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The purpose of this paper is to provide practitioners of management a sense of importance in providing a balance between providing customer service and still safeguarding personal identity through a national identity program.

A review of the applied literature on national identity programs and a personal interview of 252 professional and semi‐professional people was conducted, representative of the service industries located in the metropolitan section of Pittsburgh, PA.

Via multiple linear regression, χ², and factor analysis, virtually all the basic personal information and customer relationship management (CRM)‐related tenets of benefits with identity program, global security concerns, technology enabled, personal identity concerns, standardization concerns, wealth and education factors, cost of capita, online experiences, and confront with personal information, were found be statistically significant and positively related to the degree of invasion of privacy factor.

Although, there are many beneficial reasons why national identity programs should be implemented, such as security, convenience, and enhancing CRM‐related strategies, the vast majority of citizens have many fears and feel there are too many risks involved.

Few empirical studies existing in the literature, especially from a business perspective concerning national identity initiatives. These issues regarding national identification cards and CRM were addressed through exploratory data reduction analyses. Although, there were several significant and negative issues associated with implementation, in general, if citizens are better educated about the benefits of a national identification card they are more willing to adopt it and pay for the program.

Supply chain finance is an emergent research area dealing with the financial performance of a firm throughout its supply chain. It has been drawing significant attention among industrial practitioners and researchers. However, there is need to identify improvements in supply chain finance (SCF) practices to ensure sustainable growth. In recent years, circular economy practices are being adopted worldwide with a motivation to achieve the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Moreover, integration of circular economy practices in the financial aspects of supply chain is still in infant age.

Adoption of circular SCF in firms enhances both restorative and regenerative capacities of the firm. In this regard, this study aims to review articles on circular practices in SCF. The study identified 329 articles related to circular practices and sustainable practices in SCF from the Scopus database. The shortlisted articles were reviewed and discussed.

The findings of the study help to recognize the most influential and productive research in circular SCF in terms of journals and trends. Further research is recommended to explore this area in depth to recognize potential integrating factors that help in smooth acceptance of circular finance in supply chains.

Bibliometric and network analyses were performed to identify research trends and networks in the field of circular SCF. In addition, emerging research themes in the field of circular SCF were identified and discussed, and research propositions are proposed to delineate future research directions.

This paper aims to problematise critiques raised against customer accounting’s numeric focus, which risks controlling and simplifying customers rather than facilitating closer engagement. This analysis suggests ways to better account for what it is that customers buy, why they do so and how to better serve them.

Service-dominant logic (SDL) is a marketing ideology that recognises the active role of customers in value creation. Seven customer accounting techniques are appraised against SDL principles to identify strengths and shortfalls in logic and application.

Customer accounting techniques align with SDL’s beneficiary-oriented and relational view of customers. Weaker alignment is found regarding a focus on outputs rather than outcomes, silence about the customer’s role in co-creating value and failure to recognise contextual circumstances.

The analysis uses prototypical descriptions of customer accounting techniques. Actual applications could offset weaknesses or raise other shortfalls.

For each area of SDL, the authors suggest avenues for integrating SDL into customer accounting using related literature and building on concepts within customer accounting techniques.

SDL contrasts with the traditional, goods-dominant logic that underscores much of accounting. SDL is used to critically and constructively evaluate customer accounting techniques.

The purpose of this paper is to understand the differences between proactive and reactive market research techniques during the development of new market offerings. The study focused on the financial and innovative performance of traditional market research techniques, such as focus groups and in‐depth interviews, in comparison to more co‐creation‐oriented techniques that are designed to capture customers' value‐in‐use.

The study was a two‐stage process. Study I, an empirical investigation of 195 development projects in European companies, examined how these companies use different market research techniques and how this relates to the profit margins of new products and services. Study II designed an experiment with 50 users of a consumer good and evaluated the contribution of different market research techniques, based on the degree of originality and customer value.

Significant differences were found, in terms of both content and originality, between the technique based on customer co‐creation and the two traditional market research techniques (Study II). These findings can help to explain why the relationship between the use of market research techniques and profit margin (Study I) is stronger for co‐creation techniques than it is for traditional market research techniques.

Despite empirical evidence that the application of market research techniques based on co‐creation can lead to original ideas, there is a lack of valid studies regarding how co‐creation techniques perform in relation to more traditional methods of collaboration with customers.

Using 12 case studies, the purpose of this paper is to investigate the use of business analysis techniques in BPR. Some techniques are used more than others depending on the fit between the technique and the problem. Other techniques are preferred due to their versatility, easy to use, and flexibility. Some are difficult to use requiring skills that analysts do not possess. Problem analysis, and business process analysis and activity elimination techniques are preferred for process improvement projects, and technology analysis for technology problems. Root cause analysis (RCA) and activity-based costing (ABC) are seldom used. RCA requires specific skills and ABC is only applicable for discrete business activities.

This is an exploratory case study analysis. The author analyzed 12 existing business reengineering (BR) case studies from the MIS literature. Cases include, but not limited to IBM Credit Union, Chase Manhattan Bank, Honeywell Corporation, and Cigna.

The author identified eight business analysis techniques used in business process reengineering. The author found that some techniques are preferred over others. Some possible reasons are related to the fit between the analysis technique and the problem situation, the ease of use-of-use of the chosen technique, and the versatility of the technique. Some BR projects require the use of several techniques, while others require just one. It appears that the problem complexity is correlated with the number of techniques required or used.

Small sample sizes are often subject to criticism about replication and generalizability of results. However, this research is a good starting point for expanding the sample to allow more generalizable results. Future research may investigate the deeper connections between reengineering and analysis techniques and the risks of using various techniques to diagnose problems in multiple dimensions. An investigation of fit between problems and techniques could be explored.

The author have a better idea which techniques are used more, which are more versatile, and which are difficult to use and why. Practitioners and academicians have a better understanding of the fit between technique and problem and how best to align them. It guides the selection of choosing a technique, and exposes potential problems. For example RCA requires knowledge of fishbone diagram construction and interpreting results. Unfamiliarity with the technique results in disaster and increases project risk. Understanding the issues helps to reduce project risk and increase project success, benefiting project teams, practitioners, and organizations.

Many aspects of BR have been studied but the contribution of this research is to investigate relationships between business analysis techniques and business areas, referred to as BR dimensions. The author try to find answers to the following questions: first, are business analysis techniques used for BR project, and is there evidence that BR affects one or more areas of the business? Second, are BR projects limited to a single dimension? Third, are some techniques better suited for diagnosing problems in specific dimensions and are some techniques more difficult to use than others, if so why?; are some techniques used more than others, if so why?

This paper aims to address the various issues of board‐level (off‐chip) interconnects testing. A new algorithm based on the boundary scan architecture is developed to test off‐chip interconnect faults. The proposed algorithm can easily diagnose which two interconnects are shorted.

The problems in board‐level interconnects testing are not simple. A new algorithm is developed to rectify some of the problems in existing algorithms. The proposed algorithm to test board‐level interconnect faults is implemented using Verilog on Modelsim software. The output response of each shorting between different wires of different nodes is different, which is the basis of fault detection by the proposed algorithm. The test vectors are generated by the test pattern generator and these test vectors are different for different nodes. This work implements built in self test using boundary scan technique.

The dominant‐1 (wired‐OR, denoted as WOR), dominant‐0 (wired‐AND, denoted as WAND) and stuck‐at faults are tested using the proposed algorithm. The proposed algorithm is also compared with the several algorithms in the literature, i.e. modified counting, walking one's algorithm and others. This paper's results are found to be better than the existing algorithms.

The limitation of the proposed algorithm is that, at any time, the faults on any seven nodes can be tested to avoid aliasing. So, the groups are formed out of total nodes, in a multiple of seven to carry out the testing of faults.

The proposed algorithm is free from the problems of syndromes and utilizes a smaller number of test vectors.

Various existing algorithms namely modified counting, walking one's algorithm and others are discussed. A new algorithm is developed which can easily detect board‐level dominant‐1 (WOR), dominant‐0 (WAND) and stuck‐at faults. The proposed algorithm is completely free from aliasing and confounding syndromes.

This paper aims to examine the use of projective techniques for published marketing and management research in the USA. The paper emphasizes the influence that McClelland, Atkinson, Clark and Lowell's study, The Achievement Motive (1953), has had on subsequent research. That work applied quantitative analysis to responses obtained using projective techniques.

The approaches used in this paper consist of descriptive historical methods and a literature review. The historical analysis was conducted using Kuhn's 1967 conception of paradigms, showing that the paradigm from which projective techniques emerged – psychoanalysis – failed to gather many adherents outside the discipline of psychology. The paradigm failed to gain adherents in US colleges of business, although there are some exceptions. One exception is managerial motivation research, which built on the traditions of The Achievement Motive. The literature review suggests that, despite lacking institutional bases that could be used to develop new adherents to the paradigm, projective techniques were used by a number of researchers, but this research was marginalized, criticized or misunderstood by adherents of the dominant paradigm, positivism.

Some of the criticism directed at projective techniques research by positivists involves criticism of the paradigm's assumption that humans have an unconscious, and a belief that projective techniques are unreliable and invalid. This paper points out that a growing number of cognitive psychologists now accept the existence of an unconscious, and measure it using the “implicit association test.” This paper argues that the IAT is an associational test is the tradition of word association. Moreover, the literature review shows that projective techniques are much more reliable than critics contend, and exhibit greater predictive validity than many positivist instruments.

As with all literature reviews, this one does not include every published research study using projective techniques. As a consequence, the conclusions may not be generalizable to the studies excluded from the analysis.

The paper is one of the few to assemble the literature on projective techniques used in several disciplines, and draw conclusions from these about the applicability of the techniques to market research.

The present study aims to discuss the role of Hofstede's cultural dimensions, uncertainty avoidance and individualism/collectivism, on the use of various humor types in print advertising, across culturally diverse countries.

A sample of 12,351 ads (3,828 humorous) from the largest circulated UK and Greek magazines was content‐analyzed in light of Speck's humorous message taxonomy, emphasizing humor types and intentional relatedness.

The results indicate that cultural diversity is reflected in the types of humorous devices that tend to be used in the UK and Greece. British advertisements incorporate not only sentimental but also disparaging humor types such as sentimental humor and full comedy, providing a great deal of pure entertainment. On the contrary, Greek print ads emphasize cognitive humorous appeals, in an attempt to provide credible information to the uncertainty‐avoiding Greek audience.

The findings of this study highlight some key aspects of UK and Greek print advertising that can be extended in other homogeneous cultures. In individualistic countries with low uncertainty avoidance, it seems that consumers prefer humor‐dominant messages. On the contrary, in collectivistic countries with high uncertainty‐aversion attitudes, humor can be used as a Trojan horse to convey the required information to the target group.

The present study points out how advertisers' intentions to entertain or to inform the target audience are expressed in the use of various humor types in advertising, underlining, also, the effect of cultural values on these communication decisions.

For some years now the dominant techniques for coating thickness have been based on electronic instrumentation. As such they have been subject to the same rigid progress which has been seen in the electronics industry. Components have become smaller and more complex and the microprocessor is pushing into more and more areas of control and measurement. Development of the various techniques has increased the range of coating‐substrate combinations that are measurable and improvements to stability have extended the measurement range. Statistical evaluation of results has been added to all but the simplest instruments. Describes the principal instrument types and in conclusion sees their intelligent use and the implementation of statistical process control as making the life of the organic finisher easier and more profitable.

This review paper aims to provide an overview of applications of direct rapid manufacturing assisted mold with conformal cooling channels (CCCs) and shows the potential of this technique in different manufacturing processes.

Key publications from the past two decades have been reviewed.

This study concludes that direct rapid manufacturing technique plays a dominant role in the manufacturing of mold with complicated CCC structure which helps to improve the quality of final part and productivity. The outcome based on literature review and case study strongly suggested that in the near future direct rapid manufacturing method might become standard procedure in various manufacturing processes for fabrication of complex CCCs in the mold.

Advanced techniques such as computer-aided design, computer-aided engineering simulation and direct rapid manufacturing made it possible to easily fabricate the effective CCC in the mold in various manufacturing processes.

This paper is beneficial to study the direct rapid manufacturing technique for development of the mold with CCC and its applications in different manufacturing processes.