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The reforms that have been promoted in public organisations in developed countries since the 1970s are said to impose changes in professional bureaucracies by promoting self-governance and institutional autonomy and by challenging professionals’ status and their values and standards. Taking the specific case of Portugal, this paper intends to contribute to understanding to what extent professional bureaucracies, like hospitals and Higher Education Institutions (HEIs), have been affected by changes in state policies and how the professionals involved have responded to these organisational changes. Based on an empirical qualitative study the paper concludes that there are significant differences in the way the state changed the regulatory framework and the professional archetypes in hospitals and HEIs and that professionals give heterogeneous responses to these changes.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the way gender may be used as an instrument to avoid New Public Management (NPM) potential processes of deprofessionalisation in nursing.

In total, 83 nurses with managerial duties were interviewed in autonomous and corporate public hospitals in Portugal.

Nurses used gender as an argument to legitimate their presence in management, and in this way, to keep their control over the profession. Gender stereotypes were used to legitimate their position in two different ways. Firstly, nurses reproduced and reinforced gendered inequality by supporting their male colleagues careers. Secondly, they valorised their feminine skills sustaining that women were in better position to manage hospitals as an extended role from the private domain.

The paper uses a sample from only one country and care must be taken when extrapolating conclusions to the wider population.

Acknowledges the way NPM reinforces gender stereotypes and contributes to redefine professionalism.

Recognition of the complexity and diversity of gender issues in the organisational context and in the structuration of professional legitimacy.

The purpose of this paper is to conduct a systematic literature review (SLR) to identify the main firm-level performance indicators and group them in dimensions that support decision-making in the wine industry.

To achieve this goal, an SLR approach was conducted in the Scopus database from 2009 to 2019. From a set of 607 articles, only 25 studies related to firm-level performance indicators were considered and, following an inductive thematic analysis and an interpretative synthesis, separated into different specific foci that include social, economic and environmental dimensions.

There is a limited number of papers identifying indicators regarding the firm-level performance of wine firms, and even fewer studies including indicators on an integrated approach to measure the different dimensions of firm performance. This paper documents that economic and environmental indicators cover 78.2% of all SLR indicators analyzed. As this group of indicators is limited to a set of sub-dimensions, this paper found that several groups of indicators are misrepresented, such as product portfolio or certifications related to marketing activities and indicators covering purchasing and supply chain activities, which play a crucial role in the competitiveness of the wine industry.

For practitioners, it discloses the most pertinent indicators they need to improve to craft their business strategies. This framework is of added value for policymakers to customize their support programs for specific producers to develop their competitive strategies. It could be deployed in teaching programs as a tool to address the importance of aligning different types of indicators to achieve firm-level performance in the wine industry.

This study contributes to the literature identifying a framework of analysis that includes indicators of four dimensions, namely, economic, social, territorial and environmental. This framework aims to relate performance measures to corporate strategy as a management control tool. The framework intends to improve the fit between firms’ activities and their competitive context and to be flexibly adapted to various products/firms in the wine industry.

Multichannel (MC) service providers have been adopting a wide diversity of front-office service delivery models, i.e. different ways of employing channels to support the delivery of the service activities that involve customer interaction. Despite this, we are still faced with a paucity of concepts to understand the myriad of possible choices. The purpose of this paper is to develop a theoretical framework and basic design architectures to provide a structured understanding of the diversity of operational design choices for MC front-office service delivery models, their efficacy implications, and how they fit with the provider’s service strategy.

The study employs the analytical conceptual approach. The authors logically develop the architectures based on the operations management theory and provide corresponding empirical illustrations based on secondary sources, direct observation, and case studies.

The authors propose two theoretically meaningful dimensions to characterize and distinguish between delivery models (channel redundancy and channel span) and put forward four anchor architectures for such models: generalist, parallel, constricted, and centralized. The authors identify the operational efficacy implications (effectiveness and efficiency) of the different architectures, and develop a set of propositions and design principles for selecting appropriate architectures.

Future research should develop empirical measures for the dimensions underlying the architectures.

The study extends existing service process classifications by capturing the MC traits of front-office processes. The authors offer design principles to assist firms in selecting architectures that are aligned with their service strategy. The framework and architectures provide seminal concepts to support a wealth of future empirical studies.

This chapter aims to reconstruct the trajectory of comparative education in Brazil using the timeline concept to identify structural elements in the emergence and reconfiguration of this field of study. The timeline historical perspective allows us to use two additional features: (a) the reconstruction of the scenario in which emerge the intellectual productions; and simultaneously (b) identify how themes, issues, and research objects appears, whether in a homogeneous association or not. These elements allow us to associate comparative and historical methods to recognize the supranational and supraregional influence, determining the configuration of what is meant by comparative education in Brazil. The text distinguishes seven different moments for the Brazilian comparative educational area, which are: (1) the study of the structure and functioning of European and North American systems education; (2) the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization’s (UNESCO) pioneering influence on the production of annuals; (3) the prioritization of educational practices; (4) the influence of supranational relations; (5) the focus on educational public policies; (6) new cycle of supranational influence; and (7) (re)definition of the theoretical, methodological, and epistemological anchorage of comparative education. In the last quarter century, it can be said that there is a resurgence of Comparative Education in Brazil and the region, which may be associated with strong historical influences, here reconstructed by periodization.

The primary objective of this study is to explore the nuanced interplay of conspicuous consumption, ethical label purchasing and the ensuing dynamics of civic virtue and cynicism within the luxury foodservice context.

Grounded in a theoretical understanding of solidarity within the context of product consumption, this research employs a two-pronged approach involving secondary data analysis and scenario-based experimental studies. The initial phase involves analyzing firm-level data from the Euromonitor database in 2019 and 2021. The main study employs a between-subjects experimental design with a cohort of 316 participants sourced from an online panel.

The results reveal a consistent pattern in the consumption of luxury foodservice and underscore a distinct upward trajectory in consumer demand for ethically labeled food. Notably, these findings underscore the moderating role of ethical label purchasing in the relationship between conspicuous consumption and consumers civic virtue. Additionally, ethical label purchasing moderates the impact of conspicuous consumption on consumer cynicism, both directly and indirectly through emotional solidarity related to both communal and equitable principles.

This study holds significance for both luxury food service researchers and market design practitioners. It provides valuable insights into how ethical labeling interacts with consumers conspicuous consumption, all facilitated by emotional solidarity.

The development of information technologies has led to a considerable transformation in human resource management from conventional or commonly known as personnel management to modern one. Data mining technology, which has been widely used in several applications, including those that function on the web, includes clustering algorithms as a key component. Web intelligence is a recent academic field that calls for sophisticated analytics and machine learning techniques to facilitate information discovery, particularly on the web. Human resource data gathered from the web are typically enormous, highly complex, dynamic, and unstructured. Traditional clustering methods need to be upgraded because they are ineffective. Standard clustering algorithms are enhanced and expanded with optimization capabilities to address this difficulty by swarm intelligence, a subset of nature-inspired computing. We collect the initial raw human resource data and preprocess the data wherein data cleaning, data normalization, and data integration takes place. The proposed K-C-means-data driven cuckoo bat optimization algorithm (KCM-DCBOA) is used for clustering of the human resource data. The feature extraction is done using principal component analysis (PCA) and the classification of human resource data is done using support vector machine (SVM). Other approaches from the literature were contrasted with the suggested approach. According to the experimental findings, the suggested technique has extremely promising features in terms of the quality of clustering and execution time.

This study aims to analyse the major geographical dimensions of the location strategies of multinational tourism firms.

Conceptually, this paper is situated at the intersection of two distinct and evolving bodies of research literature on the global geographies of the tourism industry and the production of economic globalization from a set of strategic locations. Empirically, principal component analysis is applied to explore the main geographical configurations within a location matrix of 102 tourism firms across 547 cities.

The results identify strong geographical organizing patterns in the location strategies of multinational tourism firms, above all articulated in countries/regions that themselves have large domestic and/or international tourism markets. However, there is also a global component in terms of firm/location composition, while the national/regional components are hybrid and porous in practice.

This study contributes to a new way of looking at a globalizing tourism sector. The findings can be used to reflect on possible wider implications for the tourism geographies literature and reveal some avenues for further research.

跨国旅游公司的地理位置和选址：全球化战略

本研究旨在分析跨国旅游企业区位战略的主要地理维度。

在理论研究层面, 本文基于两个截然不同和不断发展的研究交叉点: (1)全球经济地理中的旅游产业研究; (2)战略区位选择上的经济全球化研究。在实证研究层面, 本文将主成分分析法应用于547个城市的102家旅游企业的区位矩阵研究中。

研究结果显示, 跨国旅游企业的区位选择具有很强的地理规律, 这点在本身拥有庞大国内和/或国际旅游市场的国家/地区内尤为明显。此外, 跨国旅游企业/地点的区位组成也具有明显的全球属性, 在单个国家/区域内的表现则很多元化, 有很大的不同。

这项研究有助于以新的视角来看待全球化的旅游产业。本文的研究成果可以用来反思旅游地理文献可能存在的更广泛的意义, 并探讨进一步的研究可能。

La geografía y la localización de selección de las empresas multinacionales de turismo: estrategias Para la globalización

Este estudio tiene como objetivo analizar las principales dimensiones geográficas de las estrategias de localización de las empresas multinacionales de turismo.

Conceptualmente, este documento se sitúa en la intersección de dos bibliografías de investigación distintas y en evolución: (1) sobre las geografías globales de la industria del turismo y (2) sobre la producción de la globalización económica desde un conjunto de ubicaciones estratégicas. Empíricamente, el análisis de componentes principales se aplica para explorar las principales configuraciones geográficas dentro de una matriz de ubicación de 102 empresas de turismo en 547 ciudades.

Los resultados identifican fuertes ordenamientos geográficos en estas estrategias de ubicación, sobre todo articuladas en países/regiones que a su vez tienen grandes mercados turísticos nacionales y/o internacionales. Sin embargo, también hay un componente global en términos de composición empresa/ubicación, mientras que los componentes nacionales/regionales son en la práctica híbridos y porosos.

Este estudio contribuye a una nueva forma de ver un sector turístico en globalización. Los resultados se pueden utilizar para reflexionar sobre posibles implicaciones más amplias para la literatura sobre geografías turísticas y discutir algunas vías para futuras investigaciones.