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The association between economic development and growth of the service sector seems indisputable. Although it is necessary to highlight that services are of a different nature from that of products, nowadays the latter are more and more penetrated by complementary services, given the circumstance that services themselves also include, occasionally, the use and consumption of products. Market orientation had been developed mainly in association with tangible products; therefore it is necessary to carry out a study where the evolution of the market orientation is reflected in the service sector independently from industrial sectors. That is why a historical summary of the evolution of market orientation on the service sector has been performed.

This paper aims to examine the context and nature of marketing used by nonprofit organizations in the Czech Republic.

A number of senior self‐designated marketing managers in a wide range of non‐profit organizations in Prague were interviewed to generate a descriptive narrative of what these key persons understood marketing to be and how they devised and implemented marketing within organizational strategy.

The findings paralleled that of other research (1995‐2005) on the understanding and role of marketing within the profit sector of the Czech Republic. While marketing was identified as an interesting and powerful concept, non‐profit policy makers generally had a limited understanding of a marketing theory or of the context in which exchange transactions occurred.

This project was designed as an initial survey. The limited number of representatives interviewed and their purposeful selection from a small number of high‐profile non‐profit organizations limit the reliability of the findings and reduce the extent to which they can be generalized.

This paper provides a useful entry point for those interested in the use of marketing in the Czech Republic, a very significant transformative economy in the centre of Europe. Since one of the authors is a native Czech speaker, the paper reviews relevant marketing and non‐profit literature in Czech as well as English.

While there has been some interest in the understanding and practice of marketing in the profit sector, it is believed that this is the first paper to address the non‐profit sector – a sector that plays a very significant role within transformative economies.

The aim of this project was to investigate whether combinations of strategies, planning modes and levels of autonomy are associated with superior college effectiveness relative to other combinations of these variables. It was hypothesized that a college pursuing a prospector strategy ‐ with an emphasis on continuously seeking new client segments and/or developing new offerings ‐ would be more effective with longer‐term and more externally oriented planning, and with more autonomy for its dean. Conversely, a college pursuing a defender strategy ‐ relying on traditional client segments and offerings ‐ would be more effective with shorter‐term and more internally oriented planning, and with less autonomy for its dean. Generally, the hypotheses pertaining to the prospector‐type strategy were supported, while those involving the defender strategy were not supported. Discusses implications for practitioners and researchers.

In order to elaborate the concept of resources (a key component of the well-established resource-based theory of the firm) this paper concentrates on exploring and elaborating the associated concept of competences, in particular distinctive and core competences. This exploration includes an examination of the extant literature, alongside and in parallel with, an extensive body of action research undertaken over 15 years and with 44 top management teams engaged in strategy making. As such the concepts are scrutinized both in terms of their theoretical underpinnings as well as their impact on practice. The research reinforces the view that distinctiveness emerges most powerfully from the identification (or creation) of unique bundles or combinations of competences and that effective and meaningful core competences can be identified from understanding and refining the links between competences and organizational goals. The resultant conceptualization of the systemic competence/goals structure emerges from the interaction of theory and practice.

The purpose of this paper is to provide some thoughts following on from reading “Evaluating service users’ experiences of using Talking Mats®”.

This commentary outlines some considerations for the continued discussions about how to engage people who have profound and multiple learning disabilities.

The literature is not clear on the involvement of people with more profound and multiple learning disabilities, or for those who do not use much spoken language. Some papers have explored the notions of involvement and interpretation of pre-intentional communicators’ desires and interests.

There needs to be a robust discussion across carer, academic and service user communities to consider what the communication rights and needs are for people who have profound and multiple disabilities.

Although management scholars have displayed a strong interest in top management teams, surprisingly little research has been devoted to the international dimensions of top management teams including their international diversity and their societal and cultural underpinnings. This paper provides a recent overview of empirical studies addressing the international dimension of top management teams and identifies avenues for future research. Particular attention is paid to the role of the institutional and cultural societal context in shaping the configuration of top management.

The purpose of this paper is to reveal the strategic change-related issues by examining the dynamics between external fit and internal fit, as the success of strategic change is involved in the consideration of both internal and external fit.

This paper uses regression analysis to analyze the panel data from the electronics companies in Taiwan’s stock market between 2004 and 2011.

The empirical results show that there is a relationship between internal fit and external fit, and the momentum of internal fit was found as well. Moreover, the impact of the interaction effect of external and internal fit on performance is moderated by external fit.

This research contributes to and extends the current research in both theoretical and practical ways. From a theoretical aspect, this paper considers internal fit and external fit simultaneously and has adopted the profile deviation approach to test their impacts on performance. From a practical aspect, the empirical results have derived implications for managers as to understand the dynamics such as trade-off, momentum and synergy between the two types of strategic fit, which may be helpful for making decision on strategy change.

This study aims to examine the effect of entrepreneurial orientation (EO) on the export performance of apparel small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) and the role of multiple differentiation strategy as a mediation effect between their relationships. It has also investigated the moderation impact of export market category between EO and performance relationship. The multiple differentiation strategy comprises the product (PDD), customer (CTD), service (SVD) and brand (BDD) differentiations.

A cross-sectional survey was carried out by providing a questionnaire to senior managers and owners of the apparel SMEs from the developed and developing markets exporters. The primary data of 550 was treated by the partial least squares-structural equation modelling) technique for final analysis.

The study revealed EO’s positive and significant effect on SMEs’ export performance. The study has found the mediation effect of product, customer and brand differentiation strategies between EO and export performance relationships from the mediation analysis. In contrast, service differentiation has found no mediation effect. However, the moderation effect (export market category) has revealed an insignificant effect between EO and performance association.

The findings of this study are based on one country data analysis. This study has been conducted in the SMEs of the apparel industry in Bangladesh, considering only owners and senior-level managers of the firms.

This research has drawn the attention of managers/owners to EO and multiple differentiation strategies enhancing export performance from the developing country context, such as Bangladesh. Multiple differentiation as a competitive strategy is the pioneer application of mediating effect between EO and export performance relationships. Moreover, this research has investigated the effect of the export market category as a moderator. Dearth research has applied the export market category to investigate the moderation effect between EO-performance models. Therefore, current research has theoretical and practical contributions to the international entrepreneurship and strategic management literature.