The Differing Effects of Satisfaction, Trust, and Commitment on Buyer\u27s Behavioral Loyalty: A Study into the Buyer-Salesperson and Buyer-Selling Firm Relationship in a Business-to-Business Context

This study is one of the first studies to fully address the relationship that business-to-business buyers have with both the selling firm and salesperson within an integrated model. Finding from this survey research support 14 of the 26 original hypotheses and the 2 additional linkages using structural equation modeling. This study finds that the relationship customers have with the selling firm is a stronger predictor of continuance than the relationship that the buyer has with the salesperson. While this relationship is stronger between the buyer and the selling firm, findings suggest that the salesperson can have a direct negative impact on the relationship if conflict is present. Overall, this study provides a framework for future research on the topic of business-to-business buyer-selling firm and buyer-salesperson relationships

Sales and Operations Planning (S&OP): A Group Effectiveness Approach

Sales and Operations planning (S&OP) is an approach meant to help firms achieve demand and supply balance, yet experts agree that it has fallen short on delivering anticipated benefits. Carried out by cross-functional teams, S&OP entails getting people from different thought worlds, especially sales, aligned around common goals. Despite ample practitioner guidance, there is a dearth of scholarly research indicating pathways to success. Using a group effectiveness theoretical framework, this study identifies both internal team factors and contextual influencers that are predictors of S&OP effectiveness. Perspectives were captured from S&OP team members across a wide cross-section of industries representing sales and operations functions using a survey-based approach. Results indicate that internal team factors of social cohesion and decision making autonomy are key drivers of collaboration. Similarly, information quality, procedural quality, and team-based rewards/incentives serve as contextual influencers of collaboration. In turn, collaboration serves as a central mediator, partially linking antecedents to S&OP effectiveness and also serving as a direct influencer of success. Moreover, having joint rewards and incentives, which is often not the case among S&OP teams, is the greatest overall driver of S&OP effectiveness. Overall, these findings provide empirically-based guidance for managers seeking to determine which factors are most important for S&OP team success. Additionally, grounding S&OP in principles of group effectiveness theory will also aid future academic study in efforts to help firms achieve greater demand and supply balance

Evaluating the Influence of Personal Learning On Salesperson Role Ambiguity and Organizational Commitment

Learning facilitates changes in attitudes and behavior and these changes beseech improved performance and increased sales outcomes. Yet, given the independent nature of most sales positions, with fewer opportunities to engage with supervisors and co-workers, it is reasonable to postulate that many of the benefits of the organizational learning resources may go unrealized causing these employees to feel ill prepared and less committed to performing the duties of their job. The current study offers insight as to how ongoing efforts might produce positive energy toward the application of workplace learning thereby increasing the probability that the benefits will lead to performance outcomes that can be felt on an organizational level. Using a sample of frontline salespeople across varying industries, this study investigates personal learning, defined as the acquisition of knowledge, skills, or competencies which contribute to individual development. We evaluate changes in role ambiguity and organizational commitment as evidence of personal learning. The findings of the study reveal the effects of which may have longstanding organizational impact

Playing popular science

Popular science is a critical form of science communication and dissemination. While scientific journals and detailed textbooks are well suited to dissemination of detailed theories and findings within academic communities, there is a definitive need to inform the general public of key scientific concepts and challenges. Indeed, this is increasingly seen as a central part of any research project or funding bid: in the United Kingdom, the Research Councils stipulate a need to consider public engagement and outreach in research proposals For scientists, the popular science book has long been a medium of choice, primarily because they already have a great deal of experience in writing. But in recent years scientific researchers have been increasingly engaged with other forms of popular science communication, including radio and television broadcasting. Early careers researchers are now provided with training in these areas, including guidance on how to develop programme proposals and how to write, present, direct, and edit materials for print, the airwaves, and screen. In effect, today’s scientists are expected to engage directly with popular science journalism not merely as scientific advisors, but as the writers, directors, and broadcasters.This event involved an exhibition and discussion of four popular science games, co-designed by scientific experts and designed and developed by students at Abertay University. The four games were: (1) Namaka by Crowbar Games Co-designed by Ecotoxicologist Dr Brian Quinn (2) Tides: A Shark Tale by Benthos Games Co-designed by Immunologist and sharks expert Dr Helen Dooley (3) Orbs by Quantessential Games Co-designed by Quantum Physicist Dr Erik Gauger (4) Cell Cycle by Type 3 Games Co-designed by Cell Biologist and cancer researcher Dr Adrian Sauri

Transplantation of human pulpal and gingival fibroblasts attached to synthetic scaffolds

Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/72582/1/j.0909-8836.1999.eos107408.x.pd

Individuating Assets and Liabilities in Financial Accounting

Until recently, accounting theorists gave little thought to what makes a particular instance of an asset or liability a single object and the very object it is—what individuates assets and liabilities. This paper offers an analysis of this individuation in the IASB's Conceptual Framework. It can be read at two levels: as an exploration of the coherence of the framework in its own terms, or, at a deeper level, as a philosophical analysis, located within philosophical pragmatism. I argue that the IASB framework's individuation is radically incoherent. I set out the case for a pragmatist approach and offer pragmatist principles of individuation. Standard setters have recently given some attention to individuation via a new kind of accounting object, the unit of account, and this is taken further in the IASB framework. This thinking is a good deal more convincing than the attempt to individuate assets and liabilities and is consistent with pragmatist principles. I propose reconceptualizing assets and liabilities using the principles developed for the unit of account. The paper extends our understanding of the way assets and liabilities are conceptualized in financial accounting; my proposal would improve the coherence of the conceptual framework in its own terms, provide a philosophically sound underpinning for its individuations, and open up the possibility of reconnecting the framework to the pragmatist epistemology encountered in classical accounting theory, extending the underpinning to the framework as a whole and, perhaps, reviving scholarly interest in the accounting theory of the framework project

Are Accounting Standards Memes? The Survival Of Accounting Evolution In An Age Of Regulation

This paper employs memetics to argue against the view that standardisation overwhelms the evolution of accounting. I suggest that, in an unregulated setting, accounting procedures constitute classic memes and survive according to their fitness for their environment, which is predominantly a matter of their suitability for investment decision-making. In a standardising regime, the standardising canon embodies a special kind of meme encoding ideas as actions to be imitated to realise those ideas. Evolutionary pressures and the canon develop in tandem, although not necessarily synchronously. If we accept the central tenet of memetics, which is also the assumption underlying the argument challenged here, that memes emerging before regulation were responsive to evolutionary pressures, we can analyse the responsiveness of the standardising canon by examining its relationship to a counterfactual continuation of the pre-regulated regime. The degree of synchronicity is an empirical, but elusive, question and we should follow Dennett’s recommendation that we settle for the philosophical realisations we can glean from memetics. I argue that three factors are of importance in addressing the question. Accounting memes function within a dense ecology, limiting radical and destabilising change. There has been a high degree of continuity, permeability and commonality in the intellection driving development: the same thinking has influenced policy design wherever it has taken place. Finally, the principal determinant of successful adaptation did not change on the transition to standardisation and the canon and its vehicles have survived. Consequently, we can conclude that standardisation has not disrupted the development of accounting

The metaphysics of financial performance in financial accounting

This paper argues that the metaphysics of financial performance in the conceptual framework employed by accounting standard-setters is incoherent: income and expenses cannot, as the framework holds, both be independent elements of financial statements, identified from underlying events, tested for recognition and measured by discrete acts, separately from the identification, testing and measurement of other elements and satisfy the analytical relationship between performance and position embraced by the framework. An alternative conceptualisation is proposed, under which income and expenses are part of a wider system of classifying all changes in assets and liabilities, measured indirectly. This approach improves the metaphysical coherence, and thus the intellectual strength, of the framework project; while it leaves the measurement of financial performance unchanged, by emphasising the importance of classification, it invites further attention to the presentation of financial performance, with the potential for improving the usefulness of disclosures

How hegemony works: the fate of a presidential initiative

This study charts the course of an American Accounting Association initiative designed to overcome perceived stagnation in US accounting scholarship by removing impediments to innovation within the research infrastructure. It analyses events using Gramscian theory of hegemony, extended to embrace Raymond Williams’ development of the cultural dynamics of the phenomenon and concepts of disciplinary hegemony and micro-hegemony. It shows that the structurally complex disciplinary micro-hegemony of US accounting scholarship underwent challenge and some modification and recreation of its elements but was largely successful in defending its cultural ascendency and repressive capacity. Some tentative ideas about how paradigmatic domination might be overthrown are sketched out

The sedimentology and stratigraphy of the Beaufort Group of the Karoo Supergroup in the vicinity of Thaba Nchu, central Free State province

Different basin fill models have been proposed for the retroarc foreland basin within which the Karoo Supergroup of South Africa was deposited. The most recent of these proposals suggests that the Karoo Basin behaved as a partitioned entity and that reciprocal infill occurred either side of a hinge line in the centre of the basin. Detailed sedimentological, palaeontological, stratigraphic and geophysical information for the Beaufort Group in the eastern central Free State in the vicinity of Thaba Nchu is presented here enhances aspects of this model. It is shown that the fossils assignable to the Dicynodon, Lystrosaurus and Cynognathus assemblage zones occur within the sandstones and mudrocks of the Balfour, Katberg and Burgersdorp formations in the study area. Using this combined data set it is shown that parts of the Beaufort Group stratigraphic succession which are present in the southern part of the Karoo Basin are absent in the central Free State. This suggests a depositional hiatus at both the beginning of the Lystrosaurus Assemblage Zone and at the end of Cynognathus Assemblage Zone times. During these hiatuses deposition was restricted to the proximal sector i.e. south of the hinge line. This finding is in line with the proposal that the Karoo Basin behaved as a partitioned basin with reciprocal fill. Geophysical information defines a basement high north-east of Thaba Nchu that probably accounts for a coarse-grained unit with anomalous palaeocurrent directions within the study area