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Reports an interview with Terry Wells, director of Customer Service at J. Sainsbury plc, where the importance of customer service is discussed. States that the provision of good service is “critical” in keeping customer loyalty. Shows how J. Sainsbury keeps customer loyalty which even makes the customer less price sensitive. Concludes that at Sainsbury’s, at least, providing good customer service has proved to be profitable.

Describes how John Lewis developed a strategy for service quality by ensuring that all staff feel valued, are well treated, well trained and given a sense of responsibility ‐ treat the staff right and they, in turn, will treat the customers right. Also points out that John Lewis places great emphasis on customer confidence and on complete honesty in all its trading operations and communications with the public.

To underestimate service quality is like saying goodbye to some of your hard‐earned profits. Even after revamping and upgrading products, many organizations continue to experience decline because they forget that people want to feel good. The feel‐good factor is espoused by politicians throughout the world to nurture votes. The fact that people want to feel good is often overlooked and ignores Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. How many times have you bought a product only to find there is a fault and the product needs replacing? This is normally something which is very irritating, but not ulcer‐inducing enough to get worked up about until, that is, the customer service department treats you as though it is your fault.

Discusses in interview form the progress and impact of the UK Quality Awards on British Industry. Malcolm Franks, the interviewee and CEO of the British Quality Foundation, concludes that the UK has a long way to go to improve productivity. Proposes that the UK Quality Awards are a step in the right direction.

Over the last few years, many corporate planning departments have been pared to the bone. Companies no longer have whole teams devoted to market and competitor analysis. Often they have just a few people in the finance department who put together the annual plan. Yet top executives still need advice on market and competitor issues before they make the big decisions. Consultants are useful when a major issue needs to be addressed but usually cannot often provide day‐to‐day support without breaking the bank. How can business leaders get the support they with only a small planning function?

At the World Bank we are learning that economic development is more of a process of knowledge accumulation than of capital accumulation, all the more pertinent because the creation and dissemination of knowledge are accelerating rapidly. The stock of understanding of knowledge itself is growing more rapidly as a result of advances in our understanding of scientific principles. In addition, rapid developments in information and communications technologies (in part the results of these advances) are themselves speeding the rate of generating and diffusing knowledge. This is largely being achieved by reducing the cost of codifying and processing information.

To celebrate the life and achievements of Felix Geyer by addressing issues of mutual interest, in a light‐hearted and informative fashion.

Adopts a polemical style that encapsulates the conclusions that will appeal to many types and affiliations of reader.

That, on the one hand, Felix Geyer is a cool dude who once smoked cigars and wore a raincoat. That, on the other hand, by walking around with “implants” in his body, and by celebrating/publicising this fact to the mass media, Kevin Warwick raised issues that remind us of the cult of the dandy.

Style, agenda, and range of concerns are unorthodox.

The purpose of this paper is to enrich country of origin (COO) effect in international marketing theory by adding the understanding of temporal dynamism into COO research.

Utilizing a qualitative and interdisciplinary phenomenological approach, this paper analyses historical and contemporary sources triangulated with contemporary primary interview data. The example of how perceptions of Italians about the values typical of the British Sixties varied over time periods is presented.

COO perceptions are both malleable and in evolution. Results show that values from earlier peak periods of appeal can be combined and recombined differently over time due to the varying historical and contemporary resonances of COO values.

This study focuses on COO applied to two product areas, fashion and music, over a limited time period, in a two-country study and so the findings are not fully generalizable, but rather are transferable to similar contexts.

The fact that COO is neither static nor atemporal facilitates a segmented approach for international marketing managers to review and renew international brands. This enriched COO theory provides a rich and variable resource for developing and revitalizing brands.

The major contribution of this paper is that temporal dynamism, never before discussed in international marketing theory, renders COO theory more timeless; this addresses some critiques recently made about its relevance and practicality. The second contribution is the original research design that models interdisciplinary scholarship, enabling a thorough historical look at international marketing.

While it is generally well known that nonviolent collective action was widely deployed in the US southern civil rights movement, there is still much that we do not know about how that came to be. Drawing on primary data that consist of detailed semistructured interviews with members of the Nashville nonviolent movement during the late 1950s and 1960s, we contribute unique insights about how the nonviolent repertoire was diffused into one movement current that became integral to moving the wider southern movement. Innovating with the concept of serially linked movement schools – locations where the deeply intense work took place, the didactic and dialogical labor of analyzing, experimenting, creatively translating, and resocializing human agents in preparation for dangerous performance – we follow the biographical paths of carriers of the nonviolent Gandhian repertoire as it was learned, debated, transformed, and carried from India to the Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR) and Howard University to Nashville (TN) and then into multiple movement campaigns across the South. Members of the Nashville movement core cadre – products of the Nashville movement workshop schools – were especially important because they served as bridging leaders by serially linking schools and collective action campaigns. In this way, they played critical roles in bridging structural holes (places where the movement had yet to be successfully established) and were central to diffusing the movement throughout the South. Our theoretical and empirical approach contributes to the development of the dialogical perspective on movement diffusion generally and to knowledge about how the nonviolent repertoire became integral to the US civil rights movement in particular.