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Previous research, conducted before the Internet was widely accessible, has shown that information sources and channels can influence the initiation, adoption, and implementation of innovations. The field of operations management faces a wide variety of innovations, the eventual diffusion of which may depend on changes that are now occurring in information technology. This study uses data collected from two surveys, one conducted postally and one conducted over the Internet, to identify how operations management practitioners, consultants, academics, and students perceive and use information from various sources (books, journals, etc.) and channels (conferences, the Internet, etc.). The results indicate that the Internet is growing in importance as an information channel, with more than 40 percent of all respondents having used information obtained from the Internet during the year preceding our study. Although most respondents view that information as being less important to them professionally than information from other sources and channels, those who use the Internet most frequently have a much higher opinion of the information it provides. Multidimensional preference analysis indicates that the Internet is perceived as being quite different from traditional sources and channels, but because of that difference it currently meets the preferences of only a small subset of individuals.

Although the topic of manufacturing performance measurement has recently attracted considerable interest, little has been done to enumerate or classify the measures that exist. Lists 125 different strategy‐related measures that were found through a survey of accounting, manufacturing and managerial literature. Develops a taxonomy which categorizes those measures according to competitive priority (cost, quality, flexibility, delivery reliability, or speed), data source (internal or external), data type (objective or subjective), measure reference (self‐referenced or benchmark), and process orientation (process input or process outcome). Finds that the largest number of measures have been proposed for the competitive priority of flexibility and the fewest for delivery reliability. Most measures have focused only on process outcomes using self‐referenced objective data from internal sources. Based on these results, suggests that companies and academic researchers utilize new or different measures to assess adequately strategy‐related manufacturing performance.

The purpose of this study is to investigate how origin information for wine products influences retail sales. The growing variety of products and the generally singular origin of wine products makes this market particularly sensitive to origin information. The origin of wine is often perceived as an indicator of quality and is used as the basis of decision making when purchasing wine products. This study empirically tests a portion of Johansson's framework for the use of origin information through both a market survey and a field experiment to determine the predictive value on market position for a group of wine products from the Texas region. The results of the survey and the field experiment were consistent and found that emphasizing the origin of Texas wine significantly influenced retail sales. These results also indicate that special displays and increased retail shelf space do not always have a positive effect on sales of the displayed products. Therefore, it is important for retail managers to first identify whether the image of the wine's origin is perceived positively or negatively before using origin information in store displays.

Industrial buyers' willingness to buy foreign products is influenced in proportion to the political freedom of the country of origin, as opposed to its level of economic development. Countries at the same level of development as the buying country are perceived more or less favourably according to degree of political freedom. US buyers, for this reason, seem to favour Japan out of ten South East Asian countries, according to a random sample drawn from a membership list of a leading purchasing managers' association. The most favoured sources of products are those countries which are both developed and free.

Selected differences observed among segments of the public in terms of socio‐economic and sociographic characteristics, raise the hope that donors of voluntary contributions can be defined through behaviouristic giving variables, which can be profiled and accessed. Data collected from telephone interviews in Indiana regarding giving behaviour and socio‐economic/sociographic characteristics of the sample, plus individuals' media exposure, suggests that such surveys can isolate segments which are different in their giving orientations, and can aid the targeting of marketing/advertising strategies.

This chapter investigates the nature of the transformation of macroeconomics by focusing on the impact of the Great Depression on economic doctrines. There is no doubt that the Great Depression exerted an enormous influence on economic thought, but the exact nature of its impact should be examined more carefully. In this chapter, I examine the transformation from a perspective which emphasizes the interaction between economic ideas and economic events, and the interaction between theory and policy rather than the development of economic theory. More specifically, I examine the evolution of what became known as macroeconomics after the Depression in terms of an ongoing debate among the “stabilizers” and their critics. I further suggest using four perspectives, or schools of thought, as measures to locate the evolution and transformation; the gold standard mentality, liquidationism, the Treasury view, and the real-bills doctrine. By highlighting these four economic ideas, I argue that what happened during the Great Depression was the retreat of the gold standard mentality, the complete demise of liquidationism and the Treasury view, and the strange survival of the real-bills doctrine. Each of those transformations happened not in response to internal debates in the discipline, but in response to government policies and real-world events.

Status characteristics theory states that influence in small groups reflects the distribution of group members' status characteristics. This process is mediated by expectations for task performance. Vocal accommodation is an unobtrusive measure that indicates expectations. We test whether vocal accommodation predicts influence and then examine the role of expectations in this process.

We conducted a laboratory experiment in which status-differ-entiated dyads completed a collective problem-solving task. We use a common measure of vocal accommodation to predict influence, and we employ questionnaire data to measure performance expectations. We hypothesize that the actor that exerts more effort in the synchronization process will have less influence over group decisions and that performance expectations will mediate the effect.

Results from GSEM analyses of 65 dyads show that levels of vocal accommodation significantly predict influence. Further analysis shows that performance expectations mediate a significant portion of the relationship between AAR and influence.

Vocal accommodation is useful for predicting both status perceptions and influence. Since this technique is an unobtrusive measure, it presents new possibilities for status research, including opening new lines of theoretical inquiry, providing a tool for conducting replications outside of the standard experimental setting, and for examining status organizing processes in a variety of environments.

We present a novel method for examining status outcomes, including a measure of influence that is analogous to existing measures that status scholars use but which is more suitable for studying status processes in open interaction.

Status characteristics and status cues theories posit that those with highly valued status attributes are expected to be more competent and influential than their lower status/skilled task partners. With a focus on beauty and a task cue we term “working smart,” our aim was to specify the combined attributes that led certain women to attain higher status than their female, dyadic task partners.

Using Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA), we reanalyzed data from a published study about the impact of women's beauty on a paraverbal measure of status. The approach determines how combined conditions, such as being attractive and task efficient, explain an outcome, such as a status difference, between partners. QCA was paired with qualitative coding of interactants' speech to further interrogate the data.

More task-efficient women always attained higher status than their partners, yet a status difference was stronger if the more efficient partner was beautiful. Although gendered deviance was found to lower women's relative status, it does not constitute a status violation.

Social and Research Implications: Variants of expectation states theory are supported based on our unique QCA approach. Applying QCA as a triangulation tool to evaluate the validity of past findings is a novel usage. Social psychology benefits from QCA's ability to treat micro-level data.

“Working smart” was always associated with higher relative social status but not always beauty or task ability. After 50 years, the “what is beautiful is good” thesis continues to be supported and expanded to “what is beautiful works smarter.”

Purpose – This article examines the relationship between strategic sports metaphors, such as “slam dunk” and “trash talk,” and white middle-class heterosexual masculine embodiment in competitive work environments. Competitive organizations, like sports arenas are contested spaces, and in these environments employees, like athletes, work to “position” themselves to maximize their chances of winning valuable projects and clients from other employees and competing companies.

Value of chapter – Unlike previous research which finds that men's use of sports at work is primarily a feature of male networks and socializing, the argument presented here is that sports tropes are used and enacted by men to structure the production process, including intra- and inter-organizational business meetings, client projects, and committee work. Sports references are also used to construct hegemonic masculinity at work, which results in women, gays and black men being constructed as inferior.

Research implications – The issues raised in this chapter will be useful for empirical studies that examine the relationship between the importance of sports at work, and whether groups such as women, gay men and lesbians, the disabled, older, and overweight business professionals identify with sports and whether this destabilizes assumptions of embodied heterosexual able-bodied male superiority.

Approach – The data used in this analysis draw upon the my background as a Division I collegiate basketball player and 10 years of experience and observations as a marketing professional and business executive in the financial services industry in the United States.

This article examines the early post-World War II civil rights organizing of black women radicals affiliated with the organized left. It details the work of these women in such organizations as the Civil Rights Congress and Freedom newspaper as they fought to challenge the unjust conviction and sentencing of black defendants caught in the racial machinations of U.S. local and state criminal justice systems. These campaigns against what was provocatively called “legal lynching” formed a cornerstone of African American civil rights activism in the early postwar years. In centering the civil rights politics and organizing of these black women radicals, a more detailed picture emerges of the Communist Party-supported anti-legal lynching campaigns. Such a perspective moves beyond a view of civil rights legal activism as solely the work of lawyers, to examining the ways committed activists within the U.S. left, helped to build this legal activism and sustain an important left base in the U.S. during the Cold War.