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This study systematically addresses an important yet neglected question pertaining to the potentially time-varying effects of economic development on political democracy. Building on Huntington's insightful observations of alternating “waves” and “reverse waves” of democracy in world history, we deduce research hypotheses subject to empirical falsification and find, through a systematic analysis of the experiences of 87 countries from the 1960s to 1990s, that the impact of economic development on democracy shifted from the well-known U-shaped relationship to an inverted U-curve. These shifts occurred around 1980, a time point that corresponds to Diamond's classification of the end of the “second reverse wave” and beginning of the “third wave” of democratization. The finding thus demonstrates that the “wavy” progression of democracy in the world reflects historically changing dynamics of economic development and their impacts on political democracy over time.

Mandi Bane is a Ph.D. candidate, in the Department of Sociology, University of Michigan. Her areas of academic interest are social change, globalization, race and ethnicity, comparative-historical and ethnographic methods, social movements, and Latin America. Her dissertation is a multiscalar, historically grounded study of indigenous social movement organizations in Ecuador that contributes to the literature on multiculturalism, development, cultural citizenship, radical democracy, and neoliberalism.

The aim of this paper is to demonstrate that scholarship is all about challenging the prevailing wisdom by offering an alternative perspective or explanation. Hopefully, the author’s journey of more than 50 years will inspire others to be eclectic and become deep generalists.

It is an autobiographical evaluation of an accidental scholar. It emphasizes that an educator is more than a scientist or a priest or a public servant. It is all of them. Educators are in the business of making ordinary people extraordinary. They are diamond cutters who are entrusted by society with its rough diamonds to get their brilliance out and make them useful to themselves, the society and the community.

Over 50 years, marketing has evolved and adapted to the external environment, including technology revolution, changing demographics, global competition and geopolitics. This provides enormous opportunity for the next generation of scholars to establish their own identity in managerial marketing, consumer behavior or marketing analytics.

While publishing in the top journals is both necessary and desirable in the early stages of an academic career, it is also important to make an impact on practitioners by publishing professional books.

According to Peter Drucker, there are only two functions of business: innovation and marketing. While innovation is admired by everyone, marketing can also become a positive force for a better world.

Lessons learnt over time from different encounters and circumstances in research, teaching and service are important to document. In the end, according to the author, they are all academic entrepreneurs.

This study aims to question the conventional wisdom that brands compete for customers, especially in mature industries such as soft drinks. Rather than engaging in price wars or promotion wars, brands coexist in the markets by focusing on their own brand loyal customers.

Consumer panel data of carbonated beverages are examined using Markov chains to measure switching between two brands: Coke and Pepsi. Switching rates are conducted for all Coke households (n = 10,474) and Pepsi households (n = 7,227). This is further examined with respect to heavy half (upper median) consumers of each brand who make up approximately 86 per cent of volume purchases.

Households that made a majority of their purchase volume in either Coke or Pepsi products stayed with their preferred brands in subsequent quarters: 85 to 97 per cent of households. These findings are validated at all levels of the brand architecture (family brands, product brands and modified brands), even though both brands engage in similar marketing mix tactics (advertising, price cuts, distribution, product offerings). Loyalty was even higher among the heavy user households.

The research was conducted using two well-known brands in a mature industry. Services or non-mature markets may exhibit different loyalty patterns.

The study extends prior research on competition, loyalty and branded offerings to show that brand loyalty remains high despite marketing efforts to switch the brand buying behavior.

Research on the service–profit chain (SPC) provides important insights regarding how organizations attain service excellence. However, this research stream does not shed light on the mechanisms by which service organizations sustain such excellence, despite the struggles of many organizations to do so. Thus, the purpose of this paper is to develop the SPC as a more dynamic system characterized by feedback loops, accumulation processes, and time delays based on the service operations, human resources, and marketing literatures.

The authors posit the feedback loops operate as virtuous cycles, such that increases in customer perceptions of service quality and in profit margins lead to subsequent increases in the quality of the internal working environment, which ultimately reimpacts performance in a positive way, and so on. The authors test the hypotheses using five years of archival data on 417 full-service US hotels. The unique data set combines longitudinal data from multiple functions, including employee assessments regarding their tools, practices, and abilities to serve customers, customer perceptions of service quality, and objective measures of financial performance.

The authors find support for the idea that some organizations provide customers with high-quality service over time by reinvesting in the inputs responsible for generating the initial success, i.e., in various aspects of the internal working environment.

The analysis of 417 hotels from a single firm may influence the extent to which the findings can be generalized.

By expanding the boundaries of previous conceptual and empirical models investigating SPCs, the authors offer a deeper understanding of the cross-functional character of modern operational systems and the complex dynamics that these systems generate.

This chapter is designed for use by commercialization teams evaluating the commercial relevance of a new invention. To be relevant commercially, an invention must create value in one or more markets, which involves solving a problem or satisfying customer needs currently unmet. Unmet needs create market opportunities, and the goal is to identify and evaluate the profitability of these opportunities. The chapter provides an overview of concepts and techniques commonly used in the process. Important distinctions between market and industry concepts are introduced along with common rubrics for categorizing inventions in terms of their technological and market implications. These concepts are then used to discuss the roles of prior experience, lead users, and brainstorming in identifying market opportunities for various types of inventions. Techniques covered include market analysis, Porter’s five forces of industry profitability, analysis of political, economic, social, and technical environments (PEST), and the analysis of strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats (SWOT). The use of these techniques is illustrated for two startup commercialization teams.

The purpose of this paper is to examine whether line extensions (modified brands) create their own loyalties or induce variety-seeking within the brand. Prior research has explored how the branded house strategy (i.e. multiple products bearing the same brand name) retains customers from competing brands. However, this research investigates loyalty within the brand by comparing loyalty and variety-seeking rates of modified brands.

Markov chains examine behavioral loyalty and switching rates of panel households in the USA over several quarters for two family brands of carbonated beverages. Emphasis is placed on the consumers who purchase the upper median of volume (heavy half) and constitute a disproportionate amount of brand’s sales (86 per cent of the volume).

Three propositions find that loyalty rates are high among modified brands with little switching to other lines within the brand. Further, loyalty and switch to rates are highest for the flagship branded product (the master modified brand).

Managers segment the market using the branded house strategy, yet loyalty rates vary for each product line. The switching rates can guide managers as to which products have established a loyal consumer base.

While brand switching is a considerable research stream, this research is believed to be the first to explore loyalty versus variety-seeking in the branded house strategy.

Psychological contracts represent unofficial or informal expectations that an individual holds, most commonly applied to an employer–employee relationship. Understanding psychological contracts helps explain the consequences of unmet expectations, including increased budgetary slack and reduced audit quality. This chapter reviews and synthesizes accounting behavioral research that discusses psychological contracts and that was published in academic and practitioner journals in the areas of financial accounting, management accounting, auditing, taxes, non-profit organizations, accounting education, and the accounting profession itself. Despite the prevalence of psychological contracts in the workplace and the applicability to behavioral research, accounting literature remains limited regarding applications of psychological contracts. This chapter aggregates research across all areas of accounting to provide suggestions for use of psychological contracts in future research and thus create a connected research stream.

The purpose of this paper is to understand how emerging technologies and Web 2.0 services are transforming the structure of the web and their potential impact on managed learning environments (MLS) and learning content management systems (LCMS).

Innovative Web 2.0 applications are reviewed in the paper to explore how they incorporate a new paradigm, reshaping the web as an electronic platform for social networks, where users share, edit and collaborate on the publication of content.

The paper finds that, in this rapidly changing environment, educators need to consider the implications of these developments for the current design of the LCMS. An emerging generation of users influenced by social networking experiences and empowered to create, publish, appropriate and redistribute content may find the structures of the LCMS traditional and inflexible in contrast with the user‐centered approach of Web 2.0 services. This fundamental shift in the experience of the digital environment in the social world will require innovative solutions, including broad institution‐wide dialogues on the role of organizations in a Web 2.0 environment, innovative approaches to faculty training, a new emphasis on the role of faculty as learners in a rapidly changing environment, and rethinking the underlying architecture of the LCMS model.

The recent emergence of these new developments and the essentially fluid nature of these innovations on the web suggest that the conclusions here remain essentially speculative in nature.

This paper identifies a critical challenge in the integration of technology into the teaching‐learning environment and the re‐evaluation of the role of a vendor‐specific enterprise LCMS in the design of e‐learning facilities.