Gaining Competitive Advantages in Higher Education: Analyzing the Gap between Expectations and Perceptions of Service Quality

The research findings have provided several implications for higher educational institutions, managers, and leaders of decision-making processes throughout the world. Service quality, customer satisfaction, and behavioral intentions are global issues that affect all organizations, large or small, profit or non-profit, global or local. We are all influenced or discouraged, satisfied or dissatisfied with positive loyalty behavioral intentions or negative complaining reactions, propelled by the level of service quality received. This revised version was published online in July 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Managerial Involvement and Perceptions of Strategy Process

Prior academic research attests to both positive and negative effects of involvement on the process of developing strategy. On the one hand, it has been argued that involvement strengthens shared vision, increases rationality and improves adaptiveness in strategy-making. On the other hand, involvement is said to lead to intense political behaviour, increased cultural inertia and more constraints in the strategy process. The purpose of this study is to investigate the relative importance of these effects. In a survey of over 6,000 managers, we find that their reported levels of involvement are positively associated with perceptions of strategy development processes that are more rational, more focused by a shared vision, and more adaptive. In addition, involvement is negatively associated with statements describing the process as top-down, influenced by politics and slowed by internal culture. Moreover, those who are more involved tend to see business and non-business constraints as less important in determining strategy. We argue that these associations between involvement and desirable features of strategy process are important because perceptions are the basis of managerial behaviour. Thus, managers who are more involved in strategy not only see the process in a more favourable light but also act in ways that make the process more effective. The main implication of these findings is that for most organisations increasing involvement improves the strategy process.     

What Drives Citizen Participation in Political Gatherings in Modern South Africa? A Quantitative Analysis of Self-Reported Behaviour

Social Indicators Research - Community and public gatherings are an important component of political participation in sub-Saharan Africa. Formal and informal community meetings and rallies are...     

A Diversity Index for Model Space Selection in the Estimation of Benchmark and Infectious Doses via Model Averaging

In chemical and microbial risk assessments, risk assessors fit dose‐response models to high‐dose data and extrapolate downward to risk levels in the range of 1–10%. Although multiple dose‐response models may be able to fit the data adequately in the experimental range, the estimated effective dose (ED) corresponding to an extremely small risk can be substantially different from model to model. In this respect, model averaging (MA) provides more robustness than a single dose‐response model in the point and interval estimation of an ED. In MA, accounting for both data uncertainty and model uncertainty is crucial, but addressing model uncertainty is not achieved simply by increasing the number of models in a model space. A plausible set of models for MA can be characterized by goodness of fit and diversity surrounding the truth. We propose a diversity index (DI) to balance between these two characteristics in model space selection. It addresses a collective property of a model space rather than individual performance of each model. Tuning parameters in the DI control the size of the model space for MA.