Realising competitive advantage through HRM in New Zealand service industries

An emerging source of competitive advantage for service industries is the knowledge, skills and attitudes of their employees. Indeed, achievement of a 'service quality' culture, considered imperative for competitive advantage in service organisations, supposedly results from the use of best practice human resource management (HRM), and from a strategic approach to their implementation. This paper empirically explores the use of these dimensions of HRM as a source of competitive advantage. It finds high-performing service organisations actively engage best practices across the areas of recruitment and selection, training and development, communication and team working. Evidence of a strategic approach to the implementation of these practices is also found.

A survey on six sigma implementation in Singapore service industries

The concept of Six Sigma was initiated in the 1980s by Motorola. Since then it has been implemented in several manufacturing and service organizations. In case of services, health care and finance were major beneficiaries till now. The application of Six Sigma is gradually picking up in other services like; call centers, utilities and public services. This paper provides empirical evidence on Six Sigma implementation in service industries in Singapore. By using a sample size of 50 service organizations (10 responses are from organizations which have implemented Six Sigma), the paper helps in understanding the status of Six Sigma in service organizations in Singapore. The findings confirm the inclusion of critical success factors, critical to quality characteristics, tools and key performance indicators as observed from the literature. The revelation of “not relevant” as a reason for not implementing Six Sigma shows the need for understanding specific requirements of service organizations before its application.

Working in the Australian suburbs: Creative industries workers’ adaptation of traditional work spaces

The cultural and creative industries contribution to the economic and social sustainability of cities is a well acknowledged phenomenon which has accelerated in the era of urban renewal since the late twentieth century. The second-tier city of Brisbane, Australia was for many years considered a cultural backwater in the national context, yet its recent urban development within a short period of time has produced a city that now has all the hallmarks of a ‘creative city’. Brisbane’s transformation has been shaped by urban and cultural policies that are largely focussed around its inner-metropolitan localities, producing a growth in cultural infrastructure and the aestheticisation of inner-city precincts. However, like most Australian cities, the majority of Brisbane’s population live, and increasingly work in the suburbs. This article is based on a large research project that shows that creative industries workers are well represented across suburban localities. The article examines the policy and planning implications for creative industries located in Australian outer suburbs and the communities in which they are located.

eCommerce in service industries : extending the socio-technical paradigm

The socio-technical framework (STF) is useful for describing how technologies are embedded in social systems and how people, groups and technologies are interrelated. This perspective, however, lacks theoretical specificity and has limited usefulness in explaining the dynamics of actual situations. In this paper we address the question of how to extend the STF to better analyse technologies in their social context. We build on the STF by including the concept of ‘information ecology’ and research on service provision to suggest a more empirically focussed way of analysing the relationships between people and technologies. In particular, we examine changes that have occurred as B2C eCommerce technologies have been implemented in service organisations, using case study findings from retail banking to introduce the concept of ‘Coactive Commerce Systems’. This concept provides a theoretically based descriptor for understanding the technologically-mediated interrelationships between organisations and their customers.

Service industries and service economy

The study analyses the role of services in modern and less-developed economies. It shows the different meanings of the value, definition and classification of service activities found in economic literature. It discusses the relation between service production growth and economic development observing the role of these activities in the dynamics of economic restructuring. Further, it also examines the differences between private and public sector service restructuring and the consequences of internationalization of services. It concludes that economic restructuring also caused by changes in the nature of goods and services has important regional effects.