Representation of Destination Cultural Factors on Hotel Websites: Content Analysis of Beijing Hotel Websites

The extant tourism literature contains virtually no studies examining the issue of destination culture in the context of hotel website evaluations. The research presented herein examined 168 Beijing hotel websites. Content analysis of these websites was carried out using 12 destination cultural factors identified by the researchers. The aim was to examine whether the performance of the hotel websites under investigation differed in terms of these factors by hotel category. The results indicate that the majority of Beijing hotels do not include destination cultural factors on their websites. Although the websites of privately owned, chain, and international hotels, as well as those with higher star ratings were found to feature more of these factors, the differences were not statistically significant. Among the 12 destination cultural factors identified, Forbidden City was the most commonly included on the hotel websites, and Temple Fair and Pet Birds were completely absent.     

Requirements for developing green services

Innovating with services and integrating sustainability in economics are research issues of increasing importance. Green services are a recently relevant type in service research combining both fields. The potential seen in ecologically sustainable services is high, while a comprehensive approach in new service development is still missing. Based on an empirical study, a set of requirements for developing green services is introduced, considering specific criteria of ecological sustainability.     

Retaining Employees Through Anti–Sexual Harassment Practices: Exploring the Mediating Role of Psychological Distress and Employee Engagement

The present study utilized sexual harassment, organizational climate, and engagement theories to articulate a process model of how perceived anti–sexual harassment practices and sexual harassment incidents relate to affective commitment and intentions to stay. The authors hypothesized that perceived anti–sexual harassment practices and sexual harassment incidents would relate to employee engagement, both directly and indirectly through psychological distress. Moreover, psychological distress and employee engagement were hypothesized to mediate the relationships of perceived anti–sexual harassment practices and sexual harassment incidents with affective commitment and intentions to stay. Study findings supported these hypotheses within two subsamples of female (N = 3,283 and 3,207) and male (N = 3,460 and 3,300) military personnel. © 2014 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.     

Analysing Household and Intra-urban Variants in the Consumption of Financial Services: Uncovering “Exclusion” in an English City

This study provides an empirical assessment of the socioeconomic factors that determine household exclusion from consumer financial services. A unique microeconomic data set, of interview data, collected from a representative cross-sectional sample of 1005 households is analysed using logistic regression techniques. In investigating exclusion from consumer financial services, both financial self-exclusion and institutional-led financial exclusion are examined. Indicators of financial self-exclusion include the absence of a savings account or home contents insurance, whilst indicators of institutional-led financial exclusion include the use of “doorstep lenders.” Findings show that both measures of financial self-exclusion are determined by income, education, age, housing tenure, and social participation, whilst financial exclusion is generally associated with socioeconomic characteristics such as age, gender, housing tenure, working status, income, disability, and the presence of young people in household but not with respondents’ residential area, education level, internet use, and social participation. These results offer useful insights to policy makers and financial services providers in terms of the range and mix of policies and instruments that local and central Government can deploy to address exclusion.     

What's the point of European Sectoral Social Dialogue? Effectiveness and polycontexturality in the hospital and metal sectors

Drawing on pragmatism and systems theory, this article analyses how participants in the European Sectoral Social Dialogue in the metal and hospital committees understand its effectiveness. We find that the participants have a broad understanding of effectiveness compared with the European Commission and existing research. Participants do not dismiss the importance of direct effects on working conditions in member states but downplay it in comparison with indirect effects from, and effectiveness in, European Sectoral Social Dialogue. That is, horizontal learning, knowledge sharing and pragmatic bottom-up work to reach consensus are emphasised as more prominent than top-down regulatory effectiveness.     

Lasting lending relationships and technical efficiency. Evidence on European SMEs

Linking the theoretical predictions of the research on lending relationships with those of the literature on managerial incentives, we investigate whether the duration of credit relationships impacts on SMEs’ technical efficiency. Our hypothesis is that the balance between costs and benefits of enduring banking relationships might have heterogeneous effects on managers’ incentives depending on the level of firms’ indebtedness. Using a large sample of European SMEs, observed in the period 2001–2008, and adopting both parametric and non-parametric measures of efficiency, we find that the positive impact of longer lending relationships on efficiency decreases as indebtedness increases, suggesting that moral hazard problems may endanger firms’ technical efficiency.     

Employees' awareness of their impact on corporate reputation

Corporate reputation is critical for cultivating stakeholder relationships and, specifically, for regaining public trust. Corporate reputation results from the firm's interactions with stakeholders, emphasizing the important role employees play in reputation management. However, employees are not necessarily aware of, or prepared for, this extra-role assignment, indicating a gap in research and a managerial challenge. The purpose of the present article is to identify how employees' awareness of their impact on their employers' reputation is influenced by pride, job satisfaction, affective commitment, and perceived corporate reputation. An online survey of employees working for firms ranked in Fortune's America's Most Admired Companies Index provides empirical evidence. The findings underline the prominent effect pride in membership has regarding employees' awareness of their impact on corporate reputation. Study findings further deliver insights into opportunities and risks for managers who wish to use internal reputation building strategies to enhance corporate reputation.     

Entrepreneurship and market size. The case of young college graduates in Italy

We analyse empirically the effects of urbanization on Italian college graduates' work possibilities as entrepreneurs three years after graduation. We find that doubling the province of work's population density reduces the chances of being an entrepreneur by 2–3 percentage points. This result holds after controlling for regional fixed effects and is robust to instrumenting urbanization. Provinces' competition, urban amenities and dis-amenities, cost of labour, earning differentials between employees and self-employed workers, unemployment rates and value added per capita account for more than half of the negative urbanization penalty. Our result cannot be entirely explained by the presence of negative differentials in returns to entrepreneurship between the most and the least densely populated areas. In fact, as long as they succeed in entering the most densely populated markets, young entrepreneurs are able to reap-off the benefits of urbanization externalities: the elasticity of entrepreneurs' net monthly earnings with respect to population density is 0.02–0.03.