Faith,hope and love: doing family through consuming pilgrimage

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to explore the consumption of Lourdes, a Catholic pilgrimage site in France. Based on a three-year ethnography, our findings focus on respondents’ ‘Lourdes stories’. Discussing themes of faith, hope and love, we illustrate the importance of the family in consuming Lourdes. Family members act as influencing agents in the initial and sometimes continuous consumption of Lourdes. Our findings differ from consumer research to date in that rather than furthering discussion of family structure or furthering discussion on family identity we suggest a new focus is the actual building of intimate family bonds and relationships – the ‘doing’ of family or ‘familying’ – with the context of the Lourdes pilgrimage offering consumers a unique setting comprising faith, fun and family.     

New Brands Versus Brand Extensions, Attitudes Versus Choice: Experimental Evidence for Theory and Practice

The current study compares better-fitting and worse-fitting new brand names and brand extensions on brand attitudes and choice shares across situations that differ in terms of the amount of product information available and consumer knowledge of the target product category (which had limited effects), 35[emsp4 ]mm cameras (choice-set competitors Nikon and Minolta). While brand extensions and better-fitting brands generally enjoyed more positive brand attitudes and larger choice shares, effects were moderated by product information. When information was limited to brand name and price, the better-fitting brand extension (Sony) commanded more share than did the better-fitting new brand (Optix) which in turn commanded more share than did either the worse-fitting extension (Nike) or the worse-fitting new brand (Topix). But when information on product features was added, target brands were chosen similarly across brand names where the better-fitting new brand Optix garnered slightly (non-significantly; 5%) more share than the better-fitting extension Sony. This weak preference was reversed, however, in the attitude data where Sony was rated significantly higher in liking than Optix. Two focal conclusions emerge. First, new brands can perform as well as or better than brand extensions when consumers process product information. In this study, brand-extension advantages were confined to situations of limited information processing and better fit. Second, since branding effects differed across attitudes and choice, researchers hoping to duplicate in the laboratory the types of branding effects likely to occur in the marketplace may want to expand their traditional focus on attitudes to include choice.     

New insights into the impact of the introduction of futures trading on stock price volatility

We examine whether, and to what extent, the introduction of trading in share futures contracts on individual stocks (i.e., individual share futures, or ISFs) has impacted on the systematic risk and volatility of the underlying shares. The use of ISFs allows a unique experimental design that complements existing work on index futures. Our major findings are as follows. First, we found a general reduction in systematic risk on individual stocks after the listing of futures. Second, we found evidence of a decline in unconditional volatility. Third, we found mixed evidence concerning the impact on conditional volatility. Fourth, the introduction of futures was found to impact on the market dynamics, as reflected by a change in the asymmetric volatility response, although the direction of that change is stock‐specific. In general, the results point to a number of features that are case‐specific and provide new insights into the mixed results that are typical of existing studies. © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Jrl Fut Mark 21:237–255, 2001     

The Influence of Servant Leadership on Restaurant Employee Engagement

Servant leadership is a leadership philosophy which addresses the concerns of ethics, customer experience, and employee engagement while creating a unique organizational culture where both leaders and followers unite to reach organizational goals without positional or authoritative power. With employees viewed as one of the greatest assets for organizations, maintaining loyal, productive employees while balancing profits becomes a challenge for leaders, and drives the need to understand employee engagement drivers. Thus, the purpose of this study was to qualitatively explore servant leadership from the perspective of employees. Participants were 11 employees from a servant leadership led restaurant who took part in two focus groups. The modified van Kaam method (Moustakas 1994) contributed to data analysis, which examined employee responses for comparison and assessment. Several themes emerged including servant leader experience, servant leader traits, the impact of servant leadership, the application of servant leadership, and limited employee attrition. The themes revealed servant leadership positively influences employee engagement while contributing to employee loyalty to the workplace. Based on the servant leader experience, participants were more committed, built healthy work relationships, and actively participated in achieving organizational goals. Findings are discussed in light of current research and practical applications are provided.     

Unique but integrated: The role of individuation and assimilation processes in teen opinion leadership

Opinion leaders propel the diffusion of innovation and exert a significant influence on the marketplace. This influence is especially pronounced during adolescence, a period marked by increasing reliance on peers and the emergence of a tension between two countervailing needs: assimilation and individuation. A survey of 1142 adolescents reveals that these developmental needs affect adolescent opinion leadership in the critical clothing market. Adolescent opinion leadership relies on a balance between desires for assimilation (i.e., centrality within the peer network) and individuation (i.e., need for uniqueness); adolescents' susceptibility to peers' normative influence and gender moderate these relationships. Adolescents who occupy central positions within their peer network tend to be opinion leaders, though only if they are not susceptible to normative influence. Position within the peer network is a key for girls, whereas need for uniqueness is a key for boys. These differences implicate different approaches for managers targeting adolescent males and females.     

Small‐Firm Performance: Modeling the Role of Product and Process Improvements*

Entrepreneurial and small and medium‐sized enterprises (SMEs) firm performance is a complex, multifaceted construct that should be examined with an eye toward its complexity. Our research study seeks to accomplish this examination by proposing a conceptual model of SME performance with two distinct but related outcome dimensions—growth as one dimension and profitability as another. We propose hypotheses for relationships between four antecedent factor conditions— environmental hostility, firm size, innovation capability, and internationalization—and an SME's likelihood to pursue either product improvement or process improvement as their primary strategic orientation. Furthermore, we propose that an SME product improvement orientation likely has greater influence on growth and profit performance than will a process improvement orientation. The findings of the study suggest that internationalization and innovator position have a positive impact on new product and process improvements, while environmental hostility, internationalization, and product improvement have positive influences on growth as a performance dimension. In addition and as hypothesized, the product improvement orientation is positively associated with growth and in turn profitability, whereas the process improvement orientation showed no statistical relationship to growth and ultimately profitability.     

Latina entrepreneurship

We utilize individual panel data from the 1996 and 2001 Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP) to analyze the relative success of self-employed female Hispanics. To allow for a meaningful comparison of earnings between self-employed and wage/salary women, we generate different earnings measures addressing the role of business equity. We compare earnings of Hispanic female entrepreneurs to both Latina wage/salary workers and to self-employed female non-Hispanic whites. Latina entrepreneurs are observed to have lower mean earnings than both white female entrepreneurs and Latina employees. However, our findings indicate that Latina entrepreneurs often do well, once differences in mean observable characteristics, such as education, are taken into account. Self-employed Latinas are estimated to earn more than observationally similar non-minority white female entrepreneurs and slightly less than observationally similar wage/salary-employed Latinas.     

International market selection and subsidiary performance: A neural network approach

How should multinational enterprises (MNEs) select international markets? We develop a model of international market selection that adds firm-specific advantages and transaction cost considerations to previously explored target market factors based on Dunning's Eclectic Framework. Results obtained using neural network (NN) analysis indicates that our model has strong predictive power in explaining international market selection. Further tests show that firms selecting international markets predicted by the model reported significantly higher subsidiary performance relative to firms whose investments were not predicted by the model. Our results provide strong initial evidence that a firm-level strategic approach to international market selection facilitates MNE success.     

Exploring knowledge management to organizational performance outcomes in a transitional economy

The Eastern European Economies offer many major business opportunities but due to the transitional nature of their economies, these are highly complex and fraught with the socialist cultural disposition. There is a dearth of research into the nature of these opportunities/complexities, especially in regard to knowledge management and subsequent organizational outcomes. Our study of firms in Croatia suggests that knowledge management positively affects organizational outcomes of firm innovation, product improvement and employee improvement. Moreover, our empirical research illustrates the importance of the management of knowledge and not just the presence of knowledge as our model results indicate insignificant results between employee knowledge-based capability and the organizational outcomes.     

Associations Between Epistemological Beliefs and Moral Reasoning: Evidence from Accounting

We investigated associations between moral reasoning and epistemological beliefs in an accounting context using the sample of 140 senior accounting students from a public university in Midwestern U.S. We found no significant correlations between accounting students’ principled reasoning about Thorne’s ethical dilemmas and their beliefs about knowledge measured by administering Schommer epistemological questionnaire. We conducted post-hoc power analysis and present the evidence that the lack of associations should not be attributed to the lack of power. Overall, our results suggest that reflective thinking and moral reasoning represent separate dimensions of cognitive process which develop at a different pace. Thus, a stand-alone course of ethics in accounting education is warranted since higher moral reasoning does not automatically follow from extended technical education and improved critical thinking skills.