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This paper provides an overview of the visiting friends and relatives category in international tourism researchover the last decade. It was delivered as a keynote paper at the international conference, “VFR Tourism: Issues and implications” held at the Victoria University of Technology, Melbourne, Australia, in October 1996.

The purpose of this paper is to respond to the Special Issue call by developing the case for enhancing understanding of entrepreneurial marketing by utilising biographical research. This builds on the limited existing research in entrepreneurial marketing using this approach.

Five entrepreneurial marketers are assessed using biographical research.

The individuals assessed clearly show the connection between the telling of a life story and how a business is run using an entrepreneurial marketing approach. Biographical techniques succeed in addressing the need for situation specific understanding. Entrepreneurial marketing core competencies help establish competitive advantage through their ability to influence behaviour, market creation and growth activities.

Biographical research contributes towards the additional theoretical and practical insight which entrepreneurial marketing requires.

Entrepreneurial marketers can make use of biographical research findings due to their readability and association with their own practices to help shape future strategies.

The biographical approach has been underutilised in entrepreneurial marketing research. These research results enhance existing understanding of the foundations of entrepreneurial marketing.

Sets down a powerful and passionate argument about social exclusion and ways to combat class, race and discrimination in a paper prepared for a conference presentation to the Library Association Public Libraries Group. Suggests that if librarians have not experienced exclusion or worked with excluded people then the next best action is to read. Gives examples of relevant titles.

The purpose of this paper is to examine and explain why most small firms remain small. A new conceptual framework – the condition of smallness – is proposed.

A critical examination of the literature about the nature of being a small firm is first conducted. Employing an inductive analysis of responses from a survey of 2,521 small business owners about employment regulation, the nature and effects of smallness is examined.

It was found that owners' choice making combines with perceptions about their resources to produce a condition of smallness. The condition of smallness is conceptualised as the circularity perceptions, attitudes and consequent practices that reflect lack of knowledge, time and capability. It is argued that this condition of smallness inhibits growth to create a wicked problem that explains why most small firms don't grow.

This work is largely conceptual, albeit the argument is grounded in, and illustrated by, empirical data. The findings may not be generalisable beyond this paper's data sets, but may be generalisable conceptually.

The focus of much scholarly work has been on growth firms. Yet the typical small firm is excluded so that the issues of smallness are often overlooked. This paper, therefore contributes to understanding why small firms don't grow.

The purpose of this paper is to explore individual approaches to career and employability through the career stories of a group of mid‐level to senior managers in career transition. Career patterns are identified and then compared with traditional, boundaryless and protean models of career. The study aims to consider the extent to which individuals in this group had adopted behaviours supportive of future employability as opposed to behaviours more in line with traditional careers.

The research adopted an interpretive and qualitative approach. In‐depth interviews were conducted with people currently going through a career transition program. The interviews were recorded and then transcribed, coded and analysed using NVivo, a qualitative research software tool.

Career patterns appeared to be shifting away from traditional careers and more towards protean and boundaryless models. There was evidence of increased responsibility for career self‐management and of behaviours supportive of ongoing employability. Self‐perceived employability could be linked to degree of job mobility and having a future career orientation.

Despite the small sample size and the subjective nature of self‐reported career histories the study provides insights into the relationship between career patterns and employability. Both organisations and individuals need to work towards developing attitudes and behaviours supportive of employability such as flexibility, adaptability and a future career orientation.

Individual level career management will need to focus more on the development of attitudes and behaviours appropriate to contemporary employment relationships than on the development of formal career plans. At an organizational level support can be provided by encouraging flexibility through activities such as job rotation, short‐term projects and opportunities for both internal and external networking.

The study provides empirical evidence of how careers are being managed within contemporary employment relationships.

Retailing is traditionally defined in terms of the retailers’ place in the distribution of tangible products. However, the retail function may be more widely defined where the retailer concerned is involved not only in the provision of product distribution services but also in the management and provision of financial services. Retailers are rediscovering the impact financial services may have on organisational success. That is, they are increasingly recognising the direct contribution that financial services may make to profit margins and the indirect benefits which may accrue through increased customer loyalty. This article considers the framework within which innovation in the provision of payment systems and other financial services is occurring in the retail sector.

Viewing the last dying embers of 1984, the Orwel‐lian year of Big Brother and some of its not‐so‐far off the mark predictions, the unemployment which one cannot help feeling is more apparent than real, it is hardly surprising that the subject of Poverty or the so‐called Poverty arise. The real poverty of undernourished children, soup kitchens, children suffering at Christmas, hungry children ravenously consuming free school meals has not, even now, returned.

In a full blaze of comings and goings, it is unnecessary to remind ourselves that the holiday season is upon us; mass travel to faraway places. The media have for months, all through the winter, been extolling a surfeit of romantic areas of the world, exspecially on television; of colourful scenes, exotic beauties, brilliant sunshine everywhere; travel mostly by air as so‐called package tours — holidays for the masses! The most popular areas are countries of the Mediterranean littoral, from Israel to Spain, North Africa, the Adriatic, but of recent years, much farhter afield, India, South‐east Asia and increasingly to the USA.

Experiential marketing is arguably marketing's most contemporary orientation, but as with many marketing innovations it has been largely overlooked by those involved in tourism and hospitality marketing and promotion. Whilst in many industries companies have moved away from traditional features and benefits approaches, to putting experiential marketing centre‐stage, marketing in the tourism and hospitality sectors does not appear to have explicitly engaged the theoretical issues involved. This raises the question what, if anything, does experiential marketing have to offer marketers in the disciplines of tourism and hospitality? In this paper, I will seek to introduce the experiential marketing debate and demonstrate how the questions raised by the concept are critical to an understanding of marketing theory and research within the tourism and hospitality sectors.

Following the authors previous publications which sought to investigate alternative paradigms for studying hospitality consumers, this research attempts to consider the practical applications of one such model.

The tourism and hospitality sectors cannot be seen to be immune to fundamental changes in the orientation of marketing. Innovative experience design will become an increasingly important component of tourism and hospitality firms core capabilities. Those who go beyond service excellence, and market experientially will lead the creation of value in the sector.

Provides a framework as to how organisations might usefully implement an experiential marketing strategy.

The purpose of this paper is to describe a computer‐assisted learning experience in operations management (OM) higher education that entailed the development of interactive learning software, its evaluation in an experimental environment and the formal analysis of the teaching method's influence on student perceptions.

The software design follows the constructivist focus based on widely‐accepted educational technology principles. Objective tests of knowledge and subjective appraisal of the learning process were used in the experiment to compare two educational scenarios (computer‐assisted learning and on‐site class). Students' perceptions of the software's technical and teaching features are also analyzed.

The study shows that the teaching method can significantly affect students' perceptions of the learning process. The findings also confirm the pedagogical effectiveness of the software that was designed and that information communication technologies (ICT)‐based methods are an alternative to traditional methods used in OM education.

The experiment involved strict control over various potential threats to validity. From a statistical point‐of‐view, the conclusions can only be generalized in the population analyzed. Nevertheless, the features of the software and the student profile allow the main conclusions to be generalized to other OM environments.

The use and evaluation of interactive software in OM educational environments are reflected on, with emphasis on the influence that the teaching methodology has on students' attitudes to the learning process. It is of interest for researchers interested in improving teaching through the use of ICT.

There are very few studies on interactive self‐learning software for OM and its effects on student perceptions. This paper is a new contribution to this field.