Search results

The study aims to determine the socio-cultural variables that affect Turkey's tourism demand. The study proposes how important socio-cultural determinants as well as economic determinants affect tourism demand.

The study examined a sample of 19 countries sending the most visitors to Turkey between 1996 and 2017 by using panel unit root, panel cointegration tests and cointegration estimator methods. The data set consists of variables such as GDP per capita (lnGDPP), total population number (lnPOP), urbanization level, information and communication technology (lnICT), human development index (lnHDI), education level and death rates (lnDTH).

The findings from the analysis provide evidence that the variables in the models show the expected effects on tourism demand. The findings show that apart from economic variables, socio-cultural variables also have an important effect on tourism demand.

The socio-cultural models used in the study were created using variables that can be quantified. The study results are valid for the countries included in the analysis.

The findings of this study will contribute to policymakers in determining the market for Turkish tourism. The results show that the policies to be prepared by considering the socio-cultural characteristics of countries can increase the tourism demand.

The study is significant in that it focuses on socio-cultural variables rather than economic variables commonly used in the literature. The study is original in terms of both the study sample and the model and considers cross-sectional dependency (CD) and homogeneity.

Branded applications (apps) are increasingly important in marketers' omnichannel strategies. They have not only changed the way customers purchase but also changed the way how companies interact with customers. Building on value co-creation literature, this research investigates consumer brand engagement's role in enhancing perceived quality and brand loyalty via value co-creation.

Using online survey data from 355 brand app users, a conceptual model is tested employing the partial least squares structural equation modeling.

The results suggest that not only does branded app personalization drives brand co-creation (fully mediated by consumer brand engagement) but that this process also increases perceived quality and brand loyalty among users of branded apps.

Data for the study are self-reported and thus may not accurately reflect actual attitudes and behaviors. In addition, respondents were students within the United States who, although representative of branded app users, may limit the generalizability of the study.

Knowing that branded apps can influence customers' perception of the quality and value of their apps, products and services, or even their associated brands, marketers and app designers should work together to provide a value co-creation platform through the apps to increase customers' personalized, engaging experience.

Although various relationships between personalization, engagement and co-creation have been studied, along with their impact on loyalty and perceived value, the interaction between these factors is not widely understood. The study examines these interactions in the context of branded apps, through the service-dominant logic perspective.

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.

By combining consumer culture theory and service dominant logic, this study proposes that value might be understood as value-in-acquisition, such that value outcomes result from the acquisition process in which broader social forces shape the exchange process.

This study addresses low-income consumers, for whom societal arrangements strongly determine service interactions. Qualitative interviews reveal service value processes and outcomes for low-income consumers during acquisition processes.

For low-income consumers, inclusion, status, resource access and emotional relief represent key value outcomes. Important value processes shape those value outcomes, reflecting broader societal arrangements at macro, meso and micro levels. Marketing constitutes an institutional arrangement that establishes an empowered “consumer” role. Value processes are hindered if consumers sense that their agency in this role is diminished, because marketing interactions give precedence to other social roles.

Marketing should be studied as an institutional arrangement that shapes value creation processes during acquisition. Micro-level value processes have important implications for service quality and service value. Value outcomes thus might be designed in the acquisition process, not just for the offering.

The acquisition process for any good or service should be designed with its own value proposition, separate to the core product or service. Careful design of value processes during acquisition could mitigate conflict between social roles and those of consumption.

There is value in the acquisition process, independent of the value embedded in the goods and services.

This study aims to investigate whether the antecedents of co-creation influence braggart word-of-mouth (WoM) in a participative leisure context, theorising the concept of co-created food well-being and highlighting implications for interactive experience co-design.

A sequential mixed-method approach was used to test a theoretical model; 25 in-depth interviews with cooking class participants were conducted, followed by a post-experience survey (n = 575).

Qualitative results suggest braggart WoM is rooted in active consumer participation in co-designing leisure experiences. The structural model confirms that participation in value co-creating activities (i.e. co-design, customer-to-customer (C2C) interaction), alongside perceived support from service providers, increases consumer perceptions of co-creation and stimulates braggart WoM. Degree of co-creation and support from peers mediate some relationships.

Limited by cross-sectional data from one experiential consumption format, the results nevertheless demonstrate the role of active participation in co-design and C2C interactions during value co-creation. This implies that co-created and co-designed leisure experiences can intensify post-consumption behaviours and potentially enhance food well-being.

The results highlight that integrating customer participation into service design, while also developing opportunities for peer support on-site, can stimulate braggart WoM.

Extends burgeoning literature on co-creation and co-design in leisure services. By encouraging active customer participation while providing support and facilitating C2C interactions, service providers can enhance value co-creation, influencing customer experiences and food well-being. Accordingly, the concept of co-created food well-being is introduced.

Extant branding literature is dominated by a metaphorical view of value co-creation in which the roles of brand actors remain unspecified. To help provide clarity, the purpose of this paper is to critically appraise how brand professionals understand brand value co-creation and perceive their role in facilitating it, with the aim of questioning its viability in day-to-day brand management practices.

Building on brand professionals’ reflexivity, the study develops a qualitative methodological glance via semi-structured interviews based on confrontational techniques with a purposive sample of 28 experienced brand decision-makers.

Brand professionals perceive accessibility, reciprocity and citizenship as the gateways provided by the firm for value co-creation to happen. Despite their enthusiastic rhetorical afflatus in making explicit their viewpoints about how firms can facilitate value co-creation, the current translation into practice of the role of the firm does not seem to be able to overcome the sender-biased approach that still resides in brand management.

To go beyond the limits of rhetorical representations and make brand value facilitation more actionable, the authors provide guidelines on how firms can create and enhance the circumstances for the co-creation of brand value to occur in interactions with consumers and stakeholders.

This study contributes to the critical actionability of the brand value co-creation by elucidating how firms currently perceive their facilitation role. The paper provides strategic recommendations to put co-creation rhetoric into practice by reframing and expanding the scope and the significance of brand management.

The use of canines in the gathering of evidence is a valuable tool for law enforcement to discover crime and criminals. Narcotics, explosives, cadaver detection, search and rescue, or patrol dogs are prevalently used by most police organizations for combatting crime. Police service dogs decrease the time required and increase success in crime detection. The purpose of this paper is to review the different fields of police service dog training programs, to investigate their implementation abroad and compare them to Turkey.

Various dog training methods are discussed, prior to the fields of police dog service. Research about the official units and legal procedures abroad are reported. The situation in Turkey is specified. As a representative in the field, The Dog Training Center of the Turkish National Police is examined. The overall comparison between Turkey and other countries is made and the paper concludes with an evaluation of future prospects.

For a better and successful fight against crime in Turkey, it is recommended that the standards concerning training and certification of the dog and the handler should be determined; an effective and accurate education should be given to the handlers so that they might better train service dogs for the security needs of private bodies such as companies and firms.

The paper shows that a more scientific approach will lead to the formation of standards in dog training and provide a successful way to fight crime by increasing efficiency.

Evaluating the performance of supply chains is a convoluted task because of the complexity that is inextricably linked to the structure of the aforesaid chains. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to present an integrated approach for evaluating and sizing real-life health-care supply chains in the presence of interval data.

To achieve the objective, this paper illustrates an approach called Latin hypercube sampling by replacement (LHSR) to identify a set of precise data from the interval data; then the standard data envelopment analysis (DEA) models can be used to assess the relative efficiencies of the supply chains under evaluation. A certain level of data aggregation is suggested to improve the discriminatory power of the DEA models and an experimental design is conducted to size the supply chains under assessment.

The newly developed integrated methodology assists the decision-makers (DMs) in comparing their real-life supply chains against peers and sizing their resources to achieve a certain level of production.

The proposed integrated DEA-based approach has been successfully implemented to suggest an appropriate structure to the actual public pharmaceutical supply chain in Morocco.

The originality of the proposed approach comes from the development of an integrated methodology to evaluate and size real-life health-care supply chains while taking into account interval data. This developed integrated technique certainly adds value to the health-care DMs for modelling their supply chains in today's world.

Critical management studies (CMS), as an unorthodox management perspective, has become more and more accepted in Western business schools. The purpose of this paper is to problematize its circulation area and interrogate to what extent CMS has penetrated Turkish academia.

The paper reviews papers presented and published in The National Management/Organization Conference which has been held annually for the last 19 years. In addition, the paper examines the management programs of the top 20 Turkish universities' business schools, in terms of whether their curricula include any critical content.

It is suggested that CMS has not found resonance in Turkey. This case is argued on a set of dynamics as follows: the Americanization process in knowledge producing, economic integration into American vision, late industrialization, bureaucratic political tradition, statism, and some cultural characteristics.

Studies employing critical management arguments and those on the dissemination of critical theory in Turkey seem to be quite silent. This paper questions CMS's place in Turkish management literature, explains the dynamics of its (under)development, and suggests ways in which CMS could be become more attractive in this part of the world.

The aim of this paper is to present and evaluate a methodology for automatically constructing and applying the physiologically‐realistic boundary/loading conditions for use in the structural finite element analysis of the femur during various exertion tasks (e.g. gait/walking).

To obtain physiologically‐realistic boundary/loading conditions needed in the femur structural finite element analysis, a whole‐body musculoskeletal inverse dynamics analysis is carried out and the resulting muscle forces and joint reaction forces/moments extracted.

The finite element results obtained are compared with their counterparts available in literature and it is found that the overall agreement is acceptable while the highly automated procedure for the finite element model generation developed in the present work made the analysis fairly easy and computationally highly efficient. Potential sources of errors in the current procedure have been identified and the measures for their mitigation recommended.

The present approach enables a more accurate determination of the physiological loads experienced by the orthopedic implants which can be of great value to implant designers and orthopedic surgeons.