The fact that customers participate in the specification and delivery of the services they seek represents an important potential point of potential leverage for services providers as the nature and intensity of customer participation is within their ability to manage. Important questions, however, need to be raised and resolved. Does increased customer participation result in higher perceptions of quality and satisfaction or in greater repurchase? Are relationships between participation and repurchase affected by the type of service being provided or the length of the prior relationship? This paper traces the antecedents of participation in the services marking literature, outlines point of distinction between participation and the related construct of involvement, and employs empirical evidence drawn from two professional service settings to address the research questions. Results confirm that participation is strongly associated with repurchase and referrals in some service settings, and a research agenda is proposed.

Although many streams of management research address leadership, succession, and executive development issues, significant gaps in the literature remain. In particular, few studies have systematically explored the systems by which the future leaders (successors) of family firms are developed. This research presents a descriptive study in which the successor development approaches of small to medium‐sized family and nonfamily firms are compared. The findings indicate that (1) family firms favor more personal, relationship‐centered approaches to successor development; (2) nonfamily firms prefer formalized, task‐oriented development approaches; and (3) company size has no real effect on successor development.

Bank marketers are making considerable efforts to increase the satisfaction of their commercial customers because satisfied customers are known to display higher levels of source loyalty and to be less vulnerable to the marketing efforts of competitors. A third reason is to create positive word‐of‐mouth among their peer and advisory communities. This study by telephone interview of 325 medium‐sized business owners in the USA shows that positive word‐of‐mouth is a powerful factor in the purchase of financial services but is less effective in predicting eventual service satisfaction.

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Family business studies have focused on succession because of the incidence of family business failure and the importance of family businesses within the US economy. This study furthers the understanding of family business failure by making the distinction between succession planning (the management task of transitioning leadership) and estate planning (the task of transitioning financial assets and managing federal estate tax obligations) and using this distinction to better understand family business discontinuance. This study of 749 heirs of failed family businesses demonstrates that inadequate estate planning is more often associated‐with family business failure than is poor succession planning.