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Construction firms need to improve the way in which they manage their processes. Focusing on good practice and knowledge sharing within and across organisational boundaries, the purpose of this paper is to discuss recent developments on a structured process improvement model developed for construction enterprises (SPICE).

A multiple holistic case study approach was taken to develop and test the presented process improvement model at a firm's level. To compare and synthesise different perspectives, respondents were selected from across a vertical cross‐section of the case study organisations. A combination of several research techniques employed for triangulation.

Provides a set of key processes to establish an essential managerial infrastructure for achieving organisation‐wide process improvement. The results highlight the need to implement the key processes in an integrated and holistic manner.

Key limitations of the presented process improvement model are closely related to the concerns raised against “process thinking.” More case studies are required to confirm or refute generalisability of the findings.

Firms need to appreciate diverse perspectives and consider norms and values of people in order to understand and improve their process capabilities in a balanced manner. Continuous diagnosis and adaptation of organisational process capability to the changing environment are required to ensure achieving sustainable competitive advantage.

This paper contributes to the process and knowledge management/organisational learning literature. It also highlights several important issues to address wider aspects of organisational process improvement, as well as future research direction.

The concept and practice of e-services has become essential in business transactions. Yet there are still many organizations that have not developed e-services optimally. This is especially relevant in the context of Indonesian Airline companies. Therefore, many airline customers in Indonesia are still in doubt about it, or even do not use it. To fill this gap, this study attempts to develop a model for e-services adoption and empirically examines the factors influencing the airlines customers in Indonesia in using e-services offered by the Indonesian airline companies. Taking six Indonesian airline companies as a case example, the study investigated the antecedents of e-services usage of Indonesian airlines. This study further examined the impacts of motivation on customers in using e-services in the Indonesian context. Another important aim of this study was to investigate how ages, experiences and geographical areas moderate effects of e-services usage.

The study adopts a positivist research paradigm with a two-phase sequential mixed method design involving qualitative and quantitative approaches. An initial research model was first developed based on an extensive literature review, by combining acceptance and use of information technology theories, expectancy theory and the inter-organizational system motivation models. A qualitative field study via semi-structured interviews was then conducted to explore the present state among 15 respondents. The results of the interviews were analysed using content analysis yielding the final model of e-services usage. Eighteen antecedent factors hypotheses and three moderating factors hypotheses and 52-item questionnaire were developed. A focus group discussion of five respondents and a pilot study of 59 respondents resulted in final version of the questionnaire.

In the second phase, the main survey was conducted nationally to collect the research data among Indonesian airline customers who had already used Indonesian airline e-services. A total of 819 valid questionnaires were obtained. The data was then analysed using a partial least square (PLS) based structural equation modelling (SEM) technique to produce the contributions of links in the e-services model (22% of all the variances in e-services usage, 37.8% in intention to use, 46.6% in motivation, 39.2% in outcome expectancy, and 37.7% in effort expectancy). Meanwhile, path coefficients and t-values demonstrated various different influences of antecedent factors towards e-services usage. Additionally, a multi-group analysis based on PLS is employed with mixed results. In the final findings, 14 hypotheses were supported and 7 hypotheses were not supported.

The major findings of this study have confirmed that motivation has the strongest contribution in e-services usage. In addition, motivation affects e-services usage both directly and indirectly through intention-to-use. This study provides contributions to the existing knowledge of e-services models, and practical applications of IT usage. Most importantly, an understanding of antecedents of e-services adoption will provide guidelines for stakeholders in developing better e-services and strategies in order to promote and encourage more customers to use e-services. Finally, the accomplishment of this study can be expanded through possible adaptations in other industries and other geographical contexts.

Different cultures believe that some numbers are “lucky” and other numbers are “unlucky”. The purpose of this paper is to determine to what extent hotels follow numerological superstitions in their floor and room numbering, if more accidents or complaints occur on unlucky hotel floors compared to other floors and if more accidents or complaints occur in unlucky hotel rooms compared to other rooms.

For the first research objective, an audit of hotels in a particular destination, Hong Kong, is taken capturing the number of floors and rooms on each floor and determining if “unlucky” numbers are used. For the second and third objectives, the accident and complaint database of one upscale hotel in Hong Kong across a five-year period is investigated.

The authors find that hotels do follow superstitious numbering, with “unlucky” numbers not being included in floor or room numbering. Chinese superstition is more likely to be followed than Western superstition. The non-inclusion of “unlucky” numbers is more likely for hotel floors than for hotel rooms. In the case study hotel, they found no significant differences in the number of accidents and complaints between unlucky and other rooms and floors across the five years of analysis.

Superstitions surrounding numbers can affect decisions made by individuals and businesses and can have significant economic consequences. There is little academic research into how the hotel sector is impacted by numerology superstitions.

This chapter provides a survey of alternative methodologies for measuring and comparing productivity and efficiency of airlines, and reviews representative empirical studies. The survey shows the apparent shift from index procedures and traditional OLS estimation of production and cost functions to stochastic frontier methods and Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) methods over the past three decades. Most of the airline productivity and efficiency studies over the last decade adopt some variant of DEA methods. Researchers in the 1980s and 1990s were mostly interested in the effects of deregulation and liberalization on airline productivity and efficiency as well as the effects of ownership and governance structure. Since the 2000s, however, studies tend to focus on how business models and management strategies affect the performance of airlines. Environmental efficiency now becomes an important area of airline productivity and efficiency studies, focusing on CO₂ emission as a negative or undesirable output. Despite the fact that quality of service is an important aspect of airline business, limited attempts have been made to incorporate quality of service in productivity and efficiency analysis.

This chapter offers a comprehensive review the literature on authentic leadership (AL). The authors employ a bibliometric approach to identify, classify, visualise and synthesise relevant scholarly publications and the work of a core group of interdisciplinary scholars who are key contributors to the research on AL. They review 264 journal articles, adopting a clustering technique to assess the central themes of AL scholarship. They identify five distinct thematic clusters: authenticity in the context of leadership; structure of AL; social perspectives on AL; dynamism of AL; and value perceptions of AL. Velt and Sinkovics assert that these clusters will help scholars of AL to understand the dominant streams in the literature and provide a foundation for future research.

This article describes the development of MARC in Korea, the Republic of China (Taiwan), and Japan. An overview of the development of each MARC system, KORMARC, Chinese MARC and JAPAN MARC is given. Also the specific characteristics of each MARC format are described and the ways in which they deal with particular national bibliographic features are compared.

Examines the recent research on advertising in mainland China over the 1979‐1998 period. Suggests that findings show a sustained effort in academic research/publications on advertising in China is in the early stage of its development and whilst many areas have been researched, there are many more yet to be touched. Concludes that the research is seldom based on established theoretical or conceptual framework and the research methods and types of analysis used have not been very advanced when compared to general advertising research.

Not all innovative ideas or approaches commonly implemented by larger companies apply to smaller firms in all regions. Innovation that does not imply company achievements might exhaust their limited resources and cause the market to be uncompetitive. This paper aims to answer two research questions: (1) Do innovation strategies, such as process, marketing and social innovation, affect the performance of small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs)? (2) Does company size moderate the relationship between social and marketing innovations with SMEs' performance?

This paper proposed three innovation strategies (i.e. social, marketing and process innovations) influencing Malaysian SMEs' performance. There were 123 valid respondents from SMEs, and the data were analysed using a structural equation modelling partial least square (SEM-PLS) technique.

The research findings advocate that process innovation directly impacts SMEs' performance, not marketing innovation. Interestingly, the influence of social innovation on organisation performance is only significant when the company size becomes more prominent. Companies can provide consistent and continuous social enhancement that arouses public trust and reputation with more resources and capabilities. Also, smaller companies might concentrate their scarce resources on process innovation with instant beneficial potential instead of a sophisticated marketing strategy.

There is limited empirical research examining how different innovation strategies, especially social innovation, affect SMEs' performance in developing countries. Furthermore, the second-generation analysis (PLS-SEM) technique provides more systematic and comprehensive results.