Culture and evaluation of service quality — a study of the service quality gaps in a Taiwanese setting

This research is built upon the work of Parasuraman, Zeithaml and Berry (1985) by exploring the service quality gap within a Taiwanese hospitality setting and reports the findings from 164 interviews among hotel managers, service staff, and hotel guests. One motive for the research was whether concepts derived from an American‐Euro‐centric conceptualisation of service relationships was transferable to another cultural setting. It was found that the influence of national, ethnic culture on perception of service is limited, but the factor of kuan‐hsi (personal relationship) and mien‐tsu (face) had some role to play in guest‐staff relationships. However, it is concluded that the globalisation of hotel corporate modes of operation have more influence in shaping expectations and thus the ServQual model has validity in such settings.     

The iconicity of celebrity and the spiritual impulse

Celebrity has a powerful material presence in contemporary consumer culture but its surface aesthetic resonates with the promise of deeper meanings. This Marketplace Icon contribution speculates on the iconicity of celebrity from a spiritual perspective. The social value or authenticity of contemporary celebrity, and the social processes through which it emerges, are matters of debate amongst researchers and competing approaches include field theory, functionalism, and anthropologically inflected accounts of the latent need for ritual, myth and spiritual fulfillment evinced by celebrity “worship.” We focus on the latter area as a partial explanation of the phenomenon whereby so many consumers seem so enchanted by images of, and stories about, individuals with whom they, or we, often have little in common. We speculate that the powerful presence of celebrity in Western consumer culture to some extent reflects and exploits a latent need for myths of redemption through the iconic character of many, though by no means all, manifestations of celebrity consumption.     

The Impact of Career Capital on Expatriates' Perceived Marketability

We examine how the development of three types of career capital (knowing how, knowing whom, and knowing why) during an international assignment affects the perceived marketability of organizational expatriates. Using the perceived marketability perspective and long‐term follow‐up data, we show that knowing how is seen as the most transferable type of career capital, while the development of other aspects of career capital has little impact on perceived marketability. We also show that career capital development is more recognized in the external market than by current employers. Our findings expand our understanding of long‐term career marketability among people who have completed international assignments. © 2015 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.     

Capital expenditures and firm performance: evidence from a cross‐sectional analysis of stock returns

Using a simple two‐period model of investment, we show that there should be a nonlinear relation between a firm's investment‐to‐capital ratio and its subsequent stock returns. This prediction finds substantial empirical support. The evidence indicates that the slope of the investment function is negative at low investment levels, close to zero at intermediate investment levels and negative at high investment levels. Our results, which are robust to the use of narrowly‐ and broadly‐defined measures of capital investment, pose a challenge to the hypothesis that the negative cross‐sectional correlation between investment and stock returns is attributable to some sort of overinvestment phenomenon.     

New perspectives on East Asian leadership in the age of globalization: local grounding and historical comparisons in the Asia Pacific region

ABSTRACT

Many management and leadership studies have traditionally been dominated by Western theories, perspectives and cases. Non-Western leadership requires additional caveats in arriving at generalizations. The theoretical trap of conceiving Asian corporations either as irrelevant concerning leadership effectiveness or as maintaining only culturally determined leadership derives from the lack of historical understanding of Asian cases. Our collection used both historical and contemporary cases of Japan, South Korea and China to show that these Asian economies have tried to some extent balance their traditional norms and values of leadership with those from the West. A key to understanding Asia is that all three countries have historically pursued leadership mandates in running both public and private corporations, although ‘corrupt’ leadership practices were also rampant during different historical periods. Further studies of leadership in non-Western cases are necessary to devise methodological and theoretical alternatives to Western-centric perspectives. In our collection, we analysed how a dynamic and evolutionary view of leadership fared in its attempt to clarify some of the conundrums surrounding East Asian leadership. From our results, it is indicated that historical and comparative methods must accompany any analysis of leadership.     

The Role of Ideas in Understanding Industrial Relations Policy Change in Liberal Market Economies

This paper analyzes the uneven processes underpinning industrial relations policy liberalization in New Zealand, Australia, the UK, and Ireland. Drawing upon 140 elite interviews and building upon ideational comparative political theories, the paper highlights the role of ideas in the policy change process. It identifies how particular ideas can be used to construct policy problems, how these ideas can gain legitimacy through battles with competing ideas, and how policy legacies can influence whether ideas take root. The findings from the comparative case analysis expose a critical difference between “positive legacies” and “negative legacies” to account for different liberalization trajectories.     

Non-tariff and overall protection: evidence across countries and over time

This paper analyzes the evolution of the incidence and intensity of non-tariff measures (NTMs). It extends earlier work by measuring protection from NTMs over time from a newly available database and provides evidence on the evolution of NTMs. In particular, building on Kee et al. (Econ J 119(534):172–199, 2009), this paper estimates the ad valorem equivalents of NTMs for 97 countries at the product level over the period 1997–2015. We show that the incidence and the intensity of NTMs were both increasing over this period, with NTMs becoming an even more dominant source of trade protection. We are also able to investigate the evolution of overall protection derived jointly from tariffs and NTMs. The results show that the overall protection level, for most countries and products, has not decreased despite the fall in tariffs associated with multilateral, regional and bilateral trade agreements in recent decades. We also document an increase in overall trade protection during the recent 2008 financial crisis. Overall, this study sheds light on an under-researched aspect of trade liberalization: the proliferation and increase of NTMs.