Telling tales: online comic and gripe story‐sharing by service workers about difficult customers

The article extends previous research on the storying practices of service workers, workplace humour as resistance, and workers’ autonomous use of social media. Discussion strings from two hairstylist forum storylines, exemplifying comic and tragic story‐sharing about difficult customers, were analysed using Gabriel's notion of story‐work. Processes of coping, entertainment, identity‐construction and learning are clearly evident in the discussion strings and social media is confirmed as a ‘new’ terrain for the enactment of employee agency. Findings emphasize that service workers are engaged in contradictory and ambiguous relations of resistance and accommodation as they learn how to deal with difficult customers. The article's contribution is to show how service workers share their fears and anxieties about difficult customers through storying and humour in generative dialogical poietic processes in social media. Further research is suggested.     

A hybrid selection model for emerging technology

Technology selection, which influences the advantages of an enterprise or a country, is a multi-criteria decision issue that can be improved by integrating different methods. In addition, it is more and more difficult to identify the right technologies because the technologies are increasing in number and complexity. This study proposes a technology selection process integrating fuzzy Delphi method, analytic hierarchy process (AHP), and patent co-citation approach (PCA) for technology selection. The former effectively gathers experts' judgments toward technology selection criteria and conducts the fuzziness existing in their responses. The analytic hierarchy process has the strength of identifying criteria and obtaining their relationship and their weights. The patent co-citation approach identifies the major R&D fields of a specific technology from patent data. Through this proposed process, the key technology fields can be identified in the end. The organic light emitting diode (OLED) technology in Taiwan is used to be an example to illustrate the proposed technology selection process.     

The Influence of Love of Money and Religiosity on Ethical Decision-Making in Marketing

The impact of “love of money” on different aspects of consumers’ ethical beliefs has been investigated by previous research. In this study we investigate the potential impact of “love of money” on a manager’s ethical decision-making in marketing. Another objective of the current study is to investigate the potential impacts of extrinsic and intrinsic religiosity on ethical marketing decision-making. We also include ethical judgments as an element of ethical decision-making. We found “love of money”, both dimensions of religiosity, and ethical judgment to have significant impacts on ethical intentions in a marketing situation. In addition to providing an important contribution to the business ethics literature, the findings also have important managerial implications.     

A model of creative design process for fostering creativity of students in design education

Creativity, which is concerned with problem solving, is essential if we are to generate new solutions to the massive and complex problems in the unknown future. Our next generation needs an educational platform where they can be taught to possess creativity. Design education is such a way to foster students’ creativity. Therefore, it is essential to understand the creative design process and its routine in order to show how students can generate creative output and how teachers can guide students in the design process. Consequently, the aim of this paper is to investigate the creative design process as it is employed in producing creative designs, and further recommend how students can practise and learn to be creative based on the model process developed in this paper. The model is expected to provide a guideline for teachers to facilitate students along the creative thinking process.     

Canadian Agricultural Programs and Paradigms:The Influence of International Trade Agreements and Domestic Factors

Tracing developments over the past two decades with respect to Canadian farm income support, orderly grain marketing, and supply management, this article argues that Canadian agricultural policy has undergone programmatic, but not paradigmatic policy change. International trade agreements, alongside domestic factors like budgetary pressures, have helped to promote programmatic change. However, paradigmatic change in the form of a rejection of the core ideas and instruments of the post Second World War state assistance paradigm has not yet occurred. The article discusses the conditions for paradigmatic change and argues that the state assistance paradigm is likely to prevail until influential decision makers becoming convinced of its failure and judge an alternate paradigm to be politically and economically viable. Un examen des changements survenus sur le plan du soutien du revenu agricole au cours des vingt dernières années, notamment la commercialisation des grains et la gestion de l'offre, indique que la politique agricole canadienne a subi des changements programmatiques et non paradigmatiques. Les accords de commerce internationaux, combinés à des facteurs intérieurs tels que les pressions budgétaires, ont contribuéà la promotion de changements programmatiques. Cependant, le changement paradigmatique sous la forme du rejet des idées et des instruments de base d'aide de l'État après la Seconde Guerre mondiale ne s'est pas encore produit. Le présent article traite des conditions préalables au changement paradigmatique et soutient que le paradigme de l'aide de l'État continuera probablement d'exister jusqu'à ce que des décideurs influents soient convaincus de son échec et estiment qu'un paradigme de rechange pourrait être politiquement et économiquement viable.     

On a multivariate Markov chain model for credit risk measurement

In this paper, we use credibility theory to estimate credit transition matrices in a multivariate Markov chain model for credit rating. A transition matrix is estimated by a linear combination of the prior estimate of the transition matrix and the empirical transition matrix. These estimates can be easily computed by solving a set of linear programming (LP) problems. The estimation procedure can be implemented easily on Excel spreadsheets without requiring much computational effort and time. The number of parameters is O(s² m² ), where s is the dimension of the categorical time series for credit ratings and m is the number of possible credit ratings for a security. Numerical evaluations of credit risk measures based on our model are presented.     

Residents' Perceptions Toward the “Chinese Tourists' Wave” in Hong Kong: An Exploratory Study

Mainland China experienced an extraordinary progress in its economy in the past two decades which directly stimulates more outbound travels. Considering the geographical proximity and political ties between Hong Kong and Mainland China, the share of inbound tourists to Hong Kong has been, and will continuously be, largely occupied by Mainland Chinese tourists on an uprising basis. The phenomenon of the “Chinese tourists' wave”, operationalizing as the influx of tourists from Mainland China, has brought tremendous change on Hong Kong's tourism industry, economy and local community. It is, thus, of necessity to understand the perceptions and response toward this phenomenon from local residents' perspective as they are the stakeholders of local tourism. Drawing on the findings from three focus group interviews with 18 Hong Kong residents, three conventional dimensions, namely “Economic”, “Social-cultural” and “Environmental” were identified and discussed to demonstrate the local residents' perceptions toward the impact of “Chinese tourists' wave” phenomenon. Generally, residents tend to recognize the positive economic impacts as well as negative social–cultural and environmental impacts generated from this tourism phenomenon. The recommendations suggested in this study also serve as a reference for tourism authorities concerned to redress the existing problems.     

The Applicability of the MACH IV Scale to Banking Executives in Hong Kong,Singapore and Australia: A Research Note

This study attempts to extend the four-factor MACH IV scale for cruel, exploitative, deceitful behaviours (Machiavellianism), designed in a North American and university student context, to the competitive business environment in the Asia-Pacific region: Hong Kong, Singapore, and Australia. A confirmatory factory analysis, with listwise deletion of missing data, is performed on the responses from 454 Hong Kong, 108 Singaporean and 94 Australian banking executives. The results suggest that the factor structure of the Machiavellianism scale is only confirmed in the Hong Kong sample, but not that of Singapore and Australia.