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The purpose of this paper is to assess the level of strategic management topic representation within the academic field of hospitality. The study addresses the following questions: what is the frequency of articles related to the topic of strategy in recent hospitality journals? How does the content of these articles differ from the more general field of strategic management? And, what are the potential gaps where researchers in the hospitality field can make contributions?

This study looks at the number and percentage of strategy-related articles published in leading hospitality journals for 2005 through 2009. The determination of the percentage of strategy-related articles published and categorizing these articles by key strategy topic area required several steps: defining strategic management as an academic area within hospitality; determining key strategy topic areas and key words or terms; and defining characteristics of the hospitality field that may impact what is and what is not strategic management in hospitality. Hospitality journal articles were then coded as strategy-related or other, and (if determined to be strategy-related) the articles were categorized into one of ten key topic areas.

Overall strategy articles represent about 27 percent of the total journal articles from the five-year period. In comparing hospitality journals to the sole top-tier business journal focusing on strategy, this study indicates differences exist among key topic areas of focus. These differences seem to indicate that researchers in general strategic management tend to focus on less applied and more theoretical notions of strategy where researchers in hospitality strategic management tend to focus on more tactical methods when addressing questions of strategy.

The limitations of this study are: the study focuses on four hospitality journals and the top-rated general strategy journal; and categorizing strategy articles was done using inter-judge reliability by the authors. Future research might identify a socially constructed definition of strategic management in hospitality.

The importance of strategic management and strategic thinking in hospitality and hospitality research has never been greater. With increasing turbulence in the global environment, the field of hospitality (and its related research) must assess and provide strategic approaches to address challenges and opportunities for the future.

The value of this study is in providing an overview of what has been studied in hospitality strategy in the recent past and pointing out future research opportunities for hospitality strategic management issues.

Distils the key insights for management development from the four research papers, in this special issue taken individually as well as collectively. The perspective taken is one of strategy – for the industry practitioner or strategy/management consultant. The key insights that extend beyond the scope of individual research papers will be presented first, under the following themes: Lessons of brand/differentiation strategy; Managing a leading brand; A lesson from the case study; Strategy in a complex, turbulent and uncertain globalising environment. Key insights that are single research paper specific will be presented as follows: The story of Singapore Airlines and the Singapore Girl; Air wars in Asia: competitive and collaborative strategies and tactics in action; The Development of the airline industry from 1978 to 1998: a strategic global overview; Beyond Singapore Girl: grand and product/service differentiation strategies in the new millennium.

Nearly two decades into South Africa’s democracy, this chapter describes the most recent policy and strategy initiatives to ensure sustainable development and to enhance the country’s tourism competitiveness. It discusses the key national tourism policies, plans, and strategies, which together provide the framework for tourism development and management in the country. The importance of balancing a “top-down” framework with “bottom-up” local engagement is emphasized as a cornerstone of South Africa’s future tourism journey. In line with the philosophy that “structure should follow strategy”, the institutional framework to manage tourism during the next planning period is outlined. The discussion concludes with the critical success factors to enhance South Africa’s future sustainable tourism competitiveness.

Governments in developing countries manage their considerable state assets for public service delivery directly. In Indonesia, the Directorate of State Asset Management responsible for developing the national strategy for state asset optimization requires the determination of key elements and prioritization tools. The purpose of this paper is to show that a simple calculation using the combination of the balanced scorecard (BCS) and analytical hierarchy process (AHP) will help in the prioritization of strategy development.

A questionnaire survey of 131 multistakeholder respondents to identify the most important key elements and the best alternative for asset optimization was done in this study.

The respondents agree on the most important key elements, and that the best alternative for asset optimization is the efficient maintenance of assets. Competitive human resources comprise the recommended second key element, and that improvements in asset performance and value will improve public service as the second-highest alternative. This study also shows the importance of the integration of asset optimization in existing government strategic instruments supported by a comprehensive data set related to public assets and their performance.

This paper provides a new contribution to integrating asset optimization strategies as the core of the organization’s performance and prioritization strategies. Additional BSC perspectives are suggested, with the inclusion of AHP for prioritization. In addition, this study includes the opinions of all the stakeholders, from external users to the central management. The flexibility of the tools to adapt to the existing strategic framework will allow their application by different agencies and in different countries.

This case study is the result of in‐depth investigation into a major Swedish multinational company in the data processing and computer equipment field. Addresses the issue of key account management and questions some of the existing views in the literature. In particular, it demonstrates that key customer account management involves much more than “better relationship management”, and extends far beyond sole consideration of sales to, and profitability of (for the supplier), the individual customer. Covers many considerations, which start at the corporate strategy level, going via customer portfolio management, and down to the management of complex networks of actors involved in the relationship between supplier and key customer account.

Surging global natural disasters provide incentive for risk-reducing policies and strategies. In this light, the African Union (AU) engaged a multi-stakeholder policy formulation process between 2002 and 2006, to develop a continent-wide disaster risk reduction (DRR) strategy. Drawing from secondary data, this chapter assesses the process and applies qualitative analysis instruments to critically assess the AU’s disaster policy. Linkages to the 2005 international Hyogo Framework for Action (HFA) are also highlighted. The analysis reveals that Africa’s policy formulation process was belated for over a decade, with respect to international expectations. The formulation process was however largely African owned and led, culminating in a strategy document that reflected African contextual reality at the time, and aligned well with HFA fundamental goals. The applied multi-stakeholder approach enhanced a spirit of participation across levels and was central to the largely successful policy formulation process. However, targeted policy outcomes were not explicit, and poorly formulated indicators marred short- and long-term policy evaluation. Based on these results, we conclude that the African-wide DRR policy formulation processes were belated but participatory, systematic and very successful. Belated policy formulation reflects an initial inertia on the African continent, justified by past negative policy experiences and the desire to succeed. A replication of this policy formulation approach in Africa is recommended, albeit exercising more caution on policy timing, the elaboration of better monitoring and evaluation instruments and criteria. Participation should further embrace modern, risk-free (anti-COVID-19-friendly) information and communication technologies.

Although numerous signal modalities are available for emotion recognition, audio and visual modalities are the most common and predominant forms for human beings to express their emotional states in daily communication. Therefore, how to achieve automatic and accurate audiovisual emotion recognition is significantly important for developing engaging and empathetic human–computer interaction environment. However, two major challenges exist in the field of audiovisual emotion recognition: (1) how to effectively capture representations of each single modality and eliminate redundant features and (2) how to efficiently integrate information from these two modalities to generate discriminative representations.

A novel key-frame extraction-based attention fusion network (KE-AFN) is proposed for audiovisual emotion recognition. KE-AFN attempts to integrate key-frame extraction with multimodal interaction and fusion to enhance audiovisual representations and reduce redundant computation, filling the research gaps of existing approaches. Specifically, the local maximum–based content analysis is designed to extract key-frames from videos for the purpose of eliminating data redundancy. Two modules, including “Multi-head Attention-based Intra-modality Interaction Module” and “Multi-head Attention-based Cross-modality Interaction Module”, are proposed to mine and capture intra- and cross-modality interactions for further reducing data redundancy and producing more powerful multimodal representations.

Extensive experiments on two benchmark datasets (i.e. RAVDESS and CMU-MOSEI) demonstrate the effectiveness and rationality of KE-AFN. Specifically, (1) KE-AFN is superior to state-of-the-art baselines for audiovisual emotion recognition. (2) Exploring the supplementary and complementary information of different modalities can provide more emotional clues for better emotion recognition. (3) The proposed key-frame extraction strategy can enhance the performance by more than 2.79 per cent on accuracy. (4) Both exploring intra- and cross-modality interactions and employing attention-based audiovisual fusion can lead to better prediction performance.

The proposed KE-AFN can support the development of engaging and empathetic human–computer interaction environment.

Recognizing the fundamental role of quality as a means to differentiate service organizations, the purpose of this paper is to propose a strategic decision making framework for service organizations, which prioritizes performance improvement strategies that are rooted to customer requirements, organizational goals and constrained by organizational resources.

The proposed framework is realized through the implementation of two stages and four distinct phases mirroring the combination of enhanced quality function deployment (first stage), and zero-one goal programming (second stage). It proposes the utilization of a mix of qualitative and quantitative methods, and the collection of data from multiple sources including customers, middle, and top management.

The application and validation of the proposed framework utilizes information from both customers and employees in the bank services sector. Overall, results from the specific study revealed that a combination of “reengineering” and “expansion” strategies was more appropriate corresponding to customer priorities, organizational goals and effective utilization of available resources.

The paper presents a novel two stage strategic framework for service organizations. It utilizes a balanced mixture of qualitative and quantitative methods in an effort to capture and delineate elusive customer requirements and design characteristics of services, allowing the assessment of different combinations of quality improvement strategies in response to management objectives.