Search results

The purpose of this paper is to consider the global activities, highlighting the UK, concerned with farm assurance schemes and associated food labelling seeking to identify their contribution towards improving primary production standards.

A desk study focusing on published literature and historical documentation.

The majority of primary production standards are based upon codes of good practice with only tenuous links between the standards and the required environmental outcomes. Owing to the difficulties of comparing like with like here is little conclusive evidence that such standards are producing environmental benefits.

If it depends on assurance schemes to improve farming practices then a European‐wide standard is required that is not compromised by variations in national laws and codes of practice.

This review is of academic value and of value to those working to improve primary production standards. It presents arguments for introducing environmental outcome based measures into the UK assurance schemes.

The aim of this study is to examine the role of aesthetic experiential qualities for tourist overall satisfaction and three types of loyalty.

A national tourist route in Norway was chosen as an empirical context for this study. Totally, the role of five aesthetic experiential qualities were examined, namely, scenery, cleanliness harmony, art/architecture and genuineness.

The findings reveal that the three aesthetic experiential qualities, scenery, harmony and genuineness, were all positively related to tourist overall satisfaction with the tourist road. Moreover, tourist overall satisfaction had a direct influence on three types of loyalty, referring to tourists’ intentions to recommend the tourist road to other, to revisit same tourist road and to visit similar tourist roads in the future. However, the findings reveal that only two aesthetic qualities, cleanliness and genuineness, had a direct effect on intention to revisit the same tourist road, and thus indicates a more complex explanatory pattern concerning tourist loyalty.

This study is limited to five aesthetic experiential qualities in a specific nature-based tourist context. The results open up some of the areas for future research on the role of aesthetics in man-made environments (in addition to the natural environment) in nature-based tourism. When most of the other variables are similar, aesthetic experiential qualities may make a difference to a nature-based product’s performance, and thus provide the competitive edge.

Destination managers and marketers should focus on aesthetic experiential qualities to increase tourist satisfaction and loyalty, and thereby strengthen a destination competitiveness and value creation.

Responding to the need to focus on aesthetic experiential qualities in a nature-based tourism context, this study measures the effects of the aesthetic experiential qualities for tourist satisfaction and loyalty in an original destination setting.

This chapter offers an experience-based report about the development of the first Scandinavian PhD program in tourism studies at Mid-Sweden University. This process is documented through a framework which, rather than having the coherence of a single clearly bounded discipline, focuses on tourism as a study area encompassing multiple disciplines. Tourism knowledge is derived through a synthesis of fact-oriented positivist methodologies and critical theory. The theoretical framework employed to develop the graduate program in tourism studies is presented by critically discussing its multidisciplinary base and briefly outlining future veins of further development.

This study aims to investigate whether the characteristics of the chief financial officer (CFO) have an impact on the intensity of the corporate research and development (R&D) investment.

Based on hand-collected data for the CFOs of a sample of the largest European listed companies for the period 2013–2016, this study uses regression analyses to test empirically the association of CFO education, CFO gender and CFO age with R&D investment intensity.

The presence of female CFOs, CFOs with a Master of Business Administration (MBA) or Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) degree and older CFOs is positively associated with the intensity of R&D investment.

This study relies on some observable characteristics of CFOs and focuses on large listed companies.

The results of this study may help investors, stakeholders and practitioners to understand better which type of CFO characteristics are more likely to result in higher firm-level R&D investment intensity.

This study offers the first insights into the impact of CFOs, as the most prominent C-suite executives, on the level of corporate investments in R&D activity.

George Herbert Mead developed a sophisticated social and pragmatist model of science, which has escaped the attention of most modern-day scholars and symbolic interactionists. While Mead’s insights have much to offer to contemporary interactionist studies of science and technology, they are not without their shortcomings. In his analyses, Mead tends to put most of his emphasis on the concrete micro-foundations of knowledge production and the functional necessity of science as a problem-solving institution par excellence, yet he fails to seriously question the role of power and domination within the competitive terrain of scientific fields. Lonnie Athens has attempted to reconstitute the basic assumptions of symbolic interactionism by insisting that domination, rather than mere sociality, is the foundation of human existence, since the root of all social acts are comprised of super- and subordinate relations. Changing our fundamental assumptions about social action thus forces us to ask new questions about the micro- and macro-processes we explore in our research. By applying this radicalized lens to Mead’s view of science, I attempt to forge a new interactionist approach, which would better connect with and contribute to the critical wing of the science studies tradition.

Politeness rituals can be understood as socially facilitative, performative speech acts that operate at the meso-level of Goffmanian interaction order, translating macro-level cultural scripts into micro-social action. Whereas previous research has focused on individual face-saving, this chapter examines the implications of politeness for the group face of speech communities, demonstrating the concept of collective facework. Taking Swedish culture as an example, I observe a tension between two sets of rules: the Nordic code of Jante Law, which frowns upon boasting and encourages humility, and the values of honesty and conversational directness. This is dramaturgically resolved through polite forms of talk, such as strategic reticence and sanctioning verbal domination. These interaction rituals perform collective facework to address negative and positive collective face needs.

This chapter presents an innovative learning opportunity for tourism students, International Tourism and Hospitality Academy at Sea, that has been in operation for the last 10 years. The program could render itself as a case study of Kolb’s experiential learning theory according to which knowledge is created by transforming experience. Its uniqueness and complexity lie in its diversity. This program has involved between 80 and 130 tourism students yearly from four to six institutions from different countries participating in new scholarly inputs by non-resident professors and instructors.

Inquiry learning points is based on questions and requires students to work independently to solve problems. Instructors are facilitators of learning, not people who give right answers and instructions to learners. Haaga-Helia University of Applied Sciences Porvoo campus in Finland is a new concept for learning. The lecturers have changed from traditional ones to coaches aiming at new competences with new tools to enhance learning. Their own implementation of inquiry learning has been assessed by themselves with an ongoing self-assessment process as a part of the normal tasks of instructional teams. Self-assessment is a part of action research that aims to develop an organization and the work in it.