Curtin Graduate School of Business

In response to perceived anger of shareholders resulting from the combination of company failures, high termination payouts and CEO remuneration packages there has been growing media interest in assigning a role to institutional investors to participate as active monitors if corporate performance. This paper explores how institutional investors undertake the monitoring of corporate performance and governance processes and structures. Selected funds managers were interviewed about their approach to active institutional monitoring of invested companies.This article reports on the processes which funds managersindicated they adopted to monitor company performance and governance. It looks at managers' perceptions of the considerations which influenced the development of attitudes and polities about monitoring and the decision to undertake active monitoring and influencing activity. The processes and p rocedures through which exercise of real influence within invested companies is pe...

This study explores the underlying motivating factors of Emiratis and Indian expatriates to visit destinations featured in movies. The results revealed a five-factor structure for Indians: novelty, fantasy-driven, personal connection, prestige and movie connection, vis-à-vis a three-factor structure for Emiratis: novelty, fantasy-driven and personal connection with the movie location. An analyses of variance analysis (ANOVA) showed significant differences in the individual mean scores of items, with the exception of novelty. Regarding gender, while no significant differences were found between the male and female Indian expatriate populations across all factors and underlying items, differences for some items were observed between male and female Emiratis, with male participants demonstrating higher motivation than female participants. These findings support the notion that the underlying factors influencing movie-induced tourism differ between cultures, while the influence of gende...

In studying consumer behaviors, the inclusion of neuroscience tools and methods is improving our understanding of preference formation and choice. But such responses are mostly related to the consumption of goods and services that meet an immediate need. Tourism represents a consumer behavior that is related to a more complex decision-making process, involving a stronger relationship with a future self, and choices typically being of a higher level of involvement and of a transformational type. The aim of this study was to test whether direct emotional and cognitive responses to travel destination would be indicative of subsequent stated destination preference. Participants were shown images and videos from multiple travel destinations while being monitored using eye-tracking and electroencephalography (EEG) brain monitoring. The EEG responses to each image and video were further calculated into neurometric scores of emotional (frontal asymmetry and arousal) and cognitive load metri...

Visitors to Dubai typically get their information from a Google search or consulting TripAdvisor when seeking recommendations on what to see and do. Thus, the “tourism message” tends to shift to user-generated content from a visitor’s, rather than a local’s, perspective. Visit Dubai, the official enterprise website for Dubai tourism wishes to promote Dubai as a cultural heritage destination. Taking this as the “brief,” two media production classes at Zayed University built unique interactive web experiences from Emirati student perspectives. What emerged were “local” perspectives on popular tourist destinations and activities as well as some recommendations that do not make it onto tourism websites. By tying the brief to a societal need, students envisioned the work they could do upon graduation and their roles as professionals. Also, as “proof of concept,” the student websites provide an alternative and legitimate voice to the spectrum of visitor information available on the web an...