A nation’s culture has a significant influence on an employee’s behavior and communication. Culture-specific characteristics cause information delivery biases, especially in services. This paper studies how a nation’s culture affects the quality of information delivery using a global airline dataset. Cultural differences are measured by two commonly used datasets, Hofstede and Globe projects. Our results show that cultural characteristics have statistically significant effects on the website quality, inflight media options, and inflight communications. We suggest firms in each culture become aware of these findings and step forward to remedy their shortcomings or to bolster their performance.

This study empirically explores a real-world manufacturer product development process from a service science perspective. In this era of keen global competition, the process of product development is crucial for companies before the final product is launched to the market. The poor development of a product can fail to meet customer needs and result in product failure, which can even lead to significant losses for manufacturers. However, traditional product development processes are much more manufacture-oriented rather than customer-involved. In this paper, we aim to use the Service science, management, and engineering (SSME) perspective, proposed by IBM, to improve product demand asymmetries by discovering true user requirements in order to enhance customer involvement and lead to better product development. We show how SSME is applied in the context of product development and in the discovery of customer needs, and propose a modified process based on SSME to the product development process.

The literature on service business in manufacturing companies posits that manufacturers “servitize” by increasing the proportion of services offered. This study presents two paths that are contrary to such forward-unidirectional servitization, indicating “reversed servitization.” In the first case, a capital goods manufacturer lost visibility to its installed base due to evolving product technology. We use the case of photocopier manufacturer Xerox to support our findings; a regulation change forced Xerox to move from a service-based toward a product-based business model. We thus propose that influencing environmental factors need to be researched and that the literature of organizational ecology may serve as a complementary perspective.

The key to becoming a green low-carbon society consists of cutting back the use of fossil fuels and developing new and renewable sources of energy. This long-term goal should be accompanied by the immediate solutions; some of which, such as Green IT practices, are already available. This paper presents a comprehensive overview of the importance of sustainability and the role of IT (Information Technology) in it by providing specific examples of how to green IT and greening with IT that some of the leading firms and non-profit organizations have already undertaken. The paper also introduces some strategies and initiatives undertaken by international environmental organizations for establishing standards and increasing green IT awareness. Finally, the study suggests some guidelines, for businesses, governments, and individuals, to increase the efforts for Green IT and its awareness.

The purpose of this article is twofold. First, it attempts to explore the factors contributing to the brand values of Taiwan’s financial service companies. Second, it aims to examine the value relevance of their brand equity. Our empirical findings from OLS regression show that advertising expenditure in banking firms have positive significant effects on brand evaluation and that the brand equity of banking firms is positively related to their market value. The general findings remain valid when we apply conditional quantile regressions to re-examine these relationships. Moreover, the quantile estimates indicate that the factor of brand loyalty could bring benefits to the banks with lower levels of brand equity. However, brands do not offer insights into the banks that have extremely low market capitalization.

Previous research has determined the different internal service quality (ISQ) characteristics in the East and the West; however, the differences within Chinese subcultures still remain unknown. The objective of this study is thus to determine whether the importance level of ISQ factors and attributes is similar within the different Chinese subcultures. The empirical results show there are significant differences between Taiwan, China, and Singapore in the purchasing function of the manufacturing industry. Internal service providers should thus be able to use the results of this research to improve the service quality they direct towards their customers. This study also offers recommendations for managers to increase the levels of ISQ in Chinese businesses.

The objective of this study is to analyse the moderating effects of gender and education on users’ loyalty to the website of an airline. We provide a tested model for greater understanding the effects of gender and education on the loyalty of experienced users in utilitarian purchasers of airline’s website. The results reveal that website quality, e-satisfaction, e-trust and affective e-loyalty are antecedents of conative e-loyalty in loyalty relationships between passengers and airline websites, as well as the importance of university education in the configuration of loyalty to the website. Consumers with university education are found to be more likely to purchase through the websites of airline companies than those without. Also, according to the most recent literature, the moderating effect of gender has been found non-significant in most of the causal relationships presented in the model studied.

This study analyzes differences in the formation of overall perceived value of a tourism service purchased online, taking tourists’ national culture as a moderating variable. The intention is to understand the influence of cultural dimensions on the antecedents and consequences of overall perceived value amongst consumers of different cultures. The sample is made up of 300 tourists (150 British and 150 Spanish) who have purchased a tourism service via the Internet. The two cultures to which the tourists belong differ in terms of the cultural dimensions of uncertainty-avoidance and individualism–collectivism. The findings reveal that in the formation of overall perceived value—which embraces both the online purchase phase and also consumption of the tourism service—moderating effects are generated principally by the cultural dimensions of uncertainty-avoidance and individualism/collectivism. The key practical implications of the study are to understand the variations on overall perceived value when making an online purchase, and to understand the role played by cultural dimensions in interactions with web-based businesses.

Over the last decade, independent agencies, institutions and research centres (ISTAT—National Statistic Office, Ministry of Economic Development, Confcooperative Legacoop, Unioncamere) have provided studies on the evolution of the cooperative movement in the Third Sector in Italy in order to monitor the development of these organizations over time and to evaluate their economic and employment impact in the country. Following a similar path, this study analyzes the contribution of social cooperatives in Italy at a regional level, highlighting the differences related to their longevity and fields of activity. Moreover, the article evaluates the efficiency and profitability of the social cooperative by adopting principal component analysis to economic and financial indexes.

This paper seeks to analyse if the capital structure decisions of service small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) are different from those of other types of firm. To do so, we consider four research samples: (i) 610 service SMEs; (ii) 126 service large firms; (iii) 679 manufacturing and construction SMEs; and (iv) 132 manufacturing and construction large firms. Using the two-step estimation method, the empirical evidence obtained in this study shows that the capital structure decisions of service SMEs are different from those of other types of firm. Service SMEs’ capital structure decisions are closer to the assumptions of Pecking Order Theory and further removed from those of Trade-Off Theory compared with the case of other types of firm.