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Increasingly companies ask customers to participate in creating and producing services. This research aims to explore the effect that communicating role expectations to customers may have on their processing and evaluation of the encounter.

A dyadic experiment using prototypical customer‐couples and practicing insurance agents was implemented. Couples and agents were randomly assigned to dyads, which were then assigned to one of two conditions – a no‐expectations or an expectations condition. Post‐encounter, couples evaluated service quality and indicated their satisfaction, trust and anticipation of future interaction.

The study found that socialized customers relied more on service quality in evaluating the encounter than did unsocialized customers. However, socialized wives showed decreased trust, satisfaction and anticipation of future interaction than did non‐socialized wives (no significant differences for husbands).

Expectations were simply provided to customers; and these expectations were framed to emphasize the benefits of complying with expectations may mitigate some negative effects of socialization.

While socialized customer outcomes declined, these customers relied more on the service quality elements of the encounter rather than peripheral elements beyond the control of the firm and the service provider. These findings highlight the caution managers must exercise as they juggle the trade‐offs inherent in communicating the customer's expanded role in the service production.

The customer's role in creating and producing service experiences has received increased attention. This research offers evidence that the benefits achieved through increased customer participation have costs to be considered.

This study aims to explore how managers of multi-unit retail chains balance unit customer satisfaction and profitability through the manager ' s customer, sales, and production operating orientations.

This research links survey data (gathered from unit managers and customers) to customer satisfaction and unit financial performance.

The study found that the store managers ' customer and sales operating orientations are strongly related to financial performance; further, these effects are negatively moderated by a production operating orientation. Results also indicate that the store manager ' s customer and sales operating orientations are related to customer satisfaction only when moderated by his/her production operating orientation.

Using a sample drawn from within a single firm, this research examines profitability and customer satisfaction at the unit level and identifies the manager of the unit as occupying a key strategic role in the multi-unit enterprise.

The findings highlight the critical role the unit manager of a multi-unit enterprise plays in driving customer satisfaction and unit profitability. Further, the results point to the challenge of managing the production-related responsibilities of the retail enterprise while striving to be sales and/or customer oriented. Implications for management are particularly salient when considering the combined effect of production-sales and production-customer orientations.

This study merges services operations and services marketing theory to explore how conflicting strategic initiatives are implemented at the store level, and how these, in turn, influence unit financial performance and customer satisfaction.

Both guidance to transport planning practitioners and scientific literature advocate the adoption of in-depth and inclusive participation and consultation methods when developing new transport plans and measures. The motivations for this normative stance are however unclear, other than general statements that public participation is inherently a good thing, and that new forms of transport planning must be different from what has gone before. However, these documents cite little or no evidence to demonstrate that more participatory transport planning has produced ‘better’ decisions or outcomes. It is also important to note that the legitimacy conferred on governments from adopting this form of participation and consultation is only one of several forms of legitimacy. The purpose of this chapter is thus to attempt to assess whether more participatory approaches to transport planning do indeed lead to ‘better’ decisions and outcomes. It does this by developing, based on the literature, a number of criteria by which to judge the decisions made and outcomes delivered. It then reviews the experience of consultation and participation in a non-random sample of four pairs of transport plans or measures, and evaluates the experience in each against the criteria developed. It finds little evidence that more in-depth and inclusive participation processes that follow the normative stance found in practitioner guidance and the literature lead to better outcomes, and some evidence that such processes may in some cases compromise legitimacy by slowing and changing measure implementation.

In today’s competitive business environment, organizations are being challenged to improve performance by improving processes, minimizing costs, and increasing output. Such changes can only be made by looking beyond traditional management systems. Continuous improvement (CI) and total quality management (TQM) have been the focus of recent quality improvement initiatives. However, in many ways, the results have not been as dramatic as desired. Business process reengineering (BPR) focuses on innovation and creativity in redesigning processes in an effort to meet customers’ needs and expectations. Experience using nonlinear systems theory in applied health care settings has revealed that nonlinear science does offer a practical new frame of reference for BPR initiatives. This article describes why radically different approaches are necessary to sustain continued quality improvement, provides the key practical insights offered by nonlinear systems theory, and provides a clinical example of multidimensional thinking as applied in an acute care setting.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the critical success factors of business process reengineering (BPR) in higher education (HE).

Empirical case studies collected from three private higher education institutions in Malaysia, which have embarked on BPR successfully.

Seven factors were found to be critical to BPR implementation success. The factors are teamwork and quality culture, quality management system and satisfactory rewards, effective change management, less bureaucratic and participative, information technology/information system, effective project management and adequate financial resources.

The paper provides a framework for future research to explore organisational development in making BPR happen successfully.

This research contributes to studies of BPR in HE context, by considering the soft issues in its implementation.

Intelligent solutions, based on expert systems (ES), to solve complicated practical problems in various sectors are becoming more and more widespread. However, the role of expert systems in the improvement of service industry has not yet been studied in the research community. The primary objective of this paper is to discuss the important role that ES can play in the improvement of service industry.

Based on the diplomacy, preparedness and engagement responsibilities with the aid of technology ((DPEAT) model proposed by Agnihothri et al. the article presents how ES can be used in order to create an effective service organization.

The key findings of the study show that carrying out ES‐based DPEAT can result in superior service outcomes.

Service industries are growing in importance in all over the world. These industries operate in a very competitive market where the need to differentiate a service from the competitor is analogous to survival. The effective use of information technology (IT) to help service companies improve service quality, financial performance, customer satisfaction and productivity is a very crucial issue nowadays. However, the role of expert systems in the improvement of service industry has not yet been studied in the research community. The value of this paper is that it describes how the DPEAT model can be used in order to create effective service organization.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the usability and potential of incorporating quality costs into an electronic adverse incident recording system within a healthcare sector.

The paper is a general review and a discussion of an electronic adverse incident‐recording system into the potential benefits and restrictions was undertaken. Articles containing both information systems and quality costs were reviewed in order to explore the potential of linking information against patient safety issues.

The paper finds that quality costs is a valid and useful approach for measuring the impact of individual adverse incidents or trends in order to support managers and clinicians to develop appropriate action plans to reduce levels of patient harm and thereby improve patient safety. The paper also shows that quality costs can be used to support managers and clinicians and are commercially designed to improve the detection, investigation and action planning to improve service quality and patient safety.

Quality costs can be used as a driver for identifying potential high impact quality and patient safety projects within a healthcare setting.

This paper provides useful information for designers of electronic adverse incident‐reporting systems to support managers and clinicians to utilise the benefits of quality costing in order to strengthen and re‐focus patient safety issues in healthcare.

The purposes of this study are to present an operational definition of information technology (IT) infrastructure flexibility and to provide a framework for assessing its components.

A comprehensive review of the relevant literature was conducted along with expert interviews to determine what experts considered to be the characteristics of IT infrastructure flexibility. A questionnaire was then developed, and 388 IT personnel with a wide range of experience verified the proposed framework. Factor analysis was conducted to reveal the common aspects of IT infrastructure flexibility.

The results expand on the four recognized components (connectivity, compatibility, modularity and IT personnel competency) from the literature by revealing five further components (scalability, continuity, rapidity, facility and modernity).

The issue of external validity should be a concern because the samples were collected only from IT personnel in the financial service industry in Thailand. The improvement of the instrument to fit additional contexts is recommended.

Practitioners may now consider their IT infrastructure profiles and determine which components need more attention. Researchers may expand on this paper's results by conducting further investigations with other organizational measurements.

This study is the first to provide empirical evidence from the context of a developing country, which fills a significant gap in the literature. Although this study reports different findings from the literature, the results still complement rather than contradict the existing research framework.

The purpose of this paper is to obtain numerical solutions of a two‐dimensional mixed space‐time PDE modelling the flow of a second‐grade.

The paper derives conditionally stable Crank‐Nicolson schemes to solve both the one and two dimensional mixed‐space time PDE. For the two‐dimensional case we implement the Crank‐Nicolson scheme using a Peaceman‐Rachford ADI scheme.

For zero‐shear boundaries the Cattanneo representation of the model equation blows up whilst the representation derived by Rajagopal is stable and produces solutions which decay over time.

The use of a Peaceman‐Rachford ADI scheme to solve a mixed space‐time PDE is both novel and new.