Critical review of the e-loyalty literature: a purchase-centred framework

Over the last few years, the concept of online loyalty has been examined extensively in the literature, and it remains a topic of constant inquiry for both academics and marketing managers. The tremendous development of the Internet for both marketing and e-commerce settings, in conjunction with the growing desire of consumers to purchase online, has promoted two main outcomes: (a) increasing numbers of Business-to-Customer companies running businesses online and (b) the development of a variety of different e-loyalty research models. However, current research lacks a systematic review of the literature that provides a general conceptual framework on e-loyalty, which would help managers to understand their customers better, to take advantage of industry-related factors, and to improve their service quality. The present study is an attempt to critically synthesize results from multiple empirical studies on e-loyalty. Our findings illustrate that 62 instruments for measuring e-loyalty are currently in use, influenced predominantly by Zeithaml et al. (J Marketing. 1996;60(2):31-46) and Oliver (1997; Satisfaction: a behavioral perspective on the consumer. New York: McGraw Hill). Additionally, we propose a new general conceptual framework, which leads to antecedents dividing e-loyalty on the basis of the action of purchase into pre-purchase, during-purchase and after-purchase factors. To conclude, a number of managerial implementations are suggested in order to help marketing managers increase their customers’ e-loyalty by making crucial changes in each purchase stage

The evaluation of E-business related technologies in the Railway Industry

For the purposes of this paper, e-business is defined as: "the performance, automisation and organisation of transactions, or chains of them, and the gathering and publishing of data, electronically over a communication protocol" Little research has been conducted either into how e-business technology can be successfully evaluated, or into the associated costs and benefits specifically related to the transportation and railway industries. Based upon a review of the current literature and a series of interviews held with railway operators, track managers and transportation customers from the Australian Fortune 100, the paper puts forward a framework for the evaluation of e-business investments within the railway industry. The research reported here is aimed at developing a flexible interface that enables the decision maker to assess and evaluate a wide variety of complex interacting variables. The proposed approach uses a variety of evaluation methods, as opposed to searching for a single "best" approach. Additionally, an attempt is being made to include the complex interaction between the implementation of the new technology and the changing organisational setting. A model is proposed using fuzzy logic to handle incomplete and uncertain knowledge; as well as to combine criteria within a conceptual model from which "real-worth" evaluations can be performed. This model provides a systematic approach to guide the decision maker in the deployment of e-business and emerging technologies in the industry. After discussing the main findings from a literature review on the use of evaluation frameworks in IT related projects, the paper deals with the proposed framework in detail. The use of empirical data, which was obtained transportation customers to help define the main framework factors, is also discussed. Finally, the paper summarises the main implications for rail freight of customers’s perceptions and stated needs in the e-business domain

Understanding the use value dimensions of outsourced maintenance services

Surviving in long-term outsourced maintenance contracts in current financial situation necessitates better understanding of what customers attribute as value and its dimensions. This paper reports on findings from research undertaken with a supplier of automation products and services and its customers. Structured interviewing technique has been conducted in four customer companies from different industrial sectors at different organizational levels. Value dimensions and their role in different decision making levels are identified

THE USEFULNESS OF ANALYTICAL TOOLS FOR SUSTAINABLE FUTURES

The aim of this study is to assess the usefulness of analytical tools for policy evaluation. The study focuses on a multi-method integrated toolkit, the so-called SMILE toolkit. This toolkit consist of the integration of three evaluation frameworks developed within an EU-funded consortium called Development and Comparison of Sustainability (DECOIN) and further applied within the consortium Synergies in Multi-Scale Inter-Linkages of Eco-social systems (SMILE). This toolkit is developed to provide reporting features that are required for monitoring policy-making. The sustainable development perspective is rather difficult to attempt due to its dynamism and its multi-dimensionality. Therefore, in this study, we aim to assess the usefulness of the SMILE toolkit to sustainable development issues on the basis of the critical factors of sustainable development. In other words, here, we will prove the usefulness of the toolkit to help policymakers to think about and work on sustainable developments in the future.

‘You can see the quality in front of your eyes’: grounding academic standards between rationality and interpretation

This article considers the failure of theory to provide a workable model for academic standards in use. Examining the contrast between theoretical perspectives, it argues that there are four dimensions for which the academy has failed to provide an adequate theoretical account of standards: documented or tacit knowledge of standards; norm or criterion referenced grading; analytical or holistic judgement processes; and broad or local consensus on standards. It concludes that whilst a techno-rational perspective poorly represents the actual practice of standards in use, alternative, interpretivist accounts do not satisfy demands for reliability, transparency and fairness. It concludes by outlining an alternative framework for safeguarding standards: systematising a range of processes for learning about and safeguarding standards, particularly for new staff; reviewing the role and potential of documented standards; building staff awareness and assessment literacy; and establishing trust in standards by students and other stakeholders

Why Catastrophic Organizational Failures Happen

Excerpt from the introduction: The purpose of this chapter is to examine the major streams of research about catastrophic failures, describing what we have learned about why these failures occur as well as how they can be prevented. The chapter begins by describing the most prominent sociological school of thought with regard to catastrophic failures, namely normal accident theory. That body of thought examines the structure of organizational systems that are most susceptible to catastrophic failures. Then, we turn to several behavioral perspectives on catastrophic failures, assessing a stream of research that has attempted to understand the cognitive, group and organizational processes that develop and unfold over time, leading ultimately to a catastrophic failure. For an understanding of how to prevent such failures, we then assess the literature on high reliability organizations (HRO). These scholars have examined why some complex organizations operating in extremely hazardous conditions manage to remain nearly error free. The chapter closes by assessing how scholars are trying to extend the HRO literature to develop more extensive prescriptions for managers trying to avoid catastrophic failures

Analyzing collaborative learning processes automatically

In this article we describe the emerging area of text classification research focused on the problem of collaborative learning process analysis both from a broad perspective and more specifically in terms of a publicly available tool set called TagHelper tools. Analyzing the variety of pedagogically valuable facets of learners’ interactions is a time consuming and effortful process. Improving automated analyses of such highly valued processes of collaborative learning by adapting and applying recent text classification technologies would make it a less arduous task to obtain insights from corpus data. This endeavor also holds the potential for enabling substantially improved on-line instruction both by providing teachers and facilitators with reports about the groups they are moderating and by triggering context sensitive collaborative learning support on an as-needed basis. In this article, we report on an interdisciplinary research project, which has been investigating the effectiveness of applying text classification technology to a large CSCL corpus that has been analyzed by human coders using a theory-based multidimensional coding scheme. We report promising results and include an in-depth discussion of important issues such as reliability, validity, and efficiency that should be considered when deciding on the appropriateness of adopting a new technology such as TagHelper tools. One major technical contribution of this work is a demonstration that an important piece of the work towards making text classification technology effective for this purpose is designing and building linguistic pattern detectors, otherwise known as features, that can be extracted reliably from texts and that have high predictive power for the categories of discourse actions that the CSCL community is interested in

The role of urban built heritage in qualify and quantify resilience. Specific issues in Mediterranean city

The Mediterranean city represents a significant example of urban organism, based on masonry construction and characterized by typological processes of growth. The material consistency and the temporal continuity of built heritage in Mediterranean city make relevant its interpretation and analysis according to the resilient approach. The declination of this approach in many disciplines generated a substantial diversity among the definitions of resilience (Francis and Bekera, 2014). Consequently, frameworks, adopted for a quantitative or qualitative assessment, underline the lack of standardization and rigor in defining resilience measurements. A review of resilience literature and actual applications in urban context permit to understand that there are different operators working on the field: on the one hand there are international organizations, on the other hand there are academics. The review of both the two ambits of investigation intends to clarify specific properties and convergence points in order to trace an evolution of conceptual framework and to identify general features of urban resilience. This process is fundamental in focusing the main aims of the research program: the definition of the role of urban built heritage, given by the close correlation between masonry constructive technique, typologies and morphologies, its material value in urban system, and its relevance in Mediterranean city in constitution of urban resilience (UNISDR, 2012a). Despite an increasing number of academic studies concerning the role of built environment in defining and improving cities resilience, their major attention is still focused on street patterns and lifelines infrastructures. The paper concludes how the role of built heritage remains insufficiently explored and a correct definition of urban structure is still missing inside the domain of infrastructural resilience

New Directions in Compensation Research: Synergies, Risk, and Survival

We describe and use two theoretical frameworks, the resource-based view of the firm and institutional theory, as lenses for examining three promising areas of compensation research. First, we examine the nature of the relationship between pay and effectiveness. Does pay typically have a main effect or, instead, does the relationship depend on other human resource activities and organization characteristics? If the latter is true, then there are synergies between pay and these other factors and thus, conclusions drawn from main effects models may be misleading. Second, we discuss a relatively neglected issue in pay research, the concept of risk as it applies to investments in pay programs. Although firms and researchers tend to focus on expected returns from compensation interventions, analysis of the risk, or variability, associated with these returns may be essential for effective decision-making. Finally ,pay program survival, which has been virtually ignored in systematic pay research, is investigated. Survival appears to have important consequences for estimating pay plan risk and returns, and is also integral to the discussion of pay synergies. Based upon our two theoretical frameworks, we suggest specific research directions for pay program synergies, risk, and survival