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The purpose of this paper is to develop a 5As framework for entrepreneurial nudge public leadership for health and wellness promotion based on two exemplary cases in Mississippi.

The authors use a “case within a case” study design to develop the 5As public influence framework for entrepreneurial public leadership.

Based on the investigated cases of healthcare and wellness promotion in Hernando and Charleston, Mississippi, the authors developed the 5As framework for wellness promotion dimensions of awareness, assistance, alignment, association, and assessment. This framework is applicable to the lived experiences of community members, leaders, healthcare providers, and government.

The study results provide a compelling insight into early-stage formation of entrepreneurial public leadership. However, the study results lack generalizability due to the case study approach used.

This study can assist entrepreneurial public leaders and policy-makers align their strategic wellness goals, initiatives, and policies that motivate community members to seek and receive supporting services.

Developing an original framework for wellness promotion useful to both healthcare practitioners and public leaders, this study contributes to the extant literature on public health leadership and proposes mechanisms for addressing community wellness needs. The framework is designed to address public health concerns by integrating public leadership strategies aimed at linking with existing community wellness and healthcare services.

The purpose of this paper is to offer theoretical and methodological guidance for ethnographers of finance and financialization. It critiques the notion of financialization as a macro process and argues for more in-depth ethnographic studies of professional financial actors.

The author analyzes existing ethnographies of financial “elites” and “non-elites” and draws on his years of employment at two contrasting British retail stockbroking firms. The concepts of “identity” and “self” are used to analyze the ways in which professional financial actors are shaped by their activities and working cultures.

The processes through which financial actors are constructed and the consequent ways in which they come to understand their professional selves are influenced by a variety of dynamics: occupational and organizational cultures and practices, the nature of the work itself, technological development, and social interactions with colleagues.

The paper demonstrates the situated nature of financial action and suggests that future research grapples with these dimensions.

The application of an ethnographic perspective to British retail stockbroking and the method of “ethnographic reflection” evoked to achieve this are new contributions. The broad analysis of ethnographies of finance through the lens of identity offers a fresh view of the literature. The paper may be of interest to those wishing to study stockbrokers, financial actors, and financial organizations, as well as those in the social sciences, more generally, who are interested in the micro-dynamics of organizations, financialization, and capital circulation.

Purpose – The overall purpose of this chapter is to discuss what is known about serious forms of bias violence, obstacles to studying bias violence, and how alternative theoretical and methodological approaches can advance our understanding of bias violence in the twenty-first century.

Design/methodology/approach – Following a review of the literature, the applicability of identity fusion theory for explaining bias violence is considered and applied to the anti-racial mass shooting at an historically Black church in Charleston, South Carolina. Data come from an innovative open-source project known as the United States Extremist Crime Database.

Findings – Drawing from identity fusion theory, information from open-source data on the Charleston church shooting suggests that the perpetrator was a highly fused individual who perceived African Americans as a threat toward his social identity group and committed an act of extreme behavior (i.e., bias homicide) as a means for stabilizing his self-views.

Originality/value – This chapter builds upon prior studies of bias violence by demonstrating how (1) publicly available open sources (e.g., court documents and media reports) may be systematically compiled and used as reliable data for studying serious forms of bias violence, and (2) the use of social psychological theories, specifically identity fusion theory, can help to explain the role of personal and group identities in discriminatory violence.

Though STEM-related jobs have become a critical sector in the United States economy, there remains a severe employment shortage of eligible workers in these fields (Beyer, Rynes, Perrault, Hay, & Haller, 2003; National Science Foundation, 2009). The shortage of workers who possess the necessary skills to fulfill this growing sector of the economy are at a level last reached the middle of the 20th century (ACT, 2006; Jackson et al., in press). Even so, approximately 1.6 million supplementary workers with degrees in the computing sciences will be required to satisfy workforce demands according to the U. S. Department of Labor (Beyer et al., 2003; Hecker, 2001). Social misfortunes have played a significant role in the disproportioned participation rates of ethnic minorities in STEM fields. Although it could be argued that the field of computing sciences has moved to the forefront of STEM within this information-based global economy, very few African Americans productively contribute to the field (Carver, 1994; Gilbert, Jackson, George, Charleston, & Daniels, 2007).

The purpose of this paper is to determine how festivals allocated their funds among various expense categories.

Festival managers from across North and South Carolina were asked to specify the percentages of their expense budgets allocated to each of the following categories: marketing, administrative, entertainment and operations.

It was found that “smaller” festivals spend a significantly greater proportion of their budgets on marketing (23 percent) and a far smaller share on administrative expenditures (5 percent) than do their “larger” counterparts that spend only 15 percent on marketing and triple the “smaller” festival's administrative costs (15 percent). The differences related to their spending for entertainment (35 versus 28 percent) and operations (36 versus 41 percent) are not as dramatic in relation to their proportion of total spending. The data herein suggest that festival size plays an important role when it comes to such allocations.

The paper has provided benchmarks that hopefully will assist festival directors' budget‐decision‐making strategies as they allow a measure with which to evaluate those decisions. While the research needs to be interpreted with great care due to its relatively small sample size and broad budgetary categorizations, the findings provide a guide to assist festival organizers as they manage their events for the benefit of their stakeholders and the communities that support them. The paper also provides a starting point for future research in this area, much of which is needed.

As markets, economies and institutions are increasingly globalized, there is a growing understanding of the need to introduce intercultural learning alongside business learning. Participating in a study abroad program is potentially one of the most important experiences for any college student. Such programs provide students the opportunity to immerse themselves in different cultures and gain new perspectives. The purpose of this paper is threefold: to identify the main factors that students consider when selecting a program; to integrate quality function deployment (QFD), benchmarking and Hoshin Kanri in the analysis of student expectations and to examine the implications for research and practice.

The study was based on primary data collected from 180 students at four universities. To design an approach that helps students in the selection of a program that best satisfies their expectations, a self-designed questionnaire was used for data collection. The data were analyzed using the techniques of QFD/benchmarking. Finally, a long-term strategy is proposed based on the Hoshin Kanri theory.

The great variability in student expectations presents a challenge in designing a methodology of selection; however, it does help in identifying the most important student expectations. A key, balanced relationship among academic quality, having fun and cost cannot be ignored in this study because they represent the factors that are altogether influential in the decision to study abroad. In the current literature, the key variables of study abroad programs are discussed; however, most studies fail to incorporate student expectations. This paper will fill this gap by incorporating both key academic variables and the voice of the customer (student).

Given the diversity of the population, the authors developed several methodologies to standardize the array of student responses to the questionnaire. Using this standardization along with several total quality management (TQM) tools allows us to simplify and categorize the different student expectations. The gathering of students’ expectations directly provided by students (voice of the customer) allows international programs to focus on the real problems and expectations that have been acknowledged, thus yielding student satisfaction with their experience, most importantly, in their field of study.

For universities, the current study identifies new means by which to improve the quality of international programs with the use of TQM tools including QFD, benchmarking and the Hoshin Kanri Planning Process with an evidence-based real case.

This paper presents a conclusive application of QFD, benchmarking and Hoshin Kanri and an analysis of how these tools can help international programs with future improvements incorporating the needs of students in their programs. To the authors’ knowledge, this is the first application of these techniques to improve the international experience for business undergraduate students.

Since the 1960s, quality function development (QFD) has been recognized worldwide as a suitable planning tool for translating customers' needs into product specifications. QFD methodologies, as opposed to traditional quality approaches, are most often cited as essential for advancing the competitive advantage of an organization. This paper proposes a modified approach to QFD, called “QFD strategy house”, as a systematic means of incorporating intelligence on markets, consumers and technologies in strategy development. It links marketing and manufacturing strategies by first developing a continuous improvement strategy. Both the marketing and manufacturing literatures have reported that an alignment between the two constituent strategies confers a competitive advantage in the marketplace.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the impact of electronic procurement technologies on procurement practices (PPR) and procurement performance (PP).

This paper posits a model of the relationships between e‐procurement technology (EPT) usage, PPR, and PP. This model was tested and validated using a sample of 368 procurement specialists in the USA.

The findings suggest that EPT usage positively affects managers' perceptions of both PPR and PP.

The findings of this paper primarily pertain to the operational level of the organization. Future research could also attempt to isolate the impact of individual EPTs on firm performance.

The contribution for practitioners is to provide guidelines for the use of EPTs, and to report its impact on PP. The measurement instruments developed in this paper can be used to evaluate and benchmark current PPR.

This paper contributes to the literature by providing an empirical test of the impact of EPTs on perceptions of PPR and performance.

Purpose–To provide a conference report on the annual Charleston Conference, a meeting that blends acquisitions, serials, collection development and general publishing trends. Design/methodology/approach–Describes the highlights of the conference. Findings–Many trends continue to evolve in the area of electronic publishing, scholarly communications practices and library/publisher/vendor relations. Originality/value–This conference however covered by the press, attracts a “straight shooters” sharing the latest ideas and implications from doing new things in the area of acquisitions, serials, collection development, publishing developments and increasingly user services.

This research aims to report the findings of an exploratory survey administered in the USA, Spain and Costa Rica on leaders' behavior. The purpose of the survey is to understand any differences in transformational leader behavior in three different countries.

This research used a survey instrument applied to USA (113 responses, 35.5 percent response rate), Spain (168 responses, 66 percent response rate) and Costa Rica (100 responses, 40.0 percent response rate). The researchers used different statistical analyses such as structural equation modeling (using AMOS), and ANOVA.

The findings suggest that there is an international measure of leader behavior. When comparing measurement models of leader behaviors in the three countries, differences were found to be more notorious between Spain and both Costa Rica and the USA. However, the individual geographies, histories and vantage points of the Anglo‐Saxon country (USA) versus the Spanish‐Speaking countries (Costa Rica and Spain) seem to have created some differences in leader behaviors.

The research provides insights into the growing body of knowledge on leader behavior. It first shows an international measure of leader behavior and then compares the three countries.