Social dialogues—the state of the art a decade after Maastricht

The article asks whether social dialogues, according the procedures of the Social Protocol and the Amsterdam Treaty, have proved to be valuable instruments able to make major contributions to the development of social integration. More recent developments at the inter‐professional as well as at the sectoral level are evaluated. Furthermore, major trajectories for likely future trends at both levels are highlighted. The final part discusses the problem of whether social dialogues will profit from the introduction of new modes of governance, especially the more recently preferred open method of co‐ordination.     

Professorial Rankings of Australian Accounting Departments

This article presents the results of a survey of professors in accounting departments in Australia. Professors ranked Australian accounting departments on a variety of research, teaching and staffing attributes, on contributions to the accounting profession and provided an overall ranking of the departments. Overall rankings placed the University of Queensland and the University of New South Wales a close first and second, followed by the University of Sydney, the University of Melbourne, the University of Western Australia, and Monash University. Analysis of the separate sub-dimensions of performance shows that it is variations in respondents' perceptions of research-related performance of departments which accounts for variation in the overall ranking. We also asked the professors for their views on several issues facing accounting educators and those who recruit accounting graduates. Most believed that there should be more breadth in undergraduate accounting courses than is currently the case. However, most felt that recruiters would prefer degree structures to remain as they are. There was overwhelming consensus that it was reasonable to expect ethics to be taught in accounting programs; that the Australian Securities Commission should not replace corporate management in the appointment of auditors; and that accounting standards should not be written to force very conservative depictions of profitability and financial position. There was disparity of opinions on whether auditors ought to be expected to foreshadow financial distress; whether the audit role should be expanded to explicitly embrace fraud detection; and whether financial reports should be understandable to the lay person.     

SERVCON: development and validation of a multidimensional service convenience scale

As customers have demanded greater convenience in service exchanges, researchers have responded by incorporating the convenience construct into their conceptual models and empirical studies, but a comprehensive, formally validated measure of convenience remains lacking. This study conceptualizes service convenience as a second-order, five-dimensional construct that reflects consumers’ perceived time and effort in purchasing or using a service. Service convenience dimensions are salient at different stages of the purchase decision process. Given this conceptualization, the study presents the development and validation of the SERVCON scale, a comprehensive instrument for measuring service convenience. The five dimensions are independent within a nomological network that illustrates distinct antecedent and consequent effects, and the results reinforce the multidimensional representation, offering insight into the distinctive relationships between each service convenience dimension and its antecedents, such as competitive intensity, and consequences, such as repurchase behavior. The findings help researchers and managers understand a fully conceptualized convenience construct and facilitate the measurement of convenience in future empirical studies.     

Differences in Roma and non-Roma students’ ratings of their peers’ popularity: an inquiry into the oppositional culture in Hungarian schools with the use of a survey experiment

Quality & Quantity - Oppositional culture theory posits that students who belong to oppressed ethnic minority groups define their ethnic identity in opposition to the majority of students....     

Competition under revenue-cap regulation with efficiency benchmarking: tariff related incentives for gas transmission system operators in merged markets

Journal of Regulatory Economics - In Europe, gas market mergers aim at reducing restrictions on gas wholesale markets. Market mergers also allow network users to book transport capacity at...     

Employment relations without collective bargaining and strikes: the unusual case of civil servants in Germany

The article deals with the widely neglected employment relations in the public sector of Germany with a special focus on civil servants. It is subdivided into two main parts. A shorter part elaborates on public employees and collective bargaining, a longer one on civil servants and their diverging forms of employment relations without the right to collective bargaining and strike. In order to better understand major changes that have taken place since the mid2000s, we chose a long-term perspective and examine traditional as well as present forms of interest representation. Limited degrees of decentralisation and their lasting diverging consequences are analysed in great detail.     

The past,present, and future of brand research

Marketing Letters - This article discusses the past, present, and future of brand research. We begin by reviewing three historical eras of branding development in the past: the information,...     

Passive learning: a critique by example

In models of learning by experimentation that exhibit signal dependence, a benchmark using a passive learner has been proposed. The use of this benchmark is flawed – first, passive learning does not disentangle the effects of knowing that beliefs, as well as other state variables, might change, and we address this issue directly by introducing a naïve learner. Secondly, and more tellingly, passive learning does not do what it is supposed to do, namely help measure the gains from active experimentation; the naïve learner enables us to illustrate this point in the context of a particular example.