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Looks at definitions of quality in the literature and their appropriateness to TQM in service industries. Discusses the opinions of leading proponents on the cost of quality, the nature of “service”, the measurement of service quality and the importance of leadership in service design. Describes Zeithaml et al.’s model for measuring service performance.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the challenges faced by corporations in incorporating ethics into their strategic management processes.

The research is based on a survey of the issues and the literature published in Europe, North America and Asia.

Findings indicate a definite gap between the implementation of strategy and the moral and ethical obligations of corporations. Given the decline in business ethics and recent corporate scandals it is proposed that ethics be brought back to the forefront of strategic management and integrated into the strategic management process.

The paper serves as a instrument for debate and future research in that the ethical issues faced by corporations will continue to gather momentum as will the issues faced by traditional strategists.

This paper allows researchers and practitioners to gain an understanding of the issues and shortcomings in strategy and ethical integration, which allows for future research.

The purpose of this paper is to offer a point of view on the challenges China faces competing in a twenty‐first century software industry.

The approach taken was desk research and conversations with other academics and industry experts.

The paper suggests that China needs to overcome weaknesses in managerial and technical skills and focus on international markets where it is positive strengths.

India provides some important and practical lessons for China's emerging software industry including those Chinese firms looking to increase their export revenues and presence around the globe.

This paper provides insight into the issues and challenges faced by the Chinese software industry looking to expand within a global economy. The paper may also prove useful to those researchers interested in emerging economies.

Purpose – This study demonstrates that serious episodes of presidential ill health can have positive impacts on role performance.

Design/methodology – The author utilizes both primary source materials (personal interviews with White House physicians and several other physicians who treated Reagan at the hospital, and the writings of key Reagan aides and family members) and secondary source materials (writings of political scientists, historians, and journalists).

Findings – Reagan was at first in critical condition. It was then that his Secretary of State appeared to make a bold grab for power, an act that contributed materially to the end of his political career. Additionally, the administration’s failure to invoke the presidential disability amendment allowed the official chain of command to be in doubt. Finally, the significant increase in Reagan’s popularity that flowed from his light-hearted demeanor after he was shot is examined here in terms of the President’s subsequent legislative successes.

Originality/value – This study suggests strongly that Reagan’s impressive legislative achievements in mid-1981 were due significantly to his heroic response to having been shot.

This chapter presents a form of both co-participation theory and artful inquiry methodology as useful approaches in carrying out research into the student experience. Participatory Pedagogy is predicated on repositioning participants as co-producers of knowledge by introducing them to important aspects of the research, providing a platform to foster expression and affording opportunities to co-shape the research process. Artful inquiry can take many different forms, but collage in particular has the capacity to bring new meanings to the surface even in well-researched fields, such as the student experience. In supporting a Participatory Pedagogy approach, collage can unpack powerful testimonies of personal experience. A practical application of this pairing is also presented based on research into the student experience. This gives readers an insight into how it can be applied to a study, what its limitations might be and especially how students, particularly those from under-represented backgrounds, can benefit from being involved.

This case study focusses on student conceptions of becoming an academic, and their perceptions of their institution’s role in supporting them, or creating barriers, on this journey. In-depth qualitative research was conducted with nine undergraduate Fine Art and Design students from a range of Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic (BAME) and White backgrounds to understand the impact that tutor relationships; the curriculum, creative pedagogies and the invisibility of diverse teaching staff might have on their journey through, and sense of belonging within, the academy. It is positioned amid the current BAME attainment gap in UK higher education (HE) and takes as its context the discourse on the lack of BAME academics in UK universities; an issue more pronounced in the creative disciplines (ECU, 2017a, p. 158).

The aim of the study was to understand how institutional practices might support or hinder students returning to the academy as staff, using Critical-Race Theory and whiteness and cultural capital frameworks to situate the research. The findings present an overwhelming interest amongst the students in teaching as a future career, and makes a case that students’ motivations and aspirations to teach, if fostered and supported, could partially remediate the current lack of BAME staff in HE.

This chapter examines the involvement of finance companies in the purchasing and leasing of Australian farmlands. This is a new global phenomenon as, in past decades, finance companies have lent money to farmers, but have rarely sought to purchase land themselves. We investigate and discuss the activities of the Hancock company – an asset management firm that invested in farmland in northern NSW. Material on the activities of Hancock and other investment firms were obtained from documents on the public record, including newspaper reports. Semi-structured interviews with community members were conducted in the region of NSW where Hancock operated. Australian agriculture is being targeted for investment by companies in the finance industry – as part of a growing ‘financialization’ of farming. While it is financially beneficial for companies to invest, they do not do so in ‘empty spaces’ but in locations where people desire to live in a healthy environment. The Hancock company was criticized by community residents for failing to recognize the concerns of local people in pursuing its farming activities. To date, there have been few studies on the financialization of farming in Australia. By investigating the operations of the Hancock company we identify a number of concerns emerging, at the community level, about an overseas company running Australian-based farms.

This chapter examines the history and process of research participants producing and working with data. The experience of working with researcher-produced and/or analysed data shows how social research is a set of practices which can be shared with research participants, and which in key ways draw on everyday habits and performances. Participant-produced data has come to the fore with the popularity of crowdsourced, citizen science research and Games with a Purpose. These address practical problems and potentially open up the research process to large scale democratic involvement. However at the same time the process can become fragmented and proletarianised. Mass research has a long history, an exemplar of which is the Mass Observation studies. Our research involved participants collecting video data on their intoxication practices. We discuss how their experience altered their own subject position in relation to these regular social activities, and explore how our understanding of their data collection converged and differed from theirs. Crowdsourced research raises a challenge to the research binary as the work is done by participants rather than the research team; however it also reaffirms it, unless further work is done to involve participants in commenting and reflecting on the research process itself.