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Globally, elderly populations are increasing at unprecedented rates. This has precipitated change in the way practitioners are thinking of delivering eldercare services, especially in the public sector. In Norway, innovation scholars, the Norwegian government, and most municipalities delivering eldercare services agree that they must innovate to meet upcoming demands. However, infrastructural impacts are not expected for 15 years. Thus, the more difficult question becomes when a change is so distant, when or with whom should you innovate? The purpose of this paper is to determine innovative readiness by looking at group climate.

The study will explore the differences between two groups within an organization: one group that participated (participant group) in formal innovation training and and the other group (nonparticipant group that did not participate in the training). The differences in each group’s climate will be explored using a t-test.

There exist two identifiable group climates within the same organization. The participant group’s climate indicated that their members are ready for innovative change by showing that they are task oriented (C2), engaged (S1), and have an overall positive attitude toward innovation (A1 and A2). On the contrary, the nonparticipant group’s climate indicates that their members are not ready for innovative change. This group has a dominant role of acceptance (D2), rather than pursuing ideas or causes they believe in, they accept those tasks given to them. Each group’s level of innovation understanding was relatively similar prior to any formal training.

This research shows that even though a manager within an organization is championing or encouraging innovative behavior, there can still exist two different group climates: a group that is genuinely interested in innovation and one that is not. Should participation in innovation training be mandatory or voluntary? This study showed the latter that the participant group’s climate indicated its members were more ready for innovative change, while the nonparticipant group’s climate indicated its members were not. This could be an important group dynamic for managers to consider when building a new innovative initiative, especially if that organization struggles with maintaining engagement and positivity for that change.

This part contains four papers. Even though this volume of AIM primarily concerns exporter–intermediary relations, the first two contributions deal with channel choice and partner selection. The first chapter by Kent Eriksson, Jukka Hohenthal and Jessica Lindbergh, “SME export channel choice in international markets”, tests some of the fundamental factors proposed by the IP model explaining choice of entry mode (accumulation of knowledge of foreign markets determining foreign operation modes). Later developments of the model claim that experience and knowledge of local business relationships are also essential elements of the IP model. Whereas the IP model has been found to hold well for incremental resource commitments, it has – in contrast to transaction-cost theories – produced mixed results concerning its ability to explain operation modes. The authors present findings from research in 494 firms from Sweden, Denmark and New Zealand: factors included in the initial explanation of the IP model explain choice of channel, but later developments of the model do not. Implications are that the foreign market knowledge is, and that more incremental experiential knowledge accumulation is not relevant for export channel choice as regards integrated or non-integrated channel. The results show that for Small and Medium Sized Businesses (SMEs), expected market growth lead to use of integrated channels. Integrated channels make it possible to reap more of the profits from a growing market and to learn faster about what is going on in the market. They also found that use of integrated channels is correlated with cultural distance, contradicting the findings of Johanson and Vahlne (1977) and Kogut and Singh (1988). The IP model therefore offers a rather weak explanation of choice of integrated channel.

The paper describes the method and the results of a pilot‐study on recreational effects of holidays. The objective of the study was to get first insights in the psychological process of recreation during holidays: E.g. How can recreation be measured? What kind of changes in the emotional state do occur during long term recreational processes? Do people perceive themselves as «recreated» during or after a holiday? A sample of 59 German teachers were asked to fill in psychological questionnaires before, during and after their summer holiday 1992. The questionnaires used measured different dimensions of personal condition (mood), individual effects of work load, and some data concerning organisational and motivational aspects of the holiday trip as well as sociodemographic data.

Aux experts axés trop exclusivement sur l'économie, le Professeur Hunziker rappelait opportunément que «l'homme lui‐même est le vrai centre du tourisme» et que la fonction économique du tourisme n'est que «subsidiaire», alors que «sa mission humanitaire» est «éminente».

This paper attempts to discover whether or not social networks work in the same way in different sectors of the labour market in the same society, using data from the 2008 Asian Social Survey. Labour markets in some societies are segmented; there are two segments in the labour market, namely, the core sector and the peripheral sector. The practices of each sector differs from the others. Some sectors employ CME labour markets, while others favour LME labour markets (Kanbayashi and Takenoshita, 2014). In other words, we can find both CME and LME labour market in one society.

Since Granovetter’s (1973) pioneer study, scholars are interested in investigating in what way social network influence our job searching outcomes. However, these researchers have not yet yielded consistent results. Scholars argue that the institutional context of labour market can shape the network impacts on our job search outcome (Chen, 2014; Chua, 2011).

Surprisingly, this paper finds that there is no room for the use of personal contact in the public sector in both China and Japan. But, mean status is positively related to annual income in the private companies sector in both Japan and China. The significant influences of mean status in the private sectors in both China and Japan reflect the reinforcing of existing social inequality structure. This is because as the status of contact can facilitate respondents' job attainment process, those who are already in higher social status are more likely than those who are in the bottom of the social strata, to get a better job with the help from their network members.

The above findings show us that social network can exert various impacts on people's job searching process even in the same society. This is because it is possible that the labour market are segmented. These segments have very different practices. This difference attributes to the inconsistent findings of network effects on occupational attainment process. Therefore, it is essential to locate which labour market respondents are in, and the features of this labour market. This can help us know more about the use and effectiveness of network in different types of labour markets.