Sexuality and holiday choices: conversations with gay and lesbian tourists

This paper is an exploratory investigation of the travel motivations of gay and lesbian tourists. Based on in-depth interviews and focus groups, it investigates the interrelationships between sexuality, tourism behaviour and tourism spaces. Given that public space is controlled and heterosexualized, the paper suggests that whilst gay and lesbian people are motivated to travel for a range of reasons, such is the power of the dominant heterosexual milieu that their sexuality has a critical impact on their tourism choices. The need for safety, to feel comfortable with like-minded people, and to escape from heterosexism – often to specifically gay spaces – emerge as key influences on their choice of holiday.     

Customer satisfaction measurement and management: A processual analysis

Customer satisfaction (CS) measurement has been widely advocated as central to the pursuit of market orientation, total quality management, and competitive advantage by allowing management to monitor and improve performance in the terms most significant to customers. However, relatively little analytical attention has been devoted to the processual issues implicit in the adoption of CS measurement systems by organizations. This paper presents executive workshop data and new survey evidence to support the contention that both research and managerial agenda should be extended to recognize the multi‐dimensionality of organizational process, and the implications of that characteristic for the adoption and use of CS measurement systems.     

European Community Merger Control in the Service Industries

This article examines the application of the EC Merger Regulation to service industries in the light of the 50 final decisions relating to services taken in its first two years of operation. These cases generally raised few competition concerns and only one (Accor/Wagons-Lits) has led to full proceedings. However they have raised important questions about the calculation of turnover, definition of control and treatment of joint ventures as well as uncertainties about jurisdiction. An understanding of the Commission's evolving policy will be of increasing importance as service industries internationalise, especially if thresholds for investigation are eventually lowered as the Commission has proposed.     

A Taxonomic Evaluation of Advertising Budgeting Models

The advertising budget allocation decision has been recognized as a critical decision that should receive logical, scientific determination. However, actual decision-making practice indicates that marketers typically use qualitative, non-scientific methods when setting advertising budgets. This article discusses the reasons for this practice by focusing on the properties of qualitative models which make them attractive to practitioners and the properties of quantitative models which make them unattractive. To assist in this analysis, a taxonomy for the classification of various qualitative and quantitative budget models is constructed, the emphasis of which is on the perceived usefulness of a budget model to practitioners.     

Women and Minorities in Introductory Economics Textbooks: 1974 to 1984

The authors conducted a painstaking review of widely used economics textbooks to determine if or how issues relating to race and gender are treated. In doing so, the authors also shed light on the nature of the treatment of these issues.     

Design considerations for neyman-pearson and wald hypothesis testing

Summary The Neyman-Pearson Lemma describes a test for two simple hypotheses that, for a given sample size, is most powerful for its level. It is usually implemented by choosing the smallest sample size that achieves a prespecified power for a fixed level. The Lemma does not describe how to select either the level or the power of the test. In the usual Wald decision-theoretic structure there exists a sampling cost function, an initial prior over the hypothesis space and various payoffs to right/wrong hypothesis selections. The optimal Wald test is a Bayes decision rule that maximizes the expected payoff net of sampling costs. This paper shows that the Wald-optimal test and the Neyman-Pearson test can be the same and how the Neyman-Pearson test, with fixed level and power, can be viewed as a Wald test subject to restrictions on the payoff vector, cost function and prior distribution.     

Challenges for multinational corporations

The author presents some thoughts about multinational corporations, traces the evolution of the multinational operations of his organization, and outlines some of the broad challenges ahead for multinational companies.