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The purpose of this paper is to examine the factors that influence customer satisfaction among Chinese online shoppers. It applies the normative categories identified in the literature and tests them for effect in the emerging Chinese online consumer market.

Electronic survey instrument was used to obtain data from Chinese online shoppers. The survey covered 15 composite items that could potentially influence the level of customer satisfaction related to online shopping experience. These, in turn, were further decomposed to six driving factors (convenience, product performance, customer services, security concerns, web site interactions, and web site sensory stimulations).

It was possible to identify and classify the most critical moderators of online customer satisfaction (most of which are consistent with similar studies in the West). Paradoxically, the data also revealed the existence of some behavioral differences which are context‐specific.

As is usually the case with online surveys, there was limited scope for free‐response data to be generated. Also, the study concerned itself with the factors influencing customer satisfaction, but did not examine the relationship with online purchase intention and loyalty.

This paper provides some fascinating insights into the factors that moderate the level of customer satisfaction among Chinese online shoppers. These are likely to become the important determinants of success (or failure) of companies' customer satisfaction management programs related to online shopping in China and, therefore, of practical value to companies engaging in internet marketing.

The research objective was to assess the challenges of transition that firms face in adopting a market orientation in China, as the basis for providing a context‐specific explanation of market orientation.

A sample from the He Bei Light Industry Directory was selected by the systematic‐selection‐from‐lists procedure. The survey instrument was adapted from the widely used MARKOR scale.

Although some of the early results are consistent with those obtained in the West, an underlying lacuna needs to be addressed in order for a useful culture‐sensitive interpretation of market orientation to be offered vis‐à‐vis locale‐specific knowledge.

While there can be little doubt that market orientation delivers superior performance in developed western economies, implementations in many transition‐economy contexts reveal a range of paradoxes, which point to some gaps in both the theory and practice of marketing.

A useful explanation of market orientation in transition economies should necessarily embed an approach that accommodates the institutional peculiarities of the environment under study, focusing the temporal, spatial and wider socio‐cultural and historical characteristics of marketing itself.

In the multiplicity of facts and factors which bear upon the feeding of nations the question of transport is the predominant partner.

The purpose of this paper is to provide an update on the work of the Scottish Government in modernising the Scottish compulsory purchase system by publishing two fresh circulars to guide acquiring authorities and a number of other measures short of legislation. It is anticipated that this will be the first stage in a programme which will be followed by an examination of primary legislation by the Scottish Law Commission in its eighth programme of law reform.

The paper explains the current Scottish system with a brief historical review, comments on the new circulars and the intentions and aspirations that lie behind them.

The Scottish compulsory purchase system has not had the revisions of 1965 and 2004 implemented by its English neighbour. It still relies on the original 1845 legislation and circulars issued in 1976 and 1992. The new circulars are helpful to acquiring authorities, particularly those who use the system infrequently and are a useful updating and reference source for professional practitioners.

This is a professional paper designed to draw attention to two new circulars and the policy thinking and aspirations underpinning them.

Compulsory purchase processes strike the delicate balance between the private property rights of individuals and corporations, and the needs of the community to obtain and use land that may lie in private ownership. The paper introduces two circulars that affect that balance.

The paper introduces the new compulsory purchase circulars to practitioners undertaking compulsory purchase work and to those academics involved in this discipline.

The paper aims to examine the investment in Scotland's further education (FE) estate as an example of public sector capital investment. It looks at the sector's modernization, which has previously suffered from under‐investment, to provide a built environment that meets the educational requirements against a background of constrained resources.

The paper examines the historic legacy of the estate, the program to address the problem, issues arisen, solutions devised, assesses progress, and future development.

In 1999 the FE Estate in Scotland reflected decades of under‐investment. Local authority owners in the face of competing priorities allowed many buildings to deteriorate, often failing to meet modern health and safety requirements, wrongly configured, and sometimes incorrectly located. The investment program of the Scottish Funding Council has successfully started to arrest the deterioration in the estate, and in many places has achieved significant improvement through highly focused funding levering in substantial resources by way of commercial loans and recycled property receipts which have multiplied the impact of the SFC investment.

The paper raises issues of how the public sector attempts to resolve competing policy objectives, with constrained resources and imperfect knowledge of future demands. Paper is descriptive with some analysis of problems and potential resolution. It highlights an opportunity for future quantitative work by researchers interested in optimizing capital allocation decisions under multiple constraints and imperfect knowledge by drawing attention to under researched source material in Scottish Government documents.

The paper presents fresh material on public sector capital investment. Primarily drawing on Scottish Government information sources, recent developments in the Scottish FE Sector are explained. Shows how the Scottish Government, its predecessor the Scottish Executive and the Scottish Funding Council have used modern tools of capital planning and estate management to improve the property legacy of a sector that has been short of investment for some decades.

Provides a brief history of Glacier Vandervell Europe. Describes the range of new materials developed, which are manufactured alongside the more traditional materials. The range includes copper lead and lead bronze, aluminium‐based materials and polymer bearings. Details further research taking place into interactions between components in the bearing system. Summarizes the testing processes at the new laboratory in Kilmarnock.

The earliest law of the adulteration of food imposed divisions among the local authorities of the day in functions and enforcements; most of the urban and rural sanitary authorities possessed no power under the law. Provisions dealing with unfit food — diseased, unsound, unwholesome or unfit for human food — were not in the first sale of food and drugs measure and there duties were wholly discharged by all local authorities. Rural sanitary authorities were excluded from food and drugs law and boroughs and urban authorities severly restricted. Enforcement in the rural areas was by the county council, although local officers were empowered to take samples of food and submit them for analysis to the public analyst. Power to appoint the public analyst for the area was the main criterion of a “food and drugs authority”. The Minister had power to direct an authority with a population of less than 40,000 but more than 20,000 to enforce the law of adulteration.

A MAJOR transport problem is the rush‐hour traffic. On London's Underground, the morning and more particularly the evening rush‐hour crowds are dense and unless officials at a station are aware of, or can anticipate, the position at any time the situation can arise where departures of trains are delayed and time‐tables are upset.