Mary Theresa Holden

Waterford Institute of Technology | WIT · Department of Management & Organisation

While larger tourism enterprises benefit from a graduate management intake and continuing executive development, the owner of the small tourism operation is limited in continuing education and professional development opportunities due to resource poverty, and lack of appropriate and available tertiary tourism education. This paper details a longit...

While larger tourism enterprises benefit from a graduate management intake and continuing executive development, the owner of the small tourism operation is limited in continuing education and professional development opportunities due to resource poverty, lack of appropriate and available tertiary tourism education. This chapter details the pedago...

While larger tourism enterprises benefit from a graduate management intake and continuing executive development, the owner of the small tourism operation is limited in continuing education and professional development opportunities due to resource poverty, lack of appropriate and available tertiary tourism education. This chapter details the pedago...

This chapter contributes to our understanding of interorganisational relationships (IORs) through the presentation of a relational communication strategy that incorporates a set of propositions about the features and mechanisms of the communication process in successful collaborative innovation. We propose that relational communication provides the...

An essential element in the development of any new educational programme is the evaluation of its effectiveness; however, there is a lack of consensus on the process and focus when evaluating the design of a problem-based learning (PBL) programme. This paper will specifically detail the evaluation of the design of a new degree programme (the BSc in...

The rapid integration of information and telecommunications technology is facilitating the electronic flow of information across organizational boundaries. Most inter-organizational relationships have an electronic component often referred to as an inter-organiz ational information system (IOS) (see Suomi, 1994). This paper concentrates on relation...

The authors’ institute has long recognised the hunger of micro and small tourism practitioners for tertiary education, however, meeting the educational need of this cohort is challenging due to its nature and the demand for training that is “short, snappy, relevant and local” (Fáilte Ireland, 2005; cf. Gibb, 1997; Dalley and Hamilton, 2000). A revi...

This chapter contributes to our understanding of interorganisational relationships (IORs) through the presentation of a relational communication strategy that incorporates a set of propositions about the features and mechanisms of the communication process in successful collaborative innovation. We propose that relational communication provides the...

This paper is situated in the context of the introduction of a new Bachelor of Science programme in the School of Business at Waterford Institute of Technology employing problem-based learning (PBL). Although PBL has been utilised in medicine since the 1960s, it is emergent in the business discipline, most especially in Ireland, and its effectivene...

The success of the global tourism industry will ultimately depend on its professionalism (Edgell et al., 2008). Tourism professionalism is a multidimensional concept, but lacking consensus on its dimensions; this paper addresses this issue by presenting a conceptualisation of professionalism. This paper extends Hall‟s (1968) early work on professio...

This paper originates in the context of growing recognition that the success of the global tourism industry will ultimately depend on the professionalism of its workforce (Edgell et al., 2008). Indeed, as far back as 1986, Baum and Reid highlighted the need for professionalism in the Irish hospitality sector. More recently, the Tourism Policy Revie...

The Tourism Policy Review Group (TPRG) (2003, p. 54) has highlighted the need for the development of the professionalism of the Irish tourism industry, warning that “unless this is done across the industry as a whole, the status and credibility of education and training programmes will be called into question.” Yet, although there is a general acad...

The Irish tourism industry is fragmented, composed mainly of micro/small businesses, and its owner/managers are lacking in innovativeness and competencies in such areas as marketing, knowledge management, information technology, quality assurance, pricing policy, innovation and management. As identified by Fáilte Ireland (2005; 2007), there is a ne...

While there is a growing interest in learning networks, relatively little research has been published with a specific tourism focus. Thus, this paper is concerned with tourism learning networks (TLN) and the role of virtual learning environments (VLE) in sustaining member viability following facilitated TLN interaction. The authors investigate user...

The aim of a rural innovation network (RIN) is to reduce uncertainty through cooperation with other rural stakeholders, with different competencies, in order to create new knowledge and enhance firm competitiveness. The variables that impact on RINs have been identified (Murdoch, 2000), but the development of a managerial model to maximise the invo...

This paper introduces novice researchers to the differences in philosophical perspectives and the major research implications arising from them. It is our contention that research should not be methodologically led, rather that methodological choice should be consequential to the researcher's philosophical stance and the social science phenomenon t...

Contrary to most extant relationship research which has relegated communication to a minor relational role, we found communication to be a central relationship variable. Communication's importance arose in a qualitative stage of our research which involved four manufacturer-retailer Waterford Institute of case studies. To affirm communication's cen...

Today's managers are organising and managing a portfolio of interorganizational relationships (IORs); hence, the governance of exchange relationships has gained strategic consequence. Prior interorganizational research by the authors has indicated that communication may be central to IOR governance. One test of communication's potential in this are...

Presents an exploratory study that illustrates the central role communication can play in a relationship, especially in the emergence of electronic trading. Elements of communication; Case study on the relationship between Waterford Crystal and its retailers; Role of communication in corporate governance.

This paper centralises the management of innovation in the early stages of the new product development (NPD) process. The purpose of this paper is to describe the critical episodes that enabled an SME to successfully manage the development of new product concepts from inception and, in so doing, presents implementable guidelines that can be used by...

A review of the academic and practitioner literature on customer relationship management indicates a general consensus that quality, value, and satisfaction are critical variables in explaining customer loyalty in services, yet, although much is known about the relationship between the aforementioned variables and customer loyalty, they don"t fully...

The conceptual model presented in this paper was developed through a multi-disciplinary approach, leveraging the interpersonal relationship, communication, knowledge, and network streams of research. The model centralises proximity, interpersonal relationships and their communication patterns as key determinants of knowledge transfer efficiency, mo...

1. Abstract Due to the narrow research focus on "determinants of organisational innovation" or on "innovation output" rather than understanding the dimensions, the term innovativeness lacks clarity and has become a notoriously ambiguous construct for tourism practitioners and academics. Reliable and valid constructs of firm-level innovativeness hav...