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The purpose of this paper is to examine conflicting institutional demands on individual frontline employees in hybrid public sector organisations. Specifically, it examines the competing accountability pressures professional and commercial logics exerted on academics at a business school, how individual lecturers responded to such pressures, and what drove these responses.

The paper draws on a case study of an English business school and is informed by the literatures on institutional logics and hybrid organisations.

The paper shows that the co-existence of professional and commercial logics at the case organisation exerted competing accountability pressures on lecturers. It moreover shows that sometimes deliberately and purposefully, sometimes ad hoc or even coincidentally, lecturers drew on a wide range of responses to these conflicting pressures, including compliance, defiance, combination and compartmentalisation.

The paper sheds light on individual level responses to competing institutional logics and associated accountability pressures, as well as on their drivers. It also highlights the drawbacks of user, customer or citizen accountability mechanisms, showing that a strong emphasis on them in knowledge-intensive public organisations can have severe dysfunctional effects.

Customer social participation (CSP) is a new phenomenon that has emerged with the evolution of social media. Current literature designates customer participation in social media as “CSP”. Although CSP has been investigated in the online brand community context in social media, it has been little investigated in the context of student customers using WhatsApp – a highly trending social media platform among learners. Thus, this study aims to investigate the effectiveness of CSP in informal WhatsApp groups for academic purposes among undergraduate students of management studies.

The study adopted a single cross-sectional survey design. A structured online questionnaire was employed. Using convenience sampling technique, data were collected from 170 undergraduates of the Bachelor of Management Studies programme at the Open University of Sri Lanka.

The results revealed significant positive effects of functional, social and hedonic benefits with CSP. Meanwhile, the relationship between psychological benefits and CSP was insignificant. Furthermore, there is no influence of age and level of study on CSP among the learners in informal WhatsApp groups. Moreover, at present, the level of CSP in WhatsApp for academic purposes among students is moderate.

The role of the student as the customer and student behaviour in informal WhatsApp groups established for academic purposes have been little investigated in the field of open and distance education services. In this context, this study empirically validated the model of participation benefits and CSP in WhatsApp groups informally established for academic purposes.

The purpose of this paper is to examine whether the image of the university, environment, facilities, student expectations, internationalization, services, financial support and perceived value have direct effect on the satisfaction and loyalty of the students of social sciences at Meijo (Private) University, Japan.

To analyze the data, a confirmatory factor analysis was applied where it explored the associations between items and constructs and, then, utilized structural equation model (SEM) to investigate the relationships existing between constructs with the application of the R program. A structured questionnaire comprising of 52 questions were used with 10 constructs. A total of 257 students from Meijo (private) university filled in the newly developed questionnaires using seven items Likert scales.

The study reveals a valuable insight on student satisfaction and loyalty toward the university. According to the findings, satisfaction has a positive direct impact from services and financial support provided by the university. And also loyalty has a positive strong impact on student satisfaction. On the contrary, satisfaction reveals a positive strong direct impact on loyalty too. Furthermore, there is an indirect impact of image, services and perceived value on loyalty. All the goodness of fit indices are at acceptable levels. Thus, the satisfaction of students seems to reflect quite well from the above construct, image, services, financial support and perceived values.

This study collected data from two faculties, Faculty of Business Management and Faculty of Economics. The results of this finding cannot be generalized to the entire Meijo university student as a whole.

This study successfully applied an SEM to identify the relationship among constructs. Thus, this research has hopefully opened up avenues for other researchers to carry out such behavioral studies with larger sample sizes by applying R program with SEM analysis.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the indicators of service quality from the perspective of graduating students in a public university in Ghana. The identified indicators of service quality were rated and the extent of satisfaction among the students was determined. Another issue explored was whether the satisfaction among the respondents inures to their loyalty to the university.

A questionnaire was designed, pre-tested and administered to 500 graduating students, and 482 of them were returned for analyses. Principal component analysis was used to determine the indicators of service quality. Independent sample t-test and z-test for proportions were used to compare mean scores and proportions of respondents on various variables, respectively.

The results revealed three indicators of service quality which include quality of academic services and facilities, quality of lecturers and quality of academic programs. Graduands were satisfied with academic services, lecturers and programs. They were, however, not satisfied with the quality of facilities. Majority of the respondents will remain associated with the university as a result of their satisfaction with the services, lecturers as well as programs of the university. It is recommended that the university works assiduously on improving infrastructural facilities to help boost the confidence of the students in the university.

This paper argues that what constitutes quality service vary from one academic institution to the other. It is, therefore, needful for institutions to determine from the perspective of their students what may indicate quality service.

The purpose of this study is to examine the influence of service quality on student’s satisfaction.

Using empirical research, the study identified previously validated scales of service quality and student satisfaction. Using the SERVPERF scale, data were collected from 279 students studying in public and private universities across Saudi Arabia. The model fit of the scale was assessed to ensure that the data produced accurate outcomes. Structural equation modelling was used to test the effects of independent variables on dependent variables.

The results suggest that four of the five dimensions of service quality, namely, tangibility, reliability, responsiveness and assurance had a significant effect on students’ satisfaction. Empathy was not found to contribute to student satisfaction. The findings broaden and deepen our understanding of how the dimensions of service quality reinforce students’ satisfaction.

Future research can also incorporate in the model other variables, academic and non-academic, related to student satisfaction.

The results have useful implications for decision-makers in higher education institutions who strive to enhance students’ satisfaction and increase the quality of higher education programmes, particularly in Saudi Arabia and the Gulf region in general.

This study uses the SERVPERF scale, which is empirically superior to the SERVQUAL scale for measuring student satisfaction.