Delivering ‘Effortless Experience’ Across Borders: Managing Internal Consistency in Professional Service Firms

This article explores how professional service firms manage across borders. When clients require consistent services delivered across multiple locations, especially across borders, then firms need to develop an organization that is sufficiently flexible to be able to support such consistent service delivery. Our discussion is illustrated by the globalization process of law firms. We argue that the globalization of large corporate law firms primarily takes place in terms of investments in the development of protocols, processes and practices that enhance internal consistency such that clients receive an ‘effortless experience’ of the service across multiple locations worldwide. Over the longer term the ability to deliver such effortless experience is dependent upon meaningful integration within and across the firm. Firms that achieve this are building a source of sustainable competitive advantage

Services brands' values: internal and external corporate communication

As services brands are a cluster of values, we explore the way in which values are communicated to both customers and staff. This work is based upon a literature review and themes highlighted from depth interviews with leading edge services branding consultants. Values tend to be communicated to consumers via their experience of the brand as a whole, including their interactions with employees, external brand communications and the tangible elements of the service offering. For employees, values are communicated via HR practices and polices, internal and external brand communications and the example set by senior managers

The development and initial validation of The Cognitive Fusion Questionnaire

Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) emphasizes the relationship a person has with their thoughts and beliefs as potentially more relevant than belief content in predicting the emotional and behavioral consequences of cognition. In ACT, ‘defusion’ interventions aim to ‘unhook’ thoughts from actions and to create psychological distance between a person and their thoughts, beliefs, memories and self-stories. A number of similar concepts have been described in the psychology literature (e.g. decentering, metacognition, mentalization and mindfulness) suggesting converging evidence that how we relate to mental events may be of critical importance. Whilst there are some good measures of these related processes, none of them provides an adequate operationalization of cognitive fusion. Despite the centrality of cognitive fusion in the ACT model, there is as yet no agreed measure of cognitive fusion. This paper presents the construction and development of a brief, self-report measure of cognitive fusion: The Cognitive Fusion Questionnaire (CFQ). The results of a series of studies involving over 1800 people across diverse samples show good preliminary evidence of the CFQ’s factor structure, reliability, temporal stability, validity, discriminant validity, and sensitivity to treatment effects. The potential uses of the CFQ in research and clinical practice are outlined

The globalisation of service industries

School of Managemen

Global markets, the global consumer and international retailing

School of Managemen

The logic of international growth for service firms

School of Managemen

Strategy in service organisations

The Oxford Handbook of Strategy is a two-volume set on the key subject areas and issues currently under discussion in the field of strategy. It unites a team of contributors who are all authorities on the topic of their chapter. The handbook will be of considerable value to researchers, graduate students, and teachers whose interest in the subject area has advanced beyond that of the traditional textbooks, and to managers and consultants who seek an authoritative, accessible, and up-to-date discussion of the fundamentals of strategy

Service industry strategies

About the book: The second edition of this flagship business and management reference work is divided into 12 individual subject volumes and an index and includes a brand new volume on Entrepreneurship: Comprises over 6500 specially commissioned and carefully edited entries Written and edited by international teams of over 1500 of the world's best scholars and teachers Features extended bibliographies of relevant, wider, international literature and the foremost global scholarship in each field Flexible, multi-level use, maintained and further extended by sophisticated cross-referencing both among individual encyclopedia entries and between volumes and external sources. Available online, for the first time, via the EBSCO database and linked to wider literature and to an associated Blackwell Library Online, consisting of a selection of Blackwell Handbooks and Journals in the field. Register with us to receive updates on this landmark project at www.managementencyclopedia.com where you will find further details, a special pre-publication offer and, coming soon, contributor browsing features

Global firms: heroes or villains?

Globalisation has had a bad press. Industries and firms go global in the quest for competitive advantage. They excite criticism and worse, for their alleged side effects on local businesses, national economies, political structures and traditional cultures. The article examines why globalisation happens and what it actually does

Globalization of service industries

About the book: The second edition of this flagship business and management reference work is divided into 12 individual subject volumes and an index and includes a brand new volume on Entrepreneurship: Comprises over 6500 specially commissioned and carefully edited entries Written and edited by international teams of over 1500 of the world's best scholars and teachers Features extended bibliographies of relevant, wider, international literature and the foremost global scholarship in each field. Flexible, multi-level use, maintained and further extended by sophisticated cross-referencing both among individual encyclopedia entries and between volumes and external sources. Available online, for the first time, via the EBSCO database and linked to wider literature and to an associated Blackwell Library Online, consisting of a selection of Blackwell Handbooks and Journals in the field. Register with us to receive updates on this landmark