International student complaint behaviour: Understanding how East-Asian business and management students respond to dissatisfaction during their university experience

The higher education sector is characterised by intense global competition for international students. This is driving universities to place greater priority on the student experience and, in particular, student satisfaction and retention. However, an under-researched area is student complaint behaviour. By understanding how students react to poor experiences; the likely impact on the learning and teaching experience, satisfaction ratings and ultimately international student recruitment can be assessed, and appropriate strategies implemented. This study developed an instrument that measured East-Asian students’ preferred university complaint channels. The research focused on four categories of complaint behaviour: public, private, third party and non-behavioural, and data were collected from 135 East-Asian Business and Management students. A vignette questioning technique was used, providing respondents with hypothetical negative student experiences and recording their likely responses in terms of both how and where they would complain. Results suggest international students are pro-active in reporting dissatisfaction direct to the university, but also share these negative experiences with fellow students. The findings offer new insights to those responsible for managing the student experience and, in particular, for those tasked with handling student complaints

Open Door Policies: Measuring Impact Using Attitude Surveys

This study examines employee perceptions of an Open Door Complaint System from both those who have filed claims and those who have not. Our sample includes over 4000 employees working in a Fortune 100 company. We examine these perceptions through an organization wide employee attitude survey. Analyzing situation specific perceptions, we examine their relationship with overall fairness, satisfaction and intent to remain with the organization. Results suggest that a positive Open Door incident raises both distributive and procedural justice perceptions. In turn, fairness perceptions influence satisfaction levels. Finally, results indicate that satisfaction has a strong effect on the intent to remain with the organization. Implications are discussed for both complaint systems and employee opinion surveys

«FRIENDLY» COMPLAINING BEHAVIORS: TOWARD A RELATIONAL APPROACH

The relational approach is often presented as a strategy to retain customers, but it may also be an appropriate approach to encourage customers to complain, as a review of literature shows. Using information contained in complaints and giving the right answers (distributive, procedural and interactional) to such complaints is essential. Relational marketing may also be used to induce customers (but not all of them) to complain about the attributes of certain products/services. This article focuses on these issues and should stimulate further research in this new field.Relationship Marketing; Complaining Behavior; Friendly Complaints, Justice Theory

Experimental comparison between proportional and PWM-solenoid valves controlled servopneumatic positioning systems

The performance of the Dynamical Adaptive Backstepping-Sliding Mode Control (DAB-SMC) scheme for positioning of a pneumatic cylinder regulated by two types of PWM-solenoid valves is experimentally investigated. The goal is to study the compromise in controller’s performance as the system moves from using a proportional valve to employing the low-cost PWM-solenoid valves. Sinusoidal and multiple-step inputs are used as the reference position trajectories. Experimental results show that the DAB-SMC scheme works best with the proportional valve. The performance, however, deteriorates by more than twofold, once the system utilizes PWM- solenoid valves of 3/2-way or 2/2-way configurations. From this study, tradeoff between performances of different types of valves applied on a DAB-SMC scheme-controlled servo positioning system is successfully documented. This information helps to configure appropriate servopneumatic system for positioning applications

Organizational Misconduct: Beyond the Principal-Agent Model

This article demonstrates that, at least since the adoption of the Organizational Sentencing Guidelines in 1991, the United States legal regime has been moving away from a system of strict vicarious liability toward a system of duty-based organizational liability. Under this system, organizational liability for agent misconduct is dependant on whether or not the organization has exercised due care to avoid the harm in question, rather than under traditional agency principles of respondeat superior. Courts and agencies typically evaluate the level of care exercised by the organization by inquiring whether the organization had in place internal compliance structures ostensibly designed to detect and discourage such conduct. I argue, however, that any internal compliance-based organizational liability regime is likely to fail because courts and agencies lack sufficient information about the effectiveness of such structures. As a result, an internal compliance-based liability system encourages the implementation of largely cosmetic internal compliance structures that reduce legal liability without reducing the incidence of organizational misconduct. Furthermore, a review of the empirical literature on the effectiveness of internal compliance structures suggests that many organizations have adopted precisely this cosmetic approach to internal compliance. This leads to two potential problems: first, an underdeterrence of organizational misconduct and, second, a proliferation of costly but ineffective internal compliance structures

We\u27re Cool Statements After Omnicare: Securities Fraud Suits for Failures to Comply with the Law

As part of a symposium celebrating the multiple contributions of the late Alan Bromberg, this article examines implications flowing from the Supreme Court’s recent decision in Omnicare Inc. v. Laborers District Council Construction Industry Pension Fund. Because Omnicare lands so squarely on the Court’s earlier opaque opinion in Virginia Bankshares, Inc. v. Sandberg addressing the treatment of the materiality of opinion statements, Omnicare is the new currency in the realm that will have far-reaching implications. In Virginia Bankshares, the Supreme Court quickly concluded shareholders would attach significance to the board of directors’ statement that the cash-out merger price was “fair” and “high” so that the statement met the materiality standard, but emphasized there was another, more perplexing, issue: whether such an opinion statement was a statement of fact. On this question, Virginia Bankshares’ formulation is hopelessly ambiguous. As developed in this article, Omnicare Inc. returns the focus to the traditional orientation of the information’s significance to the investor and thereby not only provides an understandable, indeed conventional vis-à-vis the common law, but also harbors the strong potential to dramatically change existing approaches to how we view general statements that provide optimism and reassurance, for example “puffery statements” or even what constitutes “meaningful cautionary language under the Bespeaks Caution Doctrine. The article also provides insight to how Omnicare complements the positive contributions of state law doctrine that has developed in the wake of Omnicare Inc. v. NCS Healthcare, Inc. that extended the directors’ monitoring duty to their oversight of compliance systems

The Racial Equity Report Card: Fair Housing on Long Island

Examines the history of residential segregation on Long Island, analyzes current practices and complaints data by race/ethnicity and outcome, and assesses enforcement of fair housing laws at the county, state, and federal levels. Includes recommendations