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This paper examines the effects of performance driven public services on managerial behaviour and the values that influence individual actions.

The approach is historical/institutional within a constructed theoretical framework

Fuelled by the “new public management” movement, public managers are forced to act in performance‐driven ways and instruments like “performance contracts” and “performance‐related pay” are being used to improve managerial behaviour and the professionalism of public officials. Consequently, public managers have acquired personal stakes in public organizations because when they meet organizational targets, they reap financial rewards. More efficiency, lower costs, and less waste, more responsiveness to customers, and increased flexibility are perceived to be good for society. These changes, however, are more than instrumental. They are about changing identities and changing the meaning of acting as a public official. Traditional Weberian ideas about how such organizing furthers the public good have been replaced by a performance‐driven conception of public management, which is strong on organizing, but weak on the public good. The paper concludes that professional public managers must be judged within the context of the “res publica”.

The paper contributes to the debate about professionalism within the context of NPM and whether this is compatible with a view of public service as serving the public interest

The purpose of this paper is to discuss the potential of Internet of Things (IoT) to affect organizational buying behavior. Potential impacts on organizational communication, buying center structure and processes and privacy and security issues are discussed.

This is a conceptual paper that advances testable propositions based on the technology overview and use of existing organizational buying behavior theory.

This paper concludes that major changes are likely as a result of the adoption of IoT. The nature of organizational communication may shift to more machine-to-machine communication and buying centers may become smaller, less hierarchical but more coordinated, with less conflict. In addition, privacy and security concerns will need to be addressed.

This is the first attempt to conceptualize the impact of adoption of IoT technologies that may help future researchers to examine the impact on a more granular level. For practitioners, it may help them prepare for the impacts of the IoT technological juggernaut.

The goal of this paper is to analyze industrial buying behavior. First, the paper reviews the previous work on the relation between the participation, influence, characteristics of the purchase situation, individuals and organizational structure. Among purchase situation conditions frequently mentioned are: novelty, product complexity, buying situation complexity, buying importance, time pressure and perceived risk associated with the purchase. With respect to individual characteristics, the paper includes personal stake and level of experience. Finally, the paper considers the set of variables which characterizes the company's organizational structure and try to determine if the influence of the different functional areas of the firm in the buying center, and the participation of individuals and the composition of it, vary significantly according to the stage of the buying decision‐making process. The paper subsequently tests the explanatory power of these variables for a sample of Spanish industrial firms.

This study aims to analyze the effects of goal-directed feelings on student’s performance in marketing simulations. Calculating path coefficients from data collected at two points in time, the authors tested a model consisting of four constructs personal stakes, anticipatory emotions, volitions and goal-directed behavior. The results suggest that positive and negative anticipatory emotions mediate the relationship between personal stakes and volitions and determine student motivation, behavior and actual performance independently from simulation design, simulation environment and cognitive personality characteristics of the participants. Implications for educators include the need for active pursuit of anticipatory emotion development.

The model consists of the four constructs: personal stakes, anticipatory emotions, volitions and goal-directed behavior. Personal stakes determine involvement and are perceived based on an evaluation of the degree of potential impact of one’s performance on one’s personal well-being. Anticipatory emotions, as explained before, are affected by personal stakes and can be either positive or negative. They influence volitions or wills; these are intentions consisting of both directive components (for example, strategy planning and approach selection) and motivational components (for example, the commitment to a necessary effort). Volitions are the mediators that transform anticipatory emotions into goal-directed behaviors. These goal-directed behaviors comprise the fourth construct, consisting of mental and physical efforts aimed at accomplishing a specific objective.

The hypotheses were tested calculating path coefficients. All hypotheses were supported and statistically significant (p < 0.01; one-tailed significance test). With regard to H1, personal stakes were positively related to both positive and negative anticipatory emotions, with a particularly strong relation to positive emotions. Consistent with H2, anticipatory emotions were strongly related to volitions and, thus, heavily influencing the extent to which students would engage in planning and compare their own effort against that of their fellow students. Fueled by the anticipatory emotions, the volitions, in turn, were strongly related to the actually exhibited behavior, supporting H3. In other words, the students put their intentions into practice and engaged in careful simulation planning as well as in an effort that they perceived to be superior to the one of their peers. It is then no surprise that H4 was also supported. The more the students attempted to be carefully prepared and the harder they tried to outperform their fellow students, the more likely the achievement of the desired objectives became. Finally, H5 was supported, even though only weakly with regard to negative outcome emotions. This indicates that successful performance leads to positive emotions, but a failure in the marketing simulation (measured by a non-achievement of objectives set) does not necessarily make the students feel bad.

In conclusion, the study provides the rising number of marketing educators using computerized simulations with an approach to increase student motivation and performance. It has become obvious that personal stakes alone are not sufficient to fully develop commitment on the side of students. Rather, anticipatory emotions serve as the mediator between those stakes and students’ volitions.

This paper explores the relevance of the concept of self in the process of independent technological innovation. In‐depth interviews were conducted with technological innovators from start‐up firms in IT, biotech and advanced services concerning the subjective and social forms of engagement in the innovation process. Emerging factors in the interview data revealed aspects pertaining to the innovator’s reflexive self‐conception, innovator ego‐involvement in the venture, forms of commitment and control, personal and social stakes, and various self‐oriented cognitive strategies. It is argued that the self‐concept allows the innovator to come into view as a social and subjective being who is involved in reflexive activities such as dynamic role‐taking, “is” vs “ought” reflections and social negotiations.

This chapter argues that Deliberative Dialogues (DDs) are a form of Education for Sustainable Development, whose design, process focus, wide-tent approach, and interdisciplinarity align with best democratic practices. DDs are an effective method for bridging seemingly opposing forces in academia and the larger society: Narrow expertise versus interdisciplinarity, individual orientation versus collaboration, polarization and prioritization of majority/privileged voice versus inclusivity and search for common ground. This chapter will define and describe deliberation and DDs as useful for a wide range of disciplines, offer models, explore basic components, and analyze the author’s participant researcher experience in crafting and facilitating DDs in 35 classes across multiple disciplines in a small private university. The chapter will look at the planning process, the logistics of running the DD, post-DD outcomes, and provide questions and suggestions for future enhancements. A particular kind of DD will be explored, the Syllabus Deliberation method (also known as the negotiated or process syllabus). Finally, the chapter will articulate findings related to the process of preparing for the deliberations, ways in which scaffolded activities improved, relationship between the dialogues and course curriculum, evolution of faculty and researcher-facilitator roles, challenges, and successes. Students’ and faculty’s perceptions of some outcomes are also included.

This paper investigates online evaluation processes on peer-to-peer platforms to highlight how online peer evaluation enacts neoliberal subjects and collectives.

The paper uses netnography (Kozinets, 2002) to study the online community of Airbnb. It is also based on 18 interviews, mostly with Airbnb users, and quantitative data about reviews.

Results indicate that peer-to-peer platforms constitute biopolitical infrastructures. They enact and consolidate narcissistic entrepreneurs of the self through evaluation processes and consolidating a for-show community. Specifically, three features make evaluation a powerful neoliberal agent. The object of evaluation shifts from the service to the user's own worth (1). The public nature of the evaluation (2) and symetrical accountability between the evaluator and the evaluatee (3) contribute to excessively positive reviews and this keeps the market fluid.

This paper calls for problematization of the idea of sharing in the so-called “sharing economy”. What is shared on peer-to-peer platforms is the comfort of engaging with people like ourselves.

This paper contributes to the literature on online accounting by extending consideration of evaluation beyond the review process. It also stresses that trust in the evaluative infrastructure is fostered by narcissistic relationships between users, who come to use the platform as a mirror. The peer-to-peer context refreshes the our knowledge on evaluation in a corporate context by highlighting phenomena of standardized spontaneity and euphemized evaluation language. This allows evaluation processes to incorporate a market logic without having to fuel competition.

The purpose of this paper is to analyse the history of, and prospects for, mergers between incumbent European mobile operators.

The paper examines the history of proposals for mergers among incumbent mobile operators in Europe over the past two decades, but with a particular emphasis upon the period commencing in 2006. It examines the rationale for the proposals and analyses why, in virtually every case, the proposals failed to come to fruition.

The paper argues that there are a set of road blocks that bar the way to realising inter‐incumbent mergers, and that these are by no means all economic. Given that the environment for M&A activity was relatively positive during 2006/2007, yet nothing much was achieved, it now seems likely that in the febrile environment of the 2008/2009 credit crunch, the topic will return to the backburner.

This paper is the first detailed attempt to address this topic.

In this paper, we aim to understand why consumers often prefer products made using traditional practices even when products made using new practices are not of lower quality. We argue that this resistance, which we call “production process conservatism,” is heightened when the product is used in the performance of a social ritual.

We develop this argument in the context of diamond jewelry, as consumers have generally been resistant to diamonds that are produced in laboratories, i.e., lab-created diamonds. Hypotheses were tested using experiments conducted with an online sample (Experiment 1) and with an MBA student sample (Experiment 2).

In Experiment 1, we find that married female respondents significantly prefer mined diamonds to lab-created diamonds when they are used as part of an engagement gift as opposed to a more routine gift. In Experiment 2, we find the same effect among women; in addition, the perceived risk associated with the ritual is found to mediate this production process conservatism.

This paper contributes to the understanding of a macrosocial phenomenon – acceptance of an innovation – by examining microinteractive processes in groups.

This paper develops an original theory that when individuals deviate from traditional aspects of rituals, they risk signaling a lack of commitment or cultural competence to the group even when such aspects are not explicitly stated.

The purpose of this study is to investigate how first-year students conduct everyday life research and how, if possible, their everyday research skills can inform information literacy instruction in higher education. Very few studies in information literacy emphasize existing knowledge that students bring with them to college; instead, the emphasis tends to fall on deficits in students’ academic research skills. Strengths-based approaches or asset-based approaches as found in the literature of psychology and education provide a basis for exploring this direction in information literacy education.

The research used a phenomenographic methodology, interviewing 40 first-year students from two large universities, a medium-sized university and a community college.

The qualitative study suggests that first-year students are capable of using information purposefully to learn or research interests that have sparked their curiosities. They are also capable of reflecting on the ways that their investigations fulfilled their purposes, resulted in unexpected outcomes or made them consider their issue in a new light. These existing capacities provide promising starting points for strengths-based approaches to information literacy instruction.

Dialogue with students about prior research experiences enables teaching librarians to plan engaging, authentic information literacy curriculum that acknowledges existing strengths.

This study provides a valuable contribution to empirical evidence of student research skills prior to entering higher education and suggests connections between those skills and the ACRL Information Literacy Framework. In addition, the study provides a case for strengths-based education, activating students’ prior knowledge to learn and create new knowledge. Authors have presented at Library Instruction West, July 2018.