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This paper aims to present a systematic literature review (SLR) of continuous improvement (CI) research in the hospitality and tourism management (HTM) literature. The paper also notes trends, parallels, inconsistencies and opportunities towards a clearer understanding of current scholarship.

This SLR finds a dearth of research in the field. After parameter expansion and exclusions, 35 papers across 11 journals are reviewed.

Studies of CI methodologies and practices are published infrequently, tending to focus on total quality management in European contexts. Despite the guiding customer-centric principles of CI methodologies, studies focus on improving internal processes rather than the service encounter.

The review is guided by sections of the ABS 2015 list, which excludes some journals. Books, conference papers and trade magazine articles are not reviewed.

This paper identifies clear needs for CI research with a specific hospitality management focus, the development of CI toolkits and curricula for hospitality managers. The development and deployment of CI methodologies and practices in HTM literature and industry should lead to long-term service improvements.

This study asserts the need for further context-specific, practice-led research into the refinement and long-term utility of CI methodologies and practices, towards demonstration of significant bottom-line industry impact. The paper also offers a clear SLR methodology and a definition for CI in hospitality.

Medication errors are a significant cause of injury in Norwegian hospitals. The purpose of this study is to explore how Lean Six Sigma (LSS) has been used in the Norwegian public health-care context to reduce medication errors.

A mixed method approach was used to gather data from participants working in the four regions served by the Norway health authorities. A survey questionnaire was distributed to 38 health-care practitioners and semi-structured interviews were conducted with 12 health-care practitioners.

The study finds that the implementation of LSS in the Norwegian public health-care context is still in its infancy. This is amidst several challenges faced by Norwegian hospitals such as the lack of top-management support, lack of LSS training and coaching and a lack of awareness around the benefits of LSS in health care.

Because of the large geographical area, it was difficult to reach participants from all health regions in Norway. However, the study managed to assess the current status of LSS implementation through the participants’ perspectives. This is a fruitful area for future research whereby an action research methodology could be used.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first empirical study into the use of LSS methodology in reducing medication errors. In addition, this study is valuable for health-care practitioners and professionals as a guideline to achieve the optimal benefit of LSS implementation to reduce medication errors.

The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the limitations and emerging trends of Six Sigma through an empirical study. Six Sigma is one of the most powerful business process improvement strategies used by numerous World Class corporations for over three decades. A handful of existing publications address some limitations and potential trends of Six Sigma, yet there are no empirical studies investigating the fundamental limitations and emerging trends of Six Sigma.

The authors developed an online survey instrument based on the existing literature addressing the above. In this study, 61 Six Sigma Master Black Belts and Black Belts from large manufacturing companies and 25 academics who are familiar with the Six Sigma topic participated and contributed to the research.

The study reports the top 5 limitations and emerging trends of Six Sigma from the viewpoints of both academics and experts from large manufacturing companies. These are: integration of Six Sigma with Big Data, use of Six Sigma in small medium and micro enterprises, over emphasis of Six Sigma on variability reduction, poor implementation of Six Sigma and its negative impact on employee satisfaction and non-exploitation of integration of Six Sigma with Industry 4.0.

In order to sustain Six Sigma initiatives, it is imperative that limitations and fundamental gaps are understood, and strategies developed to address them. The authors argue that leading academic scholars have a vital role to play in working with industry practitioners to overcome the limitations and emerging trends addressed above.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first empirical study looking into the limitations, research gaps and emerging trends of Six Sigma.

This paper is a critical literature review of corporate social responsibility (CSR) research in both general management and hospitality management literature. This paper aims to discuss trends, commonalities and inconsistencies to better understand the state of contemporary scholarship, and it calls for a context-specific conceptual engagement with the phenomenon.

Systematic literature review, noting and critiquing a general tendency towards measurement of financial and other internal benefit impacts.

Hospitality management is well-positioned to evaluate the opportunities and challenges of CSR; yet, research has uncritically adopted the instrumental emphasis on assessing processes, perceptions and private profitability from the general management literature, without engaging on a contextually specific and/or theoretical level.

CSR research is abundant and therefore difficult to summarise in one paper. The primarily Anglo-American and Asian contextual bias is reflected in this review.

Consistently inconsistent results challenge the portability of financial impact studies. Studies are needed to re-evaluate the concept of CSR, as it pertains to hospitality and measure the effectiveness of CSR activities relative to context and resource availability.

Further research into the scope of CSR in hospitality management, with an emphasis on recuperating social value, would lead to widespread positive social implications.

This critical review offers a new perspective on CSR in the hospitality literature and industry, calling for a reconsideration of the concept in context, and formulates a working definition.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the relationships between consumer motivations, their interactions with hospitality spaces and experiential outcomes. Enhancing consumer experience is of clear interest to industry professionals. This quantitative study explores the impact of escapism and entitlement to leisure upon involvement in liminoid consumptions spaces, thereby contributing a theory of liminoid motivators within commercial hospitality.

This study adopts a quantitative methodology, using a survey of a sample of student nightclubbers in the UK. Data are analysed through Partial Least Squares.

Hospitality consumers are positively affected by the feelings of increased involvement experienced in consumption spaces that exhibit liminoid characteristics.

Surveys involve potential for error regarding respondents’ ability to agree with questionnaire statements. Data collection was conducted in Scotland, and so, results may not be generalised to other commercial hospitality spaces outside of Scotland.

Hospitality consumers become more involved, and thereby more satisfied, in liminoid consumption spaces when motivated by escapism and entitlement to leisure. Attending to the liminoid motivators that drive consumers away from work and domesticity, and towards commercial hospitality spaces, will go some way towards creating the desired consumer experience.

This is the first quantitative study to investigate consumer motivations to escape and entitlement to leisure as antecedents of involvement in a commercial hospitality context. It develops a theory of hospitality consumption using the liminoid anthropological concept.

In Hong Kong, robberies occurring in the elevators in high-rise buildings were identified as a particular problem and the purpose of this paper is to address a dedicated programme aimed at reducing such offences.

A comparison of elevator-based robbery statistics over a ten-year policy-implication period, in two police districts, one with a high rate of public ownership and a traditionally high rate of elevator robberies, the second with a higher rate of private ownership and a traditionally lower rate of such robberies.

The evidence suggests that the programme was successful, with such robberies declining significantly and with no evidence of displacement.

This research is based on police statistics. There is a need for more research, for example, investigating residents’ involvement with the system and the extent to which it encouraged shared ownership of the initiative.

What is clear is that, where in the West the Newman legacy led to the demonisation of high-rise public sector housing, in Hong Kong, where there is no viable alternative, the use of CCTV helped transform such areas into safer communities.

The rate of robbery, most notably elevator-based robbery, fell dramatically, improving community safety.

Though there has been a considerable amount of research on the impact of CCTV on crime, almost all of this has focussed on Western industrial societies and little of it has addressed robbery. To the best of authors’ knowledge, this research is the first in Hong Kong, and the first to evaluate the impact of CCTV on robbery.

In terms of the concept of broken home as a juvenile delinquency risk factor, whilst Nigeria and Ghana are culturally different from western nations (Gyekye, 1996; Hofstede, 1980; Smith, 2004), parental death (PDE) and parental divorce (PDI) have been previously taken-for-granted as one factor, that is ‘broken home’. This paper aims to deconstruct the singular model of ‘broken home’ and propose a binary model – the parental death and parental divorce hypotheses, with unique variables inherent in Nigerian/Ghanaian context.

It principally deploys the application of Goffman’s (1967) theory of stigma, anthropological insights on burial rites and other social facts (Gyekye, 1996; Mazzucato et al., 2006; Smith, 2004) to tease out diversity and complexity of lives across cultures, which specifically represent a binary model of broken home in Nigeria/Ghana. It slightly appraises post-colonial insights on decolonization (Agozino, 2003; Said, 1994) to interrogate both marginalized and mainstream literature.

Thus far, analyses have challenged the homogenization of the concept broken home in existing literature. Qualitatively unlike in the ‘West’, analyses have identified the varying meanings/consequences of parental divorce and parental death in Nigeria/Ghana.

Unlike existing data, this paper has contrasted the differential impacts of parental death and parental divorce with more refined variables (e.g. the sociocultural penalties of divorce such as stigma in terms of parental divorce and other social facts such as burial ceremonies, kinship nurturing, in relation to parental death), which helped to fill in the missing gap in comparative criminology literature.

This article reviews individual risk factors for bullying, especially gender, age, aggressiveness, low intelligence and achievement, hyperactivity‐impulsiveness, low empathy, low self‐esteem, depression, unpopularity, and physical and biological features. It also reports individual, family and socio‐economic predictors and correlates of bullying discovered in a longitudinal survey of 411 London boys. The most important individual risk factors are low impulsiveness and low empathy, and they could be targeted in cognitive‐behavioural skills training programmes.

The purpose of this paper is to present a novel miniature magnetic climbing robot for industrial inspection. The robot has high mobility with low complexity.

The robot has a miniature cylindrical shape with 28 mm of diameter and 62 mm of width. The robot has two wheels. The adhesion is achieved with an advanced magnetic circuit fixed on the frame of the robot.

From an horizontal sheet, the robot can make transition to almost any intersecting sheet from 10 to 360°. The robot passes inner and outer straight corners in almost any inclination of the gravity.

The novel robot opens new possibilities to use mobile robots in ferromagnetic environments with stringent size limitations, as found in power plants. The new mechanism increases mobility and opens a new avenue for inspection robotics. A patent is pending on this system.

This paper aims to present new evidence from the Cambridge Study in Delinquent Development (CSDD) showing the extent to which obstetric (e.g. abnormal birth weight, confinement at birth, severe abnormality of pregnancy, etc.) and early childhood and family factors (illegitimate child, unwanted conception, family overcrowding, etc.) have predictive effects on psychopathic traits measured later in life at age 48 years.

Data collected in the CSDD are analysed. This is a prospective longitudinal study of 411 London men from age 8 to age 61 years.

The results suggest that none of the obstetric problems were predictive of adult psychopathy. However, some other early childhood factors were significant. Unwanted conception (by the mother) was significantly associated with high psychopathy. The likelihood of being an unwanted child was higher when the mother was younger (19 years or less), and when the child was illegitimate. The poor health of the mother and living in an overcrowded family were also significant in predicting psychopathy in adulthood, as well as both psychopathic personality (F1) and psychopathic behaviour (F2).

These findings suggest the influence of very early emotional tensions and problematic social background in predicting psychopathic traits in adulthood (at age 48 years). They also emphasise the importance of investigating further the very early roots of psychopathic traits.