Hiding Customer Complaints: Studying the Motivations and Forms of Service Employees' Complaint Concealment Behaviours

This study aims to explore both how and why customer service employees conceal the complaints made by customers. Using an exploratory qualitative approach, data were gathered through the in‐depth interviewing of 25 managers, 25 supervisors and 57 front‐line employees of UK general retailers/supermarkets. Data analysis reveals that the concealment of customer complaints by store employees of all hierarchical levels is common. Front‐line, customer‐contact employees were found to conceal complaints in four ways: through (1) misleading customers, (2) complaint resolution without logging, (3) concealing recorded complaints and (4) falsification of recorded complaints. Store‐level supervisory and managerial employees were also found to conceal complaints in four ways: through (1) complaint resolution without logging, (2) concealing recorded complaints, (3) the non‐recording of complaints and (4) the disregarding of ‘minor’ complaints. The motives for complaint concealment differed between managerial/supervisory and front‐line employees but included reasons of (1) personal protection, (2) perceived customer unpleasantness, (3) serial complaint avoidance, (4) alienation, (5) friends or family protection, (6) instrumental gain, (7) avoidance of additional work, (8) perceived unfairness and (9) limited time. These findings suggest that theorists and practitioners need to acknowledge the existence and prevalence of these motives and behaviours and incorporate them into their conceptualizations and practices.     

Operations in Financial Services—An Overview

We provide an overview of the state of the art in research on operations in financial services. We start by highlighting a number of specific operational features that differentiate financial services from other service industries, and discuss how these features affect the modeling of financial services. We then consider in more detail the various different research areas in financial services, namely systems design, performance analysis and productivity, forecasting, inventory and cash management, waiting line analysis for capacity planning, personnel scheduling, operational risk management, and pricing and revenue management. In the last section, we describe the most promising research directions for the near future.     

WebStress: A web interface to explore a multidatabase bibliographic corpus on occupational stress

A bibliographic study on a multidisciplinary subject, such as occupational stress, requires a multidatabase query facility. Given this, we searched eight databases belonging to different fields (medicine, psychology, etc.) and from different countries. Thus, more than 26000 references on occupational stress were gathered. A bibliographic corpus of this sort is unusable because of the heterogeneous format of the records and the number of duplicate entries. Considering the limitations of commercial programs, we have developed a system, called WebStress, for reformatting the data and removing duplicates. The huge number of references and the research needs of updating and searching have necessitated the addition of several other functions to WebStress. Therefore WebStress comprises a web interface that makes it possible to search the corpus with advanced features (using clustering, a specialized thesaurus on stress and Boolean queries). In addition to the usual bibliographic queries on a specific database such as Medline, WebStress provides bibliometric analysis of the corpus, which might contribute to a detailed analysis on occupational stress in order to highlight the networks of researchers and to find the main topics studied in this area. WebStress is not yet available to researchers in general. It is being further developed, and also permission needs to be obtained from the eight commercial bibliographic databases that it consults.     

A Remarkable Heritage: The 'Daily Round' of the Children of the Harkis, between Merger and Vilification

Strictly speaking, the word 'harkis' originally denoted one of the categories of former Muslim auxiliaries in the French army who had served on a voluntary basis under the French flag during the War of Algerian Independence (1954-62). When Algeria achieved independence in 1962, those former auxiliaries of the French army who were able to escape the National Liberation Front's bloody reprisals (conservative estimates suggest some 65,000 perished) were forced to seek exile in mainland France. In spite of the restrictive measures enacted by the highest state authorities with a view to preventing the migration to France of people generally considered undesirable, and in spite of rudimentary reception arrangements, some 95,000 to 100,000 former auxiliaries and family members established themselves in France after choosing French nationality. But in a society increasingly restructured by strong migratory flows from the Maghreb (particularly from Algeria) and characterized by strong prejudice against Arabs (in part linked to the transfer of the memory of 'French Algeria'), today in France the sons and daughters of the harkis find themselves in a situation where their identity is very insecure and one which forces them to cope with a burdensome legacy at both the socio-cultural and symbolic levels.     

Labor market participation in France: an asymptotic least squares analysis of couples’ decisions

This paper examines the interactions between spouses’ decisions to join the labor force. We use the asymptotic least squares method in order to estimate a system of equations with limited dependent variables. We find that when spouse’s decision-making is modeled as simultaneous, this affects primarily the man’s participation equation who appears to be positively influenced by whether the woman works or not, by the number of children and by the birth of a child. The woman’s decision to participate is not affected by whether the man participates or not and depends negatively of the number of children and the birth of a child. This implies that there is a female leadership in decisions to participate in the labor market and that the added-worker effect should be reinterpreted as a function of demography rather than unemployment.

Collinearity in generalized linear regression

The problem of ill-conditioning in generalized linear regression is investigated. Besides collinearity among the explanatory variables, we define another type of ill-conditioning, namely ML-collinearity, which has similar detrimental effects on the covariance matrix, e.g. inflation of some of the estimated standard errors of the regression coefficients. For either situation there is collinearity among the columns of the matrix of the weighted variables. We present both methods to detect, as well as practical examples to illustrate, the difference between these two types of ill-conditioning. Also the applicability of alternative regression methods will be reviewed.     

Extending Budgetary Participation beyond Budget Pitsos in Botswana

Waves of budget reforms are sweeping unremittingly across Africa with an overarching objective of democratising the budgetary process, mainly by increased popular participation. In this connection, Botswana introduced reforms in 2010 in the form of pitsos (opinion‐gathering meetings) to enable citizens to participate more in the budget. This article attempts to answer the question, ‘Are pitsos enough to enhance budgetary participation?’. Relying on both primary and secondary sources, the answer is in the negative. Even though the pitsos can enhance participation, there is a need for thoroughgoing reforms, for example a Budget Act and a strong Parliament, to complement them.     

Catching up with big fish in the big pond? Multi-level network analysis through linked design

This article contributes to the study of “duality” [Breiger, R., 1974. The duality of persons and groups. Social Forces 53, 181–190] in social life. Our study explores multi-level networks of superposed and partially connected interdependencies, the first being inter-organizational, the second inter-individual. We propose a method of structural linked design as an articulation for these levels. First, we examine separately the complete networks at each level. Second, we combine the two networks in relation to one another using systematic information about the membership of each individual in the first network (inter-individual) to one of the organizations in the second network (inter-organizational), as in bipartite networks. This dual positioning, or the linked design approach, is carried out in an empirical study examining performance variations within the “elite” of French cancer researchers in 1999. By looking at measures of centrality, we identify the actors that these top researchers consider as central or peripheral at the inter-individual level (the big and the little fish among the elite), and the laboratories that the research directors consider as central or peripheral at the inter-organizational level (the big and the little ponds among all the laboratories conducting cancer research in France at that time). In addition to the rather trivial report of the competitive advantage of big fish in big ponds (particularly because of the advantage of size for laboratories in this field), we use measurements of scientific performance to identify “catching up” strategies that the smallest fish use in this system. We suggest that this method offers new insights into the duality and multi-level dimension of complex systems of interdependencies, and also into the ways in which actors manage these interdependencies. We believe that it adds a new dimension to the sociological exploration of the determinants of performance, of meso-level phenomena such as opportunity structures and institutional change, or of macro-level phenomena such as social inequalities.     

Two definitions of collegiality and their inter-relation: The case of a Roman Catholic diocese

Against the backdrop of the conflict observed between managers and professionals, two definitions of collegiality emerge: on one hand, a specific organizational form (bottom up) and, on the other, a procedure of bureaucratic management (top down). A study of networks of priests in a Roman Catholic diocese in France is used to explore how those two definitions are related. Questions are raised as to the effects of a too narrow organizational rationalization that uses collegiality only as a top down, bureaucratic, managerial procedure. This always entails the risk of making the work done by experts sterile because it overlooks the first type of collegiality, which is based on the nature of non-routine tasks that members perform together thanks to an endogenous organizational structure of a bottom up type.     

Performance et relations de conseil: comment la structure relationnelle de l’élite des chercheurs français en cancérologie a conditionné leur progression entre 1999–2001 et 1996–1998

This article shows that performances of a specific subpopulation of French researchers in cancer research depend on their advice network. They make progress if they maximize access to scarce resources and their connection to other groups in certain cases. The absence of status competition within the group of peers is an advantage as well as a sufficient relational opening beyond the group with a majority of “dependent” researchers. By taking into account a shape of “glass ceiling” and a specific case of hematologists, the researchers who have the right structural qualities are 11 times more likely to make progress in terms of performance.