Editorial

Abstract

This book of proceedings draws from papers presented at the Management Studies International Conference held from 21 to 24 November at the University of the Algarve, Faro, Portugal and is the result of a joint effort between the School of Management, Hospitality and Tourism, University of the Algarve and the Tourism & Management Studies journal.

The conference sought to create a forum for debate, collaboration and comparison across various fields which can be considered to be part of the broad research area of management studies, with a particular focus on the interconnections between management studies and tourism research.  Advancing knowledge on business management was one of the priorities of this conference.

Two hundred and seventy proposals were originally submitted, but after a strict refereeing process, the number of presentations was reduced to 211. More than 400 researchers representing 112 universities from 21 countries were involved in the research leading to the papers presented. The conference conveners insisted on working with three languages, thus the papers were submitted and presented in one of the three official languages of the conference: English, Portuguese and Spanish. Thus, the 104 papers published in the four volumes were written in one of the three languages, with the majority being written in Portuguese (71), followed by English (20) and Spanish (13).

The papers published in this edition not only prove to be of good quality, reflecting the interdisciplinary nature of the conference., but also help to shed light on what management is and how it should be approached both scientifically and empirically, adding new insights to questions about what we can know in the areas of management and tourism, as well as how such questions can be effectively addressed.

The issue is divided into four volumes: the first volume is dedicated to tourism management, marketing, and ITC management. The second volume compiles papers in the areas of human resources, business ethics, and governance. The third volume gathers papers on financial management, accounting, and taxation and volume four introduces papers on strategic management, entrepreneurship, and innovation.

With over a hundred papers it would be impossible to make individual reference to all, but this editorial would like to foreground the most important topics made salient by the work published here.

Volume 1 presents a wide range of studies in the area of tourism management (part 1) of which many papers are the outcome of studies conducted in Brazil, whose authors focus on cultural heritage and sustainable tourism, destination image, rural tourism networks and challenges of an interdisciplinary postgraduate programme on sustainability. Other papers, some from Spanish authors, present studies linking tourism to culture, and research on quality management. Within the marketing research area (part 2) we find papers concerned with the public sector, with tourism impacts on the environment, with the luxury travel industry, with sports, brands and the sustainability of cities. The final part of this volume, dedicated to ICT management, presents work on hotel websites, distance e-learning and how individual work processes are influenced by computer programmes.

Volume 2 includes particularly relevant studies in human resources management across the globe, namely in Brazil, Palestine, Portugal, Spain, and the USA. Part 4 presents studies in which employers’ and employees’ perceptions are analysed from various angles: strategies for success, comparison between HRM policies in different companies, company organization, recruitment and selection, and social discrimination. Part 5 and part 6 are dedicated to ethics and governance, in which the focus is on sustainability and social responsibility in corporations and in the public sector.

Volume 3 starts out with thirteen papers in the area of financial management; focusing on hospitality and catering, on the automotive sector and on the intellectual capital of Portuguese companies. Also, one paper analyses the financial education of young people as a strategy to include this group in the stock market. Part 8 presents papers on accounting including studies on various types of organizations – private, public and non-profitable - across various countries. Part 9 presents three papers dedicated to taxation, of which one presents empirical evidence for the impact of taxation on economic growth in the European Union.

Part 10 in Volume 4 compiles research on the topic of strategic management. These papers focus on organization models and again there is a wide range of study objects, for instance tourism destinations, hospitals and car manufacturing, amongst others. This is followed by entrepreneurship - part 11 – approached from the perspective of social entrepreneurship and venture capital, in which we find a paper questioning the relationship between strategic management and entrepreneurship. Part 12 is dedicated to innovation and includes solely studies within the Brazilian context: of intellectual production in higher education, knowledge management and networks and collaboration amongst corporations.

The editors would like to thank all authors for their valuable contributions to this publication.

José António C. Santos

Paulo Águas

Filipa Perdigão Ribeiro

Escola Superior de Gestão, Hotelaria e Turismo,

University of the Algarve

March 2013