A Public Sector Marketing Model to Measure the Social and Environmental Values of Public Strategies: An Empirical Study on a Green Public Service

This article develops a public sector marketing model to measure the social and environmental values of public strategies. Applying partial least squares path modeling, the authors empirically test the model by conducting a quantitative survey (N = 603) among users of a green public service in the form of a public bike-sharing system. The findings reveal that users simultaneously perceive public outcomes on the social value and environmental value dimensions. The effect estimated on the perceived social value dimension of the green public service was slightly stronger than the effect on the environmental value dimension. Thus, users primarily perceive self-centered values, before considering values generated for the environment. The findings also show that engaging citizens now in the actual usage of green public services can foster green consumption intentions in the future.     

Tactical Service Failure: A Case Study on Public Funding as a Marketing Issue

This article analyzes the ways in which public-sector service providers may use service-delivery failure as a way of securing resources. In tactical service failure, an organization tactically delivers nonadequate service, so as to project a media image of being harmed by its funding cuts. Analyzing this process enables new insight into both public funding and provider-to-funder (P2F) marketing and selling. This research uses a single case study method to confirm the existence of the phenomenon first detected through long-term media analysis. To explore the single case, the authors interviewed a former city official who participated in tactical-service-failure processes and their marketing. The article shows how and why service providers may opt for this tactic and the potential gains and pitfalls of utilizing it. New insight is offered into how media connections are used to influence public-funding decisions.     

Consumers as researchers – innovative experiences in UK National Health Service Research

Consumer involvement is an established priority in UK health‐ and social‐care service development and research. To date, little has been published describing the process of consumer involvement and assessing ‘consumers’ contributions to research. This paper provides a practical account of the effective incorporation of consumers into a research team, and outlines the extent to which they can enhance the research cycle; from project development and conduct, through data analysis and interpretation, to dissemination. Salient points are illustrated using the example of their collaboration in a research project. Of particular note were consumers' contributions to the development of an ethically enhanced, more robust project design, and enriched data interpretation, which may not have resulted had consumers not been an integral part of the research team.     

Measuring Service Quality in a Corporatised Public Sector Environment

ABSTRACT

Using a modified SERVQUAL scale, this paper measures perceived service quality in a corporatised public sector environment. Five factors were identified: personalised proficiency, empathic professionalism, reliability, tangibles and access; explaining 61% of overall variance. Further analysis using multiple regression also indicated that 45% of the variability in customer satisfaction and 43% of the variability in overall service quality was explained by the five factors. The research was conducted in response to calls for the application of this measure and following a review of extant literature that indicated the limited number of studies undertaken within the public sector that assessed service quality.     

Marketing Culture in an Australian Public Sector Service Organisation

ABSTRACT

This paper measured the marketing culture of an Australian public sector organisation using the instrument developed by Webster (1990). The perceptions of 1,400 employees working in the Western Australian operations of this organisation were sought. Respondents indicated their ideal marketing culture and their perceptions of the actual marketing culture of the organisation across 34 variables. Organisational performance was rated highest for items pertaining to service quality and innovativeness. The six dimensions of marketing culture identified by Webster (1990) were found to be reliable within this context and the gap between perceptions of ideal culture and actual organisational culture was computed for each of the dimensions. The organisation was found to have room for improvement in all six dimensions with particular areas for future attention being interpersonal relationships, internal communications and selling task. Recommendations for future initiatives were made.     

Productivity of the Service Sector: A Regional Perspective

In this article we analyse the evolution of productivity in the service sector for the Spanish Regions during the period 1986-94. The study environment has been limited to marketed services. Within this group of activities, we set out an analysis for different branches of activity - credit and insurance, transports and communications, and other marketed services. The methodology used includes tools such as data envelopment analysis to measure technical efficiency, the Malmquist indexes to determine the evolution of the productive change and the break-up of total efficiency into intra-sectorial efficiency and composition efficiency. The results at a national level show a tendency to drop of total efficiency until 1990 and a later recovery until the end of the analysed period. This evolution is explained by the behaviour of the composition efficiency, while the intra-sectorial efficiency maintains quite a uniform growth in this period.     

Ethics and Values in Nonunion Employment Arbitration:A Historical Study of Organizational Due Processin the Private Sector

This paper provides a historical overview of the interrelationship between the use of nonunion employment arbitration and the ethics of employee organizational due process. Key research questions to be explored include the following, among others: Why are expectations about due process in organizations increasing? How are these expectations being exhibited? What is the nature of fair treatment of employees in relation to nonunion employment arbitration? Should arbitration in the nonunion employment relationship be nurtured? A final objective of this paper is to study some of the current initiatives that neutral agencies have adopted to ensure that nonunion arbitration is fair, just, and equitable for a firm's employees.     

Competitive Tendering and Contracting in the Public Sector: A Survey

This paper is a survey of the role and impact of competitive tendering and contracting (CTC) policies in the public sector. The paper examines the theoretical rationale for introducing competition in the provision of public services and the methodology by which contracting decisions are reached. It investigates the extent of implementation and nature of outcomes in several countries. A broad sweep of the empirical findings suggests that CTC generates substantial cost savings. Lack of adequate data makes an assessment of the effect on quality more troublesome, and further research is needed     

中国公共服务部门所有权激励制度安排的经济学分析

公共服务部门为社会提供公共服务产品,具有和私人产品部门完全不同的特点和激励结构,因此公共服务部门的改革面临着更复杂的问题。本文基于不完备合约理论,通过一个简单的公共服务部门所有权激励模型发现:私有制的公共服务部门更努力地减少运行成本,具有生产效率;国有制的公共服务部门则在公共服务的产量上具有优势,能够实现公共服务的有效供给;同时,对于国有制的公共服务部门来说,增加其自由裁量权(或剩余控制权)可以有效地激励公共服务部门降低成本、提高公共服务的质量。     

Public Sector Marketing in Australia:

Government departments and public sector organisations in Australia are utilising marketing concepts and techniques that originated in the private sector. This has been reported by reference to case studies. However, no systematic attempt to assess the implementation of marketing in the public sector has been reported. This article reports a survey of the use of marketing positions in the Australian public sector over the ten year period 1982-1991. It shows that public sector organisations with similar objectives to organisations in the economic environment of the private sector may well be implementing marketing oriented management. However, a significant and consistent difference is found in the use of marketing between those public sector organisations with a social and political orientation as opposed to those organisations with a commercial and/or economic orientation.     

组织生态学视角的组织失败理论研究脉络及进展

迄今为止对组织失败问题的研究主要是基于二个视角展开,产业组织和组织生态学视角的组织背景环境决定组织失败的环境决定论;企业层面上组织研究和组织心理学研究视角的将企业失败归因于管理者的经验不足或能力不佳的意志控制论。通过对组织生态学视角企业失败文献的梳理,分析其理论观点、经验实证的结论,并说明其研究方法及其存在的难点。     

Examining Public Hospital Service Failure: The Influence of Service Failure Type,Service Expectations,and Attribution on Consumer Response

This study investigates three independent variables; types of service failure, service expectations, and attribution on postfailure responses in healthcare. A between-subjects 3?×?2?×?2 experimental design using written scenarios was used. The findings demonstrate that customer responses to service failures in hospitals are extensively influenced by the type of service failure, the level of service expectation of the provider, and, to a lesser extent, the controllability of the cause of the failure. Core service failures lead to greater increases in negative responses for satisfaction, emotional, and behavioral responses than supplementary service failure with high service expectations protecting the provider against overall dissatisfaction, negative word-of-mouth, and switching behaviors. Interestingly, perceived high controllability leads to greater dissatisfaction but not to increased negative emotional or behavioral responses. The study applies attribution theory to explain the results. The article concludes with managerial implications.     

Competition in the UK Retail Financial Service Sector: Some Implications for the Spatial Distribution and Function of Bank Branches

Traditionally, banks have tended to operate in a highly stable environment. However, in recent years there has been a dramatic increase in competition in the UK retail financial service sector. Some of the reasons for this increase in competition are discussed in this article as are the implications it holds for the spatial distribution and functions of bank branches. Particular emphasis is given to the different ways in which the same, or a similar, service can be provided and the effects this is having on the skill requirements of bank staff.     

Customer Perception in the Health Care Sector:

Customer perceptions of quality play a major role in the success or failure of an organization. Their perception also serves to determine their level of satisfaction or dissatisfaction. This paper will discuss those factors that the customer perceives as "quality" factors and how those factors affect satisfaction. The second section of the paper will look at who is (or should be) responsible for implementing and carrying out the goals of a quality improvement program. A case study of a large hospital located in the American Midwest is also presented. Finally, recommendations for the best way to begin a quality improvement program (i.e., measure customer perceptions of quality, involving everyone, and making a real commitment to this program--forever) will be given.     

Service Failure and Complaint Behavior in the Public Hospital Industry: The Indonesian Experience

The main objective of the study is to examine dimensions of service failures in the hospital industry. It is also the intention of the study to see if there is a specific pattern of complaint behavior in Indonesian context. The primary study was conducted in four cities in Bengkulu province, Southwest Sumatra, Indonesia. The number of questionnaires distributed in the survey was 350 and 300 questionnaires were returned and analyzed. Factor analysis and cluster analysis were employed to the dataset. The result of the analysis reveals that service failure constructs can be categorized into six underlying dimensions: medical reliability errors, physical evidences errors, poor information, medical treatment errors, costly service, and complaint handling failures. The study also indicates that hospital patients can be clustered into three segments, namely core service patients, complainers, and salient patients. Service failure dimensions and the clusters found can be used by hospitals in Indonesia to improve their service process and delivery. The study found a specific pattern of complaint behavior in the hospital industry.     

Differentiation through Service: A Perspective from the Commodity Chemicals Sector

This article examines the role of service as a differentiating factor in the marketing of commodity chemicals. The commodity chemicals sector is characterised by high volume products that are fundamentally undifferentiable by product characteristics, made to an industrial standard often produced with a technology that is common amongst competing producers, with high exit cost due as a result of extensive capital investment. In addition many segments of the market exhibit excess supply over demand. The research, based on an empirical study of companies in the sector and their supply chain relationships, suggests that service and relationship management are key strategies used by companies to escape the commodity trap and gain competitive advantage. The results of the study are discussed in the context of the services marketing continuum and using the servitisation model. The implications of the findings are that, if firms in this sector wish to break out of the commodity trap of blind allegiance to cost leadership as a generic strategy, then they must seek methods of differentiation. The article concludes that a servitisation strategy placed in the context of relationship management can be a means of creating differentiation advantage in a traditionally cost orientated sector     

Moral Reasoning as a Determinant of Organizational Citizenship Behaviors: A Study in the Public Accounting Profession

This study examines the relationship between an employee's level of moral reasoning and a form of work performance known as organizational citizenship behaviors (OCB). Prior research in the public accounting profession has found higher levels of moral reasoning to be positively related to various types of ethical behavior. This study extends the ethical domain of accounting behaviors to include OCB. Analysis of respondents from a public accounting firm in the northeast region of the United States (n = 107) support a positive and significant relationship between moral reasoning and two dimensions of OCB: interpersonal helping behaviors and sportsmanship behaviors. This study controls for previously identified determinants of OCB (e.g., procedural justice) and demographic variables (age, sex, tenure and social desirability). Results suggest that moral reasoning accounts for professional behaviors that are perceived as intrinsically good by the employee and economically beneficial by the employer.     

针对PIM-SM拒绝服务攻击的简单解决方案

PIM-SM协议本身存在着许多安全漏洞，恶意主机通过伪造大量数据包就可以达到拒绝服务攻击的目的。提出了一个方案，通过在DR路由器添加一些简单的限制规则就可以解决该问题，并通过测试证明了该方案的可靠性和高效性     

Development of the Service Sector: A Critical Survey of Macro-economic Models

The slow-down in the economic growth and the rise in unemployment have revived the discussion about the oppor- tunities for growth through the development of the service sector. This article reviews what models tell us about the mechanism of the development of the service industries. An attempt b made to specify the relative importance of demand and supply aspects of the service economy and to indicate the black holes in our knowledge.     

Managing Relationships in the UK Organic Food Sector

The paper explores the management of business-tobusiness relationships in the rapidly growing UK organic food industry. Interviewees perceived that supermarkets were attempting to use market power to dominate the industry, despite their partnership rhetoric. This was potentially at the expense of smaller companies that had pioneered the development of the organic food sector. A severe supply shortage of organic products had boosted the relative bargaining position of the pioneer companies. As this advantage declines, the pioneer companies face a limited window of opportunity to build relationships with the supermarkets. The paper concludes by considering implications for relationships within the industry, and for relationship management in general.