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The purpose of this paper is to extend research on customer loyalty status, external equity, and satisfaction with service recovery. Most people accept that firms give special treatment to their “best” customers; but after service failures, will they accept firms' offering better compensation to loyalty program members?

An experiment was conducted involving mobile telephone service failure scenarios affecting two similar customers; the customer received either identical or one‐half the compensation of a referent customer, who was described as either a member or non‐member of the firm's loyalty program. Participants were randomly assigned to conditions in a 2×2 design, completing questionnaires that measured satisfaction with service recovery.

The paper finds that when both focal and referent customers received equal service recovery, loyalty program status had no effect. When the referent customer received greater compensation, respondents were very dissatisfied with the outcome, but were significantly less dissatisfied if the referent customer was a loyalty program member.

Although respondents were students, 97 percent used mobile telephones and experienced similar service problems.

As communications among firms' customers increase (blogs, online communities), they can compare one another's complaint outcomes. Some inequity in service recovery may be tolerated because of the beneficiary's loyalty program status.

Consumers consider loyalty of other customers when judging fairness of firms' service recovery. Inequity has a powerful effect on satisfaction with recovery initiatives, but the negative impact is moderated by loyalty program status; this paper makes a contribution by showing how inequity and customer loyalty interact.

The purpose of this research is to examine the effects of actions recommended by researchers for firms to encourage complaint voicing, and test the proposition that complaining by dissatisfied consumers would increase if only firms would make it easier to complain.

An experimental study assessed consumer reactions to scenarios in which a retailer made it easier or harder to complain by varying its refund policy, employee empowerment, access to call center representatives, and in‐store hassles to return merchandise. Consumers in an online panel completed questionnaires measuring perceived effort, likelihood of success, and complaint intentions.

Complaint‐friendly policies produced perceptions of lower anticipated difficulty and increased chances of successful redress. However, only lenient refund policy significantly influenced complaint voicing intentions. While most policies designed to make complaining easier had limited impact on complaint voicing, measured perceptions of complaint difficulty were significant predictors of complaining intentions.

In future studies, researchers should examine these variables in non‐retail settings where getting a refund does not dominate the consumer's decision to voice a complaint.

The results call into question the proposition that complaint voicing would increase if only firms would make complaining easier. Managers should focus on assuring customers of liberal refund policies if they complain.

By focusing on actions that the firm can undertake to improve the probability of consumer complaining, this paper departs from the literature on antecedents of complaining behavior, which has focused on individual difference factors that affect the probability of complaining, variables that lie outside managerial control.

Women in medicine face barriers that hinder progress toward top leadership roles, and the industry remains plagued by the grand challenge of gender inequality. The purpose of this study was to explore how subtle and overt gender biases affect women physicians, physician leaders, researchers, and faculty working in academic health sciences environments and to further examine the association of these biases with workplace satisfaction. The study used a convergent mixed methods approach. Sampling from a list of medical schools in the United States, in conjunction with a list of each state's medical society, the authors analyzed the quantitative survey responses of 293 women in medicine. The authors conducted ordinary least squares multiple regression to assess the relationship of gender barriers on workplace satisfaction. Additionally, 132 of the 293 participants provided written open-ended responses that were explored using a qualitative content analysis methodology. The survey results showed that male culture, lack of sponsorship, lack of mentoring, and queen bee syndrome were associated with lower workplace satisfaction. The qualitative results provided illustrations of how participants experienced these biases. These results emphasize the obstacles that women face and highlight the detrimental nature of gender bias in medicine. The authors conclude by presenting concrete recommendations for managers endeavoring to improve the culture of gender equity and inclusivity.

We analyze the structure and the dynamics of a field, drawing on data from organizational public behavior in the digital sphere. Organizational self-representations afford rich insights into how organizations position themselves with regard to their peers, both in terms of web page language and hyperlink affiliations. Our empirical example is the lively and important discussion of the social impact of nonprofit organizations. We follow how it has evolved from 2011 to 2018 and with what consequences. We begin with portraits of the discursive movements of powerful, individual organizations, where we observe extensive changes. These portraits show how influential organizations alter their public faces. We then analyze discourse at the field level, which is surprisingly stable even though individual organizations change their discursive and relational positions frequently. Finally, we turn to groups of organizations with similar positions and highlight their ability to integrate vocabularies of other groups. Here we observe that a lingua franca increases integration at the field level, while affording distinction with individual organizations’ positioning. We conclude with a discussion of complementary research avenues that can advance the relational and linguistic view we present in this paper.

Highlights some of the major conceptual and methodological issues involved in organisational buying behaviour. Aims to avoid pitfalls involved in the utilisation of research regarding specified issues — at the same time stimulating research aimed at the resolution of these issues. Reviews the current status of organisational buying behaviour, follows this by identifying five potential groups of users of information on organisational buying behaviour. Goes on to focus on the conceptual and methodological issues involved in organisational buying research. Suggests new research directions which, if implemented, could help advance the relevance and quality of organisational buying research. States that academic studies, directly concerned with a better understanding of organisational buying behaviour can be classified as falling into one of three areas the: buying centre (least studied area); organisational buying centre and process; or factors affecting the organisational buying centre and process. Purports that these three concepts can provide the basis for organising much of the diverse research efforts in organisational buying behaviour and goes on to illustrate findings from each of these areas and discusses them in depth.

To reflect what a teacher’s inner voice mediated by a video observation and discussion revealed about the process of change in literacy practices.

Nexus Analysis (NA) (Scollon & Scollon, 2004) was used in studying the teacher’s self-reflective dialogue for identifying the teacher’s (the first author) ways of being in the nexus of old and new literacy practices – in the process of change in the context of literacy practices. These ways of being were reflected on further in the study in the collaboration with the other authors.

The teacher’s ways of being balanced between “not knowing” and “knowing” connected both personal and professional aspects of learning.

Inner states of professional learning processes imply that both personal and professional support is needed in educational changes, such as the change in literacy practices. Video observations and discussion should thus not only concentrate on practical or theoretical issues of professional learning, but on promoting and offering safe spaces for reflection on subjective learning experiences.