Search results

Despite the need for such, little scholarly attention has been paid to transdisciplinary enquiry into gender inequities in workplaces. The authors provide a pragmatic evaluation of the transdisciplinary research (TDR) model by Hall et al. (2012) for framing the study of this societal issue, shedding light on the challenges, principles and values that could usefully inform subsequent TDR in organisational settings.

This paper evaluates the model in relation to TDR on gender inequities in New Zealand's public service by Hall et al. (2012) Content analysis on our reflective narratives from research team meetings, email exchanges, informal discussions and a workshop reveals TDR study insights. Findings show support for the model and its four broad phases and surface principles and values for applied TDR enquiry that addresses societal challenges in the organisational context.

The adoption of a TDR model to examine a study of equity in the public service revealed practical and conceptual challenges, encouraging ongoing reflection and adaptive behaviour on the researchers' part. The pragmatic evaluation also highlighted environmental constraints on undertaking TDR, with implications for the ambition of future studies.

This evaluative enquiry encourages similar research in other organisational and national settings to validate the use of TDR to gain insightful, contextualised understandings of social challenges centred in the organisational setting.

This pragmatic evaluation of a TDR model's capacity to approximate the approach and phases of our applied enquiry lays the groundwork to refining TDR approaches used in subsequent studies aimed at addressing societal issues in the organisational setting.

This paper can potentially promote greater collaboration between research scholars and other stakeholders wanting to develop TDR paradigms and applied enquiry that can meaningfully inform workplace and societal impacts.

This pragmatic evaluation of a TDR approach involves its initial application to the study of equity at work and develops principles and values that could inform TDR paradigms and methodologies of subsequent enquiries in the field.

The relationship between customer loyalty and satisfaction, profitability and customer retention is described within the framework of relationship marketing. The importance of loyal customers and their impact on business profitability is undisputed, but it is more difficult to build customer retention than it may appear. Various strategies including loyalty schemes and discount cards are sometimes used in an effort to retain customers, but their success is questionable. A New Zealand hotel case study is presented which describes customer reactions to a discount card promotion. It was found that customers who purchased the card exhibited the characteristics of Morgan’s “mercenaries”. Although they had high satisfaction, their commitment to the company was low. However, in order to succeed, loyalty programmes need to develop “loyalists”, customers who have high satisfaction, high loyalty and who will stay and be supportive of the company.

Those promoting tourism often seek to highlight that which is unique about their destinations in order to attract tourists. Many countries have beautiful landscapes, rich histories and heritage, and the tourist may come to see linkages of landscape and history across different countries and indeed possibly across continents. However, in the search for the unique, those countries with ethnic minority or other minority groups demarcated by factors other than ethnicity but characterised by special belief systems or ways of life living within their borders (e.g. the Amish) are truly able to offer the tourist a glimpse of something that will not be found in other parts of the world. Accordingly, and being aware that holiday makers are not lay anthropologists and may be seeking little more than an entertainment, minorities and their culture have become in many places a staged show based primarily on song and dance. Indeed, such has been the process that Xie (2011, p. 196) provides an example from the island of Hainan, China, where tourism promoters have created ‘the authentic Chiyou tribe’ to entertain tourists – a tribe developed purely for entertainment based on concepts of the exotic and primitive and only loosely based on the culture of the native Li people. One partial result described by Xie (2011) has been that the Li themselves have become confused as to their own culture.

Three new titles have been added to the Unilever Topics series of leaflets:

The Travel and Tourism Research Association‐Canada Chapter held its 27th annual conference in Niagara Falls, Canada, from 14‐16 October 2001, with the theme of optimizing destination development. This paper is a summary of the presentations and workshops. Aside from a research case study of the Niagara region, two keynote addresses and a final plenary session, the conference dealt with six sub‐themes: the environmental and human sides of optimization, innovations in destination development and marketing, challenges associated with them and, finally, the relationship between food, wine and tourism. Two workshops were held on the effective use of online surveys and on the process of developing a tourism optimization management model (TOMM), using Niagara Falls and knowledge gained from the research case study as a basis for building it.

Life studies are a rich source for further research on the role of the Afro‐American woman in society. They are especially useful to gain a better understanding of the Afro‐American experience and to show the joys, sorrows, needs, and ideals of the Afro‐American woman as she struggles from day to day.

For students who are blind or visually impaired, technology enables greater access to the educational curriculum, immediate and independent access to information, and full participation in community and citizenship. This chapter reviews research on technology use by students with visual impairments, and highlights effective practices, promising developments, and ongoing challenges. The authors discuss the implications of these advancements on policy, instruction, professional development, and future research.

This chapter presents a comparative analysis of the English, Northern Irish, Arab Israeli, Trinidad and Tobago and the US cases. The focus is what we have learned from the research about: the relationships within Education Governance Systems to navigate turbulence; building capacity for empowering senior-level leaders to deliver on their manifestos and outstanding track records for school improvement; reducing the achievement gap between dominant groups and marginalised groups in International Governance Systems. The chapter identifies that all cases require participatory multi-stakeholder action to develop and support collaborative networked learning communities in practice. Such communities of and for practice need to Empower Young Societal Innovators for Equity and Renewal (EYSIER). Policy and Education Governance Systems have the potential to synthesise the best of what has been said and done in the past, with innovative ways of working by empowering networks of knowledge building and advocacy. These networks co-create opportunities for action learners to work together to describe intersectionalities of discrimination and begin to remove fear of discrimination and marginalisation from Education Governance Systems. From this position, senior-level leaders can work with their leaders, teachers, parents and students to optimise how learning about the self, and learning how to learn improves community education for all students and EYSIER.

The COVID-19 pandemic significantly disrupted the lives of the deaf community, and the implementation of restrictions on face-to-face meetings resulted in the trial introduction of video remote interpreting (VRI) in a secure psychiatric setting. This study aims to use a qualitative research paradigm to explore user experiences to inform potential future technological developments in this area.

Twelve deaf patients and three interpreters took part in structured face-to-face interviews and discussed their experiences of the use of VRI, with the results being assessed using thematic analysis.

Seven main themes were identified: resource availability, ease of use, technical issues, misunderstandings, medium secure-specific issues, preferences and human factors. All participants agreed that they did not like the VRI technology in the health-care environment in its current format, and their main concern was the difficulty in understanding the information being communicated. It was considered that this had the potential to incur potentially serious medico-legal and safety implications for both staff and patients alike.

This study has provided detailed users’ feedback about the potential future use in this communication tool and can help guide service developers to review the technology design to tailor it towards the users’ needs. While the existing technology is not currently suitable for this deaf population, particularly because of the potential for error, there is potential scope for further research in this area.

The COVID-19 pandemic provided a unique opportunity to explore the potential use of VRI for a deaf patient population within a secure psychiatric setting, where such technology is unlikely to have otherwise been used.