African Journal of
Business Management

  • Abbreviation: Afr. J. Bus. Manage.
  • Language: English
  • ISSN: 1993-8233
  • DOI: 10.5897/AJBM
  • Start Year: 2007
  • Published Articles: 4188

Table of Content: 9 September, 2011; 5(19)

September 2011

A comparison of operational marketing and strategic marketing: An organizational perspective

The essay aims to justify that marketing in the current business environment should not only be perceived as an operational factor of the organization and that the organization must strategically deploy the concept of marketing on an organization wide basis in order to be successful in the business. The essay provides an overview of the operational marketing and compares it with the benefits of strategic marketing with...

Author(s): Seyed Mohammad Abdollahi Keyvani

September 2011

Ethics in pre-school administration

Ethics is the standard of behavior, pointing out how people act in different situations. Ethics is an indispensable part of education. Besides being crucial for every step of education, it also has a distinctive meaning for the pre-school education period, accepted as the initial step of education. In pre-school educational institutions, the administrator is responsible for building and promoting the values of ethics....

Author(s): Cagla Gur

September 2011

The relevance of Obama’s victory to post-modern theory

The paper focused on the postmodern theory and its relevance to contemporary societies with America as a reference point. The argument here is that there is conceptual mutuality between postmodern theory and Obama’s victory as the 44th president of the United States of America. In this paper, the authors argue logically in favour of postmodern theory, that we are now in a postmodern world where stereotype...

Author(s): Chinogonum D. Chuku, Fineface I. Ogoloma and Wilfred I. Ukpere

September 2011

Gender wage differentials in the Malaysian services sector

The Malaysian economy has undergone dramatic changes moving from a heavy dependence on agriculture to an increasing reliance on the manufacturing and services sectors. These days, the services sector has become the most important source of Malaysian economic growth. Most sub-sectors in the service industries have been transforming toward more capital-intensive and knowledge-based activities that require additional...

Author(s): Rahmah Ismail

September 2011

Mediating effects of subordinates’ competence on leadership styles and organisational citizenship behaviour

This paper seeks to examine the relationship between leadership styles and organisational citizenship behaviour within Malaysian companies. Although there have been several studies that explored the relationship between leadership styles and citizenship behaviour, hitherto, there has yet a study carried out to examine the mediating effects of subordinates’ competence on such relationship. Data from 347 respondents...

Author(s): Lee Kim Lian and Abdul Latif Salleh

September 2011

Casual and dynamic linkage of stock markets: An empirical study of Karachi Stock Exchange (KSE) with emerging and developed equity markets

The main purpose and scope of this empirical study is to explore the causal and dynamic linkages of KSE-100 with emerging stock markets of India, China, Hong Kong, Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand, Turkey, and Brazil, as well as with the developed stock markets of Japan, USA, UK and France for the period of January, 1998 to December, 2008. 132 monthly stock indices observation are taken. Descriptive analysis, correlation...

Author(s): Kashif Hamid and Arshad Hasan

September 2011

A comparison of service experience on repatronage intention between department stores and hypermarkets in Taiwan

This paper compares the effect of service experience at department stores and hypermarkets on the customer’s repatronage intentions, that is, the customer’s desire to make a repeat purchase. Service experience covers three aspects: core service, employee service, and services cape. The impact of service experience on emotional response, satisfaction with monetary value, and repatronage intentions are...

Author(s): Hao-Wei Yang and Kuei-Feng Chang

September 2011

Knowledge creation in an operational setting: A case study in an auto manufacturing firm

These days, organizations concentrate on knowledge creation to improve their innovative processes (such as new product development)  as well as routine activities. The process of knowledge creation has been vague before the evolution of the SECI knowledge creation theory, which was widely accepted, validated and implemented in several research fields. This research concentrates on the evaluation capability of this...

Author(s): Mohammad Aghdasi and Nasim Ghanbar Tehrani

September 2011

Corporate characteristics, governance attributes and the extent of voluntary disclosure in Bangladesh

The aim of this paper is to examine the linkages “corporate characteristics”, “governance attributes” and the “extent of voluntary disclosure” in Bangladesh. The paper is based on a sample of 120 listed non-financial companies in Dhaka Stock Exchanges (DSE) in 2007. The study used ordinary least squares regression model to examine the relationship between explanatory variables and...

Author(s): Abdur Rouf

September 2011

Rethinking information-technology company rankings for better decision-making

Numerous groups have created various kinds of company rankings which can change ordinary companies into celebrity firms. Such company rankings have the power to deeply affect the decision-making process of both internal and external stakeholders of a company. Typically, a company ranking is produced in response to a special concern, and uses a specific evaluation method or weighting. Since, however, a truly robust and...

Author(s): Wei-Wen Wu

September 2011

A research on the relationship among market orientation, absorptive capability, organizational innovation climate and innovative behavior in Taiwan’s manufacturing industry

The main purpose of this study was to investigate the influence of the market orientation on innovation behavior in manufacturing industry, the interference of the absorptive capability in the relation between market orientation and innovation behavior, and the interference of organizational innovation climate in the relation between market orientation and innovation behavior. By random sampling, 100 companies became...

Author(s): Chih-Yang Chao, Yong-Shun Lin, Yu-Lin Cheng and Shu-Chia Liao

September 2011

Auditor switch, analysts forecasts and executives' stock options

This paper shows that companies tend to switch auditors when audit opinions are inconsistent with those in the previous period, financial performances are worse, and both stock and option values fall. We find no evidence that, during the switching year, option values and firm performance affect the exercise of executives’ stock options, possibly because the exercise of stock options often occurs before switching...

Author(s): Chin-Fang Chao, Yi-Mien Lin, Chu-Shiu Li and Sheng-Jung Fang

September 2011

Analysis of risk in linear multi-objective model and its evaluation for selection of a portfolio of investment in the Mexican Stock Exchange

Each model designed to select an investment portfolio is based on different assumptions for estimating the risk and the return. These assumptions determine feasible solutions area and the front of efficient portfolios. Therefore, the assumptions of Markowitz model, capital assets pricing model and the linear multi-objective model are discussed. A portfolio of investments in different scenarios was determined by the last...

Author(s): José C. Zavala-Díaz, Ocotlán Díaz-Parra and Jorge A. Ruiz-Vanoye

September 2011

An empirical study of the existence, relatedness and growth (ERG) theory in consumer’s selection of mobile value-added services

This study utilized Alderfer’s existence, relatedness, and growth (ERG) theory of human needs as the basic framework to investigate consumer satisfaction and desires when choosing mobile value-added services. A web-based survey was conducted to collect data on user characteristics and to validate the ERG theory.  Results showed that existing mobile value-added services could be classified into the three need...

Author(s): Cheng-Liang Yang, Mark Hwang and Ya-Chien Chen

September 2011

Environmental concern of South African cohorts: An exploratory study

Environmental issues receive ever increasing attention in society and a general level of concern is expressed in the society, yet specific action-related programmes (such as recycling campaigns) do not experience the success that could be expected, given the level of attention and concern. This poses questions regarding the awareness and actions towards environmental issues. These are however, influenced by attitudes,...

Author(s): Adele Berndt and Danie Petzer

September 2011

Shedding more light on the impacts of quality certified systems in small service enterprises: A multidimensional analysis

The purpose of this paper is to describe the small enterprises within the service sector that have adopted certified quality systems, focusing on the motives that have encouraged these enterprises to do so and the organizational impacts such adoptions have had. The results highlight the importance that these enterprises grant to certified quality systems as a strategic tool that can be used in a proactive way to contend...

Author(s): José Miguel Rodríguez-Antón, María del Mar Alonso-Almeida and Luis Rubio-Andrada

September 2011

A new ranking method based on cross-efficiency in data envelopment analysis

Data envelopment analysis (DEA) models compute efficiency score for decision making units (DMUs) and discriminate between efficient and inefficient DMUs. Therefore, they rank DMUs except when multiple DMUs have an efficiency score of 1. This paper proposes a new method for complete ranking of DMUs that is based on cross-efficiency evaluation method. One of the drawbacks of the cross-efficiency evaluation method is the...

Author(s): F. Hosseinzadeh Lotfi, G. R. Jahanshahloo and P. Zamani

September 2011

Verification of a destination image influence model for Taiwan bicycle tourism blogs for Chinese tourists

The impact of information technology increases day by day. The bicycle tourism industry in Taiwan has started to actively adopt internet applications in its development. The content of internet information in commercial behavior is an even more important development issue. This study constructed the following influence models: blog information recommendation, website experience, message trust, and destination image, and...

Author(s): Chun-Chang, Yen, Chih-Yu Liu,  Wei-San, Su Chii-Hwa, Liang and Chia-Ming Chang

September 2011

Followers’ ability as a substitute for leadership

The conviction that under certain circumstances “hierarchical leadership influence is replaced by the contingencies” is the central premise of the substitutes for leadership. In this regard, spectacular research has been taken to identify the potential substitutes for the leadership especially in European and American contexts. However, the present study for the first time in Pakistani context, has evaluated...

Author(s): Wan Khairuzzaman Wan Ismail, Ghulam Hussain, Siti Zaleha Abdul Rashidand Noor Azmi Mohamad

September 2011

Jack and Jill fall down the stress filled hill: An integrative management educational model to prevent such stressful slides

Stress has been found to increase anxiety and depression in individuals, and to increase anger and violence in society. Further, stress has been shown to negatively affect learning. The purpose of this article is to introduce and propose an integrated management educational model to teach stress reduction skills to management students as part of their courses. This article suggests that a holistic approach to dealing...

Author(s): Aditya Simha, Fariss-Terry Mousa and Sang Kyun Kim

September 2011

A comparative analysis of rural tourism development in Hungary and Greece

In the present paper we study Greek and Hungarian villages which have different levels of rural tourism development. Through the use of personal field research, interviews of entrepreneurs occupied in rural tourism, we evaluate the similarities and differences that we discovered in our research, and we suggest the positive and negative steps for each country. We examine the way in which rural tourism is developed in the...

Author(s): Anestis K. Fotiadis

September 2011

An empirical investigation of the audit expectation gap (AEG) in Nigeria

The audit expectation gap (AEG) is denoted as the difference between what the public expects from an audit function and what the audit profession accepts the objective of auditing to be. The existence of an audit expectation gap is likely to be detrimental to the value of auditing and the well-being of the auditing profession as the contribution of auditing may not be fully recognized by society. This has stirred a...

Author(s): Semiu Babatunde Adeyemi and Olayinka Marte Uadiale

September 2011

Psychological contract and job outcomes: mediating role of affective commitment

This cross sectional field survey examined the relationship between psychological contracts, affective commitment and job outcomes (Job satisfaction and Intention to quit). We hypothesized that psychological contract types are related to job satisfaction and turnover intention, we further hypothesized that the link between psychological contract and outcomes is mediated by affective commitment. The data were collected...

Author(s): Inam Ul Haq, Farooq Ahmad Jam, Muhammad Umer Azeem, Muhammad Ahmad Ali and Tasneem Fatima