PurposeThe purpose of this study is to empirically develop and validate a practical, consistent and specific scale to assess perceived service quality at the service encounter at quick-service restaurants (QSRs).Design/methodology/approachDevelopment and validation of the scale involved a five-stage process. Data were collected from 430 customers of a QSR belonging to an international brand located in Barcelona. Surveys were applied immediately after the service encounter, using the face-to-face method. The scale development procedure involved exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses.FindingsThe results suggest a specific and parsimonious measurement scale, whose structure comprises 14 items in four dimensions. In contrast to previous studies, this study identified the appropriateness of splitting the interaction quality dimension into two single dimensions, one focusing on the interaction time and other on staff–customer interaction. Furthermore, these indicate that a speedy service, pleasant treatment and food quality are the most valued attributes in QSR.Practical implicationsThis scale is a useful instrument to administer and assure service quality standards within QSR management systems. Its practical approach and short survey length ease data collection, considering that customers spend short amounts of time in this type of restaurant. Furthermore, it could also be used by franchisors and restaurant operators as a tool to monitor continuing compliance with service quality standards.Originality/valueThe resulting scale introduces a novel four-factor structure with high goodness of fit to effectively measure customers' perceived service quality in QSRs, where the ease of use and speed of gathering client responses are a key factor for successful implementation.
This article portrays the evolution of international business (IB) literature. We review the main issues and theoretical assumptions that have dominated research in the IB field during the last sixty years.Moreover, on the basis of the essential paradigms developed, we analyse what issues are of interest and may represent a potentially fruitful arena in which to develop future scholarly research.Creative Commons License 4.0 64The process of theory development is gradual and incremental, in parallel to business changes and environmental evolution. A lot of water has passed under the bridge since the 1960s when the first IB theories based on market imperfections were proposed. As a result, MNCs have been examined from different disciplines and points of view, yielding a great and diversified array of theoretical research. Many ways of understanding the MNC and its diverse patterns of behaviour have been hitherto developed; yet, focusing on only one stream of analysis can severely limit the power of explanation of the IB field. Therefore, to support and advance theorization in IB, the aim of this article is to review the main issues and theoretical assumptions that have dominated research in international business during the last sixty years in order to discover the basic paradigms on which the present literature is grounded.Therefore, the present article briefly explains the evolution of existing thought on which new and future theory and models can be built.In addition, although theoretical and empirical research has succeeded in answering many of the questions mentioned above, there are still many challenges to be confronted and new questions to be answered. Accordingly, we try to go further, analysing which issues are of interest today and may represent a potentially fruitful arena in which to develop future scholarly research. In short, we contribute to a better understanding of what we know about IB up until the present and also what we would like to know in the immediate future.In order to better understand this co-evolution of theoretical development and changes in the business environment, we dedicate the next section to explaining the birth of modern international business literature. Section three is dedicated to the development of IB theory with the arrival of the new century. After this overview of the field, the fourth section lays out several challenges and future lines of research and the final section presents the conclusions. Creative Commons License 4.0 77 theory, the network view assumes that MNCs are more affected by their business environment than by their institutional environment (Forsgren 2008). MNCs are considered to work more like complex global networks than hierarchies (Ghoshal and Bartlett 1990), since they count on internationally dispersed connected units, which in turn are each embedded in different host country networks (Andersson et al. 2002; Forsgren et al. 2005).The creation of international business networks is the result of a path-dependent process where past decisions conditio...
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