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As the prioritization of family goals depends on the resolution of family conflict, this study's purpose is to explain how a dominant coalition (DC) of parental family members prioritizes their family economic and non-economic goals when faced with different types of family conflict.

A conceptual framework is developed drawing on a socio-cognitive approach to explain a family's goal formation process. This socio-cognitive approach extends the stakeholder salience underpinnings of family influence/essence theory. It shows that family conflict arises from the complex and novel social settings of a family business and that a DC prioritizes their family's goals by drawing on heuristic biases to resolve such family conflict.

A key finding of this study is the introduction of a distinct type of agency to family influence/essence research. Unlike the salient explanations, a family's goal formulation process is attributed to a DC's heuristic response in resolving their family business conflict.

Scholars have called for a greater need to investigate the social and cognitive underpinnings of a family's goal formation process. While the social settings of a family business are often explained in terms of family conflict, an understanding of the sources of such conflict and their resolution have received limited attention. This study opens new avenues to understanding the sources of such family conflict and the cognitive mechanisms needed to overcome them. This understanding is critical not only to the prioritization of a family's goals but also to the idea that “influence” defines the essence of a family business.

The article deals with factors that act as an incentive to internationalisation of the hotels in the small‐to‐medium‐sized enterprises (SME) category in the traditional tourism countries, and also discusses the obstacles to internationalisation. The “OLI” approach according to Dunning (ownership advantages, location‐specific advantages, advantages of internalisation) is tested against the results of a survey of hotelkeepers in the Alpine countries, particularly Austria. It is not just the size of the enterprise that acts as a limit on the extent of internationalisation of SMEs. Other factors that determine the attitude taken towards internationalisation include market intelligence, financing problems, the degree of entrepreneurial spirit, and the specific nature of tourism services.

Communications regarding this column should be addressed to Mrs. Cheney, Peabody Library School, Nashville, Term. 37203. Mrs. Cheney does not sell the books listed here. They are available through normal trade sources. Mrs. Cheney, being a member of the editorial board of Pierian Press, will not review Pierian Press reference books in this column. Descriptions of Pierian Press reference books will be included elsewhere in this publication.

The paper attempts to answer the question as to the determinants of the typical size configuration of firms in Central Europe's hospitality industry. In discussing the historically fragmented character of hospitality and tourism and the associated conduct and performance characters of this industry, the paper presents different possible growth scenarios and/or possibilities for the hotel accommodation sector including internationalisation. In the concluding section of the paper the consequences of the twin forces ofglobalisation and heightened competition and a quickened pace of technological change are analyzed with respect to the industry's pattern of growth and development.

Globalization and internationalization tendencies imply new challenges for small and medium‐sized enterprises (SMEs), which are either facing the pressure to achieve short‐term profits, or have to attract new market segments by means of long‐term strategies. This trend raises the question of growth perspectives of SMEs and their future development. The paper gives an insight into selected growth theories, entrepreneurship and SMEs, firm competencies, core competencies and the wellbeing of entrepreneurs as a growth indicator. The majority of SMEs are run by the family and characterized by low growth rates or even stagnation, and relatively low market entry and qualification barriers. An exploratory study was carried out among 3‐ and 4‐star hotels in South Tyrol (Italy) in 2004 for a better understanding of the driving forces, growth barriers, entrepreneur's satisfaction, and prerequisites and incentives of growth.

In recent years, there has been a growing desire to more fully integrate informants into the overall research process. In response to this trend, the purpose of this paper is to scrutinize the usage and outcomes of the member checking technique for enabling more participatory interpretive research practices. Information systems (IS) research has utilized this technique, but it has not yet undergone a thorough analysis in this context. Additionally, interpretive IS research is in need of means and tools for engaging with informants during the data analysis and interpretation process.

The data for this study originated from an inquiry into the position of usability work within its cultural context, and this study has adopted a hermeneutic lens to make sense of the member checking technique, which positions informants as co-analysts and co-interpreters to make sense of both their organizational realities and researchers’ interpretations of those realities.

The analysis shows that during the research process, the informants reproduced, questioned, and cultivated the researcher-crafted texts that they were given to interpret, both individually and collaboratively. The study shows that member checking contributes to fulfilling the criteria set for interpretive IS research in a variety of ways.

The study contributes to interpretive IS research method practice by offering IS researchers insights into and guidelines on the usage and potential outcomes of the member checking technique.

The examination of the member checking technique through a hermeneutic lens is a novel approach. For IS research, the study explicates the usages and outcomes of member checking in more participatory interpretive research practice. Also novel in this study is that member checking is examined as a collective endeavor.

The purpose of this paper is to explore a particular philosophical underpinning for Information Systems (IS) research – critical systemic thinking (CST). Drawing upon previous work, the authors highlight the principal features of CST within the tradition of critical research and attempt to relate it to trends in the Italian school of IS research in recent years, as exemplified by the work of Claudio Ciborra but also evident in work by, e.g. Resca, Jacucci and D'Atri.

This is a conceptual paper which explores CST, characterised by a focus on individual uniqueness, and socially‐constructed, individual worldviews as generators of human knowing.

The paper draws on work by Heinz Klein in which he elaborated three constitutive stages in critical research: interpretive, genealogical and constructive. The authors introduce a fourth, reflective stage and discuss five categories of critical research, reflecting different perspectives on emancipation, culminating in emergent expressionism, associated with Ciborra and the Italian school more generally.

This paper discusses approaches to CST and how they might have practical implications in IS development. The distinction between approaches founded in logical empiricism and those founded in hermeneutic dialectics are considered and the development of critical and systems strands are discussed.

The paper addresses CST as an approach to development of information systems. Such approaches enable users to explore their individually unique understandings and create a constructive dialogue with one another, which emancipates and empowers users to own and control their own development processes and hence build more productive and usable systems.

A focus on research which is oriented towards emancipation in the tradition of critical social theory.

The paper draws on extensive theoretical research carried out by the authors over a period of more than ten years in CST and synthesises the practical implications.

Using “districts” nested within “regions”, this multi‐level analysis research aims to examine whether a climate of supervisory‐support at a “district”‐level (as measured by perceived supervisor support (PSS)), and “region”‐level unemployment rates were related to “district”‐level retention rates of blue‐collar part‐time employees (PTEs).

Blue‐collar PTE retention rates (from company records) and PSS levels (from a company‐wide survey) of a large global service provider were gathered. “Regional” unemployment rates were collected via publicly‐accessible government statistics.

The study finds that PSS levels of blue‐collar PTEs were related to retention rates. Additionally, through the nested relationship of the study, the “region”‐level unemployment rate was also related to PTE retention levels.

Limitations of the study included generalization to other companies, inability to collect demographic data, sample size and sampling issues, and concerns about the measurement of retention.

This study revealed that supervisory‐support climate was important in PTE retention. This paper gives mechanisms that managers can use to improve PSS levels of employees. Additionally, since organizations exist in environments, results show that the external environment may affect organizational outcomes, no matter what occurs internally in the organization.

This study is unique since it focused specifically on blue‐collar PTEs, a much‐needed group of people to research. The paper gave ways for managers to enhance their relationship with PTEs, thereby having special value for managers and those who study managerial development. Additionally, the study gave evidence that organizations exist in environments, and factors outside the organization may affect retention within organizations.

The purpose of this paper is to test the relationship between subjective job insecurity and self-rated job performance, and to assess how this association is different across different employment groups.

The authors used a data set owned by TNO and Statistics Netherlands of more than 89,000 Dutch workers and self-employed that is a representative sample of the Dutch workforce. The authors included data from 2014 and 2016 assessing subjective job insecurity in terms of “a concern about the future of one’s job/business” and self-rated job performance.

The effect size of the association between subjective job insecurity and self-rated job performance is small. For temporary agency workers and on-call workers, the association between subjective job insecurity and job performance is weaker compared to permanent workers and fixed-term workers. However for self-employed workers with and without employees, however, the relation between subjective job insecurity and job performance is stronger compared to permanent workers.

The biggest limitation is the cross-sectional design of the study, which limits conclusions about causality.

The finding that subjective job insecurity goes together with less work performance shows that job insecurity has no upside for the productivity of companies.

The study provides a deeper understanding of the relationship between subjective job insecurity and self-rated job performance on a national level.

Looks at the ways in which firms are currently using the Internet and examines the extent to which these uses are informational or facilitate relationship building. A study shows that the majority of fims still use the Internet for informational purposes. Relationship facilitating and transactional uses of Internet are found – particularly for larger firms and for those that have internationalised via the Internet. A question over the ability of the Internet to facilitate and sustain this type of relationship is raised by the failure of the mature US Internet market to show a significant progression to more sophisticated Internet usage. This may relate to underlying uncertainty of customers or to the security of transacting via the Internet. Similarly, firms that are already international will have to contend with a number of serious challenges that arise from the open and global nature of information exchange on the Internet before they maximise its potential.