Search results

Purpose — We assert that researchers developing new web interaction tools should consider an array of user motives beyond query-based information retrieval. This chapter reports on two probes used to investigate user activities that go beyond search as traditionally conceived.

Design/methodology — This chapter reviews research on user experiences with search engines and general web use. It then describes the design and case study of cards and pebbles, two search engine-based probes developed to help elicit new concepts for web-based experiences.

Findings — Participants reflect on their experiences with the probes and offer ideas regarding how to incrementally shift the traditional search paradigm and conceive of the web in new ways.

Implications/value — This investigation serves as a starting point by offering criteria that should be considered when designing new ‘beyond search’ tools.

This chapter sets out to analyze the impact of the Covid-19 virus on the holidays provided by UK group tour operators (GTOs) and the implications for overtourism. With tourism arrivals expected to fall by up to 30% in 2020 and a slow return to pre-Covid-19 levels for 2021 and beyond, the industry is possibly suffering the loss of up to 100 million travel-related jobs (World Travel and Tourism Council, 2020). GTOs will need to assess and possibly change the way they do business to initially survive and subsequently build up tourism numbers in the coming years.

This chapter identifies how GTOs could alter their holiday proposition to reassure travellers including the challenges of operating international tours when airlines have reduced capacity, the need to consider alternative age demographics who are more likely to travel and assessing existing itineraries to visit rural or small town locations rather than cities where numerous itineraries travel to now.

Finally, this chapter discusses and describes the significance of the findings with insights about possible opportunities based upon the approaches taken by various countries to target potential holidaymakers and the need to create a ‘crisis management plan’ for current and future countries. This may result in operational adjustments to meet these new requirements including the changing outlook of potential customers and the possibility of offering domestic tours to meet the current demand.

Purpose — To provide a theoretical background to understand current local search engines as an aspect of specialized search, and understand the data sources and used technologies.

Design/methodology/approach — Selected local search engines are examined and compared toward their use of geographic information retrieval (GIR) technologies, data sources, available entity information, processing, and interfaces. An introduction to the field of GIR is given and its use in the selected systems is discussed.

Findings — All selected commercial local search engines utilize GIR technology in varying degrees for information preparation and presentation. It is also starting to be used in regular Web search. However, major differences can be found between the different search engines.

Research limitations/implications — This study is not exhaustive and only uses informal comparisons without definitive ranking. Due to the unavailability of hard data, informed guesses were made based on available public interfaces and literature.

Practical implications — A source of background information for understanding the results of local search engines, their provenance, and their potential.

Originality/value — An overview of GIR technology in the context of commercial search engines integrates research efforts and commercial systems and helps to understand both sides better.

In a past era, alchemists believed they could magically transmute lead into valuable gold. Science has progressed a substantial distance since then and for decades nuclear and particle physicists could change various materials into gold. When considering technology, leaders are faced with a comparable challenge: How does one leverage technology to create unique organizational value? To manage emerging technologies effectively to create organizational value, managers will need to lead the producers and practitioners of technology effectively. In the age of global interdependence, organizations must abandon old outdated perspectives.

Technology is a force which drives itself. Organizations must adopt to emerging technology or risk being obsolete. Leveraging technology to create value involves more then circumferentially managing technology. To create value, leaders must encourage staff to transmute technology. The principles and practices of quantum leadership provide for this possibility. This chapter will irradiate why simply managing technology does not offer organizations the maximum value from technology. The reader will be introduced to the four core features of quantum leadership: duality, superposition, entanglement, and observation. With this groundwork, the principles and practices of this leadership perspective will be discussed in context of transmuting technology into unique organizational value. Which lens one uses to see which possibility becomes reality are exclusively in the eyes of the viewer. Using information systems technology, artificial intelligence (AI), and 5G technology as the exemplars, readers can decide whether to accept, reject, or suspend judgement on using quantum leadership as the perspective to transmute technology into valuable organizational gold.

Since the Land Revolution of 1949, China has continuously practiced collective ownership of land resources and local governance at the village and township levels. This chapter argues that based on Chinese experiences, a socialist transformation is largely dependent on socialization of land resources, with the majority having access to land, food, and shelter, as well as on community organization of livelihood. This is not only the legacy of land revolution but also the foundation of Chinese society, which acts as social stabilizer. China in the past 70 years has completed primitive capital accumulation and proceeded to industrial expansion and financial adjustments. Rural China has played an important role in absorbing the shocks of cyclical economic crises induced by external and domestic factors. China adopts policies of land distribution in favor of the small peasantry and promises to defend the agrarian sector – comprising three irreducible dimensions: peasants, rural society, and agriculture, together known as Sannong, as well as the current policy of rural vitalization – against the background of macroeconomic crises, particularly amid the current economic downturn and health crises, that is, United States–China trade war, the crisis of globalization, New Cold War, and the COVID-19 pandemic. The experiences of Zhoujiazhuang Commune and Puhan Rural Community will be provided as examples to show that the bedrock of maintaining socialist transformation is the resilience of small peasantry and rural communities.

This chapter investigates the behavior of Reddit’s news subreddit users and the relationship between their sentiment on exchange rates. Using graphical models and natural language processing, hidden online communities among Reddit users are discovered. The data set used in this project is a mixture of text and categorical data from Reddit’s news subreddit. These data include the titles of the news pages, as well as a few user characteristics, in addition to users’ comments. This data set is an excellent resource to study user reaction to news since their comments are directly linked to the webpage contents. The model considered in this chapter is a hierarchical mixture model which is a generative model that detects overlapping networks using the sentiment from the user generated content. The advantage of this model is that the communities (or groups) are assumed to follow a Chinese restaurant process, and therefore it can automatically detect and cluster the communities. The hidden variables and the hyperparameters for this model are obtained using Gibbs sampling.

Purpose — To provide an overview of recent research that examined how search engine users evaluate and select Web search results and how alternative search engine interfaces can support Web users' credibility assessment of Web search results.

Design/methodology/approach — As theoretical background, Information Foraging Theory (Pirolli, 2007; Pirolli & Card, 1999) from cognitive science and Prominence-Interpretation-Theory (Fogg, 2003) from communication and persuasion research are presented. Furthermore, a range of recent empirical research that investigated the effects of alternative SERP layouts on searchers' information quality or credibility assessments of search results are reviewed and approaches that aim at automatically classifying search results according to specific genre categories are reported.

Findings — The chapter reports on findings that Web users often rely heavily on the ranking provided by the search engines without paying much attention to the reliability or trustworthiness of the Web pages. Furthermore, the chapter outlines how alternative search engine interfaces that display search results in a format different from a list and/or provide prominent quality-related cues in the SERPs can foster searchers' credibility evaluations.

Research limitations/implications — The reported empirical studies, search engine interfaces, and Web page classification systems are not an exhaustive list.

Originality/value — The chapter provides insights for researchers, search engine developers, educators, and students on how the development and use of alternative search engine interfaces might affect Web users' search and evaluation strategies during Web search as well as their search outcomes in terms of retrieving high-quality, credible information.

The strategic management literature emphasizes the concept of business intelligence (BI) as an essential competitive tool. Yet the sustainability of the firms’ competitive advantage provided by BI capability is not well researched. To fill this gap, this study attempts to develop a model for successful BI deployment and empirically examines the association between BI deployment and sustainable competitive advantage. Taking the telecommunications industry in Malaysia as a case example, the research particularly focuses on the influencing perceptions held by telecommunications decision makers and executives on factors that impact successful BI deployment. The research further investigates the relationship between successful BI deployment and sustainable competitive advantage of the telecommunications organizations. Another important aim of this study is to determine the effect of moderating factors such as organization culture, business strategy, and use of BI tools on BI deployment and the sustainability of firm’s competitive advantage.

This research uses combination of resource-based theory and diffusion of innovation (DOI) theory to examine BI success and its relationship with firm’s sustainability. The research adopts the positivist paradigm and a two-phase sequential mixed method consisting of qualitative and quantitative approaches are employed. A tentative research model is developed first based on extensive literature review. The chapter presents a qualitative field study to fine tune the initial research model. Findings from the qualitative method are also used to develop measures and instruments for the next phase of quantitative method. The study includes a survey study with sample of business analysts and decision makers in telecommunications firms and is analyzed by partial least square-based structural equation modeling.

The findings reveal that some internal resources of the organizations such as BI governance and the perceptions of BI’s characteristics influence the successful deployment of BI. Organizations that practice good BI governance with strong moral and financial support from upper management have an opportunity to realize the dream of having successful BI initiatives in place. The scope of BI governance includes providing sufficient support and commitment in BI funding and implementation, laying out proper BI infrastructure and staffing and establishing a corporate-wide policy and procedures regarding BI. The perceptions about the characteristics of BI such as its relative advantage, complexity, compatibility, and observability are also significant in ensuring BI success. The most important results of this study indicated that with BI successfully deployed, executives would use the knowledge provided for their necessary actions in sustaining the organizations’ competitive advantage in terms of economics, social, and environmental issues.

This study contributes significantly to the existing literature that will assist future BI researchers especially in achieving sustainable competitive advantage. In particular, the model will help practitioners to consider the resources that they are likely to consider when deploying BI. Finally, the applications of this study can be extended through further adaptation in other industries and various geographic contexts.

This chapter explores religion and spirituality as a form and source of demographic differences relevant to the study of occupational stress and well-being. The purpose of the chapter is to provide a resource and starting point to occupational health and stress researchers who may be interested in religion/spirituality. A review of critical religion/spirituality concepts is provided, along with a discussion of how religion/spirituality can be integrated into common occupational stress theories and reconciled with commonly studied variables within this domain. A series of future research directions involving religion/spirituality and occupational health and stress are ultimately presented.