Customer experience management: toward implementing an evolving marketing concept

Although research continues to debate the future of the marketing concept, practitioners have taken the lead, appraising customer experience management (CEM) as one of the most promising marketing approaches in consumer industries. In research, however, the notion of CEM is not well understood, is fragmented across a variety of contexts, and is insufficiently demarcated from other marketing management concepts. By integrating field-based insights of 52 managers engaging in CEM with supplementary literature, this study provides an empirically and theoretically solid conceptualization. Specifically, it introduces CEM as a higher-order resource of cultural mindsets toward customer experiences (CEs), strategic directions for designing CEs, and firm capabilities for continually renewing CEs, with the goals of achieving and sustaining long-term customer loyalty. We disclose a typology of four distinct CEM patterns, with firm size and exchange continuity delineating the pertinent contingency factors of this generalized understanding. Finally, we discuss the findings in relation to recent theoretical research, proposing that CEM can comprehensively systemize and serve the implementation of an evolving marketing concept.     

The economic function of credit rating agencies – What does the watchlist tell us?

Credit rating agencies do not only disclose simple ratings but announce watchlists (rating reviews) and outlooks as well. This paper analyzes the economic function underlying the review procedure. Using Moody’s rating data between 1982 and 2004, we find that for borrowers of high creditworthiness, rating agencies employ watchlists primarily in order to improve the delivery of information. For low-quality borrowers, in contrast, the review procedure seems to have developed into an implicit contract á la Boot et al. (2006), inducing the companies “on watch” to abstain from risk-augmenting actions. The agencies’ economic role hence appears to have been enhanced from a pure information certification towards an active monitoring function.     

Channels of employee voice: complementary or competing for space?

This article identifies the existence of employee voice channels and examines how they interact within the context of an overall organisational voice system. In so doing, we can better appreciate the disparities between the micro‐level reality and macro‐level rhetoric of employee voice for highly skilled employees in the knowledge intensive sector. Drawing on an instrumental, inductive case study involving managers and, most notably, employees, the research finds that the plurality of mechanisms provided for voice appears to cause some confusion that leads to a neglect of certain channels and others competing for attention. This raises the issue, which has not received attention thus far, as to whether the availability of multiple voice channels can have counter‐productive effects whereby they start to compete with rather than complement each other.     

A Spatial Autocorrelation Approach for Examining the Effects of Urban Greenspace on Residential Property Values

This paper presents spatially explicit analyses of the greenspace contribution to residential property values in a hedonic model. The paper utilizes data from the housing market near downtown Los Angeles. We first used a standard hedonic model to estimate greenspace effects. Because the residuals were spatially autocorrelated, we implemented a spatial lag model as indicated by specification tests. Our results show that neighborhood greenspace at the immediate vicinity of houses has a significant impact on house prices even after controlling for spatial autocorrelation. The different estimation results from non-spatial and spatial models provide useful bounds for the greenspace effect. Greening of inner city areas may provide a valuable policy instrument for elevating depressed housing markets in those areas.     

Towards a cross-cultural framework of strategic international human resource control: the case of Taiwanese high-tech subsidiaries in the USA

Due to the growing expansion of newly emerging multinational companies (MNCs) in the USA market, it seems pertinent to explore how to manage their Western industrialized subsidiaries in terms of human resource management. This study combines the institutionalism, resource dependence perspective, and control theory to provide an integrative framework in an attempt to investigate the cross-cultural determinants of strategic international human resource control over MNCs' subsidiaries. By a qualitative analysis of 10 Taiwanese top high-tech manufacturing companies operating in the USA, our findings are as follow: In order to perform subsidiary's value-added activities, multinationals need to identify the value and capabilities need for these activities. At the same time, subsidiaries also need to compare the cultural advantage of the home country in terms of these activities. In addition, from the perspective of cross-cultural influence, input control is designed to respond to high integration and high adaptation; output control is executed in the case of low integration and high cultural adaptation; while behavioural control is used to respond to high integration and low adaptation, simultaneously in the case of low value of subsidiary's activities.     

A phenomenographic study of Greek primary school students’ representations concerning technology in daily life

The present research investigated and studied students’ representations about daily life technologies, in a prospect of studying technology in Greek primary education. In the research participated 60 Greek primary school students aged 9 to 12 years old. Research data were collected through semi-structured, personal, clinical-type interviews. Each interview investigated student’s conceptions and views about the following thematic areas: the concept of technology, daily life technologies, technological change, and the impact of technology use in everyday life. Data analysis revealed that the majority of students equated technology with modern tools and appliances, especially with computers, TV, mobile phones, satellites and other micro- and macro-technologies, whereas experience based technologies (de Vries, Technology education: Beyond the “technology is applied science” paradigm. J. Technol. Edu. 8 (1996), 7) have been hardly recognized by them as technology. Also students’ representations can be categorized either as technology-oriented representations, which focus on a collection of technical means without reference to humans, or as human-oriented representations, focused on technical means with substantial reference to human needs and activities. Depending on these types of representations, students seem to conceive differently the nature of the problems, which they recognize that the wide use of technology causes mainly to the environment and the responsibility of the user for these problems. Moreover, it seems that the concept of technological change is a quite difficult one for the students. In order to help students form adequate representations about daily life technology and technological change an appropriate teaching approach was designed on the basis of these students’ representations.     

Durability Versus Concentration as an Explanation for Price Inflexibility

We document the extent of price rigidity across United States manufacturing industries in the 1980s and early 1990s and compare rigidity across different phases of the business cycle. We measure price rigidity in three ways – each under four different sets of assumptions. We take an approach that relies on disaggregated data; we look at price patterns for over 4000 individual manufactured commodities. Both durability and seller concentration are found to be important factors explaining differences in price rigidity across industrial product classes. Using our data, we replicate the regression results found in Carlton (1986) that were based on actual transaction prices from the 1960s.