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The purpose of this study is to explore the concept of long-term thinking in a non-business context to gain deeper insights into bridging the gap between the theory of long-term thinking and its application as a management strategy.

To explore the concept of long-thinking further in a non-business setting, a grounded theory study was conducted with preschool leaders in a municipality in Sweden to examine how the leaders describe, define and apply the concept of long-term thinking in their schools. Interviews with school leaders, both written and oral, were used for data collection.

This study illustrates that the concept of long-term thinking can be twofold. First, the description can be as an anchor that reflects a mission. Second, the description can be a steering mechanism that guides decision-making. The findings also reinforce the importance of organisations developing an organisational culture that connect their vision and goals with the values and needs of their customers.

This study was carried out in a single organisation and shows a snapshot of the organisation's status at the time the data were collected. Therefore, the findings are not generalisable to all organisational settings; rather the findings may be transferable to other settings.

The results can be used to help identify areas where preschools in a municipal context can engage with sustainable quality development in order to build systems that support work with quality in a more structured way.

Long-term thinking is seen, within both theory and organisations, as necessary to achieve success in terms of sustainable development and quality, and this study contributes with knowledge about the current gap between theories of long-term thinking and practice in organisations.

The purpose of this paper is to explore existing and desired methodologies for systematic quality work to promote quality in preschools from the principal’s perspective.

A collaborative approach was used in this research project, and principals were asked to complete portfolio assignments. Their answers to those portfolio assignments were analysed by the research team and subsequently compared to total quality management values.

Existing and desired methodologies for systematic quality work are presented and sorted into 13 and 17 groups, respectively. The principals desire four times more methodologies than they are presently using to promote systematic quality work, and the results show that they must extend their methodologies to support TQM values.

This research is based on answers collected from 18 principals in one municipality in Sweden.

The use of the cornerstone model provides a framework to illustrate the application of TQM in preschools.

Principals struggle to find time for systemic quality work. The presented results can be used to work systematically with quality in preschools and other organizations.

Service failures usually occur in front of third-party customers. Third-party customers react emotionally and behaviorally to service failure and recovery efforts aimed at focal customers. However, there is a gap in the literature on how third-party customers react to a service failures incident and a recovery over another customer, depending on how socially close or distant they are from. This study investigates the effect of third-party customers' emotions on consumer forgiveness, negative word-of-mouth (WoM) and repatronage intentions in the service recovery process by comparing close and distant third-party customers.

This study utilizes a 2 (social distance to the focal customer: close, distant) × 2 (service recovery: yes, no) between-subjects design. The authors used a scenario-based experiment to test the proposed hypotheses. A total of 576 respondents were involved in the study.

The results from the authors' scenario-based experimental study show that positive and negative emotions felt by distant third-party customers are higher than those of close third-party customers. In addition, the effect of positive emotions on customer forgiveness is more substantial for distant third-party customers. Third, moderated-mediation analysis indicates that social distance has a moderator effect only on the relationship between positive emotions and customer forgiveness.

This study contributes to the service literature by comparing socially close and socially distant third-party customers' reactions to service failure and recovery attempts.