Editorial

Abstract

Since 2011 the Tourism & Management Studies journal, together with the School of Management, Hospitality and Tourism of the University of the Algarve has organized international conferences in the fields of Tourism and Management. The last conference was the “TMS Algarve 2012 – Management Studies International Conference”, which received paper submissions from more than 400 authors representing 112 universities from 21 countries. The fact that we are dealing with hundreds of papers is evidence that not only do many authors wish to present their research at the University of the Algarve, but also that they are aiming at publishing their original research papers in our journal.

A selection of the best conference papers presented in English is published in this volume, together with other works submitted directly to the journal. In our opinion, the availability of a large number of good papers along with a demanding refereeing process is the right way to quality.

Since 2008, internationalization has been one of the most important goals of our journal. The large variety of universities and countries where research contained in this volume has been developed is perhaps the best evidence that that goal has been reached: 19 papers from authors from 21 universities in Australia, Austria, Brazil, Bulgaria, England, Hungary, Poland, Portugal, South Africa, Spain and Switzerland.

The first 6 papers are on Hospitality Management and Tourism. Very interesting topics are approached such as: hotel companies and corporate environmentalism; social media and web 2.0 in top hotel chains; the advancement of women into the high echelons of leadership in the hospitality industry; the influence of teenagers on a family’s vacation choices; a systematic literature review of academic papers in tourism marketing and consumption in ISI Current Contents; and long-run forecasting in Tourism.

Most papers in this issue are on Management for obvious reasons, as almost all of them have been selected from our last Management conference. Four contributions are on the sub-area of Strategy, encompassing topics such as: strategy, investment, behaviour and results; strategic knowledge management; role of strategy and environment on the relationship between corporate liquidity and investment; and the alignment between environmental scanning strategy and IT strategy. Marketing is also well represented in this issue with three topics: Political consumerism, demographic characteristics and motivations of consumers regarding organic food; the influence of reference group judgements of global warming on consumers; and consumer sentiment index toward marketing?mix in crisis context. The remaining topics deal with: workplace surveillance; types of entrepreneurs in the conversion process of economic functions in towns; knowledge intensive business services; the relation between IT competency and knowledge management processes and its mediators; organizational culture and the transfer of management, functions and roles in the SMES succession; and how benefits management helps balanced scorecard to deal with business dynamic environments.

Very recently we’ve adopted the APA style for referencing and hope to contribute to some simplification of the formal publication guidelines, as APA manuals are freely available through the internet and allow quick and easy clarification of any doubt at any time. We would like to ask authors to check their references thoroughly before submitting, as we have found that this is one of the aspects that needs to be improved.

We would like to thank authors and reviewers of this issue for their excellent contribution to the success of our journal.

The Editors

José Santos, Margarida Santos, Paulo Águas.