Search results

The purpose of this paper is to present the findings that describe any correlations between leadership demographic characteristics with that of the levels of business continuity (BC) and disaster recovery (DR) planning by surveying the academic department's continuity planners at two major research universities in Southern California.

The research methodology was a quantitative method utilizing a correlational research design (logistic regression). Survey data from a self-reporting web-based survey were analyzed.

Analysis of five leadership demographic characteristics and four covariates reveals one statistically significant predictor of resiliency planning. Furthermore, close to one-quarter of the academic departments were found to have no BC or DR plan. Conversely, having a budget for resiliency planning was not found to be a significant predictor of resiliency planning.

This study was specifically limited to continuity planners within two major, public, academic research institutions within Southern California. This allows for an in-depth understanding of a specific contingency planning phenomenon: geographically bounded public, research-oriented, higher education institutions. This study could provide a framework for administrative leaders in academic settings to assess their organizations’ capacity for recovery from an unexpected business disruption. This study could assist university administration in identifying personnel to lead resiliency planning within the institution.

The research indicates that educational institutions lack in organizational resiliency planning. This study could provide a framework for administrative leaders in academic settings to assess their organizations’ capacity for recovery from an unexpected business disruption.

While there is much literature on the separate topics of leadership in an academic environment and contingency planning, no study exists that attempts to observe any correlations between these concepts.

Urban planning in the Global South is insufficiently discussed in research. In addition to the global lack of utilization of research in practice, this lack of discussion resulted in an apparent gap between research, practice, governmental policies and education particularly in the Global South. The paper explores the inconsistency of interest between policymakers, practitioners and researchers by reviewing their themes of interest comparatively. The paper investigates the case study of Egypt, which recently faces a new regime with optimistic urban agendas and examines the research publication that coincided with it.

A scientometric analysis is conducted on all urban planning publications in Egypt between 2016 and 2022 using the software ‘CiteSpace’. The analysis illustrates the dominating research interests using the publications keyword.

The analysis revealed a distinct interest between researchers, who were more invested in themes like ‘planning policies’, ‘informal settings’, ‘urban expansion and growth’ and ‘urban governance and management’, while policymakers were more devoted to themes related ‘satellite cities or new cities’, ‘public transit and transit networks’, ‘informal settings’ and ‘urban expansion and growth’. The themes of interest are displayed in network analysis for a comparative analysis with other aspects like practices, governmental policies and education.

The research utilizes all research publications in the field (in a selected period) to develop a study of the research interest in the field of urban planning in Egypt during the recent years. In addition, it uses novel scientometric software to assist in analysing existing publications to produce new findings and trends.

This paper aims to describe the transdisciplinary, multiphase, mixed methods, generative design research, participatory planning and social design activities developed and implemented by the West Virginia University Rural Tourism Design Team and associated outcomes.

The multiphase methodology included quantitative and qualitative research in initial stages of the study (key informant interviews, resident attitudes toward tourism survey, visitor preferences survey, economic impact analysis) which informed social design activities at latter stages (asset mapping, landscape design/visualization of opportunities and sites targeted for development and cultural identity design) using generative design tools facilitating co-design with the communities and helping the destination take sequential steps toward achieving their goals and objectives.

Opportunities and challenges identified through multiple methods were triangulated and pointed to the same conclusions including the need for long term planning and managed growth; protecting community values; underutilized natural, cultural and historic assets; the opportunity to develop nature-based, cultural and historical attractions; and the need for a common vision and collective identity.

This study makes a unique contribution to literature on sustainable tourism planning by incorporating social design activities to visualize findings of more traditional planning methods and provide tangible, visible outcomes of planning activities which can guide local stakeholders in rural destinations more directly to funding for planning recommendations and project implementation.

The transdisciplinary and social/generative/participatory approach provided a scaffolding of outputs to the community with citizen control and active involvement throughout the planning and design process. The incorporation of social design provided tangible outcomes including site designs and a cultural identity. Generative design research gives people a language with which they can imagine and express their ideas and dreams for future experiences.

This paper investigates the role of social design in a transdisciplinary, multiphase project to support sustainable tourism planning.

Independent travelers are those vacationers who have booked only a minimum of their transportation and accommodation arrangements prior to departure on the vacation. Independent travel is an important and growing sector of worldwide tourism. Choice of vacation itinerary for the independent vacation represents a complex series of decisions regarding purchase of multiple leisure and tourism services. This chapter builds and tests a model of independent traveler decision-making for choice of vacation itinerary. The research undertaken employs a two-phase, inductive–deductive case study design. In the deductive phase, the researcher interviewed 20 travel parties vacationing in New Zealand for the first time. The researcher interviewed respondents at both the beginning and the end of their New Zealand vacations. The study compares pre-vacation research and plans, and actual vacation behaviors, on a case-by-case basis. The study examines case study narratives and quantitative measures of crucial variables. The study tests two competing models of independent traveler decision-making, using a pattern-matching procedure. This embedded research design results in high multi-source, multi-method validity for the supported model. The model of the Independent Vacation as Evolving Itinerary suggests that much of the vacation itinerary experienced in independent travel is indeed unplanned, and that a desire to experience the unplanned is a key hedonic motive for independent travel. Rather than following a fixed itinerary, the itinerary of an independent vacation evolves as the vacation proceeds. The independent traveler takes advantage of serendipitous opportunities to experience a number of locations, attractions and activities that they had neither actively researched nor planned.

The librarian and researcher have to be able to uncover specific articles in their areas of interest. This Bibliography is designed to help. Volume IV, like Volume III, contains features to help the reader to retrieve relevant literature from MCB University Press' considerable output. Each entry within has been indexed according to author(s) and the Fifth Edition of the SCIMP/SCAMP Thesaurus. The latter thus provides a full subject index to facilitate rapid retrieval. Each article or book is assigned its own unique number and this is used in both the subject and author index. This Volume indexes 29 journals indicating the depth, coverage and expansion of MCB's portfolio.

The purpose of this paper is to provide a review of literatures and previous studies on the relationship between strategic planning and performance and propose conceptual designs and hypotheses using multidimensional constructs to advance the understanding of this relationship, contribute to existing debates in the extant literature and make recommendations.

A semi-systematic literature and previous studies (studied by various groups of researchers within diverse disciplines) review approach has been used in this paper to contribute to the debate on whether strategic planning affects performance and how. Using more recent knowledge about the strategic planning concept, the semi-systematic review looked at how research within strategic planning has progressed over the past five decades and its relationship with performance.

In the past, the strategic planning performance relationship has been treated as a black box and this paper proposes that the conceptualisation of a number of constructs and the inclusion of strategy implementation will help converting the black box into a white box. To strengthen support for the debate regarding the relationship between strategic planning and performance this paper proposes a further conceptual/operational design, mathematical expressions and hypotheses to be tested empirically in further studies. The proposal provides a conceptualisation of the major constructs (strategy development; strategy implementation; and performance), and the use of strategy implementation as a mediator and/or as a moderator in the planning performance relationship.

This study is limited due to fact that the findings have not been tested empirically, it is not a cross-sectional and/or a longitudinal research and only a limited number of dimensions of strategy development and strategy implementation have been used. In addition, the approach used is a semi-systematic review followed by quantitative thinking, which, in turn, typically assumes the relevance of and a warrant mainly from a positivist epistemology.

The proposed design developed in this paper ensures that core issues in planning performance relationships research are addressed. Furthermore, the inclusion of strategy implementation in planning performance relationship studies means that the whole chain of activities in the strategy process is being considered, drawing a complete and comprehensive conclusion on how strategic planning affects an organisation’s performance. In addition, by separating strategy implementation and by not combining it with formulation/formation activities will theoretically and analytically help to evaluate the importance or role of each stage of the strategy process. Moreover, the conceptualisation and operationalisation of the key concepts as multidimensional constructs contribute to past research gaps. Finally, this paper provides some clarity to many contradictory findings concerning the strategic planning and performance relationship.

This paper aims to clarify whether J. Walter Thompson (JWT)’s planning and research tradition gave rise to the concept of Account Planning. In addition, it seeks to analyse the different planning methodologies that preceded Account Planning to highlight how it emerged at JWT London. A further goal is to understand the impact of Account Planning, which sought to achieve effective advertising through detailed consumer insight and has transformed the multinational JWT as a whole and the advertising sector in general.

The methodology is based mainly on the analysis of primary research conducted on original files donated to Duke University Library (North Carolina, USA) by the multinational J. Walter Thompson.

Account Planning emerged in 1968 in London as a consequence of the research and planning tradition that already existed at JWT. JWT’s corporate culture established the importance of the Account Planning approach that was valued by advertisers and spread to all offices. The planning tools used by the multinational today are updated versions of those that were designed from 1960 onwards.

The historical approach taken here precludes an analysis of the current reality of Account Planning. In future research, it would be useful to carry out in-depth interviews with professionals to explore how they apply planning tools that represent updated versions of those that were developed 50 years ago.

This paper’s main interest lies in the fact that it is based on original, unpublished sources, an approach that makes it possible to reassess previous findings.

Business plan writing seems the panacea to gain stakeholder legitimacy and financial backing. Our chapter explores the contributions and disconnections between business plan writing and the start-up process for incubated technology entrepreneurs. The study is set in the South East Enterprise Platform Programme (SEEPP), an incubator programme for technology graduate entrepreneurs in the South East of Ireland. Using a purposive sample of technology entrepreneurs in start-up mode, we took a qualitative approach consisting of content analysis of 40 business plans and in-depth interviews with 25 technology entrepreneurs. Our research found that writing a detailed business plan constrains the technology entrepreneur’s natural penchant for action, compelling them to focus on business plan writing rather than enactment. Technology entrepreneurs favour a market-led rather than funding-led operational level document to plan, and learn from, near-term activities using milestones.

The purpose of this paper is to test a predictive model for organizational factors on the extent to which organizations involved in non‐governmental organizations (NGO) or bilateral partnerships conduct campaign planning research.

In‐depth interviews with 120 heads of organizations running AIDS campaigns in Uganda were conducted. The interviewers queried the participants regarding characteristics of their organization and the extent to which they conducted campaign planning research during their last campaign. The information was assigned to quantitative categories, so that the predictive model could be tested using path modeling software.

The results of the path analysis indicated that the model fits the data well. An emergent finding from the path analysis involved the relationship between the number of trained staff workers and the tendency to solicit outreach worker feedback. Organizations with a greater number of trained staff workers sought outreach worker feedback to a greater extent during the campaign. The model also clarified that none of the tested variables predicted the organization's frequency of pretesting campaign messages.

Limitations of the current study include its single‐issue and single‐country focus. Organizational factors were excluded in this study that may be relevant and should be considered in future research (e.g. size of the organization, management style, public versus private). The factors included in this study, however, are commonly studied characteristics of organizations. Regardless of location, organizations differ in terms of financial resources, formalization, and focus, and engage in formative research to varying extents. Research is also an important part of the campaign process, regardless of the issue or organization type.

NGOs that involve community outreach workers for assistance in crafting campaign messages and test early messaging strategies with audience members are likely to see improved campaign effectiveness and improved cultural competencies.

By identifying the characteristics of local organizations that may facilitate formative research activities, this study makes a significant contribution to the literature on HIV/AIDs and health communication campaigns. As the context surrounding HIV/AIDS campaigns continues to evolve, NGOs and bi‐lateral organizations are in continued demand to develop new and more effective campaign messages to address emerging issues.

In the last four years, since Volume I of this Bibliography first appeared, there has been an explosion of literature in all the main functional areas of business. This wealth of material poses problems for the researcher in management studies — and, of course, for the librarian: uncovering what has been written in any one area is not an easy task. This volume aims to help the librarian and the researcher overcome some of the immediate problems of identification of material. It is an annotated bibliography of management, drawing on the wide variety of literature produced by MCB University Press. Over the last four years, MCB University Press has produced an extensive range of books and serial publications covering most of the established and many of the developing areas of management. This volume, in conjunction with Volume I, provides a guide to all the material published so far.