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This research aims to explore perceptions and practices in the area of valuing human resources. It focuses on the importance of valuing human resources, current measurement practices, barriers to measurement and the progress expected in this field.

This research uses a survey questionnaire design to identify and describe perceptions and practices in valuing human resources in three types of UK organizations: traditional companies; knowledge intensive companies; and local authorities.

While the majority of respondents regarded the measurement of human resources as important to their organization, little or moderate progress was expected in measurement practices over the next few years. The main reasons for this included a lack of organizational support, uncertainties as to what should be reported, lack of precision in current measurement practices and sensitivities around what should be reported.

A limitation was in identifying who in the organization should receive such a questionnaire in order to improve the response rate.

Organizations need to be made more aware of the benefits and strategic importance of measuring human resources particularly in an era of resource‐based strategies – competing through people.

The paper highlights that by reporting the data descriptively it can be used as a context for considering what issues need to be resolved and what barriers need to be overcome to take measurement beyond just recognizing its importance.

The mutualisation of two English third division football clubs in 2001 and the creation of a large number of supporters' trusts make it timely to consider whether there is a case for mutualisation of football clubs. This paper assesses whether mutuality would be of economic benefit for clubs, drawing heavily on the experience of mutuals in the financial sector. Our conclusions are mixed. The economic case rests on the distinctive feature of customer loyalty to a club, presuming this to be much stronger than loyalty to a financial institution. However, club members in a mutual must expect to be called upon to provide financial support.

This paper aims to explore the relationship between open innovation (OI) and absorptive capacity (AC) using a bibliometric analysis of existing literature.

The bibliometric analysis is used to review the covered research articles in the Web of Science (WoS) database. The time span covered over 20 years from the year 2000 to 2020.

The study suggests that it is an attracting and growing field for researchers, and there exists a close relationship between OI and AC. Further, the literature has parted into three research streams (1) AC and OI: dependency and interchangeability; (2) OI and its future avenues (3) OI and AC: critical factor for firm innovation performance which elaborate various future scopes to study.

The study's limitations exist with the biasness in database selection criteria, such as the possible non-inclusion of crucial articles.

The study’s implications are to discern close association and path dependency of AC and OI; and facilitate the innovation performance of the firm via developing of AC.

The approach used is a novelty, and the conclusions can better understand the relationship between both terms (OI and AC). Thus, it can help increase firm innovation performance.

Virtual wine experiences (VWEs) replaced in-person wine experiences during the Covid-19 pandemic and continue to be offered by some actors. This study aims to investigate the factors driving interest in VWEs and identify relevant traits of potential consumers to help assess VWEs long-term potential.

A representative sample of 399 Oregon and California wine consumers answered a structured online survey. The authors combine ordered logistic regression and qualitative techniques to analyze the data.

VWEs may effectively attract potential wine consumers and tourists. High interest in VWEs is associated with strong wine involvement and intentions to visit wine regions. Digitization, aversion to travel-related risk and convenience are other relevant drivers of VWE interest. The segmentation analysis revealed that consumers with a potentially higher interest in VWE have distinct traits.

Wineries and wine tourism destinations could leverage VWEs to attract wine tourists and consumers. The authors discuss specific characteristics of high-interest consumers.

Participants in VWEs interact with hosts and explore products in real time. This engagement has long-term marketing potential for attracting them as customers or visitors. The study provides strategic information for practitioners and academics on VWE interest drivers and potential demand, which is currently missing from the literature.

In recent years, electronic word-of-mouth (e-WOM) concerning travel products reflected in online review information has become an important reference for tourists to make their product purchase decisions, while for travel service providers (TSPs), monitoring and improving the e-WOM of their travel products is always an important task. Therefore, based on the online review information, how to capture e-WOM of travel products and find out specific ways to improve the e-WOM is a noteworthy research problem. The purpose of this paper is to develop a method for capturing and analyzing e-WOM toward travel products based on sentiment analysis and stochastic dominance.

Specifically, online review information of travel products is first crawled and preprocessed. Second, sentiment strengths of online review information toward travel products concerning each feature are judged. Then, the matrix of structured online review information toward travel products is formed. Further, the matrix of e-WOM comparisons between any two travel products is constructed, and e-WOM ranking concerning each travel product is determined. Finally, trade-off chart models are constructed to conduct the e-WOM improvement analyses concerning the travel products.

An empirical study based on the online review information toward six travel products crawled from the Tuniu.com website is given to illustrate the use of the proposed method.

The proposed method can not only realize the real-time e-WOM monitoring to travel products but also be useful for TSPs to improve the e-WOM of their travel products.