Search results

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the effect of national culture in terms of power distance and uncertainty avoidance on service provision in terms of information flow and communication policy within the Takaful industry (Islamic insurance) in Kuwait and Egypt. Second, to validate Hofstede's claim regarding the homogeneity of Arab culture which he believes is dominated by the Islamic religion.

The study was undertaken among 462 employees from three Takaful organizations in Kuwait and Egypt. The sample was randomly selected from all levels within Takful companies operating in both countries. The data were analyzed using two different statistical packages. The first tool was SPSS version 17 with which the first hypothesis of the differences between Kuwait and Egypt was tested. Second, the analysis of moments structure was utilized to find the effect of national culture based on two cultural dimensions of power distance and uncertainty avoidance on two service mechanisms of information flow and communication policy within the Takaful industry.

Results demonstrate that: more differences than similarities exist between Kuwait and Egypt in terms of power distance and uncertainty avoidance, which implies that the differences in national culture between the two countries are in contrary to Hofstede's claim of homogeneity of Arab culture, and national culture in terms of power distance and uncertainty avoidance affects service provision in terms of information flow and communication policy, respectively.

The paper contributes to the body of knowledge in service marketing literature at the theoretical and practitioner level. First, it provides empirical investigation to an existing theory that links national culture to service provision through service quality gaps. Second, it provides evidence that disputes Hofestede's claim of homogeneity in Arab culture, as it evidently proves the cultural differences between Kuwait and Egypt. On other hand, practitioners of Takaful may comprehend how power distance and uncertainty avoidance might affect information flow and communication policy for which managers can eliminate their information gap, which in turn will strengthen the Takaful operator service quality in information gathering, sharing and disseminating. Takaful Policy makers and institutions might benefit from this research by understanding the effect of national culture on service provision and taking this as an important factor when designing regulations.

The purpose of this paper is to present a preliminary work on extracting band gap information of materials from academic papers. With increasing demand for renewable energy, band gap information will help material scientists design and implement novel photovoltaic (PV) cells.

The authors collected 1.44 million titles and abstracts of scholarly articles related to materials science, and then filtered the collection to 11,939 articles that potentially contain relevant information about materials and their band gap values. ChemDataExtractor was extended to extract information about PV materials and their band gap information. Evaluation was performed on randomly sampled information records of 415 papers.

The findings of this study show that the current system is able to correctly extract information for 51.32% articles, with partially correct extraction for 36.62% articles and incorrect for 12.04%. The authors have also identified the errors belonging to three main categories pertaining to chemical entity identification, band gap information and interdependency resolution. Future work will focus on addressing these errors to improve the performance of the system.

The authors did not find any literature to date on band gap information extraction from academic text using automated methods. This work is unique and original. Band gap information is of importance to materials scientists in applications such as solar cells, light emitting diodes and laser diodes.

The purpose of this study is to analyse the connection between managerial job and importance of job‐relevant performance information.

Two hypotheses on the relationship of the nature of job to the job‐relevant information are tested by survey data gathered in spring 2008. The data include responses from 76 Finnish CEOs in manufacturing industry. Managerial job, information, and information gap types are extracted by the factor analysis. The hypotheses are tested by the regression analysis.

Evidence shows that the type of job strongly influences the importance of different information types in managerial work. However, information gap does not depend on the type of work but on contextual variables.

The results limited by the small sample size and industry. Larger data, advanced statistical methods, and different constructs to measure managerial job and contextual variables should be used in further studies.

Contingency factors are important in affecting the nature of managerial job. Managerial job largely determines the importance of information but the gap of information depends on contextual environment. It is important to take account of the nature of managerial job in designing information systems.

This study shows that managerial job mediates the effect of contingency factors on the importance of information. However, these factors have a direct effect on the gap of information.

Public information disclosure is a manifestation of transparency and contributes to governance-by-disclosure. Also, better financial reporting can improve the credibility and integrity of public finances and contribute to a better management of public resources. A survey was carried out in Cyprus of users’ of public financial reports concerning an expectation gap about the types of information included in such reports (information needs expectation gap) as well as the quality of such information (information quality satisfaction gap). The paper aims to discuss these issues.

Two focus groups of users and preparers of public financial reports were used to construct the questionnaire. Users of such reports, who belonged to all three categories of public sector financial reporting identified by IPSASB, were surveyed. The quantitative data obtained was analysed using SPSS and quadrant analysis to answer the research questions posed.

Data from 101 respondents confirmed that each of the information needs identified in the IPSASB Consultation Paper (2008) was rated as being a significant information need. Data analysis also showed that both types of expectation gap exist, especially as far as local authority and semi-public organisations are concerned.

The response rate in the self-administered survey was admittedly rather low but it was not unexpected mainly due to the survey’s very specialised nature and the tendency by people in Cyprus not to critique public bodies.

Deficient financial public sector reporting means the auditor general is not able to adequately express an opinion on public spending at the local government level. This, in turn, means taxpayers do not get the quality of services they pay for. At the same time, the lack of information transparency means corrupt practices are not eradicated. One answer to the problem would be legislating the content of public financial reports.

The lack of governance-by-public exposure means that services to the local community cost a lot more, due to corruption and inefficiency. In addition, it contributes to lowering market confidence and eventually contributes to financial crisis at the national level.

The survey conducted was the first of its kind in Cyprus to investigate financial public sector reporting and document both manifestations of the expectation gap. In addition, information needs identified in the IPSASB Consultation Paper (2008) was rated as significantly needed and this is the first time it has been done in Eurozone member state and in a country facing a financial crisis.

This paper studies the role of personal selling and the salesforce as an information source and the impact potential information gaps in a downstream business chain can have. It offers a conceptual model of information gaps in an on‐licence wine business channel and suggests areas necessitating further research.

The expectation gap between auditors and users has recently been the topic of many controversies. This paper aims to evaluate the relationship between auditor’s characteristics and audit expectation gap among information users in listed companies on the Tehran stock exchange market. In other words, the study attempts to find whether there is a significant relationship between audit components and the audit expectation gap or not.

The multiple regression model is used to test the hypotheses. Research hypotheses are tested using a sample of 78 listed companies on the Tehran stock exchange during 2012-2016, by using integrated data technique of the multiple regression model.

The findings show that standard audit fees are not significantly associated with the audit expectation gap. Furthermore, audit fees are negatively associated with the audit expectation gap, which provides that allocated audit price in financial statements gives useful information for external and internal individuals. Predictably, it is recommended that audit opinion significantly determines the level of the audit expectation gap. The authors also find that the independence of the director boards and audit committee members fulfill the expectation gap of individual users. Moreover, finding the negative impact of audit firms ranking on the expectation gap, supports the idea of higher ranked audit firms provide high quality services, and consequently, more reliable information. Finally, the results show that the audit record is positively associated with the audit expectation gap.

As all recent studies on the expectation gap were qualitative, the present study is the first paper, which measures the expectation gap quantitatively through the statistical method.

Enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems are increasingly being adopted by organisations in developing countries. As in industrialised countries, this adoption seems beset by significant rates of failure, leading to a large waste of investment and other resources. This paper seeks to understand why such ERP failure occurs.

The paper moves beyond factor lists to make use of an overall “design‐reality gap” model. The model is applied to a case study of ERP failure in a Jordanian manufacturing firm, analysing the situation both before and during ERP implementation through a mix of interviews, observation and document analysis.

The research finds sizeable gaps between the assumptions and requirements built into ERP system design, and the actual realities of the client organisation. It is these gaps – and the failure to close them during implementation – that underlie ERP project failure.

This study shows the relevance and applicability of the design‐reality gap model to understanding ERP failure. Further research can be undertaken applying the model to other ERP cases, including case studies of success.

The paper draws conclusions about good practice in ERP implementation relating to both risk identification and risk mitigation, which must be based on closing design‐reality gaps. It offers examples of both specific and generic actions that help to achieve this. But it also notes limitations existing in some developing country contexts that may continue to constrain the effective use of enterprise resource planning systems.

The paper provides a new model for understanding ERP project success and failure, and for practical risk mitigation. The design‐reality gap model aims to be comprehensive but also contingent; sensitive to the specific conditions of any individual client organisation.

This study aims to explore the gap between information needs and services for autism in China.

The gap is revealed by investigating the status quo of autism information needs and services. The authors extracted categories and subcategories of information needs through content analysis of academic documents and then supplemented the subcategories through text mining of an online forum. Meanwhile, categories and subcategories of information services were extracted through content analysis of autism websites. Finally, the authors matched the two to explore the gap and designed a quantitative index to measure it.

A total of eight and ten categories of information needs and services are extracted, respectively. In total, six categories of information needs can be partly matched, but nearly half of the subcategories failed. Huge gaps in economic support, sociality and policy mechanisms categories are observed through the quantitative index and medium gaps in social resource services and employment categories while almost no gaps in psychological/emotional counseling, rehabilitation skills training and professional knowledge/information categories.

This study takes a deep insight into the gap between autism information needs and services in China, providing evidences and suggestions for information providers to improve their services. Academic documents and online forum data are adopted to avoid the impact of stigmatization, which provides a multi-source data analysis approach for the information needs of special groups.

The purpose of this study is to discuss the concept of information in relation to temporality within the context of climate change communication. Furthermore, the paper aims to highlight the empirical richness of information as a concept by analysing its use in context.

The discussion is based on 14 semi-structured interviews with initiators and collaborators of 6 open letters on climate change published in 2018–2019. By taking three specific notions the interviewees introduced—fast food information, information quality and information gap–as the analytical point of departure, the study aims for a contextual understanding of information grounded in temporal sensitivity.

The paper finds that information in the context of open letters is informed by different, and at times contradicting, temporalities and timescapes which align with various material, institutional and discursive practices. Based on this finding, the paper argues that notions of information are intrinsically linked to the act of communicating, and they should be viewed as co-constituting each other.

The paper contributes with an empirically informed discussion regarding the concept of information as it is used in a specific context. It illustrates how “information” is far from being understood in a singular fashion, but is made up of multifaceted and at times contradictory understandings. Ultimately, they correspond to why and how one communicates climate change information.

The purpose of this research is to provide companies in the hotel and tourism industry with an alternative reporting method to the traditional financial reporting.

ValueReporting™ is a framework developed and tested in 16 other industries by PricewaterhouseCoopers. Its ambition is to codify the information perceived to be critical by CFOs and the investment community for understanding the quality and sustainability of performance of a company in a given industrial sector. Given that the hotel and tourism industry is one on which the economy of Cyprus depends (in 2003 it was 13.9 per cent of GDP) and is one that has been going through a sustainability crisis, it was decided to develop the framework for this sector and to recommend it to executives as a method of mitigating this current lack of confidence. The study was tested on financial statement users (analysts, investors and regulators) and executives.

The findings identified that users wish to understand the operational drives of performance (“value‐creating activities”) and that there is an information gap between the information the users want and the information they get.

The study was of interest to publicly listed companies or public but not listed. Given the relatively small number of companies in the industry and the limited number of users, this study needs to be replicated in another country with a bigger sample size.

The focus in ValueReporting™ should be on value‐creating activities and measures should be taken by the hotel and tourism industry in Cyprus to tailor the information in ValueReporting™ to the special concerns of the users.

Whilst many frameworks have been put forward, they lack the detail testing that ValueReporting™ has had in 16 global industries. This framework has not been tested in the hotel and tourism industry, which makes this work original.