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Firms are increasingly required to make ethical choices when selecting suppliers for their supply chains, and the decisions often rest on individual purchasing managers within the firm. This study builds on the literature on ethical decision-making and the concept of decision frames to investigate the decision-making process of purchasing managers in financially distressed firms. Codes of Conduct (CoC) and how they are enforced (financial rewards and codified procedures for oversight) are studied in terms of their effectiveness in informing and guiding purchasing managers in their supplier selection decisions.

Four sequential experiments were conducted with a total of 648 purchasing managers from manufacturing firms.

The results indicate that purchasing managers in firms facing financial distress are more than four times more likely than purchasing managers in the control groups to select the less ethical supplier in favor of better operational performance. As a potential remedy, it is found that enforcing the firm's CoC help to counteract this tendency and increase ethical supplier selection decisions by 2.1- to 2.6-fold. However, CoC enforcement that invokes multiple conflicting decision frames simultaneously is more likely to impair than promote ethical supplier selection decisions, compared to situations where only one enforcement method is present.

These findings develop an improved understanding of purchasers' decision-making processes and shed light on how to effectively use CoCs to guide these decisions.

The competitive strategies of international tour operators have had a negative effect on the sustainability of some tourist destinations. British tour operator strategies are analysed as an example to show the effects of vertical integration amongst tour operators, travel retailers and airlines and how this influences pricing and contracting methods in resorts. Also considered are developments in market segmentation and tour operator branding which have accelerated the trend towards standardised holiday products. The consolidation of ownership amongst European tour operators in likely to increase the power of companies vis‐à‐vis destinations. The study concludes by outlining policies to counteract the negative effects of tour operator strategies and suggests ways of developing a more balanced partnership between mass market tour operators and tourist destinations.

New Zealand's population is aging; government agencies realise the impact of this and are factoring it into their planning for the future. There is a perception that “Seniors” are reluctant to change, but a recent Royal New Zealand Foundation of the Blind (RNZFB) pilot project to test an internet‐connected Digital Talking Book Player with 40 borrowers, most of whom were in their 70s and 80s, has shown the opposite. The purpose of the trial was not only to test an online talking book delivery system but also to ascertain if the RNZFB seniors, some of whom have little or no experience with computers, could cope with an internet capable Digital Talking Book Player. The purpose of this paper is to describe the RNZFB trial.

In total, 39 RNZFB library members between the ages of 60 and 93, most in their 70s and 80s and one 40 year old were selected to participate in a Digital Talking Book Trial. Each of the trialists were loaned a Digital Talking Book Player for approximately four weeks and were asked to read two books and two magazines per week.

The outcome of the trial was remarkable. The trial showed seniors do have a positive attitude to change and are not afraid of technology.

The trial showed that if the reward is greater independence and a better service, and seniors are given appropriate support they will embrace new technology and make it work for them. By moving ahead and using new innovative technology the library service will be able to provide a greater variety of titles and better access to information and recreational reading.

This study empirically investigates consumers’ use of five heuristics (conjunctive, disjunctive, lexicographic, linear additive, and geometric compensatory) in the consideration set formation, a critical first phase before actual choice behavior. Data were collected on the selection of beer brands and fast food outlets by real consumers. Using a decomposition approach in determining the consumers’ choice heuristics, it was found that the conjunctive heuristic is the most often used decision model in the consideration set formation for the two product classes. Implications for brand managers and future research directions are developed.

Online offerings for transformative services create value for consumers, although little research examines the process through which these services deliver this value. The purpose of this paper is to develop a comprehensive framework to capture the complexity of the co-creation of transformative value experienced by the consumers of online transformative services.

This paper uses a netnography approach to examine longitudinal data from an online weight management program. In total, this research examines 15,304 posts from 3,149 users, including eight staff users.

Consumers integrate a range of social support resources, from informational support to esteem support, which provide a range of benefits such as new ideas and self-efficacy that underpin the different types of value such as epistemic and personal value. The degree of co-created value differs across the consumption experience but culminates over time into transformative value.

The proposed framework may be useful beyond the weight management and online contexts; however, further work is required in a range of behavioral contexts and other modes of service delivery.

By understanding the resources consumers integrate and value, co-created services can develop appropriate value propositions to assist in improving consumers’ well-being.

This research provides a comprehensive framework of the transformative value co-creation process, extending on existing frameworks which examine either the process, value co-creation or the types of value co-created.

The ICL Distributed Array Processor, or DAP, is a single instruction stream, multiple data stream computer in which instructions are broadcast for simultaneous execution in each of 4096 processing elements. Although originally developed for numeric computation, the DAP also provides a means for the rapid matching of the term lists representing documents and queries in information retrieval systems, and this paper presents an investigation of the use of the DAP for the parallel searching of large serial files of documents. Best match retrieval experiments with three collections of documents and queries show that the DAP is very much more efficient than a conventional mainframe computer in calculating a measure of similarity between a query and each of the documents in a large collection. It is suggested that the DAP, or machines with similar architectures, could form the basis for interactive bibliographic searching of serial files.

Knowledge concerning the meaning of the object of learning is an important contribution of Learning study. The purpose of this paper is to generate this kind of knowledge and show how it can be developed and refined in the different phases of a Learning study.

The paper reports on a Learning study in primary technology education conducted with students aged six to seven years old, with the aim to explore a specific object of learning; to construct a linkage mechanism for transferring and transforming movement.

The findings show several aspects to discern by the learner in order to grasp the object of learning and reveal how this knowledge was gradually developed during the Learning study. The presumed aspects, those identified in the pre- and post-test, as well as how they were elaborated in the lesson contributed to refining the meaning of the object of learning.

In Learning study, knowledge concerning the meaning of the object of learning is generated. By empirically demonstrating the development and specification of this knowledge during a Learning study, this paper will contribute to the discussion of knowledge products from Learning studies as well as to knowledge concerning what there is to know in order to develop a specific capability in technology education.

In order to succeed in an action under the Equal Pay Act 1970, should the woman and the man be employed by the same employer on like work at the same time or would the woman still be covered by the Act if she were employed on like work in succession to the man? This is the question which had to be solved in Macarthys Ltd v. Smith. Unfortunately it was not. Their Lordships interpreted the relevant section in different ways and since Article 119 of the Treaty of Rome was also subject to different interpretations, the case has been referred to the European Court of Justice.