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21 – 30 of over 12000Annachiara Longoni, Mark Pagell, Anton Shevchenko and Robert Klassen
Sustainable operations management is characterized by environmental, social and operational goals. The implementation of routines to protect and direct the effective use of human…
Abstract
Purpose
Sustainable operations management is characterized by environmental, social and operational goals. The implementation of routines to protect and direct the effective use of human capital is proposed to potentially improve all three dimensions. However, functional managers with overlapping responsibilities at the plant-level might implement human capital routines based on their individual functional schemas. The purpose of this paper is to investigate whether functional managers have conflicting perceptions of human capital routines, due to narrow perceptions benefiting their own functional domain, and thus generate trade-offs.
Design/methodology/approach
A combination of matched survey and archival data from 198 manufacturing plants is used to explore the degree to which functional managers have conflicting perceptions of human capital routines and the effects of these perceptions on sustainability outcomes.
Findings
The results indicate that on average functional managers have conflicting perceptions that generate trade-offs between sustainability dimensions. However, when functional managers had a shared perception better outcomes on all sustainability dimensions are shown. Thus, human capital routines can be a powerful tool for sustainability only if senior management can promote a shared schema across functional managers.
Originality/value
Differently than most previous studies assuming shared sustainability goals within an organization, this study considers a multiplicity of functional actors with potentially varying perceptions about sustainability goals and links these to organizational routine implementation and outcomes. Additionally, the dynamic and subjective nature of organizational routines, such as human capital routines, is proposed to explain contradictory impacts in a multi-objective setting such as sustainable operations management.
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Live chat e-service provides a communication platform for online customers to make information inquiries and receive instantaneous assistance from a service representative. It is…
Abstract
Purpose
Live chat e-service provides a communication platform for online customers to make information inquiries and receive instantaneous assistance from a service representative. It is important for organizations to explore ways to improve their live chat e-service. The purpose of this paper is to propose a new organization–customer communication model (Schema Resonance Model), explicate how schema resonance can be achieved in live chat e-service, and investigate the impact of schema resonance on live chat e-service effectiveness, efficiency, customer satisfaction and intention of continued use.
Design/methodology/approach
A post-test only, between-subjects experiment was conducted. A total of 409 participants completed the experiment sessions, and 389 of these participants were used in the analysis.
Findings
Research results suggest schema resonance could improve the time efficiency of the live chat e-service while maintaining e-service effectiveness. Schema resonance could increase customer satisfaction with the overall e-service, the communication approach used by the representative and the information provided.
Research limitations/implications
Because a convenience sample was used in the experiment, results cannot be generalized to all live chat e-service users. Future research should include observation of real-world organization–customer live chat e-service sessions.
Practical implications
Organizations can consider applying the Schema Resonance Model in live chat e-service practices to enhance customer satisfaction and increase representatives’ service productivity.
Originality/value
This research proposes and tests a new organization–customer communication model to explore how organizations can improve live chat e-service in response to customers’ information inquiries.
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This paper aims to review the notion of schemata in consumer behavior, placing particular emphasis on the conceptualization of brand knowledge, and illustrate how schema theory…
Abstract
Purpose
This paper aims to review the notion of schemata in consumer behavior, placing particular emphasis on the conceptualization of brand knowledge, and illustrate how schema theory may act as a unifying conceptual framework to study what consumers know about products and brands. Extant research on how consumers conceptualize brands lacks a single, coherent theoretical framework. The literature is fragmented into different approaches that may prevent comparisons across studies and make it difficult to draw conclusive results.
Design/methodology/approach
The paper discusses the central tenets of schema theory and then presents the structure of schematic knowledge and the main typology of consumer schemata. It focuses on the brand schema, delineating its internal properties and drawing analogies with other approaches used to describe consumers’ mental representation of brands.
Findings
Schema theory can provide a comprehensive framework to analyze how consumers perceive brand information. A cognitive schema specifies the parameters of knowledge content, discriminates between different types of information and indicates how various pieces of information relate to one another. Importantly, the internal structure of schemata remains stable across conceptual domains, allowing to investigate brand-specific knowledge in different contexts and in conjunction with superordinate and subordinate knowledge structures.
Originality/value
This is the first systematic review of the notion of schemata in consumer behavior. It thoroughly describes how schema theory from psychology has been applied in marketing research to describe the organization of market knowledge and illustrates how it may function as an analytical tool.
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Tseng-Lung Huang and Yi-Mu Chen
– This study aims to determine whether smartphones create the best communication fit with a young audience.
Abstract
Purpose
This study aims to determine whether smartphones create the best communication fit with a young audience.
Design/methodology/approach
To validate the hypotheses, a task-based laboratory study was conducted. And smartphone film and television (TV) film were provided in the laboratory. Young respondents were recruited in the classroom and brief introduction and film were broadcasted. After watching the film, levels of respondent’s emotional experience was measured via questionnaire.
Findings
The results indicate that when the text of the film matches the young audience’s schema, the young audience uses, mainly, imagery coding to interpret the text and achieve an emotional experience. Conversely, when the text and schema do not match, the young audience uses both proposition coding and imagery coding.
Practical implications
Based on the results found in this study, companies should use different texts to match the different schema of young audiences to ensure that audiences can process coding and enjoy emotional experiences when using smartphone.
Originality/value
Dual-coding theory is applied to determine which coding system the audience use to interpret the new-media text, such as smartphone films.
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Chunqiu Li and Shigeo Sugimoto
Provenance information is crucial for consistent maintenance of metadata schemas over time. The purpose of this paper is to propose a provenance model named DSP-PROV to keep track…
Abstract
Purpose
Provenance information is crucial for consistent maintenance of metadata schemas over time. The purpose of this paper is to propose a provenance model named DSP-PROV to keep track of structural changes of metadata schemas.
Design/methodology/approach
The DSP-PROV model is developed through applying the general provenance description standard PROV of the World Wide Web Consortium to the Dublin Core Application Profile. Metadata Application Profile of Digital Public Library of America is selected as a case study to apply the DSP-PROV model. Finally, this paper evaluates the proposed model by comparison between formal provenance description in DSP-PROV and semi-formal change log description in English.
Findings
Formal provenance description in the DSP-PROV model has advantages over semi-formal provenance description in English to keep metadata schemas consistent over time.
Research limitations/implications
The DSP-PROV model is applicable to keep track of the structural changes of metadata schema over time. Provenance description of other features of metadata schema such as vocabulary and encoding syntax are not covered.
Originality/value
This study proposes a simple model for provenance description of structural features of metadata schemas based on a few standards widely accepted on the Web and shows the advantage of the proposed model to conventional semi-formal provenance description.
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This study aims to understand how consumers evaluate Made in USA messages that are congruent/incongruent to consumers’ prior expectations about the brand’s US-based sourcing…
Abstract
Purpose
This study aims to understand how consumers evaluate Made in USA messages that are congruent/incongruent to consumers’ prior expectations about the brand’s US-based sourcing initiatives.
Design/methodology/approach
Two separate studies were conducted. Online experiment was designed implementing both message and treatment variance to increase internal and external validity of the study. Data collected from two distinct samples were analyzed using MANOVA and ANOVA.
Findings
Findings from Study 1 indicated that consumers’ perceived message credibility, attitude toward message and attitude toward brand were highest for congruent messages, followed by when incongruity was resolved and lowest when incongruity was not resolved. Further, consumers’ brand attitudes before and after message exposure were different, with change being most positive for incongruity resolution, followed by congruity, whereas negative for incongruity non-resolution. Findings from Study 2 indicated that consumers’ general attitude toward brands’ US-based sourcing strategies influenced their brand attitude, as well as moderated the relation between schema congruity/incongruity resolution/incongruity non-resolution and brand attitude.
Originality/value
The findings are helpful for brand managers and sourcing personnel to better invest their resources in US-based sourcing strategies. In addition, the findings of the study contribute and extend theory by identifying a boundary condition.
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Narges Adibsereshki, Mahdi Abdollahzadeh Rafi, Maryam Hassanzadeh Aval and Hassan Tahan
Anxiety disorders have a high prevalence in children. Those children with anxious symptoms are more likely to experience significant disruption in their lives. This disruption can…
Abstract
Purpose
Anxiety disorders have a high prevalence in children. Those children with anxious symptoms are more likely to experience significant disruption in their lives. This disruption can interrupt or even stop a child from participating in a variety of typical childhood experiences. It is understood that genetic and environmental factors may cause this disorder. The purpose of this paper is to focus on environmental factors, namely, the mediating role of maladaptive schemas in mothers’ child-rearing and childhood anxiety disorders.
Design/methodology/approach
This study used correlation-modeling to assess the analysis. The sample included 326 students (aged 9-12 years old) and their mothers. The parenting style (Baumrind, 1973), Early Maladaptive Schema (Rijkeboer and de Boo, 2010), and anxiety disorders (Muris et al., 2006) questionnaires were used in this study.
Findings
The results showed a relationship between parenting styles of mothers and childhood anxiety disorders, a significant correlation between childhood maladaptive schemas and childhood anxiety disorders, a relation between child-rearing styles and childhood maladaptive schemas, and finally a mediating role on childhood anxiety disorders and mothers’ child-rearing styles for some childhood maladaptive schemas.
Originality/value
This research contributes to the knowledge base of the importance of children’s mental health. The paper analyzes the relationship of mothers’ parenting styles and children’s anxiety. It also focuses on maladaptive schemas as a mediator and its relationship with childhood anxiety disorders.
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Abdelsalam Almarimi and Jaroslav Pokorny
This paper introduces an approach to minimize the total designer effort for building XML data integration systems. Since fully automatic schema mapping generation is infeasible…
Abstract
This paper introduces an approach to minimize the total designer effort for building XML data integration systems. Since fully automatic schema mapping generation is infeasible, in our view such an approach can be used as a semi‐automatic tool for XML schemas mediation. A method is proposed to query XML documents through a mediation layer. Such a layer is introduced to describe the mappings between global XML schema and local heterogeneous XML schemas. It produces a uniform interface over the local XML data sources, and provides the required functionality to query these sources in a uniform way. It involves two important units: the XML Metadata Document (XMD) and the Query Translator. The XMD is an XML document containing metadata, in which the mappings between global and local schemas are defined. The XML Query Translator which is an integral part of the system is introduced to translate a global user query into local queries by using the mappings that are defined in the XMD.
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Nanda Surendra and James W. Denton
This paper has two purposes. The first purpose is to study how groups and members of an organization use collaborative technology in accomplishing their everyday work. The second…
Abstract
Purpose
This paper has two purposes. The first purpose is to study how groups and members of an organization use collaborative technology in accomplishing their everyday work. The second purpose is to study how interpretive researchers can use an ethnographic research approach, called the strip resolution process (SRP), to make explicit the process by which they achieve their interpretation, rather than provide just their interpretation leaving the process as a black box.
Design/methodology/approach
Interpretive case study using interviews, observation, participant‐observation, and study of documents.
Findings
For IS researchers, a key finding is that the SRP facilitates both an understanding of research phenomena from the members’ perspective and a means of explaining how that understanding was achieved. For IS practitioners, a key finding is that organizational work practices and reward structures should be “co‐designed” with the collaborative technology's functionalities to accomplish organizational objectives.
Research limitations/implications
This study used ethnographically informed approaches, including the SRP, to collect and interpret data. However, the duration spent at the organizational site, 25 days spread over eight months, would not qualify this study as an ethnography based on the recommended duration of 12 months of sustained fieldwork.
Practical implications
This study's findings have two implications for IS practice. The first implication is that practitioners planning to deploy collaborative technology in an organization should not focus primarily, or even mainly, on the technology's functionalities. Instead, they should pay most attention to the organization's work practices and reward structures. Work practices and reward structures should be “co‐designed” with the technology's functionalities to accomplish organizational objectives. The second implication is that the SRP could help close the “understanding gap” between IS practitioners and system stakeholders. Hence, a practitioner can use the SRP as a supplement to any systems development methodology for analyzing system requirements.
Originality/value
The value of this paper for IS interpretive researchers is that it explains and illustrates how an ethnographic research approach called the SRP can be used by a researcher to understand research phenomena from the members’ perspective, test and validate his interpretation, and reveal how he reached his interpretation and not just provide his interpretation leaving the process of achieving it a black box. The value of this paper for IS practitioners is that it emphasizes the importance of “co‐designing” work practices and reward structures with a collaborative system's functionalities and provides them specific questions to ask, and reflect upon, before designing and deploying a collaborative system. In addition, practitioners can use the SRP as a tool to supplement any systems development methodology to help reduce the understanding gap between themselves and the system stakeholders.
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Rebeca Schroeder, Denio Duarte and Ronaldo dos Santos Mello
Designing efficient XML schemas is essential for XML applications which manage semi‐structured data. On generating XML schemas, there are two opposite goals: to avoid redundancy…
Abstract
Purpose
Designing efficient XML schemas is essential for XML applications which manage semi‐structured data. On generating XML schemas, there are two opposite goals: to avoid redundancy and to provide connected structures in order to achieve good performance on queries. In general, highly connected XML structures allow data redundancy, and redundancy‐free schemas generate disconnected XML structures. The purpose of this paper is to describe and evaluate by experiments an approach which balances such trade‐off through a workload analysis. Additionally, it aims to identify the most accessed data based on the workload and suggest indexes to improve access performance.
Design/methodology/approach
The paper applies and evaluates a workload‐aware methodology to provide indexing and highly connected structures for data which are intensively accessed through paths traversed by the workload.
Findings
The paper presents benchmarking results on a set of design approaches for XML schemas and demonstrates that the XML schemas generated by the approach provide high query performance and low cost of data redundancy on balancing the trade‐off on XML schema design.
Research limitations/implications
Although an XML benchmark is applied in these experiments, further experiments are expected in a real‐world application.
Practical implications
The approach proposed may be applied in a real‐world process for designing new XML databases as well as in reverse engineering process to improve XML schemas from legacy databases.
Originality/value
Unlike related work, the reported approach integrates the two opposite goal in the XML schema design, and generates suitable schemas according to a workload. An experimental evaluation shows that the proposed methodology is promising.
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