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Discusses the need to combat wear and corrosion, and to analyse wear types with regard to weight, longer working life, demands on performance, etc. Provides details of various surface coatings and debates their properties. Examines several R&D programmes on new‐generation coatings. Concludes that surface‐coating engineers should be part of the design team in the manufacturing process.

This article reviews the extensive history of dynamic performance research, with the goal of providing a clear picture of where the field has been, where it is now, and where it needs to go. Past research has established that job performance does indeed change, but the implications of this dynamism and the predictability of performance trends remain unresolved. Theories are available to help explain dynamic performance, and although far from providing an unambiguous understanding of the phenomenon, they offer direction for future theoretical development. Dynamic performance research does suffer from a number of methodological difficulties, but new techniques have emerged that present even more opportunities to advance knowledge in this area. From this review, I propose research questions to bridge the theoretical and methodological gaps of this area. Answering these questions can advance both research involving job performance prediction and our understanding of the effects of human resource interventions.

The purpose of this paper is to advance a model for identifying the superior customer value proposition that evolves through a process of corporate transformation while simultaneously seeking to align this value proposition with regional expansion and growth of Caribbean financial firms.

The study utilizes a cross-sectional design. Telephone surveys were used to collect data from 80 financial firms and 243 customers across ten Caribbean countries. Structural equations modeling was employed for data analysis.

The main findings are that corporate transformation of financial firms was a significant driver of customer orientation, consumer confidence, quality, flexibility, branding, and firm capability while lower prices (such as interest rates, fees, and charges), consumer confidence, and branding were the key drivers of regional expansion and growth.

The study identified six value-added dimensions along with price as the superior customer value proposition of financial firms. These dimensions should be incorporated in the business model for transformation and growth of these firms.

The study extended the literature through development of a customer value proposition model that was primarily built on Levitt’s (1965) product life cycle conceptualization and augmented by Porter’s generic strategies.

Many nations, including African ones, view PhD graduates as a means to be more internationally competitive, and national policies may encourage outward mobility of potential PhDs, expecting that graduates on return will enhance the country’s capacity. Many studies of such mobility, as with studies of early career researchers generally, focus on their work-related experiences. That is, they do not incorporate the broader life considerations that can intersect with their work-career decisions. So, this study of 36 Africans who completed their PhDs abroad uses a framework that embedded an individual’s work within personal considerations, such as life goals, while not ignoring the structural factors, such as job availability, in play when making work-career decisions.

The paper used a narrative methodology, with two stages of analysis: first of individual cases, then of patterns across individuals.

Multiple personal factors came to bear in negotiating the structural factors related to work and career. Moreover, there were multiple intersections between personal factors, and the influence of a factor ranged from sustaining through disrupting, highlighting the specific context-bounded nature of the thinking at the time of decision-making.

This was a small-scale study with no intention to generalize to the broader population of African PhD holders. Rather but the goal was an in-depth examination of individual’s work within personal considerations to further conceptualize the understanding of career decision-making.

PhD programmes could encourage PhD students to consider the importance of life intentions and hopes in career decision-making and how careers evolve over time in light of structural and life factors.

Overall, participants demonstrated an intricate weighing of personal factors in making decisions as they also sought to negotiate different structural factors to advance their careers. Further, no other studies the authors are aware of report how the same interacting factors can have a sustaining through disrupting influence dependent on specific contexts, thus further revealing how nested contexts and personal factors co-influence the work-career decisions that each individual makes.

This paperaims to investigate a novel expectation by examining how framing a company as its constituent members (members frame) versus an organization (organization frame) can influence consumer evaluations of a product or service from this company.

Four studies were conducted examining the effectiveness of an organization (vs members) frame in a between-subjects experimental design (a pilot study, Studies 1a, 1b and 2). Study 2 also tested the moderating role of donation strategies (amount-focused vs frequency-focused).

Results show a members (vs organization) frame leads to a higher purchase likelihood of a product from a company engaging in corporate donations. Further, this framing effect is mediated by increased levels of consumers’ perceptions about how committed the company is to the cause and the emotion of moral elevation in response to the company’s corporate donations. Moreover, this effect is moderated when the company uses a frequency-based (vs amount-based) donation strategy.

This research contributes to the literature on message framing by demonstrating how the same information about a company may lead to differential effects on consumer evaluations, depending on whether the company is framed as its constituent members versus an organization.

This paper presents significant managerial implications for small companies, in which the owner is the company, about how they can effectively communicate corporate donations to the consumers.

This research provides a novel perspective on how the same information about a company may lead to differential effects on consumer evaluations, particularly in the context of corporate donations.

This paper aims to improve marketing managers’ use of information from sales. The authors propose and empirically test the link between cross-functional trust and marketing’s use of information from sales, and whether this effect is contingent on marketing’s power within the firm.

Cross-sectional survey data were collected from 338 large-scale Hungarian firms. Structural equation modeling and bootstrap procedures were used to test the hypotheses.

The effect of cross-functional trust on marketing managers’ use of sales information is fully mediated by sales–marketing integration and marketing’s perception of information quality. However, the power of marketing within the firm moderates this mediating relationship.

This paper provides empirical evidence concerning the mediating mechanisms of transferring cross-functional trust to marketing’s successful use of information from sales. The findings imply that cross-functional trust can improve marketing managers’ use of sales information of firms with powerful marketing units by facilitating integration, whereas it can improve the use of sales information of firms with low marketing power by improving marketing managers’ perception of information quality from sales.

This is the first study that models and empirically investigates marketing managers’ use of information collected by sales. The current study conceptually links and advances extant knowledge on the literatures on the sales–marketing interface and utilization of market information at the individual level and increases the understanding of how cross-functional trust contributes to information use under different contingencies of marketing power.

This study uses structural equation modeling to test a model of the impact of human resources management practices on perceived organizational performance, on a large sample of European companies. The influences of competitive intensity, industry attractiveness, and strategic management are considered in the model, and their direct and indirect influence on organizational performance is assessed. The model produced an adequate fit, and results show that strategic management does influence human resource practices. Human resource flexibility practices and performance management have a positive impact on organizational performance, while training was not found to have a significant impact. A direct positive impact of competitive intensity and industry attractiveness on strategic management was supported by the data, as well as a direct positive effect of industry attractiveness on perceived organizational performance.

The enormous improvement in child health in this country—in infant mortality and morbidity, in physical growth and well‐being, are self‐evident. Not only do we see the physical improvement in our children, but it strikes visitors from overseas more forcibly, and there can be few other countries in the world which can boast such swarms of healthy, vigorous children. If this was preventive medicine's only success, it would be worth many times over the money spent on this branch of the National Health Service, which is little enough in all conscience: about £20 millions a year compared with over £400 millions for curative medicine. Can any of the undoubted great and dramatic advances of the latter match the far‐reaching effects of this one achievement of preventive medicine?