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The purpose of this study is to model the consumer journey of admission-based membership services from initial purchase to full-season memberships. Particularly, the study pays attention to customer-owned contacts (purchase behavior) and service-owned contacts (salesperson voice- and text-based communications), to examine longitudinal internal data to determine factors which hinder and propel customers toward full memberships.

On the basis of big data supplied by a National Hockey League team, the study uses three simultaneous equations in modeling to account for potential endogeneity related to the likelihood that sales and service personnel are more likely to contact frequent customers. The longitudinal data allow us to map the customer journey over the course of multiple years, compared to typical cross-section studies.

The findings show that as customers increasingly own committed points of contact, they are prepared to move to the next level – but rarely skip major steps in the relationship journey. The quantity, type and timing of customer contacts by the service firm may hinder or propel the customer down the path to purchase full memberships.

The prevalence of big data among service firms should allow researchers to better understand how consumers respond to contact strategies over time, as well as fluctuations in firm performance. The research adds to the customer journey research stream, while meeting the call of researchers to bridge the gap between service marketing research priorities and current practice.

Sales practices and marketing automation tactics may come at the cost of burning leads and alienating future members. Frequent text-based contacts absent voice-based interactions hinder consumer journey and work against relationship building. Service marketers can learn how to better allocate resources, properly manage and motivate contact strategies and target campaigns to send the right message via the right media at the right time.

This is the first study to map customer journey for admission-based, membership services. The longitudinal approach across multiple years provides a deep understanding of how customers take steps toward loyal membership status, while also pinpointing potential drawbacks of current contact strategies.

Local housing authorities are responsible for meeting the priority housing and support needs of the local community, regardless of tenure. Under the Government's policies to develop their ‘community leadership’ role and implement Supporting People, they also have an increasing responsibility, with social services and other services, to support needs in the community. The Chartered Institute of Housing has published good practice guidance on housing and services for people with support needs, outlined in this article.

Traditional methods of addressing workplace violence have relied almost solely on reactive measures. Methods of de‐escalation, strategies to calm the already distressed person down by means of positive communication, or responding to an actual or potential act of violence by means of physical control have formed the focus of training initiatives provided for staff. This approach has suggested an acceptance of the premise that violence in certain services is an inevitable problem that must be managed. This paper proposes that many incidents can be prevented and outlines the emerging evidence to support a structured, holistic approach. Additionally, it provides an overview of the recent policy agenda, the evidence base and examples of some recent and ongoing development work that attempts to change practice.

The purpose of this paper is to apply analysis of public discourses on Ze Xiao to explore and interpret the power relationships shaping inequality in admission to public junior high schools in urban China.

This study first introduces the rise of Ze Xiao as an educational phenomenon in China. It then elucidates power relationships in public school admission by analyzing continuities and changes in stakeholders’ interaction in public school admission. It concludes by discussing educational reform for equal public school admission in urban China. Data were collected from written and spoken texts about public school admission, including newspaper articles from the 1980s to the 2000s, policy documents and interviews with relevant stakeholders.

Findings demonstrate that multi-layered power relationships caused diverse inequalities in admission to public secondary education in urban China. These are represented by political and institutional privileges and an imbalance in education development during the social transition from a profit-driven approach in the 1990s to a balance-centered one after 2000. Arguably, there is a necessity to further promote a systematic reform to terminate the privileges and imbalance for an equal and balanced public secondary education in urban China post-2015.

This study attempts to make a contribution toward reconstructing the meaning of inequality in admission to public junior high schools in urban areas by revealing the power relationships among stakeholders constituted through their interactions in public education during the different stages of socio-economic development in urban China.

This paper aims to understand the emerging state of online counseling practices in India, highlight the benefits of process transition and explore potential research issues in this domain. Changing demands of labor market and growing availability of wide range of education and training options in the higher/technical education sector underscore the need of counseling services for an individual’s career guidance requirements. “Online counseling” in this context, as an e-government intervention, is expected to meet this requirement by extending support to individuals’ decision-making process and optimally match their interest with appropriate kind of education.

The authors have highlighted some key contributions from the literature to build theoretical insight about contextual factors of counseling, and presented a detailed case analysis of online counseling practices in one of the states of India.

With a critical perspective, it is noticed that design of online counseling services in India has largely been developed from the requirements of service provider’s to support the conventional set of practices, with less attention given to students’ decision support. More research is required in the direction of service gap analysis, information quality issues and more interactive website functionalities from user’s viewpoint.

Aligning the objectives of online counseling services with the relevant theories of career guidance should essentially be considered by the government/online counseling managers. Furthermore, managers must understand the importance of information quality and self-help tools for online information accessibility to facilitate student’s decision-making process.

The article reports a research scenario/case of a unique service of its kind under the education sector in India which is weighted high on both the dimensions – technical/operational elements, because of multiple stakeholders’ involvement, and informational service elements, as viewed through e-government service maturity research lens.

Our first goal is to discuss new information for national policymaking which may arise from the analyses of international achievement study data. The second is to illustrate this potential by exploring determinants of students' career plans in a cross-national perspective. Using neo-institutionalism as our theoretical framework, we propose that the influence of a global educational ideology encourages high levels of occupational ambitions among students. This is particularly the case in countries where the transfer of this ideology is supported by the reception of aid for education, where economic prosperity is at modest levels but the service sector employment is expanding. To explore this proposition, we analyze students' occupational expectations using the 2006 PISA surveys from 49 countries. We account for a broad range of possible determinants by estimating three-level hierarchical models in which students are clustered in schools and schools within countries. We find that at individual and school levels, ambition is positively correlated with economic and noneconomic resources. In contrast, students in poorer countries, where secondary education is not yet universally accessible, tend to be more ambitious. The global educational ideology, indicated by the reception of education-related aid, is associated with student career optimism, while students in affluent nations with less economic inequality have modest occupational plans. In addition, the rate of service sector expansion is positively related to high levels of ambition. These patterns hold even after we control for cross-national variation in the extent to which PISA respondents represent populations of 15-year-olds in their countries.

An Asian delegate to the UN‐conference of Women in Copenhagen 1980 asked the Norwegian Ombud:

Tackling the problem of aggression and violence in health care is high on the agenda for healthcare professionals. In an endeavour to protect both patients and staff alike when managing aggressive behaviour, the use of physical restraint is under scrutiny, particularly as a result of the reported deaths of a number of patients whilst being restrained. The challenges of employing this type of intervention, implications for safe and effective practices and the need for the suitable training of staff are explored in this paper.