BackgroundSagging domestic and global market shares in key industries in the early 1980s and subsequent analysis of Japanese manufacturing practices [1,2] prompted US companies to formulate a conscious quality management strategy. This led to the total quality management (TQM) revolution in the late 1980s. To improve the quality of goods and services of US companies, Congress established the Malcolm Baldrige Award in 1987. The Baldrige Award has generated a very strong and lasting wave of interest by many US businesses to improve the quality of their operations. In fact, entries for the Baldrige Award have increased manifold over the last four years, and the number of applications distributed every year now runs into thousands [3].In the rush of this rising tide of TQM popularity, however, many companies miss one important point -TQM is a long-term improvement process which has to be taken very seriously, and every person in the company must commit themselves to the philosophy of improvement [4][5][6][7]. Unfortunately, many of the new followers of TQM philosophy have failed to implement the TQM paradigm successfully [8]. Several possible reasons have been cited for this failure, major among these being a lack of top management commitment and a lack of appropriate human-resource management. Companies with lower top-management commitment also show a lack of co-ordination of human-resource management and overall quality efforts. In these companies, quality responsibility is relegated to the middle-and lower-level managers, and shopfloor employees. An apparent assumption in these companies is that a pot-pourri of statistical qualitycontrol tools will be the solution to their productivity and quality problems. Since no one sincerely believes in viewing quality management as a process rather than a specialist function, there is no real emphasis on long-term and organization-
This study investigates business schools' intentions about offering e-commerce education (ECE) using an extended theory of planned behavior (ETPB). The need for an adequate match between future supply and demand of e-commerce skills constitutes the main motivation for the study. The results show that most business schools consider ECE important for an adequate preparation of their students for today's competitive labor market. In addition, the proposed ETPB fits well the empirical data and predicts 65.2% of the variances in the schools' intentions about offering ECE. The results can help business schools in their curriculum decisions in at least two ways: (1) through the likely effect of social contagion and (2) through the constructs in the ETPB. First, institutional theory clearly indicates that organizations tend to adopt a new behavior when there is evidence that other organizations in their population have adopted or are likely to adopt that behavior. Having provided such evidence for ECE, this study is likely to promote the adoption of this educational product innovation. Second, the fact that the postulated ETPB fits well the empirical data suggests that administrators of business schools may pay attention to the key constructs when making curriculum decisions. Overall, the study has both theoretical and practical implications. Theoretically, it contributes to a growing literature on the adoption of innovative educational products like ECE. Practically, it provides valuable insights that administrators of business schools can use in their strategic curriculum decision making.
This article reports the findings of an experimental study to determine the effectiveness of humor as a teaching tool in international marketing education. The study found that using humorous anecdotes or incidents relating to specific international marketing topics had positive effects on student performance.
The propensity for military service (PMS) of young Americans is an important issue for our Armed Forces. Since the 1990s, the PMS of young Americans has steadily declined. Overtime, a declining PMS may cause military mission degradation, lowering of military recruitment standards, base closures, and reinstatement of the unpopular military draft system. This paper investigates the moderator effect of prior military service on the Generalized Exchange-PMS relationship. Generalized exchange is when indirect benefits such as preserving freedom and the American way of life accrue to the larger society because of an individual's military service. This paper uses a structural equation modelling approach to analyse the moderating effect of prior military exposure on prospective recruits regarding their PMS. Findings indicate that the group of prospective recruits with prior military exposure had higher levels of PMS than the group without such exposure, that is, the young people with prior military exposure are more likely to enlist in the military than the young Americans with no prior military exposure.Propensity, structural equation modelling, military, exchange theory,
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