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The purpose of this paper is to investigate the role of line managers in managing attendance at work in the lean regime of grocery retailing. The increasing competitiveness within the sector, coupled with the sophisticated control systems in place put pressure on managers to keep labour costs low. Attendance, therefore, becomes a critical factor, particularly as staffing levels become leaner. Taking this into account, it is necessary to understand the parameters of the line managers’ role in managing attendance, especially within the lean food retail market and the antagonistic terrain of the supermarket shop floor. The paper discusses the impact of lean retailing on line managers’ authority and provides a fresh sociological analysis regarding their role in managing attendance, offering insights into managerial practices on the UK supermarket shop floor.

The paper draws on qualitative research evidence from two case study grocery retail organizations in the UK. It reports on 44 semi-structured interviews and provides a multi-level analysis aiming to understand the different perspectives on the problem examined.

The paper reveals the existence of a centralized absence management policy and highlights the greater involvement of line managers in this procedure. Line managers though were subjected to forces of bureaucratic control, intensification and degradation of their work. Despite having an active role within the attendance management process and high responsibility for the implementation of rules and procedures handed down by head office, they had limited authority over the process. Line managers perceived the latter as routine and a box-ticking exercise and had developed coping tactics to deal with the control from above.

This paper provides practical and theoretical considerations over the role of line management in the labour process, investigating their role in managing attendance at work within the lean terrain of food retailing. This research contributes to the ongoing academic discussions related to the devolvement of HR responsibilities to the line, highlighting the great involvement of line managers in the absence policy. It also provides a sociological perspective over line managers’ authority and discretion in managing attendance, revealing that they were subjected to direct and bureaucratic control within their role in attendance management. However, the research reveals that line managers were not passive in the face of direct control from above and had developed tactics to cope with the monotony and the repetition of this process, attempting to somehow escape the top-down control they were subjected to.

The Chinese Professional Baseball League (CPBL) experienced a rapid decline in attendance after the mid 1990s. In this study, market demand analysis is used to discover the causes of variation in CPBL attendance from 1990 to 2008. The ordinary least squares (OLS) is employed for model estimation. From this model, empirical evidence reveals that a homogenous sport substitute, Taiwan Major League (TML), the Major League Baseball (MLB) effect and game-fixing scandals in CPBL negatively influence CPBL attendance. Additionally, real income is found to negatively affect CPBL attendance, making CPBL games an inferior product. The proposed model accounts for approximately 91% of variation in CPBL attendance between 1990 and 2008.

The purpose of this paper is to analyse simultaneously the effect of attendance at the stadium on the size of the TV audience, taking into account the effect of price and uncertainty of outcome hypothesis on both the TV audience and stadium attendance. The paper assumes that a home-team effect exists and influences potential spectators’ decision to go to the stadium or to stay at home.

The data set consists of all 228 matches broadcast live and on open air from the Brazilian League across the seasons 2013–2015. The econometric approach of the present paper is based on three simultaneous equations through the Three-Stage Least Square estimator. This method is chosen in order to avoid endogeneity between ticket prices and live attendance and, consequently, with the television audience, too.

This work finds a correlation between TV audience and attendance at the stadium. However, it has been demonstrated that those matches that are more expensive have a larger TV audience. Scheduling and UO appear to be relevant for TVs and clubs. Scheduling is relevant, as weekend matches have a smaller TV audience but higher attendance at the stadium.

The findings indicate that Brazilian football clubs should find optimal prices for matches in order to maximise both TV audience and attendance.

Analysing simultaneously the effect of attendance at the stadium on the size of the TV audience, taking into account the effect of price on all three of these variables, is new. Another novel aspect is the use of data on audience size to observe a possible substitution effect. The authors also distinguish between home and away matches, assuming that a home-team effect exists and influences potential spectators’ decision to go to the stadium or to stay at home.

The purpose of this paper is to examine issues of ethical corporate social responsibility related to the estimation of event attendance, scrutinize the philosophy of situational ethics as justification for reporting inflated figures and present a potential solution to the dilemma.

A conceptual approach is applied. First, the importance of attendance as a primary evaluation variable for economic, social and environmental impact studies, as well as for event stakeholder return on investment in general, is clarified. A brief review follows on the subject of event attendance estimation as reported in both popular and academic literature, before moving into a content analysis of this literature to investigate if there are existing concerns of ethical corporate social responsibility.

Attendance at events as reported by popular media remains controversial. Methods for arriving at accurate figures have been investigated and reported upon in academic literature, but there remains no consensus on how to best estimate event crowd size. Inflated attendance numbers reported are too often justified by situational ethics, a non-logical philosophy that has been previously debunked. A content analysis of popular media and academic literature revealed a lack of concern for ethical corporate social responsibility when it comes to the accurate estimation of event attendance.

The failure to accept ethical corporate social responsibility when estimating attendance harms event stakeholders and leads to misleading and unreliable impact data.

This subject has not been previously addressed and is important to advancing the professionalism of event management.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the determinants of church attendance and the formation of “religious human capital” using a Becker-inspired allocation-of-time framework.

Data derived from three waves of the Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia Survey were used to estimate a reduced-form two-equation system where the endogenous variables were frequency of attendance at religious services and intensity of faith.

The results indicate that while the hourly wage rate accounts for some of the variation in the attendance and faith regressions (i.e. higher wages lead to lower levels of attendance and faith), “allocation of time” variables like working long hours also influence these dimensions. The findings also suggest that the decision to attend or not or to have any faith at all is generally independent from economic factors. However, once the decision to attend or to have faith is made, an individual’s wage influences the degree of attendance or faith to a significant level.

The study contributes to this embryonic body of empirical literature by providing – to the best of the authors’ knowledge – the first results for Australia.

The purpose of this paper was to explore a new sport attendance behavior spectrum framework where sport consumer behavior is not derived from just a dichotomy of a motivator positively impacting attendance or a constraint negatively impacting attendance. Rather, when accounting for the context of the setting (e.g. sport, playing level, locality, patron type, etc.), some areas belong on a spectrum that fluctuates between positive and negative impacts on attendance that are dependent on the context of the given environment.

Through factor analysis and structural equation modeling, the proposed model attempted to explain relationships between five second-order factors and game attendance, which expanded to include the new internal contextual and external contextual factors, and ultimately team fandom.

The results indicated three significant main effects where internal contextual exhibited a positive relationship with attendance, while constraints and external contextual demonstrated a negative relationship. Internal and external motives were not significant. Further, the moderating effect of high and low sport interest groupings largely indicated no significant spectator differences. The model explained 24% of the variance in attendance, and attendance accounted for 41% of the variance in team fandom.

Attendance is intricate, and this study highlighted the importance of considering and adapting to the sporting context as some factors exist on a sport attendance behavior spectrum and differently impact spectators positively or negatively, given the context of the setting. Further, in this lower-level sport setting, consumers viewed minor league hockey more as a leisure commodity than a premier sport contest.

As an exploratory study, the purpose of this paper is to examine the underlying motivations for attending soccer games.

Attendees at two soccer games in Athens, Greece were surveyed about their frequency of attendance at soccer games and their attitudes toward soccer. In total, 252 people from five randomly selected sections of the stadiums participated in the survey.

The results indicate that there are three major motivations – emotional excitement, socialization, and soccer atmospherics – and two identity salience factors – ardent soccer fans and rational soccer fans – for attending soccer games. The most important factor for attendance is being an ardent soccer fan closely followed by the emotional excitement factor. Among the demographic factors considered, only gender significantly affects soccer game attendance.

In contrast to previous studies that are somewhat descriptive, this research explicitly introduces factors related to social identity theory and attempts to predict soccer game attendance on the basis of a scale of factors that focus on the major motivations for attendance of soccer games, identity salience reasons, and demographic factors. The inclusion of social identity theory as a factor in the attendance of soccer games is a major contribution of this study. Contrary to most of the earlier studies, this study showed that the socialization factor is not related to attendance at soccer games.

This paper aims to investigate the relationship between the student’s class attendance and learning strategies that will influence Bloom et al. (1956) learning outcome or performance.

Data were collected from undergraduate students in their final year. Student identification number was subsequently matched to observe initial, final assessments and responses from questionnaire using parts of MSLQ (Pintrich et al., 1991). Hypotheses were tested, and data were analyzed using multiple regression analysis and multinomial logistic regression analysis.

Students’ learning strategies and class attendance are in fact related. Thus, class attendance, students’ study time and the mid-semester exams could explain more than 34.0 per cent of the variance. The results show that class attendance, mid-semester exams and study time had a significant positive influence on the learning outcome.

This study used undergraduate students in a university in Ghana, and may not necessarily be applicable universally. Also, teachers’ expectancies were not controlled. Another potential limitation was that TQM was the only subject area used for this study.

This study will recommend teachers to work individually with students in setting appropriate goals for each exam and frequently offer feedback. The results may influence on-line teaching and the student’s role in teaching and learning in the class.

This paper contributes to literature by examining how the student’s learning strategies, class attendances, study time, gender, status (part time student or full time student) influence the learning outcome or performance. This paper findings will provide educators new ways to understand student behavior and to assist them in achieving learning success.

The purpose of this research is to discuss the issue of managing and reducing school absenteeism and truancy.

The article proposes the development and implementation of some long‐term strategic approaches to tackling truancy and other forms of non‐attendance from school. This article focuses on the innovative School‐Based Scheme (SBS).

The article proposes methods which are relatively easy to organise, implement, monitor and evaluate. It can be used in both primary and secondary schools and/or throughout all schools within a local education authority.

Preliminary evaluations suggest that it has improved attendance rates by over 4 per cent throughout all schools in one local education authority (LEA).

A high proportion of schools throughout England and Wales are below the Department for Education and Skills (DfES) targets either for overall levels of attendance, or for levels of authorised or unauthorised absence within both the primary and secondary sectors. The approaches proposed would address such issues.

It is hoped that the article will be of particular interest and help to head teachers, senior and middle management in schools, learning mentors, classroom assistants, home‐school liaison officers, principal and senior education welfare officers and appropriate local education authority staff, especially those pastoral and management staff who have day‐to‐day dealings with pupils like absentees and truants.

Corporate meetings are a large sector of the global meetings, incentive, convention and exhibition (MICE) industry. However, regular attendance and productive participation by employees are regularly cited as critical problem areas. The purpose of this paper is to investigate how key inhibiting factors related to meeting attendance influence one dimension of employee organizational citizenship behaviors (OCB)–civic loyalty.

An online survey was administered to 229 attendees of corporate meetings, drawn from a large range of private companies and government agencies. Regression analysis was used to investigate which factors affected two variables reflecting employee OCB–civic loyalty: future attendance intentions and positive co-worker advocacy.

It was found that opportunity costs and travel convenience were the two most important factors. Opportunity costs reflected the personal costs faced by attendees attending corporate meetings offsite through family or work-related responsibilities. In addition, organizational support was a further significant factor. The strength of relationships varied depending upon gender and mode of transport to the destination.

While there is a large literature on motivators of meeting attendance in general, this is the first study to examine attendance factors for the corporate meeting sector. This study addresses calls for studies that seek to understand which key factors are related to positive attendance outcomes, and especially extends the scant level of research on meeting inhibitors. This study is also the first to utilize organizational citizenship theory to understand these relationships within the MICE sector. Implications are drawn for event organizers.