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Aarhus Kommunes Biblioteker (Teknisk Bibliotek), Ingerslevs Plads 7, Aarhus, Denmark. Representative: V. NEDERGAARD PEDERSEN (Librarian).

The actions of employees such as service personnel are seen as being important in communicating a company’s corporate values and goals, particularly where they interact directly with customers and other corporate audiences. Their beliefs, norms and values derived from the organisational culture influence their actions and the informal messages that they communicate. A mystique still exists around the concept of organisational culture. This paper attempts to rectify this by reviewing the literature relating to organisational culture, focusing on its definition, the factors which influence it and the arguments as to whether it can be managed. The paper highlights the complexity of the phenomenon and the need for corporate marketers to be more sensitive to this complexity in the development and execution of corporate communication strategies. This requires marketers to work more closely with researchers and practitioners working in the fields of organisational behaviour and human resource management.

This paper reports on a programme of research in the UK aimed at examining the role of mystery shopping in the measurement and management of service quality. The research focused on the views of the senior managers responsible for commissioning mystery shopping research and the directors of market research agencies responsible for the provision of such research. The research findings identify the main uses of mystery shopping in the UK and the methods used to maximise the reliability of the technique. The study also discovers that organisations rarely integrate mystery shopping results with other measures of service delivery performance.

Examines the nature of corporate culture in a service delivery environment. In particular, attempts to examine the level of consensus that exists with regard to the norms, values and behaviour of service personnel. The research included a programme of quantitative research within one retail bank, involving the completion of a questionnaire by 268 branch staff in 48 bank branches. The research found no evidence to suggest that corporate values and attitudes are shared by all of the service personnel in an organization. Instead there is a mix of company‐wide consensus on some issues and subcultural consensus on others. Therefore cultural consensus can occur at a corporate level, at a service team level or at a hierarchical level within an organization.

This article reviews different viewpoints in the marketing literature in an attempt to clearly define the concept of corporate reputation and identify its relationship with corporate image. Definitions offered for the term corporate reputation by marketing academics and practitioners are therefore merged into two dominant schools of thought. These include the analogous school of thought, which views corporate reputation as synonymous with corporate image, and the differentiated school of thought, which considers the terms to be different and, according to the majority of the authors, interrelated. This article argues that on balance, the weight of literature suggests that there is a dynamic, bilateral relationship between a firm’s corporate reputations and its projected corporate images. Future research is therefore encouraged to explore how corporate reputations influence and are influenced by all the ways in which the company projects its images: its behaviour, communication and symbolism.

In the last four years, since Volume I of this Bibliography first appeared, there has been an explosion of literature in all the main functional areas of business. This wealth of material poses problems for the researcher in management studies — and, of course, for the librarian: uncovering what has been written in any one area is not an easy task. This volume aims to help the librarian and the researcher overcome some of the immediate problems of identification of material. It is an annotated bibliography of management, drawing on the wide variety of literature produced by MCB University Press. Over the last four years, MCB University Press has produced an extensive range of books and serial publications covering most of the established and many of the developing areas of management. This volume, in conjunction with Volume I, provides a guide to all the material published so far.

It has now become a normal part of the consumption journey for consumers to share their positive and negative service encounters with firms on microblogs such as Twitter. There is, however, a limited amount of research on service encounter microblog word of mouth (SEMWOM) and its impact on firm reputation from a receiver’s perspective. This study aims to understand the comparative effects of positive and negative valence SEMWOM on receivers’ perceptions of firms’ reputations and the factors that are particularly salient to receivers’ perceptions of firm reputation upon exposure to SEMWOM.

An experiment exposed 372 Twitter users to positive and negative valence SEMWOM. To determine whether changes in perception of firm reputation occurred on exposure to both positive and negative valence SEMWOM, participants’ perceptions of a range of US airlines were measured before and after exposure to the SEMWOM. To confirm the factors that influence the perception of reputation on such exposure, six structural equation models were created to determine the comparative effects of positive and negative valence SEMWOM among three electronic WOM media as follows: video, photo and text.

Both positive and negative valence SEMWOM affect receivers’ perceptions of airlines’ reputations on exposure. Furthermore, the factors that influence perceptions of reputation on exposure to SEMWOM vary depending on valence and type of media contained in a tweet.

Although consumers now routinely share their positive and negative service encounters with brands on microblogs, scant research has examined receivers of positive and negative valence SEMWOM, important actors in the microblog domain. This study addresses this research gap by empirically investigating the impact of both positive and negative valence SEMWOM on receivers’ perceptions of firm reputation upon exposure to it.

The following bibliography focuses mainly on programs which can run on IBM microcomputers and compatibles under the operating system PC DOS/MS DOS, and which can be used in online information and documentation work. They fall into the following categories: