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The paper discusses how the use of qualitative research can enrich an organisation's understanding of service quality. A Queensland state government organisation currently using SERVQUAL to measure service quality has adopted a combined qualitative and quantitative approach to gain a richer understanding of service quality from both client and staff perspectives. This has resulted in strategic insight as well as a better understanding of service quality implications by all parties.

The rapid growth of the solo economy in the Asia-Pacific area indicates an economic transition. In East Asia, solitary households are growing along with low marital rates and birth rates under high economic pressure. Because of these population changes, malls must provide good quality service to meet the specific needs of solitary households and social households. The paper aims to discuss this issue.

In this study, relationships among service quality, customer satisfaction (CS), perceived value, corporate image and customer loyalty were compared between social and solitary customers of Taiwan click-and-mortar malls. The effects of five service quality dimensions on CS and customer loyalty were investigated by structural equation modeling.

The analytical results show that all hypothesized relationships among factors were supported with the exception of the impact of perceived value on satisfaction and the impact of the corporate image on satisfaction. Additionally, the comparison between solitary and social customers showed that service quality, corporate image and customer loyalty have strong relationships without differences between both kinds of customers. Solitary and social customers only differed in the impact of perceived value on loyalty.

The managerial implication of this study is that, to satisfy both social and solitary customers and to increase their loyalty, Click-and-mortar malls (CAM malls) should apply different service quality strategies for social and solitary customers. To satisfy both types of customers, a strategy for increasing visible cares should be applied in social customers, and a strategy for increasing the perception of reliability, assurance and visible cares should be applied in solitary customers. To enhance the loyalty of solitary customers, a CAM mall should enhance the value perceived by solitary customers, which can help CAM malls increase the loyalty of solitary customers in the solo economy.

The solo economy is a hot topic in East Asia because the issue of solo economy impacts the market. A CAM mall must evolve its business to attract solitary customers. However, no studies compared perceived quality, satisfaction, perceived value, corporate image and loyalty between solitary customers and social customers. This study is the first study investigated the business model of CAM malls.

The purpose of this paper is to analyse and critique Lyndall Urwick's long‐term advocacy of scientific management and its influence upon management thought.

An analysis and critique of Urwick's published writings across 60 years, on the subject of scientific management and organizations, particularly linking his work and arguments to the influence of Frederick Taylor, also positioning him relative to the thinking of leading thinkers such as Henri Fayol.

This paper argues that the key to understanding his legacy lies in his unique and changing definition of “scientific management”. This was broader than the definition applied by most of his contemporaries and inspired his integrationist project of assimilating Taylorist scientific management into a raft of developing schools of management thought.

Urwick's legacy included a lifetime campaign to reconcile scientific management with succeeding schools of thought, today's management literature stereotyping of some of his contemporary thinkers, and a contribution to management literature's predilection for the labelling of theories and principles.

The paper argues for returning to original sources to accurately understand the intentions and arguments of early founders of many aspects of today's management practice. It also alerts us to the proclivity of management theory and practice to opt for convenient labels that may represent a variety of historical and contemporary meanings.

The paper offers a critical reflection and assessment of the longest standing advocate of scientific management in the management literature.

For this month's Focus interview we spoke to five librarians around the world about the automation system used in their library, their opinion of it, and their thoughts for the future of library automation. Lyndall Osborne is Circulation Services Librarian at Maroochy Shire Library Service, Queensland, Australia (http://peg.apc.org/∼maroochy/). Sue Sutherland is Libraries Manager of Canterbury Public Library, Christchurch, New Zealand (http://www.ccc.govt.nz/Library/). Min‐Min Chang is Director of the Library at Hong Kong University of Science and Technology Library (http://library.ust.hk/). Cinda Romuldietz is Automation Supervisor at Saskatoon Public Library, Canada (http://www.sfn.saskatoon.sk.ca/education/spl/). Alejandro Leal‐Cueva is in charge of the Library Automation Programme at the University of Nuevo Leon in Mexico (http://ulibarri.bcms.uanl.mx/).

Digital disruption offers an innovative opportunity to address housing affordability issues through the use of market design theory and two-sided matching markets. The purpose of this paper is to scope a model for how “uberisation” can revolutionise the traditional apartment delivery model in Australia, leading to improved housing affordability.

This paper uses semi-structured interviews with operators of online real estate platforms and deliberative developers to examine how the principles of “uberisation”, that is two-sided matching markets, are driving innovation in the apartment supply process.

Findings confirm that real estate internet platforms and deliberative developers innovators are informed by the benefits of aggregating demand to reduce development risk, thus enabling apartments to be provided at a substantially lower price than by traditional methods.

The number of interviews is small reflecting the limited number of market actors currently engaged in the innovations investigated.

This research is innovative as it introduces theoretical understandings gained from market design theory and applies those concepts to disrupt the apartment development process.

This paper aims to examine the employment of the military metaphor by the management thinker and writer Lyndall Urwick who in the twentieth century developed and articulated his ideas over a 60-year period, arguably the longest continuous period of any management writer of his day.

This study draws on published research into Urwick as well as upon the breadth of his published writings over a 60-year period. It offers a contextualised explanatory analysis of his military theory ideas and explores their lack of traction by reference to British military, economic and social history.

The study reveals the wartime context that surrounded the emergence of his ideas and motivated Urwick’s faith in the military approach to management. This stood in contrast to the countervailing forces of the post-war decline in British industry and a populist mythology of British Army mismanagement and failure in the Great War.

In this case of a management idea’s failure to gain traction, the importance of the congruence between management theory and societal beliefs emerges as crucial to the likely uptake of new management thinking.

This paper describes the development of a digital role play game (RPG) designed to help construction apprentices to better communicate with their supervisors about issues with the potential to impact on their physical and psychological health and safety.

A participatory approach was adopted to utilise the knowledge and insights of the target users to inform the digital RPG development. Apprentices and supervisors were interviewed to identify characteristics of effective supervisor-apprentice communication, which became the RPG’s learning objectives. The scenarios constructed in the RPG were drawn from lived experiences shared by the apprentices in the interviews. During the development process, consultations were conducted with an advisory committee comprising of apprentices and supervisors to improve the realism of the RPG scenarios.

Three scenarios were developed for the RPG. In each scenario, players are asked to make decisions at various interaction points about how the characters should respond to the unfolding and challenging situations. Scripts were developed for the game, which were acted out and motion captured to animate digital MetaHuman characters embedded in a virtual construction site. Two example situations are introduced in this paper to illustrate the development process.

To our knowledge, the RPG introduced is one of the first applications of digital game-based training in the construction industry. The adoption of a participatory design approach ensures that the game content relates to real-world experiences. The digital RPG is highly interactive and engaging in nature and presents a novel approach to developing “soft” skills in construction.