Search results

Discusses the importance of qualitative data from customers in customer satisfaction measurement programs. Presents results of a study which is based on customer comments, using airline flight attendants as the target customer population. Indicates that qualitative data can produce actionable information as well as explanations for the nature of quantitative customer satisfaction data. Provides implications for management.

This case presents an overview of the confectionary industry, a description of the Hershey Foods Corporation, and a look at the company's strategies and the impact of these strategies. The case focuses on the unintended consequences that result from the implementation of dramatic new strategies for a company and what occurs in a company town that displays a very strong paternalistic culture. Some analysts had previously thought that Hershey's profitability and its close relationship with the town, the trust and the school made the company untouchable, but events proved otherwise.

After reading this case, the reader will feel compelled to answer the following questions. What is the best strategy for future growth of Hershey? How important is organizational culture on a corporation's strategic direction? Should the company indeed be sold to a larger corporation?

Reflecting on the contingencies and felicitous moments of life and career, a senior scholar celebrates the intellectual community and friends that inspired and sustained his efforts.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the effects of corporate governance mechanisms, namely, board of directors and auditors, on tax aggressiveness in Italian companies listed on the Milan Stock Exchange.

This study used a population of 168 Italian non-financial firms listed on the Milan Stock Exchange, holding shares in at least one foreign subsidiary in countries other than Italy in fiscal year 2018. Data on corporate boards and auditors were collected through the evaluation of companies’ annual reports over the period 2011–2018. Five panel data analyses with fixed effects were performed for each tax aggressiveness index, yielding 1,176 observations to test the research hypothesis.

This paper finds that corporate board characteristics, such as size, gender diversity and CEO duality, and auditors’ features, such as external audit quality, increase corporate tax aggressiveness.

This study provides investors with an understanding of corporate boards’ and auditors’ roles in preventing agency conflicts and evaluating a company’s tax approach. Furthermore, the findings are useful for international political bodies in regulating corporate board composition and managerial monitoring.

Almost all studies focusing primarily on corporate governance mechanisms’ effects on tax aggressiveness are within the US context. Empirical evidence on the topic in the European contexts is limited. The legislative discrepancy between countries is reflected in the computation of indices measuring tax aggressiveness, affecting US studies' generalizability across nations. This paper extends the literature on the topic by investigating other unexplored corporate governance mechanisms. Five indices were used to measure corporate tax aggressiveness and to assess analysis reliability and data robustness. Moreover, to the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study is the first attempt to investigate the link between corporate governance mechanisms and tax aggressiveness in Italy.

The ability for learners to interact online via their avatars in a 3-D simulation space means that virtual worlds afford a host of educational opportunities not offered by other learning technology platforms, but their use also raises several pertinent issues that warrant consideration. This chapter reviews the educational use of virtual worlds from a design perspective. Virtual-world definitions are explored, along with their key educational characteristics. Different virtual-world environments are briefly contrasted, including Second Life, Active Worlds, Open Sim, and Minecraft. A wide variety of virtual-world uses in schools and universities are examined so as to understand their versatility. Key educational benefits of virtual worlds are distilled from the literature, such as the ability to facilitate 3-D simulations, role-plays, construction tasks, and immersive learning. Emergent issues surrounding the use of virtual worlds are also analyzed, including cognitive load, safety, and representational fidelity. One higher education and one school level vignette are provided in order to offer more detailed insight into the use of virtual worlds in practice. Recommendations for learning design and implementation are presented, based on the thematic analysis of contemporary virtual-worlds research.

With precursor software dating to 1972, multi‐LIS became the first commercially available, fully integrated library system in North America to run on the Unix operating system. In 1988, multiLIS developers, Sobeco Ernst & Young Inc. (SEY), ported multiLIS software to the MIPS Reduced Instruction Set Computer (RISC) processor, making it the First fully integrated software program to be available on a RISC platform. multiLIS fully supports both CAN/MARC and USMARC as well as the monographs specifications of UNIMARC. As the multiLIS software was developed in a resource‐sharing environment, consortiums are a natural market for the multiLIS product.

Teaching is increasingly recognised as a complex, demanding career. Teachers experience higher levels of stress and burnout than other professionals. The career is subject to heightened levels of public scrutiny and yet offers only modest rewards in the form of social status and income. Drawing on a typological model of coping styles among a diverse sample of German health professionals, we identified six types of emotional coping (Good health, Sparing, (healthy) Ambitious, (path to) Burnout, Diligent, and Wornout) among a longitudinal sample of 612 Australian primary and secondary teachers. A significant outcome of our study was the empirical differentiation between burned out and wornout teachers. This extends the literature on teacher burnout and offers new directions to the study of ‘at risk’ beginning teachers.

While bilinguals frequently mix languages in everyday conversation, these hybrid language practices have often been viewed from a deficit perspective, particularly in classroom contexts. However, an emerging literature documents the complexity of hybrid language practices and their usefulness as an academic and social resource for bilingual students. This chapter examines hybrid language practices among English- and Spanish-speaking high school students in an astronomy/oceanography classroom in southern Arizona. Microethnography, or fine-grained analysis of video recordings from long-term ethnographic observation, is used to reveal what bilingual students accomplished with hybrid language practices in the classroom and to outline implications for teachers who want to engage their students’ hybrid repertoires. Specifically, the analyses reveal that careful attention to hybrid language practices can provide teachers with insights into students’ academic learning across linguistic codes, their use of language mixing for particular functions, and their beliefs about language and identity. The research is necessarily limited in scope because such in-depth analysis can only be done with a very small amount of data. Nevertheless, the findings affirm that hybrid language practices can enrich classroom discourse, academic learning, and social interaction for emergent bilinguals. The chapter highlights a teacher’s story in order to offer practical guidance to other teachers who seek to capitalize on the promise of hybrid language practices in their own classrooms.

The purpose of this paper is to present a procedure to design an experimental setup meant to validate an innovative approach for simulating, via computational fluid dynamics, a high-pressure gas release from a rupture (e.g. on an offshore oil and gas platform). The design is based on a series of scaling exercises, some of which are anything but trivial.

The experimental setup is composed of a wind tunnel, the instrumented scaled (1:10) mock-up of an offshore platform and a gas release system. A correct scaling approach is necessary to define the reference speed in the wind tunnel and the conditions of the gas release to maintain similarity with respect to the real-size phenomena. The scaling of the wind velocity and the scaling of the gas release were inspired by the approach proposed by Hall et al. (1997): a dimensionless group was chosen to link release parameters, wind velocity and geometric scaling factor.

The theoretical scaling approaches for each different part of the setup were applied to the design of the experiment and some criticalities were identified, such as the existence of a set of case studies with some release parameters laying outside the applicability range of the developed scaling methodology, which will be further discussed.

The resulting procedure is one of a kind because it involves a multi-scaling approach because of the different aspects of the design. Literature supports for the different scaling theories but, to the best of the authors’ knowledge, fails to provide an integrated approach that considers the combined effects of scaling.

This article takes stock of the current promises and problems of postmodern-informed interactionism. It points out that postmodern interactionism may go the way of ethnomethodology unless it is more reflexive about its practices. The article examines the present trends in postmodern informed interactionism, then speculates about future paths for it, by creative various analytic categories for postmodern interactionisms. Present trends include personal ethnographies, subdivided into autoethnographies, polyphonies, and impressionistic stories. Other present trends are cooperative ethnographies, performances, and power/knowledge ethnographies. Future paths are divided into the building block approach, the blending approach, the empathetic approach, and the divisive approach. The article summarizes the pros and cons of postmodernism for interactionists. The author notices that postmodern interactionism lacks clear criteria of evaluation and points to the possible courses to follow to rectify the problem.