The influence of attitudes towards healthy eating on food consumption when travelling

This study explores tourists' attitude towards healthy eating and its influence on their travel eating behaviour. Based on focus group interviews and literature review, two instruments were developed to measure healthy eating attitude and travel eating behaviour. Factor analysis results revealed two healthy eating attitude factors (‘food content and nutrients’ and ‘balanced diet and eating habit’), and five travel eating behaviour factors (‘novelty’, ‘risk avoidance’, ‘health steadfastness’, ‘familiarity’, and ‘food supplement and medicine’). The relationships among the factors were examined using structural equation modelling. The findings revealed that respondents who had a stronger attitude towards ‘balanced diet and eating habit’ tended to be more motivated by the ‘novelty’ factor; whereas ‘risk avoidance’, ‘health steadfastness’ and ‘familiarity’ were found to be associated with a stronger attitude towards ‘food content and nutrient’. The findings suggest that the healthy eating attitude construct is multidimensional and healthy eating conscious tourists should not be treated as a homogeneous group.     

Examining the relationship of work–family conflict to job and life satisfaction: A case of hotel sales managers

The study was designed to clarify the ambivalent relationships between work–family conflict (WFC) and measures of satisfaction. Both the direct and indirect effects of WFC on job and life satisfaction were investigated. Job satisfaction was also separated into two components: affective reaction and cognitive appraisal. Data were collected by a field survey of 121 sales managers from 26 hotels in China. Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) indicated a critical role of one's affective reaction to his/her job in the relationship between WFC and life satisfaction. Specifically, the present study found that both work interfering with family (WIF) and family interfering with work (FIW) have significant negative association with an individual's affective reaction to his/her job, while only FIW reduced the cognitive appraisal of a job. Further, affective reaction, rather than cognitive appraisal, had a significant positive correlation with life satisfaction. Finally, FIW was negatively associated with life satisfaction. The results suggest the strategic role of family friendly human resource polices in hotels.     

Incremental Organizational Change in a Transforming Society: Managing Turbulence in Hungary in the 1990s

The rapid liberalization of the former state socialist economies of Eastern Europe coupled with privatization were thought by many in the early 1990s likely to generate effective capitalist firms quite quickly. However, the radical institutional transformation and collapse of Soviet markets resulted in considerable uncertainty for most companies which, together with high sunk costs and lack of resources, inhibited organizational restructuring and strategic change. Despite high levels of foreign ownership and control by the mid-1990s, many Hungarian companies continued to produce much the same kinds of products for mostly the same customers with inputs from mostly the same suppliers as in 1990. While most had reduced employment substantially, and many had disposed of ancillary organizational units, the bulk of the companies considered here had not greatly altered their work systems and overall organizational structures. In the few enterprises where the production process had been extensively reorganized by 1996, this was funded and directed by foreign firms who had taken them over. These foreign firm-controlled companies also tended to have new top managers from outside the enterprise. They additionally introduced new products more often than Hungarian firms, albeit within rather narrow product lines that usually dominated the domestic market. Overall, most of the enterprises studied were still doing much the same set of activities in the mid-1990s, though with fewer staff, as at the start of the decade, and privatization per se had not led to major shifts in enterprise structure and strategy, nor did it seem likely to do so in the foreseeable future.     

Visitor perceptions of crime-safety and attitudes towards risk: The case of Table Mountain National Park,Cape Town

This paper investigates tourist perceptions of crime-safety and attitudes towards risk whilst visiting Table Mountain National Park (TMNP) in Cape Town in June and July 2008. The study examined survey data of 303 domestic and international tourists during their visit to TMNP. A linear regression analysis revealed that although visitors had concerns about their personal safety they are still likely to return to TMNP and recommend it to other people. In addition, visitor attitudes towards risk did not influence perceptions of crime-safety and its effect on their intentions to revisit or recommend TMNP. The results also show that respondent's individual characteristics such as age, nationality, and purpose of visit influenced their perceptions of crime-safety. Perceptions that TMNP is unsafe tended to increase with respondent's age. Respondents on holiday were more likely to perceive TMNP as safer than those on business or visiting friends and relatives. The study's findings add to the literature by offering more insight on tourist perceptions of crime-safety and attitudes towards risk and their impact on tourist behaviour. Various tourist-crime prevention measures to enhance visitor safety at national parks are also recommended to the tourism industry and law enforcement agencies.     

Rural tourism and gendered nuances

Research findings on rural residents’ attitudes towards tourism are often contradictory, in part due to a lack of data examining the often divergent perspectives of particular subgroups. Regional survey data from the Intermountain Western United States is used to provide an improved understanding of rural tourism attitudes as they are linked to community involvement and changes, while also exploring both intragender and intergender differences. Group differences in levels of community involvement, perceptions of tourism and various other issues are observed. While differences emerge, there is also widespread agreement on the importance of preserving local culture and the opposition to sale of agricultural land for development.     

In the mirror of the market: The disciplinary effects of company/fund manager meetings

This paper draws upon empirical qualitative research with Finance Directors and Investor Relations managers to examine the disciplinary consequences of their meetings with institutional investors. These ‘private’ meetings have increased both in frequency and importance in the last decade, but, when compared to public disclosure, they are relatively under researched. Existing studies have focussed on the role that the meetings play either in the market for information, or as a mechanism for corporate governance. By contrast, in this paper we draw upon Foucault’s analysis of power/knowledge to explore how the meetings shape executive subjectivity. The meetings take place in the context of a proliferation of techniques through which corporate performance is disclosed, modelled, compared and ranked. Such visibility makes possible processes of executive subjection which the paper traces firstly in the anticipatory self-discipline of executive’s extensive rehearsals for the meetings, and secondly in the rituals of face-to-face scrutiny of the meetings themselves where the body of the executive is understood to represent the company. The paper then explores the ways in which subjection to investors enables executives to speak on behalf of the investor within the business and effect its restructuring in the name of shareholder value. We suggest that these neglected disciplinary effects of company/fund manager meetings have been all too potent in recent years.     

Informed Traders and Price Variations in the Betting Market for Professional Basketball Games

This paper examines betting line changes from the opening to the closing of the point spread betting market on National Basketball Association games for evidence of informed trader betting. We show that within-betting period line changes significantly improve the accuracy of betting lines as forecasts of game outcomes. We examine individual line change magnitudes and show that these are directly and proportionately related to biases in opening lines. Further, line changes are of sufficient magnitude to remove these biases by the close of betting. We interpret these results as evidence that informed traders are influential in this market.