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The process of establishing a competitive advantage is at the heart of competitive marketing strategy. However, a competitive advantage cannot be established without a clear idea of what constitutes the relevant competitive arena. Theoretically, there are strong arguments for seeing both these processes as market‐driven, but in practice their implementation may present particular problems for financial services providers. The degree of complexity and intangibility which characterizes most financial services is generally thought to complicate the identification of a clear source of competitive advantage; it is also argued that these characteristics might affect the extent to which an organization may identify the appropriate competitive arena. Provides preliminary interview‐based evidence on the extent to which the market‐driven concepts of competitive advantage and competitive arena have been adopted in financial services and evaluates the extent to which they can be adopted, given the distinctive characteristics of many of the services concerned. Contends that the findings confirm the difficulties associated with the development of a clear competitive advantage and the relative unimportance of price; they also highlight the practical difficulties associated with defining the competitive arena as market‐driven. While these difficulties are common across the financial service providers interviewed, concludes that there is some evidence to suggest that market‐driven competitive arenas and sources of competitive advantage are more easily identifiable for specialist or niche players.

“Brand architecture” is an organisation's approach to the design and management of its brand portfolio. Previous research, focused on the views of practitioners, identified a “multi‐corporate” approach in financial services, where a “family of main brands” was incorporated into an organisation's brand portfolio, often in the form of brands traditionally associated with separate companies. The current study seeks to provide contrasting insights from consumer data and to highlight the conceptual and practical implications of the findings.

A qualitative methodology was adopted for the study incorporating six focus groups containing an average of nine participants.

The findings from the current study offer empirical support for the conceptualisation of the corporate brand playing a predominant role in services markets. In doing so, the findings also suggest that the alternative conceptualization of a “multi‐corporate” approach advocated by practitioners and identified previously is not validated by consumer‐based research.

The context of the study reported may be limited by its restriction to a single category, financial services.

Practitioners' rationales for maintaining multiple brands are, in the main, undermined by the views of consumers. Organisations should consider rationalising their brand architecture in order to benefit from significant cost savings.

The consumer perspective on brand architecture is significantly under‐researched and as a result this paper provides valuable insights, and a significant contribution to existing literature.

Self-determination policies and the expansion of bilingual schooling across Australia's Northern Territory (NT) in the 1970s and 1980s provided opportunities for Aboriginal educators and communities to take control over schooling. This paper demonstrates how this occurred at Shepherdson College, a mission school turned government bilingual school, at Galiwin'ku on Elcho Island in North East, Arnhem Land, in the early years of the policies between 1972 and 1983. Yolŋu staff developed a syncretic vision for a Yolŋu-controlled space of education that prioritised Yolŋu knowledges and aimed to sustain Yolŋu existence.

This paper uses archival data as well as oral histories, focusing on those with a close involvement with Shepherdson College, to elucidate the development of a Yolŋu vision for schooling.

Many Yolŋu school staff and their supporters, encouraged by promises of the era, pushed for greater Yolŋu control over staffing, curriculum, school spaces and governance. The budgetary and administrative control of the NT and federal governments acted to hinder possibilities. Yet despite these bureaucratic challenges, by the time of the shift towards neoliberal constraints in the early 1980s, Yolŋu educators and their supporters had envisioned and achieved, in a nascent way, a Yolŋu schooling system.

Previous scholarship on bilingual schooling has not closely examined the potent link between self-determination and bilingual schooling, largely focusing on pedagogical debates. Instead, this paper argues that Yolŋu embraced the “way in” offered by bilingual schooling to develop a new vision for community control through control of schooling.

To review what “quality” meant to universities historically and might mean in the future.

Written as a keynote talk for The Australian Universities Quality Forum 2004, this paper problematizes “universities” and “quality” by reviewing the way changing communication modalities have changed the meaning of the two terms over time.

After reviewing some of the literature forecasting alternative futures of universities, the paper settles on a preferred future in which all education, higher and lower, is driven by the logic, best practices, and evolving technologies of electronic games.

The paper reveals that researchers who compare word‐based educational systems with electronic, interactive sound‐and‐image‐based systems should use measures appropriate for the latter, rather than derived from the former.

The paper shows that educators should take interactive electronic game methods more seriously in thinking about and planning for the futures of universities and their curricula.

This paper provides a contribution to the growing emphasis on making learning interactive, engaging, effective, and fun.

Purpose – This paper focuses on efficiency as a central theme of the Italian health care reforms, combining macrolevel policies with microlevel (i.e., operating room) perceptions of the concept.

Design/Methodology/Approach – According to the phenomenographic approach, this analysis investigates how the components of a surgical team (22 semistructured interviews) experience efficiency in their daily workflows.

Findings – The main findings show that the concept of efficiency is multidimensional. According to participants’ perspective, several categories of efficiency collected in an outcome space emphasize an holistic view of efficiency driving health policies and strategies.

Social implications – The suggestion of further relationships between perspectives and other constructs (i.e., quality, safety, patient focus, process) at micro and macro level could enhance the impact of health reforms.

Originality/Value – A qualitative approach conducted at microlevel help to recognize the phenomenon (of efficiency), engaging the individual conception that practitioners have of the health efficiency.

In the era of artificial intelligence (AI), algorithms have gained unprecedented importance. Scientific studies have shown that algorithms are frequently mentioned in papers, making mention frequency a classical indicator of their popularity and influence. However, contemporary methods for evaluating influence tend to focus solely on individual algorithms, disregarding the collective impact resulting from the interconnectedness of these algorithms, which can provide a new way to reveal their roles and importance within algorithm clusters. This paper aims to build the co-occurrence network of algorithms in the natural language processing field based on the full-text content of academic papers and analyze the academic influence of algorithms in the group based on the features of the network.

We use deep learning models to extract algorithm entities from articles and construct the whole, cumulative and annual co-occurrence networks. We first analyze the characteristics of algorithm networks and then use various centrality metrics to obtain the score and ranking of group influence for each algorithm in the whole domain and each year. Finally, we analyze the influence evolution of different representative algorithms.

The results indicate that algorithm networks also have the characteristics of complex networks, with tight connections between nodes developing over approximately four decades. For different algorithms, algorithms that are classic, high-performing and appear at the junctions of different eras can possess high popularity, control, central position and balanced influence in the network. As an algorithm gradually diminishes its sway within the group, it typically loses its core position first, followed by a dwindling association with other algorithms.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this paper is the first large-scale analysis of algorithm networks. The extensive temporal coverage, spanning over four decades of academic publications, ensures the depth and integrity of the network. Our results serve as a cornerstone for constructing multifaceted networks interlinking algorithms, scholars and tasks, facilitating future exploration of their scientific roles and semantic relations.

On April 2, 1987, IBM unveiled a series of long‐awaited new hardware and software products. The new computer line, dubbed the Personal Systems 30, 50, 60, and 80, seems destined to replace the XT and AT models that are the mainstay of the firm's current personal computer offerings. The numerous changes in hardware and software, while representing improvements on previous IBM technology, will require users purchasing additional computers to make difficult choices as to which of the two IBM architectures to adopt.