Explore the vast range of titles available.

In Marketing Today’s Academic Library, Brian Mathews uses his vast experience to speak directly to the academic library practitioner about matching services with user needs. This book proposes new visions and ideas, challenging the traditional way of thinking and providing a framework to target users more precisely.

Are librarians preoccupied with the future? There are countless books, articles, blog posts, webinars, and conference presentations filled with speculation about what libraries will become. This is understandable with the emergence of new roles for libraries and librarians as we determine our identity across the digital landscape. This essay offers guidance for thinking about the future. By adopting the cognitive tools and mindsets used by practitioners of strategic foresight, library leaders can position their organizations for greater impact and value. Knowing how to discover, design, assess, and address possible future scenarios is becoming increasingly critical, and this skill should become part of our professional fluency.

Organizational commitment can help explain a range of human attitudes and behaviours at work and the measurement of this construct is central to explaining such organizational linkages. The purpose of this article is to re‐examine the dimensionality of Cook and Wall's (1980) British Organizational Commitment Scale (BOCS) and further to examine the extent to which it holds good in several organizational contexts. The outcomes suggest that the six‐item version (all positive) remains superior and is robust across the three organizations studied, although factor covariances and loadings differ.

Equity in resource allocation is central to the tenet of social justice in health care. The management of surgical waiting lists is of critical importance to clinicians, patients and regulators. In most hospital environments, the basic process has remained unchanged for decades. Patients are assigned to one of three urgency-related categories. Clinicians consequently administer three competing patient pools. The basis by which patients are selected for treatment maybe difficult to define. The specific clinical circumstances of each patient are often unreported and may be unknown to those administering the list. Waiting list bias is also recognised. This may reflect clinician advocacy, pressure to meet category timeframe restrictions or perceived training requirements. In this environment, it is difficult to demonstrate propriety in care. We report the implementation of a pilot program to redesign waiting list management within a South Australian public hospital unit. This allows assemblage of patients into a single list. Overall priority is determined by balancing clinical acuity and waiting time. The determination of acuity takes into account both the primary category and the specific characteristics of each patient that are relevant to their intended procedure. Uniquely, the process is applicable to lists containing patients with dissimilar conditions. This paper reviews the limitations of current approaches in meeting reasonable community expectations. The principles and social justification underpinning this reform are introduced. Finally, the benefits offered by the program are discussed and interim results are reported.

The term satisfaction is a very important concept in marketing and is central to many definitions. This paper seeks to examine what this term means to the public at large. It explores the various definitions of satisfaction within the literature. The empirical results derive from individuals' own interpretation and definition of the term satisfaction, as well as evaluation of their definitions. Finds that most people cited several definitions of satisfaction, illustrating that it is a multifaceted concept. The most common interpretations reflect the notion that satisfaction is a feeling which results from a process of evaluating what was received against that expected, the purchase decision itself and or the fulfilment of needs wants. It also finds that the particular interpretation is affected by contextual issues, such as whether it is a product or service under consideration. Implications for consumer satisfaction measurement and interpretation are discussed.

Service organizations are striving to increase the quality of the services they offer. They are also using a wide variety of people management techniques. These 2 activities can sometimes come into conflict. This article examines a variety of management practices, particularly from human resource management, used by the service sector, and assesses their potential impact on service quality and total quality management. Many techniques are identified as being potentially supportive of quality improvement but some pose threats, particularly those most closely associated with cost minimization and the less subtle forms of managerial control. In order to encourage research in this area a number of research propositions and an agenda for further research are developed.

This study focuses on the potential difficulties in implementing a relationship marketing strategy within a retail context. It is suggested that a number of attributes characterise the nature of the service and market structure are influential in an organisation's ability to implement relationship marketing. Specifically, these are: balance of power, level of involvement with the purchase, professionalism of the service provider, and level of personal contact. Seven dimensions central to relationship marketing in a retail context are derived from the literature. Via survey research, these are evaluated in four service contexts, namely: hairdresser/barber, optician, recreation centre, and supermarket. Findings indicate that because of the influence of the four factors identified above, hairdressers, opticians, and recreation centres are more likely to operate in conditions that give greater support to the development of relationship marketing.

The patterns of adoption of quality management practices and techniques vary across national boundaries. This article presents the findings of a questionnaire survey into the quality management procedures and tools adopted in three European countries, the UK, Portugal and Finland. A total of 450 responses are analysed. The main differences between the three countries are outlined with regard to factors motivating the implementation of quality systems, quality tools and techniques used, outcomes from quality management and problems encountered in providing quality training. The results are then analysed under the perspective of the probable impact of national culture. The models of national culture developed by Hofstede, Trompenaars and Earley and Erez were used for this purpose. The main conclusion is that these models can help to explain, to a great extent, much of the variation observed and constitute a basis for understanding why particular quality management approaches are adopted.