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The purpose of this paper is to explore the contextual and linguistic challenges that French business schools face when preparing for international accreditation and to shed light on the different ways in which experts facilitate these accreditation processes, particularly with respect to how they capitalize on their contextual and linguistic boundary-spanning competences.

The authors interviewed 12 key players at four business schools in France engaged in international accreditations and in three specific categories: senior management, tenured faculty and administrative staff. The interview-based case study design used semi-structured questions and an insider researcher approach to study an underexplored sector of analysis.

The findings suggest that French business schools have been particularly impacted by the colonizing effects of English as the mandatory language of the international accreditation bodies espousing a basically Anglophone higher education philosophy. Consequently, schools engage external experts for their contextual and linguistic boundary-spanning expertise to facilitate accreditation processes.

The authors contribute to language-sensitive research through a critical perspective on marginalization within French business schools due to the use of English as the mandatory lingua franca of international accreditation processes and due to the underlying higher-education philosophy from the Anglophone academic sphere within these processes. As a result, French business schools resort to external experts to mediate their knowledge and competency gaps.

This paper aims to describe the European Holocaust Research Infrastructure (EHRI) project's ongoing efforts to virtually integrate trans-national archival sources via the reconstruction of collection provenance as it relates to copy collections (material copied from one archive to another) and the co-referencing of subject and authority terms across material held by distinct institutions.

This paper is a case study of approximately 6,000 words length. The authors describe the scope of the problem of archival fragmentation from both cultural and technical perspectives, with particular focus on Holocaust-related material, and describe, with graph-based visualisations, two ways in which EHRI seeks to better integrate information about fragmented material.

As a case study, the principal contributions of this paper include reports on our experience with extracting provenance-based connections between archival descriptions from encoded finding aids and the challenges of co-referencing access points in the absence of domain-specific controlled vocabularies.

Record linking in general is an important technique in computational approaches to humanities research and one that has rightly received significant attention from scholars. In the context of historical archives, however, the material itself is in most cases not digitised, meaning that computational attempts at linking must rely on finding aids which constitute much fewer rich data sources. The EHRI project’s work in this area is therefore quite pioneering and has implications for archival integration on a larger scale, where the disruptive potential of Linked Open Data is most obvious.

The purpose of this paper is to explore relationships among three primary variables: sports spectatorship of intercollegiate football, university brand equity and student satisfaction. The primary purpose is to understand the extent to which athletic programs influence campus culture, sense of community and the satisfaction of undergraduate students. A secondary purpose is to probe the factor structure, reliability and validity of a recently developed sports spectatorship scale.

The authors collected data through an online survey of 419 undergraduate students enrolled at three separate Midwestern universities, using previously developed and validated survey scales.

Relationships between brand equity and student satisfaction suggest that athletic programs provide a benefit to universities by improving students’ psychological sense of community and emotional connection to the institution. Furthermore, correlations between sports spectatorship and brand equity measures suggest an internal advertising effect.

The results contribute to the understanding of the role of intercollegiate athletic programs, in this case from the perspective of enrolled undergraduate students. Additionally, the findings recommend ways that universities might maximize some of the benefits by emphasizing the emotional connection of the student body to the teams. The paper also contributes to the validation of the sports spectatorship scale as a tool for further research.

The purpose of this paper is to contrast two lay theories of how consumers draw affective inferences about their online bidding experiences. The active-bidder theory (smart-bidder theory) predicts that after winning a bid, highly (minimally) participative bidders would be more satisfied than minimally (highly) participative bidders.

Four experiments test two competing hypotheses, the active-bidder hypothesis and the smart-bidder hypothesis (Study 1), identify a condition that mitigates the observed effects (Study 2), identify when the mitigation is effective or ineffective (Study 3) and replicate the findings in a scenario-based study where participants are allowed to make actual bidding decisions (Studies 4A and 4B).

The findings support the smart-bidder hypothesis across three different product categories; however, this heuristic-driven effect is absent when bidders have concrete shopping goals. The effect was sufficiently robust to be observed even when the bids are made at will.

The present research does not incorporate the widely adopted procedure of second-price auction (also known as proxy bidding in the eBay setting), a system that allows the highest bidder to win the auction but pay the amount of the second-highest bid.

Online consumers should be mindful that entering the minimum number of bids not only helps consumers avoid overbidding but also elevates their joy in winning after the auction ends.

Prior research on bidding behavior on online auction sites has yet to examine how different bidding dynamics affect consumers’ post-auction satisfaction. This research sheds light on the psychological process underlying the robust phenomenon: online auction consumers rely heavily on proxy signals. Bidders appear to use the efficiency heuristic in constructing their affective judgments of their buying experiences.

A key factor in achieving initial AACSB accreditation is establishing an effective relationship between the mentor and the business school. If individual issues are not addressed during the development and implementation of the accreditation plan, time to initial accreditation can be increased substantially. We review four steps in the initial accreditation process and identify seven challenges to the mentor‐business school relationship. Strategies for meeting these challenges are developed for both mentors and business schools. General principles from the organizational mentoring literature are applied to the initial accreditation process to maximize and enhance interaction between mentors and business schools.

Small businesses are critical to economic health and encouraged in government spending by set-asides – annual small business sourcing goals that often are not attained. Little research has explored the negative and risky stigmas associated with small business sourcing.

This research explores reduced transaction costs of small business sourcing to government buyers. A survey of 350 government source selections reveals lower transaction costs derived from lower perceived risk of receiving a bid protest and via more efficient source selection processes.

Contrary to common bias, the performance level of small businesses is no less than that of large business. Thus, small businesses engender lower transaction costs for correcting supplier’s performance. On the basis of these findings, managerial and theoretical implications are discussed.

This paper aims to test the proposition that integrated marketing communications (IMC) practice is lagging in the trucking industry. It stems from the more general proposition extant in the literature that business to business (B2B) IMC practice lags business to consumer IMC practice.

In total, 109 trucking managers attending the American Trucking Association Annual Management Conference are asked which communications tools they use and for which strategic purposes. The new product adoption model (NPAM) provides a means of measuring efficient IMC practice.

Joint space perceptual maps generated by correspondence analysis reveal the association between trucking managers’ IMC mixes and the stages of the NPAM. Inspection shows that trucking managers deploy a relatively large number of traditional and digital tools to support all stages of the NPAM, indicating a sophisticated level of IMC knowledge and practice, contrary to the proposition that IMC practice is lagging in the trucking industry.

This contrary result suggests that IMC practice proceeds at different rates across B2B industries and must be examined on a per-industry basis. In combination with Garber and Dotson’s (2002) trucking IMC study, this study provides a second data point from which the evolution of IMC practice in the trucking industry can be tracked into the future. Additionally, this paper demonstrates the efficacy of the NPAM as a means of measuring the efficiency of IMC mixes, as well as for monitoring and training. Theoretical and managerial implications are discussed.

In 2010 the European Holocaust Research Infrastructure (EHRI) was funded to support research into the Holocaust. The project follows on from significant efforts in the past to develop and record the collections of the Holocaust in several national initiatives. The purpose of this paper is to introduce the efforts by EHRI to create a flexible research environment using graph databases. The authors concentrate on the added features and design decisions to enable efficient processing of collection information as a graph.

The paper concentrates on the specific customisations EHRI had to develop, as the graph database approach is new, and the authors could not rely on existing solutions. The authors describe the serialisations of collections in the graph to provide for efficient processing. Because the EHRI infrastructure is highly distributed, the authors also had to invest a lot of effort into reliable distributed access control mechanisms. Finally, the authors analyse the user-facing work on a portal and a virtual research environment (VRE) in order to discover, share and analyse Holocaust material.

Using the novel graph database approach, the authors first present how we can model collection information as graphs and why this is effective. Second, we show how we make collection information persistent and describe the complex access management system we have developed. Third, we outline how we integrate user interaction with the data through a VRE.

Scholars require specialised access to information. The authors present the results of the work to develop integrated research with collections on the Holocaust researchers and the proposals for a socio-technical ecosystem based on graph database technologies. The use of graph databases is new and the authors needed to work on several innovative customisations to make them work in the domain.