Understanding consumer usage of product magnitudes through sorting tasks

Magnitudes describing product attributes are basic elements used in decision making. Although several researchers have emphasized the need to understand how consumers categorize product attributes, empirical research on this issue is rare. As a first step in developing and evaluating methodologies to examine this issue, a sorting task methodology is introduced to study this problem. Hypotheses were generated to address important theoretical issues relating to how consumers use magnitudes describing product attributes and tested in two studies. The results suggest that the number of magnitudes used by consumers to think about product attributes (i) is higher for abstract when compared to concrete attributes, and (ii) is positively related to the number of magnitudes used in an overall evaluation of liking. Results also provided evidence to support the use of the sorting method. © 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.     

Reacting to the demands of service work: emotional resistance in the Coaching Inn Company

This paper discusses employee resistance to the emotional labour of face-to-face service work. It identifies a difficulty with the extension of the concept of resistance from the more traditional manufacturing industries to service work, asking how far apparently resistant behaviours can sensibly be conceptualised as a challenge to management control of the labour process. This difficulty is explored through a discussion of data drawn from ethnographic research into a chain of public houses. Various forms of resistant behaviour are identified, although the precise nature of this resistance is often blurred by the complex relations between employee, management and customer.     

Focus Groups and the Development of New Products by Technologically Driven Companies: A Comment

Market research information often helps to reduce uncertainty in many new product decisions. Yet, each research technique has both strengths and weaknesses in terms of its ability to aid decision makers. Daniel Seymour responds to a recent Journal of Product Innovation Management article in which the benefits of focus group research were examined. By enumerating and describing the major limitations of the technique, a more informed choice of research approaches may be embraced.     

Forced compliance in family decision-making

‘Forced compliance,’ a situation in which a person engages in a behavior that he or she would normally deem as inappropriate, is used in this study to examine conflict resolution in family decision-making. Specific hypotheses related to a major purchase decision are tested in a field study. The results indicate that those husbands or wives who have been forced to engage in counterattitudinal behaviors find numerous ways to justify their inconsistencies.     

Foreign Exchange Controls and the Parallel Market Premium

This paper studies the relationship between the official and parallel exchange rates, using cointegration, Granger causality, and reduced form methods on data from three Caribbean countries, Jamaica, Guyana, and Trinidad & Tobago, for the period 1985–93. Where the central bank follows a passive policy of infrequent and large adjustments to the official rate, changes in the official rate Granger causes changes in the parallel rate, and larger disparities prevail between the two rates. Foreign exchange controls, expansionary fiscal and monetary policy, and changes of government mostly have a positive effect on the parallel market premium, with foreign exchange controls exerting the strongest impact.     

Volume and turn-of-the-year behavior

This paper studies the trading characteristics of listed companies by size, and year-end behavior. There were no transactions on nearly 25% of the days for the smallest decile even at the turn of year which is an active trading period for small companies. As a result of low levels of trading and the regulations governing exchange specialists, transaction prices and quotations of small listed companies may require several days to fully reflect equilibrium price changes. The data confirm the existence of a year-end seasonal pattern in rates of return for small companies and suggest that there may be a seasonal pattern for large companies as well.     

Experimental bias: Task,tools, and time

In any experiment, control over all possible variables affecting the response is rarely, if ever, possible. Even in a laboratory setting it is difficult to control all variables which might conceivably affect the outcome. This study identifies three variables—task relevancy, tool availability, and time allocation as variables which have potentially reactive effects in laboratory experiments. The authors gratefully acknowledge the helpful comments of Gerald Albaum and Donald Messmer.     

Hermeneutic phenomenology and international entrepreneurship research

It is not uncommon for business researchers to avoid discussion associated with the philosophy of science. In this paper, it is argued that this avoidance weakens the quality and insightfulness of entrepreneurship and international entrepreneurship research, which by definition should be concerned with human action and activity. This paper explores the implications of alternative research philosophies and argues that a dichotomy between objective and subjective meaning is manifestly inadequate for the study of opportunity recognition and exploitation and by implication for many other problems of international entrepreneurship research. In response, hermeneutic phenomenology is proposed as an underutilized, misunderstood, yet highly relevant research paradigm.