Enzymatic action and microbial growth degrade the quality of fresh-cut lettuce. Browning, a bad smell, and softening during storage are the major forms of quality deterioration. Health-oriented consumers tend to avoid foods treated with chemicals to maintain their freshness. This study was conducted to evaluate the change in the quality of fresh-cut lettuce with combined low-temperature blanching (LB) and ultrasonication (US). The optimum condition was selected using the response surface methodology (RSM), through a regression analysis with the following independent variables; the ultrasonication time (X1), blanching temperature (X2), blanching time (X3), and dependent variable;
In the service industry the types are diversifying and the scale of service companies is greatly improving. Such a phenomenon is caused by economic growth and technological development diversifying consumer needs creating demand for new services maturing the service industry and intensifying competition among companies in the form of global competition. It can be said that this is because it is necessary to improve competitiveness by utilizing the economy of scale. Research is needed on the impact of entrepreneurship on various outcome variables in order for service organization managers to respond quickly to diverse and rapidly changing environments and achieve organizational outcomes and corporate goals of management outcomes. The purpose of this study was to empirically analyze the relationship in which the entrepreneurial spirit of a manager influences the relationship between customer orientation, which is an organizational result, customer satisfaction, and financial result, which is a management result. In order to verify such research, the questionnaire was composed of one business owner questionnaire, two employee questionnaires, and two customer questionnaires. The questionnaire was distributed to a total of 400 companies, and the questionnaires of 340 companies were collected. Of these, 303 companies, excluding the questionnaires of 37 companies with many dishonest or missing values, were used for hypothesis testing. The results of this study can be summarized as follows. First, entrepreneurship had a positive (+) effect on customer orientation, supporting the hypothesis. Second, customer orientation showed a positive (+) effect on customer satisfaction, supporting the hypothesis. Third, customer satisfaction showed a positive (+) effect on financial outcomes, supporting the hypothesis. Fourth, it was found that entrepreneurship influences customer satisfaction through customer orientation, and customer satisfaction affects financial outcomes. It turns out that customer orientation between entrepreneurship and customer satisfaction is completely mediated, and customer satisfaction is completely mediated by customer orientation and financial outcomes. The relationship between entrepreneurship and management improved employee behavior and attitudes, which is an individual outcome, and this change was found to improve customer satisfaction, which is an organizational outcome. It makes frequent contact with customers in the process of servicing them. Employee roles are important at service contacts and influence service purchases. Employees facing customers through service contacts act as a decisive factor in maintaining a continuous relationship with customers. Within a beauty service company, it is necessary to create a customer-oriented environment among workers. It suggests that customer-oriented companies and employees can anticipate their desires and provide products or services of superior value to achieve greater customer satisfaction and a competitive advantage. In addition, it was clarified that customer satisfaction has an aspect relationship with financial management, which is a management result. Therefore, it is suggested that the entrepreneurial spirit is an important factor for the management of a beauty service company to secure competitiveness and improve results.
End-uses of household water have been changed by a life style, housing type, weather, water rate and water supply facilities etc. and those variables can be considered as an internal and exogenous factors to estimate long-term demand forecasts. Analysis of influential factors on water consumption in households would give an explanation to cause on the change of trend and would help predicting the water demand of end-use in household. The purpose of this study is to analyze the demand trends and patterns of household water uses by metering and questionnaire such as occupation, revenue, numbers of family member, housing types, age, floor area and installation of water saving device, etc. The peak water uses were shown at Saturday among weekdays and July in a year based on the analysis results of water use pattern. A steep increase of total water volume can be found in the analysis of water demand trend according to temperature from
Previous research has presupposed that the evaluation of consumer who received any recovery after experiencing product failure should be better than the evaluation of consumer who did not receive any recovery. The major purposes of this article are to examine impacts of product defect failures rather than service failures, and to explore effects of recovery on postrecovery product attitudes. First, this article deals with the occurrence of severe and unsevere failure and corresponding service recovery toward tangible products rather than intangible services. Contrary to intangible services, purchase and usage are separable for tangible products. This difference makes it clear that executing an recovery strategy toward tangible products is not plausible right after consumers find out product failures. The consumers may think about backgrounds and causes for the unpleasant events during the time gap between product failure and recovery. The deliberation may dilutes positive effects of recovery efforts. The recovery strategies which are provided to consumers experiencing product failures can be classified into three types. A recovery strategy can be implemented to provide consumers with a new product replacing the old defective product, a complimentary product for free, a discount at the time of the failure incident, or a coupon that can be used on the next visit. This strategy is defined as "a rewarding effort." Meanwhile a product failure may arise in exchange for its benefit. Then the product provider can suggest a detail explanation that the defect is hard to escape since it relates highly to the specific advantage to the product. The strategy may be called as "a strengthening effort." Another possible strategy is to recover negative attitude toward own brand by giving prominence to the disadvantages of a competing brand rather than the advantages of its own brand. The strategy is reflected as "a weakening effort." This paper emphasizes that, in order to confirm its effectiveness, a recovery strategy should be compared to being nothing done in response to the product failure. So the three types of recovery efforts is discussed in comparison to the situation involving no recovery effort. The strengthening strategy is to claim high relatedness of the product failure with another advantage, and expects the two-sidedness to ease consumers' complaints. The weakening strategy is to emphasize non-aversiveness of product failure, even if consumers choose another competitive brand. The two strategies can be effective in restoring to the original state, by providing plausible motives to accept the condition of product failure or by informing consumers of non-responsibility in the failure case. However the two may be less effective strategies than the rewarding strategy, since it tries to take care of the rehabilitation needs of consumers. Especially, the relative effect between the strengthening effort and the weakening effort may differ in terms of the severity of the product failure. A consumer who realizes a highly severe failure is likely to attach importance to the property which caused the failure. This implies that the strengthening effort would be less effective under the condition of high product severity. Meanwhile, the failing property is not diagnostic information in the condition of low failure severity. Consumers would not pay attention to non-diagnostic information, and with which they are not likely to change their attitudes. This implies that the strengthening effort would be more effective under the condition of low product severity. A 2 (product failure severity: high or low) X 4 (recovery strategies: rewarding, strengthening, weakening, or doing nothing) between-subjects design was employed. The particular levels of product failure severity and the types of recovery strategies were determined after a series of expert interviews. The dependent variable was product attitude after the recovery effort was provided. Subjects were 284 consumers who had an experience of cosmetics. Subjects were first given a product failure scenario and were asked to rate the comprehensibility of the failure scenario, the probability of raising complaints against the failure, and the subjective severity of the failure. After a recovery scenario was presented, its comprehensibility and overall evaluation were measured. The subjects assigned to the condition of no recovery effort were exposed to a short news article on the cosmetic industry. Next, subjects answered filler questions: 42 items of the need for cognitive closure and 16 items of need-to-evaluate. In the succeeding page a subject's product attitude was measured on an five-item, six-point scale, and a subject's repurchase intention on an three-item, six-point scale. After demographic variables of age and sex were asked, ten items of the subject's objective knowledge was checked. The results showed that the subjects formed more favorable evaluations after receiving rewarding efforts than after receiving either strengthening or weakening efforts. This is consistent with Hoffman, Kelley, and Rotalsky (1995) in that a tangible service recovery could be more effective that intangible efforts. Strengthening and weakening efforts also were effective compared to no recovery effort. So we found that generally any recovery increased products attitudes. The results hint us that a recovery strategy such as strengthening or weakening efforts, although it does not contain a specific reward, may have an effect on consumers experiencing severe unsatisfaction and strong complaint. Meanwhile, strengthening and weakening efforts were not expected to increase product attitudes under the condition of low severity of product failure. We can conclude that only a physical recovery effort may be recognized favorably as a firm's willingness to recover its fault by consumers experiencing low involvements. Results of the present experiment are explained in terms of the attribution theory. This article has a limitation that it utilized fictitious scenarios. Future research deserves to test a realistic effect of recovery for actual consumers. Recovery involves a direct, firsthand experience of ex-users. Recovery does not apply to non-users. The experience of receiving recovery efforts can be relatively more salient and accessible for the ex-users than for non-users. A recovery effort might be more likely to improve product attitude for the ex-users than for non-users. Also the present experiment did not include consumers who did not have an experience of the products and who did not perceive the occurrence of product failure. For the non-users and the ignorant consumers, the recovery efforts might lead to decreased product attitude and purchase intention. This is because the recovery trials may give an opportunity for them to notice the product failure.
This project was a service-cum-research effort with a quasi-experimental study design to examine the health benefits of an integrated Family Planning (FP)/Maternal & Child health (MCH) Service approach that provides crucial factors missing in the present on-going programs. The specific objectives were: 1) To test the effectiveness of trained nurse/midwives (MW) assigned as change agents in the Health Sub-Center (HSC) to bring about the changes in the eight FP/MCH indicators, namely; (i)FP/MCH contacts between field workers and their clients (ii) the use of effective FP methods, (iii) the inter-birth interval and/or open interval, (iv) prenatal care by medically qualified personnel, (v) medically supervised deliveries, (vi) the rate of induced abortion, (vii) maternal and infant morbidity, and (viii) preinatal & infant mortality. 2) To measure the integrative linkage (contacts) between MW & HSC workers and between HSC and clients. 3) To examine the organizational or administrative factors influencing integrative linkage between health workers. Study design; The above objectives called for quasi-experimental design setting up a study and control area with and without a midwife. An active intervention program (FP/MCH minimum 'package' program) was conducted for a 2 year period from June 1982-July 1984 in Seosan County and 'before and after' surveys were conducted to measure the change. Service input; This study was undertaken by the Soonchunhyang University in collaboration with WHO. After a baseline survery in 1981, trained nurses/midwives were introduced into two health sub-centers in a rural setting (Seosan county) for a 2 year period from 1982 to 1984. A major service input was the establishment of midwifery services in the existing health delivery system with emphasis on nurse/midwife's role as the link between health workers (nurse aids) and village health workers, and the referral of risk patients to the private physician (OBGY specialist). An evaluation survey was made in August 1984 to assess the effectiveness of this alternative integrated approach in the study areas in comparison with the control area which had normal government services. Method of evaluation; a. In this study, the primary objective was first to examine to what extent the FP/MCH package program brought about changes in the pre-determined eight indicators (outcome and impact measures) and the following relationship was first analyzed; b. Nevertheless, this project did not automatically accept the assumption that if two or more activities were integrated, the results would automatically be better than a non-integrated or categorical program. There is a need to assess the 'integration process' itself within the package program. The process of integration was measured in terms of interactive linkages, or the quantity & quality of contacts between workers & clients and among workers. Intergrative linkages were hypothesized to be influenced by organizational factors at the HSC clinic level including HSC goals, sltrurture, authority, leadership style, resources, and personal characteristics of HSC staff. The extent or degree of integration, as measured by the intensity of integrative linkages, was in turn presumed to influence programme performance. Thus as indicated diagrammatically below, organizational factors constituted the independent variables, integration as the intervening variable and programme performance with respect to family planning and health services as the dependent variable: Concerning organizational factors, however, due to the limited number of HSCs (2 in the study area and 3 in the control area), they were studied by participatory observation of an anthropologist who was independent of the project. In this observation, we examined whether the assumed integration process actually occurred or not. If not, what were the constraints in producing an effective integration process. Summary of Findings; A) Program effects and impact 1. Effects on FP use: During this 2 year action period, FP acceptance increased from 58% in 1981 to 78% in 1984 in both the study and control areas. This increase in both areas was mainly due to the new family planning campaign driven by the Government for the same study period. Therefore, there was no increment of FP acceptance rate due to additional input of MW to the on-going FP program. But in the study area, quality aspects of FP were somewhat improved, having a better continuation rate of IUDs & pills and more use of effective Contraceptive methods in comparison with the control area. 2. Effects of use of MCH services: Between the study and control areas, however, there was a significant difference in maternal and child health care. For example, the coverage of prenatal care was increased from 53% for 1981 birth cohort to 75% for 1984 birth cohort in the study area. In the control area, the same increased from 41% (1981) to 65% (1984). It is noteworthy that almost two thirds of the recent birth cohort received prenatal care even in the control area, indicating that there is a growing demand of MCH care as the size of family norm becomes smaller 3. There has been a substantive increase in delivery care by medical professions in the study area, with an annual increase rate of 10% due to midwives input in the study areas. The project had about two times greater effect on postnatal care (68% vs. 33%) at delivery care(45.2% vs. 26.1%). 4. The study area had better reproductive efficiency (wanted pregancies with FP practice & healthy live births survived by one year old) than the control area, especially among women under 30 (14.1% vs. 9.6%). The proportion of women who preferred the 1st trimester for their first prenatal care rose significantly in the study area as compared to the control area (24% vs 13%). B) Effects on Interactive Linkage 1. This project made a contribution in making several useful steps in the direction of service integration, namely; i) The health workers have become familiar with procedures on how to work together with each other (especially with a midwife) in carrying out their work in FP/MCH and, ii) The health workers have gotten a feeling of the usefulness of family health records (statistical integration) in identifying targets in their own work and their usefulness in caring for family health. 2. On the other hand, because of a lack of required organizational factors, complete linkage was not obtained as the project intended. i) In regards to the government health worker's activities in terms of home visiting there was not much difference between the study & control areas though the MW did more home visiting than Government health workers. ii) In assessing the service performance of MW & health workers, the midwives balanced their workload between 40% FP, 40% MCH & 20% other activities (mainly immunization). However,