The way forward: Leadership research in the hospitality industry

This paper constructs a framework for researching leadership in the hospitality industry and reviews previous approaches to hospitality leadership. Four paradigms were constructed from an analysis of the general field of leadership and are used to represent the underlying perspectives of researchers who operate within them. As a result of this analysis the paper seeks to demonstrate how each paradigm can contribute to the application of leadership theory to the hospitality industry and provides a number of new avenues for future research.     

Durability Versus Concentration as an Explanation for Price Inflexibility

We document the extent of price rigidity across United States manufacturing industries in the 1980s and early 1990s and compare rigidity across different phases of the business cycle. We measure price rigidity in three ways – each under four different sets of assumptions. We take an approach that relies on disaggregated data; we look at price patterns for over 4000 individual manufactured commodities. Both durability and seller concentration are found to be important factors explaining differences in price rigidity across industrial product classes. Using our data, we replicate the regression results found in Carlton (1986) that were based on actual transaction prices from the 1960s.     

Who's to blame? Counterfactual reasoning and the assignment of blame

The role of counterfactual reasoning and the assignment of blame within a context involving product failure, personal injury, and luck was examined. In the first study, it was determined that directing attention to the focal individual in an event increased the perceived mutability of that individual's actions in an exceptional circumstance but not in a common circumstance. Study 2 explored how the availability of different counterfactual alternatives influenced assignments of blame for a negative outcome. The results of this experiment showed that presenting information that directed attention to the focal individual increased the mutability of that individual's actions, which in turn, increased the blame observers assigned to that individual. However, this assertion needs to be qualified; when attention was already focused on the focal individual, directing further attention to that person seemed to have little additional impact. © 1997 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.     

E‐learning: emerging uses,empirical results and future directions

The use of network technology to deliver training is the latest trend in the training and development industry and has been heralded as the ‘e‐learning revolution.’ In an effort to separate hype from reality, this paper reviews practitioner and research literature on e‐learning, incorporating unpublished information from interviews with managers and consultants directly involved in e‐learning initiatives. Specific attention is given to why organizations use e‐learning, what the potential drawbacks to e‐learning are, what we know from research about e‐learning and what the future of e‐learning may hold.     

A typology of solo independent women travellers

This paper aims to profile solo independent women travellers in Tropical North Queensland, describe their key motivations for travel and behaviours, and locate this group on a typology of solo independent travellers in Australia. Previous research has painted solo independent women at one end of a travel spectrum as fearful and risk‐adverse and at another end, as risk‐takers who have few concerns about safety within the destination. This analysis is based on visitor surveys completed over 21 months at Cairns Airport (n = 2,618). The results indicated that solo independent women travellers (n = 228) felt safe in the destination and participated in a wide variety of activities including those with some degree of risk. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Florence Nightingale Endures: Legitimizing a New Professional Role Identity

We examined the discursive processes through which a new professional role identity for registered nurses was legitimized by analysing introductory textbooks over time. We theorize five ways of rhetorically legitimizing a new professional role identity: naturalizing the past, normalizing new meanings, altering identity referents, connecting with the institutional environment, and referencing authority. In contrast to previous research focused on legitimizing new practices, we contribute to the institutional literature by showing that legitimizing a professional role identity requires the incremental development of new arguments where the past is not delegitimized. Our findings also indicate that instead of a progression from moral and pragmatic legitimacy to cognitive legitimacy, legitimizing a new role identity may focus only on moral legitimacy. Finally, our study highlights the importance of interactions between the professional task environment and the wider institutional environment as part of the process of legitimizing a professional role identity.     

Perspectives on evaluation in financial education: Landscape,issues, and studies

This review discusses the heterogeneity in the effectiveness of financial education programs that occurs because of the unique conditions for programs and methods to evaluate them. The authors define six groups served by financial education: children, youth, college students and young adults, working adults, military personnel, and low-income consumers. They then discuss research and evaluation literature for each group with a critical eye on program purpose, content, and evaluation. They also present findings affecting multiple groups on four issues: student loans, homeownership, retirement planning, and financial advising. The accumulated evidence on the effectiveness of financial education is positive, although the results are nuanced and sometimes limited. The authors argue that understanding this broad landscape in studying financial education is critical for future research and evaluation.     

Firms' decisions to innovate and innovation routines

This article investigates the forces that lead some firms to engage in more innovative activities than others using a survey of 360 large Australian firms. Many earlier studies on the determinants of innovation followed the Schumpeterian tradition, and focused on size and market structure as possible causes of innovativeness; however, with the event of new qualitative measures of industry knowledge and managerial styles, these factors have been found to be less important. The results of the present study show that external factors and generic routines common to all industries, such as the extent of learning, knowledge spillovers, appropriability and managerial approach are more important than industry specific forces. Locally-owned companies were also found to be more innovative, other things considered.     

Sex Differentials in Earnings in the South Korean Labor Market

We examine gender differences in earnings among South Korean workers in 1988 – the year the South Korean National Assembly enacted the Equal Employment Opportunity Act. Using the "88 Occupational Wage Bargaining Survey on the Actual Condition," we calculate women's mean earnings as a percentage of men's mean earnings by major industrial category and educational attainment. We find a larger wage gap among clerical and sales workers than production workers or professionals. Generally, the more education a woman has, the smaller the gap between her earnings and those of her male counterparts. Women with a middle-school education have a mean income 53.5 percent that of comparable men, while the female-to-male wage ratio among college graduates is 76.1 percent. We analyze wage differences separately for women and men. Following Ronald Oaxaca's (1973) work, we decompose male–female wage differentials. We also calculate a discrimination coefficient. Our work shows that, all else equal, men earn from 33.6 percent to 46.9 percent more than women with comparable skills. We attribute the difference to gender discrimination.