency of opinion seeking from others was relatively neutral. Interestingly the person whose opinion was sought most frequently by the medium and low involvement participants was the spouse or significant other while high involvement participants consulted female friends more often. When examining statistical differences, high involvement shoppers sought opinions of female friends and female coworkers more often than did low involvement shoppers. Feedback sought from male cohorts was very low across the board. This finding indicates that Generation Y is more interested in the female perspective than the male perspective when it comes to purchasing clothing for themselves. In the American culture, attention to fashion is attributed more often to females than to males, which might explain this finding. Females are more expected to be interested in and knowledgeable about fashion and clothing trends. It must be noted however, that the strong female influence in the high involvement group may be a result of the large number of female participants in the high involvement group.Non-personal sources of information are also important to Generation Y for clothing ideas, again with more highly involved participants using more sources. The most frequent idea sources used by the high involvement shopper were shopping in the store, store displays, and internet shopping sites. This study included thirteen choices that were media-oriented; it is interesting that the most used sources of inspiration did not involve a promotional budget. Highly involved shoppers get inspiration from the clothing in the stores. However, when compared with medium and low involvement shoppers, high involvement shoppers also used magazines, catalogs, television advertisements and programs, music videos, internet advertisements, and celebrities as inspiration sources more often. The high involvement shopper likes to shop, likes to be in the stores, and pays attention to the merchandising and displays. Further, they shop more often, and they spend more money on clothing each month than the lesser involved groups. Consistent with Wolburg and Pokrywczynski (2001), participants in this study indicated they do not rely on commercial advertising to form their opinions.On the other hand, low involvement shoppers indicated they do not seek the opinions of other people very often, but they do find inspiration for clothing choices by observing other people. It would appear from this data that this group of consumers is still interested in clothing choice, but not interested enough to seek out information directly from traditional marketing resources or the opinions of friends. Rather the Generation Y member who has a lower involvement with shopping prefers to make observations and draw their own conclusions, as is characteristic of this demographic group when it comes to the appeal of marketing (Wolburg and Pokrywczynski, 2001).Table III provides a summary of the results for each involvement group. These findings underscore the importance of this generation of shoppers. As in previous research cited in this paper, this generation does not respond to traditional sources of product promotion like older consumers did at their age. They rely on the opinions of people they know who are important to them, and to their own observations of product available in the marketplace. At the retail (or internet) store, product placement and presentation become critical for this target market. When shopping for clothing, there are many choices; they are aware of those choices and will rely on their own instincts and female friends for guidance. Afterall, they have a reputation of having a keen eye for trends (Sebor, 2006). The retailer who has a strong commitment to merchandising product will be most successful with the Generation Y customer.\n5. Implications and suggestions for further study: Findings in this study indicate clothing brands and stores should focus marketing efforts to Generation Y female consumers. While this generation has been found to be different than precious generations in many regards, they look to females for opinion validation and advice when it comes to clothing purchase. Generation Y does respond to marketing efforts, but they want to \"discover\" product themselves. Thus the most frequent idea sources were shopping, store displays, and internet shopping sites. Retailers need to focus resources on visual merchandising - both in their bricks-and-mortar and online stores. This is one support area often negatively impacted when expenses need to be reduced - yet it is vital to reaching this critical 18-35 demographic. Further, aligning the clothing brand with fashion leaders and celebrities continues to be an important strategy.The findings in this study underscore the importance of the customer experience. Atmospherics and sales personnel are vitally important in this regard, but the present data indicate the customer is also interested in the visual aspects of shopping. Further study should compare perceptions of stores using a \"plan-o-gram\" approach to stores that allow more freedom in visual merchandising at the store level. How do stores in a chain that look visually consistent to the customer compare with individualistic store-level approaches to product presentation?Future studies should also ascertain differences in clothing shopping behaviors of male and female Generation Y consumers. Most research to date has examined the group as a whole, as did the present study, or look at females' shopping behavior only.\n6. Limitations: This study used a convenience sample of students at a single university. Data analysis indicated an unbalanced sample with fewer participants in the medium and low involvement categories. While the low and medium involvement groups were relatively balanced with males and females, there were significantly more females than males in the high-involvement group. A purposeful sample that is targeted to a more balanced group of subjects with varying levels of involvement may yield different results. Also, the involvement scale used in this paper asked participants to indicate their level of agreement with the bi-polar adjectives with regard to \"shopping\". Their responses may have been different if they had been asked to indicate their involvement with \"shopping for clothing\".\n",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Purpose: - The purpose of this paper is to determine whether the degree of involvement with shopping for clothing affects the frequency with which GenY consumers seek the opinions of others when making clothing purchases for themselves; the non-personal sources that influence the frequency of clothing purchase; and certain shopping behaviors.\nDesign/methodology/approach: - Written questionnaires were completed by students at a university in the southwestern region of the USA.\nFindings: - Most of the participants were determined to be high involvement shoppers who sought opinions of female friends and co-workers, used most of the non-personal idea sources, shopped more often, spent more money, and were more comfortable shopping for clothing.\nResearch limitations/implications: - While the participants are representative of the GenY characteristics and a valid sample for this project, the use of a convenience sample may limit the generalizability of the results.\nPractical implications: - Generation Y consumers who are more involved with shopping for clothing tend to consult a variety of resources prior to purchase, particularly other females and marketing delivered via various media. Retailers and clothing manufacturers should take advantage of visual merchandising opportunities and social networking avenues as well as traditional advertising and promotion outlets.\nOriginality/value: - The research further refines the involvement construct with a group of consumers who are very involved with shopping for clothing. The opinions of other females, magazines, catalogs, television advertisements and programs, music videos, internet advertisements, and celebrities are important in the product selection process.\n",
"role": "assistant"
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] |
Dissonance in the academy: the formation of the faculty entrepreneur
|
[
"Academic entrepreneurship",
"Entrepreneurial learning",
"Faculty entrepreneurs"
] |
[
{
"content": "Summarize the following paper into structured abstract.\n\nIntroduction: Over the past two decades there has been an increased interest and demand for colleges and universities to function as enterprising institutions (Clark, 1998; Etzkowitz, 2008; Thorp and Goldstein, 2010). From this perspective, entrepreneurial universities are organizations that promote and leverage their knowledge capital in a manner that spurs economic and social developments within their communities (Charles, 2006; Clark, 1998; Etzkowitz, 2008; Etzkowitz and Zhou, 2008). Often the pressure to become an entrepreneurial university falls to the individual efforts of faculty members. When faculty members channel their research endeavors in a manner that adds value to the economy and society, they engage in what is commonly referred to as academic entrepreneurship (Clark, 1998; Chrisman et al., 1995; Etzkowitz, 2008; Mars and Metcalfe, 2009; Patzelt and Shepherd, 2009). Specifically, this form of entrepreneurship occurs when members of the academy transfer their research knowledge and expertise through endeavors such as commercialization activities (i.e. patenting), starting new businesses, or providing consulting services to industry partners (Etzkowitz, 2008; Lee and Rhoads, 2004; Mars and Metcalfe, 2009; Mars and Rios-Aguilar, 2010).\nLiterature review: The literature on entrepreneurial behaviors provides evidence that there is a strong connection between entrepreneurial action and learning (Rae, 2007; Smilor, 1997). Smilor (1997) asserts that \"effective entrepreneurs are exceptional learners\" (p. 344). He further states that:\nMethodology: To study the lived learning experiences of faculty entrepreneurs, a phenomenological qualitative research design was selected as the means for understanding the entrepreneurial journeys experienced by the participants. Phenomenological qualitative research studies are intent on capturing and understanding the \"essence or basic structure\" (p. 25) of a particular human experience or phenomenon (Merriam, 2009). Specifically, I employed a multiple case study approach to examine this group of faculty entrepreneurs. The case study method is often the most recognizable means for analyzing and presenting individualized experiences or other \"intrinsically bounded\" (p. 41) units of analysis (Merriam, 2009).\nFindings: Each of the participants traveled a different pathway on their journey toward becoming a faculty entrepreneur. Despite the unique differences between each faculty entrepreneur (i.e. academic discipline and type of business founded) the two-cycle coding process revealed six over-arching themes that were shared by all of the participants. Notably, there were not any findings that were exclusive to one or two of the individuals from the study. In this section I present and discuss the six themes that emerged from the data analysis process:\nDiscussion: The themes that emerged from the qualitative data analysis process provide several insights on the learning experiences, contextual factors, and patterns of behavior that helped the participants to develop and to persist as faculty entrepreneurs. Summarizing the findings previously discussed, the participants were able to successfully identify, start, and maintain their involvement with the businesses that they founded or co-founded for the following reasons:\nImplications for higher education administrators: Higher education administrators who are responding to exogenous factors such as the retrenchment of state appropriations and an increase in demand for intellectual capital (Clark, 1998; Etzkowitz, 2008) may want to take note on how they can create an organizational structure and culture that promotes academic entrepreneurship. Based on the experiences shared by this group of participants, faculty members are acutely aware of their institution's tenure policies, annual performance expectations, university policies, department values, and the university's overall mission. Hence, one recommendation is to include entrepreneurial activities (e.g. technology transfer activities or forming new businesses) as one of the pathways for achieving tenure and promotion. One of the participants for this study poignantly noted that faculty members often consider academic entrepreneurship unimportant because it is not valued during the tenure and promotion process or even during their annual performance evaluations. This recommendation is also shared by Hearn (2003) who believes that including \"revenue generating activities\" (p. 14) in the faculty tenure and promotion decision-making process can help build an entrepreneurial culture.\nImplications for future researchers: The findings from this study have implications for scholars interested in the subject of entrepreneurial learning, behaviors, and outcomes associated with faculty entrepreneurs. There are several other areas of research that could be expanded upon and explored by scholars who are interested in the study of faculty members and entrepreneurial capacity within higher education institutions. First, similar studies using either qualitative or quantitative research methods could be used to further understand the motives, preferences, learning styles, and outcomes associated with faculty entrepreneurs. In addition, this study focussed exclusively on faculty entrepreneurs who founded a business or non-profit organization. Further studies could explore the experiences of faculty entrepreneurs who engage in other types of entrepreneurial endeavors such as contracted research for companies. It is also noted that this study included only one social entrepreneur (Dr O'Neil). Thus, additional research could be done to further our understanding on the lived learning experiences and perspectives of faculty entrepreneurs who start not-for-profit organizations.\nConclusion: This study explored the learning, persistence, and career making experiences of faculty entrepreneurs. The overall purpose of this study was to understand, from the perspective of faculty entrepreneurs, the lived learning experiences that contributed to their development from traditional faculty member to faculty entrepreneur. The findings from this study provide a framework for how a traditional faculty member can begin his/her entrepreneurial journey.\n",
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},
{
"content": "Purpose: While interest in and demand for entrepreneurial universities has gained prominence in recent years (e.g. Clark, 1998; Etzkowitz, 2008; Thorp and Goldstein, 2010), there is minimal research on the learning experiences and career-making events that transform traditional faculty members into faculty entrepreneurs who are able to successfully apply their research knowledge toward endeavors that intersect with the private market. As a result, the purpose of this paper is to understand, from the perspective of faculty entrepreneurs, the lived learning experiences that contributed to their development from traditional faculty member to faculty entrepreneur. Specifically, this study explored the question on how faculty members who were founders or co-founders of a business learned \"to work in entrepreneurial ways\" (Rae and Carswell, 2000, p. 220). In general, individuals who are interested in pursuing a career as a professor are not generally socialized during graduate school to engage in technology transfer activities or encouraged to start businesses (Bercovitz and Feldman, 2008). This study also sought to understand how faculty entrepreneurs learn to persist in an organizational culture that does not always support entrepreneurial endeavors outside the scope of researching, teaching, and service.\nDesign/methodology/approach: A phenomenological qualitative research design was employed using in-depth, semi-structured interview questions. Entrepreneurial learning was the theoretical framework that grounded this study.\nFindings: The data analysis process revealed six themes which offer insights on the learning experiences, contextual factors, and patterns of behavior that helped the participants to develop and to persist as faculty entrepreneurs.\nResearch limitations/implications: First, the data were dependent upon the learning experiences identified and articulated by the faculty entrepreneurs. There is a possibility that significant learning or career-making experiences were omitted or unintentionally not reported by the participants. Second, the author used a broad net when searching and recruiting for faculty entrepreneurs. Any faculty member who was in a tenure-track position and who had founded or co-founded an organization was eligible to participate in this study. However, the data analysis process may have yielded different results if the author had elected to study faculty entrepreneurs from a specific academic discipline or if the author had chosen to only interview faculty entrepreneurs who had founded a specific type of business. Third, this study focussed only on tenured faculty members who are currently involved with the businesses that they founded or co-founded. Subsequently, this study did not include any faculty members whose entrepreneurial pursuits were unsuccessful (i.e. closing the business). There is the possibility that former faculty entrepreneurs may have had similar learning experiences as the individuals who were interviewed for this study.\nPractical implications: The findings may be instructive for traditional faculty members who are interested in applying their research findings and expertise with an entrepreneurial endeavor such as starting a business. In addition, these findings may be useful for higher education administrators who seek to cultivate an entrepreneurial learning environment in their institutions and for future researchers who want to expand the study of faculty entrepreneurs.\nOriginality/value: There is a gap in the literature on how traditional faculty members learn to couple their research knowledge and expertise with an entrepreneurial endeavor such as starting a small business. In addition, there has been minimal research that delineates how the faculty entrepreneur comes into existence at the individual level (Clarysse et al., 2011; Pilegaard et al., 2010). Subsequently, this is one of the first phenomenological qualitative research studies to examine the lived learning experiences of faculty entrepreneurs.\n",
"role": "assistant"
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] |
Smoothing the corporate venturing path: rules still count
|
[
"Corporate ventures",
"Organizational conditions",
"Risks of corporate entrepreneurs",
"Entrepreneurialism"
] |
[
{
"content": "Summarize the following paper into structured abstract.\n\nIntroduction: In recent years, academics as well as business practitioners have offered practical insights which help firms understand the strategic aspects of managing corporate new ventures (e.g. Burgelman, 1983; Burgelman and Chesbrough, 2001; Day, 1994; Nielsen et al., 1985; MacMillan et al., 1986; Brody and Ehrlich, 1998; see also the special issue of the Strategic Management Journal, Vol. 22, 2001, on strategic entrepreneurship). Corporate new venturing, or internal corporate venturing, can be defined as entrepreneurial activities inside the parent company. However, few scholarly works examine the influence of organizational conditions of parent companies that run successful new corporate ventures (Vintergaard, 2005; Day et al., 2001; Ahuja and Lampert, 2001; Thornhill and Amit, 2000).So which organizational conditions are important in this endeavor? To obtain an answer we reviewed the literature on corporate entrepreneurship to explore the role of organizational conditions in the inception and development of new corporate ventures. We also identify important factors contributing to these organizational conditions. We combine this exploration with case studies that contrast the performance of corporate venturing activities in the parent company and in one foreign subsidiary of that company.\nThe what and how of organizational conditions for corporate ventures: In the early 1990s, research revealed a variety of enablers and obstacles to corporate venturing programs in the specific context of the examined companies, e.g. at Toshiba (Abetti, 1997). Researchers also showed that the organizational context was one of the critical factors that contributed to the long-term success of these corporate ventures (Kanter et al., 1990). In addition to a ventures' visibility, other organizational factors influence a venture's success or failure and can be regarded as enablers or inhibitors. Also, for a parent company, we can distinguish between resources, competencies, or practices that are supportive or that are inhibiting for the ventures. These factors are illustrated in Table I.Other researchers examine the perceived risks attached to venturing and their influence on entrepreneurs' decision-making. The findings can be summarized by saying entrepreneurs' risk perceptions, the characteristics of ventures, contextual effects, and the traits of individual entrepreneurs play key roles in their decision to enter new ventures (Sitkin and Pablo, 1992; Forlani and Mullins, 2000).Corporate ventures place greater emphasis on the usage of the parent company's resources and proprietary knowledge than external ventures (Shrader and Simon, 1997). Since the organizational conditions of the parent company constitute a way for corporate ventures to obtain access to the parent company's resources, the inception and development of ventures are sensitive to enabling and inhibiting factors in a parent company. Among other findings, researchers point out that political obstacles, which can limit the strategic options of corporate ventures, form a stumbling block to the deployment of available resources. Political obstacles clearly fall into the organizational risks category (Shrader and Simon, 1997). Later in this paper we distinguish between risks inherent in new ventures versus organizational risks.It is also important to draw a distinction between technological and institutional environments because both can influence the organizational conditions of the corporate venture. In this context, the institutional environment is characterized by an elaboration of rules and requirements to which individual organizations must conform to receive support and legitimacy (Tsai et al., 1991 based on the work of Scott and Meyer, 1983). Since it is vital for internal ventures to gain support and legitimacy within their parent companies, research on the institutional environment, or organizational conditions, takes on special importance (emphasized by various authors, e.g. Kanter and Richardson (1991)).\nOrganizational conditions for corporate ventures in practice: By comparing two different venturing approaches in one international consumer-goods company (that we call Consumer Corp.) we find that the mother company's (headquarters) and daughter company's (an India-based subsidiary) approach to corporate venturing differ considerably. The data in this article are derived from a case study in the area of corporate venturing in 2001 (see Makarevitch and Enkel, 2001). We used interviews with R&D managers, responsible managers and entrepreneurs as well as archival data and document analysis. The object of our research was to discover the organizational conditions that, directly or indirectly, influence the inception and development of corporate ventures. During our research we also gained insights into a new corporate venture activity of Consumer Corp.'s India-based subsidiary. The subsidiary has had a very successful venturing record over the last decade, even outperforming headquarters.The procedural clarity and procedural discipline issue\nConclusion: The basic idea that emerges from corporate venturing literature is that corporate ventures should be free of shackles from the rigid bureaucracy of the parent and free to explore new ideas in a creative way; they should have loose systems. However, the case of Consumer Corp and its Indian subsidiary seems to provide evidence to the contrary. We argue that loose systems are required to generate new ideas and business models, but they should be complemented by tight systems represented by procedural clarity and procedural discipline to improve accountability and delivery of outcomes. The case of Consumer Corp. and its Indian subsidiary is instructive since it shows how two organizations operating the same brands, using the same technologies, being subject to the same administrative regulations and having the same management methods, achieve different results.We conclude that procedural clarity as well as procedural discipline are the factors responsible for different achievements in the area of corporate new ventures. This framework acts as a catalyst for corporate venturing activity because it allows the different elements of organizational conditions to work for rather than against newly created or projected ventures. In addition, it allows for transfer and utilization of unique resources and competencies and applies the fiscal discipline of the corporation to all new ventures impartially through rules and procedures that are well understood, reinforced and enforced, advantages that are not available to independent ventures. While it does not solve all organizational challenges related to new ventures, or alleviate all the risks that they face, it does enable entrepreneurs to find solutions to their problems regarding corporate ventures, and thus enhance the chance of success.\n",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Purpose: - Since corporate ventures operate under the organizational conditions of a parent company, this article aims to highlight key conditions influencing the success of a new venture.\nDesign/methodology/approach: - Two cases of corporate venturing are analyzed regarding their performance since they are characterized by different conditions within one international consumer-goods company. Hence, the literature on corporate entrepreneurship is reviewed and combined with a case study to explore the role and drivers of organizational conditions in the inception and development of new corporate ventures.\nFindings: - The case study reveals two key organizational differences pertaining to corporate new ventures -- procedural clarity and procedural discipline. These differences mitigate the variety of risks that corporate entrepreneurs face and smooth or hinder their way to evolve their venture from ideas to business.\nResearch limitations/implications: - As the study includes two venturing cases within the same company in the fast moving consumer goods industry (FMCG), the findings are so far limited to the characteristics of this company type and its sector.\nPractical implications: - This article supports mid-level managers to run corporate ventures more successfully by introducing a clear action plan with well defined phases. Individual managers' impact should be limited and linked to a more objective network-structure.\nOriginality/value: - In contrast to previous literature, this paper highlights the influence of organizational conditions under which corporate ventures are initiated and operated. Additionally, there are further factors identified, the ventures' internal visibility, and the knowledge support by the parent company, which will influence the venture's success or failure.\n",
"role": "assistant"
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] |
How to overcome the digital divide? An empirical study of Taiwan's DOCs
|
[
"Information and communication technology",
"Computer anxiety",
"Digital opportunity centers (DOCs)",
"Information technology ability",
"Information technology usefulness",
"Internet usage"
] |
[
{
"content": "Summarize the following paper into structured abstract.\n\nIntroduction: Over the past several years, information and communication technology (ICT), internet technology, and computers have fostered economic growth and social progress, as they have become an inseparable part of our daily and educational lives. ICTs are considered by many development agencies to be critical to achieve socio-economic progress for developing countries and aiding disadvantaged groups (Lin et al., 2015). In recent years, more and better ICTs have been adopted in international, social and economic fields and have become a strong force of social development. Therefore, information and communication technologies for development (ICT4D) issues have received considerable attention. ICT4D refers to the use of ICTs in the fields of socio-economic development, international development, and human rights (Lin et al., 2015; Heeks, 2010; Prakash and De', 2007). ICT4D requires an understanding of community development, poverty, agriculture, healthcare, and basic education (Chib and Harris, 2012). The main point of ICT4D is to help disadvantaged populations around the world, but it is usually associated with applications in developing countries (Dias, 2014). Studies about ICT4D mostly examine the use of ICTs for different development objectives, such as: health, education, electronic commerce, government service delivery, etc. in several countries, mainly the ones with low average income.\nLiterature review and research hypotheses: In the sections that follow, we provide a detailed theoretical background on the particular constructs of our model. We are interested in the relationships between ICT abilities, computer anxiety, and perceived benefit.\nICT ability: An information system (IS) is an integration of people, data, and IT. People can perform many common daily tasks more effectively after receiving computer training that includes information on how to access the internet. The ability to use ICT is essential in the twenty-first century. Generally, ICT constructs include technological literacy, technological readiness, digital literacy, media literacy, - among others. Several agree on the key facets that make up the construct, including: internet use and packaged software use. Internet usage and computer technology can improve people's daily life and home environment. As computers gradually become a part of people's lives, researchers have increasingly paid attention to both internet and packaged software usage in an integrated IS created by special features of a certain functioning mode (Segev and Ahituv, 2010). Such software can be utilized in both one's personal and family life. For instance, Skype can be a convenient tool for people to contact their family, friends, or healthcare providers. Previous studies have revealed important information about how and why the internet, packaged software, and ICT are used, such as: e-mail, folder and file management, healthcare system access, medical alert systems, Skype, web searching, and application software (Huggins et al., 2014; Yu and Chao, 2014; Heart and Kalderon, 2013; Petter and Fruhling, 2011; Simsim, 2011). Such information skills are indispensable for individuals in student and workplace environments.\nComputer anxiety: Over the past two decades, ICT, internet technology, and computers have rapidly and dramatically changed the way people live and learn. New ICT and internet technologies have a variety of advantages compared to standalone computers. Technology use can often lead to unpleasant side effects, which may include strong, negative emotional states during interaction with computers. Also, ICT may cause tension, anxiety, and stress for learners. Such cognitive and psychological factors are usually identified as \"computer anxiety\" (Parayitam et al., 2010). Parasuraman and Igbaria (1990) defined computer anxiety as \"the tendency of individuals to be uneasy, apprehensive, or fearful about current or future use of computers.\" In studies of ISs, anxiety has been viewed as a personality variable that influences ICT adoption behavior.\nPerceived benefit: Information literacy is a necessary skill for individuals to effectively recognize, locate, evaluate, and use required information (Kilic-Cakmak, 2010) from different sources. Pinto (2010) points out that information literacy is vital in the intensive, information-based modern world; it also forms the basis of life-long learning. As new knowledge emerges, people need information literacy skills in order to comprehend and make use of the knowledge in their disciplines of study. Therefore, improving information literacy, especially digital information literacy, is necessary for the effective use of information and the encouragement of life-long learning skills (Kilic-Cakmak, 2010). DOCs provide space for life-long learning of information skills. In the past, many studies have examined the effects of information skill training. The perceived benefits can be categorized as follows: educational (Balaban et al., 2013; Hassanzadeh et al., 2012), social (Dong et al., 2014; Garcia-Smith and Effken, 2013), cultural (Kivinen and Lammintakanen, 2013), and economic (Dinter, 2013).\nResearch design: Instrumentation\nData analysis: SEM was used in a comprehensive, combined analysis of both the measurement and structural models. The most common SEM techniques include: linear structural relations (LISREL) and partial least-squares (PLS) (Joreskog and Sorbom, 2005; Chin, 1998). PLS is component-based and uses a least-squares estimation procedure. It can be used to determine both construct validity and structural validity, and can also be adopted to analyze measurements and structural models. Additionally, this research used PLS to analyze the research model.\nDiscussion and conclusion: In the past several years, ICT, ICT4D, internet technology and computers have fostered economic growth and social progress and have become an inseparable part of our daily and educational lives. However, computer and internet accessibility varies dramatically across different countries and/or individuals. ICT access inequality has significant impacts on social development and education, which has been referred to as the \"digital divide.\" Governments all over the world have started paying increased attention to the digital divide issue, and introduced policies aimed at reducing or eliminating it. The Taiwan Government has promoted the expansion of digital opportunities in remote areas by constructing DOCs with e-service volunteers and management systems. DOC volunteers are tasked with helping remote area populations develop basic information abilities with digital equipment through digital education programs and IT courses. DOCs mainly provide two types of services: they train rural learners to gain essential skills required in the information age, and they apply new technologies and tools within the rural and remote districts. In short, DOCs provide citizens different types of learning experiences related to economic, social, and educational development. This study explored whether DOC program participants' personal mental factors and ICT abilities impacted their DOC learning. This study examined the perceived benefit (educational, social, cultural, and economical) of DOC programs on remote area participants from the perspectives of computer anxiety and personal information ability. ICT ability was measured by combining variables including personal innovativeness, packaged software usage, and internet usage. The results show that personal innovativeness and internet use both influence remote area citizens' learning within DOC programs; moreover, personal innovativeness has a larger impact than internet use, because it is a personal trait. When a citizen has higher personal innovativeness, he or she is more willing to accept new ICT, and to rate DOC programs as helpful.\n",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Purpose: The digital divide is a concern, as the inequality of information access might have significant influences on social development and quality of life. The purpose of this paper is to examine the perceived benefit of Digital Opportunity Centers (DOCs) programs on remote area participants from the perspective of computer anxiety and personal information ability.\nDesign/methodology/approach: The Taiwanese Government has built DOCs in remote areas to provide information technology (IT) training and learning programs to citizens residing in these areas. DOC program participants in Taiwan voluntarily completed a self-report questionnaire; the authors received 2,105 completed questionnaires, with a response rate of 84.2 percent. This research used partial least-squares (PLS) to empirical the research model.\nFindings: Using PLS, the results show that information and communication technology ability influences the perceived benefit of DOC programs; computer anxiety has significantly negative effects on package software use, internet use, and IT usefulness; and internet use and IT usefulness have positive effects on perceived benefits.\nOriginality/value: IT is continuously advancing, but digital resources are still lacking within remote areas. DOCs provide citizens different types of learning experiences related to economic, social, and educational development. DOC programs provide participants with opportunities to obtain and improve basic IT knowledge and abilities and decreasing the digital divide.\n",
"role": "assistant"
}
] |
The effects of personality, culture and store stimuli on impulsive buying behavior: Evidence from emerging market of Pakistan
|
[
"Collectivism",
"Agreeableness",
"Extroversion",
"Sales promotion",
"Neuroticism",
"Conscientiousness",
"Individualism",
"Impulsive buying behaviour",
"Store stimuli",
"Window displays"
] |
[
{
"content": "Summarize the following paper into structured abstract.\n\nIntroduction: Impulsive buying is seen as problematic from the consumers' perspective, but from a retailer's perspective, it is an imperative strategy for increasing sales volume (Xiao and Nicholson, 2011; Akram et al., 2018). In view of its significance, researchers have been examining impulsive buying behavior for decades from different perspectives (Xiao and Nicholson, 2011). Past studies show that 39 percent of the total sales at department stores depend on impulsive buying. Additionally, they have found that 80 percent of consumers buy on impulse at least occasionally (Lin and Chuang, 2005). Grocery shopping has become a recreational activity for families all over the world. Families also spend more time in the pleasant environment of department stores, where they are exposed to different stimuli that encourage impulsive buying behavior (Lee and Kacen, 2008).\nLiterature review: Impulsive buying is not a new phenomenon. It has been extensively researched for decades. However, there are many inconsistencies in its conceptualization. The literature in the early 1950s shows that the association between impulsive buying varies from one product category to another. Therefore, the bulk of the research in that era focused on examining the relationship between different product categories and impulsive buying behavior (Clover, 1950; Singh and Nayak, 2016). This trend continued for a decade. Then, in the early 1960s, the concept of differentiating planned impulsive buying and unplanned, impulsive buying was introduced. It was also documented in this era that some product categories stimulate planned impulsive behavior, while others stimulate unplanned impulsive behavior (Stern, 1962). In that era, most of the studies examined the association between demographic characteristics and impulsive buying behavior (Kollat and Willett, 1967), a research trend that continued for another ten years.\nConceptual framework: A conceptual framework is presented in Figure 1. The discussions on the literature support for the developed hypotheses are presented in the following sections.\nMethodology: Participants and procedure\nConstructs: Ten constructs were used in the study. Five were related to personality, two were related to culture, two were related to store stimuli and one was the dependent variable. The constructs used in the study are discussed in the following sections.\nResults: Descriptive analysis\nDiscussion and conclusion: The results and their relevance to earlier studies are discussed in the following section.\nConclusion: Impulsive buying is a complex behavior. On the one hand, it is considered problematic for consumers, and, on the other hand, it is an essential tool for retailers to increase their sales. In view of impulsive behavior's importance, it is important to examine the factors that influence it. Thus this study has examined the relationship between personality factors (i.e. neuroticism, agreeableness, extroversion, conscientiousness and openness), cultural factors (individualism and collectivism), and store stimuli (window displays and sales promotion) with impulsive buying behavior. The results suggest that neuroticism, openness, collectivism, and sales promotion have a positive effect on impulsive buying behavior. On the other hand, the results suggest that agreeableness, extroversion, conscientiousness, individualism and window displays have an insignificant association with impulsive buying behavior. Retailers could use the results of the study in developing strategies for increasing sales. Moreover, it could also be used by policy makers to reduce the incidence of impulsive buying, as, in the long run, it leads to compulsive buying, which is harmful to individuals and society.\n",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to examine the relationship between personality factors (i.e. neuroticism, agreeableness, extroversion, conscientiousness and openness), cultural factors (individualism and collectivism) and store stimuli (window display and sales promotion) on impulsive buying behavior.\nDesign/methodology/approach: The sample size for the study was 350 with a response rate of 96 percent. The questionnaire was adapted from the established scale and measures. SmartPLS was used for statistical analysis. After reliability and validity analysis, the structural model was tested, and it fitted very well.\nFindings: Of the nine hypotheses, five were accepted, and the other four were rejected. The results suggest that neuroticism, openness, individualism, collectivism and sales promotion significantly affect impulsive buying behavior. Marketers can use these results in developing appropriate marketing strategies.\nResearch limitations/implications: Implications for managers were drawn from the results. In this study, only two cultural factors were considered. Future studies could use all the cultural factors in their model. Additionally, the developed model can be extended for comparative studies.\nOriginality/value: Impulsive buying behavior, on the one hand, is problematic for consumers, but, on the other hand, is used as a tool by retailers for increasing sales. Comparatively, this study examined the effects of personality factors, cultural factors and store stimuli on impulsive buying behavior. These three factors have rarely been used together in one study.\n",
"role": "assistant"
}
] |
Nationwide banks on its female talent: Building society is among top 50 employers for women
|
[
"Gender",
"Equal opportunities",
"Financial services",
"Banks",
"Awards"
] |
[
{
"content": "Summarize the following paper into structured abstract.\n\n__NO_TITLE__: Nationwide Building Society has been recognized for its commitment to the recruitment, retention and progression of women across its 16,000-strong workforce.\nCommitment to creating a female-friendly work environment: He continued: \"We are extremely proud of our achievement in reaching the Times Top 50 Employers for Women and the evidence it provides, to both potential and existing female employees, of our commitment to creating a female-friendly work environment, directly endorsed by board-level sponsorship.\"We place great importance on diversity and inclusion and have a sharp focus on the role that women play, among other groups, in helping us to reflect and serve the growing numbers of customers who choose to do business with us. It is a simple fact that most of our staff are women, each hired on merit, ability and experience. For us, creating a supportive and progressive environment makes good business sense.\"As a result of this culture, and our focus on promoting a healthy work-life balance, more than 80 percent of our female employees return to work after maternity leave. We also have a thriving employee-led women's network, which has a powerful role in forming our future policy while helping the business better to understand and embrace women's specific needs.\"This award is further endorsement of our commitment to equality already recognized through our gold-status, top-10 ranking from Opportunity Now, as well as our Investors in People gold standard.\"Mandy Griffin did not let the onset of motherhood halt her development or promotion through various roles. \"There weren't many senior female role-models when I started out,\" she commented, \"so I hope my story will help others to consider how flexible-working arrangements could help to maintain or even start a career, despite the patter of tiny feet.\"After four years at university, Mandy Griffin fulfilled her childhood dream to become an English teacher in Bournemouth. She became head of subject after a year and then head of faculty.Four years later she felt the need to expand her life skills and move into the world of business. She joined Nationwide Building Society as a temporary worker at the Poole branch. Within three months she had been chosen to join the graduate management-training scheme.Three years after that, Mandy Griffin became a mother for the first time. She initially returned to work full time. One year later she successfully applied to job-share with a colleague.This proved to be a good arrangement for both the job-sharing partners and Nationwide. Lasting 11 years, it saw them progress through several management roles, with Mandy Griffin becoming local branch manager when her youngest child started school.\nOpen-minded line managers: She attributes the success of the arrangement to having a job-share partner who shared her outlook, work-ethic and aspirations, delivering at least as much (if not more) than their full-time equivalents. Having open-minded line managers also helped. She found the culture supportive enough successfully to undertake an MBA during her time as Bournemouth branch manager, writing a project on the positive impact of job-sharing.When family life allowed, Mandy Griffin returned to work full time. A number of promotions followed her involvement in the Nationwide management-assessment center - a program designed to identify and fast track high-potential employees. She is now head of customer events and experience, leading a team that seeks to improve customer experience at significant points in their lives when something needs to change, such as a marriage, change of address or birth of a child.Mandy Griffin believes that her success comes from \"being mindful of what would work for both our customers and our business; akin to being a good mum, but on a different level\".She commented: \"For me, job sharing and flexible working were the best ways I could still perform a fulfilling role in the hours I realistically had available, without missing out on my family life.\" But she is aware that such opportunities are not always readily available. Her tips for making such an arrangement work include:* finding the right person to share with, preferably with different but complementary skills and experience, to increase the advantages for the business;* presenting how the working arrangement could work successfully for the business;* maintaining flexibility for available training and development courses, so as not to be overlooked when opportunities arise; and* as a mother, preparing for when you can accelerate and be creative about how to kick-start things.\nInternal management-trainee program: After a year working at a bank straight from school, Roz Hills was appointed financial-administration clerk with UCB Home Loans Corporation, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Nationwide Building Society. Despite her youth, and the fact that she joined largely without experience, she was quickly identified as an employee with potential, and enrolled on an internal management-trainee program. This equipped her with fundamental leadership skills. It was the first step in achieving promotion to assistant manager and, within 18 months, to administration manager.It was not only her intellect and personality that shone through, but the supportive culture she encountered. \"Throughout my 25 years with Nationwide no one has ever closed the door on me,\" she explained. \"They have given me practical advice, opportunities for development and flexibility when I need it.\"She recalls managers who encouraged her to broaden her horizons and consider different areas of the business for progression, and even the positive influence of the managing director of the company as being \"refreshing\" as he \"encouraged staff to find a voice to change and challenge practices to make things better for customers\". That is a mind-set that still influences her judgement today.Roz Hills decided to broaden her experience, transferring to a new role in a larger operation that gave her the opportunity to manage a team of 35. As a result, she was offered further training to develop her leadership skills, including neuro-linguistic programming. She continued studying the practice up to master's level in her spare time.After a short break to have her son, Roz Hills returned to a more senior role, leading a team of 90 and establishing an award-winning customer-satisfaction policy.\nSuccessfully climbed the corporate ladder: It is perhaps her response to her unsuccessful application to become an area director, some three years later, which best illustrates why Roz Hills has climbed the corporate ladder so successfully. Rather than being despondent or walking away, she set about convincing the company that this was, in fact, the right move for her. She sought mentoring and advice on the skills she needed to acquire and develop, took part in additional projects to show her potential, and used internal resources to train herself.Two years later her subsequent application was successful. She enjoyed the experience of working in this area for six years, before becoming senior operations manager in the mortgage department of the Bournemouth, Swindon and Glasgow offices.\"Whatever your gender - and that is largely irrelevant - your dream job is not going to land in your lap,\" she explained. \"Even though environment is fundamental, it is up to you to shape and drive your career, but wherever possible get advice to enable you to broaden your horizons, challenge your thinking and introduce you to what and who you need to know. While you need to be doing a great job in your current role, you also need to be mindful of how you are going to achieve your next goal. For most women such multi-tasking is what we do every day!\"\nNote: David Pollitt, Human Resource Management International Digest editor, wrote this article.\n",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Purpose: - This paper aims to examine the policies that helped Nationwide Building Society to become one of the UK's top 50 employers for women.\nDesign/methodology/approach: - It provides two detailed case studies of women who have climbed the corporate ladder at the building society.\nFindings: - It explains that the building society has developed flexible working patterns to suit the business and its people - including part-time, term-time, job share, annualized hours, and flexible and home working. It also has a thriving employee-led women's network, which has a powerful role in forming future policy, while helping the business better to understand and embrace women's specific needs.\nPractical implications: - The paper reveals that almost 70 percent of Nationwide's workforce are women. They make up more than 63 percent of managers - more than double the financial-services industry benchmark - and 28 percent of senior managers.\nSocial implications: - It explains that Nationwide supports the work of the Equal Opportunities Commission on closing the pay gap between men and women. Nationwide's equal-pay audits ensure that the organization's drive for equality is backed up by what it pays.\nOriginality/value: - The paper provides a detailed account of the career progression of two women at Nationwide.\n",
"role": "assistant"
}
] |
Translating emotional insights from hospitality employees' comments: Using sentiment analysis to understand job satisfaction
|
[
"Job satisfaction",
"Sentiment analysis",
"Human resources",
"Hispanic employees",
"Hospitality employees",
"Latino employees"
] |
[
{
"content": "Summarize the following paper into structured abstract.\n\nIntroduction: With the blurring of geographical boundaries, international labor mobility and employee demographic shifts, diversity management has assumed an important role in hospitality operations (Manoharan and Singal, 2017). In this study, sentiment analysis is used to explore an important but overlooked stakeholder group, Latino hospitality employees. US inhabitants whose origins are from Mexico, Puerto Rico, Cuba, Central and South America and other Spanish-speaking countries are referred to as Latinos (Pew Research Center, 2016). The term Latino is thought to be more encompassing then the term Hispanic, as it considers the indigenous cultures of those countries, people of different racial groups, and people from Portuguese-speaking countries, such as Brazil (see Leiva, 2012 for a detailed discussion of the nomenclature of Hispanic and Latinos in the USA). For the purposes of this study, the term Latino is used to describe male and female members of this group. Immigrant Latino is used to describe those who were not born in the USA and have migrated to the USA.\nLiterature review: Employee job satisfaction factors\nMethodology: Data collection\nResults: The goal of this study was to use sentiment analysis to better understand the resort employees' job satisfaction from the unstructured comments of a companywide survey of resort employees. Specifically the aim of the paper was to explore what emotions are the most prevalent with employees and to identify any differences between the following employee groups: comments written in English vs those in Spanish, front-of-house vs back-of-house employees (Spanish comments only) and employees with male supervisors vs female supervisors (Spanish comments only).\nDiscussion: The main goal of this study was the use of sentiment analysis, a fresh approach to analyzing large text databases, to understand employee job satisfaction from the unstructured comments of a companywide employee job satisfaction survey. The intention was to see if emotions from employee comments could be identified between the different groups and, further, if the emotions identified could give insight on what might be impacting the company's customer service and occupancy levels. The study's results add a new contribution related to employee job satisfaction from multiple hospitality employees' viewpoints that complement the findings of Madera et al. (2013) who investigated hospitality managers' job satisfaction in diverse hospitality workplaces. As Madera et al. (2013) identified, manager-to-subordinate miscommunication transpired based on multicultural language barriers and cultural cues. Findings from this current study also confirm Madera et al. (2013) results that the repercussions of a negatively perceived diversity climate include distrust, conflict and lower organizational commitment levels among employees. By using the process of sentiment analysis to analyze the emotional content of a large data set of employee comments, this study's results generate new insights to add to job satisfaction in the existing hospitality literature in each of the research question's findings:\nImplications and conclusions: The findings presented here are of value to hospitality organizations due to the insight provided into the experience of Latino employees, who are a valuable but understudied resource in today's workforce (Raghuram et al., 2012). By identifying opportunities for increasing Latino worker job satisfaction, hospitality organizations can decrease the undesirable outcomes, such as stress and high turnover rates, and in turn create a productive work environment for all employees. This research advances the literature examining employee diversity, specifically referring to Latino hospitality employees who communicate in Spanish.\nConclusion: Clearly a diverse workforce will continue to play a major role in the operations of the hospitality sector. As demonstrated in this research, Latino employees are a vital source of human capital for the hotel industry, and, in turn, the industry needs to take their needs seriously to ensure both employee and guest satisfaction, with the goal for improved financial results. Since researchers have posited that ethnic discrimination is correlated with job dissatisfaction, then the growing Latino presence in the US population suggests that traditional human resources employee behavior assumptions and expectations need to be adjusted for the growing workforce diversity, particularly in the hospitality industry. Therefore, it is hoped that this paper will raise awareness and stimulate further work in this area.\n",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to use the data analysis method of sentiment analysis to improve the understanding of a large data set of employee comments from an annual employee job satisfaction survey of a US hospitality organization.\nDesign/methodology/approach: Sentiment analysis is used to examine the employee comments by identifying meaningful patterns, frequently used words and emotions. The statistical computing language, R, uses the sentiment analysis process to scan each employee survey comment, compare the words with the predefined word dictionary and classify the employee comments into the appropriate emotion category.\nFindings: Employee responses written in English and in Spanish are compared with significant differences identified between the two groups, triggering further investigation of the Spanish comments. Sentiment analysis was then conducted on the Spanish comments comparing two groups, front-of-house vs back-of-house employees and employees with male supervisors vs female supervisors. Results from the analysis of employee comments written in Spanish point to higher scores for job sadness and anger. The negative comments referred to desires for improved healthcare, requests for increased wages and frustration with difficult supervisor relationships. The findings from this study add to the growing body of literature that has begun to focus on the unique work experiences of Latino employees in the USA.\nOriginality/value: This is the first study to examine a large unstructured English and Spanish text database from a hospitality organization's employee job satisfaction surveys using sentiment analysis. Applying this big data analytics process to advance new insights into the human capital aspects of hospitality management is intriguing to many researchers. The results of this study demonstrate an issue that needs to be further investigated particularly considering the hospitality industry's employee demographics.\n",
"role": "assistant"
}
] |
Reframing professional development: An action-inquiry case study of a collaborative school counselor network
|
[
"Collaboration",
"Networks",
"Professional development",
"Professional learning community",
"Action research",
"School counsellor"
] |
[
{
"content": "Summarize the following paper into structured abstract.\n\n__NO_TITLE__: \"I gave them aspirations and hope, they could visualize going to college,\" stated Ms Cochran, an urban school counselor with over 25 years of experience. Although she carried a caseload of 745 students, her passion and dedication for each individual students' academic success was clear. Critical to student success, school counselors are the non-familial adults that most often shape students' college aspirations (Corwin et al., 2004; Holcomb-McCoy, 2010). Although vital gatekeepers to a student's academic path, they are often an overlooked group in terms of professional development and resources required to facilitate college access (Engberg and Gilbert, 2013; House and Hayes, 2002; Holcomb-McCoy, 2010; McDonough, 2005; Rowell, 2006). In response to the increasing educational and economic divides between privileged groups (e.g. white, middle class) and marginalized groups (e.g. low-income, individuals of color), national attention has focused on the critically important role of professional school counselors (House and Hayes, 2002; Perna and Finney, 2014; Putnam, 2015). Yet, one in five high schools in the USA lack a dedicated school counselor (American School Counselors Association (ASCA), 2011). The purpose of this action-oriented qualitative case study was to gain insight into how a collaborative inter-agency partnership reframed professional development to increase counselors' capacities and enrich their roles in addressing educational inequities in a localized context. The question guiding this study was how does an intra-agency partnership reframe professional development to support a learning network of school counselors? Although ASCA officially adopted the term professional school counselor to identify all school counselors in grades K-12 who provide academic and postsecondary guidance to students, school counselor is also a common term. For the purpose of this manuscript, we use the term school counselor unless professional school counselor was used when directly quoting another author.\nThe complex role of school counselors: Education reform efforts aimed at raising educational achievement rates for all US students have pushed the school counselor to the forefront of the national conversation. School counselors navigate a myriad of complex roles: social agent of change responsible for modeling academic success for the school community, gatekeeper to college access, and collaborator responsible for engaging school staff, faculty, and families (Corwin et al., 2004; Holcomb-McCoy, 2007; Jarsky et al., 2009; McKillip et al., 2012; NOSCA, 2014; St John et al., 2014). This exhaustive list is exacerbated by decades old challenges around the ambiguity of the role of the school counselor. Efforts to professionalize, bureaucratize, and clearly articulate the range and breadth of school counselor duties have been a part of the national conversation since before the Second World War (Cicourel and Kitsuse, 1963). Cicourel and Kitsuse (1963) found that a lack of standard certification requirements prevented professional counseling groups from creating uniform standards of practice. While this has changed as national school counseling models exist (e.g. ASCA national model), organized professional development for school counselors remains limited. Thus, the expanded national focus on school counselors as primary to increasing college/career readiness for all students appears to have occurred without unpacking or addressing deeply embedded systemic issues. Further, individual sites and school counselors bear the onus for understanding and implementing complicated local, state, and federal policies. This is especially problematic in schools with a student population that includes 50 percent or more of the students within underrepresented or underserved demographic categories. Students in these schools rely on school counselors for guidance navigating the complex college and financial aid application processes (Holland, 2010; Kim and Schneider, 2005; Perna and Thomas, 2009; Smith, 2008; Tierney and Hagedorn, 2002; Weiss et al., 2009). Unlocking access to the postsecondary pipeline requires increasing capacity and resources for school counselors.\nBuilding the network: action-inquiry case study: Action research describes the general method of investigating issues and implementing solutions that have the potential of producing useful knowledge leading to empowerment and social justice for marginalized groups (Schwandt, 2001). This method is best employed with multiple stakeholders who share an interest in addressing a common problem (Herr and Anderson, 2014). Our collaborative partners in the county office of education shared a vision of addressing educational inequities regardless of institutional lines. Kiyama et al. (2012) found that institutional agents involved in critical networks come together as they \"share a social critique\" of how institutions reproduce societal inequalities (p. 296). Our shared emancipatory epistemological stance called for us to be advocates for change by empowering disempowered groups, in this case school counselors. Employing action research in the practice of school counseling can build community among practitioners and contribute to ending the isolation many feel (Rowell, 2006).\nResults: crossing organizational lines to build community: Effectively disseminating information directly to the counselors was one of the biggest struggles identified by our county partners. Mrs Burnett voiced the frustration that \"district reporting lines and communication policies\" have made it difficult to get the information into the right hands. In contrast to other administrative leadership positions (e.g. principals, curriculum directors, vice principals), school counselors did not have a central advocate or convening group. Although they participated in site-specific leadership meetings, they were absent from district level conversations. We as researchers were determined to transcend the communication borders, to reach those counselors who may have been isolated within their sites.\nDiscussion: reframing professional development: The collaborative counselor meetings moved beyond an out-of-context singular event and evolved toward a continuing conversation within a professional network of colleagues that honored the counselors' knowledge. The depth of these conversations happened because of the trust and the sustained engagement that occurred. We strove to disrupt traditional spaces and practices by valuing multiple perspectives. From the beginning, the participants knew that we, as researchers, would convene meetings and bring resources based upon the needs of the group. The counselors were empowered with the understanding that they would become the leaders as we handed the project over to them.\nConclusion: complexities of innovation: The national call to raise the educational achievement for students in underserved communities holds K-12 school counseling programs accountable for improving postsecondary access. School counseling stands at a crossroads as stakes around resource allocation are high. Counselors can be at the leading edge of turning college/career readiness numbers around but cannot do this work in isolation. Increased collaboration and utilization of community resources can accelerate student achievement. It is vital for each of the stakeholders involved in the process to recognize each other's contributions to become full partners and work toward academic achievement for every student. This goal continues to be difficult to achieve amid an increasingly complex and tumultuous educational policy environment and persistent resource constraints (Cicourel and Kitsuse, 1963; Firestone and Riehl, 2005; House and Hayes, 2002; Stone-Johnson, 2015). The fragmented policy landscape creates difficulties for school communities who rely on policies to guide and inform their actions. Hence, responding to the changes pressures the K-12 environment to provide isolated and sometimes haphazard professional development programming. Empowering counselors by giving them a voice, providing support, and the tools can strengthen the efforts.\n",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Purpose: The school counselor can reduce barriers to college access for students in underserved communities but there is a lack of focused support and professional development resources to assist them with this task. The purpose of this paper is to gain insight into how a collaborative partnership reframed professional development to increase counselors' capacities and enrich their role in addressing educational inequities in a local context.\nDesign/methodology/approach: The authors employed an action-oriented qualitative case study through the lens of social justice to critically consider how urban school counselors took action to address local educational inequities in the postsecondary process. Data were collected over a ten month period and consisted of semi-structured interviews, 17 hours of meeting transcriptions, meeting notes, field observations, numerous field notes, researcher reflections, weekly e-mail correspondence, electronic data, counselor demographic surveys, and document analysis.\nFindings: The inter-agency networked learning community model encouraged the school counselors to take ownership for their professional development, starting small led to greater collaboration, the counselors engaged in collective learning and counselors took a responsibility for the broader school community.\nResearch limitations/implications: Inter-agency partnerships can address social inequities and initiate transformative change but further research is needed to explore how to address what happens as actors move in and/or out of the partnership. Acknowledging and validating the experience of the school counselors empowered them to take risks, invite new ideas, and adapt the new idea to their local school site. Reframing professional development began to transform how the counselors were viewed by the broader school community. Further research is needed to explore how educational systems can be empowered to engage in conversations to embrace change.\nSocial implications: This study illustrated the transformative power of school counselors in building community, collaborating, and constructing bridges between each other, school administrators, and postsecondary researchers. Unless the current devaluing of school counselors shifts, the benefits associated with networked collaborative partnerships will likely go unrealized. We call on policymakers to reconsider the role of school counselors and call on them to ensure these positions are mandatory in all K-12 schools.\nOriginality/value: This study demonstrated how an inter-organizational collaboration between a university and a K-12 local education agency initiated transformative change. The collective action of the network equipped counselors with tools to build community with each other, within their individual school sites, and in the local community. Many studies provide models regarding what school counselors should do but few explore how to empower them to use the models to enact change. The action-inquiry approach provided an opportunity to explore how urban school counselors experienced and understood the process of engaging in professional development designed to help them try something new in addressing educational inequities in underserved communities.\n",
"role": "assistant"
}
] |
Effect of heat on the sensory quality of jaew sauce
|
[
"Heat treatment",
"Consumer perceptions",
"Sensory evaluation",
"Jaew",
"Sauce",
"Sorting technique"
] |
[
{
"content": "Summarize the following paper into structured abstract.\n\n1. Introduction: Various kinds of foods are usually accompanied by sauce to enhance the flavor of such foods. Thailand has an assortment of sauces of which jaew sauce is one of the popular sauces as it is commonly consumed together with grilled pork and chicken, as well as grilled and steamed fish (Wiens, 2010). It is made from fish sauce, palm sugar, lime or tamarind, chili, and in some recipe, roasted rice is added. Jaew sauce originates from the Northeastern part of Thailand and is generally sold with such foods in local street vendor. Yet, very few are commercially available. Shelf-life and spoilage factors are important to be considered for commercial products. Several factors could have an effect of the shelf-life of sauces, including water activity, pH value, oxygen, microorganisms, light, relative humidity, packaging, and heat (Fabiano et al., 2000; Kilcast and Subramaniam, 2000; Kilinc and Cakli, 2005).\n2. Method: 2.1 Sample preparation\n3. Result: 3.1 Color measurement\n4. Discussion: This research showed that heating jaew sauce at a constant temperature for up to six hours caused dramatic change to the sensory qualities, especially the color of the sauce. The changes in color were the result of the non-enzymatic browning or so-called Maillard reaction. Reducing sugar from palm sugar and amino acids from fish sauce reacted under the presence of heat. Colored compounds are generally formed during the advanced and final stages of the Maillard reaction (Silvan et al., 2006). Sauces, including fish sauces, undergo Maillard reaction upon heating and fermentation process and produce products such as furosine and carbosy-methyl-lysine, which gave rise to subsequent color formation of the sauces (Chao et al., 2009; Jiang et al., 2007). In addition, heating the samples at 80degC allowed the observation in the changes of color to be apparent because higher temperature accelerated the reaction. Similar color development was observed in the findings of seasonal effects on the characteristics of fish sauce in which brown color formation of fish sauce was very rapid during the Summer when compared to Winter (Hjalmarsson et al., 2007).\n5. Conclusion and limitation: The sensory qualities of jaew sauce altered as it was heated. The changes were observed after 1.5 hours and became more apparent after 4.5 hours. The jaew sauce appeared to be darker in color and had stronger taste as well as spiciness, in terms of consumer perceptions. Consumers grouped jaew sauce into four distinct groups based on the similarities in the sensory characteristics of the sauces, commercial, 0 hour heating, 1.5 and 3 hours heating, and lastly, 4.5 and 6 hours heating. In addition, the acceptability of jaew sauce also decreased as heating time increased for both Thai and foreign consumers. Thai consumers considered commercial and jaew sauce without heating as most acceptable, while foreigners considered commercial and jaew sauce heated up to 1.5 hours as acceptable.\n",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to examine the changes in sensory qualities of jaew sauce as heat is applied and to determine its acceptance level among Thai and foreign consumers.\nDesign/methodology/approach: Jaew sauce was heated for six hours and samples were collected at 1.5 hours interval. The color of jaew sauce was measured using color spectrophotometer and consumers examined the underlying sensory qualities of jaew sauce using sorting technique. A total of 40 Thai and foreign consumers were asked to sort the commercial and the heated jaew sauce samples according to the similarities and dissimilarities in sensory characteristics and provide descriptions for explanation of each group. A consumer test with 100 Thai and foreign consumers was also conducted to determine the acceptance of jaew sauce.\nFindings: Alterations in the sensory qualities, mainly color, were observed. Prolong heating resulted in darker color. The sorting results showed that Thai and foreign consumers have similar perception of jaew sauce. Similar groupings of jaew sauce was observed, which could be divided into four groups, commercial, 0 hour heating, 1.5 and 3 hours heating, and 4.5 and 6 hours heating. Agreeing results of both Thai and foreign consumers showed that commercial and 0 hour heating samples were most preferred and the acceptance of jaew sauce decreased as it was heated.\nOriginality/value: Despite the extensive usage of jaew, very few are available commercially in the market. The fact that Thai and foreign consumers have similar preference infer that jaew sauce has a high potential to be adopted and accepted among foreigners to a large extent if available commercially. This study also provides a basis into further research on an appropriate packaging and shelf-life study of jaew sauce for commercial purposes.\n",
"role": "assistant"
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] |
Internal social networks in work teams: structure, knowledge sharing and performance
|
[
"Performance",
"Instrumental and expressive relationships",
"Knowledge sharing",
"Social network",
"Work team"
] |
[
{
"content": "Summarize the following paper into structured abstract.\n\n1. Introduction: Regardless of the impact of social networks on various aspects of our lives (Dunbar, 2008), and the organisational reality (see e.g. Zupan and Kase, 2007; Leveson et al., 2009), the social context has long been neglected, especially in the more individualistic social sciences such as economics (Kilduff and Tsai, 2007). However, studies on organisational social networks have increased in number in recent years. The importance of the social aspect of interconnection among workers is reflected in various reviews of networks on the intra-organisational (Flap et al., 1998; Krackhardt and Brass, 1994), the organisational (Gulati et al., 2002) and the inter-organisational (Baker and Faulkner, 2002) level and in methodological (Wasserman and Faust, 1994; Scott, 2000) and managerial studies on identifying and managing social networks (Cross and Parker, 2004). Despite this emphasis on social relationships in organisations, there is more to be done, especially on the group level (see also Henttonen, 2010).The determinants of group performance have attracted a lot of research attention (see e.g. Guzzo and Dickinson, 1996 for an extensive review). Moreover, social networks have been included in the critical set of determinants under examination in innovation and R&D settings, in student teams, in laboratory settings and in other organisational teams (see Henttonen, 2010).However, just as in other group settings, studies in work-team settings dealing with similar research questions to this one have produced contradictory results. Mehra et al. (2006) found that the density of friendship relations within an organisational group was positively related to group performance, whereas Oh et al. (2004) report an inverted U-shaped relationship between the density of socialising relationships and group effectiveness. On the other hand, Wong (2008) and Sparrowe et al. (2001) found no relationship at all, and according to Luo (2005), even a team structure with fully connected cliques can have a positive impact on performance. One explanation for this may be the failure thus far to simultaneously examine how different types (instrumental and expressive) of social ties influence team performance and access to social-capital resources.The aim in this study is to further narrow this gap in the literature, and by showing how different kinds of social-network ties within work teams lead to different levels of performance to contribute to the research on group social capital (Oh et al., 2004) in a work-team setting. On the group level, social capital is defined as the structure of the team members' social relationships that give access to the necessary resources (Oh et al., 2004).Knowledge, in particular, is often considered among the most important resources to be accessed via group social-network structures, and is thereby also assumed to improve team performance (Wong, 2008). Thus, a further aim is to contribute to the literature on group social capital by examining the mediating effect of work-group knowledge in this relationship. More specifically, the idea is to complement Wong's (2008) research on work teams and their expressive network structures in terms of enhancing understanding of how instrumental and expressive structures influence team performance, and assessing the extent to which group knowledge functions as a causal mechanism through these structures. Third, the inclusion of the social-network approach as a theoretical perspective contributes to the literature in shedding light on how work teams take advantage of their internal expressive and instrumental relationships in order to foster knowledge sharing. Thus, from the perspective of group social capital (Oh et al., 2004), the main purpose is to examine how instrumental and expressive social-network structures influence knowledge sharing and, furthermore, work-team performance.The rest of this paper is organised in four sections. Section 2 discusses the theoretical background and presents the hypotheses, and Section 3 covers the data collection and the development of the measures. Section 4 reports the empirical testing of the hypotheses and presents the findings. The implications and further research directions are discussed in Section 5.\n2. Background and hypotheses: One way of assessing the influence of social networks on team performance is to consider how the overall network structure enhances knowledge sharing. It has been found in previous research that both expressive (Shah, 1998, 2002) and instrumental (Sparrowe et al., 2001; Wong, 2008) ties garner knowledge and advice. On the basis of this theoretical logic it is proposed here that both expressive and instrumental network structures affect the degree of knowledge sharing in work teams. Figure 1 presents the social-structural-network model to be tested.In particular, the term density is used to illustrate the intensity of relations (see also Wong, 2008). However, given that a highly dense team-internal network may be inefficient because it could yield a narrower range of information (Nahapiet and Ghoshal, 1998), fragmentation is included in order to capture more sparse, possibly even cliquish, structures. It has been argued that density and sub-group structures are not mutually exclusive (Oh et al., 2006). Members of highly dense networks are fully connected and no one can escape the notice of others. This fosters co-operation in that information is fully circulated (Burt, 2001). Density has two functions in a closed network: it affects access to information and facilitates sanctions, thereby making it less risky for people to trust one another (Coleman, 1990). Fragmentation highlights the existence of sub-groups within the team, which usually reflect a task orientation.2.1 Expressive and instrumental social relationships - what they are and why they should be distinguished\n3. Methods: 3.1 Study setting\n4. Findings: Table I reports the means, standard deviations and intercorrelations of the variables. As in other social-network studies, the network variables are positively correlated: it is worth noting that the closer the fragmentation is to zero the less of it there is. The positive correlation means that the social-network relationships are often overlapping (Adler and Kwon, 2002; Coleman, 1988), thus network members may simultaneously have both expressive and instrumental relationships: they are not all mutually exclusive. Indeed, it is likely that instrumental relationships give rise to expressive relationships in the real world, especially in conditions of repeated interaction (Adler and Kwon, 2002). Furthermore, the values of the variance inflation factors associated with each of the independent variables are within the range of 1.108-3.026 (mean 1.77), thus the effects of multicollinearity are within acceptable limits (Hair et al., 1998).Linear regression analyses were used to test all the hypotheses, the control variables being entered in step 1 followed by a set of independent variables in the following steps. Table II (Models 1 and 2) reports the effects of the analyses of knowledge sharing on the control and network variables in the instrumental network. H1 is supported in that instrumental-network density relates positively to knowledge sharing. However, H2 is not supported: although expressive-network density relates positively to knowledge sharing, the relationship only approaches significance (b=0.269, p=0.10). Table III (Models 1 and 2) shows the linear regression analyses of knowledge sharing on the control and network variables in the expressive network. H3 is supported in that instrumental-network fragmentation relates positively to knowledge sharing. However, H4 is not supported. Table II reports further (Models 3 and 5) the effects of the linear regression of team performance on the control and network variables in the instrumental network. In support of H5a and H7a, instrumental-network density and fragmentation are positively and significantly associated with team performance. Table III (Models 3 and 4), on the other hand, shows the effects of the linear regression on team performance on the control and network variables in the expressive network. Expressive-network density is not significantly related to team performance, against H6a, but expressive-network fragmentation is significantly and negatively associated thus supporting H8a. H5b and H7b posited a mediating effect from instrumental-network density or fragmentation via knowledge sharing on team performance, and H6b and H8b posited the same for expressive networks.In support of H5b and H7b there is an indirect effect of instrumental-network density and fragmentation on team performance (Table II, Model 6). However, H6b and H8b are not supported and no such indirect effect is evident in the expressive network (Table III, Model 5).\n5. Discussion, implications and further research: The primary goal in this paper was to explore the association between two types (instrumental and expressive) of internal-network properties of teams engaged in relatively knowledge-intensive but moderately complex work and performance. It thus incorporates a social-network perspective into the study of groups. Indeed, group and network research provide complimentary approaches to investigating the impact of social networks on group performance. Given the growing interest in the role of social networks in recent years (see e.g. Cummings, 2004; Henttonen, 2010), the contribution of this research is threefold. First, the current data provides some empirical evidence regarding the structural properties of work teams and their direct relationship with performance. More specifically, the study contributes to the research on work teams engaged in fairly knowledge-intensive but only moderately complex tasks, in comparison to many previous studies focusing on R&D and innovation teams engaged in much more complex work (see e.g. Kratzer et al., 2005, 2008; Leenders et al., 2003). Furthermore, it seems from the findings that the creation of sub-groups (advice-network fragmentation) is not detrimental if they are connected (advice-network density) and, thereby, give access to the desired resources. Thus, the positive impact of fragmentation on performance indicates that full connection (i.e. high density) is not the only significant success factor. One possible explanation for this positive impact in the work teams in question relates to the division of labour and its benefits: each member carries out his or her specific tasks somewhat independently. Another reason may be that fragmentation weakens the negative impact of \"poor performers\" in that it may force members to assume more specialised responsibilities (see Lin and Hui, 1999).People rely very much on their social networks in finding information and solving problems (Cross et al., 2002). Thus and second, with regard to the various functions in social networks, expressive relationships did not materialise in relation to knowledge, but instrumental networks did. The results of previous studies support these findings insofar as the resources that expressive social-support relationships provide include emotional support and informal influence (see e.g. Krackhardt and Hanson, 1993 on friendship relationships). Thus, it seems that these resources (i.e. expressive social-support relationships) do not contribute much to the process of knowledge creation in small-sized teams. Luo (2005) echoes these findings. However, the expressive network, or more specifically fragmentation within it, had a notable performance effect. It thus seems that close expressive contacts are important in that, as Homans (1974), for example, suggests, they create groups in which members give each other approval, and this further affirms their individual standing within the group. This is likely to motivate them to complete their tasks more effectively and, at best, the team performance as a whole improves.Third, tests were run to find out whether team knowledge mediated the effects of network structures on team performance. The results showed that knowledge sharing fully mediated the influence of complementarities between dense and fragmented (instrumental, i.e. advice) network relationships, thus providing empirical validation of the implicit understanding that networks transfer knowledge. It is not surprising that instrumental advice relationships enhance knowledge sharing within a work team. What is more interesting, however, are the results suggesting that neither knowledge sharing nor, thereby, work-team performance is facilitated through expressive social-support relationships.On the management level this study demonstrates the value of instrumental, advice and expressive social-support networks in work teams carrying out only moderately complex and both fairly knowledge-intensive and routine tasks. Managers of larger teams could assign members liaison roles in building up and maintaining relationships, for example. The results also suggest that stimulating both expressive and instrumental relationships is beneficial, but in different ways. For example, off-duty social activities do not improve network relations in terms of knowledge sharing, but a fragmented expressive network structure within the team is likely to be detrimental to performance. This indicates that emotional support and informal influence also matter.Clearly this research has its limitations. One of the main concerns throughout the process was to do with the use of the self-efficacy (performance) measure. The subjective context may also have biased the performance evaluations. Moreover, there may have been leniency bias (Sparrowe et al., 2001) in the ratings, given that team performance reflects the members' and the leader's personal performance. Hence, another interpretation of the results could be that the social structure of the work team is related to the team leader's and the members' assessments rather than to the team's actual performance. The analysis provided further evidence justifying the use of quasi-self-report measures, but future studies could still focus on objective measures in order to obtain more accurate assessments of team performance. Furthermore, in theoretical terms the implication is that the network structure precedes team performance, when in reality it is possible that the relationship between the two is the reverse. However, the independent variables and the dependent variable were not measured at the same time. This left some time lag between the assessments, thus allowing, although in a cursory manner, a test of causality between the work-team social structure and team performance. Furthermore, social-network analysis requires exhaustive data collection. Bearing that in mind, the minimum 80 per cent response rate reported here, although good by most standards, is sufficient but not quite the ideal. The same applies to the sample size (n=76 teams). The nature of small-group research, however, means that sample sizes do not often exceed the size of the sample studied here (it is, on average, 60 groups, or teams; Cohen and Bailey, 1997). There is thus a need for more studies in different contexts that are less-knowledge intensive than R&D and innovation. The results of the study are cross-sectional and thus less dependent on the context than studies concentrated on one or a few sectors, and by implication may well be generalisable to other work-team settings. Additionally, further research could extend the analysis to different types of network structures (e.g. density and fragmentation) at the same time, thereby providing more detailed information on the structural dynamics. The complementarities and tensions between the different structures are acknowledged, but studies addressing such issues on the team level are, to the author's knowledge, rare.\n",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Purpose: - From the structural perspective of social-capital theory, this research investigates how a team's social-network relationships affect its performance. More specifically, it concerns the type of work-group-internal connectedness in instrumental and expressive networks that is associated with enhanced team performance, and whether knowledge mediates these effects.\nDesign/methodology/approach: - The research was survey based, involving 76 work teams and a total of 499 employees in 48 organisations. The work teams carried out fairly knowledge-intensive but only moderately complex tasks, some of which were routine in nature.\nFindings: - Both dense and fragmented instrumental-network structures affect work-team performance. However, fragmentation in expressive networks has a negative impact. Furthermore, the mediation results give empirical support to the implicit understanding that only instrumental networks transfer knowledge, especially if they are dense.\nResearch limitations/implications: - The results indicate that social-network relationships affect team performance and also provide access to social capital (here knowledge). However, instrumental and expressive networks differ in terms of theoretical and practical implications. Future research could overcome the limitations of this study through increasing the sample size and focusing on much more fine-grained intervening mechanisms (here knowledge sharing).\nPractical implications: - The recommendation to managers is to stimulate dense instrumental relationships in order to facilitate knowledge sharing and avoid overly fragmented expressive relationships.\nOriginality/value: - First, in examining the social structure of both instrumental and expressive relationships this study responds to the growing call in organisational theory for research into the social content of social networks. Second, the contribution of this research paper lies in directly testing whether team knowledge mediates the effects of advice-network structures on team performance.\n",
"role": "assistant"
}
] |
Assessing some stylized facts about financial market indexes: a Markov copula approach
|
[
"Copulas",
"Markov switching",
"Tail dependence",
"Time-varying parameters"
] |
[
{
"content": "Summarize the following paper into structured abstract.\n\n1 Introduction: In this work we study the dynamic relationships between financial market index returns and each of the following: their trading volume and their volatility. These variables have attracted much attention of academics and professionals, indicating their importance as measures of financial market behavior. The contribution of this work lies on the literature of financial markets efficiency (EMH) and behavioral finance, precisely on information flows hypothesis (IFH), both concerning the predictability of price changes. In this context, we believe that studying the behavior of relationships among returns, trading volume and volatility is worthy and compatible with both environments.\n2 Copulas and tail dependence: An n-dimensional copula C is a multivariate distribution function in [0, 1]n whose marginal distributions are uniform in the [0, 1] interval. Applying this copula function to random variables, C is a function that binds a multivariate distribution function H to its one-dimensional marginal distribution functions F\n3 Estimation: As we are only interested on the bivariate relationships return negatives/volatility and volatility/trading volume, the marginal distributions are modeled via a nonparametric approach. In other words, to avoid model misspecifications by assuming a parametric form for the marginal distributions of return negatives, volatility and trading volume, we consider empirical cumulative distribution functions (ecdf) for them. In a second moment, using maximum likelihood estimation, we obtain the copula parameters estimates.\n4 Empirical analysis: In the empirical analysis we analyze a data set comprised of trading volume and returns for the BOVESPA (Sao Paulo Stock Exchange) and S&P500 (Standard and Poor's 500) indexes. The daily volatility is constructed from intraday (frequency of 15 minutes) data[10]. The sample covers the period from May 13, 2004 to October 8, 2009 for BOVESPA and from December 13, 2004 to October 8, 2009 for S&P500.\n5 Final remarks: We analyze the dependence relationship between trading volume and volatility for BOVESPA and S&P500 indexes using copula-based models, allowing the dependence parameter to vary over time according to both a non-observed two-state first-order Markov chain and a restricted ARMA process.\n",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Purpose: The aim of this paper is to measure and evaluate the relationship between returns-volatility and trading volume and returns and volatility of financial market indexes using time-varying copulas.\nDesign/methodology/approach: The time dynamic dependence parameter is allowed to evolve according to a restricted ARMA-type equation which includes a constant term that is driven by a hidden two-state first-order Markov chain.\nFindings: In using this time dynamics in conjunction with non-elliptical distribution functions and tail dependence measure, the authors are allowing for (and focusing on) non-linearities in the returns-volume-volatility relationship. The results support the assumption that current trading volume provides information about future volatility as well as that there is a negative relationship between returns and their volatilities in financial market indexes.\nOriginality/value: The authors provide an interesting empirical interpretation for the regimes the authors have identified: in the high dependence regime the sequential information arrival hypothesis and/or noise trading hypothesis are valid, consequently future volatility prediction is possible and persistent but does not last indefinitely; in the low dependence regime, the future volatility prediction is more unlikely to occur, since both trading volume and return negatives have a low (near zero) relation with future volatility.\n",
"role": "assistant"
}
] |
The gendering of entrepreneurship: theoretical and empirical insights
|
[
"Gender",
"Entrepreneurialism",
"Entrepreneurship",
"Feminism"
] |
[
{
"content": "Summarize the following paper into structured abstract.\n\nEmergence from the Gender and Enterprise Network: Women\nTrans-national contributions bridging the context/action divide: We were delighted to receive some 33 papers. The volume and quality of submissions brought difficult decisions at each stage in the review process. We fully appreciate Hughes et al\nDoing gender and entrepreneurship from different positions in local gender regimes: Ekinsmyth and Forson both present papers on the gendered experiences of women in small enterprise at a particular point in the life course - when they have dependent children. While both studies are set in the UK, they focus on different types of experience, reflecting different local gender regimes and individual strategies for doing entrepreneurship and motherhood and, therefore, for doing gender.\nWhat about the gendering of male entrepreneurship?: As research on the gendering of entrepreneurship is still in relative infancy, numerous additional research gaps and directions remain. Perhaps most notably, research on male entrepreneurship through a gender lens is extremely scarce. Yet, we believe that gender theory can help to advance understanding of all entrepreneurial practice; we could understand male entrepreneurs better through a gender lens as well as using that framework to produce political critique. Indeed, gender relations are clearly changing in many areas of the world and it is surely time to understand male entrepreneurship as a heterogeneous practice and to ask when it can be gender liberating, enabling men to practise alternative forms of masculinity to the hegemonic norm and, in turn, act as an agent for change in local gender regimes. Thinking through the lens' of the contributions in this special issue, we commend researchers to observe fathers juggling entrepreneurship and domestic commitments, study images of masculinity in media on male entrepreneurship, analyse the effect of labour markets and education systems on male entrepreneurship and ask what forms of entrepreneurship are gender liberating for men.\n",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Purpose: This extended Editorial outlines the genesis and theoretical interests of the Gender and Enterprise Network from which this special issue of the International Journal of Entrepreneurial Behaviour\nDesign/methodology/approach: Articles in the special issue include cross-national studies, multi-level analyses drawing on qualitative and quantitative methods, longitudinal analysis and feminist research. The Editorial explores methodological challenges, including how to encourage cross-national collaboration, research the circumstances in which entrepreneurship is gender liberating and embed gender theory in research on male entrepreneurship.\nFindings: A comparison is made of the findings from the papers in this special issue, to draw out wider implications for our understanding of entrepreneurship as a gendered process.\nOriginality/value: This special issue represents a significant milestone in advancing our understanding of all entrepreneurship as gendered. Its focus on gender theory (rather than on the empirical study of women\n",
"role": "assistant"
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] |
Middle-level secondary school leaders: Potential, constraints and implications for leadership preparation and development
|
[
"Middle‐level school leadership",
"School leadership preparation and development",
"Leadership",
"Schools",
"Australia"
] |
[
{
"content": "Summarize the following paper into structured abstract.\n\nIntroduction: There is increasing research evidence about the prevalence and impact of dispersed forms of school leadership. Of course, schools have for many years had positions of leadership in what have been termed middle-level leadership roles, with many of these teachers leading curriculum areas. In this era of dispersed leadership and school change focused on the personalisation of learning and employing twenty-first century curriculum and pedagogy, their role should be crucial. The potential for teachers in these roles to change teaching and learning is exciting, but unfortunately, too often the expectations and support for these roles is lacking. This paper reports on a decade of research that we have conducted on middle-level curriculum and subject leaders in Australian secondary schools, and which shows both the potential and the constraints of these roles. Implications for leadership preparation are considered.Researching school leadership: principals, dispersing leadership and middle-level leadership\nMethodology: Details of the research methodologies are fully described in Cotter (2011), Keane (2010) and White (2000), but all followed a consistent approach using multiple perspective interviews of middle-level leadership in government and Catholic secondary schools in Melbourne, Victoria, Australia. Principals, senior leaders, middle-level leaders and teachers were interviewed to gain their perceptions on middle-level leadership. For example, White asked the following main questions:* For the principals, deputy principals, curriculum coordinators and teachers - with particular regard to leadership, how do you see the role of curriculum area middle managers (CAMMs) in this school?* For the CAMMs - with particular regard to leadership, how do you see your role as a CAMM in this school?White also used several further questions to ensure the completeness of the responses:* During discussion of the CAMM leadership role, were there concrete examples used?* Was there discussion relating to the perceived effects of CAMMs on student learning outcomes?* Has the interview participant been given an opportunity to relate material they feel is relevant to the CAMM leadership role?Keane (2010) used a similar set of questions, whilst Cotter (2011) used a more extensive list of 14 questions to cover a similar range of issues. Interviews were supplemented with school document analysis as appropriate. White (2000) researched heads of English and Mathematics in six government secondary schools and interviewed in total 18 principals and senior leaders, 11 heads of English or Mathematics and 17 teachers. Keane (2010) researched learning area leaders (LAL) (English, mathematics, technology, science, technology) in three Catholic secondary schools and interviewed in total eight principals and senior leaders, ten LAL and five teachers. Cotter (2011) researched curriculum coordinators in three Catholic secondary schools and interviewed in total 17 principals and senior leaders, 3 curriculum coordinators, 15 middle-level leaders and 7 teachers. Across the three studies involving 12 schools, 111 people have been interviewed comprising 43 principals and senior leaders, 39 middle-level leaders, and 31 teachers.\nFindings: In White's (2000-2002) study on middle-level leadership there was a consistent view within the schools studied about the role of the English and mathematics coordinators, a position that White labelled as CAMM. Senior leaders, CAMMs and teachers all believed that CAMMs can affect student learning outcomes, yet the nature and impact of the role was highly context dependent with, for example, some CAMMs working with teachers to improve teaching and learning and other CAMMs operating managerially, concerned with supplies, textbooks and timetabling matters only. Taking into account the extant literature on middle-level leadership, White constructed four leadership components (instructional leader, curriculum strategist, learning area architect, and administrative leader), and then distributed the 15 themes (shown in the boxes in Figure 1) that arose from analysing the participant interviews. This model acknowledges important management considerations (administrative leadership), but highlights leadership that leads to improved teaching and learning (instructional, curriculum and learning area leadership), leading White to call this an enhanced model of CAMM leadership.At the time we (Drysdale, Gurr and White) had been discussing the idea of portfolio leadership - that is, leadership in which an individual amasses a range of leadership knowledge and skills from which they can draw upon and use depending on the context or situation (Gurr, 2001). It acknowledges the earlier research on contingency and situational leadership and it influenced White's middle-level leadership model shown in Figure 1. White (2001, pp. 220-2) described each role as follows:(1) CAMM as instructional leader: this reflects aspects of the CAMM leadership role that are directly involved in improving the teaching and learning process in the learning area.(2) CAMM as curriculum strategist: this reflects aspects of the CAMM leadership role that are involved in direction-setting for the learning area and the school in curriculum matters. Includes aspects to do with the CAMM role in raising learning area and school profiles when appropriate opportunities arise.(3) CAMM as learning area architect: this reflects aspects of the CAMM leadership role that are involved in changing learning area culture and building human capital in the learning area.(4) CAMM as administrative leader: this reflects aspects of the CAMM leadership role that involves what is traditionally considered learning area \"management\".Keane (2010) found that the leadership role of LAL (these roles include the English and Mathematics coordinators of White's research, as well as those leading any learning area) was considered essential to the development of good student learning outcomes, yet in only one of the schools, where the LAL role was enhanced so that they could lead, was there evidence of significant improvement in student learning outcomes. Leadership capacity of most of these teachers was constrained by inadequate preparation and support, lack of time to effectively carry out the role, difficulties with staff management, and role ambiguity. Conversely, leadership capacity was enhanced when the senior leadership of the school: enlisted LAL as partners in developing strategic approaches to teaching and learning; created structures that enabled time to work with staff; and, proactively removed barriers which might inhibit LAL leadership. Unlike White's research, Keane's participants reported considerable differences in perception about the leadership role. Whilst there was agreement that the administrative aspect was important, principals and curriculum coordinators expected LALs to exert more leadership than they believed they could, especially in regard to staff management: \"many of the LALs expressed frustration about difficult staff members or problems getting staff together. A key dilemma for the LALs was that they wanted to be consultative leaders yet they were expected to be supervisors as well [...]\" (Keane, 2010, p. 152). Keane did not develop a leadership model as his research essentially confirmed the model proposed by White ten years earlier. Apart from the differences found in perceptions about the role, Keane's research provides evidence that these middle-level leaders can positively influence student learning outcomes:[...] LAL leadership is complex and multi-dimensional and is seen to be central to improvement in student learning outcomes. Their complex role includes the kinds of leadership that is exercised by principals and the SMT and yet the LALs often receive inadequate preparation and little time to carry out their role. Moreover they are often removed from discussions about whole school policy and development (Keane, 2010, p. 153).Cotter (2011) found the role of curriculum coordinators to also be complex. Positioned at a senior leadership level, their primary role was to promote and support learning and teaching suited to the local context; that is to make sure that the teaching and learning programme matched the needs and aspirations of the school's students and parents. This was a narrow role, however, more about minimising the impact of the external world than being innovative: \"[...] a desire for the curriculum coordinator to demonstrate territorial pride [...] to filter ideas and act as 'gate keeper'\" (Cotter, 2011, p. 217). Much of this work was managerial and how this was done varied considerably across the schools as the design of the role at each school seemed to be influenced by the school context and specifically tailored to the person holding the position. Consistent across the schools, however, was a lack of focus on \"active instructional leadership of a clear vision for strategic improvement in learning and teaching\" (Cotter, 2011, p. 218). There were several tensions that help explain these observations. Curriculum coordinators were expected to:* ensure the school was compliant with externally imposed curriculum changes, but in a way that was aligned with local needs, and which reflected an awareness and responsiveness to local priorities;* provide operational guidance to the school, subject departments and teachers on curriculum matters, yet respect the autonomy of teachers and middle leaders in doing so;* be knowledgeable about the latest curriculum innovations, but to be able to filter these so teachers were not overwhelmed by change;* manage people and curriculum processes and in so doing hold people to account, whilst maintaining personable relationships; and* have a vision for learning and teaching at their school, but with little support or direction at the school level as to what this might be.There was little evidence that curriculum coordinators impacted on student learning, and this seemed to stem from a lack of clarity at the school level about how to improve student learning, and, at the curriculum coordinator level, little sense of how they might influence school improvement, and a poor understanding of leading change, especially in relation to engaging people in change efforts:Rather than being innovators for change and improvement themselves the curriculum coordinators were seen to react to what educational researchers commonly view as the inevitability of change [...] Seeing change as mainly doing the same things somewhat differently was perhaps prevalent because the 'buy in' to change had not occurred at a strategic improvement level (Cotter, 2011, pp. 218-9).Cotter cast a critical eye at the role in recommendations that suggested the importance of the role for contemporary schools needed to be reviewed; maybe it could be done better by dispersing the functions across other senior leadership roles, or if it is to be retained then the emphasis needs to be on leadership or learning rather than \"compliance and administration of externally imposed change at the school level\" (Cotter, 2011, p. 222).\nDiscussion: Leadership role\nConclusion: Our overview of the research on middle-level leadership in Australia, focused on the research of White (2000), Keane (2010) and Cotter (2011), shows their potential to make a significant impact on school and student improvement. Unfortunately far too often this potential is unrealised. In this paper we conclude that lack of understanding and organisational support by senior leaders, the lack of professional preparation and leadership development by individual middle-level leaders, and underdeveloped professional knowledge and capability contribute to a missed opportunity to make a difference in schools. By referring to our successful school leadership model (Drysdale and Gurr, 2011a) as a guide and conceptual framework we recommend that middle-level leadership can be enhanced by focusing on opportunities for quality professional learning and leadership development in building professional knowledge and practice in teaching, curriculum, assessment and student learning (Level 1), and also in helping with developing strategies for building school capacity (Level 2). We have argued elsewhere (Gurr et al., 2011a, b) that whilst formal leadership development programmes will remain important, increasingly there will be more thought given to structured experience-based programmes, and the personal qualities of leaders. For our middle-level leaders this will mean developing personal qualities and skills that enhance working with colleagues to improve practice (such as coaching and leadership skills like active listening, providing feedback and so forth), actively structuring experiences that progressively develop leadership capacity (with the use of internships, mentoring and coaching important), and having access to high-quality formal professional learning programmes that will link these experiences and develop awareness of the wider knowledge about improving schools. Finally, there also needs to be high expectations and processes in place that encourage middle-level leaders to accept responsibility for their own learning and development. This could partly be achieved by the development of individual customised learning plans that are linked to school and system goals and which form part of a performance review process (Drysdale and Gurr, 2011b; Gurr and Drysdale, 2011).\n",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Purpose: - The aim of this paper is to bring together for the first time three studies of middle-level leaders in secondary schools in Victoria, Australia. The studies span more than a decade and allow consideration of the progress in developing middle-level leadership roles.\nDesign/methodology/approach: - All studies followed a consistent approach using multiple perspective interviews of middle-level curriculum and subject leadership in government and Catholic secondary schools in Melbourne, Victoria, Australia. Principals, senior leaders, middle-level leaders and teachers were interviewed to gain their perceptions on middle-level leadership. Interviews were supplemented with school document analysis.\nFindings: - The work of middle-level leaders is heavily dependent on how their roles are constructed and the capacities, abilities and attitudes of the leaders. Some are expected to be leaders that influence teaching and learning, and they may be developed and supported to do so. Too often, however, teachers in these key roles have few expectations or opportunities to exercise leadership. Whilst many have the capacity to be leaders of teaching and learning, others are not sure about their ability to influence teaching and learning. Suggestions are made for how leadership might be structured in schools to emphasise the importance of middle-level leaders, and how these leaders can be better prepared and supported.\nResearch limitations/implications: - Observational studies, studies of primary school contexts and cross-country comparisons would extend this research.\nPractical implications: - Middle-level school leaders need to be seen as key personnel in improving teaching and learning, school structures need to reflect this, and developing leadership capacity needs to be prioritised.\nOriginality/value: - This paper highlights continuing issues with how the work of middle-level school leaders is conceptualised and supported, and makes suggestions for leadership structure and the preparation and development of school leaders.\n",
"role": "assistant"
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] |
Attractiveness in supply chains: a process and matureness perspective
|
[
"Customers",
"Suppliers",
"Supply chain management",
"Denmark"
] |
[
{
"content": "Summarize the following paper into structured abstract.\n\n1 Introduction: Several industrial companies have recognized that their supply chain capabilities provides them with competitive edges for delivering what the customers want. Companies often interact with numerous suppliers and customers. Looking at companies' customer and supplier sides, these groups of actors are typically not homogenously delivering and do not require the same physical products and services. From a manufacturer's perspective, this brings rationale to think of customer attractiveness. How can a company work with a differentiated approach to be more attractive to customers and suppliers?Attraction in business relationships has been described as the factor that creates voluntary commitment, which can mobilize buyer-supplier resources. But attraction has also been described in different ways over time, where the concept has different meanings and influences different aspects of relationship building. Others have seen attraction in business relationships as important and central in complex relationships, where there is need for creating and affecting commitment from the buyer-supplier relations and thereby extend the possibility for value creation.Attraction will be seen as a prerequisite for development of trust and commitment, not just in the initial stages of relationships but also in continuation and development throughout the relational duration. The question is whether attraction can be defined as one theoretical concept, or it is to be described differently throughout the different stages of a relationship. In logistics and supply chain literature, the matureness or development stage approach has had wide application. For example, it has been applied in logistics matureness by Bagchi and Skjott-Larsen (1995), different partnership types by Lambert et al. (1996) and in sub-supplier categories (Andersen and Christensen, 1998). Thus, the principal research question of this paper is:RQ. How can different matureness levels of attractiveness be described?The purpose of this paper is to address this issue by proposing a process and maturity model for attractiveness in supply chains. It describes the different previous views of attraction described in the literature and argues that attraction is presented in different forms and the concept has different purposes in the different stages of relationship building, which can be seen as problematic. A discussion is provided concerning, whether attraction can be viewed from a \"maturity approach,\" where the importance and characteristics of being perceived as attractive will rise as the complexity increases in the relationship. In order to explain the \"maturity approach\" the paper includes two Danish case studies of companies that have different needs and purposes for being perceived as attractive by the buyer-supplier. The approach of this paper is that attraction and perception of attraction between relationship partners will change over time, when the relationship develops or the purpose of the relationship changes. This paper is further structured into four sections. The next section contains a literature review on attractiveness. Then a section of the applied methodology follows. This is followed by a section with case study analyses. The final section concludes the paper.\n2 Methodology: The methodology in this paper draws on a literature review and two explorative case studies. The literature review has been completed by the snow-ball method in which references from one source has been the starting point to identify other references and so forth. A search for articles in the EBSCO and science direct research article data bases for papers including \"attractiveness\" in the paper title has also been completed. The search for literature covering the topic area at hand has provided a limited amount of articles covering attractiveness. However, the present literature in this paper may not be viewed as complete. There might be other papers dealing with the same content area, but they use another terminology than attractiveness. Furthermore, there might be other relevant literature in books and conference proceedings about this topic, which this literature review has not identified. Furthermore, this paper is based on two explorative case studies of Danish manufacturers. A case study is an empirical inquiry that investigates a contemporary phenomenon within its real-life context, especially when boundaries between phenomenon and context are not clearly evident (Benbasat et al., 1987; Ellram, 1996; Yin, 2003). The case study method is suitable for this study because it attempts to answer how different maturity levels of attractiveness can be described. Applying the terminology from Yin (2003) the research design is an embedded single case study. Miles and Huberman (1994) have provided an overview of sampling strategies for qualitative research. Criteria range from theory-based, criticality, uniqueness to opportunistic and convenience. Sample strategies for the case studies have been to find two companies with different maturity levels in attractiveness. Thus, case company alfa is selected due to the perception of that this company has a mature business model that incorporates interpersonal attractiveness components in its management of upstream relationships. Case company beta is selected due to a belief that this company is less mature in attractiveness and because this company is in a beginner's phase of applying this concept to its customers. In case company alfa, semi-structured interviews with the group purchasing manager, the group product development manager, the sales director and project developer have been completed. In case company beta, semi-structured interviews with the CEO and the group sales manager have been completed. All interviews were concerned with identification of what respondents perceive as attractiveness and to cover their practices.\n3 Literature review: This sub-section about the literature review of attractiveness is structured into three sub-sections. Firstly, the concept of attractiveness is discussed. Secondly, ten identified contributions are described. The last sub-section summarises the literature review.3.1 Attractiveness\n4 Case studies and model development: This section is structured into three sub-sections. The first two sub-sections describe two case studies of companies that have different maturity levels in supply chain attractiveness. The last sub-section contains the development of a matureness model of attractiveness.4.1 Case study alfa\n5 Conclusion and implications: We began this paper with the aim of describing and analysing the importance of attractiveness in supply chains. Overall, we found that attractiveness is a valid approach in supply chain management. Attractiveness contributes by providing an alternative approach to managing business relationships based on creation of voluntary motivation and commitment between the relationship partners. The attractiveness approach gives an alternative explanation to power. It was also found that attractiveness is not a static approach, but it will change according to the relationship stage. Based on a literature review and two cases, a process and maturity model for attractiveness in relationships is developed. The developed model contributes by pinpointing the importance of complexity in the exchange between companies engaged in relationships and customer attractiveness. Attractiveness is directed towards the expected outcome of a relationship and according to the exchange dimensions attractiveness will differ. More complex exchange will provide basis for different scopes and dimensions in customer attractiveness.5.1 Managerial implications\n",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Purpose: - Companies engage in several business relationships ranging from arm's length to close relationships based on trust and commitment. Several companies have recognized that their supply chain capabilities give them a competitive edge for delivering what customers want. However, often customers are not a homogeneous group requiring the same physical products and services. From a manufacturer's perspective, this demands that the issue of customer and supplier attractiveness should be considered. How can a company work with a differentiated approach: to be more attractive to selected customers or to suppliers? The purpose of this paper is to address this issue by proposing a process and maturity model for customer attractiveness in supply chains.\nDesign/methodology/approach: - The paper is based on two in-depth explorative case studies of Danish business-to-business manufacturers. The cases report both seller and buyer perspectives on attractiveness.\nFindings: - The literature review on attractiveness reveals that the explanation of attractiveness has been described differently by a range of authors who are divided into three levels. This challenge calls for the development of a maturity model. Based on the developed maturity model, different sets of managerial implications are deducted. It is found that the parameters used at different attractiveness stages have to differ both in scope and in actual usage.\nResearch limitations/implications: - The research is explorative in nature and rests on two case studies. This does not provide a basis for statistical generalization. Future research should test the maturity model, through both more case studies and more questionnaire surveys.\nPractical implications: - The maturity model helps companies manage their resources more efficiently. It provides a structured framework showing where to start and a foundation for an assessment of companies' current customer and supplier attractiveness.\nOriginality/value: - The paper is the first to develop a maturity model for customer and supplier attractiveness from a supply chain management perspective.\n",
"role": "assistant"
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] |
Economic and demographic challenges for social care : A critical perspective on the management and delivery of care
|
[
"Management",
"Managerialism",
"Elderly care",
"Social services"
] |
[
{
"content": "Summarize the following paper into structured abstract.\n\nIntroduction: This paper provides a critique of attempts to address significant economic and demographic challenges to the provision of adult social care in England. Reforms that have sought to introduce a managerialist perspective on social care management and to place greater responsibility for identifying and organising services in the hand of older people (personalistation) are evaluated. In doing so, the authors draw upon their own empirical research to highlight the threats that responses to these challenges create for the delivery of high-quality and effective care services. A counter-response, grounded in critical gerontology and drawing upon the ethic of care, suggests how a more effective care service might be organised and delivered. In providing a critique of recent reforms in the light of empirical research and engagement with previous studies, this paper represents a topical and novel analysis of the social care reform agenda in England that presents key learning of value to those working in other contexts.\nTheoretical framework: Much of the Coalition Government's enthusiasm for public-sector reform in the UK has focused on its importance for the renewal of the economy. Reforms largely centre on a need to reduce costs and hence the budget deficit. In many countries, including the UK, this has resulted in (central) government restructuring or recasting the areas for which it takes responsibility (England, 2010). Health and social care has been one of the most heavily affected sectors. Reforms to the provision of social care have created a mixed economy of provision which has brought autonomy and choice to those with financial resources of their own. However, cost constraints within social care for those relying on the state for funding have undermined genuine choice (Rogowski, 2010).\nResearch approach: The research study reported in this paper was commissioned by a local authority in England that holds a statutory responsibility to provide social care services for those meeting its threshold criteria. The purpose of the study was to investigate the preventative services provided to adults in the county, with a specific focus on services targeted at older people (aged 60+) living in their own home. The commissioners requested that this work should focus on the impact of ill-health and so the project focused on older people with poor health or who had recently been in hospital. This includes services provided by the local authority as well as those provided by charitable organisations and by community groups and volunteers.\nFindings and analysis: Notes and transcripts (from inquiry board meetings) were subject to continuous analysis throughout the project with input from participants as described above. Three broad themes emerged from the data and are summarised below. These themes focused on: issues relating to knowledge and communication; issues relating to the structure of care and support services; and issues that relate to responsibility for managing care.\nDiscussion: the ethic of care as response to the reform agenda: This section of the paper provides a discussion to the findings described above and considers how an alternative approach to the provision of adult social care may deliver more effective services. Whilst such an approach is not specifically concerned with more efficient or less costly ways of delivering care, the \"effectiveness\" of solutions is a key factor in determining total cost. In the following section, the authors suggest that restructuring the system to take account of and to respond to individual needs provides a way to mitigate the impact of these reforms. The underlying assumption in this discussion is that the reforms as they are being enacted and experienced are acting to damage the quality of the relationship between those providing care and those that are in receipt of care. Without attending to this, the quality of care cannot be assured and therefore \"effectiveness\" not assured.\n",
"role": "user"
},
{
"content": "Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to analyse the impact of reforms designed to address economic and demographic challenges in England with reference to the authors' own empirical work providing a critique of their impact and suggesting a way to improve the quality of social care for older people.\nDesign/methodology/approach: The research was a qualitative study conducted in a participatory manner in which older people were positioned as co-creators of the research study. This involved setting the scope of the study and identifying and refining the themes used in the analysis of an inquiry board and interviews.\nFindings: The research findings highlight the threat of recent moves that emphasise \"independence\" and \"self-management\" particularly as they risk marginalising some groups of older people and reducing the quality of care. An alternative approach drawn from the ethics of care is suggested.\nResearch limitations/implications: The research study focused on a narrow selection of older people and future work will wish to explore concepts of \"care\" and \"independence\" in additional contexts and of reforms in other geographies.\nPractical implications: The researchers argue that the current reform agenda threatens the quality of care services and suggest improvements to the way in which services might be organised and presented.\nSocial implications: It is intended that the research will contribute to social policy debates and particularly those that focus on social care. The study also looks to contribute to current work in the fields of critical gerontology, feminist ethics and the management of public services more generally.\nOriginality/value: The paper presents a novel and critical viewpoint of current social care policy in England and will therefore be of interest to policy-makers and to professionals.\n",
"role": "assistant"
}
] |
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