Leisure and work ethics and locus of control

Abstract

Equivocal findings regarding the relationship between attitudes toward leisure and the extent to which people feel in control of their own fate led to the consideration of possible mediating influences. The current study was an attempt to examine the relationship between locus of control and the affective domain of leisure attitude, or leisure “ethic,” while controlling for the influence of work ethic. The possibility of differences between males and females and students and nonstudents led to four separate subgroup analyses. Results indicated that of the four groups, only female students showed a substantial relationship between locus of control and leisure ethic. In this group, leisure ethic was associated with an external locus of control, the tendency to regard the control of life's circumstances as lying outside oneself. In none of the groups was the influence of work ethic great enough to make an appreciable difference in the relationship between locus of control and leisure ethic. The group differences were discussed in terms of sex‐role orientations and career aspirations.     

Participant crowding and physical contact rates of whale shark tours on Isla Holbox,Mexico

Whale shark tourism is a growing niche market within the marine wildlife tourism sector. Increased visitation and declining whale shark numbers at some tourism sites worldwide raise questions over the long-term sustainability of this industry. This study examines the social and potential biological impacts of “swim-with” whale shark tourism on Isla Holbox, Mexico. A total of 397 tour participants completed a self-administered questionnaire regarding perceived crowding, reported encounters and encounter norms, as well as self-reported physical contact rates with whale sharks. Relatively high physical contact rates suggest that tourism may cause some harm to sharks. Users who encountered more swimmers than their norm felt significantly more crowded and were more likely to perceive the industry as having a negative impact on the sharks and surrounding environment. However, the results suggest that the number of boats in the whale shark viewing area may have a greater influence on crowding than number of swimmers. Management interventions to improve the sustainability of the industry include improved interpretation and guide intervention, achieving higher compliance with existing guidelines, and limiting the number of boats allowed in the whale shark viewing area.     

Assessing Managers’ Ethical Decision-making: An Objective Measure of Managerial Moral Judgment

Recent allegations of unethical decision-making by leaders in prominent business organizations have jeopardized the world’s confidence in American business. The purpose of this research was to develop a measure of managerial moral judgment that can be used in future research and managerial assessment. The measure was patterned after the Defining Issues Test, a widely used general measure of moral judgment. With content validity as the goal, we aimed to sample the domain of managerial ethical situations by establishing links to dimensions of managerial performance, as well as to the types of organizational justice issues managers encounter. Proposed scenarios were evaluated for realism by ethics officers and human resource managers. Results indicated that the new measure is reliable and correlates with a number of relevant variables in the hypothesized manner, demonstrating evidence of construct validity. Implications for future research and for human resources management are discussed.     

MNE practice transfer as a process of institutional change

We build upon current theory on strategic organizational practice transfer in multinational firms by incorporating the agency of actors and applying an institutional lens to the transfer process. Our theoretical analysis suggests that practice transfer is a process of institutional change that leads not only to practice adoption, adaptation, or nonadoption, but also to reconstruction. We argue that when contradictions exist within and across institutional environments, misaligned interests motivate actors to engage in praxis. As a parent‐subsidiary coalition, these actors reconstruct the practice by transcending the multitude of institutional environments that comprise the institutional system. Our process theory provides insight into how less powerful subsidiary actors engage in praxis to extend knowledge and build new capabilities within the firm. Copyright © 2014 ASAC. Published by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Retention of latent segments in regression-based marketing models

Product design and marketing mix decisions for segmented markets depend crucially on the correct specification of marketing models used as input to these decisions. With real-world data, the true number of segments in a market is unknown. Current evidence from simulation studies suggests that the accuracy of commonly used criteria for determining the number of segments in a market depends on the usage context, including the type of distribution being used to describe the data, the model specification, and the characteristics of the market. This study investigates via simulation the performance of seven segment retention criteria used with finite mixture regression models for normal data. This is one of the most important analysis contexts in marketing research since regression models are used, for example, in conjoint analysis and market response analysis, yet no previous study in either the marketing or statistics literatures explores the segment retention problem for mixture regression models. The study shows that one criterion, Akaike's Information Criterion (AIC) with a per-parameter penalty factor of 3 (AIC3), is clearly the best criterion to use across a wide variety of model specifications and data configurations, having the highest success rate and producing very low parameter bias. Currently, this criterion is rarely, if ever, used in the marketing literature.     

“搜索”淘金潮

“众里寻他千百度，蓦然回首，那人却在灯火阑珊处。“中国排名第一的搜索引擎公司——百度公司的名字取自辛弃疾的千古名篇《青玉案·元夕》。从千年前的寻爱之旅到21世纪的搜索成功之路，百度仅仅走了不到5年的时间。     

Pushing back the frontiers: management control and work intensification under JIT/TQM factory regimes

Drawing on primary and secondary sources the authors argue that the JIT/TQM manufacturing system intensifies work as a result of increased surveillance and monitoring of workers' activities, heightened responsibility and accountability, the harnessing of peer pressure within 'teams' and via 'customers', and the fostering of 'involvement' in waste elimination and the continuous improvement of the production process.