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The author conducted an ethnography of a social network site (SNS), a secret Facebook (FB) group with more than 60,000 members consisting of public school teachers from all over the Philippines, with the country being one of the fastest growing markets for FB in Southeast Asia with 47 million active FB accounts. The author frames her analysis of a social media group for educators within the larger socio-historical context of the Philippines to explore teacher agency. Teachers in the Philippines have historically held a low social and occupational status, shaped in part by colonialism, and maintained in policy discourse, social perceptions of cultural capital. Within a social media group, teachers are able to express frank views, but also reinforce certain norms. The chapter posits that the nuance of teacher status can be revealed from ethnographies that explore and promote teachers’ historical narratives. This study was undertaken during the initial stage of the implementation of the K-12 reform when various directives regarding curriculum, materials, pedagogy, medium of instruction, assessment, and reporting systems are being issued from the central office based in Manila to all 46,404 schools spread in the three major island groups.

Affect is a dynamic construct that varies over time and can significantly influence motivation and performance in organisational contexts. This chapter addresses key conceptual and methodological challenges that arise when aiming to measure affect as a within-person process. The literature has been divided on whether the structure of affect is unipolar or bipolar and no research has considered this structure across levels of analysis. Measuring affect as a within-person process also requires a brief scale that can be administered with minimal disruption. This chapter presents data that provide evidence for bipolarity in the structure of affect. We use these data to validate the momentary affect scale, which is a new brief affect scale that can be used in within-person research designs and applied settings.

Purpose – A major limitation in cross-cultural research continues to be attempts to compare construct measurements across cultures without adequate conceptual and empirical evidence of the equivalency of the measurement scores. Of significant concern in such studies is the presence of various types of response bias that may systematically differ from one culture to another, resulting in a potential violation of the assumption that measurement scores across cultures are equivalent. The focus of this study is to investigate the role of the response format type, extreme response style (ERS). Most studies have investigated response bias styles using Likert-type scales as response formats, yet it has long been argued that these particular formats tend to result in various types of response style bias, especially in cross-cultural research. Would other scaling devices, such as semantic differential (SD), lessen response style bias in pan-cultural studies? To answer this question, our study employs two types of response formats (i.e., Liker-type and SD) to empirically test for the presence of ERS within each response format style.

Methodology/approach – This chapter takes the form of empirical research using ERS indices to test for the degree of ERS between response formats using samples from a collectivistic culture (i.e., South Korea) and an individualistic culture (i.e., United States).

Findings – Results show that samples from both cultures exhibit greater levels of ERS when using Likert-type scales compared to SD scales. Additionally, this study finds that, when using Likert-type scales, ERS is greater for U.S. respondents than for South Korea respondents. Finally, results show that there is no statistically significant difference in ERS between the two cultural groups when using SD response formats.

Research implications – Findings show that the use of SD response formats eliminates systematic differences in ERS between a collectivist sample and an individualist sample. Therefore, the use of such response formats in future cross-cultural research can greatly diminish the problematic effects of culturally based ERS and lead to greater confidence in the equivalency of measurement scores across cultures.

Originality/value of paper – This study is the first to simultaneously assess culturally based ERS using two types of response formats to investigate the impact of response format on ERS. Furthermore, this study assesses the role of response format on ERS both within and between two distinctly different cultures.

This chapter provides an overview of the Department of Defense (DoD) laboratory structure to help equipment designers, modelers, and manufacturers determine where research, testing programs, or relevant findings can be found. The chapter includes a discussion of the performance measures and metrics typically used in DoD laboratories and concludes by considering the current state-of-the-art as well as the state-of-the-possible for human performance measurement.

The chapter proposes to investigate online reputation of hospitality brands and its measurements. Brand reputation is generally defined as an overall appraisal of a company by its stakeholders, which is the result of the company's past actions and predictions about the company's future (Ferguson, Deephouse, & Ferguson, 2000). Being viewed as the opinion shared among a group of stakeholders (Dowling, 2008), it plays an important role in the tourism industry. With the progress of Information Communication Technologies (ICTs), reviews and user-generated contents of destinations and of hospitality companies together with the related emerging brand reputation can influence consumers' behaviors and choices. Brand reputation analysis could be more useful in the hospitality brand management when integrated with brand image and brand identity analysis, mainly because in tourism businesses and destinations, brands are typically affected by an inherent fragility determined by the service nature of products (Casarin, 1996). According to Biel (1991), the meanings that consumers assign to a brand are synthesized into brand associations formed by the components perceived to underlie the brand's image. As well as brand reputation, strong, positive and unique associations reinforce a brand and increase its equity that requires significant internal brand identity efforts, which should create a corresponding brand image through integration in overall marketing programmes (Keller, 2003). It makes sense to develop an analytical research approach that compares online brand reputation (OBR) with brand association matching as a measure of the alignment between brand identity and brand image in hospitality companies. This comparative analysis emerging from brand reputation, brand image and brand identity analysis can reveal divergent situations (i.e., high brand reputation and low brand association matching) and orient brand managers in reviewing online brand communication. Brand reputation and brand image analysis will be contextualized in an online community as a social setting that is considered to be a new type of market (Muniz & O'Guinn, 2001). We focus on hospitality online communities populated by consumers and other actors such as influencers and bloggers: their brand perception could be separately compared with brand identity that we will extract from company communications including presentational information and brand-related press releases found on websites, nonfinancial narrative from annual reports, and interviews with managers published in mainstream media sources. In our analysis we will focalize on a cluster of luxury hospitality companies integrating a netnographic and text-mining techniques. We will use both the techniques in order to (1) extract and study brand associations in terms of brand reputation, brand image, and brand identity; (2) develop indicators of brand reputation and brand association matching; and (3) discuss their utility in the management of the hospitality company brands.

The most commonly described components of customer experience include cognitive and affective aspects. However, the subjective self-reported methods traditionally applied in tourism research cannot fully represent the instant, dynamic, and affective nature of customer experience. Therefore, there is a need for moment-based approaches and longitudinal methods in tourism research. The chapter provides a selective review of measures that can be used to assess the affective aspects of customer experience. Taking into account the advantages and limitations of each method, the integration of self-reported scales, moment-based psychophysiological techniques, and longitudinal methods should be considered as the best approach to measuring affective components of customer experience in tourism. This holistic interdisciplinary approach will help researchers and tourism practitioners understand the relationship between affective and cognitive components of tourists' pre-visit, onsite, and post-visit experience, as well as evaluate the effectiveness of marketing campaigns, identify weak points of tourists' customer journey, and maximize total travel experience.

Internet + and Electronic Business in China is a comprehensive resource that provides insight and analysis into E-commerce in China and how it has revolutionized and continues to revolutionize business and society. Split into four distinct sections, the book first lays out the theoretical foundations and fundamental concepts of E-Business before moving on to look at internet+ innovation models and their applications in different industries such as agriculture, finance and commerce. The book then provides a comprehensive analysis of E-business platforms and their applications in China before finishing with four comprehensive case studies of major E-business projects, providing readers with successful examples of implementing E-Business entrepreneurship projects.

Internet + and Electronic Business in China is a comprehensive resource that provides insights and analysis into how E-commerce has revolutionized and continues to revolutionize business and society in China.

Purpose – This paper proposes a new procedure for measuring affective responses during social interaction using facial thermographic imaging.

Methodology – We first describe the results of several small pilot experiments designed to develop and refine this new measure that reveal some of the methodological advantages and challenges offered by this measurement approach. We then demonstrate the potential utility of this measure using data from a laboratory experiment (N=114) in which we used performance feedback to manipulate identity deflection and measured several types of affective responses – including self-impressions and emotions.

Findings – We find warming of the brow (near the corrugator muscle) and cheek (near the zygomatic major muscle) related most strongly to emotion valence and self-potency, with those whose brows and cheeks warmed the most feeling less positive emotion and less potent self-impressions. Warming in the eye area (near the orbicularis oculi) related most closely to undirected identity deflection and to positive self-sentiments. Positive self-views and strong identity disruptions both contributed to warming of the eyes.

Implications – The rigor of contemporary sociological theories of emotion exceeds our current ability to empirically test these theories. Facial thermographic imaging may offer sociologists new assessments of affect and emotion that are ecologically valid, socially unreactive, temporally sensitive, and accurate. This could dramatically improve our ability to test and develop affect based theories of social interaction.