Search results

This paper sets out to present a brief history of electronic licensing initiatives before considering current practices for managing licences to electronic resources. The intention is to obtain a detailed understanding of the requirements needed for a registry of electronic licences that will enable usage terms and conditions to be presented to end‐users at point of use.

Two extensive focus groups were held, each comprising representatives from the main stakeholder groups. These structured events considered existing and ongoing issues and approaches towards licence management and investigated a range of “use‐cases” where potential usages for a licence registry were outlined and discussed.

The results form part of a requirements gathering and analysis process which will inform the development of a registry of electronic licences. The work forms part of the JISC‐funded Registry of Electronic Licences (RELI) project.. The paper finds that there are many complexities when dealing with electronic licences such as licence specificity, licence interpretation, definitions of authorised users and dissemination of usage terms and conditions.

These issues and others are considered and the impact on a subsequent registry of electronic licences is discussed. It is clear from the findings that there is a real and immediate need for a licence registry.

The paper provides a rich picture of the concerns and practices adopted both when managing licences and when ensuring conformance with licences to electronic resources. The findings have enabled the scope of a licence registry to be determined. The registry is currently under development.

This study examines the internationalization effects of corporate social responsibility (CSR) reporting, specifically aiming to identify and compare the CSR reporting practices of large US multi-national corporations (MNCs) and their Polish subsidiaries.

Based on content analysis and using a disclosure index, the authors examined the CSR information posted on, or linked to, the corporate websites of a sample of 60 US-based MNCs and their subsidiaries operating in Poland.

The findings indicate that US companies, despite operating in a less regulated environment, had more extensive disclosure than their Polish subsidiaries and covered more CSR-related topics. CSR disclosures within the US subsample were analogous in volume and detail. By contrast, only about half of Polish companies provided CSR disclosures, which were more diverse in volume and in the types of activities disclosed. The authors did not find a significant positive correlation between the CSR disclosures of the two subsamples.

The study contributes to the literature on internationalization processes and sustainability practices. It provides insights into the CSR reporting of companies located in Central and Eastern European countries. The findings also have implications for policymakers in incentivizing the enhancement of the reporting disclosure practices of companies.

This paper aims to examine empirically whether and under what organisational design conditions retailers can benefit from private label (PL) merchandising improvement.

The study tests hypotheses using a structural equation model and data obtained from general merchandise managers at 190 supermarket retailers in Japan.

The results reveal that both centralised merchandising authority and store cooperation between merchandising and store divisions motivate PL merchandising improvement, which strengthens PL competitiveness. In addition, outcome-based merchandiser control strengthens the positive relationship between store cooperation and PL merchandising improvement. However, regarding centralised merchandising authority, it is found that outcome-based control had no significant moderating effect.

To generalise the findings, it may be desirable to reflect data from store divisions for at least two constructs of interdepartmental structure and coordination. Also, it will remain a challenge to produce objective financial outcomes, such as sales, profits or market share, of PL merchandise to empirically test PL contributions to a retail store or company.

It is important for retail managers to understand their merchandisers’ efforts and behaviours to continuously improve PL merchandising activities. It is strongly recommended that retail managers continue to find ways to motivate their merchandisers.

Drawing on the philosophy of continuous improvement, this study suggests a novel approach to retail merchandising management that investigates how organisational design can influence better PL merchandising. To highlight the growing role of retail merchandisers, often ignored in the PL literature, this study advances this knowledge about the organisational design–strategic behaviour linkage by empirically testing interactions between different aspects of retail organisation design.

The purpose of this paper is to analyze consumers’ reaction to assortment composition.

This study examines several scenarios: private label (PL)-only assortments; mixed assortments (PL and national brands (NBs)), and in the latter case both small and large assortments. Consumers’ reaction is measured through three dependent variables: store image, PL purchase intention and store-switching intentions. The authors ran a structural equation model (SEM) to analyze the influence of different explanatory aspects (product category involvement, attitude toward PL, value consciousness and assortment variety perception) on consumers’ reactions for each scenario. For this research, the authors carried out an online experiment with a sample of 1,400 individuals from a large panel of consumers.

Consumers react differently to different assortment compositions, giving importance to the differences between the three assortment models analyzed. The results show that the composition of the assortment, either according to its size or its structure, influences consumers’ response in a significant way. The results demonstrate that store image exclusively affects PL purchase intention in PL-only assortments. Only in mixed assortments is there a relationship between the assortment variety perception and store image, product category involvement and PL purchase intention, and both store image and value consciousness are related to store-switching intentions. Store-switching intentions decrease when consumers intend to purchase PL, but strictly in PL-only and large mixed assortments. Finally, value consciousness and variety perception are positively related to PL purchase intentions only in large mixed assortments.

One limitation of this research is that it is restricted to the Spanish context. Second, the methodology is based on an online experiment, with the advantages and disadvantages that this entails. Third, the authors did not differentiate between high- and low-value PL which, if undertaken, could be of interest for observing how brand value affects the management of retail assortments. Finally, the authors did not differentiate regular buyers at these retail chains from those who are not.

The comparison between different assortment compositions helps the authors to draw some very interesting conclusions. The estimation of different consumers’ responses is ideal for providing retailers with recommendations on how to frame their assortment strategies. Thus, the main recommendation of this study for retailers is to look for a “balance” between PL and NBs, i.e., to offer mixed assortments.

Aside from mixed assortments, this study estimates the consequences of assortments that are exclusively PL. The authors proposed and deployed a SEM, so this paper contributes to the retailing field by including multiple dependent variables – store image, PL purchase intention and store-switching intentions. The authors conducted an online experiment containing “real” brands, which is another contribution as it enables consumers’ response to be estimated in a “real” environment.

The purpose of this viewpoint is to introduce Westerners to Chinese leadership, leader behaviors, and expectations. The main features of Chinese paternalistic leadership (PL) are explored before outlining practical advice on what to expect when working with Chinese paternalistic leaders and their organizations.

This viewpoint is developed from both a review of the literature on paternalistic leadership and 45 in-depth interviews with Chinese leaders and their subordinates. This systematic data collection is coupled with lived experience, as the author lived, worked, and studied in China for three years.

The paper makes salient the three main behaviors of Chinese PL, as identified in the literature: benevolence, authoritarianism, and morality. This paper reports on how those unfamiliar with Chinese PL can negotiate and potentially thrive under this type of leadership.

The main contribution of this paper is the advice offered for those unfamiliar with PL; this advice is based on the academic literature and primary research. The advice, such as saving face and the importance of loyalty, makes the academic literature more accessible and lends practical application by highlighting how the research on PL is relevant to subordinates and colleagues.

This paper aims to present arguments about how a complex concept of privacy labeling can be a solution to the current state of privacy.

The authors give a precise definition of Privacy Labeling (PL), painting a panoptic portrait from seven different perspectives: Business, Legal, Regulatory, Usability and Human Factors, Educative, Technological and Multidisciplinary. They describe a common vision, proposing several important “traits of character” of PL as well as identifying “undeveloped potentialities”, i.e. open problems on which the community can focus.

This position paper identifies the stakeholders of the PL and their needs with regard to privacy, describing how PL should be and look like to address these needs. Main aspects considered are the PL’s educational power to change people’s knowledge of privacy, tools useful for constructing PL and the possible visual appearances of PL. They also identify how the present landscape of privacy certifications could be improved by PL.

The authors adopt a multidisciplinary approach to defining PL as well as give guidelines in the form of goals, characteristics, open problems, starting points and a roadmap for creating the ideal PL.

VINE is produced at least four times a year with the object of providing up‐to‐date news of work being done in the automation of library housekeeping processes, principally in the UK. It is edited and substantially written by the Information Officer for Library Automation based in Southampton University Library and supported by a grant from the British Library Research and Development Department. Copyright for the articles rests with the British Library Board and opinions expressed in VINE do not necessarily reflect the views and policies of the British Library. The subscription for 1984 to VINE is: £23 for UK subscribers, £26 to overseas subscribers (including airmail delivery). Second and subsequent copies to the same address are charged at £14 for UK and £16 for overseas. VINE is available in either paper or microfiche copy and all back issues are available on microfiche.

This research investigated how students are becoming teachers of primary school (ages 5–11) physical education (PE), using a physical literacy (PL) approach (Whitehead, 2010). Primarily methodological, the purpose was to disrupt how to investigate this topic since research highlights that the philosophy underpinning PL makes the concept difficult to operationalize (Shearer et al., 2018).

PE settings are inherently lively, and the author retained this in the analytic insights from what she called a “methodological meshwork” (Law, 2004; Ingold, 2006). Informed by phenomenology, posthumanism and sociomaterialism, data gathering included observations, interviews with artefacts, with humans, and tweets as part of the methodological meshwork. Diagrammatic presentations accompany written text, whilst also doing work in themselves (Decuypere and Simon, 2016). The author followed the actors (Adams and Thompson, 2016), thus entered the middle of data, such as lesson plan or physical education equipment.

Onto-epistemological entanglements (Barad, 2007) are presented in an interweaving format. Thus, theory is discussed alongside the empirical and shows that a PL informed approach to PE is evident in multiple places-spaces.

Broader issues are raised about methodological assumptions that inform investigations of PL and practice generally. It is hoped that these may be relevant to a wider professional audience as well as those in physical and teacher education.

This chapter is designed to highlight the role of sustainable development in corporate Internet communications of selected retailers operating in Poland. It provides an overview of key content relating to corporate social responsibility (CSR) available on the websites of retailers analyzed in the study. Key thematic areas connected with corporate sustainable development are usually linked with the CSR strategy. These areas refer to the accountability of the chain as an employer, guarantor of high quality of products, reliable business partner, a member of the local community, and an entity that is taking care of the environment. Conclusions and comments are based on the analysis of the content published on corporate websites of selected retailers and the assessment of how the content is communicated using various marketing tools.

The purpose of this paper is to suggest a bibliometric method for designing agent-based models (ABMs) in entrepreneurship research. The application of this method is illustrated with an exemplary agent-based modeling and simulation (ABMS) regarding the early venture growth process. This bibliometric approach invigorates the utilization of ABMS as a viable research methodology in process-oriented entrepreneurship research.

In the bibliometric method, a domain corpus composed of scholarly articles is established and systematically analyzed through co-word analysis to discern essential concepts (i.e. agents, objects, and contexts) and their interrelations. The usefulness of the bibliometric method is elucidated by constructing an illustrative ABMS.

The bibliometric method for designing ABMs identifies essential concepts in the entrepreneurship literature and provides contexts in which the concepts are interrelated. The illustrative ABMS based on these concepts and interrelations accurately and consistently reproduces the emergence of power-law distributions in venture outcomes consistent with empirical evidence, implying further merit to bibliometric procedures.

The proposed method can be used not only to build simple models with essential concepts, but also to build more complex models that take a large number of concepts and their interrelations into consideration.

This study proposes a bibliometric method for designing ABMs. The proposed method extends similar procedures that are limited to thematic or cluster analysis by examining the semantic contexts in which the concepts co-occur. This research suggests that ABMS from bibliographic sources can be built and validated with empirical evidence. Several considerations are provided for the combined utilization of the bibliometric method and ABMS in entrepreneurship.