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Human Resource Management

Postgraduate business students, particularly MBA students.

This case examines the working environment of Fritz Publishing, a small independent South African publishing company. Fritz Publishing was established in 1960 by Nick Fritz. After his retirement, ownership passed to his son, Martin. In 2011, Martin Fritz decided to sell the company to the Prys Group, an international publishing house headquartered in Germany. February 2011 saw the arrival of a newly appointed CEO for Fritz Publishing, Vadim Arshavin, who had already experienced excellent financial results as the head of another publishing house. In the wake of his arrival, the company experienced several changes. The case highlights the challenges at Fritz Publishing that have resulted in a growing sense of dissatisfaction. After Martin Fritz sold Fritz Publishing, the organisational culture shifted quite drastically which created challenges for managers, employees and customers alike. Employees, including some members of management, are de-motivated, disengaged and frustrated because of the leadership style and behaviour of the new CEO Vadim Arshavin and consider their psychological contracts to have been breached. The case explores factors that have helped create this situation. It considers challenges to the sustainability of the organisation given recent events including an internal employee engagement survey and feedback from key customers. The case further examines the potential dangers that toxic leadership creates within organisations and encourages discussion on ways this form of destructive leadership can be handled.

The learning objectives to be drawn from the case are: to assess the impact of leadership on organisational culture; to analyse how leadership impacts the psychological contract; to identify the cross-cultural factors at play in an emerging market organisation and to understand the way a toxic leadership style can detrimentally affect a high-performance workplace. In addition, there are further learning objectives that can be explored. These are: to examine the change process and associated challenges with the introduction of new leadership into a family-type organisational culture; to understand how breach can be avoided and/or how the psychological contract can be reconstructed.

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CSS 6: Human Resource Management.

This study aims to apply the theoretical lens of embodied interaction to examine roles of peripheral service evidence (PSE) in customer experiences. While previous research explained the role of PSE as tangible proof from the firm’s perspective, this study investigates how customers interact with PSE and shape their experiences from customer’s perspective.

The research employed a qualitative methodology, conducting in-depth interviews with 40 participants. These interviews were designed to elicit narratives about customers’ experiences with eight archetypes of PSE across various service contexts. The study utilized thematic analysis to uncover the underlying roles of PSE in enhancing customer experiences.

The analysis identified five key themes demonstrating the impact of PSE on customer experience: facilitating embodied interactions on-site, resourcing customer-created servicescapes, fostering autonomy, embodying priority and urgency and evoking reflective experiences. These findings reveal that PSE serves as a crucial resource that enables customers to actively shape their service journeys, extending beyond its traditional role as mere tangible proof of service transactions.

This study contributes to the literature by reconceptualizing PSE from a customer-centric perspective, highlighting its role in empowering customers to actively shape their service journeys and activities for value cocreation. By applying the concept of embodied interaction, the study provides new insights into how PSE artifacts, in their mundane forms, significantly influence customer experiences. This study opens new vistas in service research by examining customer interactions from the perspective of embodied interaction. The findings offer practical implications for service providers and designers on how to utilize PSE to enhance customer experiences.

The purpose of this study was to investigate tendency to gossip, self-monitoring and fashion leadership among young adult consumers in two cultures: US and South Korean.

A survey was conducted using a convenience sample of 690 (278 US; 412 Korean) university students. Data were analyzed using MANOVA, ANOVA, descriptive statistics, χ2 and Cronbach’s alpha reliability.

Compared with US participants, Korean participants scored higher on tendency to gossip and lower on self-monitoring, the two subscales of self-monitoring (ability to modify self-presentation; sensitivity to the appearance of others), and fashion innovativeness and opinion leadership. In both cultures, fashion leaders scored higher on self-monitoring and tendency to gossip than fashion followers, and high self-monitors scored higher on tendency to gossip than low self-monitors. Results of this research supported Hofstede’s (1980) theory of cultural dimensions as appropriate for examining differences among fashion consumers from different countries.

Results cannot be generalized to other population groups or cultures. Further research should include data from participants in different countries and of different ages thereby contributing to the generalizability of the results.

The findings of this study suggest that gossip, especially in collectivist cultures such as South Korea, can increase brand image and serve as a useful marketing tool. Social media is one way to initialize word-of-mouth communication about a brand.

This is the first study to compare gossip and self-monitoring among fashion consumers in two different cultures.

The mission of the Department of Forestry at the University of Florida, Gainesville “is to provide high quality programs that develop and disseminate knowledge, and result in better understanding and management of forests and related natural resources.” There are close to 40 researchers in the department, including affiliate and adjunct faculty. The current research and instructional programs of the Department reflect the tremendous technological and socio‐economic changes that impact all areas of agriculture/forestry and natural resource management. Major research interests of the faculty include: using genetic engineering to improve stress hardiness and disease resistance; developing a more comprehensive understanding of all the physiological aspects of the resource including effects of disease and human impact such as acid deposition, biometric analysis, general biology and ecology of forest resources with particular emphasis on southern pines; studying the economic and policy factors affecting the forest industry, and exploring the use of mathematical modelling techniques.

Purpose – This conceptual chapter clarifies concepts of marketplace community.

Methodology/Approach – Through a review of selected CCT studies, the chapter explores and reviews theories of subcultures of consumption, brand communities and consumer tribes.

Findings – Subcultures of consumption, brand communities and consumer tribes exhibit divergent qualities that are summarised in a typology of communities.

Research implications – The perspectives offered by tribal studies present powerful tools that compliment subcultural and brand community approaches to understanding the construction of marketplace cultures.

Practical implications – Theory that improves the understanding of different features of marketplace communities can help marketing practitioners to determine more appropriate communal marketing strategies.

Originality/Value of paper – This chapter recommends a consistent and commonly shared set of descriptive and theoretical terms for different kinds of marketplace community.

A significant number of people with psychosis require inpatient admission under the Mental Health Act. Department of Health documents have highlighted the importance of delivering effective care to individuals with psychosis treated in low secure conditions. Research into patient outcomes in these settings has so far been neglected. The aim of the research reported here was to assess outcomes for patients tested at three six‐monthly assessments during their residence at a new community low secure facility for people with psychosis and challenging behaviour. Although there were numerical reductions on many of the outcome measures over time, few were statistically significant. The main significant improvements were in Positive and Negative Syndrome Scale total and delusions scores over time. Initial evidence indicates that this type of care may have promise, but further research is needed to extend these findings.

The aim of this paper is to identify and gain insights into the significance of barriers contributing to the purported “gap” between academic management accounting research and practice.

Drawing on diffusion of innovations theory, this study collects and analyses data from a questionnaire survey and follow-up interviews with 19 representatives of the four principal professional accounting bodies in Australia.

Professional accounting bodies perceive the gap between academic research and practice in management accounting to be of limited concern to practitioners. The two most significant barriers to research utilisation by practitioners are identified as: difficulties in understanding academic research papers; and limited access to research findings. In acting as a conduit between the worlds of academia and practice, professional bodies have an important role to play by demonstrating the mutual value to both academics and practitioners resulting from a closer engagement between MA research and practice.

As one of the few empirically-based, theoretically informed investigations exploring the research-practice gap in management accounting, this study provides insights rather than “answers”. Its findings therefore serve as a foundational basis for further empirical and theoretical enquiry.

This study contributes to the conversation about the “research-practice gap” in management accounting by adopting a distinct theoretical vantage point to organize, analyse and interpret empirical evidence obtained from Australian professional accounting bodies about management accounting practice.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the dynamics of marketing practice and theory in arguing that much of the dislocation between strategy and practice is due to the inheritance and internalisation of often impractical but persistently dominant, tacit Cartesian assumptions.

This paper uses case methodology to examine the marketing theory into practice/marketing practice into theory conundrum and explores: their separation (marketing theory and marketing practice); their flows (context to text to context: theory into practice/practice into theory); their symbiosis (the praxis of marketing); and the dynamic and static (in situ/in aspic) nature of their duality. This work is an exploratory empirical study undertaken in what is a very under-researched area.

In this paper, marketing theory and marketing practice are recognised as occupying different epistemes. The lifeworld of marketing theorising appears as characterised by a relatively homogenous and mostly cognitive world dominated by rationality and empirical rigour. By contrast, the embodied practitioner inhabits a more highly segmented, fragmented, heterogeneous and frequently improvised landscape.

The authors propose that the all-consuming clamour for reliance and relevance of theory to practice dictates that the form, function and philosophy of marketing must be co-created in the practical pragmatism of praxis. Praxis is practice informed by theory and theory informed by practice, a cyclical process of experiential, contextual learning.

The paper appears to be the first to bring together Cartesian thought and the practice-theory divide in B2B marketing theory.

Deleuze and Guattari have argued that in art, including literature, the senses get hold of the world in a non‐conceptual or “sensational” way, adding “new varieties” that can lead to new ways of knowing and seeing. The purpose of this paper is to explore the nature of multi‐disciplinary, practice‐led research in creative writing as a form of knowledge making in qualitative research.

The author uses her own writing, especially the novel Swimming (Vanark Press, 2009), which is situated in the broader context of feminist fiction writing, as a subversive feminist project that aims to intervene in and challenge the dominant narratives of what it means to be a woman, by creating “alternative figurations” of “woman” which highlight differences among women and enhance our understanding of “woman” as a complex and multiple subject always “in process”.

By using her own practice of fiction writing and research as a case study, the author explores the ways that constructing an imagined narrative – in this case a novel – can make a contribution to knowledge and raise questions about representation, truth and subjectivity.

In this paper, through a few examples from her novel, the author's aim has been to write a narrative of the process, of “material thinking” that led to the final work.