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The purpose of this study is to explore the dynamic capabilities required of information technology (IT) entrepreneurs for facing globalized challenges.

Using a methodological approach that combines Q‐technique and questionnaire survey, the author collected 98 statements obtained from interviewing ten IT entrepreneurs. A total of 44 out of 98 critical statements were extracted as Q‐samples based on purposive sampling. Subsequently, 20 experts used Q‐technique in terms of the sample the 44 statements to generate a revised questionnaire to investigate 500 Taiwan IT‐based companies.

According to the responses of the 281 valid copies of questionnaire received, market‐oriented sensitivity, the ability to absorb knowledge, social‐networking capability, and the integrative ability to communicate and negotiate are the dynamic capabilities required of IT entrepreneurs.

As for the restrictions, the expansive nature of the IT industry prevented the author from addressing any specific sector of the industry, and no minimum capitalisation of IT companies was set for the sample‐collecting process.

The results can be used by IT entrepreneurs of SMEs in the self‐assessment of capabilities and the development of dynamic capabilities during their start‐up and growth phases. They can also be applied to nurturing successors and cultivating new entrepreneurs.

This study clarifies the intrinsic dynamic capabilities of IT entrepreneurs, and identifies the required components of such capabilities and their priorities. The results can be used in managerial decision‐making and personnel training, both of which help entrepreneurs in building competitive advantages.

Previous research has explored the impact of customer participation in organizational‐sponsored loyalty programs on customer loyalty; however, the findings are mixed. Other research, outside the loyalty program literature, reveals that customers who socially interact with other customers, via participation in brand communities, often exhibit an intense loyalty to the sponsoring brands. Proposes to investigate the following questions: “Can loyalty programs be differentiated based on whether or not members perceive a sense of community?”; and “Does a perception of a sense of community impact member loyalty to sponsoring organizations?”

Q‐technique factor analysis is utilized analyzing statements from loyalty program participants. Principal component factor and cluster analyses confirm a two‐tiered classification schema distinguishing loyalty programs based on perceptions of communal benefits. Differences between the two factors are explored. A survey developed from the Q‐sort analysis was then administered to 153 loyalty program participants, providing evidence that consumers are more loyal to communal programs.

Loyalty programs can be distinguished based on the sense of community which members perceive. Furthermore, consumers are more loyal to communal programs than to programs that simply use financial incentives. Communal programs elicit stronger emotional connections and participants are significantly less predisposed to competitor switching.

This study integrates the theory of sense of community into the marketing literature, also offering researchers a nine‐item, unidimensional scale to measure the construct within the context of loyalty programs. Confusion in the literature regarding the efficacy of loyalty programs is diminished by showing a positive relationship between loyalty and a member's perceptions of community.

This paper attempts to capture how self-initiated expatriates (SIEs) produce and reconstruct “self” and “place” through their own processes of expatriation and career development as mobility becomes a norm under present conditions of globalization. In so doing, the paper reexamines assumptions of previous expatriate adjustment scholarship by using phenomenon-driven problematization to critically reflect on underlying theoretical assumptions in the extant literature. Empirically, the paper is an exploratory attempt to understanding and offering fresh insights on the notion of expatriation itself under these present conditions.

Bougon's (1983) Self-Q technique was used to develop interview protocols uncovering cognitive maps of SIEs' “enacted environments” as an abstraction of their experiences, while also mapping their “enacted selves”. Analyzing social action with a cognitive map approach reveals the meanings of specific social territories, i.e. the enactment of SIEs' mobility environments (place) and their subjectivities (self).

The authors’ findings suggest that SIEs seem to be constituting and reconstituting their subjectivities and their sense of “place” by displacing the notion of “home”. This notion transforms and recedes as SIEs go about their lives abroad, allowing for the emergence of plural subjectivities, never fully formed but formulated and reformulated in social encounters.

This study contributes to the expatriation literature by focusing on processes through which SIEs construct their world through their mobility and overseas experiences. Observing expatriation processes as continuous cycles of creating and recreating “self” and “place” may reflect better how contemporary business practitioners engage in transnational activities. Management scholars should attend to how these processes enact social territories for a better understanding of expatriation as a global phenomenon.

This paper is based in part on Appendix B of Friedhelm Goronzy, “A Multivariate Analysis of Selected Variables of Manufacturing Business Enterprises”, Unpublished Dissertation, Louisiana State University, 1968. The writer acknowledges the support of this work through a dissertation‐year fellowship granted by the Graduate School of Louisiana State University. This research was supervised by Professor Herbert G. Hicks. Parts of this article were presented at the Numerical Taxomony Colloquium at the University of St. Andrews, St. Andrews, Fife, Scotland, September 1–4, 1968.

In 2010 a series of case studies were conducted in Prague, Czech Republic, examining the implementation and management of digital governance. These best practice case studies were chosen from among Prague's twenty-two administrative districts and through those findings this article discusses critical success factors and barriers to successful implementation of digital government initiatives. A qualitative review of both critical success factors and barriers is discussed at the individual, organizational, and strategic levels and the paper concludes by highlighting strategies managers can take to increase e-government performance. When considered together, the critical success factors, barriers to implementation, and key factors identified in the case studies further add to the growing literature of digital governance and performance management.

The results of a Q methodological study of professional understandings of the notion of risk in mental health services within the UK are discussed in relation to the relevance for staff training and quality assurance. The study attempted to access the diversity of understandings of risk issues amongst a multi‐professional group of staff (n = 60) attending inter‐agency risk training workshops in 1998. Q methodology is presented as both an appropriate means for such inquiry and as a novel experiential technique for training purposes. A tentative argument is advanced that the qualitative accounts generated by Q research could assist in systematic reviews of quality, complementing the singularly quantitative approaches typically represented in the audit process.

The LibQUAL+^TM instrument derives from the Gap Theory of Service Quality, and the SERVQUAL instrument. Grounded in the constructs of discrepancy theory, the SERVQUAL protocol itself, is anchored by a singular precept: through a series of 22 questions the SERVQUAL instrument undertakes to measure the delivery of service quality across the five dimensions: reliability, assurance, empathy, responsiveness, tangibles. It has been established as defining the service quality construct.

Undiscovered public knowledge is a relatively unstudied phenomenon, and the few extended examples that have been published are intradisciplinary. This paper presents the concept of ‘facet’ as an example of interdisciplinary undiscovered public knowledge. ‘Facets’ were central to the bibliographic classification theory of S.R. Ranganathan in India and to the behavioural research of L. Guttman in Israel. The term had the same meaning in both fields, and the concept was developed and exploited at about the same time in both, but two separate, unconnected literatures grew up around the term and its associated concepts. This paper examines the origins and parallel uses of the concept and the term in both fields as a case study of interdisciplinary knowledge that could have been, but was apparently not, discovered any time between the early 1950s and the present using simple, readily available information retrieval techniques.

Reviews and critically evaluates the practical application of Piercy and Morgan’s model of the dimensions of marketing planning. Appraises and elucidates analytical, behavioural and organizational dimensions of planning. In order to demonstrate the usefulness of the model and clarify the concepts, applies each of the dimensions of planning to a case study organization ‐ Company Q. Presents an adjusted form of the model and puts forward theoretical and practical implications. Develops a managerial agenda, presents application questions and suggests action points.

This paper shows that the current quality literature does not consider all factors that affect quality program implementations. Employee perceptions of quality differ across organizational levels. It is clear that these differing perceptions of quality affect the success of a quality program implementation. Therefore, we propose the use of Q methodology as an effective method for understanding the perceptions of those individuals who will be taking part in a quality program implementation as well as for identifying supplemental training needs. In addition, we give an actual example of how this method can be used in a quality program implementation. This research is important because it shows the need for pre‐implementation assessment within the company and a generalizable tool that readily accomplishes this task.