Demystifying the impact of self-indulgence and self-control on customer-employee rapport and customer happiness

Past research mostly ignores the link between customers' purchase orientations and their engagement with frontline service employees. This paper addresses this gap by using socio-emotional selectivity theory to investigate the effects of customers’ self-indulgence/control on their rapport building efforts with frontline service employees and on their own happiness. It also explores the moderating effects of age, gender and shopping day on the impact of self-indulgence/control on happiness. Data from 252 Australian customers shows that self-control has no significant influence on rapport or happiness while rapport and self-indulgence positively affect happiness. Finally, all the moderating effects only find partial support.     

Institutionalising multiple accountability logics in public services: Insights from Australia

This paper reports on a field study of how a range of inter-institutional and inter-organisational forces shape the evolving rhetoric and practice of multiple accountabilities in public services. Drawing on the institutional logics perspective, we carried out a qualitative field study in the Australian Commonwealth Public Service involving semi-structured interviews, two focus group discussions, and the examination of internal accounting, management reports, and government archival records. The findings suggest that emphasis on conventional instrumental mechanisms and reporting tools, such as budgeting and accrual-based reporting, support managerial (instrumental) accountability through compliance logics. We conclude that an emphasis on public (relational) accountability through public dialogue is central to the public sector accountability debate, and that more attention needs to be paid to the question of how to balance the dual logics (instrumental and relational) in public services. The findings provide practical insights for public sector managers, policymakers and governments responsible for designing and implementing reforms, accounting tools, and accountability practices.     

Impacts of Australia’s free trade agreements on trade in agricultural products: an aggregative and disaggregative analysis

The importance of free trade agreements (FTAs) has been increasing as such agreements help reduce barriers to trade. This paper estimates the agricultural trade creation and export diversion effects of Australia’s free trade agreements (FTAs) at the aggregate and disaggregate levels, using the Poisson pseudo‐maximum‐likelihood (PPML) estimator. It includes 24 of Australia’s major trading partner countries comprising FTA and non‐FTA members and covers 22 years from 1996 to 2017. The heteroscedasticity robust regression error specification test (RESET) confirms the relevance of PPML over the Ordinary Least Square (OLS) estimator. Results showed that China–Australia, Korea–Australia, Australia–USA and Japan–Australia have larger trade creation effects in the agricultural sector. At the commodity level, variation in trade creation effects is estimated from the different trade agreements. Among the selected commodities, the larger effects were generated in trade in sugar and wine by the implementation of the majority of the trade agreements. Overall, the trade creation was greater than the export diversion of the FTAs. The findings of the study have implications for Australia’s future trade agreements.     

Strategic insider trading around earnings announcements in Australia

This paper tests, within the Australian setting, whether directors strategically time trades in their own firms, around earnings announcements, in the context of impediments to trading in the immediately preceding period. I show that both signed and unsigned trade activity are insignificantly different from zero in the preceding period, and significantly negative and positive after the event. Further, directors in Australia significantly sell following positive earnings news, and buy after negative news, providing evidence of ‘indirect’ trading. Directors’ trades in the longer-term pre-announcement period are also negatively related to the news content sentiment, contrary to expectation. Finally, I find evidence of positive autocorrelation between directors’ trades over the longer-term past, and those executed after earnings announcements, which, in the absence of the ‘short-swing’ rule in Australia, casts doubt over short-term strategic insider trading, more generally.     

Investigating the Drivers of Consumer Acceptance and Response of SMS Advertising

This study tests five potential drivers underlying the acceptance of SMS advertising. After developing a scale to measure behavioral responses to SMS advertising, the relationships between the acceptance of SMS advertising, intention to receive SMS advertising and behavioral responses to SMS advertising are tested. A convenience sampling method was employed. Survey questionnaires were distributed across Western Australia. The return yielded 203 usable questionnaires from the respondents. Several factors emerge as significant drivers of acceptance of SMS advertising including utility of SMS advertisements, context of SMS advertisements and attitudes to advertising in general. Contrary to expectation, control over SMS advertisements did not emerge as a significant driver for acceptance of SMS advertising. Trust in advertisers and laws did not emerge as a significant driver of the acceptance of SMS advertising among Australian respondents. Advertisers who pursue consumer acceptance should strive to build utility and context considerations into their SMS campaigns. Future research opportunities include testing the drivers of SMS advertising to further investigate the impact of control and trust on acceptance of SMS advertising in other countries where the SMS advertising has not been explored yet.     

The importance of farmer education in South Australia

There is a significant challenge involved with balancing food security at local and global levels whilst mitigating the environmental and social consequences of the historically productivist agri-food system. This work will address the importance of education in the South Australian agricultural sector as a tool to maximise beneficial outcomes. The results of a blended method research project, which involved farmers and governance stakeholders in South Australia, are presented as empirical evidence highlighting the positive roles that formal education, in particular university education, have in regard to increasing sustainability. It was found that higher levels of formal education contributed to farmers being more likely to prioritise the socio-environmental outcomes of their agricultural land use. There was also a dramatic reduction in farmer concerns with government support mechanisms as education levels went from secondary or less, through to vocational qualifications, and finally university degrees. Interviews with agricultural governance stakeholders emphasised the role of education in building the adaptive capacity of farmers, and the subsequent positive outcomes for the future development of the South Australian agricultural industry. These results suggest that further education provides farmers with the capacity to compete effectively in a liberalised economy.     

Service Quality Measures in Vietnam and Australia

Abstract

Satisfied customers are vital to creating and maintaining a sustainable advantage in the highly competitive business environment that applies today. Other forms of competitive advantage are easily lost, or copied by competitors. Consequently, customer satisfaction and service quality have been of considerable interest to researchers and practitioners alike over the last two decades, and a substantial body of formal academic work has emerged to address these issues. However, comparatively little work has been done to date in studying what managers of businesses actually do in practice to measure, and consequently manage, their customer satisfaction and service quality, and there has been even less work done on international differences in perceptions of these attributes. This paper reports the results of a comparative study of managers' perceptions of their customers' opinions of service quality in Australia (as an example of a developed country, 318 responses) and Vietnam (as an example of a country in transition from central control, 49 responses).     

The effects of mid-career military enlistment on civilian career prospects: evidence from the Australian banking industry during World War II

This paper uses personnel records of employees from an Australian bank to analyse the labour market consequences of career interruptions due to voluntary military service during the Second World War. The records contain the employees’ career position and pay histories, and pre-war outcomes are used to control for selection bias caused by non-random enlistment. It is shown that, despite losing human capital during the War, upon their return veterans did not face a wage penalty relative to non-volunteers. Finally, evidence from non-wage outcomes suggests that the absence of a wage penalty was a form of positive discrimination by the Bank.

澳洲多元文化共融对义乌的启示

随着国际贸易的不断发展,义乌多元文化交流格局已形成,且现阶段义乌在政治管理、经济、文化教育生活等多元文化交流活动中取得了一系列的成就,但毫不借鉴外国多元文化政策的宝贵经验仅凭自身不断摸索涌现出来的不和谐因素也是不能忽视的。澳洲政府所推行的一系列多元文化政策在澳洲获得了成功实践且蜚声国际,这对义乌多元文化建设借鉴意义重大。     

In Vino ‘No’ Veritas: impacts of fraud on wine imports in China

China is one of the largest wine importing countries in the world and is poised for continued import growth in the future. Increased wine purchases throughout China have given rise to persistent fraud where fake wines are packaged and sold with counterfeit contents and labels. For exporting countries like France, counterfeit wines displace market share, damage foreign brand reputation, and cause distrust in consumers who are aware of counterfeiting problems throughout the country. We examine the impact of fraudulent wine events (as measured by negative media reports) on Chinese wine demand differentiated by supplying country. We employ the Rotterdam demand system and a switching regression procedure to estimate import demand and compare results across different media variable specifications. Results consistently show that negative reports disproportionately affect French wine regardless of how the media variable is specified. This is not surprising because most fraudulent events involve French wine counterfeits.