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Unequal workplace gender outcomes continue to motivate research. Using the prism of work-life-(im)balance, the purpose of this paper is to show how identity salience and motivation contribute to a subject position that for many reproduces socially gendered practices of workplaces.

After initial inductive computer-assisted text analysis, the authors innovatively move to deductively analyse data from focus group and semi-structured interviews of 18 female and 19 male Australian managers in the financial and government sectors.

The authors find that a gendered sense of reflexivity is virtually non-existent among the female Australian managers and professionals interviewed in this research. The inductive stage of critical discourse analysis revealed a substantial difference between men and women in two concepts, responsibility, and choice. These form the axes of the typological model to better explain how non-reflexive gendered workplace practices are “performed”.

This empirical research provides a foundation for understanding the role of choice and responsibility in work-home patterns for women.

The absence of a reflexive gender-based understanding of women’s work-home choice is explained in Bourdieusian terms.

By not specifically using a gender lens, the authors have avoided the stereotypical understanding of gendered workplaces.

The author takes a comprehensive look at the accessibility of e-resources for all people, including those with disabilities, in the context of collection development (CD).

Employing a combination of research methodologies — policy analysis, content analysis, and phone survey—the author explores the extent to which the needs of people with disabilities are considered.

Several professional library organizations recommend accessibility-sensitive selection and procurement procedures. However, not all students enrolled in library school programs might learn about the issue. Few books on the subject cover the issue adequately. Nationwide, CD policies requiring conformance to accessibility standards are the exception; and when librarians meet to make decisions about the selection of specific e-resources, the needs of people with disabilities are rarely on their radar screens.

Researchers conducting similar surveys in the future might want to not only select a statistically more representative sample of academic libraries but also widen their focus and include both accessibility and usability in their investigations.

Textbook authors and course instructors in the area of CD need to address accessibility and usability. Librarians need to raise the issue with database and e-book vendors during license negotiations.

The acquisition of e-resources designed to be accessible and usable for all will enable people with disabilities to participate more fully in our information-driven society.

The data collected provide for a broad discussion of the extent to which the needs of people with disabilities are considered in connection with CD.

This chapter describes how the technologies of big data might apply to rural contexts. It considers the relative advantages and disadvantages of such ‘new’ innovations.

It uses two case studies, one of online community specialist groups linked to rural activities and a second from a policy shift relating to firearm legislation in the English context.

The chapter suggests that digital data in the forms discussed here can be both benign and underutilised in its potential. In relation to the management of datasets holding information on firearm owners, these need careful reflection regarding their establishment, access and general use.

The chapter provides insight into the rural context and makes a case that such locales are not immune from the influence of the dataverse. The appearance of ‘big data’ here is not without political implications. The case of UK firearm legislation reform demonstrates the implications of policy falling short of its potential and how a social science analysis can unpack the operation of power as well as position the debate more broadly.

Purpose: To outline recent developments in digital service delivery in order to encourage researchers to pursue collaborations with computer science, operations research, and data science colleagues and to show how such collaborations can expand the scope of research on emotion in service delivery.

Design/methodology/approach: Uses archived resources available at http://LivePerson.com to extract data based in genuine service conversations between agents and customers. We refer to these as “digital traces” and analyze them using computational science models.

Findings: Although we do not test significance or causality, the data presented in this chapter provide a unique lens into the dynamics of emotions in service; results that are not obtainable using traditional research methods.

Research limitations/implications: This is a descriptive study where findings unravel new dynamics that should be followed up with more research, both research using traditional experimental methods, and digital traces research that allows inferences of causality.

Practical implications: The digital data and newly developed tools for sentiment analyses allow exploration of emotions in large samples of genuine customer service interactions. The research provides objective, unobtrusive views of customer emotions that draw directly from customer expressions, with no self-report intervention and biases.

Originality/value: This is the first objective and detailed depiction of the actual emotional encounters that customers express, and the first to analyze in detail the nature and content of customer service work.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the relationship between quality management practice and labor productivity in labor-intensive manufacturing companies in a developing nation and benchmark with the world average.

Primary and secondary data were collected from 34 selected companies. The primary data were obtained using a questionnaire survey to determine the quality management adoption level of each company using the European Business Excellence Model. Secondary data also collected in order to compute labor productivity of each organization and benchmark with international norms.

In this research, labor productivity is measured by revenues per employee and total assets per employee and found that adopting quality management has strong relationships with revenue per employee unlike total asset per employee that is weakly related.

Several authors suggest a positive relationship between adoption quality management principles and productivity in large organizations located in developed countries. However, this paper particularly focuses on labor productivity of labor-intensive companies.

This article surveys the literature dealing with theory and applications of life cycle costing (LCC). It deals with the literature published in the last 25 years and provides 667 references.

The Internet gives access for blind and visually impaired users to previously unobtainable information via Braille or speech synthesis interpretation. This paper looks at how three search engines, AltaVista, Yahoo! and Infoseek presented their information to a small group of visually impaired and blind users and how accessible individual Internet pages are. Two participants had varying levels of partial sight and two Subjects were blind and solely reliant on speech synthesis output. Subjects were asked for feedback on interface design at various stages of their search and any problems they encountered were noted. The barriers to access that were found appear to come about by lack of knowledge and thought by the page designers themselves. An accessible page does not have to be dull. By adhering to simple guidelines, visually impaired users would be able to access information more effectively than would otherwise be possible. Visually disabled people would also have the same opportunity to access knowledge as their sighted colleagues.

THE Electronic Computer Exhibition and the B.I.M. conference have provided material for serious contemplation. Sir Harold Gillett, Lord Mayor of London, opening the Exhibition suggested that we are living in the age of the second industrial revolution. There are some who share the Lord Mayor's view and others who take the whole matter in their stride. One thing is certain, we shall be able to do more—and do it more efficiently.

The purpose of this paper is to use the data analysis method of sentiment analysis to improve the understanding of a large data set of employee comments from an annual employee job satisfaction survey of a US hospitality organization.

Sentiment analysis is used to examine the employee comments by identifying meaningful patterns, frequently used words and emotions. The statistical computing language, R, uses the sentiment analysis process to scan each employee survey comment, compare the words with the predefined word dictionary and classify the employee comments into the appropriate emotion category.

Employee responses written in English and in Spanish are compared with significant differences identified between the two groups, triggering further investigation of the Spanish comments. Sentiment analysis was then conducted on the Spanish comments comparing two groups, front-of-house vs back-of-house employees and employees with male supervisors vs female supervisors. Results from the analysis of employee comments written in Spanish point to higher scores for job sadness and anger. The negative comments referred to desires for improved healthcare, requests for increased wages and frustration with difficult supervisor relationships. The findings from this study add to the growing body of literature that has begun to focus on the unique work experiences of Latino employees in the USA.

This is the first study to examine a large unstructured English and Spanish text database from a hospitality organization’s employee job satisfaction surveys using sentiment analysis. Applying this big data analytics process to advance new insights into the human capital aspects of hospitality management is intriguing to many researchers. The results of this study demonstrate an issue that needs to be further investigated particularly considering the hospitality industry’s employee demographics.