An Application Of The Conceptual Model Of Service Quality To Independent Auditing Services

Auditing’s expectations gap has been documented over the last 35 years beginning with Liggio (1974) who initially coined and defined the term.  Porter’s (1991) and Australian Education Research’s (2009) models explored this gap.  However, these models don’t recognize the auditors’ three customer groups: auditees, the public, and regulatory agencies.  Additionally, these models don’t consider communication’s role between auditors and their customer groups.  The  following discussion applies the service quality model (SERVQUAL) developed by Parasuraman, Zeithaml and Berry (1988 and 1991) to the audit expectation gap and makes recommendations for researching the components, causes, effects of and solutions to the auditing expectations. This model identifies expectation gaps between the service provider (the auditor) and its customers including the auditee, the financial statement user, and the regulatory agencies.  Nyeck, Morales, Ladhari, and Pons (2002, p. 102) concluded in a review article of SERVQUAL research”. . .the SERVQUAL model remains the most complete attempt to conceptualize and measure service quality.&rdquo

Corporate sustainability: An integrative definition and framework to evaluate corporate practice and guide academic research

The issues surrounding the concept of corporate sustainability are complex and far-reaching. We undertake a focused review of the sustainability literature that integrates a variety of perspectives. Based on this review, we elaborate an illustrative corporate sustainability framework consisting of elements that are easily understandable and interpretable with respect to tangible corporate sustainability activities and actions. Using this framework we develop a concrete, comprehensive and multidimensional definition of corporate sustainability. Some implications of the sustainability framework for practitioners include the effects of incorporating sustainability into corporate strategy and external communications to corporate stakeholders; the consequences of including an organization\u27s supply chain in sustainability efforts; an illustration of the potential synergy between innovation and sustainability; the consequences of incorporating economic, ecological- environmental, and equity-social concerns in strategic decisions and design processes; and the ramifications of serving as an industry thought leader in shaping sustainability regulatory policies. The framework proposed here can assist in the evaluation of sustainability activities, as well as serve as a guide for an organization that aspires to increase the level and sophistication of its sustainability activities. An important next step for academic sustainability research is to empirically validate the framework proposed here using a variety of methodologies. © 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved

Management of supply chains with attribute-sensitive products: a comprehensive literature review and future research agenda

Purpose: Mismanagement of supply chain operations may lead to waste of products and incur substantial monetary losses. This is particularly true for products with attributes that hasten deterioration, e.g. time, temperature, humidity and barometric pressure. Attribute-sensitive products must be carefully monitored throughout all supply chain processes to ensure acceptable quality to the end customers. This paper presents a comprehensive review of the scientific literature on attribute sensitive products and on attribute sensitive supply chains. The collected studies were reviewed using the content analysis method, focusing on the following aspects of attribute sensitive products: (1) industries; (2) product categories; (3) decisions involved; (4) processes; (5) current issues; (6) sustainability concerns; (7) research methods used; (8) objectives of decision makers; (9) solution approaches used; (10) incentives driving management and (11) future research issues. Based on the analysis of findings, gaps are identified, and future research directions are proposed. Design/methodology/approach: Literature review and content analysis. Findings: The authors discovered that, while the importance of product attributes vary from one industry to the other, overall the time attribute was critical in all of the industries considered in this literature review. Coordination, customer satisfaction, reliability and safety were key issues in attribute sensitive product supply chains (asp-SCs). Similar to the typical supply chains, asp-SCs face economic, social and environmental sustainability issues. However, the majority of the studies in our analysis emphasized importance of the social sustainability. The majority of the papers were reviewed and analyzed and adopted the modeling approach as a research method. Furthermore, it was found that asp-SCs were mostly driven with customer demands and social pressure. Research limitations/implications: Based on the literature review and content analysis, there are a number of directions for the work conducted in this study to be extended in several directions. First, the literature search could be expanded by relaxing some of the restrictions (e.g. include the conference papers and articles from on-line business journals). Second, additional scientific publishers can be considered (e.g. Emerald Insight–www.emeraldinsight.com; Inderscience–www.inderscience.com). The latter two extensions would allow a more precise assessment of published to date work on asp-SC operations. Third, our findings could be validated based on interviews with professionals and executives from companies dealing with asp-SCs. Such validation will allow identification of the differences between the state of the art and the state of practice. Practical implications: Supply chains that handle attribute sensitive products (asps) must consider the complexity of products that significantly change their properties due to factors such as time, temperature, barometric pressure, humidity. Mismanagement of operations within such supply chains may lead to significant product waste, as well as substantial monetary losses. Originality/value: This study presented a comprehensive literature review and content analysis of studies dealing with asps in the following industries: fashion, food, healthcare, humanitarian and pharmaceutical industrie

Corporate Sustainability: A Framework to Guide Academic Research and Corporate Practice

This article proposes an updated and comprehensive sustainability framework to evaluate and guide academic research and corporate practice with respect to corporate sustainability

Status of corporate sustainability: a content analysis of Fortune 500 companies

In order to explore and extend our understanding of corporate sustainability definitions and frameworks, we performed a content analysis of a sample of (2013) Fortune 500 companies\u27 standalone sustainability reports using the content analysis tool, Leximancer (http://leximancer.com). Leximancer is a powerful content analysis tool that performs both conceptual and thematic analysis. In addition, Leximancer displays the results of the analyses visually, thus providing a view of the conceptual and thematic structure of the text, and enabling a researcher to quantify and display the text structure. The results of our analyses demonstrate three common themes (Business, Employees and Energy/Environment) observable across eight of the nine industries in our sample. In addition, we observed significant differences in the relative emphasis for the three common themes across industries. We believe a deeper understanding of the themes that motivate firms\u27 sustainability efforts can enhance future research that explores relationships between organizational sustainability efforts and organizational performance

Status of Corporate Sustainability: A Content Analysis of Fortune 500 Companies

n order to explore and extend our understanding of corporate sustainability definitions and frameworks, we performed a content analysis of a sample of (2013) Fortune 500 companies\u27 standalone sustainability reports using the content analysis tool, Leximancer (http://leximancer.com). Leximancer is a powerful content analysis tool that performs both conceptual and thematic analysis. In addition, Leximancer displays the results of the analyses visually, thus providing a view of the conceptual and thematic structure of the text, and enabling a researcher to quantify and display the text structure. The results of our analyses demonstrate three common themes (Business, Employees and Energy/Environment) observable across eight of the nine industries in our sample. In addition, we observed significant differences in the relative emphasis for the three common themes across industries. We believe a deeper understanding of the themes that motivate firms\u27 sustainability efforts can enhance future research that explores relationships between organizational sustainability efforts and organizational performance