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This paper focuses on the relationships that consumers develop with experiential objects in the context of the Biennale of Contemporary Art Exhibition, viewed from a dialogical and intersubjective approach. The purpose of this paper is to elaborate on the interpersonal relationships that visitors of the Biennale establish with contemporary artworks and to understand the characteristics of these relationships as well as their role in shaping Biennale visitors’ identity narratives.

This research employs an instrumental case study that draws on multiple data sources and examines consumers’ relationships with contemporary artworks.

The case study evidence introduces the relationships that emerged from Biennale visitors’ interactions with contemporary artworks and the identity narratives evolving from these relationships. The findings suggest that Biennale visitors’ relationships with the contemporary artworks take the form of I-thou and I-it relationships. These two modes of interpersonal relationships by entailing different characteristics led investigated visitors to live different types of experiences of contemporary art consumption.

The first limitation of this research is that it focuses on the establishment of interpersonal relationships at the microgenetic level. Further research can provide additional insights by conducting a longitudinal case study. The second limitation is that it provides limited insights into the relationships that are revealed by consumers’ experiences with possessive objects. Future research may examine interpersonal relationships in terms of consumers’ relationships with their brands.

The understanding of visitors’ interactions and relationships with contemporary artworks provides insights into curatorial and marketing practices for such art institutions.

The findings of the current research provide new theoretical insights into the interpersonal relationships that consumers develop with experiential objects and into the distinctive identity narratives that evolve from the establishment of different types of interpersonal relationships.

The purpose of this paper is to describe potential flaws and pitfalls in the contemporary process of testing the theory of a research model in business research through the use of covariance-based structural equation modeling (CB-SEM).

This paper offers a foundation for discussion, debate and questioning regarding the contemporary process of testing the theory of a research model in business research through CB-SEM.

The contemporary process to test theory of a research model through CB-SEM in business research lacks to a large extent a stepwise and iterative process of an accumulation of knowledge to build sound and rigorous business theory that is both reliable and valid over time as well as across contexts.

This paper provides an awakening toward further debate and discussion on the relevance and suitability of the contemporary process to test the theory of a research model through CB-SEM in business research – is it science, quasi-science or just nonsense?

The primary implication of this paper is that its content will challenge most readers ' preconceptions of the topic and stimulate debate. Subsequently, it is the author’s hope that the content is thought-provoking and counterintuitive. Some scholars might reject the content, while others may find it valuable.

The paper intends to provide counterintuitive thoughts regarding the contemporary process of testing the theory of a research model in business research through the use of CB-SEM. CB-SEM offers potentially valuable merits in business research settings, if applied and performed properly.

This paper aims to draw on a family business perspective to explore the historic accounting records of an Italian liquorice juice business. The applicability of the three-circle model of family business systems to such an historic context is examined.

Using archival records, the Cassa accounting book of the business is studied. Its transactions are examined to distinguish family and business items over the period from 1875 to 1920.

Through an analysis of the accounting records, the family, ownership and business systems are shown to overlap more than typically expected in a contemporary setting.

Contemporary literature suggests the three-circle model of a family business is relatively static, but it has not been applied to an historic context. This study suggests that the model can be applied in historic studies, but it is not static over time with its elements needing refinement.

This paper synthesizes existing experimental research in the area of investor perceptions and offers directions for future research. Investor-related experimental research has grown substantially, especially in the last decade, as it has made valuable contributions in establishing causal links, examining underlying process measures, and examining areas with little available data. Within this review, I examine 121 papers and identify three broad categories that affect investor perceptions: information format, investor features, and disclosure credibility. Information format describes how investors are influenced by information salience, information labeling, reporting and accounting complexity, financial statement recognition, explanatory disclosures, and proposed disclosure changes. Investor features describes investors’ use of heuristics, investor preferences, and the effect of investor experience. Disclosure credibility is influenced by external and internal assurance, management credibility, disclosure characteristics, and management incentives. Using this framework, I summarize the existing research and identify areas that would benefit from additional research.

The objective is two‐fold. The first is to describe contemporary and future penetration (i.e. analysis and understanding) in service encounter research. The other is to describe contemporary and future abstraction in service quality research.

The paper provides a conceptual discussion of new aspects of research into service encounters and service quality.

There are still flaws in the contemporary penetration of service encounters and the contemporary abstraction of the service quality construct.

Service encounters and service quality pertain not only to human interactions, but also to the interaction between individuals and self‐service technology. The new aspects of service encounters and service quality described here are restricted to the interaction between individuals. It is argued that an extended penetration of service encounters, and an extended abstraction of the service quality construct, taken together, provide great potential for future research opportunities in services marketing.

The aspects of penetration discussed here have the potential to provide a more sophisticated understanding of the complexity and dynamics of service encounters. The aspects of abstraction described here have the potential to contribute to a more sophisticated level of measurement of the service quality construct.

A two‐fold approach is suggested that goes beyond the current state of the art in terms of penetration of service encounters and abstraction of the service quality construct. This is likely to trigger and encourage innovative research designs and alternative methodological approaches to new research problems. This might also stimulate innovative analytical techniques that could produce groundbreaking research findings, with important implications for practice.

The purpose of this paper is to identify the contemporary research themes published in IJOPM in order to contribute to current debates about the future directions of operations management (OM) research.

All 310 articles published in IJOPM from volume 24 issue 9 in 2004 through volume 29, issue 12 in 2009 are analysed using content analysis methods. This period of analysis is chosen because it represents all the articles published in issues for which the authors are able to have full control, during their period of tenure as Editors of the journal. This analysis is supplemented by data on all 1,853 manuscripts submitted to the journal during the same time period and further, by analysis of reviews and feedback sent to all authors after review.

The paper reports the main research themes and research methods inherent in the 310 published papers. Statistics on the countries represented by these papers and the size and international composition of author teams are provided, together with the publication success rates of the countries that submit in the highest volumes, and the success rates associated with the size of the author team. Finally, data on the reasons for rejection of manuscripts are presented.

There is some residual inaccuracy in content analysis methods, whereby, in extracting research themes there is often more than one topic covered. In the same vein, as regards categorisation of the causes of rejection of manuscripts during the review process, there is frequently more than one reason for rejection, so perhaps a weighted scoring system would have been more insightful. In determining the country of origin of papers, while the country of the corresponding author is used, it should be recognised that some studies originate from international collaborations so that this method may give a slightly distorted picture. Finally, in computing publication success rates by comparison of submissions and published papers there is a time delay between the two data sets within any defined period of analysis.

The analysis adds generally to debates about contemporary research themes; in particular it extends the work of Pilkington and Fitzgerald, which analyses all articles solely in IJOPM between 1994 and 2003. In addition, the findings suggest a need for more frequent exploitation of multiple research methods, for greater rigour in the planning and execution of fieldwork, for greater engagement with the world of OM practice and finally, consideration of how OM research can address wider social and political issues.

This paper represents an inside view of the publication process from a leading OM journal; this kind of insight is rarely available in the public domain.

Contemporary organizations are facing an operating environment characterized by volatile, uncertain, complex, ambiguous, and “permanent whitewater.” To sustain high performance in this context, organizations must be able to change and develop as efficiently and effectively as possible. Within organizations, there are actors who catalyze and advance change in this manner; these actors are known as “champions.” Yet the scholar who wishes to conduct research concerning champions of change and organizational development is likely to be met by a highly fragmented literature. Varying notions of champions are scattered throughout extant research, where authors of articles cite different sources when conceptualizing champions; often superficially. Furthermore, many types of highly specific and nuanced non-generalizable champions have proliferated, making it difficult for practitioners and researchers to discover useful findings on how to go about making meaningful changes in their context. The purpose of this study was to address these problems for practitioners and researchers by engendering thoroughness, clarity, and coherence within champion scholarship. This was done by conducting the first comprehensive, critical yet insightful review of the champion literature within the organizational sciences using content analysis to re-conceptualize champions and develop a meaningful typology from which the field can be advanced. The chapter first suggests a return to Schön (1963) as the basis from which to conceptualize champions and, second, offers a typology consisting of 10 meta-champions of organizational change and development – Collaboration, Human Rights, Innovation, Product, Project, Service, Strategic, Sustainability, Technology, and Venture Champions – from which change practice and future research can benefit.

Voluntary changes in accounting principle represent explicit and fundamental decisions by managers to exercise accounting discretion. This paper develops an organizing framework to review prior literature on voluntary changes, provides descriptive insights on contemporary changes, and identifies opportunities for future research on voluntary changes. The voluntary change literature is robust and has examined many questions using data prior to the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 (SOX). We find that contemporary voluntary changes often vary across the pre-SOX, post-SOX, and post-SFAS No. 154 periods by the materiality of their income effect, issue type, and justifications provided by managers, suggesting that manager use of voluntary changes has evolved over time. Our future research opportunities consider potential determinants of voluntary changes including strategic incentives, environmental conditions, and manager characteristics, as well as the potential direct or moderating role of corporate governance and auditors on manager use of voluntary changes. They also consider user reactions to voluntary changes. By providing insight into both extant voluntary change research and the contemporary use of voluntary changes, our study informs standards setters who grant managers the ability to exercise this form of accounting discretion, as well as researchers who plan to study accounting choice through voluntary changes.

This paper aims to showcase the trends in the research topics and their contributors over a time period of 30 years in the International Journal of Contemporary Hospitality Management (IJCHM). To be specific, this paper uncovers IJCHM’s latent topics and hidden patterns in published research and highlights the differences across three decades and before and after Social Sciences Citation indexing.

In total, 1,573 documents published over 199 issues of IJCHM were analyzed using two computational tools, i.e. metaknowledge and structural topic modeling (STM), as the basis of the mixed method. STM was used to discover the evolution of topics over time. Moreover, bibliometrics (and network analysis) were used to highlight IJCHM’s top researchers, top-cited references, the geographical networks of the researchers and differences in the collaborative networks.

The number of papers published continually increased over time with changes of key researchers publishing in IJCHM. The co-authorship networks have also changed and revealed an increasing diversity of authorship and collaborations among authors in different countries. Moreover, the variety of topics and the relative weight of each topic have also changed.

Based on the findings of this study, theoretical and practical implications for hospitality and tourism researchers are provided.

It is the first attempt to apply topic modeling to a leading academic journal in hospitality and tourism and explore the diversity in contemporary hospitality management research (topics and contributors) from 30 years of published research.

The field of careers studies is complex and fragmented. The aim of this paper is to detail why it is important to study careers, what we study and how we study key issues in this evolving field.

Key theories, concepts and models are briefly reviewed to lay the groundwork for offering an agenda for future research.

The authors recommend ten key directions for future research and offer specific questions for further study.

This paper contributes to the development of the theoretical underpinning of career studies.

The authors hope that the proposed agenda for future research will help advance the field and encourage more research on understudied, but important, topics.

This paper presents a comprehensive view of research on contemporary careers.