‘Everybody's talking at me’: the dynamics of information disclosure and consultation in high‐skill workplaces in the UK

This article examines the dynamics of direct and indirect consultation processes in three high‐skill work establishments in the UK. Drawing on a mix of case study survey and interview data, it analyses the experiences and attitudes of predominantly well‐qualified professional employees. Adopting the concept of ‘embeddedness’ of employee consultation at the workplace level, we find that despite considerable breadth and depth of practice, many employees remain dissatisfied with the extent of their individual and collective influence over management decision‐making processes. Four underlying contributory factors are presented: extant hierarchical and bureaucratic management styles, the negative impact of work overload, the individualisation of consultation through computerisation, and the weakness of cooperative forms of union engagement.     

Consumer perceptions of higher and lower-level designed store environments

The role and influence of esthetics in the consumption of store environments remains poorly understood. Little is known about how esthetics propose substantial or adjunctive roles in consumers’ store experiences. The aim of this paper is to examine consumer perceptions of store design-architecture in high and low-level design contexts. Building on the esthetics, and environmental psychology literatures, our findings confirm consumers’ determinations of perceptual differences in the esthetic content contained in presented store environmental stimuli. Latent means comparisons confirm consumers’ perceptions of the presence of a high-level design in one fast-fashion store with a low-level design of a second store of the same retailer using a Confirmatory Factor Analysis. The results demonstrate the reliability and validity of the proposed constructs in confirming the presence of higher and low-levels of design. This research, thus, expands on the extant number of store specification and response constructs and prospectively opens up new lines of store environments research.     

A Ranking of the Most Productive Business Ethics Scholars: A Five-Year Study

This paper presents the results of a study that counted articles and the number of pages written on business ethics and published during the five-year period 1995–1999. Individual scholars were ranked on the basis of total articles and total pages published. Institutions were also ranked based on the number of pages and articles their scholars published in selected business ethics journals. This article is the first one to rank schools and individual scholars on the basis of research productivity in business ethics.     

Customer satisfaction and customer behavior: The differential role of brand and category expectations

Previous research has suggested that consumers use multiple strands to evaluate their satisfaction with a product and to establish postpurchase behavioral intention. However, prior empirical research has focused on which individual standard best predicts satisfaction. In contrast, this article develops and tests a model of consumer satisfaction and postpurchase behavioral intention in which consumers simultaneously use multiple standards—perceptions of performance, brand expectations, and category expectations. The results of an experiment for a simulated service encounter provide support for the proposition that consumers use multiple standards and that these standards have differential effects on such postpurchase outcomes as satisfaction, repurchase intention, and willingness to recommend. Brand expectations are shown to be better predictors of affective outcomes (such as satisfaction), while category expectations are shown to be better predictors of behavioral outcomes (repurchase and recommendation). Consistent with prior research, perceived performance is shown to have a strong effect on both satisfaction and behavioral intention.     

Trade Gains in Chaotic Equilibria

It is shown by means of an overlapping-generations (OLG) example that free international trade may be both deterministically chaotic and gainful in the sense of Pareto to a participating country.     

IMPOVERISHING TECHNICAL AND PREFERENTIAL IMPROVEMENTS

Abstract.  Edgeworth showed that a free-trading country might be impoverished by its own technical improvements if they are confined to the export industry and if no good is inferior in consumption. More recently it has been shown that improvements confined to the country's import competing industry can never be impoverishing if, in that country, no commodity is inferior in consumption. However, in all available proofs of these propositions, it has been assumed that for each country there exists an autarkic equilibrium. It will be shown that, without that assumption, the second proposition must be severely qualified.