Search results

Reviews the Baldrige Award as a modern document and views CompuAdd as a post‐modern organization. Traces the steps of CompuAdd′s application for the Baldrige Award and shows CompuAdd′s culture to be excellent local practices, that are different from the Baldrige Award criteria, and that, despite their local excellence, would be difficult to transfer to another setting.

Provides a framework for employers to follow to ensure successful orientation of employees into new positions. Emphasizes the need for planning, discusses effective implementation and argues the need for evaluation throughout the procedure and beyond – not just at the end. Suggests the feedback covers ability to perform, potential, problems and perceptions of others.

The purpose of this paper is to expand on existing co-creation knowledge in order to accurately conceptualize, operationalize and contextualize the customer brand co-creation behavior concept from a customer perspective.

A quantitative approach is adopted in this study, using structural equation modeling to verify the co-creation of brand value for those customers who co-create.

A new four-dimensional co-creation behavior concept is supported, highlighting the role of development, feedback, advocacy and helping, in the co-creation of brand value. Furthermore, a range of customer-level and brand-level antecedents are empirically verified.

The research takes a customer-centric view of co-creation and in doing so provides new insight into the effect on the co-creator. Additionally, the research offers an improved level of specificity in the co-creation domain by conceptualizing, operationalizing and contextualizing customer co-creation in a comprehensive research study.

The findings offer new insight to brand managers, identifying avenues for increasing customer participation in co-creation programs and critically highlighting that co-creation behavior has positive effects on the co-creator’s perception of brand value.

The customer-centric approach offers an original perspective from which to explore co-creation, demonstrating the positive potential of co-creation in brand management strategies.

The aim of this paper was to describe the aesthetics of self-realization as a way to overcome depersonalization, routinization, and linear temporality in the organizational setting. Artists’ self-portraits (Rembrandt, Van Gogh, and Dali) are used as metaphors of organizational life. In doing so, they could enable organizational members to reinvent modes of thinking, speaking, and behaving in the workplace. Philosophical novels (Kafka, Proust, and Murakami) could also unveil hidden aspects of human existence that are quite relevant for the organizational life. Artists’ self-portraits and philosophical novels could then help organizational members to avoid estranged depersonalization, while designing their own project of self-realization. Reinventing the real world of organizational life implies to emphasize both moral imagination (against routinization) and openness to all kinds of temporality (against linear temporality). Describing the aesthetics of self-realization could make organizational members more aware of their capacity to endorse radical humanism without destroying the organization itself.

This study aims to explore surprising gifts received and given by close relations to identify the variables involved in creating surprising gifts. The analysis of the viewpoints of the giver and the recipient, reflecting their profiles, leads to recommendations for retailers.

An exploratory, small-scale, open-ended questionnaire (48 respondents) produces 43 (38) accounts of surprising gifts given (received), informed further by in-depth interviews (eight informants, both givers and recipients of surprising gifts).

This study identifies and elaborates on the variables (why, when, what, where, who and how, and their combinations) that define surprising gift giving, from both giver and recipient perspectives. The findings indicate a paradox: even if givers or recipients prefer a surprising gift, they might give or wish for an unsurprising gift to avoid disappointment.

Further research should confirm the findings using representative samples. Moreover, gender differences in surprising gift giving should be investigated further. Finally, the exact characteristics and properties that make common objects potential candidates for successful surprising gifts should be studied further.

The discussion has relevant implications for manufacturers and retailers. For example, if recipients are surprised, happy and satisfied, they likely exhibit higher brand recall. The recipient’s (happy versus not happy) emotions also have spillover effects on the giver’s. Thus, retailers should provide assistance in the store and advertise their salespeople as experts who can offer advice about selecting appropriate gifts. The exact characteristics and properties that make common objects potential candidates for successful surprising gifts should be studied further.

The systematic account of all six variables, not previously analyzed in the literature, provides rich insights into surprising gift giving. The discussion of the study of givers and recipients supplements these insights.

The notion of accountability carries with it an implicit sense of objectification, in which schools, teachers, and students represent the objects of measure by which policy makers judge schools. Reframing the notions of accountability requires a critical interpretation of the accountability system that challenges competitive notions of achievement while cultivating compassionate views of student performance. Drawing from the principles of critically compassionate financial literacy, this chapter discusses how discipline-based art education may provide an instructional vehicle for facilitating dialogues that reframe notions of accountability in education.