Volume 11 (2016): Issue 3 (December 2016)

In this paper I discuss two long disputed notions: that capitalism without crises is a fallacy respectively that capitalism bashing, however severe, will not endanger the system itself. Yet proving both is not an easy task since the capitalism issue has always been a cupellation of theory, ideology and political precepts, which are controversial and hard to disentangle. That capitalism detractors are numberless is a truism. Yet criticism against capitalism, however fierce, has always been clearly delineated. Not any more: globalization has rendered the picture dangerously fuzzy. It is now hard to ascertain whether someone who will harangue about the ostensible evils of globalization is also a declared anti-capitalist. The blend of capitalism and globalization seems to be pure dynamite.

Although it is no longer a novelty that the Internet has now become “fashionable”, being a means of informing, socializing and trading, which is being increasingly used by the general public, it is now imperative to study the implications of its use both on the consumer, including all the roles that it can take (initiating, financing, influencing, decision making, actual consumption of goods and services) and on the marketer, who is forced to consider the Internet as a marketing tool that can be used as a lever to generate positive reactions from the consumers. Against this background, the orientation of the individuals towards the online environment, defined by specialized literature as “the second life”, comes to justify, on the one hand, the consumers’ need for social interaction, and, on the other hand, the need for comfort and speed in identifying optimal alternatives. This paper aims to address only a facet of the behavior of the digital consumer, proposing a theoretical and instrumental analysis of the purchasing behavior of online goods and services.

Due to the increasing competition in the industry and service sectors, creating the powerful brands has great importance in these industries. One of the main factors that help to create a powerful brand is investment and improving the quality of services. Nowadays, the competition for improving the quality of services is raised as a key strategic issue for organizations that operate in the services sector. The aim of this research is to investigate how the dimensions of service quality affect the brand equity in the fast food industry. The customers of fast food industry (Restaurant Raphael) in Boushehr constitute the statistical population of this research. Given that the statistical population is unlimited, through sampling 390 questionnaires were distributed, collected and analyzed. For analyzing the data, the structural equations modelling was used by help of the software smart PLS. The results show that the entire dimensions of service quality of model SERVQUAL (tangible factors of services, reliability, responsiveness, assurance and empathy) have a positive and significant impact on the brand equity. It also became clear that among the five dimensions of quality of services, the tangible factors of services have the most impact on the brand equity in the fast food industry. So implementing the programs to enhance the quality of services will have to a very large extent a positive effect on increasing the brand equity in the fast food industry.

Over the past decades, the focus of the scientists has shifted towards the area of organizational change. The concept has been approached from several perspectives and studied by numerous disciplines and refers to a shift or transformation of an organization, of several components of the organization or of the processes that lie within. Being in an environment characterized by competitiveness and complexity, organizations are under a constant need of change, of progress, while the aim of each change is to improve the aspects that make this happen. The dynamics of the labour force market has contributed to the creation of an environment in which organizations are permanently facing the need to implement various changes regarding their strategy, structure, processes or culture. Henceforth, the factors that can alter the implementation of change benefit from an increased focus. Understanding the reason for which some employees can resist change can have major financial implications for the organization. When considering the human resources involved in the change, nothing seems simple; most of the times things are not as they should be, and most of the employees experience a resistance to change, sometimes in the form of change-specific cynicism, a notion defined as the belief of employees that the organization in which they work lacks integrity. This paper represents the cultural adaptation of Change-Specific Cynicism Scale (a scale proposed by David J. Stanley in 1998, validated on the Canadian population), to the specifics of the Romanian population and supplies a method of evaluating change-specific cynicism for the specialized literature. Statistic results have shown that the Change-Specific Cynicism Scale has a high level of internal consistency (α=0,84) and can be used exclusively for equivalent populations. Moreover, this paper aims to approach the term organizational cynicism and its role in the context of organizational change.

If alcohol has substitutes, changes in its relative price can encourage the production and consumption of other illicit and harmful drugs. This paper considers if county-level bans on the sale of alcohol in the state of Mississippi encourage the production and consumption of crystal methamphetamine. We estimate the parameters of a drug production function in which the inputs are the density of people and firms, underscoring the importance of learning and knowledge spillovers to production and consumption. Poisson and Negative Binomial parameter estimates reveal that county-level bans on hard liquor sales; but not on beer and wine, increase the number of crystal methamphetamine labs. In the absence of such laws, there would be approximately 308 fewer crystal methamphetamine labs in the state of Mississippi. Our findings suggest that in Mississippi, which is the least healthiest state in the nation, county-level bans on hard liquor sales are not welfare improving as they encourage substitution for a drug that is potentially more harmful to individual health than alcohol.

The main aim of this paper is to analyse the role of different factors responsible for CO₂ emission from Indian road passenger transport with the help of Logarithmic Mean Divisia Index over the period of 1971-2011. CO₂ emission increase is decomposed into five major factors - emission coefficient, transport energy intensity, transport activity, economic growth, and population. Findings suggest that economic growth, transport activity and population have a significant positive role in increasing CO₂ emission from road passenger transport, whereas energy intensity plays a negative role in CO₂ emission increase. Emission coefficient has also a negative role in CO₂ emission increase during all the periods except during 1971-81. Therefore, emission coefficient and energy intensity are the two most important factors for policy design and implementation to reduce CO₂ emission from the sector.

Nowadays, different levels of stress and nervousness can be found in organizations. Owing to the fact that employees spend most of their time in organizations, stress may affect the health of employees. Hence, study of stress and the factors that make stress can be a viable decision in that by eliminating these factors organizations can have healthier employees. This study is a correlation study which aims to determine the possible relationship between toxic leadership and job stress. Data collection tools including two standard questionnaires were used. The questionnaire adopted from toxic leadership (Schmidt and Hanges 2009) to measure the toxic leadership in organizations and the NIOSH Generic Job Stress Questionnaire (Hurrell and McLaney 1988) to measure the job stress. In order to analyze the data SPSS software was used. Results show that there is a significant direct relationship between toxic leadership and the job stress of employees. In other words, the more toxic leadership perceived by employees, the more job stress they feel.

Premise: globalization represents both the fertile background and the accountable foreground that accompanies the evolution of TNCs/MNEs, within a self-enforcing spiral of co-evolution which gratifies the winners and discards the losers.

Argument: UNCTAD’s Top 100 non-financial TNCs/MNEs gathers together, since 1993, some of the most prominent winners of the above mentioned processes, making this instrument one of the best indicators and benchmarks in terms of both globalization and transnationalization – when analyzed at a given moment in time (for a particular year), and even more relevant when analyzed dynamically and by comparison.

Context: two major global shifts have occurred during the last decade or so: the global (financial and) economic crisis and its repercussions, and the rise of the emerging economies and of their TNCs/MNEs.

Aim: to depict the dynamics registered within the world’s top 100 non-financial TNCs/MNEs – in order to identify significant insights on how the world of TNCs/MNEs has evolved and its architecture (and inner composition) has changed – by fueling the two shifts mentioned above while internalizing their outcomes.

The main aim of this study is threefold. First, it tries to assess the passenger satisfaction with public bus transport services in the city of Lucknow in India. Second, it tries to examine the service quality attributes that influence the passenger satisfaction. Third, it tries to evaluate the relative importance of service quality attributes to find out the priority for service quality improvements to enhance passenger satisfaction. The study is based on a survey of objective as well as subjective questions conducted between May and July 2014. Five major bus stops of Lucknow were selected for the survey. Total 148 respondents were randomly selected to elicit their overall satisfaction and factors that influence their satisfaction in the use of public bus transport services in Lucknow using a self-rated questionnaire. The collected sample of responses is subjected to principal component analysis, a statistical technique for dimensionality reduction of the dataset, and descriptive analysis. The result of theses analyses shows that passengers are mostly dissatisfied with public bus transport services in Lucknow. Using principal component analysis, five underlying factors were extracted that influenced passenger satisfaction with public bus transport services in the city. Out of these five factors, comfort and safety has the greatest impact on overall satisfaction, followed by the adequacy of capacity of public bus transport services, orderly and clean environment inside buses, elegant design of buses and bus stops, and accessibility to public bus transport services in the city. The study thus provides a direction for public bus transport administration in the city to understand the gaps that exist and try to fill them to improve its services so that passenger satisfaction can be enhanced and consequently more people can be attracted towards public bus transport.

We model and examine the research and development (R&D) intensity of a focal industry from an inter-industry network perspective. More specifically, we estimate how a focal industry’s R&D investment is affected by partner (suppliers and customers) industries’ R&D expenditure. We also investigate the impact of the overall economy on the focal industry’s R&D expenditure and finally how a focal industry’s position in the supply chain network moderates the overall economy’s impact on the focal industry’s R&D expenditure. We found that, in general, a focal industry’s R&D intensity is positively associated with its partner industries’ R&D intensity. In addition, an industry’s R&D intensity is positively associated with the growth rate of the overall economy. Finally, we found that a more central industry is subjected to a stronger impact of macroeconomic shocks on its R&D intensity though there is no significant association between an industry’s centrality and its R&D intensity.

The paper presents aspects of innovation management, important issues based on literature and studies by Boston Consulting Group (USA). The case study lays on the survey made by BCG on 1500 subjects all over the world from all the industry sectors. The paper studies the importance of innovation management and makes predictions for research and development expenditure for Top4, Apple, Google, Tesla Motors and Microsoft, without taking into account rank number 5, Samsung, because the official income statement was in Korean Won.

Casino gambling in the Obalno-kraška region has had a long tradition, its origins dating back to the beginning of the 20th century. Ever since its rebirth during Yugoslav times in the 1960s, casino tourism has contributed significantly to the development of the area. Until recently, casino tourism has been one of the most important forms of tourism in addition to 3S and congress tourism. The purpose of this paper is to determine the contribution of casino tourism to the regional development of the Slovene Istria. To this end, selected socioeconomic indicators were examined and compared with the average indicator rates of regional development at the national level. The results show that casino tourism is an important factor of regional development. However, casino tourism’s future role in regional development remains an open question due to the impacts of the financial crisis and the consequent decline in the number of guests, as well as reduced levels of investment in the region.

The present paper is materialized in an empirical study concerning the impact of the internal audit on the accounting system and its reliability, in case of public universities in Romania. In order to achieve the study, it was necessary to know the different points of view of the representatives of the accounting departments of public institutions of academic education, using a statistical survey based on questionnaire. The research objectives were focused on obtaining conclusions regarding: the importance of internal auditing of the accounting system and its reliability; the extent to which the internal audit manages to provide reasonable assurances regarding the accounting and financial activity; the importance in auditing of the items related to the accounting activity; the assurance and the adequacy of the human resources allocated to the internal audit departments; the frequency with which the internal audit reports projects are modified in order to follow the audited structure recommendations; the extent to which the audit reports reflect the reality; the internal audit activity contribution in improving the accounting systems and their reliability in the Romanian universities.

Innovation is a concept that is more and more often used as a solution for increased competitiveness and economic development, either at organizational level or at a national one, but how is it created and what are the factors involved in the cycle education-innovation-economic and social development? This article intents to clarify the above mentioned cycle and provide an insight on what innovation means and what are its components, especially from a macroeconomic point of view. The results show how important innovation and other components like education are for the national and global economic development.

The aim of this paper it to analyse, why companies face difficulties in implementing modern planning concepts. For this the paper will discuss and define the terminology and goals of modern planning. Based on this, the article analyses how strategy orientation influences the willingness of companies to move from traditional budgeting to modern budgeting concepts. It will be outlined, why especially companies pursuing a cost leadership strategy are still reluctant to open themselves for modern budgeting concepts. The contribution of this paper is to analyse the influence of the strategy orientation on the readiness of organizations. Also it will be illustrated, how the overall value added of the corporate planning can be improved by prioritizing the most appropriate planning objectives.