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The purpose of this paper is to examine the level of the importance and implementation of the critical success factors (CSFs) required for the appropriate function of a quality management system (QMS) in ISO 9001:2008-certified companies and the differences between the CSFs and the demographic variables of the companies.

A research project was carried out in Greek companies from all business sectors using the questionnaire technique. The selected companies all implement a QMS in accordance with the ISO 9001:2008 standard. Correspondence analysis, a methodology from the multidimensional statistics field, was also used to identify significant differences between the importance and implementation levels of the CSFs of the QMS.

The importance that quality assurance managers attribute to these CSFs was high enough in most categories, but there was a significant difference in the implementation level, which displayed much lower scores. The most important factors seem to be management commitment, education, and communication, while the least important were the availability of data and use of statistics. Differences between categories of demographic variables were present only for the firm size variable.

The study was based on the perception (i.e. subjective data) of only one quality manager/representative of each company.

The paper provides information to certified companies in Greece on the differences in the importance and implementation levels of quality management practices (especially for hard factors) and motivation to investigate possible causes. Moreover, the most important factors for the successful implementation of ISO 9001 are presented.

This paper describes the implementation and given importance of the CSFs in companies with experience of the ISO 9001:2008 standard and for the analysis of the data a methodology from the multidimensional field is applied, with the complementary use of some special tables of coincidences.

For an enterprise striving to implement total quality management (TQM), customer satisfaction (CS) is an important objective to achieve. The success of CS is not only closely related to a company’s TQM performance but it also has permanent effects on the company’s future. However, many corporations still fail to implement CS due to lack of experience, or not being able to keep up with the continuous implementation of CS. This study takes a look at one large Taiwanese multi‐product manufacturing company with nine years of CS implementation experience. The implementation steps developed over nine years of CS implementation would be used as the foundation in building the CS implementation framework so that the possibility of actual performance failure would be minimized.

At present, in the increasingly global markets, one of the main challenges to international business is how to effectively manage human resources across cultural boundaries. In particular, high‐tech MNCs demand a specific pool of talented individuals with specific technical expertise and personal skills to be adapted to operate in an international arena. That is especially true in the case of China, which has attracted a significant variety of foreign investments from diverse countries and whose people management policies and managerial staff technical and personal skills are reported in some cases to be at a primary stage. The purpose of this paper is to explore the educational context development in China and its related influence on the recruitment and selection process in Western high‐tech MNCs in the People's Republic of China (PRC).

This is a research paper based on multiple case studies and direct face‐to‐face interviews.

China needs highly trained and highly educated individuals who can work in a dynamic domestic and global marketplace. Under the centrally planned system, the curricula in different universities are not associated to diversification in response to China changing economic needs and scenario. In most of the Chinese universities, many of the disciplines are very narrowly defined because these institutions are responsible for the job assignment of graduates. Despite the unprecedented growth of Chinese higher education thanks to the recent government reforms, the educational system in China still needs to be further restructured in its curricula to provide a sufficient number of qualified managers but however it will take time.

Nowadays, China needs highly trained and highly educated talents who can work in a domestic highly globalised marketplace. The underlying study will provide insight into those education related factors and their impact on the labour market in China with a specific focus on the search for appropriate technomanagement talents. The paper also provides insights into those educational factors, which produce satisfactory and less‐satisfactory results in recruitment of local talents in foreign technology companies. It also suggests the need for further research in the talent management area and education in PRC in relation to the current lack of data. Recommendations for the possible integration of appropriate educational projects aiming at developing highly talented individuals into those foreign corporations are provided.

Ever since the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award (MBNQA) was established in 1987, many other countries have developed their own version of a national quality award (NQA). These NQAs tend to follow the general framework of the MBNQA with different emphases on criteria items such as leadership, customer focus, resource management and impact on society. This paper is a comparative study of nine major national quality awards (three European, two North American, three Asia Pacific and one South American). It is instructive to note the differences in criteria item emphasis based on a country’s stage of economic development. Multinational companies may find it very useful when their overseas subsidiaries apply for the local NQA following the success of their home companies. Countries that have yet to develop an NQA stand to gain from the comparative information gathered.

The use of competitor analysis is a rapidly growing area of business activity, especially among major corporations, across the world. The old military stratagem “know your enemy; through knowing your enemy you can beat him/her”, has found new life in the contemporary business environment. Surveys carried out in Europe and the USA in 1989 found that two‐thirds of competitor analysis departments were less than three years old. Competitor analysis is becoming increasingly seen as a key component in strategy formulation, in particular, in forming marketing strategy.

The purpose of this paper is to provide an overview of how quantitative analysis methods have been and can be used to improve the competitiveness of tourism destination. The focus of the study is social network analysis (SNA).

The research methodology is qualitative and consists of the review literature relevant to this thesis. This methodology is necessary to give an account of the methods and the techniques adopted for the data collection used in other economic sectors.

SNA is needed to analyze the creation and configuration of communities of practice within destination and to identify possible barriers to effective interaction. Essentially, it is a complex adaptive socio-economic system. It shares many (if not all) of the characteristics usually associated with such entities, namely, non-linear relationships among the components, self-organization and emergence of organizational structures, robustness to external shocks.

The most important limit of this paper is that all the results presented here do not concern a single case study. Future research studies will provide a larger number of cases and examples to give the necessary validation to the findings presented here.

This paper provides a view into the network of relationships that may give tourism organization managers a strong leverage to improve the flow of information and to target opportunities where this flow may have the most impact on regulatory or business activities.

SNA can help to detect actual expertise and consequently project the potential losses deriving from an inefficient flow of knowledge. In addition, the authors will be able to define roles in the organizational networks and make an evaluation of informal organizational structures over the formal ones. Traditional organizational theories lack a concrete correspondence with mathematical studies and in this respect the authors sought to identify a correspondence.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the impact of customer satisfaction, service quality, the perceived value of services, corporate image and corporate reputation on customer loyalty and their relationship in the Turkish banking industry. Mediation effects of the perceived value and corporate image and reputation are also studied. Understanding the relationships between the determinants of customer loyalty toward the bank helps management to use corporate image and reputation more effectively in its strategy, thus enhancing the institution’s position in the minds of consumers.

A model is proposed to explore the relationships of service quality and customer satisfaction with a perceived value and their effect on transforming the corporate image and corporate reputation into the form of customer loyalty toward the bank. A survey is designed within this framework and SEM analysis is conducted in order to study the nature of relationships between variables of interest hypothesized to affect customer behavior and customer loyalty. Mediation tests for perceived value and corporate image and reputation are also conducted.

The findings of the survey indicate that corporate image and corporate reputation can be used as a common marketing benchmark to measure a bank’s performance. The results demonstrated that customers perceive quality and satisfaction effects loyalty through perceived value, image and reputation.

The study was conducted in Izmir, the third biggest city of Turkey. The sample is composed of regular customers, and the sample size is enough for the study but more studies are needed to generalize the results.

The results provide information to bank managers to effectively assist them to offer appropriate customer service levels sustaining satisfaction, quality and value to the customers within the transactions.

The paper studies the determinants of customer loyalty in the Turkish banking industry and considers the effects of corporate image and corporate reputation as measured by customer satisfaction, service quality and perceived value, on customer loyalty toward banks in Turkey. This model is not studied in bank marketing in Turkey and also in the banking literature.

Considers the factors which affect the success or failure of QCs. Analyses international QC experience through empirical literature reporting field results in various European, North American and Australasian countries. Summarizes a process aimed at identifying the main contingency factors likely to influence the QCs, since their smooth operation depends on a variety of economic, organizational and psychological contingency factors. Overall, the results suggest the predominance of external environmental and organizational factors over group or individual‐related factors. A final major trend points to the key importance of contingency factors at the pre‐introduction and introduction phases of QCs.

States that people management is one of the most crucial variables of corporate success. Provides an analysis of the orientation process, comparing Japan with the West. Investigates Japanese recruitment philosophy in relation to its effective and planned orientation management. Examines and illustrates the scheduling of Japanese orientation programmes. Posits that within this scenario, employee development is perceived under three distinct headings: becoming part of a team, becoming a company person and becoming trained in organizational expectations. Emphasis is put on inter‐relationships, requiring a shared understanding of the direction and values needed for effective business and individual performance. Communication, through orientation, is seen as an essential key to the integration and efficacy of new recruits and existing employees facing strategic change.

The need for internal audit to review the senior management control environment is stressed and the stages by which such a review should be organised and implemented are illustrated. It is argued that internal audit should examine the course the organisation′s senior management have set for it, should question its basic corporate reason for existing and competing, and should question the subordinate goals it has set for itself – this is regarded as truly “auditing the top”. However, in today′s environment, the likelihood of being able to conduct such a review in large organisations – where the need is probably greatest – is remote. Some of the reasons for this are explored.