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The purpose of this paper is to explore the impact of a particular low marginal-cost employee benefit on employees’ intended retention and performance. By utilizing a unique data set constructed by surveying full-time faculty and staff members at a public university in the USA, the authors study the impact of this employee benefit on faculty and staff performance and retention.

The authors focus on the impact of reduction in dependent college tuition at various levels on employees’ intentions to work harder and stay at their current job by using both OLS and ordered probit models. The authors also simulate the direct opportunity cost (reduction in revenue) in dollars and as a percent of total budgeted revenue to facilitate administrative decision making.

The results provide evidence that for institutions where employee retention and productivity are a priority, maximizing or offering dependent college tuition waiver may be a relatively low-cost benefit to increase retention and productivity. In addition, the amount of the tuition waiver, number of dependents and annual salary are statistically significant predictors of intended increased productivity and intent to stay employed at the current institution.

Employee retention and productivity is a challenge for all organizations. Although pay, benefits and organizational culture tend to be key indicators of job satisfaction, little attention is given to specific types of benefits. This study is the first comprehensive attempt to explore the relationship between the impact of this low-cost employee benefit and employee performance and retention in a higher education institution in the USA.

The faculty, as higher education's most valuable asset, is being dramatically altered. Changes in appointment status drive this alteration, resulting in the essential work of faculty being transformed. Given this change in faculty composition, this study seeks to examine how faculty appointments relate to the production of faculty work in teaching, research, and service. Faculty appointments affect faculty work and it implies that the function of higher education also is altered. The purpose of this paper is to examine the impact of the rise of contingent faculty on the professoriate and higher education.

The National Study of Postsecondary Faculty of 2004 provided data for analyses. There were faculty and instructional staff participants (26,110) from a sample of 980 institutions in the USA and the District of Columbia. The National Center for Education Statistics provides access to its Data Analysis System (DAS) for public use. Basic calculations can result in straight counts, percentages, means, correlation coefficients, and tables. Complex analytic capabilities include covariance using both weighted least squares regression and logistic regression. The DAS was used to examine how changes in faculty composition were related to teaching, research, and service.

Overall, the results indicate that tenured and tenure‐track faculty out‐perform contingent faculty on all major items of teaching, research, and service. With few exceptions, contingent faculty can be viewed as less productive faculty members within the historical function of higher education to promote inquiry and advance the sum of human knowledge, provide general instruction to the students, and develop experts for various branches of the public. If faculty are the heart and health of colleges and universities, the future of higher education may be bleak if the reliance on contingent faculty continues to soar.

The gap between performance levels of tenure/tenure‐track and contingent faculty in teaching, research, and service indicates the quality of higher education is rapidly eroding. This study indicated that the contributions to promoting inquiry and advancing the sum of human knowledge are diminished with increasing use of contingent faculty. It suggests that not only is the work of faculty threatened by a contingent faculty approach but the well‐being of higher education is threatened also.

Overall, tenured and tenure‐track faculty out‐performed other types of faculty appointments according to essential values of faculty – teaching research, and service. Faculty appointments play a significant role in the overall performance of higher education. The function of higher education cannot help but be affected. Society relies on higher education for not only career training but an educated citizenry. If left to contract and part‐time help, it raises concern for the overall well being of society.

Although there is literature discussing concerns about the influx of contingent faculty, there is little, if any, empirical evidence of its impact on the professoriate and its relationship to the overall health and well being of higher education. This study suggests that the traditional framework of faculty work – teaching, research, and service – is being dramatically altered.

Customer engagement is of critical interest to both academics and practitioners. Extant literature focusses primarily on customer engagement with a single focal object, usually brands; this study takes another view to consider customer engagement with multiple focal objects (service provider and context). In addition to testing the relationship of the individual dimensions of engagement with the service provider and engagement with the context, this research elaborates on their drivers, with a particular focus on distinct engagement platforms. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

A survey captures customer engagement with a service provider and a context in a higher education setting, with 251 responses collected across first- and third-year marketing courses in an Australian, mid-sized university.

Engagement with the service provider can drive engagement with the context. In turn, engagement with the service provider can be stimulated through the use of engagement platforms that enable customer-to-service provider interactions. The results show limited effects of customer-to-customer engagement platforms on engagement with the context though. The results are consistent across gender and student grade levels; some differences arise between international and domestic students.

This unique study broadens understanding of customer engagement with various focal objects and also details the flow of effects, from engagement with a service provider to engagement with the context. This research builds on conceptual discussions of engagement platforms and empirically examines their ability to facilitate affective, cognitive and behavioural engagement.

The empirical record of cyberattacks features much computer crime, espionage and hacktivism, but none of the major damage feared in prevalent threat narratives. The purpose of this article is to explain the absence of serious adverse consequences to date and the durability of this trend.

This paper combines concepts from international relations theory and new institutional economics to understand cyberspace as a complex global institution with contracts embodied in both software code and human practice. Constitutive inefficiencies (market and regulatory failure) and incomplete contracts (generative features and unintended flaws) create the vulnerabilities that hackers exploit. Cyber conflict is a form of cheating within the rules, rather than an anarchic struggle, more like an intelligence-counterintelligence contest than traditional war.

Cyber conflict is restrained by the collective sociotechnical constitution of cyberspace, where actors must cooperate to compete. Maintenance of common protocols and open access is a condition for the possibility of attack, and successful deceptive exploitation of these connections becomes more difficult in politically sensitive situations as defense and deterrence become more feasible. The distribution of cyber conflict is, thus, bounded vertically in severity but unbounded horizontally in the potential for creative exploitation.

Cyber conflict can be understood with familiar political economic concepts applied in fresh ways. This application provides counterintuitive insights at odds with prevalent threat narratives about the likelihood and magnitude of cyber conflict. It also highlights the important advantages of strong states over the weaker non-state actors widely thought to be empowered by cyberspace.

Several paradoxes have been presented in the literature as inherent in supervision of doctoral students. The purpose of this paper is to explore these paradoxes and offer the concept of praxis as a way of effectively engaging with complex and paradoxical dimensions of supervision, rather than denying or avoiding them.

Drawing on sometimes provocative offerings of others, and the seminal work of Grant, views are presented that problematise supervision, challenging its representation as something to be transparently understood, planned and managed. Sophisticated theories of supervision have been offered in literature to hold its inherent paradoxes while opening up its practice for inquiry. It is suggested that supervision is usefully understood as the development of praxis: challenging supervisor and student to understand their practice journey as one of interwoven, often tacit, dimensions of knowing, doing, being and becoming (that are personally and therefore distinctively resolved.

Generative metaphors drawn from other complex domains of human experience suggest useful ways of engaging with the intensity, individuality and murkiness of supervision. Such metaphors draw attention to the identities and authorities that are in play and offer markers that can be identified even through the fog.

Voice work is explored as a metaphor for supervision, suggesting reflective practices that ask supervisor and candidate to pay deep attention to the sounds of their voices as well as to the nuances of the dialogue they create together.

The EXTENT TO WHICH SURFACE ACTIVITY IS important in lubrication has been assessed differently at various times by research workers. At one time the “oiliness” of a lubricant was attributed by physical chemists to the adsorption of polar molecules on the surfaces undergoing lubrication. Recent workers have tended to discount the importance of such physical adsorption and to stress the existence of chemical reactions which lead to products having a beneficial effect and to which lubrication activity is attributable. It is therefore of some interest to consider what is the present viewpoint, taking as a source of information the series of extremely interesting papers presented in London during the week beginning on the 8th April, 1957.

Aarhus Kommunes Biblioteker (Teknisk Bibliotek), Ingerslevs Plads 7, Aarhus, Denmark. Representative: V. NEDERGAARD PEDERSEN (Librarian).

This study aims to investigate the influence of customer satisfaction on four facets of customer engagement: customer influencer behavior, knowledge behavior, referral behavior and purchase behavior. Furthermore, its (in)direct influence on affective attitude, price perception and loyalty is investigated.

Two studies were conducted. First, an experimental scenario design was set up to investigate the hypothesized relations between customer engagement; customers’ affective attitude and their loyalty; and their price perceptions. Second, a survey at a national forest park center helped to secure external validity.

The results indicate that engaged customers develop a more positive affective attitude, which leads to increased future loyalty and positive price perceptions. In addition, the results suggest that assessing cognitive approaches exclusively is not sufficient for understanding customers’ price perceptions.

Future research should investigate antecedents of customer engagement behaviors (CEBs) other than satisfaction, and extend this research by taking into account further mediators that might be cognitive rather than affective.

The results are of superior importance for services or tourism destinations. Fostering CEB can help in improving a destinations’ performance.

This research expands the current state of literature by investigating several dimensions of CEB at one time, as well as by examining customers’ affective attitude toward the organization as a potential mediator, extending previous research approaches.

Few scholars become notable figures in their areas of specialization. Understanding how and why some scholars are identified by their unusual accomplishments, therefore, can be difficult, especially when some scholars achieve more notable careers and are invisible in their professions than others, more recognized colleagues. The reasons for some scholars’ visibility and their colleagues’ invisibility may be unclear or ambiguous. One common reason for invisibility is being a woman in a patriarchal discipline. Men’s ideas, values, and careers are privileged and more highly rated in a patriarchal subject like sociology.

Here, I analyze case studies of invisibility that emerge from deliberate suppression but focus on the more hidden processes of making women invisible in sociology. These less overt processes of invisibility require different theories, networks, and methods to discover the women’s notable careers than those used in examples of more overt processes.

Making invisible women visible requires multiple processes, over time, by a number of professionals and gatekeepers.