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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 study aims to show how to improve supply chain performance through the relationship between firms and their customers. In doing so, this study examines the impact of a firm’s relationship commitment and customer integration on supply chain performance. The aim is to detail a way to increase supply chain performance through the relationship between companies and their customers.

The empirical analysis was based on a survey on 205 corporate-Egypt multi-industry businesses including manufacturing, retailing, wholesaling and shipping services firms. Data collection was through a questionnaire survey distributed to 1,264 senior managers with responsibilities in the field of supply chain, logistics, purchasing, marketing and operations and with a 16% response rate. A conceptual model was designed, and hypotheses were analysed with covariance-based structural equation modelling.

This study makes a significant contribution to the supply chain management (SCM) literature by examining the influence of firms’ relationship commitment on supply chain performance in the supply chain management context by means of the disaggregation of customer integration into two dimensions: integration with customer (IWC) and integration by customer (IBC). The findings indicate that firms’ relationship commitment does not relate directly to supply chain performance, but rather indirectly through integration both with and by customers.

This paper outlines a conceptual model in which firms’ relationship commitment relates indirectly to supply chain performance. The model also sheds light on the fact that IWCs precedes IBCs in supply chains. This finding suggests that firms should focus on customer integration to improve supply chain performance.

This study offers a particularly refined understanding of the reasons behind and situations in which supply chain integration (SCI) enables firms to gain superior supply chain performance. In fact, firms focusing on customer integration may improve their supply chain performance, thus enhancing the value of the supply chain.

This study contributes to the literature by considering a relational view of the SCI-Performance path. In particular, by disaggregating customer integration into IWCs and IBCs, this paper verifies customer integration acting as a mediator between relationship commitment and supply chain performance in supply chains.

To assess changes over the past decade in the self‐reported levels of adjustment, job performance, and professional acceptance of western women professionals working in Japan.

Napier and Taylor's benchmark 1995 study of western women working in Japan is replicated ten years later on a similar sample group of women in Japan. Questionnaire responses to questions about cultural adjustment, job performance, and professional acceptance are compared for the original and new samples.

Despite increased westernization of business practices in Japan and a greater representation of Japanese women in management positions, no statistically significant change is found in the scores for the three measures examined over the ten year period. The incidence of formal training, preparation, and support provided by employers was higher for the more recent sample.

The sample size is relatively small and represents only women in the Tokyo area, which may limit the study's generalizability to women in less metropolitan areas of Japan.

Both for those women professionals who live and work in Japan and for HRM professionals responsible for expatriation and adjustment issues involving those women, provides evidence that adjustment challenges persist despite changes in Japan's sociocultural environment.

By carefully replicating the original study and sample characteristics as closely as possible, this paper provides a useful longitudinal perspective on the situation of foreign women professionals in Japan.

The reform and opening up have triggered a “revival” of religious belief in rural China. The purpose of this paper is to explain why rural residents are increasingly becoming religious, by analysing the inherent relationship between their risks and religious choice, and conducts a preliminary investigation of the common characteristics of rural believers and the determinants of their religious choice.

The authors applied a logit model to test the determinants of rural residents’ religious choice. The authors used sample survey data collected in 2008 from the rural area of Songxian County, Henan Province.

The results suggest that age, sex, political status, health risks, and social security have a significant effect on rural residents’ religious choice. On this basis, the authors have discussed the inherent logic of “disease-related religious practice”. From these results, the paper points out that lack of basic public services such as medical care due to the government’s withdrawal from these fields has increased the health risks of rural residents, triggering a “revival” of religious belief in rural China.

This paper has improved on previous research in two ways. First, it analyses the relationship between health risk and religious choice, shedding light on the underlying causes of the religious revival in rural China. Second, the methodology involves an analysis of household survey data, thus filling the gap created by less-rigorous quantitative analysis in rural China-based religious research.

THE problem that Dr. E.A. Savage introduced in our last issue may well be one of the crucial debates of this winter. When it is remembered that there was a time, as our writer in Letters on Our Affairs asserts, when it was thought inadvisable for a public librarian to be Hon. Secretary of the Library Association, we can see that times have changed. There is no doubt that the Brighton Conference showed the impossibility of adequate discussion of purely professional matters when authority members are present. The manner of achieving what many desire, and yet to retain the goodwill' of intelligent authority members, is what has to be determined.

From 1953 to 1961, the South Korean economy grew slowly; the average per capita GNP growth was a mere percent, amounting to less than $100 in 1961. Few people, therefore, look for the sources of later dynamism in this period. As Kyung Cho Chung (1956:225) wrote in the mid‐1950s: “[South Korea] faces grave economic difficulties. The limitations imposed by the Japanese have been succeeded by the division of the country, the general destruction incurred by the Korean War, and the attendant dislocation of the population, which has further disorganized the economy” (see also McCune 1956:191–192). T.R. Fehrenbach (1963:37), in his widely read book on the Korean War, prognosticated: “By themselves, the two halves [of Korea] might possibly build a viable economy by the year 2000, certainly not sooner.”

Human resource management (HRM) is still a new concept in Iran and there is significant research to be done, mainly because of the changes over the past two decades and the recent increase in the re‐emergence of multinational companies (MNCs). An active area of academic debate is the degree to which HRM practices follow the multinational or local partners practice in international joint ventures (IJVs). The research suggests the significance of ownership structure of critical resources. The study also shows the importance of socio‐cultural differences on the transferability of HR practices and whether these are MNC standardised or localised to the host country. Based on the information from the research findings, the main factors which influenced MNC standardisation or localisation of HRM practices were ownership and control of critical resources, the compatibility of national culture and socio‐cultural differences, mutual trust and respect between partners and the compatibility of management styles of the IJV.

Dyadic services research has increasingly focused on helping providers facilitate transformative service conversations with consumers. Extant research has thoroughly documented the conversational skills that providers can use to facilitate consumer microtransformations (i.e. small changes in consumers’ thoughts, feelings and action plans toward their well-being goals). At the same time, extant research has largely neglected the role of servicescape design in transformative service conversations despite some evidence of its potential significance. To redress this oversight, this article aims to examine how servicescape design can be used to better facilitate consumer microtransformations in dyadic service conversations.

This article is based on an interpretive study of mental health services (i.e. counseling, psychotherapy and coaching). Both providers and consumers were interviewed about their lived experiences of service encounters. Informants frequently described the spatial and temporal dimensions of their service encounters as crucial to their experiences of service encounters. These data are interpreted through the lens of servicescape design theory, which disentangles servicescape design effects into dimensions, strategies, tactics, experiences and outcomes.

The data reveal two servicescape design strategies that help facilitate consumer microtransformations. “Service sequestration” is a suite of spatial design tactics (e.g., private offices) that creates strong consumer protections for emotional risk-taking. “Service serialization” is a suite of temporal design tactics (e.g., recurring appointments) that creates predictable rhythms for emotional risk-taking. The effects of service sequestration and service serialization on consumer microtransformations are mediated by psychological safety and psychological readiness, respectively.

The article details concrete servicescape design tactics that providers can use to improve consumer experiences and outcomes in dyadic service contexts. These tactics can help promote consumer microtransformations in the short run and consumer well-being in the long run.

This article develops a conceptual model of servicescape design strategies for transformative service conversations. This model explains how and why servicescape design can influence consumer microtransformations. The article also begins to transfer servicescape design tactics from mental health services to other dyadic services that seek to facilitate consumer microtransformations. Examples of such services include career counseling, divorce law, financial advising, geriatric social work, nutrition counseling, personal styling and professional organizing.

The purpose of this paper is to describe the development of – and need for – an expanded understanding of cooking (skills and knowledge) to inform research on the connection between cooking and health.

This paper describes a concept of “food agency” and contrasts it with how cooking is commonly conceived in food and nutrition literature. A food agency-based pedagogy and proposals for using it are also introduced.

Cooking is a complex process that may be crucial for making a difference in the contemporary problems of diet-related chronic diseases. There are two interlinked problems with present research on cooking. First, cooking has yet to be adequately conceptualized for the design and evaluation of effective public health and nutrition interventions. The context within which food-related decisions and actions occur has been neglected. Instead, the major focus has been on discrete mechanical tasks. In particular, recipes are relied upon despite no clear evidence that recipes move people from knowledge to action. Second, given the incomplete theorization and definition of this vital everyday practice, intervention designs tend to rely on assumptions over theory. This creates certain forms of tautological reasoning when claims are made about how behavior changes. A comprehensive theory of food agency provides a nuanced understanding of daily food practices and clarifies how to teach cooking skills that are generalizable throughout varied life contexts.

This commentary is of value to academics studying cooking-related behavior and public health practitioners implementing and evaluating cooking interventions.