Frederick A. Frost and Mukesh Kumar
Explores the extent to which the construct service quality plays in an internal marketing setting. A conceptual model known as the “Internal Service Quality Model” was designed…
Abstract
Explores the extent to which the construct service quality plays in an internal marketing setting. A conceptual model known as the “Internal Service Quality Model” was designed based on the original “GAP Model” developed by Parasuraman. The model evaluated the dimensions, and their relationships, that determine service quality among internal customers (front‐line staff) and internal suppliers (support staff) within a large service organisation, namely, Singapore Airlines. The dependent variable in this study was internal service quality (ISQ), while the independent variables were tangibility, reliability, responsiveness, assurance, and empathy. The results suggest that the perceptions and expectations of internal customers and internal suppliers play a major role in recognising the level of internal service quality perceived. The acceptance of the postulated hypotheses has confirmed the importance of the internal service quality construct, thus acknowledging the usefulness of the INTSERVQUAL instrument and the conceptualised Internal Service Quality Model proposed in this research study.
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Frederick A. Frost and Mukesh Kumar
Over the past decade, SERVQUAL has emerged as perhaps the most popular standardized questionnaire to measure service quality. In this study, a conceptual model, INTSERVQUAL, was…
Abstract
Over the past decade, SERVQUAL has emerged as perhaps the most popular standardized questionnaire to measure service quality. In this study, a conceptual model, INTSERVQUAL, was designed based on the original “Gap Model”, to explore the extent to which the construct service quality plays in an internal marketing setting. The research was conducted in a major international airline. The expectations and perceptions scales have emerged as measures with excellent internal consistency reliabilities. The two scales exhibited adequate validity as separate measures of front‐line staff (customer‐contact personnel) expectations of support services; and their perceptions of the support staff’s performance. The results indicated that the scales can be successfully used to assess the magnitude of the gap between front‐line staff perceptions and expectations.
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I consider the significance of just one silence in strategy research – it revolves around the ‘I’ which brings in matters of biography, epistemology and reflexivity. While…
Abstract
I consider the significance of just one silence in strategy research – it revolves around the ‘I’ which brings in matters of biography, epistemology and reflexivity. While different epistemic communities have their investigative conventions or protocols and allied evaluative criteria which either silence or give voice to an ‘I’, developments in the philosophy of science and the sociology of knowledge suggest the need to account for two particular and intertwined aspects of reflexivity. The first rests on C. Wright Mills' assertion that ‘craftsmanship is the centre of yourself’, and in this paper I share four snippets of autobiographical reflection outlining the crystallization of my interests and the sociological ‘eye’ which I bring to the study of strategic management. Second, the ways the established or taken-for-granted socio-politico-ethical orders routinely reproduce as legitimate (or not) particular ways of seeing-researching and thus, particular I's, is also woven into this account. My own intellectual ‘home’ of ethnomethodology is one where constitutive reflexivity is central and shows that the field of research interest – strategy work/strategizing – and our own practice of trying to understand this field are both a reflexive accomplishment.
The paper aims to describe the career and contributions of Joseph Scanlon in gaining labor‐management cooperation through employee participation and sharing the gains from cost…
Abstract
Purpose
The paper aims to describe the career and contributions of Joseph Scanlon in gaining labor‐management cooperation through employee participation and sharing the gains from cost savings.
Design/methodology/approach
The paper makes use of archives and unpublished sources; correspondence with Scanlon's daughter and a previous colleague; Scanlon's writings; and secondary sources as needed.
Findings
Joseph Scanlon used his experiences to develop a plan that encouraged union‐management cooperation and workers and managers sharing gains from improved productivity. Scanlon's background is examined and how his colleagues at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, especially Douglas McGregor, provided the venue for his ideas to flourish and gain widespread acceptance. An analysis of 117 studies over a period of six decades is used to identify the conditions that appear to promote or to interfere with the Scanlon Plan.
Practical implications
The Scanlon Plan illustrates a means to promote labor‐management cooperation and a means to involve employees through sharing cost savings.
Originality/value
This is the first biographical study to use archival and unpublished sources to provide new insights into Scanlon and how his plan for cooperation and Gainsharing developed.
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Sonja Gallhofer, Jim Haslam, Elizabeth Monk and Clare Roberts
The purpose of this paper is to elaborate upon the notion of counter accounting, to assess the potentiality of online reports for counter accounting and hence for counter…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to elaborate upon the notion of counter accounting, to assess the potentiality of online reports for counter accounting and hence for counter accounting's emancipatory potential as online reporting, to assess the extent to which this potential is being realised and to suggest ways forward from a critical perspective.
Design/methodology/approach
There are several components to a critical interpretive analysis: critical evaluative analysis, informed to some extent by prior literature in diverse fields; web survey; questionnaire survey; case study.
Findings
Web‐based counter accounting may be understood as having emancipatory potential, some of which is being realised in practice. Not all the positive potential is, however, being realised as one might hope: things that might properly be done are not always being done. And there are threats to progress in the future.
Originality/value
Clarification of a notion of counter accounting incorporating the activity of groups such as pressure groups and NGOs; rare study into practices and opinions in this context through a critical evaluative lens.
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Michele Alacevich, Pier Francesco Asso and Sebastiano Nerozzi
This paper discusses the American debate over price controls and economic stabilization after World War II, when the transition from a war economy to a peace economy was…
Abstract
This paper discusses the American debate over price controls and economic stabilization after World War II, when the transition from a war economy to a peace economy was characterized by bottlenecks in the productive system and shortages of food and other basic consumer goods, directly affecting the living standard of the population, the public opinion, and political discourse. Specifically, we will focus on the economist Franco Modigliani and his proposal for a “Plan to meet the problem of rising meat and other food prices without bureaucratic controls.” The plan prepared by Modigliani in October 1947 was based on a system of taxes and subsidies to foster a proper distribution of disposable income and warrant a minimum meat consumption for each individual without encroaching market mechanisms and consumers’ freedom. We will discuss the contents of the plan and its further refinements, and the reactions it prompted from fellow economists, the public opinion, and the political world. Although the Plan was not eventually implemented, it was an important initiative for several reasons: first, it showed the increasing importance of fiscal policy among postwar government tools of intervention in the economic sphere; second, it showed a third way between direct government intervention and full-fledged laissez faire, in tune with the postwar political climate; third, it proposed a Keynesian macroeconomic approach to price and income stabilization, strongly based on econometric and microeconomic foundations. The Meat Plan was thus a fundamental step in Modigliani’s effort to build the “neoclassical synthesis” between Keynesian and Neoclassical economics, which would deeply influence his own career and the evolution of academic studies and government practices in the United States.
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This report is addressed to the Health Committee of the City of Salford and the associated boroughs of Eccles and Stretford, on whose behalf the analytical examinations were made…
Abstract
This report is addressed to the Health Committee of the City of Salford and the associated boroughs of Eccles and Stretford, on whose behalf the analytical examinations were made, the account of which form the basis of the report. It is stated that the number of samples of foods and drugs examined during the year 1945 is the highest for any year since the laboratory was opened in 1914. The number is 3,754. It includes 948 sunlight tests. We judge that the demands made on the time of the laboratory could not be met, as the report points out that the phosphatase tests so increased in number—292—that the sunlight tests had to be discontinued for several months in the year. The smoke versus sunshine problem is acute and unsolved in all large manufacturing centres. Manchester, for example, is said to lose half its share of winter sunshine through its smoke‐polluted air. While the purity of water supply in all large centres of population is fortunately assured, the administrative and technical difficulties of clearing the air from suspended impurities are of a different order and very great. Apart from factories and workshops, everyone who lights a fire to cook a breakfast adds, of necessity, to the volume of acrid filth surging in the air overhead. The figures given illustrate this. The soot gauge records from four stations show monthly averages of from 5·60 to 8·85 metric tons of soot per square kilometre or say from 15 to 20 odd long tons per square mile. A high proportion of this stuff consists of carbonaceous matter, other than tar, and ash. In addition to this there are gaseous sulphur compounds, acid in character.
Stefania Veltri and Maria Teresa Nardo
Intangibles are the main value drivers of a firm. This consideration implies that it becomes more and more important/urgent to measure and report intellectual capital. The new…
Abstract
Purpose
Intangibles are the main value drivers of a firm. This consideration implies that it becomes more and more important/urgent to measure and report intellectual capital. The new reporting statement (intellectual capital report) is not yet commonly used by firms, but many, on a voluntary basis, already publish environmental, social and sustainability reports, which contain much information on intangibles. Starting from this point, the purpose of this paper is to demonstrate that it is possible to integrate the information contained in both reports in a single ad hoc integrated document, having both external and internal communication aims.
Design/methodology/approach
The paper addresses three research questions: whether the theoretical premises exist for the integration of the two different frameworks; which frameworks should be chosen as a starting point; and which features should have an integrated framework. Theoretical premises for integration have been found in the research‐based view (RBV) theory. To chose the social report and intellectual capital report (ICR) framework to use as starting points, the authors analyze the frameworks from the intellectual capital (IC) and corporate social responsibility (CSR) literature; then choose the frameworks (GRI3 and Meritum reports) founded on an evolved notion of, respectively, corporate responsibility and IC, which share the same features – the orientation towards stakeholders, the managerial approach, and the focus on intangible activities that a new integrated framework should respect.
Findings
Starting from the selected CSR and ICR frameworks, the authors planned and designed a new, ad hoc model of corporate communication, able to integrate the social and intangible dimensions in a single document, named the Intangible Global Report (IGR). The IGR framework is composed of five dimensions, three derived from the ICR (human capital, structural capital, relational capital) and two from the GRI report (environmental, social). The different aspects of each dimension are surveyed in terms of intangible resources, activities and impacts, measured by financial and non‐financial indicators.
Originality/value
The main originality of the paper consists in providing a general framework for firms to integrate all their intangible information in a single document – the IGR framework – focused on the firm's strategy, which allows the stakeholder to visualize all the firm's intangibles, how a company conducts its activities and the impacts that such activities have on the environmental, social and IC dimensions.
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Mohd Rafi Yaacob and Loong Wong
This paper aims to problematise the notions of both “corporate social responsibility” and “stakeholder theory”. In particular, it seeks to challenge the promises it claims to hold…
Abstract
Purpose
This paper aims to problematise the notions of both “corporate social responsibility” and “stakeholder theory”. In particular, it seeks to challenge the promises it claims to hold regarding social responsibility and community engagement.
Design/methodology/approach
The paper provides a discussion of indigenous stakeholders’ activism in Sarawak, Malaysia.
Findings
It is shown that despite the rhetoric of corporate social responsibility and stakeholderism, there is a clear failure of the state government and corporations to actively involve local affected communities. In so doing, both the state and corporations have rendered the local indigenous peoples, a significant and legitimate stakeholder, powerless, redundant and inevitably compromised both the development and management process. The paper also suggests that community engagement can be problematic for indigenous peoples and for it and stakeholderism to be efficacious, they need to involve the discourse of rights and activism within Sarawak and Malaysia.
Originality/value
The paper offers insight into the indigenous peoples at Sarawak resistance against the state Government and corporations, Focusing on stakeholder activism.