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The purpose of this paper is to describe recent progress on the “Crosswatch” project, a smartphone‐based system developed for providing guidance to blind and visually impaired travelers at traffic intersections. Building on past work on Crosswatch functionality to help the user achieve proper alignment with the crosswalk and read the status of walk lights to know when it is time to cross, the authors outline the directions Crosswatch is now taking to help realize its potential for becoming a practical system: namely, augmenting computer vision with other information sources, including geographic information systems (GIS) and sensor data, and inferring the user's location much more precisely than is possible through GPS alone, to provide a much larger range of information about traffic intersections to the pedestrian.

The paper summarizes past progress on Crosswatch and describes details about the development of new Crosswatch functionalities. One such functionality, which is required for determination of the user's precise location, is studied in detail, including the design of a suitable user interface to support this functionality and preliminary tests of this interface with visually impaired volunteer subjects.

The results of the tests of the new Crosswatch functionality demonstrate that the functionality is feasible in that it is usable by visually impaired persons.

While the tests that were conducted of the new Crosswatch functionality are preliminary, the results of the tests have suggested several possible improvements, to be explored in the future.

The results described in this paper suggest that the necessary technologies used by the Crosswatch system are rapidly maturing, implying that the system has an excellent chance of becoming practical in the near future.

The paper addresses an innovative solution to a key problem faced by blind and visually impaired travelers, which has the potential to greatly improve independent travel for these individuals.

The use of covariance structure modeling is explored as a means of moving toward a resolution of the debate over the antecedents of executive compensation. The major strength of this methodology is that it enables researchers to measure the effects of unobserved factors on measured variables. It is suggested that covariance structure modeling is a promising way of studying the effect of institutional isomorphism on executive compensation. The popular business press has questioned repeatedly the justification for and the performance effects of prevailing executive compensation systems (Crystal, 1988; Loomis, 1982; Patton, 1985). These articles argue that executives are more interested in creating wealth for themselves than for stockholders. They also underscore the absence of an obvious link between executive compensation and firm performance. Recent academic research on executive compensation adopts an agency perspective that emphasizes potential conflicts of interest between managers and stockholders. It contends that, in the absence of effective disciplining and monitoring systems, executive compensation plans may direct managers' efforts toward personal wealth enhancement to the detriment of firm value (Baumol, 1958; Berle & Means, 1932). In response, scholars have urged that executive compensation plans contain monetary incentives that only accrue to executives when shareholder wealth is maximized (Kerr, 1985; Rappaport, 1983; Tehranian & Waegelein, 1985). However, designing compensation systems that effectively align the interests of managers and stockholders requires a knowledge of the role and effect of relevant driving forces on compensation. Statistical research on executive compensation has been guided predominantly by a search for tangible, observable determinants (Ciscel & Carroll, 1980), examples of which have been firm size or growth rate (Baumol, 1967; Marris, 1963), inter‐firm and inter‐in‐dustry differences (Coughlan & Schmidt, 1985), and performance (Murphy, 1986). The emphasis on such tangible explanations is not surprising given the overwhelming use of econometric techniques, such as ordinary least squares regression (Ciscel & Carroll, 1980; Finkelstein & Hambrick, 1988), logistic regression (Walking & Long, 1984), time series analysis (Murphy, 1985), and event studies (Brickley, Bhagat & Lease, 1985; Coughlan & Schmidt, 1985; Tehranian & Waegelein, 1985). This paper argues that the focus on tangible, observable variables by compensation researchers is a methodologically ‐ driven practice that constrains theory building and testing. As a result, we may have ignored interesting and relevant theoretical frameworks for the study of executive compensation. We also have overlooked the use of analytical techniques that allow us to examine the role of potentially relevant latent constructs. In this paper, we will describe and illustrate the use of covariance structure modeling for the study of institutional pressures on executive compensation.

This study empirically explores one of the important channel issues – the relationship between various channel support given to channel partners and the perceived (by managers) goal‐orientation of a firm. Results from an emerging market, India, indicate that perceived orientation towards both profitability and market share is not associated with any of the channel support considered. Growth orientation however is strongly associated with most of the channel support activities – both business (e.g., business advice, pricing and ordering assistance, and personnel training) as well as marketing (advertising support, sales promotional material, and inventory management assistance) oriented activities. In contrast, perceived sales volume orientation is only associated with advertising support and business advice, however, the relationship is negative. These findings have interesting implications for channel management and channel motivation.

The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate the non-academic impact in supply chain management (SCM) research through the application of three distinctive approaches to phenomenological methodology in different contexts.

Evidence-based examples from three case studies using interpretivist, social constructivist and critical realist methodologies are presented. They reflect non-positivist approaches commonly used in phenomenological methodology and adopted in SCM investigative research.

Different types of non-academic reach and significance from each research methodology are discussed to illustrate the non-academic impact benefits from each case. The three distinctive phenomenological approaches have been shown to contribute to innovative research methodology development on their own philosophical merit and produced novel contributions to SCM research in particular.

The non-academic impact examples have been shown to have wider influence and implication to business, the economy and society at large.

The paper highlights the relevance of phenomenological research methodology for SCM. It also contributes to the development of the SCM subject area and is hoped to encourage further reporting of non-academic impact of supply chain research.

This paper builds upon a new era of research seeking to understand variability in how desirable outcomes result from engaging rap music as a health enhancing artifact. More specifically, the study explores the music mediated pathways to individual and community well-being. The study emphasizes female music engagement. Quantitative methods are used to examine listening habits and preferences associated with empowering rap music engagement among a female sample of 202 university students using an a priori established path analysis model. Results echo prior research that suggests the functional value of music in helping to define the self independently and articulate one’s social identity within the context of community (Dixon, Zhang, & Conrad, 2009; Hill, 2009; Travis & Bowman, 2012). Specifically, results suggest that among females in this sample, (a) their appropriation of rap music can be empowering, (b) specific factors play a significant role in determining the difference between females that feel more or less empowered from their interactions with rap music, and (c) female listeners were more likely to appropriate rap music for personal and community growth if it was their favorite music type, if they listened often, and if they tended to listen alone more often than with friends. These research findings offer promising routes for more in depth qualitative analysis to help uncover the nuances of preferred engagement strategies and to help define the subjective lived experiences that lead to feeling empowered by music to act toward positive change for oneself and others. Practical results indicate the possibility for gender-specific education, therapeutic or empowerment-based programs that utilize rap music as a rubric.

This paper examines the influence of stress arousal and burnout as mediators of the negative relations between role stressors and job outcomes (satisfaction, performance, and turnover intentions) among a sample of AICPA members working in public accounting. It extends prior research which examined these linkages (Chong & Monroe, 2015; Fogarty, Singh, Rhoads, & Moore, 2000; Smith, Davy, & Everly, 2007) by evaluating a model that simultaneously incorporates stress arousal and the three fundamental dimensions of burnout, i.e., emotional exhaustion, depersonalization, and reduced personal accomplishment. This paper also utilizes a recently validated stress arousal measure designed to capture the worry and rumination aspects of arousal posited to be responsible for a number of negative personal outcomes.

The results indicate that role stressors, mediated by stress arousal and the individual burnout dimensions, have a negative influence on job outcomes. In line with predictions regarding the temporal ordering of stress arousal and burnout in the model, each of the job stressors had a significant positive influence on accountants’ stress arousal, and the influence of the individual role stressors on each burnout dimension was either partially or fully mediated via their relations with stress arousal. In turn, the influence of stress arousal on each of the job outcomes was either partially or fully mediated through its relations with emotional exhaustion.

Knowledge is supposedly a good ally of the future. Postproject reviews aim to create knowledge and improvements based on the past, but what happens when those observations are ambiguous? Based on intriguing observations on developing structured postproject reviews, implications of the ambiguities of the past are analyzed and discussed.

The present research departed from an interactive clinical action research approach (Schein, 1987), employing several rounds of interaction over 11 months. The studied company had a clear objective to improve its project evaluations and learn from three past projects to improve future ones by developing a framework to facilitate project evaluation.

Despite top management support and a benevolent organizational climate, the development process encountered problems. The list of issues to consider grew ever more extensive, and the expected data refinement and accompanying insights did not happen. Participants debated what to observe, and there was uncertainty about how to link the elements and confusion and disagreement about what was learned.

Learning from past projects was more problematic and difficult than predicted based on the postproject review literature. The past did purvey multiple interpretations.

Learning from the past is not effective if the goal is generating causal knowledge, scoring forms and checklists for future use. Postproject reviews provide an opportunity to decide what the past should be about rather than identifying what it was about.

The past might appear stable, but, when examined, ambiguity emerges. Research on knowledge generation from postproject reviews assumes that a project’s past is more or less stable and agreed upon. However, this study addresses the critical role of ambiguity about the past and the challenges when organizations try to learn from history through project reviews and evaluation processes.

To examine the ways in which sports-related brain injury (concussion and subconcussion) is both similar to and different from other injuries and to set out a sociological understanding of the injury, its manifestation and management.

There is a broad contextualization of the ‘issue’ of concussion and the processes that have brought this to the fore, an examination of the ways in which concussion has been figuratively clouded from plain view, and an outline of the main contributions of the social sciences to understanding this injury – the culture of risk and the mediating effect of social relationships. The chapter concludes by questioning whether the emergence of concerns over chronic traumatic encephalopathy has stimulated a fundamental change in attitudes towards sport injuries, and if this has had a significant impact on the social visibility of concussion.

The two available sociological studies of the lived experiences of concussion are situated within a broader analysis of the politicization of sports medicine and the emergence of a particular social discourse around sports-related brain injury.

The difficulties emanating from the dominance of a biomedical approach to concussion are discussed along with the need for further research, incorporating a more holistic view of concussion, as a bio-psycho-social phenomenon.

The study supports the existence of a relationship between components of CEO compensation and firm performance. On average, the sampled firms can be characterized as having high levels of CEO cash compensation and high ROE, as well as high levels of stock option values and high market returns. These between‐firm effects suggest the existence of labor market norms linking executive compensation with firm performance. CEO cash compensation was also strongly influenced by CEO age and firm size.