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Focuses on “tangibilizing the intangible” as a key to success in services marketing and presents various issues related to this topic. Argues that consistency in maintaining quality is very important and that further research is required.

The product life cycle is the cornerstone to understanding product/market behaviour, but it is not well suited to the analysis of industrial markets. In the industrial marketplace technology can be isolated as the dominant variable, explaining variations in sales over time for a product category. New “high‐tech” firms must make the critical decision early in their life as to whether to follow their technology through its life cycle, adapting to the needs of each stage it goes through, or whether to specialise in one particular stage of technology and continually develop new products to replace those that progress to later stages of the technological life cycle.

Examines the use of Product Life Cycle (PLC) in analyzing the rise and fall in product demand. Applies the cycle stages: product development, introduction, growth, maturity, decline to the demand behaviour of industrial materials such as steel, aluminium, titanium. Relates the demand pattern of the Gross Domestic Product and the relative development of the national economy, e.g. USA. Concludes that the PLC invariably parallels the GDP.

In the context of business schools, the word “leadership” is widely used in missions, visions, and marketing materials. However, underlying support and the infrastructure to truly develop leaders may be lacking. The purpose of this paper is to highlight the challenges and issues facing leadership education in the context of business education. More specifically, we highlight some of the structural challenges, foundational issues, and research related problems and identify several opportunities to address some of the areas for development. Throughout this paper, we discuss how the National Leadership Education Research Agenda can spark research that will legitimize our work not only in business, but across disciplines.

The Great Benchmarking Scam? Time was, in management circles, that the term “benchmarking” would induce none‐too‐disguised yawns in recognition of it “being something to do with computers or job evaluation”. Not today; those yawns have been replaced with the excited management‐blabber of a new fad. You can benchmark anything these days; I encountered recently a guide to benchmarking employee attitudes.

Creates a framework for evaluating the marketing strategy dimensions of remanufacturing. Discusses resource recapture and how diffusion theory may be applied to the adoption of the remanufacturing/remarketing concept. Concludes that the diffusion of renovation will depend on the right firms having the right motivations to adopt the concept of remanufacturing/remarketing.

This paper aims to explore how accounting is entwined in the cultural practice of popular music. Particular attention is paid to how the accountant is constricted by artists in art and the role(s) the accountant plays in the artistic narrative. In effect this explores the notion that there is a tension between the notion of the bourgeois world of “the accountant” and the world of “art for art's sake”.

This paper draws on the cultural theory of Pierre Bourdieu to understand how the character of the accountant is constructed and used by the artist. Particular attention is paid in this respect to the biography and lyrics of the Beatles.

Accounting and accountants play both the hero and the villain. By rejecting the “accountant villain”, the artist identifies with and reinforces artistic purity and credibility. However, in order to achieve the economic benefits and maintain the balance between the “art” and the “money”, the economic prudence of the bourgeois accountant is required (although it might be resented).

The analysis focuses on a relatively small range of musicians and is dominated by the biography of the Beatles. A further range of musicians and artists would extend this work. Further research could also be constructed to more fully consider the consumption, rather than just the production, of art and cultural products and performances.

This paper is a novel consideration of how accounting stereotypes are constructed and used in the field of artistic creation

The purpose of this paper is twofold: first, it investigates whether and to what extent “linguistic hedging”, an impression management form of linguistic expression that conveys an ambiguous level of commitment, is used in corporate social responsibility (CSR) employment narratives; and second, it explores whether there is any difference in the use of linguistic hedging between written and spoken corporate forms of language. It mobilises these objectives by examining employee-related narratives made by electronic manufacturing services (EMS) providers domiciled in Taiwan, in the context of labour malpractice incidents.

Two groups of data are examined: corporate responsibility reports (written language) and interviews and speeches of corporate founders and senior executives (spoken language). The research sample is ten Taiwanese EMS firms, all of which attracted public criticism and scrutiny due to a series of employee-related incidents. The sample period is between 2009 and 2013. Linguistic hedging is measured quantitatively by the relative word frequency of hedges, using the concordance software ANTCONC, with findings interpreted through the lens of legitimacy theory and impression management.

The study found that hedging was evident in CSR narratives. The EMS providers in Taiwan appeared to use hedging in employee-related disclosures to manage legitimacy challenges due to employee-related incidents that had happened in their assembly plants. The adjustments in employee-related disclosures made by the EMS firms as a legitimation strategy can be seen as a rhetoric device of impression management or a form of symbolic legitimation to persuade society to restore their legitimacy status. Further, overall hedging was more frequently used in spoken than written language, which suggests that rhetorical hedging in written narratives is more likely to be a deliberate choice of tactics to influence stakeholder perceptions and thereby manage corporate legitimacy.

The study introduces a new analytical technique, linguistic hedging, into the CSR literature. This enriches research methods used in this field, providing more compelling insights into the relationship between the use of language and CSR narratives in the process of corporate legitimation of employee-related practices. This study thus provides a platform for future computational-linguistics studies in the field of CSR.