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In September 1985, eight sets of children's books from Australia began an odyssey that will take them into all fifty states and Canada by the end of 1988. The books— and the resource, reference and display materials that accompany them—were chosen specifically for their value in introducing non‐Australians to Australia and her children's literature. They also provide an ideal starting point for library collection development.

The purpose of this paper is to understand why people shop at small retailers in their community. The authors investigate the influence of consumers’ civic commitment, measured at behavioural and perceptual levels, on small-retailer patronage (SRP).

Data from 984 respondents represent four French cities that host common town-centre shopping streets and large out-of-town retail parks. A structural equation model applied to the theoretical framework tests the relationships between civic behavioural commitment (CBC), civic perceptual commitment (CPC) and declared SRP.

The more an individual consumer exhibits civic behavioural commitment (CBC) to his/her community, the greater his/her small-retailer patronage (SRP). Furthermore, consumers who express strong civic perceptual commitment (CPC) prefer to patronise small retailers. Results show that CPC has a stronger impact on SRP than CBC does.

If the CPC has stronger effects on SRP than CBC does, town managers can catch people’s attention by communicating civic commitment to enhance CPC. Solidarity could be developed through large-scale social projects to send a strong signal to consumers regarding retailers’ commitment in the community. Finally, the study highlights the role businesses, retailers and consumers play in building communities. Partnerships across all local stakeholders should be built.

This paper is the first to define civic behavioural commitment within consumers’ life place based on social capital theory. Moreover, it offers a new framework for understanding perception of commitment within a community, and its impact on SRP. This measurement scale allows more efficient capturing of civic commitment to communities.

Much has been made of economizing. Yet, social scientists have paid little attention to the moment of economic failure, the moments that precede it, and the calculative infrastructures and related processes through which both failing and failure are made operable. This chapter examines the shift from the economizing of the market economy, which took place across much of the nineteenth century, to the economizing and marketizing of the social sphere, which is still ongoing. The authors consider a specific case of the economizing of failure, namely the repeated attempts over more than a decade to create a failure regime for National Health Service (NHS) hospitals. These attempts commenced with the Health and Social Care Act 2003, which drew explicitly on the Insolvency Act 1986. This promised a “failure regime” for NHS Foundation Trusts modeled on the corporate sector. Shortly after the financial crash, and in the middle of one of the biggest scandals to face NHS hospitals, these proposals were abandoned in favor of a regime based initially on the notion of “de-authorization.” The notion of de-authorization was then itself abandoned, in favor of the notion of “unsustainable provider,” most recently also called the Trust Special Administrators regime. The authors suggest that these repeated attempts to devise a failure regime for NHS hospitals have lessons that go beyond the domain of health care, and that they highlight important issues concerning the role that “exit” models and associated calculative infrastructures may play in the economizing and regulating of public services and the social sphere more broadly.

Rob Griffin, senior vice president and U.S. director of search for Media Contacts, a communications consulting firm, is faced with the task of optimizing search engine marketing (SEM) for Air France. At the time of the case, SEM had become an advertising phenomenon, with North American advertisers spending $9.4 billion in the SEM channel, up 62% from 2005. Moving forward, Griffin wants to ensure that the team keeps its leading edge and delivers the results Air France requires for optimal Internet sales growth. The case centers upon Air France's and Media Contacts' efforts to find the ideal SEM campaign to provide an optimal amount of ticket sales in response to advertising dollars spent. This optimal search marketing campaign is based on choosing effective allocation of ad dollars across the various search engines, as well as selecting appropriate keywords and bid strategies for placement on the search result page for Internet users.

In determining the optimal strategy, the case presents background information on the airline industry as well as the Internet search options available at the time, including Google, Microsoft MSN, Yahoo!, and Kayak. Additionally, background information is provided on SEM and its associated costs and means of measuring the successfulness of each marketing effort. The case illustrates how one must first determine the key performance indicators for the project to guide analysis and enable comparison of various SEM campaigns. Cost per click and probability to produce a sale differ among publishers. Therefore, using a portfolio application model's quadrant positions can be used to determine optimal publisher strategies. Additionally, pivot tables help illustrate campaigns and strategies that have historically been most successful in meeting Air France's target Internet sales. Multiple recommendations on how Media Contacts can assist Air France in improving its SEM strategy can be derived from the data provided.

Students learn how to optimally leverage the Internet in generating customer sales in a cost-effective manner. Students will analyze and manipulate a variety of data using pivot tables to determine optimal strategies for obtaining maximum total online bookings through the various online channels available. Using a portfolio application model, students can determine an optimal publisher strategy and complete copy improvement analysis.

Whereas many researchers have examined the way in which health institutions have been transformed through funding modalities, and particularly through prospective payment systems (PPS), few have investigated the architecture of these systems, that is, costs and cost variance. Focusing on the study of costs and on the production of hospital rates, this chapter shows that the French PPS, called “rate per activity” made possible what we call a policy of variance. For health policymakers, the aim was to make the different accounting figures between hospitals, and between ways of practising healthcare, visible, in order to reduce these variances. This policy was attended by uncertainty in the processes of quantification, which led to metrological controversies. As a consequence of the issues around the way of calculating costs, some accounts and calculations were redone. In this chapter, we consider the case of metrological controversy over the remuneration of costs for cystic fibrosis patients’ hospital stays, and over the action of a patient organization that criticized the costs calculated officially. It leads to the analysis of the way calculative infrastructures, as cost accounting and rates, are challenged, and how some actors try to stabilize them.

The development of the public accountancy profession in the last 200 years has increased the demand for the labor of professional accountants and enhanced the role and status of the professional public account. This increase in both the demand for the labor of professional accountants and for the professional services, which professional accountants provide, has resulted from the growth of capitalist enterprises, as well as institutional work on the part of members of the organized public accountancy profession. The objective of this chapter is to trace the historical development of the public accountancy professions in the United Kingdom and in France in response to contrasting institutional logics in these two countries. While legal requirements for external audits of company financial statements provided the basis for the development of the public accountancy profession as early as the end of the eighteenth century, differences in institutional logics, including differing conceptions of the relationship between individuals and the state, led to differences in the development of the public accountancy professions in the two countries. The primary argument of this chapter is that contrasting institutional logics have influenced the history of the public accountancy profession, which has evolved into one of the key regulatory structures of modern capitalism.

The purpose of this paper is to provide a better assessment of the positive impact of family influence (FI) on the performance of SMEs and investigate a possible shift with firm size (FS) and age.

This study is based upon a large sample of 4,240 firms representative of small businesses operating in the USA. It focuses on active ownership, i.e. direct involvement of owners alongside employees as an important factor of FI and conducts hierarchical regression models with profitability as the dependent variable, FI as the independent variable, and FS/age as moderating variables. It also includes other firm characteristics as control variables.

The results show that even though active family ownership is positively associated with the profitability of SMEs, the relationship between FI and profitability is negatively moderated by FS and firm age (FA).

The limitations of this study are mainly related to the definition of family SMEs and to the cross-sectional data used to understand the variations in economic performance. However, the results show the great importance of this kind of study; more attention must be paid to heterogeneity due to the size and age of family businesses as well as the level of owners’ involvement alongside employees.

Practitioners are encouraged to maintain a higher degree of family ownership combined with a higher degree of active ownership in the initial stages, when family businesses are young and small. However, the level of active ownership should be reduced when family businesses increase in age and size. According to this study, practitioners should open up businesses to external human resources other than the owners’ family as the firm increases in size/age to avoid the risks associated with family members lacking talent and/or expropriating benefits.

This study is one of the first to give evidence on not only a direct (and positive) relationship between FI and economic performance, but also an indirect (and negative) moderating effect of FS and FA on this relationship.

The purpose of this paper is to expand on existing co-creation knowledge in order to accurately conceptualize, operationalize and contextualize the customer brand co-creation behavior concept from a customer perspective.

A quantitative approach is adopted in this study, using structural equation modeling to verify the co-creation of brand value for those customers who co-create.

A new four-dimensional co-creation behavior concept is supported, highlighting the role of development, feedback, advocacy and helping, in the co-creation of brand value. Furthermore, a range of customer-level and brand-level antecedents are empirically verified.

The research takes a customer-centric view of co-creation and in doing so provides new insight into the effect on the co-creator. Additionally, the research offers an improved level of specificity in the co-creation domain by conceptualizing, operationalizing and contextualizing customer co-creation in a comprehensive research study.

The findings offer new insight to brand managers, identifying avenues for increasing customer participation in co-creation programs and critically highlighting that co-creation behavior has positive effects on the co-creator’s perception of brand value.

The customer-centric approach offers an original perspective from which to explore co-creation, demonstrating the positive potential of co-creation in brand management strategies.

Past theorizing and empirical work suggest that long-standing strategic leaders generate harmful attention and information-processing effects in their organizations, which in turn impair organizational learning and performance. In contrast, our argument is that longevity and its attendant inertia foster useful transformational and strategic persistence for organizations pursuing stretch goals. Through attentional vigilance and restricted focus, inertia may create the cognitive profile necessary for effective learning when organizations pursue the seemingly impossible. We empirically examine our ideas in the context of the French royal navy and the naval battles it had with the British in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. More specifically, we focus on two distinct but related stretch periods during which the French royal navy was tasked with building a powerful naval force and using it to gain naval supremacy over Great Britain. Given its exceptionally weak starting position at the beginning of the two studied periods and its desire to displace the established and advantaged navy of the era, the French had a lofty task. Our results are supportive of the stability argument, with leader longevity and inertia being positive for outcomes.