POLQUAL – measuring service quality in police traffic services

Performance Management and the Police Response to Women in India

Crimes against women have critical implications, not only for victims but also for overall community health and safety. Communities entrust law enforcement agencies with the responsibility to safeguard vulnerable people through effective and efficient policing approaches that provide a safe environment. Enhancing and improving the efficiency and performance of the police is an important part of preventing and reducing crimes against women. One approach to addressing specific performance targets is to adopt a performance management strategy. This paper examines survey data from 310 police officials in northern India about one such strategy: the balanced scorecard (BSC). Our analysis illuminates police perspectives about the perceived benefits of a generalized performance management strategy such as the BSC for improving police performance in addressing crimes against women and the needs of female citizens. Our findings reveal that respondents’ assessments of all four dimensions of the balanced scorecard are associated with their degree of optimism that performance measurement can improve the police response to crimes against women.

From quality control to TQM, service quality and service sciences: a 30-year review of TQM literature

Purpose

This paper aims to review total quality management (TQM) literature in the past three decades to identify the quality related key terms, to analyse their linkage among the identified key terms and their developmental trends.

Design/methodology/approach

Bibliometric and statistical methods are used to analyse article titles published in the Total Quality Management and Business Excellence journal during 1990–2019. The current research is based on a search from the ProQuest academic database and the journal’s website, resulting in 2,452 articles collected. The VOSviewer and Microsoft Excel were then used for the analyses.

Findings

A total of 52 key terms were extracted from the journal’s 2,452 article titles, the top three key terms in terms of occurrences were “quality,” “total quality management” and “service quality.” Five themes were then proposed from clustering the 52 key terms: “frameworks/models,” “essentials/enablers,” “methods/techniques,” “culture/characteristics” and “effects/results.” Trend analyses were also conducted regarding the five themes in an attempt to highlight the patterns of research publications from 1990 to 2019. It is found that the research publications for “essentials/enablers,” “methods and techniques” and “effects/results” have steadily increased during the analysis period, while “frameworks/models” and “culture/characteristic” have slightly decreased. These insights provide implication for the historical evolution of quality from “quality control,” “total quality management” and “service quality,” combining with the development of “service sciences.”

Originality/value

This paper highlights the concept of quality since its meaning has changed and evolved over time from quality control, TQM to service quality. And it is emerging in the present and future development of service sciences because of both of TQM and service sciences having the same nature of multidisciplinary background and characteristics. Also the authors can conclude that quality and service sciences are in fact two sides of the same coin because both of them having the same duality of “tangible-intangible” and “physical-virtual” faces which are the important topics that TQM should focus on.

An application of technology-based design for exhibition services

Purpose

This study aims propose an innovative notion of the advanced technology based on the expectation theory and the emotion theory for a case study of the context-aware service system applied to the exhibition service sector.

Design/methodology/approach

To evaluate the feasibility of the notion of the advanced technology and the context awareness, the authors have collected and analyzed the data from three stakeholders through the real field applications of the mExhibition service system.

Findings

The evaluation results show that customers fairly enjoyed and were satisfied different exhibition customer experience journeys.

Originality/value

The originality of this paper is: facilitation of exquisite customer experience delivery via the advanced technology as evidenced by the mExhibition service system; exhibition service innovation through mExhibition; embodied value co-creation within the exhibition technology and mExhibition service system; and mExhibition commerce realization.