The role of home economics in agricultural extension

Home economics could play a vital, supportive and complementary role in agricultural extension. Home economics training is, however, in much need of reorientation if the profession is to play this much‐needed role. A comparison of the mission statements, foci and roles of these disciplines illustrates the value of including home economists in agricultural extension teams. The two professions have areas of similarity, but each also has specialist expertise vital to agricultural development. As a multidisciplinary, female‐dominated profession, home economics is able to assist agricultural extension officers in designing extension programmes which suit the needs of women farmers. The article outlines the areas of collaboration, specialist expertise and cooperation between the two professions while questioning the focus of traditional home economics training.     

Motives for Giving: A Reanalysis of Two Classic Public Goods Experiments

Experimental work in economics prompted the development of theories of other‐regarding behavior. In this article we reanalyze two classic public goods experiments and focus on the nature of individuals' responses to others' behavior in order to help distinguish alternative motives for giving, including altruism, warm glow, reciprocity, and inequality aversion. Analysis that allows for asymmetric feedback responses generates support for inequality aversion motives but little for reciprocity (matching), altruism, and warm glow. We conclude that individual‐level analysis of existing public goods data can provide more insightful, informative estimates of treatment effects.     

The challenges facing empirical estimation of household food (in)security in South Africa

This paper sets out to describe current principle theoretical positions in food security research, describe and compare empirical South African food security studies with key international methodologies and pose research challenges for food security research in the country. Scant available food security studies for South Africa seem to indicate that food insecurity and hunger exist and are likely to increase due to increasing food price trends, greater reliance on cash food purchases and spiralling vulnerability as a result of HIV/AIDS morbidity and mortality. Empirical research is urgently needed to determine the coping strategies of households under ‘normal’ conditions, identify vulnerable households, and monitor the impact of various shocks and stresses on household food security.     

Service provision for street-based traders in Pietermaritzburg,KwaZulu-Natal: comparing local findings to lessons drawn from Africa and Asia

South Africa's informal economy absorbs approximately one-quarter of the labour force of 15 million people and is therefore the fastest growing sector of employment. Street-based trading constitutes a major subsector within the informal economy and is continuously expanding through unrelenting proliferation of survivalist micro-enterprises. However, few organisations that support enterprises are accessible or appropriate to survivalist and informal sector micro-enterprises. Interviews were conducted with 98 Pietermaritzburg street-based traders and ten KwaZulu-Natal service providers to determine service provision requirements. The results are compared with findings of four international studies. The findings suggest that for survivalist enterprises to benefit from entrepreneurial education and training services, obstacles with regard to South African traders' understanding of entrepreneurship and cultural limitations to enterprise growth should be overcome. Service institutions also require incentives to serve the informal sector, as well as the capacity to design and deliver appropriate services.     

Evaluating ecotourism: The case of North Sulawesi, Indonesia

Ecotourism can contribute to both conservation and development and involves, as a minimum, positive synergistic relationships between tourism, biodiversity and local people, facilitated by appropriate management. This paper applies a framework for the development and evaluation of ecotourism to three protected areas in North Sulawesi. Due to its spectacular endemic biodiversity, the potential for providing quality nature experiences in North Sulawesi is high and tourism development is occurring rapidly. Site-level evaluations of ecotourism in three protected areas were performed to illustrate the application and the utility of the framework as a tool for evaluation and to assess the status of tourism in North Sulawesi. It is revealed that current relationships between people, resources and tourism in North Sulawesi have yet to provide the mutual benefits necessary for successful ecotourism. The approach and framework used to arrive at these conclusions have wide applicability for assessing the achievements of ecotourism at specific sites and for directing appropriate management strategies for ecotourism in protected areas.     

Lodging Managers' Perceptions of Work and Personal Life: Balanced or Imbalanced?

ABSTRACT

This study serves two main purposes: (1) to assess lodging managers' perceptions of difficulties and success in balancing their personal and work lives, and (2) to investigate if lodging managers' work interferes with or is enhanced by their personal lives, or vice versa. The results indicate that most lodging managers believe that they have struck a satisfactory balance between their work and personal lives. This study identifies the respective bidirectional effects of the interaction between work and personal life. Personal life boundaries are more permeable to work demands than work boundaries are to personal life demands.     

The relationship between attitudes toward diversity management in the Southwest USA and the GLOBE study cultural preferences

This study investigates the importance of diversity management as it relates to the GLOBE study cultural preferences. A survey of 225 students in undergraduate and graduate programs at a private Texas University concluded that collectivism was a strong predictor of how positively participants rated their organizations support for diversity, diversity recruitment efforts, diversity training for mentors, and employees with disabilities. The participants were nontraditional students who were also employed in a wide array of organizations. Collectivism and assertiveness were both strong predictors with regard to participant's ratings of chief executive officer (CEO) support of diversity and the organization's overall diversity training. With regard to leadership dimensions, humane-oriented leadership was a positive predictor of preference for a collective culture, which predicts diversity management ratings. Team-oriented leadership also predicted ratings of diversity management. The results of the study indicate that promoting a more collectivist rather than individualistic culture is associated with the increased rating of organizational diversity practices. Furthermore, it strengthens the argument that with the increase in globalization, organizations must be prepared to re-evaluate their policies and know when to adapt to changes in organizational culture.     

Yield management: A tool for capacity-considered service firms

Airlines typically sell their seats for a variety of different fares. If customers make reservations early, low fares might be available, but if customers call at the last minute, they will probably have to pay the full fare. Since deregulation, early all airlines have been using a technique called yield management. Yield management allows the airlines to allocate their fixed capacity of seats in the most profitable manner possible. Since the airline's inventory of seats is perishable, the airlines must have a method of quickly and accurately allocating potential demand to capacity. The airline industry has been in the forefront of using management, but yield management has potential application to any firm constrained by capacity. Other services which have adopted yield management include the lodging, rental car, delivery service, rail and cruise line industries.The objective of yield management is to maximize the revenue or yield of the firm. A good yield management system will help the firm decide how much of each type of inventory (whether it be seats on an airplane, rooms in a hotel, or cars in a rental car fleet) to allocate to different types of demand. This article attempts to structure the concept of yield management by reviewing current literature, classifying types of solution approaches, discussing the managerial implications of yield management and presenting a future research agenda. While corporate research on yield management has been performed, most firms are understandably reluctant to share the results of their research with others. Operations management researchers could assist small and medium sized capacity-constrained firms by developing simple and accurate yield management techniques. The intent of the paper is to focus attention n the yield management and stimulate practical and theoretical research in this area.