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Willingness to take risks is considered a quality of most successful managers (MacCrimmon and Wehrung 1986). There continues to be a societal stereotype, however, that women are not as inclined to engage in risk taking as their male counterparts. Research on whether this stereotype is justified has produced equivocal results, at best. This paper reports on a series of experiments which show there is a relationship between risk taking and task complexity such that the differences between male and female decisions, present in simple tasks, disappear as the tasks become more complex. Possible explanations for this phenomenon are discussed along with implications for women and the practicing manager.

The purpose of this study is to examine the impact of employees’ different disability types on lodging guests’ perceptions of service quality delivery and stereotyping. The study also explores the influence of consumer characteristics (i.e. gender, education, religiosity, generational identity and relationship to a person with a disability) on service delivery quality perceptions and stereotyping.

Using different types of disabilities, the study uses a controlled experiment, followed by a survey, to evaluate consumers’ perception of service quality delivery of a hotel front office staff member.

The results suggest that there are no significant differences in the perceptions of service quality delivery and stereotyping for service employees with disabilities with the exception of employees with a visual impairment. The study found that participants, who had a close friend or family member with a disability, expressed less stereotyping than those who did not have a close friend or family member with a disability.

Real service encounters can be used where participants might be more involved in the service process than in a controlled experiment setting.

The findings provide support to human resource management in strategically placing people with disabilities into front-line positions because they satisfactorily represent the image of the company and guests consider their service professional and reliable.

The study’s findings support that employers should tap into the under-utilized workforce of people with disabilities and avoid pre-existing stereotyping.

A major concern of hospitality companies making employment decisions about hiring people with disabilities is guests’ attitude. This is the first study in hospitality that examines service quality delivery of employees with different types of disability serve guests.

The purpose of this research paper is to identify the perceptions and stereotypical views of hotel managers to older employees in the British hotel industry, with a focus on the north of England, and to determine the equal opportunities policies and practices of hotels in relation to older workers and the types of jobs deemed suitable or not suitable for older employees.

The method used in this exploratory study was a survey incorporating a postal questionnaire. The questionnaire was sent to 144 hotel managers in hotels with a minimum of 20 bedrooms in the north of England. In all, 36 completed questionnaires were returned. Data were analysed using Predictive Analytics Software (PASW).

The results of the survey clearly point to hotel managers having overwhelmingly positive views of older workers (confirming the findings of Magd's, 2003 survey), although some managers did age-stereotype certain jobs as being not suitable or suitable for older hotel workers.

The principal limitations concern the use of a questionnaire to measure the attitudes of hotel managers, the use of a non-probability sampling technique and the relatively small sample size.

Given the UK's ageing population and labour shortages in the hotel industry, it is important that hotel managers address negative stereotypical views of older workers and the jobs deemed suitable for these workers.

As the hotel industry is a major contributor to employment in the UK, a lack of empirical data on managers’ perceptions of older hotel workers is a significant omission that this paper seeks to redress.

The purpose of this study is to understand how consumers perceive corporate volunteering programs. In particular, the author examines the moderating role of information processing and customer relationship status on consumer attitudes towards two types of volunteering programs: employee vs customer.

Using a scenario method, the author manipulated customer relationship status and program type while information processing was measured.

The author's results demonstrate that elaborate processing has a positive impact on credibility of the program and altruistic motivation of the firm. Less involved processing led to lower favorable trait attributions with employee rather than customer-based volunteering programs. Finally, relationship type moderated the impact of program type on attitudes towards the company.

These findings contribute to the understanding of customer reactions to corporate volunteering programs by examining the ways in which processing level, loyalty status, and program type interact to influence the customer's perception of the company.

Old age, in its most intense and extreme aspects involving frailty, dementia, Alzheimer's and death, is more often ignored rather than discussed in contemporary anthropology, remaining largely inaudible and invisible. This paper explores the marginal position of the study of old age in contemporary anthropology against the backdrop of the prominence of the post‐colonial agenda. The purpose of this paper is to discuss the comparison between the neglected Third Age and the abundantly discussed Third World in the context of the anthropological discourse on others.

This is a theoretical paper on ageing.

This paper explores the marginal position of the study of old age in contemporary anthropology against the backdrop of the prominence of the post‐colonial agenda. The comparison between the neglected Third Age and the abundantly discussed Third World is discussed in the context of the anthropological discourse on others. Studying the old‐as‐other reveals two types of alterity: that which is culturally constructed as different vs that which is essentially different. The others that dominate the agenda of contemporary anthropology are culturally constructed, while the old‐as‐other is an ontological essence. The condition of being old, it is argued, is essentially beyond culture, constituting an extra‐cultural materiality. As such, the old‐as‐other does not answer to the anthropological dictum of representing the “natives' point of view” and cannot fit the contemporary hermeneutics of anthropological relativism. Contemporary anthropology, which resists essential objects such as the savage and the old, thus ignores the raw materiality of old age while producing ethnographically‐informed commentaries on eldercare.

The paper is original in highlighting the juxtaposition between the savage and old age that is used to facilitate an understanding of the contemporary discipline of anthropology as a regime of social constructionism, which fails to confront and represent the bare materiality of old age.

In a study of merger-evoked cultural change in three organizations, quantitative and qualitative data were collected from individuals at all employment levels in both merger partners within each organization. Results were that most individuals perceived that the merger had impacted significantly on them personally. There was, however, a perceived lack of congruence between the organizational cultures of merging partners, resulting in culture clashes and significant changes to the organizations’ organizational cultures. More specifically, outcomes for both individuals and the subsequent acculturation following the mergers were related to the approach adopted to manage the merger process: incremental, immediate, or indifferent.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the adoption of Internet of Things (IoT) in the agriculture industry by the farmers' in India using the theoretical lens of the behavioral reasoning theory (BRT).

A survey on farmers was conducted to examine the adoption of IoT in agriculture industry (IoT-A) using BRT. The data analysis of the primary survey was done by applying the structural equation modelling (SEM) technique.

The ‘reasons for’ adoption of IoT-A were as follows: Relative advantage, social influence, perceived convenience, and perceived usefulness. The ‘reasons against’ adoption were as follows: Image barrier, technological anxiety, perceived price and perceived risk. The BRT theory provides the platform to discuss the psychological processing of acceptance of IoT in agriculture industry by the farmers.

This research has unique implications as it studies the rural consumers’ behavior of innovation adoption namely IoT in agriculture. It provides the specific reasons ‘for’ and ‘against’ IoT adoption in agriculture, which will give directions to the marketers of IoT technology to develop suitable marketing strategies to improve the adoption in rural areas.

This research takes the first step in the direction toward deliberation of the adoption of IoT-A by farmers in an emerging Indian economy using the BRT theory, which discusses the ‘reasons for’ and ‘reasons against’ adoption in a proposed model.