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The aim of this study is to examine the agency problems that arise between retail property owners and outsourced facility management (FM) service vendors in Ghana.

This study was carried out using telephone and face-to-face interviews. Nine facility managers (n =9) and six retail property owners (n = 6) purposively selected participated in the interviews. The responses from the interviews were analysed using content analysis. To begin with the analysis, the recorded audio for each respondent during the interviews was transcribed to augment what was written during the interviews. The next step was the development of a coding framework where each of the agency problems was assigned unique codes and grouped under themes. Each response was assigned a predefined code based on the agency problems identified in the literature. The research team discussed the consistency of the thematic codes assigned to each of the responses to ensure that each response was captured under the appropriate agency problem theme it best represents.

The results showed that agency problems in FM outsourcing in the Ghanaian retail sector are related to disagreement on expenditure associated with maintenance and repairs and improper tenant information sharing and use by FM service providers. Based on the findings, it is recommended that property owners explore the mixed approach to FM to mitigate the risks of complete outsourcing of FM services. It is also recommended that a clear path on how tenant information can be shared be pre-agreed in FM contracts.

This study provides new literature relating to agency problems in outsourcing and may be the first of its kind for FM in the Ghanaian retail industry. The findings could serve as a starting point for service providers and their principals to find common grounds to understand each other and mitigate the agency problems that could arise and their overall impact on performance.

All hypothesized relationships were significant. Specifically, H1 was supported as disconfirmation and surprising consumption were significantly correlated. Moreover, arousal (H2) and outrage (H4a) were functions of surprising consumption and negative affect (H3) and outrage (H4b) were functions of arousal. H4c was also supported as negative affect had a significant direct effect on consumer outrage. In addition, disconfirmation had negative direct effects on both negative affect (H5) and dissatisfaction (H6a) and dissatisfaction was a function of negative affect. Finally, both outrage (H7a) and dissatisfaction (H7b) had significant negative effects on behavioral intentions.

Respondents were recruited to participate in the data collection in a “college town” in the Southeastern United States. Respondents were provided a paper and pencil data collection instrument that include complete survey instructions and the balance of the research design. To adequately test all hypotheses, the researchers developed a unique scenario that described an extreme service failure that takes place during a hotel check-in. Each respondent was asked to read the scenario and then reflect upon it as they responded to items that assessed their feelings toward the hotel check-in experience.

The results provide additional evidence in support of the existence of the satisfaction-dissatisfaction continuum, as well as specifically identifying the affective nature of levels of satisfaction that fall surprisingly well-below the zone of tolerance. The authors feel that the present study is a necessary step to provide a more comprehensive view of the satisfaction-dissatisfaction continuum. Likewise, the authors posit initial evidence of the antecedents and consequences of consumer outrage. This research supports the prior assumptions of Westbrook (1987) about the vast detrimental effects of negative affective responses to service or product failures.

Future research needs to discover just how extremely deficient service has to be to elicit outrage. Is outrage a personal phenomenon with every consumer experiencing it to different degrees? As such, is outrage triggered at different points on the satisfaction-dissatisfaction continuum? The zone of tolerance seems to suggest this, but it would be interesting to discover if at some collective level of dissatisfaction consumers generally begin to show signs of outrage. Likewise, it would be interesting to understand how the level and pattern of outrage results in customers exiting the relationship but also results in loyal customers becoming enemies (e.g. Gregiore et al., 2009; Gregiore and Fisher, 2008).

The motivation for the current study is both pragmatic and theoretical. As alluded to above, it is evident that the level of service customers’ emotional responses to their service experiences are increasing in frequency and intensity. These negative emotions affect the efficacy of service workers and impede the financial performance of service providers. The popular mantra of “anti-woke” consumers, “Go Woke, Go Broke,” is indicative of the importance of negative emotion. Sometimes referred to as “brand activism” (Moorman, 2020; Sarkar and Kotlet, 2019), recent public stances on social and political issues have led to a boycott of Gillette razors, the burning of Nike shoes, and the canceling of Costco Memberships in what has been called “virtue signaling” (Vredenburg et al., 2020). While none of these actions are desirable, the importance of investigating the impact of strong negative emotions (i.e. outrage) is further demonstrated in reports that 65% of consumers expect companies to authentically support such issues (Barton et al., 2018; Edelman, 2018; Larcker and Tayan, 2018; Moorman, 2020).

The focus of this chapter is on micro-credentials in higher education. In the current complex and fluid context, there is a demand for higher education providers to be able to respond with flexible and targeted provision of learning opportunities. Crafting micro-credentials, or disaggregating credentials, can be effective in reaching target audiences. For students, the availability of micro-credentials allows them to satisfy immediate learning needs. For industry, micro-credentials can provide elements of vocational training. On the other hand, it is a challenge to design micro-credentials that provide the cognitive perspective associated with higher education to ensure an appreciation of an associated body of knowledge or field of study. Further, education offered by universities and other higher education providers needs to have the potential to support the ongoing academic life of the institution, which is dependent on teaching being informed by research and current understandings in the field, and the research area being refreshed with talent with an appreciation of their field of study and associated bodies of knowledge. This, therefore, can be seen as something of an eco-system, which is dependent for its sustenance on learners acquiring more than fragments of knowledge or information. There are consequences for devising policies and procedures for the design, recognition, and provision of micro-credentials in higher education. Policies and procedures need to explicitly relate micro-credentials to the current and emerging understandings in an academic discipline or field of study. Academic standards that apply to offering credentials need to be maintained. Associated staff support and development is a requirement.

The rise of the regulatory state during the Gilded Age was closely associated with the development of institutionalist ideas in American academia. In their analysis of the emergent regulatory environment, institutionalists like John Commons operated with a fundamentally marginalist theory of value and distribution. This engagement is a central explanation for the ultimate ascendancy of neoclassical economics, and the limitations of the regulatory environment that emerged in the Progressive Era. The eventual rise of the Chicago School and its deregulatory ambitions did constitute a rupture, but one achieved without rejecting preceding conceptions of competition and value. The substantial compatibility of the view of markets underlying both the regulatory and deregulatory periods is stressed, casting doubt about the transformative potential of the resurgent regulatory impulse in the New Gilded Age.

All over the world, different types of disabilities affect people and their quality of life. And schools, families, and federal and state agencies are obligated to play very important roles in advancing special education values for students with physical and other health impairments. To maintain and advance these values, the needs of students must be met to the greatest extent possible. Advancing values comes with recognizing the strengths, preferences, interests, related services, community experiences, development of employment, other postschool adult living objectives, and the acquisition of daily living skills. The question is, are these values consistently met, especially for students with physical and other health impairments? This chapter answers this question by discussing how these values can be met and advanced for students with physical and other health impairments.

This study aims to extend research in marketing on two important relational constructs, customer satisfaction and brand attachment, by comparing their long-term effects on customer behaviors with different levels of performance difficulty in a relatively understudied domain of durable products.

Using a two-stage quantitative study with US customers from five durable product categories, the authors first explored the hierarchy of customers’ loyalty behaviors based on increasing effort in a pretest study (N = 675). Then, the authors tested the effectiveness of satisfaction and brand attachment for customers’ loyalty behaviors over a nine-month period in a longitudinal study (N = 2,284) with customers from the same product categories.

Compared to satisfaction, brand attachment emerges as a stronger long-term predictor of customer behaviors. The performance difficulty of customer behaviors positively moderates the impact of brand attachment and negatively moderates the impact of customer satisfaction. Brand attachment is particularly effective in predicting difficult-to-perform customer behaviors, which require customers to expend resources such as time and money. Customer satisfaction is mainly effective for predicting easy-to-perform behaviors, but its long-term impact is significantly lower for easy-to-perform behaviors than brand attachment.

The use of consumer durables in the study and samples from only one country restricts the generalizability of the findings.

The complementary roles of customer satisfaction and brand attachment are highlighted. Only satisfying customers is not enough to engage customers in behaviors that require resources such as money, time and energy for the brand.

A comparative study on the long-term effectiveness of two established relational metrics in explaining different customer behaviors varying in their performance difficulty in an understudied domain of durable products.

The purpose of this study is twofold: first, to determine if pharmaceutical companies can be grouped based on their espoused values, and second, to examine the relationship between these values and company reputation.

A descriptive study design is used with two separate analyses: cluster analysis for grouping the companies; and descriptive data analysis for determining cluster differences.

The findings suggest that there are three value clusters: competent, community and interpersonal, with the community group showing the highest relative reputation, and the interpersonal cluster as the lowest. Brand portfolio composition appears to positively contribute to reputation. The effect of portfolio specialization is based on a company’s closeness to its therapeutic community, which may be influenced by the outward characteristics of its values.

Future research should examine the longitudinal effects of values on reputation combined with case studies.

Regardless of cluster classification, all firms should develop strong ties with their therapeutic communities using both personal and digital/omnichannel strategies.

A company’s values are becoming an important consideration for all customers and stakeholders.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study is the first to systematically examine the activities of leading pharmaceutical firms to link a specific value cluster to company reputation.

This paper aims to examine project management segments based on customer satisfaction drivers and loyalty rather than traditional demographic or behavioural variables.

Data were gathered over 18 consecutive months, and 3,129 surveys were completed using a questionnaire. The statistical methods included partial least squares (PLS) structural equation modelling, finite mixture segmentation, prediction-oriented segmentation (PLS-POS) and multi-group analysis (PLS-MGA).

The findings indicate the existence of three segments among system delivery project customers based on the differences in the strengths of the path coefficients in the customer-centric structural model. In Segment 1, satisfaction based on the proposal was crucial for loyalty, with the value-for-money construct negatively impacting the repurchase intent construct. Segment 2 had a solid value-for-money orientation. In Segment 3, the critical path indicated that satisfaction drove repurchase intention, with satisfaction based mainly on the installation.

The research contributes to the segmentation theory by introducing a new way to segment the systems delivery projects customers based on the perceived strength of the relationships in a customer-centric structural model, which aligns with traditional segmentation theory in a way that most segmentation analyses do not. A new segmentation approach to the domain of project management theory is presented. Based on the results, treating the system delivery project customer base as a single homogenous group can lead to managerially misleading conclusions.