Towards an understanding of international city break travel

This paper explores city break tourism and, in particular, the distinctive characteristics of this form of travel. The city break is examined and compared with other types of trips. The research follows a sequential mixed methods approach involving both a visitor survey and in‐depth interviews. The findings show the international city break trip to have a number of distinctive characteristics. These are summarised into five main areas (5 Ds) — duration, distance, date flexibility, discretionary nature and destination travel party. These distinguishing features provide a useful insight into one of the most important yet least examined travel segments in tourism research. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Accounting Undergraduates' Perceptions of Cooperative Learning as a Model for Enhancing their Interpersonal and Communication Skills to Interface Successfully with Professional Accountancy Education and Training

To interface effectively with professional accountancy training, accounting educationalists should ensure that they turn out graduates who possess the interpersonal and communication skills required of today's accountant. Attainment of these skills is promoted by group work. However, little empirical evidence exists to help academics make an informed choice about which form of group learning enhances interpersonal and communication skills. This paper addresses this deficiency by comparing perceptions of skills enhancement between accounting students who experienced traditional or simple group learning and those who undertook cooperative learning. The findings reveal that the cooperative learning cohort perceived their learning experience to be significantly more effective at enhancing interpersonal and communication skills than that of the simple group learning cohort. This study provides evidence that cooperative learning is a more effective model for delivering interpersonal and communication skills than simple group learning, thereby creating a more successful interface between academic accounting and professional accountancy training.     

Participating in the Common Good of the Firm

In a previous essay (Sison and Fontrodona 2012), we defined the common good of the firm as collaborative work, insofar as it provides, first, an opportunity to develop knowledge, skills, virtues, and meaning (work as praxis), and second, inasmuch as it produces goods and services to satisfy society’s needs and wants (work as poiesis). We would now like to focus on the participatory aspect of this common good. To do so, we will have to identify the different members of the firm as a community, drawing from corporate citizenship literature and stakeholder theory. Afterward, we will explore both the manner and the intensity of these different members’ participation and its impact on the firm’s common good.     

Acquisitions of family owned firms: boon or bust?

Using a hand-collected dataset, we examine the acquisitions of 307 family owned targets for the period 1984–2000 to study the conflicting roles of entrenchment and alignment of interests in these firms. We find that bidders experience the strongest announcement market reaction at the medium levels of family ownership. However, bidder returns are negatively impacted when acquiring a public target family firm, even controlling for the percent owned by the family. We also find that overall firms that acquire family owned targets experience significant large negative returns in the long run. However, the long run results are also sensitive to the ownership structure of the family firm target with medium levels resulting in insignificant returns in the long run.     

The role of Spanish local development and employment officers in human resource management

The aim of this study is to contrast the existence of a significant relation between good human resource practices and business results. The empirical analysis is applied to strategies implemented by Local Development and Employment Officers (LDEOs) with regard to the management of social integration and job placement programs within the context of Local Development in Spain for both the universalist and contingent perspectives of Human Resource Management. The novelty of this study lies in the impact local development programs are having on social integration and job placement, and, in particular, the effects of project management.     

The New Brand Ambassadors

SAN FRANCISCO Remember when citizen joumalism was a novel idea？ Now, average people armed with video cameras, laptops and mobile phones routinely cover everything from flood and fires to violence on the streets of Myanmar. Combine this do-it-yourself movement with the idea that every thought and personal event is Facebook-worthy, and it makes sense that citizen marketing is the newest form of consumer activism-one looked at by marketers as a poten- tial holy grail.     

Connecting the Two Faces of CSR: Does Employee Volunteerism Improve Compliance?

In 2004, the United States Sentencing Commission amended the Federal Sentencing Guidelines to allow firms that create “effective compliance and ethics programs” to receive better treatment if prosecuted for fraud. Effective compliance and ethics, however, appear to be limited to activities focused on complying with the firms’ internal legal and ethical standards. We explored a potential connection between the firms’ external corporate social responsibility (CSR) behaviors and internal compliance: Is there an organizationally valid relationship between these two firm activities? That is, when organizations demonstrate CSR with behaviors external to the firm, such as employee volunteerism, are their employees more likely to demonstrate uncompromised legal and ethical compliance behavior internally? We collected data from 164 working professionals enrolled in a top-tier MBA program in the southeastern United States regarding their employer-sponsored volunteer activities and their intentions to comply in various organizational compliance vignettes. We found that employer-sponsored volunteerism is associated with uncompromised compliance choices in one of the three vignettes. This finding indicates preliminary support for further inquiry into the relationship within the firm between external CSR behaviors and policies regarding organizational compliance. Post hoc analyses suggest that employer-sponsored volunteerism is strongly associated with a positive organizational identity, but organizational identity is not associated with the significant compliance vignette. This evidence suggests that the underlying mechanism that connects external CSR behaviors and internal compliance intentions is complex and requires future study.     

Sterilization and interest rates

In this note, the effect of a rise in the foreign interest rate on the home rate is considered in a small economy model with a fixed exchange rate. The cases of sterilization annd non-sterilization are considered. The effect of the degree of substitutability beteen domestic and foreign bonds is outlined.     

Hawker centres as tourist attractions: The case of Singapore

Cooked food hawkers are a sometimes neglected part of the tourism and hospitality industries, yet can play a significant role as a visitor attraction which offers both inexpensive food and insights into the contemporary society and heritage of the destination. Hawking is ubiquitous in much of South East Asia where it is integral to the life of local residents and this includes Singapore, the focus of the paper which also comments on the relationship between food and tourism in general. The cooked food hawker sector in the city state is described and the results of a survey of tourists about their experiences of dining at hawker centres are presented. Responses appear favourable on the whole, but some concerns are identified. It seems that hawkers may have unrealised potential as an amenity for tourists, although widening their appeal and use is a challenging task compounded by the threat to the survival of hawker centres from urban development pressures.     

Networks and self-employed migrants

This paper examines the immigrant’s decision to become self-employed. Personal characteristics and attitudes are crucial to this decision, but recent literature also highlights the importance of social networks as providers of information and financial support. To date, empirical research dealing with the network effect has considered self-employed migrants as a homogeneous group. In contrast, our paper examines the impact of the size and the composition of geographic concentration of co-nationals on the propensity to be self-employed among the foreign-born workers taking into account two possible choices: own-account workers and entrepreneurs. Using micro-level data of migrant workers in Spain over the period 2000–2009, the results show that networks affect positively the probability of becoming self-employed. However, they do not affect the likelihood of becoming an entrepreneur, which is determined by individual characteristics such as education and number of years of residence. Thus, our results suggest policies that enable immigrant assimilation can play a significant role in generating entrepreneurial activity.