Hospitality & Service Industries books

"Advances in Culture, Tourism, and Hospitality Research" ("ACTHR") broadly seeks to increase understanding and description of human behavior, conscious and unconscious meaning, and implicit/explicit decision processes applied to living and making major and everyday choices from where to live, how culture affects thinking and actions; marriage, children; work choices and behavior; leisure pursuits; holiday destination; travel behavior; making tradeoffs among work, play, sleeping, and necessity behaviors; deciding, using, and evaluating short and long term accommodations; and, decisions and behaviors regarding assisted living and death. The objective of "ACTHR" is to promote synergies among culture, work, leisure, tourism, and hospitality scholars. The series focuses on examining individuals and households lived experiences and their cultural and personal antecedents and consequences. Most papers appearing in "ACTHR" will offer advances both in theory and empirical evidence; empirical reports include interpretive, positivistic, or mixed research designs. Arch Woodside is very well known and highly respected figure in tourism in marketing, tourism & leisure. This volume offers a unique and interdisciplinary view on lifestyle. Each volume of the series consists of original articles.

This volume provides useful answers to the following questions: how do tourists go about seeking high novelty and yet return to the same destination year-after-year? How do some firms in the same industry end up embracing industrial tourism while other firms reject such business models? What simple and complex heuristics do freely-independent-travelers apply pre-trip and during the trip in deciding where to go and what to do? What metrics are useful for measuring the impact of activity-focused tourism on the well-being of regional areas? How do executive leadership styles affect employee satisfaction in international tourist hotels? What action and outcome metrics are useful for measuring performance management auditing and destination marketing organization planning and implementing?In terms of the first question, research on tourists' risk-handling behavior provides a useful framework for explaining their novelty seeking proneness. The first paper of the volume provides a complete research report on how tourists' risk-handling behavior explains contingencies in novelty seeking regarding repeat visits to a given destination. How executives process industrial tourism models depends on whether or not they view such enterprise development as a core or peripheral business. The second paper provides thick descriptions of alternative process approaches whilst the third reports a mixed-methods (interpretative and positivistic) research design to provide a thorough report on FITs' (fully independent travellers') pre-trip and trip thinking and doing behavior. This research approach shows how FITs take advantage of serendipitous opportunities to experience a number of locations, attractions, and activities that they had neither actively researched nor planned.The fourth paper applies the fields of travel research and community economic development (CED) within an ethnographic and survey research study on mural tourism which shows how tourism business models can be successful for nurturing CED. The following paper provides both evidence on how leadership styles affect the success of international hotel operations as well as templates on how to measure both leadership styles and subsequent impacts on hotel operations. The final paper includes a longitudinal case study of management performance audits of a government destination marketing organization (DMO) to illustrate the use of templates for measuring both auditor and DMO executives behavior and performance outcomes. As such, this paper concludes what is a diverse and engaging volume of "Advances in Culture Tourism and Hospitality Research".

The papers included in this volume may be categorized loosely into four general thematic sections: theoretical perspectives on the field of health care management; the role and impact of managed care; evolution of the health professions; enhancing health care organizational performance. The three papers in the first general section deal with a range of theoretical issues related to health care management, from complexity science to a theoretical comparison of integrated networks against systems, to how health care management researchers think about the research process. The three papers in the second section address the significant challenges faced by health care managers as they attempt to respond to the increasing impact of managed care. The third section's three papers look at the evolving roles of the health professions, including those of physicians as clinicians and as executives. The four papers in the final section focus on various approaches, from total quality management to use of work groups and transformational leadership, to enhancing health care organizational performance.

"Advances in Hospitality and Leisure", a peer-review journal published annually, delivers refreshing insights of a host of scientific studies pertaining to hospitality, leisure, and tourism, while providing a forum to stimulate discussions on contemporary issues and emerging trends essential to theory advancement, as well as professional practices from a global perspective. The main focus of the series is to divulge the innovative methods of inquiry, so as to inspire new research topics that are vital and have been in large neglected. The series attempts to address the needs of the populace willing to disseminating seminal ideas, concepts and theories derived from scholarly investigations. Potential readers may retrieve useful texts helping outline new research agendas, suggest viable topics for a dissertation work, and augment the knowledge of the new subjects of learning.

"Advances in Hospitality and Leisure", a peer-review serial published annually, delivers refreshing insights of a host of scientific studies pertaining to hospitality, leisure, and tourism while providing a forum to stimulate discussions on contemporary issues and emerging trends essential to theory advancement as well as professional practices from a global perspective. The main focus of this series is to divulge the innovative methods of inquiry so as to inspire new research topics that are vital and have been in large neglected. The series attempts to address the needs of the populace willing to disseminating seminal ideas, concepts and theories derived from scholarly investigations. Potential readers may retrieve useful texts helping outline new research agendas, suggest viable topics for a dissertation work, and augment the knowledge of the new subjects of learning.

This field guide provides methods and studies on how-to-do case study research in natural settings. A truly international guide, this text is ideal for those studying and conducting case study research in tourism, hospitality and leisure disciplines. It provides a comprehensive and practical account of how to describe, explain and predict both individual and group case behavior, at the same time explaining behavior among a set of cases relevant to a specific context. This guide embraces and extends Herbert Simon's (Nobel Prize in Economics recipient) insight that a decision results from the conjoining two antecedents in human behavior: cognitive processing of an individual or group and a given context or problem framing. Divided into six parts, this guide includes chapters on: analysis of texts; how-to-do executive interviews; field interviewing in international contexts; stakeholder participatory research; researching indigenous and marginal peoples; and cross-case analysis. The chapters increase skills and understanding of culture, tourism, and hospitality behavior through analysis of the four principle objectives of case study research: accomplishing accuracy; achieving generality; reporting complexity and broad coverage; and achieving impact for improving the individual condition, client, and/or society.

Part of a series which focuses on health economics and health services research, this volume discusses a variety of topics in the field.

Volume 3 examines how research tools affect theory advances in culture and tourism research. Using visual narrative art to explicate unconscious thinking that shapes trip plans and visits, building tree diagrams of streams of antecedent conditions associating with extreme behavior (e.g., road rage, chronic casino gambling), and research methods that go beyond quantitative/qualitative taxonomies are examples of the unique themes covered in this volume. The papers focus on how to gain meaning from data to thus look at how streams of antecedent conditions result in tourism behavior.

Accounting research in emerging economies has been growing significantly over the last two decades due to the increasing recognition of the roles that accounting systems play in these environments. Globalization of capital markets and competition; the emergence of international accounting standards and structural adjustment programmes have all brought accounting issues in emerging economies to the fore. Research papers in the current volume have highlighted the implications of the aforementioned issues. The papers have examined various issues including the adoption of International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) and International Public Sector Accounting Standards (IPSASs), management accounting change in the context of public sector reforms, corporate reporting disclosures, auditing, etc. The papers published in this volume have provided us the opportunities to further engage with wide ranging empirical and theoretical issues that will have policy implications and also generate future academic debates. Overall, the volume advances debate on the role of accounting reforms in areas such as accounting standards, disclosures, and corporate governance in both the public and private sectors in emerging economies. We believe the audience will find the papers interesting and insightful in terms of theoretical development, practices, policy implications and future research directions.

This volume provides specific answers to hard questions about how to create valid metrics to measure the effectiveness of tourism advertising and the usefulness of destination marketing websites. An extensive literature review describes 40+ years of research on the effectiveness of tourism advertising and the slow advancement to using valid impact metrics - field experiments with alternative ad treatment and placements. Several authors undertake information-usefulness audits on DMO (destination management office) websites and provide practical check lists. Tourism website comparisons include: Maine, Massachusetts and New York; Genoa, Marseilles and Valencia; France, Spain and Portugal; and China, Poland, Russia and Thailand, against each other as well as the Lonely Planet websites. Content analysis of consumer-generated advertisements that promote visits to third places, in this case Starbucks coffee shops and Chipotle restaurants, makes an intriguing study. The final paper gives a thick description of the dynamics of the government's role in shaping China's domestic, inbound, and outbound tourism industry and contributes to building a behavioral theory of government-firm relationships.