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To examine to what degree good buildings enable the delivery of high quality services.

This paper uses empirical data from a case study of two metropolitan councils in Melbourne, Australia. Both are committed to the strategic management of their community facilities to maximise service outcomes for their constituents. To this end they implemented a strategic tool to measure the facilities' performance, using key performance indicators.

The data indicates a statistically significant correlation of the performance of the physical building and the quality of the service delivered from it, supporting the hypothesis that better physical facilities engender better service outcomes.

The implications are that the strategic planning for buildings and services should be undertaken in concert to maximise the enabling effect the physical building has on service performance. While this study concentrates on council buildings, the findings may be equally applicable to other service businesses.

This paper has implications for the way facility management practice should be undertaken and fills a knowledge gap about the effect which the quality of the physical surrounds has on the processes taking place within.

Although in many respects, the Heart of England region can hardly be called “peripheral”, it nevertheless displays many of the features of out‐of‐the‐way rural destinations. Describes the outcomes of a research project into training provision for the small rural tourism business operator. It has identified that the training and support on offer to the rural operator tend to be parochial, fragmented and unco‐ordinated. The research was instigated by Birmingham College of Food, Tourism and Creative Studies, a specialist in the provision of hospitality and tourism studies and ultimately aims at the development and implementation of a co‐ordinated training programme for this sector. By pointing up the poor quality of such provision in an essentially central location, the paper invites the questions: how much worse the situation must be in truly peripheral locations, and what action can be taken to improve the situation.

This article examines Max Weber’s theory of value spheres as a basis for a polytheistic religious sociology of institutional life. Weber’s approach implies institutional theory as a form of comparative religion. Two problems present themselves. If the values of the spheres are to be considered as “gods,” they do not align easily with Weber’s sociology of religion. Given that love was central both as a driver and a constituent in Weber’s understanding of salvation religions, it also implies that love be incorporated into our theorizing of institutional life, something entirely absent in the way we think about enduring forms of social organization. Taking the second seriously may enable us to fabricate a solution to the first.

To analyse the role of after‐sales services in manufacturing contexts, and the related after‐sales performance measurement systems.

An exploratory case study research was performed in the automotive, household appliance, IT and consumer electronics industries. The sample is made up of 48 firms with after‐sales operations in Italy.

The role attributed to after‐sales activities in the IT and consumer electronics and household appliance industries shows an orientation to improve company image, customer satisfaction and retention (marketing focus). A different situation characterises the companies studied in the automotive industry. In most firms, however, measurement systems are quite simple and short‐term oriented, especially in the IT and consumer electronics and household appliance industries. The measurement of non‐financial performance emphasises effectiveness rather than efficiency, and the automotive industry, on the whole, presents more advanced measurement systems, together with more integrated strategic management of after‐sales. The household appliance industry, on the other hand, due to the significant presence of SMEs, is characterised by less sophisticated performance measurement systems.

Provides a representation of current empirical practices in after‐sales role and performance measurement, a topic insufficiently covered by conceptual and empirical research.

The purpose of this chapter is to examine the transfer of a concept issued in one culture to a different setting, featuring different characteristics from the one in which the concept appeared.

Secondary data have been collected by analysing accounting regulations issued after the fall of communism with respect to true and fair view (TFV). Primary data have been collected by conducting eleven semi-structured interviews with representatives of major actors involved in the process of financial reporting. We have further developed and tested two research propositions.

We find that the perception of TFV in Romania depends firstly on the category of actors. Second, we find that merely including a rule or a concept in the regulations of a certain setting does not automatically mean that they will be applied de facto consistently with their original meaning, issued from a different setting.

We conclude that concept intertranslatability cannot be assumed under the circumstances investigated in our chapter, with immediate implications for other cases presupposing that concept transfer works, such as International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS).

The small number of interviews we have conducted may be viewed as a limitation of our study; however, special care was exercised when choosing interviewees, and they are key persons within their organizations, or representative of all the interested parties in the process of financial reporting in Romania.

We contribute to an increasing literature on accounting harmonization and applicability of global standards and concepts in local contexts.

Consumers' perceptions of product intelligence affect their willingness to accept smart offerings. This paper explores how people perceive various smart products based on their smartness profiles, composed of five distinct smartness facets. Additionally, the study investigates how these perceptions of product intelligence impact consumers' evaluation of factors that either promote or impede the adoption of smart products. These factors are examined as potential mediators in the adoption process. This paper aims to determine if the value-based adoption model can be applied to a broad range of smart service systems.

Consumers assessed one of 28 smart products in a scenario-based quantitative study. Multilevel structural equation modeling (SEM) is used to test the conceptual model, taking the nested data structure into account.

The findings show that product smartness essentially enhances usage intention via adoption drivers (enjoyment and usefulness) and reduces usage intention via adoption barriers (intrusiveness). In particular, the ability to interact in a humanlike manner increases the benefits consumers perceive, which in turn increases consumer acceptance. Only the smartness characteristic of awareness impairs usage intention, mediated by the perceived benefits of enjoyment and usefulness.

In contrast to previous research, which usually focuses on single smart products, this work examines a variety of different products, which allows for better transferability of the results to other smart offerings. Furthermore, prior research has mainly focused on single facets of product smartness or researched smartness on an aggregated level. By considering the consumer perception of each smartness facet, the authors gain deeper insights into the perceptual differences regarding product smartness and how this affects technology adoption via conflicting key acceptance drivers and barriers.

The increasingly important role of international retail companies in the distribution and marketing of goods highlights important gaps in the literature. One of these gaps concerns a scientifically based understanding of the key, underlying drivers in the market selection process of such companies. The purpose of this paper is to establish a more robust understanding of international retailers' market selection process.

This paper econometrically tests hypotheses derived from recent literature and models the international actions of retailers based in 13 home and ten host markets.

The results highlight the importance of host market characteristics and the importance of understanding host market selections in the context of home market retail structural development and, by implication, the relative lack of importance of secondary managerial input factors.

The model presented here fundamentally challenges assumptions concerning the role of managers in market selection decisions in the light of sustainable patterns of international activity.

These findings suggest that managers responsible for international market selection decisions do not have the freedom of action implied in the marketing literature and that their actions are constrained by structural market conditions.

The relationships identified explain six‐ to seven‐tenths of the pattern of expansion in the markets considered. This would suggest that managerial input is important in the process of marketing activity but that it is important within a broader framework.