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Examines the role of service in influencing buying behaviour, basing its results on research carried out into the marketing of industrial raw materials. Defines Service and sets this within a conceptual theoretical framework. Attempts to identify what industrial buyers perceive as service, and measures the performance, of suppliers against key facts of service. Discusses the developing realistic marketing strategies for suppliers.

Wasta is an Arabic word that means the intervention of a patron in favor of a client in attempt to obtain privileges or resources from a third party. In Arab countries, wasta is often used to obtain employment, thus causing unequal opportunity. The purpose of this paper is to study the attributions that people make regarding the competency and morality of wasta users. The main hypothesis is that those that use wasta in obtaining employment will be perceived as less competent and moral than those that do not.

The study is designed as a factorial quasi‐experiment, with three independent variables; wasta, employee qualification and socioeconomic status. The dependent variables are perceived competency and morality. Data were gathered from 421 Egyptian undergraduate business students attending a public and a private university.

In support of the hypotheses, subjects discounted the competency and morality of employees that used wasta to obtain the job. Additionally, subjects from lower socioeconomic groups evaluated wasta users more positively than more affluent subjects.

This is the first study that attempts to use attribution theory to examine the effects of wasta on perceptions of competency and morality. The study may be useful in identifying the disadvantages of using wasta, thus reducing its use.

Notes that, until now, to route robotics travel, most investigations have utilized the fixed coordinate of placement points and magazine of the traveling salesman problem (TSP) method to sequence the placement points after the magazine has been arbitrarily assigned. Points out that, in fact, robotics travel routing should be based on a relative coordinate because the robotics, board and magazine simultaneously move at different speeds during assembly. Consequently, the coordinates of placement point and magazine are constantly changing. In this study, a novel tabu search (TS) based approach is presented. The proposed approach can arrange the placement sequence and assign the magazine slots to yield a performance better than the conventional one. Results presented herein also demonstrate that the larger the number of placement points and/or part numbers, the better the performance.

Within a knowledge-driven, entrepreneurial economy, an increase in a university’s importance is observed because of its significant affect on the economy. Thus, entrepreneurship is a phenomenon that could be observed among all university levels: management, academicians, researchers, and undergraduate and postgraduate students. Entrepreneurial universities could produce several externalities in terms of demography, economy, infrastructure, culture, mobility, education, and societal challenges that will later be reflected in productivity, competitive advantages, and regional capacities, networks, identity, and innovation. In this context, entrepreneurial universities have or are positioned to develop innovative pathways to reinforce entrepreneurship in their communities. This chapter explores how entrepreneurial university pathways (education and training) have had an impact on students’ start-up intentions and actions. Adopting the institutional economics approach, this research proposes a conceptual model, tested with a sample of 1,759 university students enrolled in three entrepreneurial universities (ITESM, Mexico; UNICAMP, Brazil; and UPC, Chile) in Latin America. Our findings confirm the relevant effect of entrepreneurial university pathways on start-up creation. Not only do the results provide important contributions to the literature, they also provide insights for policy-makers to design policies that further benefit society and educational organizations.

This paper illuminates the distinction between individual and organizational actors in business-to-business markets as well as the coexistence of formal and informal mechanisms of coordination in multinational corporations. The main questions addressed include the following. (1) What factors influence the occurrence of personal contacts of foreign subsidiary managers in industrial multinational corporations? (2) How such personal contacts enable coordination in industrial markets and within multinational firms? The theoretical context of the paper is based on: (1) the interaction approach to industrial markets, (2) the network approach to industrial markets, and (3) the process approach to multinational management. The unit of analysis is the foreign subsidiary manager as the focal actor of a contact network. The paper is empirically focused on Portuguese sales subsidiaries of Finnish multinational corporations, which are managed by either a parent country national (Finnish), a host country national (Portuguese) or a third country national. The paper suggests eight scenarios of individual dependence and uncertainty, which are determined by individual, organizational, and/or market factors. Such scenarios are, in turn, thought to require personal contacts with specific functions. The paper suggests eight interpersonal roles of foreign subsidiary managers, by which the functions of their personal contacts enable inter-firm coordination in industrial markets. In addition, the paper suggests eight propositions on how the functions of their personal contacts enable centralization, formalization, socialization and horizontal communication in multinational corporations.

Since its inception at Harvard in 1921, the Doctorate in Education (EdD) has been a degree fraught with confusion as to its purpose and distinction from the PhD. In response to this, the Carnegie Project on the Education Doctorate (CPED), a collaborative project consisting of 80+ schools of education located in the United States, Canada, and New Zealand were established to undertake a critical examination of the EdD and develop it into the degree of choice for educators who want to generate knowledge and scholarship about practice or related policies and steward the education profession. However, programmatic changes in higher education can bring both benefits and challenges (Levine, 2005). This chapter explains: the origins of the education doctorate; how CPED as a network of partners has changed the EdD; the use of bi-annual Convenings as spaces for this work; CPED’s three phases of membership that have built the network; CPED’s path forward.

This paper aims to identify the effects of some corporate governance (CG) mechanisms and Shariah Supervisory Board (SSB) strength on the voluntary use of internal audit function (IAF) by Islamic banks in Sudan.

Based on Agency and Stakeholder Theories, this paper hypothesizes that IAF is likely used by Islamic banks with strong CG and Shariah governance systems. To test these hypotheses, we examine the annual reports of 14 Sudanese banks for a period of five years following the global financial crisis in 2008, using logistic regression analysis.

This paper found that IAF is likely used by Islamic banks with higher CG disclosure (CGD) and strong SSB. While the findings showed that the audit committee and IAF are likely used as substitutes, this paper also indicated that there is a negative association between levels of Unrestricted Investment Account Holders’ (UIAH) ownership and the use of IAF. However, the evidence of this study did not find any impact for the board of directors’ strength on the use of IAF.

There may be better measures for some variables in the study model. Additionally, the restriction of the study sample to Sudanese banks may limit the generalization of the results. Therefore, future studies may refine the model and expand the sample to Islamic banks in other countries.

This paper highlights the importance of IAF for Shariah governance in Islamic banks. Moreover, the insignificant association between the use of IAF and the strength of board of directors has important implications for the board’s effectiveness in Islamic banks.

This is the first study to investigate the factors associated with the use of IAF by Islamic banks.

The study compared values represented in infomercials with values represented in conventional commercials. A total of 318 infomercials and 861 commercials broadcast in Israel in the late 1990s were coded to examine the prominence of value systems and of specific values. Of the three value systems examined – functionalism, hedonism and altruism – functionalism was over three times more frequent in infomercials than in commercials, and altruism was over three times more frequent in commercials than in infomercials. The frequency of hedonism in commercials was 25 percent greater than it was in infomercials. Joy, the most prominent value in commercials, ranked only third in infomercials. Overall, the results show that in spite of the fact that the infomercials are longer than the commercials, they present a more limited selection of values. Infomercials repeatedly mention only the product’s price, its basic qualities and its obvious uses.