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Drama enactments by trainees (DETs) include verbal and contextual exchanges by two or more trainees in customer–server dramas usually in the presence of trainee observers and trainers. DETs' objectives include nurturing the conscious, decoding unconscious thinking and action, and informing learning of customer–server exchanges. Training in DETs provides an opportunity to practice which increases knowledge and skills necessary for performing customer–server exchanges accurately and achieving high customer satisfaction. This chapter is a case study report on an in-class drama enactment of a hotel guest and receptionist face-to-face encounter. The enactment includes face-to-face conversations between two actors and within selves.

This chapter reports on how to assess the usefulness of official tourism websites; the study applies for information audit rubrics to assess the marketing websites for three cities in the state of California. The study provides tools that may be useful for designing destination websites to include information that visitors find useful. The three focal cities include Los Angeles (discoverlosangeles.com), San Diego (sandiego.org), and San Francisco (onlyinsanfrancisco.com). One of the hypotheses that the study examines is that destination websites are assessable in order of good, better, best. Findings: San Francisco provides the most useful information and is likely to be the most successful official tourism website. The assessment of San Francisco as the best website is the outcome of applying macro and micro rubrics covering: general and practical information, ability to book a vacation, digital and print materials, use of media components, and partnerships.

The traditional and still dominant logic among nearly all empirical positivist researchers in schools of management is to write symmetric (two-directional) variable hypotheses (SVH) even though the same researchers formulate their behavioral theories at the case (typology) identification level. Cyert and March’s (1963), Cyert, R. M., & March, J. G. (1963). A behavioral theory of the firm. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall), Howard and Sheth’s (1969, Howard, J. A., & Sheth, J. N. (1969). The theory of buyer behavior. New York, NY: Wiley), and Miles, R. E., & Snow, C. C.’s (1978, Miles, R. E., & Snow, C. C. (1978). Organizational strategy, structure, and process. [A. D. Meyer, collaborator; H. J. Coleman Jr., contributor]. New York, NY: McGraw Hill) typologies of organizations’ strategy configurations (e.g., “Prospectors, Analyzers, and Defenders”) are iconic examples of formulating theory at the case identification level. When testing such theories, most researchers automatically, nonconsciously, switch from building theory of beliefs, attitudes, and behavior at the case identification level to empirically testing of two-directional relationships and additive net-effect influences of variables. Formulating theory focusing on creating case identification hypotheses (CIH) to describe, explain, and predict behavior and then empirically testing at SVH is a mismatch and results in shallow data analysis and frequently inaccurate contributions to theory. This chapter describes the mismatch and resulting unattractive outcomes as well as the pervasive practice of examining only fit validity in empirical studies using symmetric tests. The chapter reviews studies in the literature showing how matching both case-based theory and empirical positivist research of CIH is possible and produces findings that advance useful theory and critical thinking by executives and researchers.

This chapter describes and tests the principles of configural theory in the context of hospitality frontline service employees’ happiness-at-work and managers’ assessments of these employees’ quality of work performances. The study proposes and tests empirically a configural asymmetric theory of the antecedents to hospitality employee happiness-at-work and managers’ assessments of employees’ quality of work performance. The findings confirm and go beyond prior statistical findings of small-to-medium effect sizes of happiness-performance relationships. The method includes matching cases of data from surveys of employees (n = 247) and surveys completed by their managers (n = 43) and uses qualitative comparative analysis via the software program fsQCA.com. The findings support the four principles of configural analysis and theory construction: recognize equifinality of different solutions for the same outcome; test for asymmetric solutions; test for causal asymmetric outcomes for very high versus very low happiness and work performance; and embrace complexity. The theory and findings confirm that configural theory and research resolves perplexing happiness–performance conundrums. The study provides algorithms involving employees’ demographic characteristics and their assessments of work facet-specifics which are useful for explaining very high happiness-at-work and high quality-of-work performance (as assessed by managers) – as well as algorithms explaining very low happiness and very low quality-of-work performance.

The purpose of this study was to explore low-income women’s perspectives of the shared meaning of work and employment values in their intergenerational family context from a critical and systemic lens. Participants were rural and urban women from low-income contexts (N = 14). Semi-structured interviews were designed to elicit thick description of lived experiences of work and family. Analyses were conducted using Van Manen’s hermeneutic phenomenology coding process (1990).

Four emergent categories (Purpose to Work, What Work Is, Motherhood and Work, and Loss, Resilience and Work) with 16 themes described work–family integration. These narratives evoked a deep interconnectedness of work, family, and life. Because participants were recruited in locations where they were either already employed or seeking employment, these findings may not represent other women.

Effectiveness of programs and policies could be expanded by incorporating women’s values and motivations for employment and targeting family-level interventions. Programs could better empower women to seek employment and skills training for lasting financial sustainability, rather than just getting any job. Because participants distinguished between careers and jobs based on college education, many felt they could never obtain a career. Additionally, participants described work–family integration, not the prevalent idea of “work–life balance.” Participants described fighting to provide a better life for their children.

This study highlights under-represented perspectives of low-income women about work. Understanding the experiences of low-income women is essential for designing programs and services that will be practical and useful.

Figs. 2 and 3 illustrate the impact of different cues-in-contexts affecting the implicit thinking and sensemaking of the observer (e.g., researcher) to the emic story being told in the visuals. The creation of Figs. 2 and 3 rests on a theoretical platform of Carl Jung's (2009) archetypal theory and method of decoding his own dreams. Jung's (2009) paintings of his dreams to enable conscious interpretation of his conversations within the collective unconscious inform a call for creating visual narrative art to inform meanings of personal and collective unconscious relating to stories consumers tell about buying and using brands.The collective unconscious contains the wisdom and experience of untold ages and thus represents an unparalleled guide for explaining the meaning of what is happening and what will happen. “Active imagination” and “self-experimentation” are terms Jung refers to in his use of paintings and sculpture to create dialogues between “directed thinking” (conscious thinking or what in the 21st century is referred to as “system 2 thinking”) and fantasy thinking (personal and collective unconscious, what is similar to “system 1 thinking,” see Evans, 2003). (Woodside, Megehee, & Sood, 2011).

Barriers to cultural adaptability include perceptual, interpretive, and evaluative biases. Differences in culturally based perceptual patterns can be problematic given that interpretation and evaluation of behavior is a critical element of teamwork. Altogether, perceptual patterns are “selective, learned, culturally determined, consistent, and inaccurate” (Adler, 1986, p. 54). Selective exposure, selective attention, and selective retention are all hallmarks of the process of perception. Bagby (1970) demonstrated how perceptual patterns become selective even in childhood. He had American and Mexican children watch a bullfight and a baseball game simultaneously using a tachistoscope. When asked what they had seen, the American children claimed to have watched a baseball game, and the Mexican children claimed to have watched a bullfight. Neither group was aware that they had been presented two stimuli simultaneously. Both groups of children selected stimuli that had meaning for their culture and ignored or forgot the stimuli that had no meaning for them. The children's culture predisposed them to notice some things and not others. Perceptual selectivity is a key barrier to cultural adaptability and influences both interpretation and evaluation.