Search results

This study aims to investigate multilingual representation on public signs in the High City tourist destination in Abha, Saudi Arabia. It also reveals the linguistic strategies used in such representation.

This exploratory qualitative study used purposive sampling to analyze bottom-up public signs collected from the target tourist destination. A preliminary analysis was conducted for a more in-depth qualitative analysis of every sign. An Excel database was used to provide a general description and a preliminary reading of the strategies before using an in-depth analysis of every sign.

The study revealed that monolingualism (Arabic or English) and bilingualism (Arabic and English) represented the High City as a tourist destination where the signs served information and symbolic functions. No single multilingual sign was found. Certain linguistic strategies were used on the public signs, including politeness, transliteration, hybrid representation, personification and fragmentary. Some tourist-oriented strategies, such as the crisis communication strategy, are still missing.

These findings indicate that this tourist destination still targets local and regional visitors, and its linguistic landscape (LL) needs further consideration in terms of internationalization and targeting international visitors. This study implies that bilingual Arabic and English tourist destinations are potential domains for translation students and English language learners.

This study has focused on the LL of a newly established tourist destination in Saudi Arabia. It has shed light on the nuanced representations and strategies used through public signage. It contributes to understanding how linguistic elements can shape tourists’ perceptions and experiences.

This paper seeks to review some ontological issues in the creation and representation of strategic management and strategic management processes.

In this paper Whittington's celebrated four school model is taken as a representation of the variety of strategic management theories. First, a philosophy of action perspective is taken to evaluate representations of actions required by a corporate strategy. Second, the decision‐making processes represented by each school are reviewed from the perspective of decision deparadoxification using deconstructions derived from Anderson. Third, the paper looks at the representations of time implied by the four schools by examining the transformation from individual to collective action derived from Heidegger.

The paper finds that what appears to be schools of strategic management thought are no more than the selective attention of scholars upon one contingency reducing approach. Support for any strategic action in each of the four schools will only ever be particle and contingent. None of the four are capable of accommodating Heidegger's authentic relationship of present to future.

The paper shows that, taken together, these ontological insights bring into question the general principles of strategy processes. That is to say that they undermine the notion that an organisation can somehow know about its own range of possible futures, and then make decisions and actions in the present to bring about the most desirable state.

Developing an organisational, business, or corporate strategy is an important process which sets the direction and the scope for the business, over a period of time. While any organisation can create their own strategy, not all strategies are well executed and lead to business success. What is required is a process that provides a holistic understanding of an organisational strategy, and clear links between the elements of the strategy and the organisational processes that will be central to its execution. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

This paper describes three case studies of medium-sized organisations that were the research context in which the methodology for developing and representing Strategy-to-Process Maps was developed and iteratively refined.

Each of these three case organisations had identified a need to better understand their strategic objectives by a stronger visual representation of the components of their strategy, as well as a need to identify how their daily operational tasks contributed to, or distracted from, the achievement of their strategic goals. These cases assisted in the creation of a method of both facilitating better understanding of strategy through visualisation, and better execution through linking strategy to process. This methodology resulted in the employees of these organisations gaining a much stronger understanding of the strategic directions of the organisation and improved the three elements of effective strategy execution: visibility; leverage and responsiveness.

Strategy-to-Process Maps provide a new way in which organisations can communicate without reliance on any specific strategy development methodology; and can execute their strategy more effectively by linking it closely with organisational processes.

This article describes an updateable picture of manufacturing strategy content, called a “strategy chart”. It is based on established manufacturing and business strategy theory and is designed for use by managers in a wider strategy development process. Three cases are used to examine and improve methods for constructing a strategy chart; to explore the biases inherent in this representation of strategy; and to assess its utility. Preliminary conclusions are that charts present manufacturing strategy content more holistically than normally achieved and can make “strategy” a more understandable and communicable concept for manufacturing managers and workforce. The approach also provides useful insight into the development of a firm’s manufacturing strategy over time, providing the potential for managers to examine their strategy process and to learn from the past.

This paper aims to review the latest management developments across the globe and pinpoint practical implications from cutting-edge research and case studies.

This briefing is prepared by an independent writer who adds their own impartial comments and places the articles in context.

How do managers make sense of strategy? Good question but it is a pity that attempts to answer it tend to result in more queries than firm conclusions, not to mention a certain amount of residual bafflement. When more than a thousand managers were questioned at length, their comments subjected to learned scrutiny, and the results presented to them in a personalized summary of their representation of strategy, several of them said they felt at a loss in how to deal with the various issues examined in the study. Some said they were keen to pass on their questionnaire to consultants on the assumption that its contents would help them in their work.

The paper provides strategic insights and practical thinking that have influenced some of the world's leading organizations.

The briefing saves busy executives and researchers hours of reading time by selecting only the very best, most pertinent information and presenting it in a condensed and easy-to digest format.

This paper aims to examine union and non‐union consultation and representative arrangements at South West Water (SWW) over a ten‐year period, from 1992 to 2002.

The paper attempts to fill the gap in the current research by examining the processes leading from union derecognition, non‐union employee representation (NER), to recognition of union representation using SWW as an example.

The SWW experience suggests that any representative structures within firms need to have full support of the majority of employees and to have been seen as being organic to the workplace rather than an imposed arrangement by management. Without such a bottom‐up approach, the legitimacy and respect for such arrangements will diminish, creating obstacles for developing meaningful dialogue and trust between management, staff and unions. For unions, maintaining high membership density, while no guarantee of continuing recognition, creates an environment of strong union organisation and representation at workplace level.

As the experience at SWW has shown, where unions have been excluded from the workplace, maintaining a presence through the representation of individual employee interests and through colonisation of NER structures has been shown to pay dividends in the long run. However, a recognition agreement is not enough on its own to secure new members and unions need to be effective and relevant to the workforce.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the strategic integration of HRM practices with business/corporate strategy in the context of its applications and processes in two Japanese multinational companies in Malaysia.

The research used mixed‐methodology via case studies and questionnaire surveys. Overall 29 questionnaires, 15 from Company A and 14 from Company B were returned and analyzed for a response rate of 58 per cent. In addition, 15 respondents were interviewed, including Executive Director, Head of HR and line managers.

Analysis of questionnaire responses and interview findings shows strategic integration of HRM practices has been adopted by both organizations, though their approaches vary slightly. Importantly, the involvement of HR at board level, direct reporting of HR to the CEOs and the organization's supportive culture symbolize the integrative approach to HRM. Additionally, the findings indicate that although company strategies are in place, other factors such as business credibility of the HR manager and the level of commitment and support from CEOs and line management commitment are important determinants of strategic integration of HRM practices.

The influence of Japanese management practices which has similar characteristics of high performance work system (HPWS) and resource‐based view (RBV) approach that emphasizes participatory decision making and construe employees and HR function not as cost burdens but as sources of competitive advantage are important predictors of higher and effective strategic integration.

The paper provides some insights into approaches to strategic integration of HRM practices in two Japanese multinational companies in Malaysia.

Citation contexts have been found useful in many scenarios. However, existing context-based recommendations ignored the importance of diversity in reducing the redundant issues and thus cannot cover the broad range of user interests. To address this gap, the paper aims to propose a novelty task that can recommend a set of diverse citation contexts extracted from a list of citing articles. This will assist users in understanding how other scholars have cited an article and deciding which articles they should cite in their own writing.

This research combines three semantic distance algorithms and three diversification re-ranking algorithms for the diversifying recommendation based on the CiteSeer^X data set and then evaluates the generated citation context lists by applying a user case study on 30 articles.

Results show that a diversification strategy that combined “word2vec” and “Integer Linear Programming” leads to better reading experience for participants than other diversification strategies, such as CiteSeer^X using a list sorted by citation counts.

This diversifying recommendation task is valuable for developing better systems in information retrieval, automatic academic recommendations and summarization.

The originality of the research lies in the proposal of a novelty task that can recommend a diversification context list describing how other scholars cited an article, thereby making citing decisions easier. A novel mixed approach is explored to generate the most efficient diversifying strategy. Besides, rather than traditional information retrieval evaluation, a user evaluation framework is introduced to reflect user information needs more objectively.

The internationalisation of small‐ to medium‐sized enterprises (SMEs) is considered in the context of the overall configuration of strategy in these firms. This paper is based on in‐depth case studies of the internationalisation path of ten small‐ to medium‐sized manufacturing firms in New Zealand. Two distinct paths are identified, one of global, the other of regional scope. These are argued to be the product of two distinct configurations of strategy, requiring different choices in product and market scope, mode of market development, and location of manufacturing. The patterns of internationalisation produced by these configurations are in some respects at variance with the predictions of stages models of internationalisation derived from larger enterprises and economies. The influence of these configurations and the characteristics of SMEs in particular those of the decision maker on the pace of internationalisation are also considered. A conceptual model is developed from the findings of this study by integrating internationalisation theories and SME characteristics.