The Antecedents and Consequences of Rapport between Customers and Salespersons in the Tourism Industry

This study examined the antecedents and consequences of rapport between customers and salespersons in the context of duty-free shops. Specifically, this study proposed six sub-dimensions of service-dominant orientation (i.e., relational, ethical, individuated, empowered, concerted, and developmental interactions). These dimensions have a positive influence on rapport. In addition, rapport is hypothesized to aid in the formation of customer satisfaction and brand preference, which in turn positively affects word-of-mouth communications. Data were collected from 649 Chinese shoppers who have purchased a product in a Korean duty-free shop. In addition, this study employed confirmatory factor analysis to check the adequacy of the measurement items and structural equation modeling to test 11 hypotheses. Data analysis results indicated that five sub-dimensions of service-dominant orientation, excluding individuated interaction, play an important role in the formation of rapport. Furthermore, rapport has a positive effect on customer satisfaction and brand preference, which in turn positively affects word-of-mouth communications. The findings of this study offer valuable insights for managers of duty-free stores into the most effective methods for managing their operations and providing an appropriate blend of products. Furthermore, this paper contributes to theoretical understanding in this area by improving the acceptability of a commonly believed shopper behavior model.

De-Sakralisasi dalam Pembelajaran Bahasa Arab di Indonesia: Analisis Bahasa sebagai Identitas Agama

Learning Arabic in Indonesia is still relatively minimal when compared with other foreign language lessons. One reason is that religious orientation in learning makes it an exclusive and limited subject. This study aims to describe the religious orientation in learning Arabic and its influence on the interest in learning Arabic in Indonesia. This research is a qualitative research by collecting data from several sites that discuss the urgency of learning Arabic for the people of Indonesia. The top five sites with these keywords are Rumaysho.com, BelajarIslam.com, Islampos.com, Kompasiana.com, and kiblat.net. The reasons in studying Arabic from five sites will be classified according to learning orientation that includes religious, academic, professional, and economic orientation. The most dominant orientation will be analyzed with the approach of language and identity of Yasir Suleiman's perspective on two functions of language, as an instrument of communication and as a symbol of identity. This research found that stereotyping of Arabic makes it even more exclusive and closed to non-Muslims in Indonesia. Learning Arabic itself is not only limited to religious orientation, but makes it as the function of language itself, as an instrument of communication.

Realist theories in search of realists: The failure in Europe to advance realist theory

The realist theoretical tradition has never enjoyed a strong position in Europe. During recent decades, although it is commonly claimed otherwise, it even seems to have lost its limited traction and most of its relatively few representatives. The aim of the article is to analyse this evolution, highlight how realist theorists have contributed limited conceptual or theoretical innovation, been unable to adjust their research agenda to current analytical challenges, and produced relatively few comprehensive empirical studies informed by one or more realist theories. Instead, we observe three main activities. Some realists do meta-studies on realist theory. Others do retrospectives, for instance, (re-)discovering the qualities of classical realist scholars or classical concepts such as the security dilemma. Still others practice ideology that may enjoy certain functions in legitimising national foreign policy orientations but has limited theoretical quality. Thus, textbooks are probably the only remaining context in which realism is presented as constituting a dominant orientation; a fact that highlights the complex and problematic relationship between reality and representation.

Faulted geological contacts: constraining uncertainty of discontinuities orientation using triangulation and combinatorial algorithm

<p>Subsurface information is usually a limited resource in geological modelling. This is not the case, however, for the Kraków-Silesian Homocline in central Poland. It was subject to rapid exploitation of ore-bearing clays in the second half of the 20<sup>th </sup>century. Exhaustive geological documentation remained after this activity had ceased and it contains thousands of borehole records. A small part of this resource has recently been incorporated to propose a new method for determining the dominant orientation of a selected geological contact. This new method regarded Delaunay triangles as source of local orientations that were then analyzed on stereonets. The geological contacts in this region are inclined gently towards NE, but they are also faulted and indicate some stratigraphic noise which makes the extraction of dominant orientation a challenging task.</p><p>It is still unknown, however, to which extent the proposed modelling approach is capable of detecting faults and calculating their orientation. This is particularly important for the introduction of a new method for the recognition of faults based on investigating spatial distribution of orientation patterns. This expert-guided methodology assumes to relate orientation trends with genetic trends and investigate them on 2D maps.</p><p>In this research, we built synthetic models of faulted contacts to observe the behaviour of triangles intersecting the fault surface. To observe the variability of the orientation at larger scale, and perhaps to constrain it at the same time, we applied a combinatorial algorithm for creating all three-element subsets from an n-element set. The employment of this combinatorial approach allowed to achieve a better clustering effect around the expected orientation. The limitation of the proposed approach can be attributed to some unexpected and unintuitive orientations. Compared to previous studies these singularities seem to be geometrical and not numerical in nature.</p>

Self-motion trajectories can facilitate orientation-based figure-ground segregation

Segregation of objects from the background is a basic and essential property of the visual system. We studied the neural detection of objects defined by orientation difference from background in barn owls ( Tyto alba). We presented wide-field displays of densely packed stripes with a dominant orientation. Visual objects were created by orienting a circular patch differently from the background. In head-fixed conditions, neurons in both tecto- and thalamofugal visual pathways (optic tectum and visual Wulst) were weakly responsive to these objects in their receptive fields. However, notably, in freely viewing conditions, barn owls occasionally perform peculiar side-to-side head motions (peering) when scanning the environment. In the second part of the study we thus recorded the neural response from head-fixed owls while the visual displays replicated the peering conditions; i.e., the displays (objects and backgrounds) were shifted along trajectories that induced a retinal motion identical to sampled peering motions during viewing of a static object. These conditions induced dramatic neural responses to the objects, in the very same neurons that where unresponsive to the objects in static displays. By reverting to circular motions of the display, we show that the pattern of the neural response is mostly shaped by the orientation of the background relative to motion and not the orientation of the object. Thus our findings provide evidence that peering and/or other self-motions can facilitate orientation-based figure-ground segregation through interaction with inhibition from the surround. NEW & NOTEWORTHY Animals frequently move their sensory organs and thereby create motion cues that can enhance object segregation from background. We address a special example of such active sensing, in barn owls. When scanning the environment, barn owls occasionally perform small-amplitude side-to-side head movements called peering. We show that the visual outcome of such peering movements elicit neural detection of objects that are rotated from the dominant orientation of the background scene and which are otherwise mostly undetected. These results suggest a novel role for self-motions in sensing objects that break the regular orientation of elements in the scene.