The servicescape: The social dimensions of place

Abstract

Place should not be viewed solely as a physical space that people inhabit or, within a servicescape context, patronise because the experiences consumers have in place are very much shaped by its occupants. Marketing literature, though, has tended to focus on the physicality of place, or the stimulus–response aspects of place, whereas in other disciplines such as geography, place has been viewed in terms of its temporal, spatial, natural, and social dimensions. The purpose of this study was to gain a greater understanding of how women's non-commercial relationships shaped their patronage decisions. Since this study was interested in why consumers make repeat retail visits, qualitative methods were used. As the findings revealed, one's need for social connectedness and desire to feel like an insider were sometimes more important than the products available and/or the servicescape's attributes.     

The Chinisation of Africa: The Case of Angola

(1249) Renato Aguilar and Andrea Goldstein The relationship between the Asian Drivers and Angola has attracted an attention only paralleled by the one surrounding interactions with Sudan. Three closely related perspectives are important. First, the rapid expansion of the Chinese and Indian economies has sustained the world price for oil, of which Angola is the second‐largest producer in sub‐Saharan Africa. In the process, China has also become Angola’s third‐largest trading partner, with a sizeable trade surplus favouring Angola. Second, from an international financing perspective, China’s keen interest to diversify the portfolio of assets in which to invest its huge international reserves is only matched by Angola’s need to find alternatives to normal and concessional sources of international financing, from which it is excluded due to the lack of progress in negotiating with the Bretton Woods institutions. Third, all these issues must be understood in the broader and possibly more complex scenario of the political economy of the relationship between Angola and the world. Because of the country’s size and control over huge oil resources, the growing presence of China in Angola has reverberations across the rest of Africa. And Angola has also joined OPEC in late 2006.     

The economics of enforcement: The case of OSHA

A model of enforcement is developed that determines the impacts of OSHA actions on regulated parties. This model analyzes the effect of decision procedures developed by OSHA to enforce the law and their effect on resource allocation within the firm. It is concluded that the impacts from both the initial inspection and reinspection programs on the resource allocations of firms have likely been insignificantly different from zero. If OSHA is to increase the allocation of injury control resources of firms through its enforcement program, it must increase the costs of noncompliance that it imposes on firms.     

The American Academy of Advertising: The Early Years

Abstract

The first seven years of the American Academy of Advertising were crucial. It was the first and only organization ever formed specifically for advertising educators. In the beginning, many advertising educators did not see the need for such an organization and many others had a “wait and see” attitude. The Academy survived; and, at the end of the period, more than 300 teachers had joined. It also was recognized by the advertising profession. This article serves as a synopsis of those seven years.     

The Cultural Dimensions of Negotiation: The Chinese Case

Culture is one of the major components of negotiation and plays an especially crucial role in international relations. The current state of research is presented and discussed. The type of influence of culture is specified and compared with other categories such as strategic behavior and structural determination.Then, referring to the China case, the way culture impacts on the key elements of negotiation such as actors, structures, strategies, process, and outcome is described and analyzed. Lastly, culture's consequences on the negotiator's cognition, beliefs, behaviors and identity are investigated.     

The Happy Few: The Internationalisation of European Firms

Policymakers tend to view the internationalisation of firms from the perspective of export, import and FDI statistics. A lack of statistical information at the firm level has so far prevented the systematic inclusion of firm-level analysis in the policymaker's standard toolbox. Some firm-level datasets are now available, however, and their analysis reveals some new facts that are simply unobservable at the aggregate level. This paper is based on the EFIM Report 2007, issued under the same title as Bruegel Blueprint Series Volume III. EFIM is a network of eight research centres from eight European countries created in 2006 under the coordination of Bruegel and CEPR to work on policy-relevant questions concerning the internationalisation of European firms that are best treated using firm-level trade and FDI data (http://www.bruegel.org/Public/SimplePage.php?ID=1720). The authors are grateful to Laurent Eymard and Andrew Fielding for editorial support. Opinions expressed in this publication are those of the authors alone.     

The migrant wife: The worst of all worlds

This study reanalyses data on migrants to Alberta, collected by Statistics Canada in a 1980 Labour Force Survey. The findings indicate that migrant men are gainers and migrant women, particularly migrant wives are the losers from such movement, even during a period of relative economic prosperity in the Province. Women's occupational status tends to improve with time spent in the new labour force. However there is a failure to return to occupational statuses enjoyed before the move. This means, first, that male and female workers are more sex-differentiated after the move than before it; second, that migrant women, especially wives, enjoy fewer occupational returns on their educational investment than migrant men; third, that the balance of economic contribution, and possibly therefore influence, within a migrant household is shifted towards greater male dominance by the move.It is to be emphasized that each of these findings is to be regarded as tentative pending the completion of further analyses on this and three related data sets. In particular the analysis of household level data will be critical in assessing any hypotheses about family power before and after the move. Loma Marsden is Professor of Sociology at the University of Toronto. Her most important publication is: The Fragile Federation: Social Change in Canada(with E. B. Harvey), (McGraw Hill Ryerson, 1979). Lorne Tepperman is Professor of Sociology at the University of Toronto. His most important publications include Social Mobility in Canada(1975); Crime Control: The Urge Toward Authority(1977); The Roots of Disunity(1979), with David Bell.     

The privatization of telecommunications services: The case of Argentina

The Argentine telecommunications system is characterized by its poor quality of service. A deep national economic crisis and a huge fiscal deficit, combined with worldwide changes in the telecommunications sector, lead the Argentine government to the privatization of ENTel beginning in 1989. Herrera provides a detailed account of the economics surrounding the decision to privatize and the privatization program itself.     

The impact of flattery: The role of negative remarks

This study extends our understanding of flattery and consumers’ use of persuasion knowledge in the retail context by addressing the role that negative evaluations from a salesperson play on consumer's perceptions of store agent trustworthiness. Across two experiments, our findings show that a negative salesperson remark along with a positive remark reduces the client's use of persuasion knowledge therefore enhancing the client's perception of the salesclerk's trustworthiness. Additionally, we found a boundary condition of this effect: the price of the target product. Finally, perceptions of salesperson trustworthiness mediated the effect of the remarks on behavioral intentions.     

FOCUS: Studying Risks: The Science of Cindynics

'Catastrophes are not accidents.'All complex organizations can take steps to prevent catastrophe by enlisting the new scientific study of danger. The author is a member of the Scientific Committee of 1'Institut Européen de Cindyniques and Directeur général adjoint of L'Union des Assurances de Paris. This article is part of a presentation made to the 1992 Paris Conference of the European Business Ethics Network, of which the author is a Council member. The subject of the Conference was the role of business in the shaping of cities, but the author's reflections on learning from risks are of considerably wider application.     

The Management of Collecting Boxes:

Little is known about the income generated by static box collection schemes where boxes are located in retail outlets by collectors who place and empty them. The aim of this paper is to assess the amount donated to a charity collecting box over a period of time using an equivalent annual return statistic and to determine the relative merits of different types of retail location. The analysis shows that not all the retail types have the same box yield. Those with the highest yields are: Take-away, Cafe, Bar, Newsagent, Supermarket, Ironmonger, Baker, Butcher and Chemist.     

Kunming： The City of Spring

Kunming is the political, economic and cultural center of Yunnan province and the most popular center for tourism in Southwest China. Kunming enjoys a pleasant climate and does its best to liveup to its title of ＂the City of Spring＂. Whenever you are planning to go, the temperature is always pleasant. With its convenient transport links in and out of the city, Kunming welcomes tens of thousands of tourists every day.     

The theory of international factor flows: The basic model

The basic model used to discuss the simultaneous international flow of labor and capital is a one-commodity model in which a common technology is shared between countries. The Ramaswami result, wherein an optimal restriction of labor inflows is superior to an optimal restriction on capital outflows for a capital abundant country, is extended to reveal that optimality requires inflows of both factors. Box diagrams and iso-welfare contours are used to show how optimal policy rankings are reversed if foreign labor must be paid higher home wages.     

The journeyman executive: The demise of the lifetime contract

“We have a great incentive system around here; make one mistake and you're fired.” Until recently, executives would have found no meaning in what is now a cliche. The traditional concept, however, of an employer-employee lifetime contract has under-gone discernible alteration since the 1950s. This article explores this growing trend toward “journeymen executives.” All the factors contributing to this new management lifestyle-fluctuations in the economy, demands for innovations, attitudes of employers, expectations of employees—are considered. The implications in the changes are explored and questions raised on how the new assumptions are working.