1,720,963 research outputs found
Job positions in entrepreneurial founding teams. The role of gender
No full textEntrepreneurship scholars have proved that gender does matter (Jennings and Brush, 2013). Our paper has two aims. First, we assess whether characteristics of founders (i.e., previous work expertise, age, educational background) and contextual factors (i.e., discipline of competence, year of inception) predict the formation of entrepreneurial teams with a predominance (or not) of female entrepreneurs. Second, we analyze the internal structure of entrepreneurial teams, in terms of job positions by women entrepreneurs in order to assess the presence of a gender bias in the allocation of female roles within ETs
Strategic orientation and performance of service firms: evidence from the Italian hotel industry
No full textDue to fierce competition in the marketplace, globalization, and an explosion of technology in recent years, the strategic orientation – “the overall strategic direction of the company and the need to design new initiatives” (Okumus, 2001) – is considered as a necessity for every company in order to achieve market success and sustain a competitive advantage. Despite a large number of studies, which have paid attention to service organization, empirical works related to the impact of strategic orientation on the hotels’ performance is still quite scarce. However, due to the constant change and increasing competitive pressures on today’s hotel industry, a deep analysis concerning the strategic orientation adoption and its impact on the performance could be very interesting. In fact, demanding customers, new regulations, globalization, and the destabilizing effects of technological advancement change the hotel landscape significantly and are introducing new challenges and imposing hotels to be innovative, accelerate their learning activities and develop long-term relationships with their customers. In summary, in view of the nature of the hotel industry, a more strategic-oriented approach might be especially required of them for improved performance.
In this paper, we examine the impact of strategic orientation upon hotels’ performance in Italy. We adopt a multidimensional conceptualization of strategic orientation to acknowledge the input of entrepreneurial, learning, and market orientations (Miller, 1983). An entrepreneurial orientation combines innovative, proactive, and risk-seeking behavior that create value in organizations. A learning orientation is based on market, technological, and social aspects that constitutes a significant internal organization value that can explain the hotels’ performance. A market orientation is the “degree to which the business unit obtains and uses information from customers, develops a strategy which will meet customer needs, and implements that strategy by being responsive to customers' needs and wants” (Ruekert, 1992). Differently from the majority of the studies, we adopt a multidimensional approach to strategic orientation, in an attempt to highlight the importance of all three dimensions. This interpretation highlights that a hotel needs to possess these different, interrelated elements if it is to achieve superior performance. Starting from the idea that hotels differ in their strategic orientations, we analyze how different strategic orientations influence the hotels’ performance. We test our hypotheses on a sample of 120 hotels operating in Rimini, an Italian mature tourism destination. Inferential statistics based on a probit regression model allows us to ascertain if strategic orientation can be considered as the most important driver of a successful lodging firm. The dependent variable is the performance of hotels. The independent variables are innovation (entrepreneurial orientation), customer-based services offered by hotels (market orientation) and learning propensity by leveraging collaborations (learning orientation). We also take into account the effects of quality (stars hotel) and size (number of rooms).
Our results verify that both innovation and customer orientation significantly influence the hotels’ performance, while learning orientation does not influence the performance. Thus our results confirm first of all that the current competitive business environment where hotels have to act calls for a continuous emphasis on delivering superior quality products and services; second, that innovativeness must be seen as one of the most important entrepreneurial orientations for hotels to achieve long-term success. On one hand, our result reinforce the marketing theorists view that hotels which focus their activities on the needs of their customers, i.e., behave in a customer-oriented way, perform better than those hotels that do not. On the other one, the findings of this study reveal that the hotels, which are very innovative, are likely to enhance their business performance. The not significant influence of learning activities based on external networks on hotels’ performance can be justified by the scarce traditional attitude of hotels in Italy to collaborate. These results assume a greater relevance if we consider that in our empirical settings the size of hotels has a negative influence in their performance, that is the smaller the hotel, the larger its performance.
In turn, this research discloses several fundamental topics that deserve further attention from international entrepreneurship scholars interested in tourism and in particular in hotel industry. First, our results demonstrate the importance of a multidimensional approach to strategic orientation when we are studying the hotels’ performance effects. Second, the current study’s emphasis is designed to provide hotel managers with more understandable guidelines on specific entrepreneurial, learning and market activities identify opportunities and create a set of resources trough which prospects can be exploited along with openness to new strategic ideas and their consequences. Third, this study suggests that, to improve performance, marketing and entrepreneurial orientation should be encouraged by managers and owners in the hotel industry and particularly if they perceive innovativeness and customer relationships in terms of openness to new ideas as an integral part of corporate strategy. Finally, evidence from this study also points to the importance of strategic emphasis on the creation of an internal business environment conducive to innovative activities, focusing on the needs of the customer
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Variations on the Author
Full text link“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Full text linkWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
Full text linkWe conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
koamabayili/VECTRON-author-checklist: VECTRON author checklist
No full textWe have done our best to complete the author checklist relating to the use of animals in the hut study. Note that the objective for the hut study was to evaluate the IRS treatment applications for residual efficacy against Anopheles mosquitoes, including the local An. coluzzii mosquito population. Cows were only used to attract mosquitoes into the huts and no tests were carried out directly on the cows. The author checklist is intended for use with studies where experiments are carried out on animals, which is why we have had such difficulty in completing this for the hut study, as many of the questions do not relate to how the cows were used
Author-wise bibliometric analysis based on entropy.
No full textAuthor-wise bibliometric analysis based on entropy.</p
- …
