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The ability to predict future demand is a need that businesses work towards irrespective of their size. Creating a favourable competitive stance for firm’s output is also a crucial goal of businesses. These two goals are of particular importance for enterprises operating in an environment characterised by rapid changes, shortened lead‐times, and exponential innovative activities. This study aims to elaborate on branding as a marketing principle relevant to the entrepreneurial quest for stimulating demand and creating competitive advantage. It also aims to highlight the appropriateness of branding to SME practices and to identify relevant guidelines that SMEs could follow in building a successful brand.

Describes a qualitative research project involving a “narrowing” research process. The first stage involved initial, highly exploratory qualitative work. The findings led to a second stage that involved a review of relevant literature and secondary sources of data, followed by more focussed, focus group research into the issues uncovered. The problem investigated was how to measure customers’ evaluations of quality for an industry in which the service/product offering is dominated by the tangible product. The initial fear was that traditional process‐oriented measurement models for customer perceptions of quality, might not offer full and comprehensive measurement of all the antecedents of customer quality evaluations and their subsequent satisfaction with, and attitude towards, product‐dominated service providers. In attempting to answer the research question, the qualitative work undertaken suggests that consumers’ evaluations of quality will depend on product quality, process quality and additional external factor quality based on evaluations of image.

Terrorism is not a new phenomenon in human life. It existed during Biblical times when Joseph, the seventeen‐year‐old son of Jacob, was kidnapped and sold into slavery by his jealous brothers. Although terrorists have been active throughout history, it is only recently that we have seen an increase in scholarly interest in the phenomenon of terrorism. One reason for this is the fact that terrorist activities have increased dramatically since the 1960s. Everyday we read in the newspapers and hear on radio and television details of the latest terrorist outrage. Many American colleges and universities now offer a course or two on terrorism as a part of their curriculum.

The transition from the standard industrial classification (SIC) system to the North American industrial classification system (NAICS) will not be rapid, but its effects will be profound for business researchers and information professionals. Most government agencies are already in the midst of this six‐year transition and, although private information producers are not compelled to switch from SIC to NAICS, most are planning to do so. The far‐reaching impact of NAICS on business information will affect libraries of all types. This article describes the challenges and costs associated with this change and makes recommendations for materials and training.

While mail surveys continue to be a widely used research technique, relatively little empirical research exists that assesses their effectiveness among industrial (commercial) organizations. To address this literature void, the present paper reports the findings from a mail survey of international freight forwarders. More specifically, this paper investigates the influence of postcard prenotification with respect to response rates, response speed, response quality, response bias, and response cost effectiveness. The paper also discusses implications of the results and offers suggestions for further research.

The main focus of this paper is upon the use of computers and other elements of Information Technology (IT) in the daily practice of social work, specifically in relation to the impact which it has upon the service user and the social workers and upon the outcome of service delivery. But it is also necessary to stray into other territories; notably management uses of computing in social work agencies, and to the more abstract area of the relationship between service‐users, social work and society.

Group Support Systems (GSS) have been used and studied in the support of facilitated ideation sessions for years. The norm for these sessions has been for participants to work individually at GSS workstations. A review of applicable literature suggests that pairing participants at GSS workstations could result in higher quality ideas and participant satisfaction. This paper reports the results of a lab experiment that tested for differences between paired and unpaired facilitated GSS sessions. These results suggest that pairing participants can yield higher quality ideas from facilitated ideation without negative consequences.

Game Theory has become an integral part of the business school curriculum, but the popular business press ignores it. Here's a crash course.

This article examines the selection criteria used by employers from the perspective of a sample of registered unemployed. It uses the same criteria set to get the sample to assess their own re‐employment prospects. It concludes that although training and retraining programmes may be a necessary condition to enhance the re‐employment prospects of the unemployed, they do not constitute a sufficient condition.

While there have been extensive empirical investigations of pay-performance sensitivity, the perspective of performance-pay has received less attention to date. While executive compensation is sensitive to firm performance, firm performance is also likely to be affected by executive compensation. Adopting multiple theoretical perspectives, the purpose of this paper is to examine whether executive compensation has a greater influence on firm performance or whether the latter has a greater influence on compensation.

Using data from a five-year period (2010-2014) for Financial Times and Stock Exchange 350 companies, the authors employ a set of simultaneous equation modelling to jointly investigate, after accounting for endogeneity problem, the mutual association of executive compensation and firm performance by employing four control variables (board size, non-executive directors, leverage and boardroom ownership).

The authors find strong evidence for the greater influence of executive compensation on firm performance than the pay-performance framework. This finding supports the tournament theory compared with the agency perspective.

Inevitably, there are limitations in a wide-ranging study of this nature that could be addressed in future research. As any empirical study utilising company data, there may be concerns to the effect of survivorship bias and the manner in which companies have reorganised, if there is any, themselves during the period under examination. There are also issues as to missing data, some measures relating to both executive compensation and corporate governance are not provided by the BoardEx database.

The study results provide evidence that using the tournament perspective by remuneration committees as a guide for determining executive compensation helps in achieving better performance. This helps in developing appropriate mechanisms for setting executive remuneration.

This paper combines an empirical investigation of the frameworks of pay-performance and performance-pay and develops a system of six simultaneous equations to examine the associations between executive compensation and firm performance.