Whose Culture and How Far? Culture Presentation in Current Business English Textbook Series

International business communication is associated with cultural norms of both native and non-native business counterparts. It seems that the study of culture presentation from the perspective of English as a lingua franca in business English textbooks has been rather underexplored. To this end, cultural contents in two internationally distributed business English book series published by leading publishers were examined. It was found that the selected textbooks in the series were in favor of a representation of native speakers in global business encounters, the inner-circle culture of native speakers was the dominant culture content, and the level of cultural presentation tended to remain in the knowledge-oriented rather than communication-based level. This leads to an argument in favor of critical and reflective culture presentations in business materials.     

DBS policymaking in Japan : An interpretive history

Despite Japan's successful experimentation with DBS technology, fundamental conflicts of interest between NHK and Japan's commercial broadcasters continue to chart an uncertain course for the future of Japan's DBS programme. This study traces the history of DBS policy-making in Japan, focusing on the role of the conflict between the two power groups in shaping Japanese DBS policy. The author highlights important policy considerations and discusses how the conflict between NHK and the commercial broadcasters must be resolved in order for Japan's DBS programme to be successfully implemented.     

Building Projects on the Local Communities’ Planet: Studying Organizations’ Care-Giving Approaches

Journal of Business Ethics - This study examines local communities’ lived experiences and organizations’ care-giving processes regarding four oil and gas projects deployed in three...     

Scheduling trucks in cross-docking systems: A robust meta-heuristics approach

In a cross-docking system, trucks must be scheduled to minimize the total flow time of the system. This problem is NP-hard, and this study proposes two hybrid meta-heuristics—hybrid simulated annealing and hybrid variable neighborhood search—to solve it by achieving the best sequence of truck pairs. The Taguchi method serves to reveal the best robustness of these algorithms. To demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed methods, especially for large-sized problems, this study solves various test problems, and the computational results clearly reveal that the proposed methods outperform previous approaches.     

The role of e-readiness assessment criteria in accepting e-commerce for small and medium size enterprisesmDevelopment of technology acceptance model

This paper develops Davis technology acceptance model by adding two criteria of e-readiness assessment. For small and medium size enterprises, the paper evaluates the credit of developed model in studying the efficient factors in internet technology acceptance, which is one of the most applicable communication tools in e-commerce. The added factors, taken from models and means of e-readiness assessment, are ＂existing information technology infrastructures＂ as well as ＂organization＇s training＂. The authors study 45 small and medium size enterprises in the city of Tehran, which are active in information technology products and services. Using Lisrel structural equation modelling, it is shown that there is a meaningful relationship between the added factors and the variables indicating internet network usage. Therefore, the better factors of e-readiness assessment lead to the higher acceptance level of electronic communication tools in e-commerce.     

Linear and nonlinear Granger-causality between short-term and long-term interest rates during business cycles

This paper is about the causal relationship between short-term and long-term interest rates in the US and Canada. To that end, we apply a linear Granger causality test introduced by Toda and Yamamoto (1995 Toda, H. Y., and T. Yamamoto. 1995. “Statistical Inference in Vector Autoregressions with Possibly Integrated Processes.” Journal of Econometrics 66 (1–2): 225–250. doi:10.1016/0304-4076(94)01616-8.[Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]) and the nonlinear Granger causality test of Diks and Panchenko (2006 Diks, C., and V. Panchenko. 2006. “A New Statistic and Practical Guidelines for Nonparametric Granger Causality Testing.” Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control 30 (9–10): 1647–1669. doi:10.1016/j.jedc.2005.08.008.[Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]). By combining linear causality effects with the nonlinear ones, it is seen that the most common Granger causality direction between short-term and long-term interest rates is a bidirectional one. We also find that nonlinear Granger causality can be found where no linear causality had been uncovered. Moreover, our findings show that during recent business cycles, the federal funds rate (in the US) and the overnight rate (in Canada) still Granger-cause long-term interest rates significantly.     

Learning outcomes of entrepreneurship education: Entrepreneurship education for knowing,doing, being,and living together

The authors try to identify the learning outcomes of entrepreneurship education at high schools. The statistical population of this research consists of vocational high school students in Tehran, Iran. The findings showed that learning outcomes for knowing are more than the aspects of doing, being, and living together. More specifically, 65 learning outcomes of entrepreneurship education have been identified in four pillars. This study presents a comprehensive framework for the philosophy of entrepreneurship education.     

A Systematic Literature Review on Islamic Values Applied in Quality Management Context

The dominant framing of the political corporate social responsibility (CSR) discussion challenges the traditional economic conception of the firm and aims to produce a paradigm shift in CSR studies wherein the traditional, apolitical view of corporations’ roles in society is replaced by the political conception of CSR. In this paper, we show how the major framing of the political CSR discussion calls for a redirection to take international hard legal and moral regulations, as well as the need for the boundaries between business and politics into account.     

Impact of Customer Relationship Management on Customer Satisfaction: The Case of a Budget Hotel Chain

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) can bring many benefits to the hotel business, though there are some associated challenges. Such challenges often bring a significant risk of failure, and these risks become more significant in budget hotels. This study considers the changes that have emerged in the last decade as regards customer expectations when staying in budget hotels. We use qualitative approaches to investigate the overlaps between customer expectations and managers’ perceptions of CRM applications. The findings reveal that regardless of all changes, value for money and core products continue to play a critical role in customers’ overall satisfaction with budget hotels.