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The purpose of this paper is to examine whether switching barriers in the retail banking industry affect different age groups differently.

Questionnaires were administered to 188 bank customers of different age groups, measuring their perception of variables related to relational benefits, switching costs, availability and attractiveness of alternatives, service recovery and retention.

Results from independent two‐sample t‐tests and logistic regression support all five hypotheses, confirming that young and older bank customers differ significantly in their perception of switching barriers: relational benefits, switching costs, availability and attractiveness of alternatives, service recovery and the duration of time they intend to end their relationship with their banks.

This study was conducted among employees of two higher education institutions. Thus, further research needs to test the research results in a diverse population.

Since younger customers are more likely to change their banks easily, if retail banks want to retain younger customers they need to offer more meaningful incentives to younger customers than they offer to older customers. In terms of practice the findings in this research highlight the need for managers to design different switching barrier packages for each customer age group.

Researchers in the past have found a close association between customer age and bank product usage and have shown that switching barriers play an important role in binding the customer to the service organization. However this research not only validates the switching barrier variables that affect different age groups differently but also elevates the role of age in banks switching barrier design.

The purpose of this article is to analyze both the opportunity recognition and product development management processes not only among technology firms, but among non‐technology firms as well at two points in time, 1998 and 2003.

The current study included two data sets: a 1998 survey of technology‐based and non‐technology firms located in US incubators; and a new 2003 study of technology and non‐technology based firms in the Inland Northwest. All respondents indicated they considered themselves entrepreneurs.

Findings suggest that the opportunity recognition process changed between 1998 and 2003. Some of the authors' prior work suggested that the process, at least for technology‐based firms, had been similar between 1989 and 1998. Industry changes over time, perhaps different firm types, and insufficient data could be rational reasons for the changes. Thus, as far as the opportunity recognition process then, there is evidence that suggests that the process is different for manufacturing and non‐manufacturing firms.

The study of management and marketing processes should be performed by industry or business type over time. The researcher should consider that if the opportunity recognition or product development management processes reflect the changing nature of entrepreneurship over time, then characterizing those processes as constant models is inappropriate.

The overall results are consistent with other research studies and serve to further substantiate the use of single industry data. An “equation of state” for an opportunity recognition model or a product development management model is suggested by the empirical results reported on in the current paper as well as the diversity of other researchers' work.

The purpose of this paper is: to determine how offshore outsourcing firms in the USA are involved in providing assistance to education and training the downsized/unemployed; and to conduct inter‐industry comparisons among offshore outsourcing firms to determine if there are differences in their degree of involvement in assisting education and training the downsized/unemployed.

This research is based on a survey of 51 firms in the USA that are listed as major offshore outsourcers and exporters of American jobs in “CNN's Lou Dobbs Exporting America website”.

The findings show that out of eight areas of corporate social activities included in the survey, offshore outsourcing firms indicated that they were least involved in providing or supporting training programs to the downsized/unemployed. However, we also found that offshore outsourcing firms were highly involved in providing assistance to charities and supporting private and public education.

The response rate in this survey was similar to other response rates for research conducted on similar topics. However, the sample size for the study is relatively small and results from larger sample sizes are required to make empirical generalizations with confidence.

The findings of this study are useful for USA policy makers who are dealing with the negative effects of offshoring. It also provides direction to offshoring firms on how to alleviate negative attitudes toward offshore outsourcing.

The paper is the first to investigate the contributions of offshore outsourcing firms to education and training the downsized/unemployed as part of their corporate social responsibility. Thus, it makes a significant contribution to the literature.

Academic outcomes for individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) remain poor, especially in the area of reading, in particular, reading comprehension. In recent years, researchers have begun to investigate subcomponent skills of reading comprehension for children with ASD in order to better understand its development and potential interventions to enhance outcomes. This chapter highlights the current knowledge in the field in regards to the key cognitive and language skills associated with reading development for individuals with ASD. These include emergent-literacy skills, word-reading and decoding, reading fluency, oral language, and social cognition. Additionally, the chapter makes suggestions for future research in this area, in particular the need to conduct research to establish evidence-based practices to better support the syndrome-specific reading needs for this population.

This chapter explores what managers in the library and information science workplace can do to keep stress and burnout levels low. The literature on stress and burnout in human services, or the helping professions, is surveyed and the differences between the two phenomena are explained. Research is clear that keeping stress levels low and burnout at bay in the workplace benefits both employees and the organization. Even so, managers are given little training on how to identify and deal with stress and often fail to notice that their employees are chronically stressed. When managers become aware that they do have employees who are seriously stressed or burned out, they are often unsure whether they should address the problem and how to handle it. The author explains the differences between stress and burnout and clarifies how managers can minimize their negative impact by monitoring six areas in which workers are most likely to experience them: (1) the demands of the job which include the quantity of work and the knowledge required to perform; (2) the amount of control employees are permitted to exercise in the workplace; (3) the amount of the social support employee’s feel they have from managers and colleagues; (4) the quality of workplace relationships; (5) the clarity of one’s role on the job; and (6) support and honest communication during times of change. The practical implication of this information aimed at managers is to help them create a better workplace and mentally and physically healthier staff members.

Reports the results of a field experiment using a contingent reward system to improve sales performance of Russian retail workers. The results clearly demonstrated the ability to use this technique successfully in organizations undergoing transformational change. Whilst preintervention differences were found in perceived job enrichment and manager behaviour, regression analyses demonstrated that the intervention had an effect beyond these situational factors. Discusses these additional findings which concern the importance of supportive leadership and feedback. Contradicts earlier claims that management theories are culturally limited, and extends the application potential of an already well‐established intervention technique.

Nancy Maclean’s Democracy in Chains (2017) is an attempt to provide a narrative arc for the rise of free market ideas in political action during the second half of the twentieth century and into the first decades of the twenty-first century. The central character in her narrative is neither F.A. Hayek nor Milton Friedman, let alone Adam Smith or Ludwig von Mises, but James M. Buchanan, the 1986 Nobel Prize winner in economics. MacLean argues that rather than extol the virtues of the market economy as Hayek and Friedman did before him, Buchanan focused on the dysfunctions of politics. Due to a series of argumentative fallacies and failures that follow from her ideological blinders, I argue that MacLean’s attempt is a missed opportunity to seriously engage some very pressing issues in public choice and political economy and understand how James Buchanan attempted to resolve them in a democratic manner. As such, Democracy in Chains is not only a mischaracterization of Buchanan and his project but also a poignant lesson to us all about how ideological blinders can subvert even the sincerest effort to unearth truth in the social sciences and the humanities.

Presents a special issue, enlisting the help of the author’s students and colleagues, focusing on age, sex, colour and disability discrimination in America. Breaks the evidence down into manageable chunks, covering: age discrimination in the workplace; discrimination against African‐Americans; sex discrimination in the workplace; same sex sexual harassment; how to investigate and prove disability discrimination; sexual harassment in the military; when the main US job‐discrimination law applies to small companies; how to investigate and prove racial discrimination; developments concerning race discrimination in the workplace; developments concerning the Equal Pay Act; developments concerning discrimination against workers with HIV or AIDS; developments concerning discrimination based on refusal of family care leave; developments concerning discrimination against gay or lesbian employees; developments concerning discrimination based on colour; how to investigate and prove discrimination concerning based on colour; developments concerning the Equal Pay Act; using statistics in employment discrimination cases; race discrimination in the workplace; developments concerning gender discrimination in the workplace; discrimination in Japanese organizations in America; discrimination in the entertainment industry; discrimination in the utility industry; understanding and effectively managing national origin discrimination; how to investigate and prove hiring discrimination based on colour; and, finally, how to investigate sexual harassment in the workplace.

The aim of this paper is to present and empirically validate a conceptual framework that explores the links between the two service features (physical and interactive) and their impact on customer loyalty. It also introduces and investigates the potential intervening role of a single personality dimension (neuroticism) in the relationship between service features and customer loyalty. In addition, examining whether the customer’s switching barriers affect customer loyalty is also an aim of the present study.

A structured questionnaire was used to collect data from a sample of 224 customers in the banking industry in Greece. The respondents were picked using simple random sampling. Exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses were used to validate the latent factors of the proposed conceptual framework, whereas their relationships were examined through linear regression analyses.

The empirical data verify that physical and interactive features of service quality have a significant impact on customer loyalty. The study also concludes that customer neuroticism has an intervening effect on the relationship between service features and customer loyalty. In addition, switching barriers such as confidence benefits, special treatment benefits, switching costs and availability and attentiveness of alternatives affect a bank’s customer loyalty.

This perspective could improve managerial understanding of the service-quality/customer-loyalty relationship and lead to more focused decisions. During the period of economic Greek crisis, the customers’ learning and understanding, the immediate response to their needs and expectations, the provision of customer services in accordance with their personality type and the establishment a long and effective relationship with them may have an important impact not only on success but also mainly on bank survival.

Previous studies have shown the positive and significant relationship between customer satisfaction and loyalty in the banking industry, but this study extends the literature of consumer behavior theory by examining the distinct role that the physical and interactive service features play in the formation of customer loyalty. While it is known the role of personality in customer satisfaction has not been analyzed sufficiently the effect of neuroticism in the evolution of the above relationship. The present study tries to fill the bibliographic gap focusing on the Greek banking sector in the period of economic crisis.