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This study seeks to examine customer satisfaction (CS), productivity, and profitability in terms of the organizational commitment (OC) and job involvement (JI) of company customer contact personnel. Additionally, the study aims to investigate the relationship between the OC and JI of customer contact personnel in team and non‐team structures.

A field design is used for testing the study's four hypotheses and for examining the relationships between the independent variables and organizational profit and productivity. The study uses the service departments of 40 geographically diverse franchised automobile dealerships from one original equipment manufacturer.

The OC of customer contact personnel was significantly correlated with CS but not profit and productivity. On the other hand, the JI of customer contact personnel was significantly correlated with CS, profit and productivity. There was a significant difference between the team and non‐team structures for JI, but not for the OC of customer contact personnel.

Future studies need to focus on the potential effect of compensations schemes on the relationships between OC, JI and CS within team and non‐team structures.

This study offers some insight to whether teams provide any motivational benefit in terms of commitment and job involvement. Further, there is clear evidence that team structures increase productivity and net profit. It is hoped that this research will offer more support for the need to shift some of an organization's strategic service vision inward onto the employees.

This is one of the few studies that examine the dependent variables of profit, productivity and customer satisfaction across 40 different service organizations.

To make readers aware of the pervasiveness of credit card fraud and how it affects credit card companies, merchants and consumers.

A range of recent publications in journals and information from internet web sites provide corroboration and details of how fraudsters are using credit cards to steal billions of dollars each year. Numerous schemes and techniques are described in addition to recommendations as to how to help control this growing type of fraud.

Credit card fraud is a healthy and growing means of stealing billions of dollars from credit card companies, merchants and consumers. This paper offers current information to help understand the techniques used by fraudsters and how to avoid falling prey to them.

This fraud relies on technology currently available and the easy ability to obtain machinery to steal individual identities and account information, and to produce fraudulent credit cards. Information cited is current but could change radically as technological breakthroughs occur. The changing nature of technology also affects the recommendations made to control this fraud.

A very useful source of current information on credit card fraud for bank, credit card companies, merchants, and consumers.

This paper provides specific current information and recommendations regarding a fraud topic that is of interest to a wide audience.

In the contemporary US, pregnant women must navigate competing ideas about their bodies, including expectations for weight gain. Given that there are few social spaces where women may gain weight without disapproval, pregnancy represents a period when women are allowed to put on weight. However, gaining weight means doing so within the context of the obesity “epidemic” and increased medical surveillance of the body. To explore how women navigate the medicalization of pregnancy weight, I draw on data from in-depth interviews with 40 pregnant and recently pregnant women. Findings indicate that women reframe the meaning of pregnancy weight as “baby weight,” rather than body weight. This allows them to view it as a temporary condition that is “for the baby,” while holding two concurrent body images – a pregnant and a non-pregnant version of themselves. Women also resist the quantification of their maternity weight, either by not keeping track or not looking at scales in the doctor’s office. Doing so prevented baby weight from turning back into body weight – a concrete and meaningful number on the scale. Such resistance to quantification is often accomplished with the help of doctors and healthcare professionals who do not explicitly discuss weight gain with their patients. These findings suggest that women rely on a variety of strategies to navigate the medicalization of pregnancy weight, and provides another lens through which to understand how and why women may make similar choices about other medicalized aspects of their pregnancy (or pregnancy experiences).

The past several decades have seen a tremendous increase in the U.S. incarceration rate, with varying trends in other advanced industrial democracies. These developments have only recently begun to attract the attention of political scientists. This chapter provides a critical review of recent literature on mass incarceration by both political scientists and scholars in related disciplines, and a discussion of directions for further research. I argue that further work in this area should involve theoretically informed analysis of interactions between criminal justice experts and professionals, elected politicians, and the public at large, with particular attention to how public concerns about crime are parsed and interpreted by public officials in the making of penal policy.

To explore the discursive construction of disordered eating and athlete identity meanings within elite female athlete’s stories. Published athlete autobiographies were interrogated as cultural sites of analysis to accomplish this aim.

A critical social constructionist perspective on disordered eating is outlined along with narrative research findings on female athletes and disordered eating. A discursive psychological approach and critical discourse analysis (CDA) is then discussed to theorize and study meanings of disordered eating and athlete identities/subject positions. Next, the utility of studying two elite female athlete’s autobiographies is outlined followed by examples from a CDA of two athlete stories.

Two discourses and two identity/subject positions within each are outlined: discourse of performance and the “committed, controlled athlete” and a discourse of personal growth and the “empowered athlete in transition.” The features of each discourse and subject position are outlined and examples from each athlete’s story. The intention is to show the ways in which discursive resources construct the body, food and identities in sport and the implications.

The chapter is concluded with why studying “disordered eating and body talk” within discourses is useful to expand understanding of constraining and emancipative aspects of athlete identities, struggle and recovery.

Empirical research demonstrates that bribery has a detrimental impact on investment, economic growth, trade, and democratic governments. In response to rising bribery activity and the additional burdens placed on corporate officials by the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002, enforcement of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA) of 1977 has reached an all-time high. Although many managers, financial officers, entrepreneurs, and auditors are aware of the FCPA's objectives and mandates, many do not do an adequate job of protecting their firms, employees, and/or clients from fines and prison sentences. The purposes of this paper are to (1) analyze and describe bribery and FCPA case filings, sanctions, payments (bribes), and value of business to be obtained; (2) describe and analyze the important provisions of the FCPA; (3) discuss vicarious liability or the liability of U.S. firms and others for the acts of third parties; and (4) make recommendations to help firms improve their compliance with the FCPA.

Drawing on Bourdieu's field, habitus, and capital, I show how disparate experiences and “dispositions” shaped several departments’ development in the organization behind the annual Burning Man event. Observations and interviews with organizers and members indicated that in departments with hierarchical professional norms or total institution-like conditions, members privileged their capital over others’ capital to enhance their authority and departmental solidarity. For another department, the availability of multiple practices in their field fostered disagreement, forcing members to articulate stances. These comparisons uncover conditions that exacerbate conflicts over authority and show how members use different types of capital to augment their authority.

The purpose of this paper is to bring wider‐reaching feminism to confluence with relational indigenous values for transformative responses to systemic exclusion.

The authors critique the prevailing (corporate) institutional logic in higher education through their stories and experiences, weaving in diverse feminist perspectives. Liberal feminist perspectives, the most visible gender critique, may merely increase numerical equality, diversifying the biographical characteristics of privilege. Exclusion for many is systemically retained. The authors argue that relational logics underpinning indigenous worldviews hold generative potential for institutional change toward deeper inclusiveness and justice.

Liberal feminists' two‐fold transformative aspirations for gender equality and deeper respect for currently marginalized “feminine” values leave room for deeper and wider reflection on how indigenous perspectives might contribute to institutional change.

This exploration may be applied to university recruiting, selection, evaluation, and promotion policies; articulating and assessing career competencies and trajectories; curriculum evaluation; organizational and management research; and pedagogical development and research.

An indigenous critique of liberal feminism and indigenous perspectives on justice, relationality, and inclusivity may enhance social, university, corporate, community, and family life.

Interweaving feminist and indigenous insights into a critique of the prevailing corporate institutional logic informing organizational practice – in higher education and all sectors of society, it highlights the generative potential of indigenous contributions and encourages inclusion of diverse indigenous perspectives in organization theory and practice.

Despite a renewed interest in processes which help organizations to harness social capital, it is apparent that practical efforts to achieve this rarely focus on employees who are members of low status groups. In large part this is because such employees tend to be skeptical of, and to resist, engagement in intervention programs on the basis of previous adverse experience regarding the benefits achieved and lack of trust. This paper presents evidence that, among hospital staff, work groups who felt they were devalued displayed higher levels of cynicism regarding the potential efficacy of a stress intervention program. Within the organization, devalued groups were characterized by lower levels of organizational identification and members of these groups reported under‐utilization of their skills by the organization. Thus, there is evidence that organizations are failing to realize the social capital of specific groups. The ASPIRe model of organizational development is discussed as an appropriate vehicle to provide devalued groups with genuine opportunities for development and empowerment. To the extent that such a program receives genuine institutional support, we argue that it has the potential to unlock key enclaves of social capital that tend otherwise to be overlooked.