中国经济政策推动下的脱钩：调高2009年-2010年预测

编者按:摩根士丹利研究部(亚洲/太平洋)于2009年7月1 6日发布了题为<中国经济政策推动下的脱钩:调高2009年-2010年预测>的最新研究报告.征得作者同意,本刊选取了该报告的核心部分予以整理并发表,供读者参考.     

The UK National (and Scottish) Vocational Qualification System: State of the Art or in a State?

The creation of a new competence-based framework of National (and Scottish) Vocational Qualifications (N/SVQs) in the UK has been fraught with difficulties and the ensuing debate has sharply divided those involved in education and training. Some argue that the N/SVQs are doomed to failure because the underlying philosophy is fundamentally flawed or see their introduction as part of a political conspiracy of the right to wrest power away from liberal educationalists; others see national standards and N/SVQs as a way of ensuring that education and training better meet the needs of employment; a few hold on to the original idealistic vision of opening up access to qualifications and giving credit where credit is due, especially for those workers who have been disadvantaged in the education system. Early implementation has been puncuated by scandals and, with a few notable exceptions such as the Care Sector, take-up rates have fallen well below what is necessary for achievement of National Education and Training Targets for the year 2000. In 1996, the publication of three major reviews of 16–19 qualifications, of assessment in General National/Vocational Qualifications and of the top 100 most commonly used N/SQVs, marked a crisis in confidence in the emerging UK system. Yet variations on the outcomes-based approach established by NCVQ/SCOTVEC are increasingly finding favour in the European Union and in New Zealand, Australia and the new South Africa, not least because they hold out the promise of greater transparency for all stakeholders. Extensive changes are now anticipated but they may be too little too late to get this radical innovation back on course.     

A Proposed Model for Consumer-Based Brand Equity Analysis on Social Media Using Data Mining and Social Network Analysis

Online social networks have expanded their “virtual borders,” making the Internet more like an environment of social interaction than a business tool. However, even before the emergence and expansion of social media, marketing professionals were interested in identifying consumers' perceptions about brands. Thus, operational models have been proposed to facilitate such a task. Those models, however, can be expensive and inconvenient, since the models use questionnaires for data collection. To help overcome this problem, this article proposes a model for brand equity analysis from the consumer perspective expressed in social networks using opinion mining techniques and social network analysis. The application of the proposed model on data collected from Twitter made it possible to analyze five brand equity dimensions: brand awareness, brand loyalty, perceived sentiment, perceived quality, and brand associations. The results reached by the application of the model show that brand equity can be analyzed from data retrieved from virtual social networks, disclosing how consumers perceive brands in such an environment, without using questionnaires, enabling different brands in different contexts. Those data can be analyzed under both objective and replicable criteria for each of the brand equity elements that make up the model.     

Compound Voids and Unproductive Entrepreneurship: The Rise of the “English Fever” in China

China has emerged as an economic power due, in part, to government policies that opened China to the world and created a modern consumer culture. One of these policies is the advancement of English-language education, including private providers, which has spawned the “English Fever” phenomenon. We use the unique context of the private English-language education industry in China to illustrate the concept of “compound (institutional) voids” and their relationship to unproductive entrepreneurship. Our contribution is in untangling some of the complexities related to institutional relationships, and in describing how compound voids increase the likelihood of rent-seeking behavior.     

The Effect of Technology Readiness on Customers' Attitudes toward Self-Service Technology and Its Adoption; The Empirical Study of U.S. Airline Self-Service Check-In Kiosks

Airline self-service check-in kiosks are increasingly becoming an option for today's passengers. This article aims to develop a model, using the technology readiness (TR) construct, to predict passenger's intentions to use a self-service check-in kiosk. Structural Equation Modeling is applied to determine the validity of the model and the hypotheses. The findings show that TR has a positive effect on attitudes toward kiosks, attitudes toward the kiosk provider, and overall intentions to use a kiosk. Interestingly, attitudes toward kiosks positively affect attitude toward the kiosk provider. Further research recommends using cross-cultural data.     

Hospitality Staff Attitudes to Guests with Impaired Mobility: The Potential of Education as an Agent of Attitudinal Change

This study aims to determine whether the attitudes of students (and therefore future employers) towards people with physical disabilities can be modified by exposing them to the needs of disabled people, or whether perceptions of the needs of the disabled are too entrenched for education to effect any change. It also evaluates whether attitudinal changes are enduring and therefore continue to influence students' responses to the disabled after a period of time has elapsed.     

Job preferences of students and new graduates in nursing

This article investigates the preferences of student and newly graduated nurses for pecuniary and nonpecuniary aspects of nursing jobs. It is the first study applying methods based on discrete choice experiments to a developed country nursing workforce. It is also the first to focus on the transition through university training and into work. This is particularly important as junior nurses have the lowest retention levels in the profession. We sample 526 individuals from nursing programmes in two Australian universities. Flexible and newly developed models combining heteroscedasticity with unobserved heterogeneity in scale and preference weights are estimated. Overall, salary remains the most important feature in increasing the probability that a job will be selected. ‘Supportive management/staff’ and ‘quality of care’ follow as the most important attributes from a list of 11 nonpecuniary characteristics. However, the subset of new graduates rank ‘supportive management/staff’ above salary increases, emphasizing the importance of a supportive workplace in the transition from university to the workplace. We find substantial preference heterogeneity and some attributes, such as the opportunity for clinical rotations, are found to be attractive to some nurses while seen as negative by others. Nursing retention could be improved by designing different employment packages to appeal to these different tastes.     

Wealth Distribution and Imperfect Factor Markets: A Classroom Experiment

The author presents a simple exercise to demonstrate how initial property distribution can affect final wealth patterns in developing areas of the world. The simulation is a variant of the Monopoly board game in which students role play different members of a market in which they each face different rules of credit access and salary patterns. The property distribution and new mortgage rules reflect the reality of many developing areas. The simulation can be completed in one full class period and has proven successful in making students more sensitive to wealth distribution issues. Students have suggested several variations of this simulation to make it applicable across more settings.     

Advisory Councils in Franchising: Advancing a Theory-Based Typology

There is limited empirical data on the roles associated with Franchise Advisory Councils (FACs) yet much time, money, and energy is spent on these quasi-governing bodies. This qualitative research study combines a series of semistructured interviews with franchisors and franchisees who are part of systems with and without FACs, data from case studies involving interviews, and participant observations of FAC meetings and conference calls. The results identified four core roles FACs perform (i.e., supporting, partnering, representing, and monitoring) and uses a multitheoretical perspective to advance a typology to explain franchisor–franchisee dynamics within FACs.     

Social franchising: A systematic review

Abstract

Social franchising is starting to garner more interest among researchers and practitioners as a replication approach used to help address a growing array of societal issues in both developed countries and emerging economies. While there has been a proliferation of experimentation with social franchising that is occurring on the global stage, the knowledge base remains fragmented. A comprehensive review of the empirical and practitioner literature has not been done. This article fills the void by reviewing the past decade of literature and will be of interest to governments, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), philanthropists, social impact investors, corporations devoted to social goals, and other key players who support the scaling up or replication of ventures that strive to address societal ills by creating pathways to health and prosperity.