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Ground-handling services are important for effective aircraft operations in the air transportation system. Airlines often outsource these services to ground-handling agents through business-to-business (B2B) marketing decisions. Therefore, this paper aims to address the problem of ground-handling agent selection in the airline industry.

A real-world case study was carried out to demonstrate the applicability of the integrated best worst method and fuzzy multi-attribute ideal real comparative analysis (F-MAIRCA) approach to solve ground-handling agent selection problems under uncertainty and imprecision. A two-stage sensitivity analysis was also conducted to ensure the credibility and validity of the application.

In the weighting stage, “Quality” was determined as the most important criterion in terms of supplier performance. With regard to the performance of the ground-handling agents, A2 was found as the optimal supplier in terms of both credibility and validity.

This study enumerated several criteria that ground-handling agents must meet in order to effectively supply services for the airlines. In addition, this study provides a novel framework from which managers can gain additional benefits from their businesses. Finally, it is concluded that this approach will help airline managers quantitatively in choosing the most appropriate ground-handling agent.

The contributions of this study to the existing literature are twofold. First, we propose a novel multiple attribute decision-making approach to address the problem of supplier selection for airlines under uncertainty and imprecision. Second, the selection of ground-handling agents from the B2B perspective is addressed for the first time in literature.

INSTALLATION of two Yamazaki CNC machining centres and a computer aided manufacturing (CAM) system at the Leicester works of subcontractor Castillion Precision Engineering Ltd have reduced delivery times by up to 50 percent and dramatically increased their competitiveness in quality and price, according to director Mr Ian Walsh.

It will be recalled that the last monograph treated the significance of the collective agreement in society. If solely a function in society, (though having a legal basis), were to be attributed to the collective agreement, this would mean that no rights or obligations whatsoever would be created between the parties to it. This is not so in practice. It is of course a fact that no legally enforceable rights and obligations normally accrue, and as already indicated, those are moral ones and are only enforceable in honour, i.e. a gentleman's agreement. Nevertheless, this does not necessarily mean that the collective agreement has no juridical significance. Even agreements which are binding in honour only, as for example the kind of agreement found in Balfour v. Balfour, have a known juridical nature. Furthermore, though the collective agreement is only binding in honour, its incorporation into the individual contract of employment makes its terms legally enforceable even though recourse to the courts is seldom had. As a source of rights and obligations of considerable importance the collective agreement must therefore have some juridical significance and cannot remain entirely in the realms of society.

Approaches to the sociology of culture have largely been constituted around the long tradition of functionalism in sociology. This has hampered the field greatly. Among other shortcomings, this intellectual foundation has led to a limited understanding of ideology and civil society, a conservative political orientation and an overdeterministic view of social action and the actor. In this paper, I explore and then apply a new approach to the sociology of culture, one that attempts to conceptualize more robustly the dynamics of ideology, ideological conflict and civil society. As part of this project, I endeavor to map out a critical cultural perspective that establishes a multidimensional understanding of the contingency of social action.

THE highest strength wrought aluminium alloys currently available are based on the aluminium‐zinc‐magnesium‐copper system, and such alloys offer considerable potential for weight savings in airframe structures. However, these alloys have presented problems in service, arising from deficiencies in fracture toughness and fatigue crack propagation resistance together with a susceptibility to exfoliation corrosion and stress‐corrosion, which have led to restrictions being placed on their use by individual aircraft companies and by procurement authorities in a number of countries. This situation has led to the wide‐spread use in the UK and continental Europe of lower strength alloys of the aluminium‐copper‐magnesium‐silicon type, even though significant weight penalties are incurred in the process. There has been a more general acceptance of the high strength aluminium‐zinc‐magnesium‐copper alloys in the USA, where problems associated with their use have been partially alleviated by a willingness to replace components at short intervals, but even so during recent years a trend has developed there towards the use of lower strength versions of these alloys in attempts to improve airframe durability and reliability.

If, as everybody agrees now, business should be about meeting customers’ needs, it makes sense to involve customers as we create strategy. But here lies a problem. Ordinary market research techniques are fine for finding out what customers think about what already exists. They are much less good at helping us uncover customers’ attitudes to what might be, or their ideas about what should be.

It is difficult to overestimate the importance of the French Revolution in Russian intellectual life. One could even make the claim that the French Revolution has had a more significant impact on modern Russian history than it has had upon modern French history! Indeed, since the end of the nineteenth century, the French Revolution has become passe in France in the sense that no Frenchman has looked at it as a blueprint for current political development. While there have been cases in which some of the old revolutionary images were invoked to bolster support for certain political activities (such as support for the war against Germany), it has never been wholeheartedly re‐embraced and there has been a sense of detachment about the revolution, a sense that modern conditions were somehow different.

This paper uses various Data Envelopment Analysis (SBM-DEA) approaches to study the efficiency of major airlines in Asia-Pacific region. To evaluate the operation efficiency of fourteen major airlines in Asia-Pacific region from 2003-2011, Available Seat Kilometers(ASK), Available Ton Kilometers(ATK), the number of employees are used as input factors, Revenue Passenger Kilometers(RPK), Revenue Ton Kilometers(RTK), the amount of Sales are used as output factors.

The non-radial SBM-DEA (Slacks-based Measure of Efficiency) model was able to provide a more comprehensive efficiency of combining economic performance and regional difference. And it was also able to capture slack values in input excess and output shortage.

The results demonstrate that Korea and Japan airlines are operated efficiently and could be regarded as the benchmarking airlines. On the other hand, most of the China and ASEAN airlines are deemed to be inefficient. Also analyzing slacks may be more suitable way for the evaluation or suggestion of an improvement scheme for the inefficient airlines. The excess of labor is the major cause of the airlines’ inefficiency.

Two studies were conducted to examine Chinese consumers' responses to alpha‐numeric brand names. Results of the first study found that certain letters and numbers were considered to be luckier than others. The lucky letters and numbers were A, S, and 8, while the unlucky ones were F, Z, and 4. Reasons for the perceived luckiness of the numbers were based on homonym and phonetics; whilst for the letters, they were based on the association with the educational grade and position in the alphabet. In the second study, the results showed that products with lucky alpha‐numeric brand names were perceived to be luckier, and have better quality and success than those with unlucky brand names. Additionally, brand names with a lucky number were perceived more favourably than those with a lucky letter even though the accompanying letter/number was unlucky. Offers theoretical and managerial implications and suggests directions for future research.