Community Attitudes Toward Tourists: A Study of Iran

This article concerns the attitudes of local community members in Iran toward the tourists with whom they interact. Reference is made to prevailing conditions within Iran generally and particularly in the tourism industry. The results of a questionnaire survey conducted in two settlements that are popular with tourists are presented. Participants responded to a series of attitude statements about tourists and the researchers tested the effects of various sociodemographic characteristics, including professed degree of religious devotion. The findings suggest favorable views about visitors and tourism development overall, although different groupings expressed preferences for particular tourist types. Implications of the results for academics, industry practitioners, and policymakers are also discussed.     

The Sahel: A Malthusian Challenge?

The population of the least developed countries of the Sahel will more than triple from 100 million to 340 million by 2050, and new research projects that today’s extreme temperatures will become the norm by mid-century. The region is characterized by poverty, illiteracy, weak infrastructure, failed states, widespread conflict, and an abysmal status of women. Scenarios beyond 2050 demonstrate that, without urgent and significant action today, the Sahel could become the first part of planet earth that suffers large-scale starvation and escalating conflict as a growing human population outruns diminishing natural resources. National governments and the international community can do a great deal to ameliorate this unfolding disaster if they put in place immediate policies and investments to help communities adapt to climate change, make family planning realistically available, and improve the status of girls and women. Implementing evidence-based action now will be an order of magnitude more humane and cost-effective than confronting disaster later. However, action will challenge some long held development paradigms of economists, demographers, and humanitarian organizations. If the crisis unfolding in the Sahel can help bridge the current intellectual chasm between the economic commitment to seemingly endless growth and the threat seen by some biologists and ecologists that human activity is bringing about irreversible damage to the biosphere, then it may be possible also to begin to solve this same formidable problem at a global level.     

Strategic Planning in an Accounting Department using Causal Maps and Cognitive Factions

Strategic planning can be a time-consuming task for academic departments. As such, an effective and efficient strategic planning approach is paramount. This paper presents a strategic planning approach using causal mapping to uncover the factors which faculty members believed would make their department (in the USA) more successful. The information gathered during the session was used as part of an AACSB accounting maintenance of accreditation process. The approach applied here elicits faculty involvement in ways which bring to the surface perspectives held by subgroups/factions of faculty. Additional perspectives are positive in a strategic planning context as they can contribute to devising strategies that might not have resulted by considering only majority views. Content analysis of the strategic plan suggests the range of views uncovered were integrated into the plan, including both the strategic factors and the relative importance of the factors.     

The influence of relational experience and contractual governance on the negotiation strategy in buyer–supplier disputes

This paper theoretically refines and empirically extends the debate on the type of interplay between relational experience and contractual governance in an under-researched area: supply chain disputes. We define relational experience as either cooperative or competitive; distinguish between control and coordination functions of contractual governance; and assess their interplay on the negotiation strategy used in disputes. Using a unique data set of buyer–supplier disputes, we find, in particular that increasing contractual control governance weakens the positive effect of cooperative relational experience on cooperative negotiation strategy. However, increasing contractual control governance for a buyer–supplier dyad with competitive relational experience will increase cooperative negotiation strategy. Contractual coordination governance reinforces the positive effect of cooperative relational experience. Through this study, we reach a better understanding of how and when contractual and relational governance dimensions interact; rather than whether they act as substitutes or complements as has been studied in prior research. We discuss the implications of these findings for the field of supply chain management.     

Religious tourism and its management: the hajj in Saudi Arabia

Religion and tourism share a close relationship in which the former motivates travel and is a source of assorted visitor attractions. Pilgrimage is one expression of the ties between the two and the paper identifies key pilgrimage tourism issues pertaining to demand and provision that are discussed within the context of the contemporary hajj. The hajj by Muslims to the cities they deem holy in Saudi Arabia is a distinctive illustration that involves the mass movement of pilgrims every year. Numbers are strictly controlled, but set to rise as the government pursues a policy of expanding space at certain holy sites and encouraging an increase in the supply of accommodation and other amenities as well as enhancing supporting infrastructure. Some projects are very ambitious, leading to questions about whether the pace of development is sustainable. The purpose of the study is to improve understanding of the uniqueness and significance of the hajj phenomenon and illuminate the challenges of managing large‐scale religious tourism events in the changing world of the twenty‐first century. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Islamic tourism and managing tourism development in Islamic societies: the cases of Iran and Saudi Arabia

This paper is concerned with the effects of state religion on tourism development in Muslim countries with particular reference to Iran and Saudi Arabia. Aspects of the relationship between Islam and tourism are investigated overall and issues of tourism policies, management and marketing and community involvement within the context of the two cases are discussed. The distinctive circumstances prevailing in Iran and Saudi Arabia are suggested, but more general insights are also presented into the interactions between and management of tourism and Islam. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

A foreign exchange transaction reporting system (FXTRS) for central banks

This paper builds on our 1996 work, “Introducing Competition to Global Currency Markets” [1], with respect to recent developments of the international capital and foreign exchange markets. Recent proposals are reviewed relevant to the desirability of a new architecture or structure to improve the operation of these markets. We propose in greater specificity than in our earlier paper a Foreign Exchange Transaction Reporting System, (FXTRS^sm), whose specific technological features will supplement the beneficial affects of non-technological methods proposed by ourselves and others to stabilize and improve these markets, while reducing their social and environmental costs. Patents are pending on the FXTRS^sm and royalties earned will be donated to the United Nations by the authors.     

OPTIMAL TIMING FOR AN INDIVISIBLE ASSET SALE

In this paper, we investigate the pricing via utility indifference of the right to sell a non‐traded asset. Consider an agent with power utility who owns a single unit of an indivisible, non‐traded asset, and who wishes to choose the optimum time to sell this asset. Suppose that this right to sell forms just part of the wealth of the agent, and that other wealth may be invested in a complete frictionless market. We formulate the problem as a mixed stochastic control/optimal stopping problem, which we then solve. We determine the optimal behavior of the agent, including the optimal criteria for the timing of the sale. It turns out that the optimal strategy is to sell the non‐traded asset the first time that its value exceeds a certain proportion of the agent's trading wealth. Further, it is possible to characterize this proportion as the solution to a transcendental equation.     

How quickly do CEOs become obsolete? Industry dynamism,CEO tenure,and company performance

Scholars have characterized CEO tenures as life cycles in which executives learn rapidly during their initial time in office, but then grow stale as they lose touch with the external environment. We argue, however, that the opportunities for adaptive learning are limited because (1) a CEO assumes office with a relatively fixed paradigm that changes little thereafter; (2) inertia limits the speed at which an organization can align itself with a new CEO's paradigm; and (3) for any within‐paradigm learning to occur, the external environment must be stable enough so that the cause–effect relationships that CEOs glean today remain relevant tomorrow. In a longitudinal study of 98 CEOs in the relatively stable branded foods industry and 228 CEOs in the highly dynamic computer industry, we found results that strongly supported our hypotheses. In the stable food industry, firm‐level performance improved steadily with tenure, with downturns occurring only among the few CEOs who served more than 10–15 years. In contrast, in the dynamic computer industry, CEOs were at their best when they started their jobs, and firm performance declined steadily across their tenures, presumably as their paradigms grew obsolete more quickly than they could learn. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.