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The purpose of this paper is to postulate that the technique of Importance-Performance Analysis (IPA) is currently underutilised in visitor management studies reported in the peer-reviewed marine wildlife tourism (MWT) research literature. Further, this paper provides insight into how IPA could inform future research and management of tourism experiences at marine wildlife destinations.

This paper synthesises learning gained from the natural area tourism and recreation literature that report the application of IPA in MWT and insights from a recent study at the Dolphin Discovery Centre in Bunbury, Western Australia.

Although currently underutilized in MWT research, IPA is a relatively straightforward, easy to interpret, and, if correctly applied, a powerful tool that managers and researchers can employ to investigate and enhance visitor satisfaction in the short-term and for longer-term sustainability of the industry through visitor-informed tourism management.

Having identified the opportunity to enhance visitor experiences, site management and target species welfare through increased IPA research, this review provides a plain language introduction to the application of IPA and direct access to comprehensible academic discourses and exemplars for the technique. Moreover, in light of increasing tourism demand, IPA can assist in determining management options for the future.

Relations in university settings are becoming more heterogeneous in terms of race, ethnicity, religion, nationality, class, and gender. In South Africa, transformation imperatives have radically changed the complexion of the country’s university campuses but have also entrenched political imperatives in its universities. As a consequence, the university is a highly politicised space. This is not new. What is new is a communication environment characterised by real-time, global networked digital communication and the uptake of digital media platforms (including social media platforms). We explore the effects of politicisation and new modes of communication using the case of a controversial article published in a South Africa journal and the ensuing polemic. Drawing on both institutional theory and Castells’ description of the network society, we conceptualise collegiality along two dimensions: horizontal collegial relations which exist for the purpose of knowledge creation and transfer which, in turn, depends on self-governance according to a taken-for-granted code of conduct; and vertical collegiality which describes collegial relations between academic staff and university management, and which is necessary for the governance of the university as a complex organisation. We conclude that the highly personal nature of communication that is propelled by digital communication has a direct impact on collegial relations within the university. The motivations of both university academic staff and management, as well as the public, extend beyond stimulating collective debate in the service of knowledge production to serving individual and/or ideological agendas as the communication of science becomes politicised. While issues pertaining to collegiality in South Africa may at first glance appear to be unique to the country, we believe that in a globally transforming academy, the South African case may offer novel insights and useful lessons for other highly politicised university systems.

The paper provides a detailed historical account of Douglass C. North's early intellectual contributions and analytical developments in pursuing a Grand Theory for why some countries are rich and others poor.

The author approaches the discussion using a theoretical and historical reconstruction based on published and unpublished materials.

The systematic, continuous and profound attempt to answer the Smithian social coordination problem shaped North's journey from being a young serious Marxist to becoming one of the founders of New Institutional Economics. In the process, he was converted in the early 1950s into a rigid neoclassical economist, being one of the leaders in promoting New Economic History. The success of the cliometric revolution exposed the frailties of the movement itself, namely, the limitations of neoclassical economic theory to explain economic growth and social change. Incorporating transaction costs, the institutional framework in which property rights and contracts are measured, defined and enforced assumes a prominent role in explaining economic performance.

In the early 1970s, North adopted a naive theory of institutions and property rights still grounded in neoclassical assumptions. Institutional and organizational analysis is modeled as a social maximizing efficient equilibrium outcome. However, the increasing tension between the neoclassical theoretical apparatus and its failure to account for contrasting political and institutional structures, diverging economic paths and social change propelled the modification of its assumptions and progressive conceptual innovation. In the later 1970s and early 1980s, North abandoned the efficiency view and gradually became more critical of the objective rationality postulate. In this intellectual movement, North's avant-garde research program contributed significantly to the creation of New Institutional Economics.

Digital freight forwarder (DFF) start-ups and their associated business models have gained increasing attention within both academia and industry. However, there is a lack of empirical research investigating the differences between DFFs and traditional freight forwarders (TFF) and the impact of digital start-ups on incumbents' companies. In response, this study aims to examine the key business model characteristics that determine DFFs and TFFs and propose a framework illustrating the extent to which digital logistics start-ups influence incumbent logistics companies.

Based on the primary data gathered from eight interviews with experts from start-ups' and incumbents' logistics companies, as well as secondary data, the authors identify the main factors of DFFs start-ups that have an impact on TFFs and analyze the similarities and differences in regard to the business model components' value proposition, value creation, value delivery and value capture.

The results show that differences between DFFs and TFFs appear in all four business models' components: value proposition, value creation, value delivery and value capture. In particular, the authors identify three main factors that need to be considered when assessing the impact of DFFs on TFFs: (1) the company size, (2) the market cultivation strategy and (3) the transport mode.

This is one of the first studies to specifically examine the key business model differences between DFFs and TFFs and to propose a conceptual framework for understanding the impact of digital logistics start-ups on incumbent companies.

Using a discrete choice experiment (DCE), this study aims to better understand the job preference of postgraduate students studying at the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology-Institute of Distance Learning, Ghana and also rank the attributes of a job they deem important.

The research adopted a positivist epistemological design contextualised within a deductive approach and case study strategy. Primary survey data was collected from a stratified random sample of 128 postgraduate students with multi-sectorial career prospects. Sample students were subjected to a DCE in which their stated preferences were collected using closed-ended questionnaires with 28 pairs of hypothetical job profiles. Respondents’ preferences from the DCE data were then modelled using the conditional logit.

The research reveals that: salary in the range GHC 2,800.00 to GHC 3,400.00 ($1 = GHS 5.3); supportive management; very challenging jobs; and jobs located in the city were the top attributes that were significant and had the most impact in increasing the utility of selecting a particular job. Interestingly, jobs with no extra hours workload were not significant hence, had a negative impact upon student preferences.

This novel research is the first to use a DCE to better elicit preference and trade-offs of postgraduate students in a developing country towards varying job characteristics that have an impact on their future employment decisions. Knowledge advancements made provide invaluable insight to employers and policymakers on the key criteria that should be implemented to retain the best candidate.

The authors examine how performance measurement systems (PMSs) and academic agency influence the meaning of research quality in practice. The worries are that the notion of research quality is becoming too simplistically and narrowly determined by research quality's measurable proxies and that academics, especially manager-academics, do not sufficiently realise this risk. Whilst prior literature has covered the effects of performance measurement in the university sector broadly and how PMSs are mobilised locally, there is only little understanding of whether and how PMSs affect the meaning of research quality in practice.

The study is designed as a comparative case study of two university faculties in Finland. The role of conceptual analysis plays a notable role in the study, too.

The authors find that manager-academics of the two examined faculties have rather similar conceptual understandings of research quality. However, there were differences in the degree of slippage between the “espoused-meaning” of research quality and “meaning-in-practice” of research quality. The authors traced these differences to how the local PMS and manager-academics’ agency relate to one another within the context of increasing global and national performance pressures. The authors developed a tentative framework for the various “styles of agency”. This suggests how the relationship between the local PMS and manager-academics’ exerted agency shapes the “degrees of freedom” of the meaning of research quality in practice.

Given that research quality lies at the heart of academic work, the authors' paper indicates that exploring the three matters – performance measurement, the agency of manager-academics and the meaning of research quality in practice – in combination is crucial for the sustainability of the academe. The authors contribute to the literature by detailing the way in which local PMS and manager-academics' agency have material impacts on what research quality means in practice. The authors conclude by highlighting the pressing need for manager-academics to exercise the agency in efforts to safeguard a broad and pluralistic understanding of research quality in practice.

Whilst English remains the language of global commerce, the role and outcomes of English language provision in English-medium higher education institutions in the Arab Gulf countries remains central to any discussion on graduate profile and the employability of graduates in the global marketplace. This paper describes the findings of research into English workplace communication skills amongst a sample of Bahrain employers and students at Bahrain Polytechnic. Using a mixed methods approach, data was gathered through telephone interviews, student workplace simulations and employer focus groups. Findings show that generic employability skills, channelled through English as a second or additional language, are highly valued by Bahrain’s employers. In particular, students need to market themselves as confident, knowledgeable individuals during the recruitment process and after recruitment, continuing to operate successfully in the sociolinguistic culture of their company. Consequently, it is concluded that English language training in higher education programmes needs to move from purely linguistic and degree-related content areas to a broader remit of English for communication purposes that covers both specialised discourse fields and broader generic employability skills and competencies.

This paper examines the relationship between transport connectivity and regional economic development in China. It develops measurements appropriate for transport connectivity based on a set of evaluation models. This model is used to analyze the logistic connectivity of China’s 31 provinces by focusing on 11 variables, including some new factors (Density of road network, Density of railway network, Number of Internet Users) not used in previous studies, over the 13-year period from 2002 to 2014. Using panel data regression analysis, the empirical results show a statistically significant and positive impact of transport connectivity (factors like Density of road network, Density of railway network and Number of Internet Users) on economic development in China. In particular, the Number of internet users is a key factor reflecting information connectivity in all the variables. Comparative analysis regarding economic development is conducted to benchmark between coastal provinces and interior provinces. Like most previous research, this study yields the same finding of higher impact of transport connectivity on economic development in eastern provinces than in western provinces. This study suggests that decentralized decision-making will be significantly more efficient for analyzing regional infrastructure development. It also shows that the influence of transport connectivity on economic development is dependent on a certain developmental stage. This suggests that an economic region should adopt different development strategies for transport connectivity during different stages of development.

The purpose of this study is to examine the potential of integrating material from the arts into postgraduate curricula to deepen students’ engagement with marketing phenomena. The authors assess the use of arts-based activities, within a broader critical pedagogy, for encouraging imaginative and analytical thinking.

The authors devised two learning activities and an interpretive method for studying their value. The activities were an individual essay connecting themes in song lyrics to marketing, and a group photography project. These were applied, within a broader, critical approach, in postgraduate modules on sustainability, ethics and critical marketing. Data collection comprised diaries kept by the teachers, open-ended feedback from students and students’ assignments.

Students showed high levels of engagement, reflexivity and depth of thought, in felt experiences of learning. Their ability to make connections not explicitly in the materials, and requiring imaginative jumps, was notable. Several reported lasting changes to their behaviour. Some found the tasks initially intimidating or, once they were more engaged, stressful or saddening.

This adds to scholarship on management education by showing the usefulness of an arts-based approach towards a transformative agenda.

It offers a template of how to draw from the arts to strengthen critical engagement upon which marketing teachers can build. It also contains practical advice on the challenges and benefits of doing so.

The authors provide evidence that this approach can enhance sensitivity and reflexivity in students, potentially producing more ethical and sustainable decisions in future.

The pedagogical interventions are novel and of value to lecturers seeking to enhance critical engagement with theory. An empirical study of an attempt to integrate arts into teaching marketing represents a promising direction, given the discipline’s creative nature.