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Manufacturers of smartphone devices are increasingly utilising a diverse range of sensors. This innovation has enabled developers to accurately determine a user’s current context. One area that has been significantly enhanced by the increased use of context in mobile applications is tourism. Traditionally, tour guide applications rely heavily on location and essentially ignore other types of context. This has led to problems of inappropriate suggestions and tourists experiencing information overload. These problems can be mitigated if appropriate personalisation and content filtering is performed. This research proposes an intelligent context-aware recommender system that aims to minimise the highlighted problems.

Intelligent reasoning was performed to determine the weight or importance of different types of environmental and temporal context. Environmental context such as the weather outside can have an impact on the suitability of tourist attractions. Temporal context can be the time of day or season; this is particularly important in tourism as it is largely a seasonal activity. Social context such as social media can potentially provide an indication of the “mood” of an attraction. These types of contexts are combined with location data and the context of the user to provide a more effective recommendation to tourists. The evaluation of the system is a user study that utilised both qualitative and quantitative methods, involving 40 participants of differing gender, age group, number of children and marital status.

This study revealed that the participants selected the context-based recommendation at a significantly higher level than either location-based recommendation or random recommendation. It was clear from analysing the questionnaire results that location is not the only influencing factor when deciding on a tourist attraction to visit.

To effectively determine the success of the recommender system, various combinations of contextual conditions were simulated. Simulating contexts provided the ability to randomly assign different contextual conditions to ensure an effective recommendation under all circumstances. This is not a reflection of the “real world”, because in a “real world” field study the majority of the contextual conditions will be similar. For example, if a tourist visited numerous attractions in one day, then it is likely that the weather conditions would be the same for the majority of the day, especially in the summer season.

Utilising this type of recommender system would allow the tourists to “go their own way” rather than following a prescribed route. By using this system, tourists can co-create their own experience using both social media and mobile technology. This increases the need to retain user preferences and have it available for multiple destinations. The application will be able to learn further through multiple trips, and as a result, the personalisation aspect will be incrementally refined over time. This extensible aspect is increasingly important as personalisation is gradually more effective as more data is collated.

This paper contributes to the body of knowledge that currently exists regarding the study of utilising contextual conditions in mobile recommender systems. The novelty of the system proposed by this research is the combination of various types of temporal, environmental and personal context data to inform a recommendation in an extensible tourism application. Also, performing sentiment analysis on social media data has not previously been integrated into a tourist recommender system. The evaluation concludes that this research provides clear evidence for the benefits of combining social media data with environmental and temporal context to provide an effective recommendation.

Gender inequity at senior ranks in Australian public sector universities has long been recognised as a major problem. Universities are attempting to address the problem, through policies for recruitment and retention of senior women. This paper describes what happened in one faculty in a large university that has such gender equity policies when three women were appointed to head departments. At the end of a year, all three were gone. The women experienced a masculine‐oriented management culture, with little experience of feminine management values. The women and the men had different perceptions of management roles and different perceptions of alternative job opportunities. Gender issues became more visible to these senior women, but remained invisible to the men. Suggestions to improve the retention of senior women include nominating a change agent to provide support and encouragement for senior women, more transparent organisational processes and structures, and changes in hiring practices.

The article seeks to show that companies should and can build winning cultures.

A total of 365 companies in Europe, Asia and North America were surveyed for links between financial out‐performance and winning culture. Three dozen high performers were analyzed in in‐depth case studies; one from each region that has transformed its culture is presented.

Findings were that building a winning culture – which fewer than 10 per cent of companies succeed in doing, despite broad recognition that culture provides the greatest source of competitive advantage – requires five key steps: setting expectations, aligning leaders, accountability for delivery, organization‐wide consistency and communication/celebration. Winning cultures tend to display six key behaviours: high aspirations, external focus (customers and competitors), attitude of ownership, bias to action, valuing collaboration and striving for the exceptional. These can be measured through the daily performance of the company's front line.

By definition, out‐performance is rare, but further insights into winning cultures may result when the survey of companies is extended to new regions, such as Latin America.

Practical implications are the winning culture key behaviours, key building steps and performance measurement identified. The article also shows that challenges and even crisis can help, rather than hinder, the transformation of a corporate culture into a winning one.

The article will help focus company leaders on the opportunity and challenges in building a winning culture. It identifies the key behaviours of winning cultures, key steps in building them, and how to measure their progress. It should be of value to all management levels from the chief executive to front‐line staff.

The purpose of this paper is to theorise and develop seven dimensions (strategic supplier partnership, level of information sharing, quality of information sharing, customer service management, internal lean practices, postponement and total quality management) into a supply chain management (SCM) practices (SCMPs) construct and studies its causal relationship with the conceptualised constructs of supply chain performance (SCP) and manufacturing firms’ performance (MFP). The study also explores the causal relationship between SCP and MFP.

Data were collected through a survey questionnaire responded by 249 Jordanian manufacturing firms. The relationships proposed in the developed theoretical framework were represented through three hypotheses: H1 – there is a significant relationship between SCMPs and SCP; H2 – there is a significant relationship between SCMPs and MFP; and H3 – there is a significant relationship between SCP and MFP. Linear regression, ANOVA and Pearson correlation were used to test the hypotheses. The results were further validated using structural equation modelling.

The results indicate that SCMPs have a positive effect on SCP (H1), which in turn also positively affect MFP (H3). Despite this intermediary positive effect of SCMP on MFP through SCP, the study also suggests that SCMPs have a direct and positive effect on MFP (H2).

This study provides hard evidence indicating that higher levels of SCMPs can lead to enhanced supply chain and firms’ performance. It also provides SC managers of manufacturing firms with a multi-dimensional operational measure of the construct of SCMPs for assessing the comprehensiveness of the SCMPs of their firms.

This study is among the very first SCM researches conducted on the Jordanian manufacturing sector, particularly, in relation to the practices that manufacturing firms in this country need to adopt to make their supply chains a solid competitive vehicle for their development. The results have broader implications for all manufacturing companies, particularly in developing economies where the growth of manufacturing and the development of integrated supply chains are key stages in economic development.

Firms with market foresight – knowledge of market changes ahead of competitors – can convert that knowledge into creative and timely new product offerings. Based on a discovery-oriented process, working closely with managers throughout the research process, we develop and test a framework delineating market information determinants and new product outcomes of market foresight.

Using data collected primarily from senior executives of industrial manufacturers, the hypotheses were tested using partial least squares.

The results indicate that external (active scanning, lead user collaboration, and market experiments) and internal sources (boundary spanner input and interdepartmental connectedness) of market information positively affect market foresight. Further, the effects of active scanning, market experiments, and interdepartmental connectedness on market foresight are positively moderated by the organization’s open-mindedness. These findings also provide evidence that firms with superior market foresight develop more creative products, introduce them to the market faster, and introduce them at a more opportune time.

Our findings demonstrate that managers’ knowledge of market changes ahead of competitors is enhanced through acquiring both external and internal sources of market information. Furthermore, market foresight is significantly enhanced by managers being open-minded to the information gained from these sources as it may challenge long-held assumptions.

This chapter introduces a new construct, market foresight capability, to the literature that will aid managers in developing greater insight into emerging shifts in the market. For researchers, this new line of inquiry expands our understanding as to the critical sources and new product outcomes of obtaining future-focused market information.

This paper aims to evaluate the use of community visioning in Montgomery, Alabama and Chattanooga, Tennessee, as each municipality seeks to become a globally competitive 21st century smart city while also fostering participatory and inclusive planning processes.

This research is qualitative, drawing upon discourse analysis of relevant mass media and public documents to map the consultation process and identify the key themes and challenges arising in the two visioning projects.

Montgomery and Chattanooga are committed to using participatory visioning to generate inclusive pathways to smart city status by 2040. Each used the local utility company as the key platform to enable a smart city because of each company’s inclusive demographic reach and historical status. The two cities are at different stages of the smart city trajectory and each faces ongoing challenges in ensuring that the benefits of smart city development reach beyond elites to include communities across racial and economic lines. To date, the planning process in each city is more accurately classified as a responsive community visioning rather than participatory.

This is a pilot assessment of community visioning in Montgomery and Chattanooga. Implementation of each vision is ongoing and further research is needed to illuminate how each city meets ongoing challenges and opportunities, particularly in light of the Covid-19 pandemic and its flow-on economic and social shocks.

The value of this work lies in the comparison of community visioning across two mid-sized and diverse American cities in the Southern region that must compete with larger and more established technology-hubs in both the USA and globally for investment, amenities and human capital.

The purpose of this paper is to propose that #MeToo is a social movement which has been more effective in changing norms around and increasing understanding about the prevalence and destructiveness of sexual harassment than decades of laws and organizational policies have been.

The paper uses communication, management and psychology literature on social media, public shaming and social movements to propose that #MeToo is a social movement that has changed perceptions of and knowledge about sexual harassment and assault. #MeToo provides voice to previously silenced targets and incentives for individuals to avoid perpetrating harassment and for organizations to deter sexual harassment at work and sanction it if it occurs.

The paper discusses individuals who have been publicly shamed and terminated for bigoted behavior outside of work, and organizational leaders who have been ousted after social media postings, as organizations attempt to distance themselves from the perpetrators of bigotry and sexual misconduct. Since #MeToo, some cities have passed laws prohibiting organizations from requiring sexual harassment targets to sign non-disclosure agreements.

Sexual harassment is associated with high individual costs and organizational costs, including costs of turnover, lost business and reputational damage. The #MeToo movement provides incentives for organizations to be more proactive and vigilant in their attempts to deter sexual harassment, and to appropriately address it when it occurs.

Sexual harassment has widespread effects on women’s daily lives and careers. #MeToo gives voice to harassment targets, changes norms of silencing them, and increases awareness of harassment as unacceptable, harmful behavior.

The paper positions #MeToo as a social movement, with the ability to change the seemingly intractable problem of sexual harassment in ways laws have not.