Previous studies have indicated that the creation of outstanding consumer value was for spa hotels to achieve sustainable financial and market success. In this study we identified the key factors that affected consumers¡¦ behavior or purchasing decisions, and the process how consumers chose a particular hotel for spa service, which was appropriate for themselves under such intensely competition among spa hotels in Taiwan. The study aims to assess a relational perspective on the value perception relationships, and to examine the main effects and the processes linking perceived value, its antecedents and willingness to buy in Taiwan spa hotel industry. The economical deduction was adopted to provide the constructs positioning and adequate rationality of the conceptual model. The analysis of Pearson correlation indicated that the recent downsizing economy might be the source that affected the attitude of ¡§leisure service consumption¡¨ in more conservative way because of the weakly significant relationship between perceived value and willingness-to-buy. The hierarchical multiple regression (HMR) was used to assess the main effects and the processes. The HMR analyses revealed that customers separately considered perceived quality and perceived price, the immediate situational factors of benefits and sacrifices, particularly when purchasing a spa service product, which will lead to changes in behavior. Perceived quality totally mediated the price-value relationship, and perceived value partially mediated the quality-willingness and price-willingness relationship. Sex and living location moderated the quality-value relationship. Marriage status and consumptive times moderated the value-willingness relationship. The finding indicated that the perception of customer value was very much dependent upon quality and much less dependent upon risk and price in Taiwan spa hotel industry; management and advertising objective should focus on increasing customer value by improving the customer perceptions of overall product and service quality. The moderation of demographic variables provides managers directions to offer proper packages to potential customers.

Der Sammelband enthält wichtige Arbeiten studentischer Teilnehmer eines Seminars an der Fakultät für Wirtschaftswissenschaften der TU Chemnitz im WS 2008/09 in überarbeiteter Fassung sowie einen Beitrag des Mitveranstalters und Mitherausgebers, Prof. Flohr. Dieser steckt das Themengebiet ab und schildert neuere Entwicklungen des Franchising auf nationaler wie internationaler Ebene. Die 6 ausgewählten Seminararbeiten befassen sich mit Franchise-Verträgen als multilateralen Vertragsbeziehungen (Adam), der AGB-Kontrolle von Franchise-Verträgen (Czikowski), europarechtlichen Vorgaben für Franchising (Descher), der Informationsasymmetrie bei Franchise-Systemen vor allem im Hinblick auf vorvertragliche Aufklärung (Frenzel), mit der Frage nach Mediation als zukunftsweisender Streitschlichtung in Franchise-Systemen (Löwe) und schließlich mit der belgischen Franchise-Gesetzgebung (Opitz). Abgerundet wird das Buch von einem Vorwort des anderen Herausgebers (Prof. Gramlich) und von einigen weiterführenden Hinweisen bzw. Links. Aus den einzelnen Beiträgen ergibt sich auf diese Weise eine Bestandsaufnahme des Franchising im Jahr 2009, die zugleich auch Perspektiven aufzuzeigen vermag.

Thèse de doctorat : Droit privé : Metz : 1998. / 1998METZ001D. 585 ref.

Zugl.: Bern, Univ., Diss., 2009

Abstract Globalization is forcing many American college students to re-evaluate their perspective on foreign travel. If they are offered an opportunity to improve their cultural relativity skill set by immersing themselves into a new culture, the more astute students might choose to embark on that journey especially if it would result in resume enhancement. This paper focuses upon a group of twelve community college students' cross-cultural experiences, navigation techniques, and adaptation methods as student interns teaching conversational English in Changchun, China for a period of nine to thirteen weeks in spring 2011. Several areas of interest emerged from their experiences and observations to allow for pedagogical inquiry: the global divide between Chinese and American cultural and educational initiatives; utilization of social, economic, and cultural capital by some but not all participants; successful teaching methods to deal with different learning styles; and negotiation of identities to become effective teachers and cultural ambassadors. The body of analysis, conclusions, and interpretations sections identifies the successes and failures of the twelve subjects and suggests that there is importance to this ethnographic study for sociology and education scholars. The bottom-line significance becomes apparent as more future college graduates will be seeking work both inside and outside the US in education and business fields. As employers peruse college graduates' resumes for something substantially unique, a candidate who has lived and worked in an emerging foreign country can be a huge advantage for their career aspirations.

<p>Religious observance has been reliably shown to improve a wide variety of health outcomes across the lifespan. Significant work has already been done to find mediating processes that explain this relationship, but as yet no studies have been published that attempt to integrate these mediators into a single model to see if they all work together. The current study presents three possible mediators of the religiosity-health link: social support, self-control, and reliance on others. Participants were recruited from Amazon.com’s Mechanical Turk worker system (N = 112) for a 14-day diary study in which all relevant constructs were measured on a daily basis, with daily health behaviors being the outcome. Social support, self-control, and reliance on others were all found to be simultaneous partial mediators of the religiosity-health link, though some questions remain as to the causal flow between religiosity and each of these mediators. It is concluded that each of these mechanisms is related to religiosity and in turn aid in the pursuit of superior health.</p> / Dissertation

This dissertation asks how the heightening of artistic and scientific mediation has affected the representation of the environment in modernist and contemporary American poetry. In chapters on Marianne Moore, A.R. Ammons, and Jorie Graham, I contend that the twentieth century sees a crucial shift in the representation of the environment, as poets become increasingly attentive to the self-reflexive non-transparency of their own medium and incorporate the mediating discourse of science into their work. While science has served as a source for poetic imagery for centuries, suddenly in the twentieth century, mathematical equations--expressed entirely in symbols--appear in the middle of poems, and qualitative scientific language, remarkable for its opacity to the non-specialist, is woven into the texture of verse. Writing at the height of High Modernism, Moore is fascinated by natural history's fusion of art and science. For Moore, the mimetic copies displayed in natural history museums (for instance, glass flowers) reveal things about real creatures that an unmediated encounter could not. Her incorporation of replicas of natural creatures into her poems about real environments enables her to evoke what I term the "synthetic" super-real. In the early 1960s, Ammons is intrigued by the latest scientific discoveries, especially the mathematical modeling of nonlinear dynamical systems. While philosophers have argued that the poet and the scientist occupy separate spheres, Ammons fuses mathematical modeling and sensuous description. His hybrid poetic style enables him to represent the temporal evolution of nonlinear dynamical systems and the operation of forces within a field. In Sea Change, Graham, writing in the imagined wake of future climate change, fundamentally transforms poetic representational techniques, as she creates a frame-shattering poetic form that is uncomfortably poised on the threshold between a climate model and a sensuously embodied environment. By exemplifying recourse to the mediating discourse of science, these poets extend the representational limits of their own aesthetic medium, as they pave the way for twenty-first-century poets who, with greater urgency than ever before, attempt to represent the environment in an era marked by man-made climate change.

One important research direction that has emerged in Child Protective Services (CPS) is the potential of information technology (IT) to be used by CPS agencies in order to enhance organizational effectiveness by addressing the barriers that caseworkers face in integrating multiple stakeholders’ knowledge. Based on empirical findings with regard to numerous unsuccessful IT development initiatives, the present study strives to gain an in-depth understanding of the research question: How can CPS caseworkers be supported by their agency in the integration of knowledge resources, thereby contributing to organizational effectiveness? A literature review to answer this question revealed the following two major research gaps: the adoption of a technology-focused perspective of intervention and the use of direct research models to evaluate this kind of intervention. In order to bridge these research gaps, this study presented a knowledge-based and process-oriented mediation model, built around the concept of knowledge integration that involves related processes at the syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic levels. In this model, a process-oriented Knowledge Management System (KMS) stemming from a Socio-Technical System (STS) perspective was proposed as an alternative intervention model consisting of knowledge management intervention in three dimensions: techno-structural, socio-cultural, and inter-organizational practices. This mediation model partitions the effect of this KMS on outcome (organizational effectiveness) into two components: the direct effect and the indirect effect that is mediated by its output (a CPS caseworker’s knowledge integration ability). This research model was empirically tested using Structural Equation Modeling. This analysis used a sub-set of the 2008 Survey of Organizational Excellence (SOE) data set, which includes the perceptions of CPS caseworkers in the Texas DFPS about their work environment. Results indicate that each of the three dimensions of knowledge management practices enhanced a CPS caseworker’s knowledge integration ability. This ability was a critical factor in determining organizational effectiveness. The mediation effects of a caseworker’s knowledge integration ability were found to mediate the relationship between three dimensions of knowledge management practices and organizational effectiveness. Overall, this mediation model was more useful in explaining the complex relationships among the variables of interest than other direct models. / text

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