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Symbia's Customer Barometer offers a supplier the means to gauge how it is performing against the real needs of its customers and to cement a long‐term relationship, says Jim Humphris.

During the interwar period, the Netherlands experienced a phase of rapid industrialization and mechanization and saw the introduction of many new labor-saving techniques on the shop floor. This process, which went under the name “rationalization of production,” caused great concern in the labor movement and sparked an intensive debate over the existence and extent of technological (or permanent) unemployment. Although the problem of technological unemployment was denied by the mainstream economists of the day, the problem was addressed by left-wing, mathematically trained economists such as Theo van der Waerden and Jan Tinbergen. They sought for rigorous “scientific” arguments that would convince policymakers, colleagues, and the public of socialist employment policies.

This chapter shows that van der Waerden and Tinbergen used ever-increasing formal methods to face the issue of rationalization, which became politically relevant and controversial in the specific context of the interwar period. Their new scientific tools gave them esteem and influence. In their role as advisers to the government, they gained influence and were able to recommend policies that were in accordance with their political beliefs.

The purpose of this paper is to identify the strategies of formal customer evaluations and the use of satisfied customer index in the Swedish commercial real estate industry.

This research is based on an inventory of 24 commercial real estate companies use of formal customer evaluations and an analysis of 15 interviews with top-level managers in the Swedish commercial real estate sector.

Only half of the companies included in the study conduct formal evaluations, although they are considered to work customer oriented. Two different strategies for using formal evaluations is, for improvement work and for signalling quality. One proposed explanation to why only half of the companies conduct formal evaluations is the possibility that the official Swedish Real Estate Barometer is not sufficient if the company would like to use the result for organisational development. There are instead indications that this barometer mainly is used in publicity and marketing purpose, to signal quality.

The research in this paper is limited to Swedish commercial real estate sector. But, the overall strategies for conducting formal evaluations should be applicable in general.

The insight the paper provides regarding how the industry perceive the Swedish Real Estate Barometer gives direct implications of improvements of the barometer.

It provides an insight regarding the use of formal customer evaluations and a proposition of how the Swedish Real Estate Barometer could be changed to better support and fulfil the aim of being a barometer for benchmarking.

The purpose of this paper is to design and test effective indoor navigation solutions for visually impaired people in situations where GPS, bluetooth or Wi-Fi signals are unavailable. The authors use the inertial measurement units (IMU), the compass and the barometer of a smart phone.

The authors have used commercial Android smart phones with IMU, compass and barometer to record a path and to give navigation instructions in an adapted way using a mobility-specific vocabulary. The method proposed is to save paths taking into account different indoor waypoints such as the stairs (change from one floor to another) and the change of direction of the trajectory of the path (e.g. one-fourth turn right or left), recording data from the IMU sensor’s, compass and barometer of the smart phone. Having this information and the characteristics of the each segment (distance, azimuth to the north and pressure) of the path, it is possible to provide functional navigation guidance to the visually impaired subject. Three different visually impaired people (one partially sighted and two fully blind) and three sighted people have tested the paths. The efficiency of the navigation is analyzed in terms of distance and time using the comparison between blind and sighted people.

The main finding is that it is possible to guide visually impaired people some hundreds of meters just using the sensors of a smart phone under certain conditions: the visually impaired person has to understand the guidance instructions and respect some strategies (e.g. not to walk diagonally across vast spaces). Additionally it is observed that the visually impaired participants walked distances, which are not much different to the optimal values. On the other hand; because of their hesitations using their white cane to find free paths, they take in some cases 50 percent more time to arrive (for a few minutes path, this time is not critical and even more efficient than looking for a guide). One thing to highlight is that even with this hesitation, the subjects arrived to the final destination.

This paper demonstrates how an IMU coupled to a compass and a barometer from a Smart Phone employing a spoken mobility language (e.g. next corridor to the left; at the end of the stairs turn right, turn left, etc.) can guide visually impaired people inside buildings.

This paper deals with services provided within an organization, outlining a model to measure internal customer satisfaction and perceptions of internal quality. Adapting the concept of the service profit chain which is used still frequently to illustrate the relationship between external customer satisfaction and economic success, this article proposes that the external service quality can be attained only after internal performance prerequisites have been investigated and optimized. Additionally, it introduces the concept of an internal service barometer, and presents the results of an empirical study to evaluate the relationships between internal service quality, internal customer satisfaction and internal customer retention.

In this paper, the barometer of tourism (BoT), as a new approach to environmental scanning, is presented and discussed. A unique research methodology developed by IPDT, with the aim of analyzing prospectively the tourism and hospitality sectors from the perspective of senior professionals and public and private decision makers, is illustrated in detail.

The paper is based on official tourism information and on-going research by IPDT, in particular, the “Barometer of Tourism”, which results are used to correlate with official statistics, thus demonstrating the Barometer’s value as a scanning tool.

BoT is a simple and low budget tool that can successfully predict the behaviour of tourism demand for Portugal in the short and medium term. After 50 editions, BoT established itself as a recognized and unique trends’ identification tool for the Portuguese hospitality and tourism organizations.

Results provide rich insights on analyzing prospectively the tourism and hospitality sectors from the perspective of senior professionals and public and private decision makers.

This paper seeks to illustrate that BoT can successfully predict the behaviour of tourism demand for Portugal, being a simple, low-budget and recognized tool for trends identification in hospitality, travel and tourism organizations.

Examines the position of confidence of commercial property lenders as surveyed by the Chesterton Financial/CSW Confidence Barometer. Describes the confidence barometer as being gauged on the response to a number of questions on lenders′ perceptions of the market. Concludes that there has been a dramatic increase in confidence from January 1993 to July 1993.

Tourism is an area with poor statistical coverage. In most countries, only frequency for the hotel trade are monthly published, while results for self‐catering accommodation, camping etc., as well as for branches of economic activity which are mainly dependent on day visitors, are lacking. No statistics are compiled about demand for special tourist transport, sport/culture/entertainment or gastronomy. Furthermore, there are no data on developments in monetary terms. In some countries and tourist areas, new instruments have therefore been introduced to document tourism developments faster, more comprehensively and taking a broader view. This article is based on a recently concluded study on instruments used in monitoring the tourism market (Schmid 2003). A reporting system was set up using a panel in which businesses in branches of economic activity of relevance to tourism can participate. These businesses report some key indicators each month and can, in return, compare their results anonymously with the average for the corresponding branch. Their data are then used to make projections. In the test phase, monthly physical and monetary indicators were calculated for accommodation, restaurants/catering transport and sport/culture/entertainment. It was proved that a voluntary reporting system can work and provide a positive cost‐benefit ratio for participants. The stock of tourist data can be supplemented and made easily accessible. However, difficulties remain in the holiday home sector. Moreover, the results are approximate projections and not exact, full‐scale surveys.

Examines the provision of an occupational health service and the audit of such a service as one barometer of an organization's effective functioning. Occupational health is seen as part of the human resource function and encompasses health care, health education/information, health surveillance and health protection. It is concerned with the effect of health on work as well as the effect of work on health. Looks at attempts to measure the effectiveness of such a service using the traditional arguments of reduction in the costs of work absence and the increase in worker morale. Finally, suggests that the most effective argument is the cost to an organization of not putting into place an effective occupational health service. Concludes by recognizing that occupational health services must be more accountable, and be regularly audited. At the same time there is a social aspect to any enterprise and an element of humanitarianism without which human institutions lose a significant part of the reason for their existence.

The relationship between gender and governance is often neglected in both conceptual and empirical work. However, gender equality in the decision-making fora is vital, for enabling far-reaching social change and for empowering people excluded from decision making. The purpose of this paper is to analyse the participation of women in governance institutions in a small island economy like Mauritius. Though, there has been some progress in Mauritius in redressing the gender imbalance in national and local governance processes, more is still to be achieved. This paper analyses women participation in governance by using gender-sensitive governance indicators.

Data were collected from different sources namely from the Mauritian Electoral Commissioner's Office, Statistics Mauritius, Mauritius Household Budget Surveys and the Ministry of Education and Human Resources. Data were also made available from the Global Gender Gap Report, 2012; the Global Parliamentary Report, 2012 and the SADC Gender Protocol Barometer, 2012. These data were used in the computation of gender-sensitive governance indicators used by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP, 2006). The indicators are the Global Gender Gap Index, the percentage of seats reserved in parliament for women, voter turnout among registered females and prevalence of women in poor districts.

The paper argues that the overall gender gap index for Mauritius has increased over the years but the scores for economic participation and political attainment remain very low. In the economic sphere, the author note a rising female unemployment rate, though girls perform better than boys at all educational levels. Mauritius has been adept at the politics of recognition of different ethnic groups but this approach has not addressed the issue of women. The findings reveal that women are often excluded from decision making, from the household up to the highest levels of policymaking. The “invisibility” of women in parliament, is a concern and is “a grave democratic deficit” for the country (Sachs, 2001).

No study has taken a gender perspective of governance issues in Mauritius. The author assess the importance of gender in a democratic country like Mauritius which has performed well on the economic front but gender is still too often ignored in governance and other spheres. There is thus a growing need for greater gender equality and participation of women in governance institutions and processes.