Co-production and customer loyalty in financial services

Recent developments in marketing thought and practice highlight the opportunities that co-production of services provide for creating customer value. The authors propose a model of co-production with which they investigate the links between co-production and customer loyalty and the factors likely to increase the level of co-production in a financial services context, with support from an investigation in the medical services context. Further, the authors consider the relationships of customer expertise, customer–advisor communication, customer affective commitment, and interactional justice with the level of co-production. On the basis of testing with a sample of 1,197 customers of a large multinational financial services organization and 100 patients of medical services, the model is partially supported. Therefore, the authors suggest that co-production may have an important role as a basis for competition in the financial services industry.     

Advances in Information Ethics

The versatility and adaptability of information technology offer many potential benefits to society, its organisations and its citizens; but there are also many associated risks. The social and ethical implications of this technology warrant special attention and have resulted in the creation of information ethics as a discrete area complementary to business ethics. Simon Rogerson is Director of the Centre for Computing and Social Responsibility at De Montfort University, The Gateway, Leicester, LE1 9BH, UK. (email: srog@dmu.ac.uk and web site http://www.cms.dmu.ac.uk/CCSR/)     

Searching for a listed infrastructure asset class using mean–variance spanning

This study examines the portfolio-diversification benefits of listed infrastructure stocks. We employ three different definitions of listed infrastructure and tests of mean–variance spanning. The evidence shows that viewing infrastructure as an asset class is misguided. We employ different schemes of infrastructure asset selection (both traditional asset classes and factor exposures) and discover that they do not provide portfolio-diversification benefits to existing asset allocation choices. We also find that defining and selecting infrastructure investments by business model as opposed to industrial sectors can reveal a very different investment profile, albeit one that improves the mean–variance efficient frontier since the global financial crisis. This study provides new insights into defining and benchmarking infrastructure equity investments in general, as well as into the extent to which public markets can be used to proxy the risk-adjusted performance of privately held infrastructure investments.     

Domestic Crop Booms,Livelihood Pathways and Nested Transitions: Charting the Implications of Bangladesh's Pangasius Boom

Rapidly transforming Asian food systems are oriented largely towards domestic markets, yet literature on Asian crop booms deals almost exclusively with commodities produced for export. With reference to pangasius aquaculture in Bangladesh, we argue that ‘domestic crop booms’ – agricultural booms driven by domestic demand – are contributing to rapid social and ecological transformations in Asia and across the globe. We adopt a comparative multi‐scalar approach, and develop the concept of ‘livelihood pathways’ as a means of understanding agrarian change associated with crop booms. The study reveals sharply divergent patterns of social change resulting from the pangasius boom, as experienced in two different village settings, despite underlying similarities in the processes of commodification evident in both. In addition to drawing attention to domestic crop booms and the diversity of transitions in which they result, the paper demonstrates the value of comparative multi‐scalar analytical approaches and the importance of livelihood pathways in processes of agrarian change.     

An International Comparison of Employment Adjustment to Exchange Rate Fluctuations

This paper evaluates the response of employment to exchange rate shocks at the industry level for G-7 countries. Using an empirical framework that places little structure on the data, it is found that European industries, at least France and Germany, are much less influenced by exchange rate shocks and much slower to adjust to long-run steady states. The United States, Japan, Canada, the United Kingdom and Italy all appear to adjust more quickly. German and Japanese employment are quite insensitive to exchange rate fluctuations, consistent with previous research on output and markup responses to exchange rates.     

Collaborator or competitor: assessing the evidence supporting the role of social enterprise in health and social care

In many countries, social enterprise has been introduced into a competitive market-oriented environment as a substitute for publicly owned services, particularly in healthcare. In the United Kingdom, evidence for this move seems to derive from case studies where social enterprise operates in collaboration – as opposed to competition – with publicly owned services. Our systematic review demonstrates that there is no evidence to support the role of social enterprise as a substitute for publicly owned services. However, there is evidence to show that where social enterprise operates in a collaborative environment, enhanced outcomes can be achieved, such as connectedness, well-being and self-confidence.     

Customer behavioural intentions towards mobile money services adoption in Ghana

This study examined the determinants of mobile money service usage intentions and assessed the effect of social influence (SI) on mobile money services adoption and behavioural intentions (BIs). The sample of the study comprised 300 mobile money service users in Ghana. Guided by the conceptual framework and two theories identified to have an effect on technology adoption and consumer behaviour, eight hypotheses were developed and tested using Structural Equation Modelling Techniques. It is discovered that perceived ease of use, perceived usefulness, perceived trust and perceived cost of use have a strong influence on mobile money service usage. The study found SI to have a significant effect on the adoption and BI. Providers ensure that their mobile application services are simple to operate, fulfil specific consumers’ needs, protect consumers’ accounts to ensure trust and are affordable, hence positively influencing consumers’ adoption of services.     

Managing whale-watching as a non-lethal consumptive activity

Marine tourism is a new frontier of late-capitalist transformation, generating more global revenue than aquaculture and fisheries combined. This transformation created whale-watching, a commercial tourism form that, despite recent critiques, has been accepted as non-consumptive activity. This paper uses four academic discourses to critique whale-watching as a form of capitalist exploitation: (1) commercial whale-watching and global capitalist transformation, (2) global capitalist politics and the promoted belief that whale-watching is non-consumptive, (3) the inherent contradictions of non-consumptive capitalist exploitation, and (4) whale-watching as a common-pool resource. These discourses lead us to critique whale-watching practices in relation to the common capitalist sequence of resource diversification, exploitation, depletion and collapse. Using specific impact studies, we conclude that a sustainability paradigm shift is required, whereby whale-watching (and other forms of wildlife tourism) is recognized as a form of non-lethal consumptive exploitation, understood in terms of sub-lethal anthropogenic stress and energetic impacts. We argue the need for a paradigm shift in the regulation and management of commercial whale-watching, and present the case for a unified, international framework for managing the negative externalities of whale-watching. The relevance of the issues raised about neoliberal policy-making extends beyond whale-watching to all forms of wildlife and nature-based tourism.