Search results

As more men adopt the role of grocery shopper, the potential grows for positioning a supermarket chain against the male shopper. Anecdotal evidence and previous research suggested differences between male and female shoppers over the time taken to shop. A study is presented where male and female shoppers were timed while shopping in a branch of Safeway. When just the time taken to shop is considered, the male sample spent significantly less time than the female sample. But, when the rate of shopping, expressed in expenditure per minute or items per minute was compared, women seemed to shop faster than men. However, when the samples were matched for the total volume of shopping purchased, no significant difference could be found between the sexes. It could be argued from the survey and previous work that men are less involved in the shopping process. Some ideas are presented to enable retailers to target the male shopper.

To examine the relationship between deposit of electronic theses in institutional and archival repositories. Specifically the paper considers the automated export of theses for deposit in the archival repository in continuation of the existing arrangement in Wales for paper‐based theses.

The paper presents a description of software that makes use of the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI‐PMH) as the first stage in the automatic import and ingest of items between institutional and archival repositories. The implications of this approach on the management of the institutional repository are also considered.

The paper shows that OAI‐PMH is a useful approach to harvesting the metadata for items to be imported into an archival repository. This reduces the difficulty of maintenance of the import and export software components albeit at the possible expense of necessitating certain requirements on the management of the institutional repository.

The research shows that institutions can make use of OAI‐PMH as a part of an automated export/import process, encouraging the preservation of multiple copies of digital items for increased safety of the content.

The software has been developed and is being tested. It is proving capable of performing the required harvesting but the relative imprecision of searching in OAI‐PMH has implications for the management of the exporting repository. These are discussed.

The paper presents a description and discussion of novel software components that enable the use of OAI‐PMH as the first stage in the export and import of digital items between repositories, independently (as far as is practicable) of the software used by the repositories themselves.

The case can be used in strategic management, international business or ethics courses. In strategic management courses, students will be able to identify political relationships as sources of a firm’s competitive advantage. Students will also understand the role of ethics in the firm’s competitive advantage. In international business courses, the students will be able to analyze the role that corruption and bribery play in the analysis of a country’s institutions. Students will also understand how corruption in a host country influences a firms’ decision to internationalize. Finally, students will understand the challenges that firms face when serving customers in other countries. In ethics courses, students will understand the nature of state/business corruption, i.e. the abuse of public office for private gain and the concept of state capture, i.e. managers controlling the political system for their advantage. Students will be able to analyze the decision of whether to collaborate with unethical partners or customers.

Bell Pottinger Private (BPP) was a British public relations (PR) firm with a successful but questionable reputation of helping famous critical figures and despots improve their public image. In 2016, Lord Tim Bell and the other leaders of BPP were asked to create a PR campaign for the Gupta family. The Guptas were a group of businessmen headed by three brothers who migrated from India to South Africa in the early 1990s. By the 2010s, they had built a business empire allegedly thanks to a corrupt relationship with the President of South Africa, Jacob Zuma and his family. The press and prosecutors were increasing their investigations on these relations. The case has two parts, which address two separate challenges and can be taught as standalone cases or in a sequence in two sessions.

MBA and Executive Education.

Teaching notes are available for educators only.

CSS 5: International business.

William Baumol famously introduced the “cost disease” according to which the relative price of services vis-á-vis manufactured goods keeps rising because of a negative productivity differential between services and manufacturing industries. Empirical evidence strongly supports the predictions of Baumol’s model of “unbalanced growth” as we show in this article. Baumol was convinced that the cost disease need not have fatal consequences for growing economies as they can afford to earmark ever-higher shares of GDP to pay for services like healthcare and education if the overall “pie” keeps growing. Then, consumption of goods may rise as well even if its share in GDP steadily declines. However, income inequality has surged since the 1980s; and the rising price of vital services means that lower-income strata may be increasingly unable to pay for them. In this article, we develop the nexus between the cost disease and rising income inequality and sketch the ensuing challenges for social policy.

The world is facing unprecedented potential disaster with the impending climate crisis. Research within social studies education surrounding the integration of ecological issues, while still on the fringes, has seen a recent surge. This is a review of practitioner-oriented research published in the last ten years on teaching these issues in social studies classes.

This study reviews practitioner-oriented articles on teaching ecological issues in social studies classes. The author searched databases and did a manual review using specific search terms. The author’s first level of analysis was to analyze the year of publication, whether the article was (co) written by a practicing teacher and whether the article featured a lesson plan/resources. The author then analyzed the content/focus of each article.

In total, ten articles were (co)written by a practicing teacher, 23 articles included lesson plans and the article themes could fall into one of six themes (water issues, pollution, climate change, climate activism, sustainability and economic growth and ecological citizenship/ethics).

The author was unable to review one year of articles from the Ohio Social Studies Review due to the COVID-19 pandemic and only having remote institutional access to library materials.

In reviewing the practitioner-oriented articles, the author hopes to not only strengthen the curricular justifications for teaching these issues in social studies classes but also show what research has been done and provide critiques and show what could be done in the future.

The purpose of this paper is to review the legacy of sociologist Irving Kenneth Zola in bringing the body into social science research and making visible and dismantling social structured barriers to hearing and speaking and living as fully human.

It begins with an examination of Zola’s experience of “being sexy” in his book, Missing Pieces (1982). It considers what a visual sociological focus on “being sexy” can contribute to understanding structured barriers to living as fully human after the emergence of this field in the 1990s and 2000s.

It provides two examples of the use of video cameras in understanding the daily experiences of adults using wheelchairs and children with asthma that continue the embodied work begun by Zola.

Embodied sociological research can be a strategy for social and political change.

Jonathan Miller appeared in September 2009 on “Shark Tank,” the ABC television reality show featuring entrepreneurs versus angel investors in a discussion of the business value proposition and to win a negotiation for an investment from one of the 4 Sharks. The company he founded, Element Bars, a maker of custom energy bars, needed investment capital. Prior to appearing on the show, Miller had considered several financing options available to entrepreneurs: loans and other debt capital and equity capital, each of which are evaluated in the case. Miller had a good feel for the different types of capital to use for this new venture, having started several ventures in the past and winning the Kellogg School of Management business plan competition, the Kellogg Cup, in 2008. The case includes Miller's decision to forego the investment offer he won on television, instead he pursued lower cost of capital equity.

Students several aspects of raising capital, including raising equity and debt capital. Students need to learn to know as much or more about fundraising as the professionals who provide the capital-in fact, entrepreneurs have to understand the interaction among combinations of capital within their enterprise-whether debt and/or equity in different combinations. Often, teaching about equity relates to teaching how venture capital investment professionals look at deploying funds. Receiving equity into the entrepreneurial firm has much different attributes and issues. Teaching about debt often occurs at much higher volumes in typical MBA courses; this entrepreneurial debt must occur at a much smaller dollar value. This protagonist, Jonathan Miller, has exceptional preparation habits, which teaches students the value of the skills to prepare themselves and their businesses for investment.

Social influence plays a crucial role in determining the size of information diffusion. Drawing on threshold models, we reformulate the nonlinear threshold hypothesis of social influence.

We test the threshold hypothesis of social influence with a large dataset of information diffusion on social media.

There exists a bell-shaped relationship between social influence and diffusion size. However, the large network threshold, limited diffusion depth and intense bursts become the bottlenecks that constrain the diffusion size.

The practice of viral marketing needs innovative strategies to increase information novelty and reduce the excessive network threshold.

In all, this research extends threshold models of social influence and underlines the nonlinear nature of social influence in information diffusion.

States that the major reasons for difficulties in cross‐cultural communication stem from the fact that actors from different cultures have different understandings regarding the interaction process and different styles of dialogue. Suggests that better understanding of communication within other cultures is the key to success. Uses past literature to suggest a number of cultural variability constructs concerning preferred interaction behaviours and the common themes they share. Presents three case studies to illustrate this.