French Creole and Cajun Houses in Colonial America

Descriptive Essay Fit And Healthy - 1504 Words

Fit. Healthy. These words may mean different things to different people. Actually, I am sure that they do, as well all have our own frames of reference. Here s what I m referring to here in the context of this article. Fit and healthy means having the physical ability to do the things you want to do without getting out of breath. It means being able to open a heavy door, carry bags of groceries, go up and down stairs. (By the way-this is the definition according to Erin-this is not Webster s by any stretch of the imagination.) It means being able to play with your kids-really play with them, not lie down on the floor and let them climb on you because you don t have the energy or ability to do anything else. It is the ability to live your life and do what you want to do, without self-imposed, changeable physical limitations. Are we straight? OK, here we go! 1-I have to exercise a lot. This is not true. Actually, I should clarify. It depends on what you call a lot. If 30 minutes daily or at least 6 times a week is a lot, then maybe yes. However, you do not have to do all structured exercise-meaning going to the gym, lifting weights, or doing cardio. It can be activity-take the dog for a walk, throw the football, play frisbee, whatever. The most important thing is to get off your duff and move. Don t sit when you can stand, don t stand when you can walk. Get up and walk around the house or office every 20-30 minutes. Go window shop. Clean the house-talk aboutShow MoreRelatedIs Cooking Really Freedom in Jim Sollisch’s Article,751 Words   |  3 Pagesestablishing a personal connection. Sollisch’s article is found on the New York Times website in the Private Lives section on the Opinion Pages. Private Lives is a section for personal essays about real people’s lives and problems they may have encountered. This explains Sollisch’s subject choice and why this is mainly an opinion essay. He starts off with a personal story of how he first came upon the art of cooking (Sollisch, â€Å"Cooking Is Freedom†). He tops off his anecdote with similes such as when he describesRead MoreThe Role Of Lifestyle On Influencing Our Health1241 Words   |  5 PagesThis essay will talk about the role lifestyle plays on influencing our health and in the development of diseases. It will include in it what health is, lifestyle epidemiology going into the details of 3 illnesses in details. WHAT IS HEALTH The World Health Organisation (WHO) defined health as a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being and not merely the absence of diseases or infirmity. It is a positive concept focusing on social and personal resources as we as physical strengthRead MoreDulce Et Decorum Est Analysis Essays1122 Words   |  5 Pages‘Dulce Et Decorum Est’ Essay For years, war and the honour of war has been built up and glorified unfairly by the media in cartoons, movies, games, news and even songs as well as warmongers trying to cash in on unsuspecting and gullible young men who want to be recognized as heroes. Wilfred Owen, who had served in World War 1 and died while defending his country age 25, wrote the poem ‘Dulce Et Decorum Est’ as an attempt to dismantle the unrealistic expectations about war that boys who are ‘ardentRead MoreIslamic and Christianity Essay13431 Words   |  54 Pagesprocess for this examination begins and at least one more time before the final scores for the examination are recorded. Contents of the Rating Guide For Part III A Scaffold (open-ended) questions: †¢ A question-specific rubric For Part III B (DBQ) essay: †¢ A content-specific rubric †¢ Prescored answer papers. Score levels 5 and 1 have two papers each, and score levels 4, 3, and 2 have three papers each. They are ordered by score level from high to low. †¢ Commentary explaining the specific score awardedRead More Explanation, Understanding, and Subjectivity Essay3357 Words   |  14 Pagespropositions relevant to an event E such that nearly all of the very many psychologically healthy, intelligent, well-educated adults who think about it claim to gain an increased level of understanding of why E occurred. What reason could there be for denying that this account is at least a potential explanation of E? What good reason might one have for insisting that the account is merely a set of descriptive propositions somehow relevant to E? I can think of none. I see no reason for calling someRead MoreThesis Statement2070 Words   |  9 Pagesforms of academic writing conform to a thesis-support structure—a structure in which we find the main claim near the beginning of the essay, followed by evidence and analysis in support of this claim in the body of the essay. Your thesis statement serves as the main argument that drives your paper forward. Students are for the most part well accustomed to writing essays that follow this top-down structure; however, they usually have a much harder time adapting their thesis statements to match the purposeRead MoreA Classroom Full Of Vulnerable Learners1962 Words   |  8 Pagesadult, and then repeated the exact action when they felt the same emotions. Therefore a teacher must model healthy habits, so the children children learn them as well. The development of a conscience is also an imperative part of early childhood education. 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Explore this in the context of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child and explain the impact the Convention on UK legislation. I am also going to suggest some steps which in my consideration can implement equality of opportunity for children in UK. Equal opportunity is a descriptive term for an approach intended to give equalRead MoreEssay about Humbert the Pedophile1965 Words   |  8 Pagesdoes not always include child sexual abuse. The pedophile must act upon his desires before it is considered sexual abuse. Humbert, in fact, does act upon his urges by looking, fantasizing, and actually holding Lolita on his lap. In Aristos Bouiuss essay, Pedophilia Versus Abuse, it is suggested that a real pedophile loves children and doesnt want to hurt them in any way, but rather wants a relationship with the child which can be an enjoyable and loving experience on both sides. Pedophiles often

Impact of the Internet on Society Free Essays

Dominic Lobban Impact of the Internet on Society The goal of this paper is to research and analyze the positive and negative effects of the internet and its integration with technology on people in their socialization, learning and interpersonal relationships. The internet offers many advantages and disadvantages to our society, therefore it is important to understand how the internet can affect our society so that we can all benefit from it. In recent decades, the internet has visibly impacted our lives and our daily patterns. We will write a custom essay sample on Impact of the Internet on Society or any similar topic only for you Order Now E-commerce, social-networks and search engines are just a few of the ways that have changed the way we work, communicate and acquire knowledge. For this paper, a survey was prepared by way of an online questionnaire as well as personal interviews in order to figure out in what was the internet was helping or hurting people in their own lives and to get a broader sense of its impact on society in general. A common assumption about today generation is that the youth area attached to their computers and mobile devices to their detriment. It is thought that these people are often detached from society and are missing out on opportunities for social interaction and development resulting in an increase in loneliness and depression. Its is also seen as a substitute for in-person relationship especially when referenced to social networking sites, blogs and instant messengers. On the other hand, it can be said that this same technology has allowed people to form closer relationships than ever before. People are now able to meet new people, discuss topics and elaborate on ideas without having to deal with social barriers such as fears of offending people or shyness. It can also allow for closer relationships between friends and family because they are able to facilitate closer communication among friends and family. For this study, the survey method was used through the use of questionnaires given to a small sample of people in online and in-person surveys. In this study, consideration to their age, sex or education status was taken as one entity and the similarities as well as differences and trends were analyzed. The survey method was picked for this study because it offered the opportunity to gather information about a larger number of subjects in the easiest way possible. The problem with using the survey method is that is does not accurately represent the general population as a whole and the answers can sometimes be subject to bias and distortion. After analyzing the questionnaire, the findings show that most people who use the internet are teens and young adults who use the internet main for entertainment. They find it much easier to express themselves through text rather than in person especially when dealing with the opposite sex. As a result, they are better able to form close relationships especially with people they may not know in person. However, teenagers are more likely to be victims of internet predators and be exposed to inappropriate language and content during a time in their life when they are still vulnerable and developing mentally. When people feel lonely, they get on the internet to chat with their friends or anonymous people but excessive use of the internet can lead to isolation from friends and family and result in depression. Ironically, people who are depressed tend to use the internet as an escape. In addition, excessive use of the internet involving unproductive activities can result in a slow-down of mental growth and turn the users attention away from more constructive activities. Even so the internet is an important part of peoples lives as it allows for faster and better access to entertainment, shopping, information and communication. Some people have said that they have been successful in eliminating their reliance to these diversions and claim to be much happier because of it and there are people who claim that it makes their life better and that they could not life a day without it. For many years during previous decades, there was a certain level of social stigmas regarding the internet and concern about its effect on to social skills of the new generation. To older people who did not grow up with the internet, it would appear that it was all but a lonely and time wasting activity when all they saw was their child or grandchild by them selves staring at a screen for a sizable amount of hours. In the current generation what grew up closely with it, they have embraced it as a part of their lives and express their new found freedom and inter-connectivity through the invention of things like Facebook and the Iphone. The cliche that can be said though is that inevitably everything is bad if not done in moderation. The survey method was appropriate for this study because it was the most time-efficiency and relevant way to gather this type of information. The problem of accuracy can be addressed in a few ways. The first being to greatly increase the sample in order to reduce the influence of deviations and errors. The other is to incorporate observational studies in order to reduce bias and distortion. More detailed information can be gathered even though it might not be representative of the general public. How to cite Impact of the Internet on Society, Papers

Entrepreneurship and Development of Business †Free Samples

Question: Discuss about the Entrepreneurship and Business Development. Answer: Common patterns between the fields of entrepreneurship Entrepreneurship is related to the development of business venture by touching several fields such as corporate, start-up and social. These are three types of entrepreneurship that will be explained by considering the opportunity of technology as the point of discussion. Innovation and technology implementation is the key aspects of the success of the three fields of business. Technological innovation is related to the contribution of the several attributes of technology to the higher economic output of the country that is responsible for the higher economic output. The technology used in this study as the opportunity for entrepreneurship development is hydroponics (Bataineh and Zecca 2017). The concept of corporate entrepreneurship, social entrepreneurship and start up are different from one another. Corporate entrepreneurship is defined as the development of new business opportunities and ideas within an established or large enterprise that leads directly to the enhancement of the competitive position and the improvement of the organizational profitability or can be the strategic renewal of the business models. The opportunity of technology is proven to be a great help in order to implement strategies of innovation to the world of hydroponics. Technologies can be used in the field of research and development for the cost reduction of the methods that are involved in growing crops without soil (Orsini et al. 2013). Technology can be also used in every small business operations for faster communication and perfect results of the productivity of the cultivation of the crops as well as the organizational excellence in the field of hydro-culture. The companies use the nutri ent solutions instead of soil for the growth of the crops and plants in the water solvent. The techniques that are used in the technology of hydroponics are aeroponics, static solution culture, run to waste, rotary, deep-water culture, fogponics, NFT technique, top feed deep-water culture, passive sub irrigation, etc. The substrates that are used are pumice, gravel, sand, sheep wool, rock wool, perlite, rice husks, grow-stones, coir peat, vermiculite, brick shards, etc. On the other hand, the nutrient solutions that are used in the hydroponics method of agriculture are tools, mixing solutions, organic hydroponic solutions, inorganic hydroponic solutions, etc. Carbon dioxide is used as a form of advancements (Wamukoya and Ngweno 2017). It can be said that this is a huge innovation in the science of agriculture. Day by day rate of pollution is increasing that affects the quality of the elements of cultivation i.e. air, water and soil. Hence, the technology of hydroponics is prevailing. The technology is new and is adopted by many entrepreneurs in various countries of the world. The products that are cultivated by using this method are quite different from the foods cultivated by normal methods of agriculture. Hence, the technologies have immense growth opportunity. It is up to the entrepreneurs regarding the use of the technology for developing their business idea (Brown-Paul 2014). Start-ups use a different form of entrepreneurship. Usually these are small fast growing companies. Hence, investment in the utilization of the technology is less than that of corporate entrepreneurship. The pattern of utilizing the technology is different as the forms of operations of the business are different from the other forms of entrepreneurship. Social entrepreneurs on the other hand utilize this technology or fund while expecting of getting benefit in the fields of the environmental, social, cultural issues, etc. They are recognized as for-profit organizations. The aim of this entrepreneurship is not related to individual benefit (Wamukoya and Ngweno 2017). Instead of it, social entrepreneurship focuses on the benefit of the society and environment as a whole. Utilization of hydroponics will be used for social benefit by the social entrepreneurs of the for profit organizations. References Bataineh, A. and Zecca, F., 2017. Challenges and Potential of Future Agricultural Development in Jordan: Role of Education and Entrepreneurship.Academic Journal of Interdisciplinary Studies,5(3 S1), p.11. Brown-Paul, C., 2014. California greening.Practical Hydroponics and Greenhouses, (141), p.36. Orsini, F., Kahane, R., Nono-Womdim, R. and Gianquinto, G., 2013. Urban Agriculture in the developing world: a review.Agronomy for sustainable development,33(4), pp.695-720. Wamukoya, C.M. and Ngweno, A., 2017. I-Entrepreneurship: Changing Lives Through Technology. InDigital Kenya(pp. 163-186). Palgrave Macmillan UK.

Socrates On Democracy Essays - Socratic Dialogues,

Socrates On Democracy In Plato's Euthyphro, Crito and the Apology, we learn of Socrates' highly critical view of the democracy. Socrates believed that democracy was a flawed system because it left the state in the hands of the unenlightened and it valued all opinions as equal. In the Apology, we see how Socrates believed it was his duty to stand for the law and justice despite the wishes of The Assembly, and this cold have cost him his life. In Crito, Socrates states to obey the laws of the State, only if they are just. It could be said that Socrates' views on democracy and justice is what ultimately led to his death. Socrates believed poor leaders are chosen, simply on their basis of their rhetoric ability, not on their ethics or character. He opposed the efforts of the Sophists to teach their students virtue, knowledge and rhetoric as practical subjects needed by citizens to participate in the institutions of Athenian democracy. His belief on knowledge and virtue was that these required "absolute definition" which was to be attained through exhaustive philosophical dialogue and debate. He seemed to offend many Athenians with his negative dialectic method; revealing people's ignorance and inability to give definitions of truth and virtue. He believed the citizen's lack of knowledge made it impossible for the citizen's to vote properly for their leaders or for the leaders themselves to even run. In the Apology, Socrates did not want anything to do with the Thirty Tyrants and he crossed them to the extent that his life might have been in danger, if they had not been overthrown. Socrates was against the trying of the admirals from the battle of Arginusae. He was the only one to refuse to do anything contrary to the laws. In his view it was his duty to stand for the law and for justice despite the wishes of the Assembly, so he did, at risk of prosecution or death. In Crito, Socrates believes that an Athenian is obligated to obey the orders of the state or its officers, unless he considers those orders unjust, "in which case he may protest its injustice, but must consent to punishment if his protest proves unavailing." Socrates' continued to honor his commitment to truth and morality even though it cost him his life. In the Euthyphro, Socrates asks "is the pious loved by the gods because it is pious, or is it pious because it is loved by the gods?" (10A). This question can be restated as does the state prohibit this action because it is unjust, or is it unjust because the state prohibits it? Does this ultimately mean then that actions become right or wrong because of society's approval or disapproval? In the Apology, Socrates states the only opinion that counts is not that of the majority of people, but rather that of the one individual who truly knows. The truth alone deserves to be the basis for decisions about human action, so the only proper approach is to engage in the sort of careful moral reasoning by means of which one may hope to reveal it.

Kashmir Conflict Essay Example

Kashmir Conflict Essay Example Kashmir Conflict Essay Kashmir Conflict Essay Kashmir conflict: The issue of territory is one factor that has lead to conflict between India and Pakistan. It is one of the most intractable and long standing conflicts in the world. The problem of Kashmir arose because maharaja hari singh was unable to makeup his mind to which dominion the state of Kashmir should accede to or whether to accede at all. On one level their nuclear weapons are used as a symbol of international power and prestige, but their introspective viewpoint on Kashmir has required no international intervention.Being locked out of the nuclear club by signing the CTBT would, in Indias view, have locked it into second-grade status. Alternatively, for all the enduring tension between India and Pakistan, the real target of Indias nuclear angst maybe more discrete, in which, may pose more of a threat to its National Security than Pakistan ever will. Some senior Indian leaders, including Defence Minister George Fernandes, have even identified China as the number one st rategic threat to India.Up until two years ago when it signed onto the CTBT, China was running the most vigorous and extensive nuclear weapons development program of any nation state in the world . Indias nuclear tests are a wake-up call to the world, and particularly to the nuclear weapons states. Indias tests got the worlds attention. The country that was really woken up by these tests was Pakistan. These tests have refueled the conflict between Pakistan and India. The two countries have fought three wars, two of them over the disputed region of Kashmir.The region is small, but nestled in the foothills of the Himalayas, its strategic importance and beauty make it a prized possession. Great Britain carved the Muslim state of Pakistan out of Indian territory. This is the primary source of there conflict. When the English did this they had to force some of the Hindus out of the Muslum Pakistan and likewise for Muslums in India. THE NUCLEAR CONFRONTATION INTRODUCTION The testing of nu clear devices, conducted by India and Pakistan in May of this year, and the obvious and ubsequent nuclear deliverance capabilities that these nations clearly now possess, have only heightened tensions within South Asia and the international community. But the retaliatory stratagems that the Indians and Pakistanis have been engaging in for the past fifty years and most importantly the recent nuclear tests, can only be attributed to the convergent and divergent National Interests of these nation states, ultimately bringing South Asia to the brink of a nuclear arms race.Although the nuclear issue is integral in the geo-strategic struggle, the princely state of Kashmir has intensified the crisis since the insurgence of Muslims in 1947. History: When British India was given its independence , India was supposed to be divided into two countries. i. e India and Pakistan. all areas which have more than 70% Muslims were suppose to go Pakistan. the rest would be India. However the princely st ates would be left to decide on their own . they could join India or Pakistan or remain independent.But the local Kashmiris who did not want to be part of India started causing riots and agitations in Kashmir. As a result ,the maharaja of Kashmir joined India and requested the assistance of the Indian army . the Indian army arrived immediately the some day , and Pakistan attacked the next day. The maharaja of Kashmir had no right to call in the Indian army, because the maharaja of Kashmir was not a heredity ruler. He was merely a British appointee. There had been no such position as the maharaja of Kashmir prior to British rule.Finally the agreement was made that any areas more then 70% Muslims would go to Pakistan Kashmir has more than 90% Muslims and therefore clearly should have been part of Pakistan. Threats: Government officials and political leaders from India have made numerous bellicose threats, while both Indian and Pakistani troops have exchanged artillery, mortar and smal l arms of fire along the Line of Control in Kashmir the Himalayan region that was at the center of two of the three Indo-Pak wars.The point to remember about Pakistan is that its economy is on the verge of bankruptcy and its society is in the grip of deep social divisions, expanding sectarian violence, widespread corruption (permeating most governmental and non-governmental organisations) and notable human rights violations, as well as extensive lack of law and order and political stability

Free Trade Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1500 words - 1

Free Trade - Essay Example In the global context, promoting free trade means opening up global markets. In other words, markets increasingly become liberal as protectionist activities reduce. The idea is to offer global trade players an equal environment within which they conduct their business. Notably, governments are the primary enforcers of free trade in the international trade environment. In streamlining free trade across the globe, governments come up with policies or programs that formulate and implement oversight authorities such as World Trade Organization and the European Union. These bodies enforce trade agreements and relationships, thus ensuring compliance to the set rules and regulations. For the European Union, the mandate of the body goes beyond the trade factor. However, the economic aspect of the union is critical to the realization of free trade within and across member states. The realization of global free trade is not an easy process. This is because diverse and dynamic factors affect trade activities within and across domestic, regional, national, and international levels. In today’s global economy, there are many different operational trade agreements and treaties. This shows the extent to which international trade players are willing to embrace and subsequently practice free trade. David Ricardo’s comparative advantage theory is influential in international trade (Daniels, Radebaugh, & Sullivan, 2012). This theory sets out the advantages of international trade based on the production factor. In light of the theory, trade is important because it allows producers across the globe to capitalize their production strengths while benefiting from the strengths of another state in the same regard. This theory informs the basis of free trade, where stakeholders seek to maximize their trade welfare through liberal or more open markets

Science fiction film studies Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 2000 words

Science fiction film studies - Essay Example c world that is not real, asks you to suspend your disbelief and pretend that it is, and then return to reality, hopefully, with some new insight for this world. At least that is the basic idea. However, sometimes the medium (or all the gimmicks) becomes the message and it is just for fun. There is nothing wrong with that either, as long as you know which side of the toast the butter is on. In other words if you started out making a message film but it got lost in the medium, than the message never gets out and the film usually winds up being a milquetoast event. All the films in this list have a message and were, supposedly, made to get that message out, let us see how it worked by analyzing a few. One can only imagine the audience seeing Fritz Lang’s Film, â€Å"Metropolis† for the very first time in 1927. The effects had to be as spellbinding as the audiences in 1977 seeing the premier of â€Å"Star Wars.† These two films as well as most others of the genre that have held the test of time as message driven movies have one thing in common. Their message is mythological. As Malcolmson notes in his article, The Matrix, Liberal Education and Other Splinters in the Mind, that, â€Å"Audience fascination with the character types is related to the power of myths.† (2004: 148) Whatever the innate and archetypal need for mythology, beliefs, religion is in the human psyche, it’s presence in sci-fi movies is profound and moving. When this connection is lacking, the movies is usually relegated to the b-movie section of the class. B-movies are fun too but that is another topic of discussion. However, while the effects of mythology in filmmaking are often profound their interwoven texture in the movie should not be too obvious, or it can become a little heavy-handed and the message can get blurred. Malcolmson also notes that â€Å"The Matrix† is â€Å"densely allusive† (2005: 141) and we find that was the intention of the Wachowski brothers as he quotes Larry

Journal Article Critique 4293 Assignment Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 250 words

Journal Article Critique 4293 - Assignment Example However, at the end of the 10 weeks of the study, the two groups had a total of 51 students after 9 of them dropped from the study after moving to other regions. As highlighted, there was a control group and a treatment group, each consisting of 30 students. Both the control group and the treatment group participated in Tier 1 learning instructions, but only the treatment group underwent the special Tier 2 learning instructions. These types of instructions were given for a period of 10 weeks and different measures of their improvement in literacy were used to compare their performance after the 10 week period. The data from such scores was analyzed and interpreted to compare the effect of Tier 2 learning instructions, which was a response-to-intervention model. From the findings, in the scores of the different groups, it emerged that students in the treatment grouped performed better in all the measures compared to those in the control group. Notably, the control group exhibited improvement because of the Tier 1 learning instructions. The study utilized a limited sample size, which was 51 at the end of the 10 weeks, a factor that necessitates an additional study with a larger sample size. The measurement instruments used in the study had limited capacity in assessing some measures identified for the study. The third limitation was that, the study only considered reading level ranges from early first to the level of middle third grade, which has the capacity of introducing a level of variance. This study is a salient example of the effects of adopting an intervention model of learning instructions in a bid to help students with learning disabilities to improve their literacy levels. The authors of this article are impressed by the positive findings that adopting a Tier 2 instruction model can register a difference in the learning ability and literacy levels of students

Analysis of the Hotel Industry in Malaysia

Analysis of the Hotel Industry in Malaysia CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION 1.1 Overview Basically, this chapter is an introduction of the research topic. In the Section 1.2, it briefly introduces the background of this study. Introduction of hotel industry in Malaysia is included in Section 1.3. Next, problem statements are explained in Section 1.4 while the research objectives are laid out in Section 1.5. Besides, Section 1.6 and Section 1.7 have included the scope of study and the significance of this study respectively. Lastly, Section 1.8 is about the explanation of the organization of this study with a flow chart attached depicting the tasks to be carried out. 1.2 Background of Study In todays increasingly competitive and complex business environment, being sustainable in the business arena is no longer the mission of any of the organization, but to grow. Competitive advantage gives organization to shield and isolate itself temporary from the intensive competitive environment. This advantage could be taken away when competitors improved their products or services that potentially make more appealing to customers. Therefore, organization requires a never-ending process of continuous improvement. The word kaizen has been used by Japanese for describing this ongoing process of unending improvement by setting and achieving of ever-higher goals that involves both managers and workers (Imai, 1996; Heizer Render, 2006). Over the years, organizations from every industry keep coming out new products, either with a different exterior or equipped with better and more advanced features. For example, todays mobile phones have almost the same function as a computer except with a smaller screen and size, auto industry comes out cars that strongly emphasize on performance, safety, comfortably, elegance and so forth. Same thing goes to services, organizations come out with services that are tailored to every customers. As a result, this provides what the customers are really wanted and undoubtedly, customer satisfaction increased. For instance, Tune Hotels has made all services as optional, from breakfast, air-conditioned room to water-heated bathroom (TuneHotels.com, 2009). All of these are normally being provided as a package in any other hotels. As a consequence, customers have the right to select which services they want and they are being charged according to what services they have selected. To sum it u p, organizations in 21st century are being very innovative in serving their customers. Instead of merely come out with novel products and services, organizations have to look into the quality issue of the products or services produced. Customers will never be satisfied if the products or services they received have no quality, regardless of how novel and unique it is. Here we need to look into quality issue. According to Blankenship and Petersen (1999), W. Edwards Deming is known most widely for his work in quality management. Demings 14 points help Japan in achieving very high levels of quality in products and turn out to be a great shock for the westerners because Japanese goods were perceived at low quality and cheapness before this. He used statistics to examine production processes for flaws and greatly influenced Japanese industry as it rebuilt in the years after World War II. Today, TQM is a popular topic for quality management. TQM is called total because it entire the whole organization, from the supplier to customer (Sharmma, 2008). In other words, TQM talks about the satisfaction of customer, supplier, and employee. Furthermore, quality assurance systems such as statistical process control, quality control and better conformance quality are lined to better business performance (Dick, 2000). Other than that, people in todays world are relatively concern with the quality of the products and services they purchase. With the advancement of Information Technology (IT), gathering information regarding quality for various products has no longer a time-consuming task. All of this information can be gathered with only a few clicks. For that reason, quality has become one of the considerations at customers pre-purchase stage. Since the quality has become more and more important nowadays, a non-govermental organization (NGO) named International Organization of Standardization (ISO) has published the ISO 9000 series of quality standards at year 1987 (Dick, 2000). The ISO 9000 series of international quality system standards provides a framework for a basic quality assurance system and a good starting point for achieving total quality (Evan Lindsay, 1999). Generally speaking, businesses can base the development of their products and services on reference documents which have broad market relevance. This, in turn, means that they are increasingly free to compete on many markets around the world. As on the customer side, the worldwide compatibility of technology which is achieved when products and services are based on International Standards brings them an increasingly wide choice of offers (ISO, 2009). By implementing TQM, both the organizations and customers can enjoy ever greater benefits. From the aspect of organizations, in reality, both the tangible and intangible ones are offered by TQM, such as cost savings for the employer and greater job satisfaction for the employee (Gunasekaram, Goyal, Martikainen, Yli-Olli, 1998). According to Shemwell, Tavas, Bilgin (2008), the key to sustainable competitive advantage lies in delivering high quality service that will in turn result in satisfied customers. In addition, Dick (2000) has proven that better quality does have a consistent positive relationship with improved business performance. Figure 1.1: Two Ways Quality Improves Profitability (Adapted From: Heizer and Render, Operations Management, 2006.) Also, Heizer and Render (2006) says profits can be increased by improved quality as the figure depicted above. Firstly, improved quality generally leads to both sales gains and reduced cost. This is because improved response, higher prices and improved reputation are all make sales gain happened. Moreover, reduction of cost happens when productivity increases, rework and scrap costs decreases and warranty costs decreases. Therefore, profits will be increased when expenditures (costs) have been lowered and revenue (sales) has been increased. 1.3 Hotel Industry in Malaysia As a sub-sector to services sector, tourism has an increase in foreign exchange earnings from RM17.3 billion in year 2000 to RM46.1 billion in 2007 (Bank Negara Malaysia [BNM], 2008). It shows that tourism had a growth in its revenue for 166% in a period of only 7 years. This is largely due to the effects of campaigns â€Å"Visit Malaysia Year† (Poon Low, 2005) and â€Å"Cuti-cuti Malaysia†. Up-to-date, tourism has recorded total receipts of RM49,561.2 million for the year 2008, an increment of RM3,491.2 million from year 2007 (Tourism Malaysia Corporate, 2009). Spillover effects have been generated by the increase in tourism activities into other sectors of the economy. In other words, the steadily growth of tourism industry has contributed to the growth of all related industries and businesses. These included hotel industry, retail businesses, restaurants and transportation (Bank Negara Malaysia [BNM], 2008). Hotel industry plays a very important role in complementing tourism as it provides accommodation to travelers and tourists. Nevertheless, hotel industry has been a major player in the growth of the Malaysian economy, which contributing approximately 50 percent of the nations real GDP (Awang, Ishak, Radzi, Taha, 2008). As today, there are approximately 105 hotels with different ratings and sizes in Kuala Lumpur alone (Malaysian Association of Hotels [MAH], 2009). This has shown that Kuala Lumpur has an incredibly high density of hotels. Here the problem arises, how is the hotel industry in Kuala Lumpur cope with the never ending increase of tourists and travelers? In this context, it seems not possible to provide more rooms by simply adding the number of hotels in Kuala Lumpur. This is because the land area of Kuala Lumpur has only 244km ², meaning that there will be 1 hotel in every 2.3km ². In this sense, hoteliers have to find other ways to increase their productivities. In recent years, governments from all over the world have been putting more and more emphasis in developing services industry in their countries. They are all now aware of the unique characteristic of services and its importance in supporting a countrys economic growth. Business services showed the strongest growth in terms of value added and economic productivity (Wirtz Ehret, 2009). Theoretically, any organization in developing countries must endeavor continuously to improve productivity in order to increase profitability (Oluleye Olajire, 2001). As a consequence to the Malaysia economy, a higher amount of GDP will be recorded, more and more employment will be provided and so on. Hence, these have made hotel industry as a key sub-sector to services industry and these social responsibilities should not be overlooked by hoteliers in Malaysia. 1.4 Problem Statements In general, Malaysian will have perception saying that things made by western countries and Japan have higher quality, things from China have no quality and so forth. This is partially true in reality, majority of the Malaysians opt to buy import goods where there is an option for them. Therefore, local made products are usually having less supports from Malaysian as it has been perceived to be low quality in terms of unreliable and unattractive (Damodaran, 2009). This shows that local made products have lesser competency even in local market. Consequently, government encourages both the manufacturer and services provider to look seriously in quality issue by giving several incentives (Malaysian Rubber Export Promotion Council [MREPC], 2009). However, the outcomes of it are not up to the expectation. This may due to the inadequate research carry out in Malaysia. Thus, organizations especially the small size ones will definitely lack of information when trying to implement quality man agement system. Kuala Lumpur is one of the major cities in Malaysia with an estimated of 1.6 million of population at the year 2005 (KL City Plan 2020, 2009) and it is to be said as the fastest growing region in Malaysia. This figure says that Kuala Lumpur is the most densely populated district in Malaysia. Moreover, Kuala Lumpur has a vast number of tourists and it increases over years. Just to name a few, its major tourist destinations include Dataran Merdeka (the Independence Square), House of Parliament, the Istana Budaya, the Istana Negara (National Palace), the Kuala Lumpur Tower, the Muzium Negara (National Museum), Petaling Street and etc (Tourism Malaysia, 2009). With the limited land that Kuala Lumpur has, it is almost impossible to build more hotels in order to cater the increasing number of tourist in the near future. Therefore, several actions have to be taken in order to best serve the tourists with the limited number of hotels in Kuala Lumpur. This is to ensure that the receipts from tourism will not be negatively affected while the hotel industry can continuously contribute significantly to GDP. As time goes by, Human Resource Management (HRM) has become a popular topic than ever before. Organizations have understood the importance of employees (human resources). At the same time, empirical research studies have been done by researchers to further understand and prove those theories related to motivate and compensate employees. Dessler (2005) says that employee satisfaction and performance are positively related. Therefore, hoteliers must understand the importance to maximize their employee satisfaction as this could lead to greater business performance. However, by solely compensating employees with both monetary and non-monetary rewards has its limitation. Performance will stop increasing when the problem arises are not come from employees but the management. For instance, it could be lacking a well-planned system in executing tasks, ineffective communications in organization and so forth. In other countries, TQM has been so popular for a period of time as it helps organiz ations to achieve even higher of performance. In other countries, plenty of research studies have been carried out to investigate which TQM factors are the most influential to the particular country. Unlike in Malaysia, the number of TQM study that can be applied is limited and lacking of guidelines for hoteliers is still a major problem. Someone could say that hoteliers can simply use the findings from other countries as a guideline for implementing the TQM. But, there is always a high possibility that those mentioned as important factors are not important in Malaysia, when compared to the original country that the research is carried out. In other words, it is imperative to understand the applicability of the findings from other countries. The applicability of some of the findings from research still remains questionable. For example, information and analysis, one of the TQM factors is said to be extremely important to developed and developing countries but it is not persuasive enough to apply on third world countries. This is because they probably lack of necessary infrastructure. Therefore, it can be said that Malaysias hoteliers are actually lack of a blueprint when initially applying TQM to their respective hotels. In other words, hoteliers may not known which factors of TQM can generally lead to better performa nce in the Malaysia. Furthermore, with the limited of number of such research available to Malaysia, it has nothing to show hoteliers how strong the impact of TQM factors is to labor productivity, thus lack of motivation to change their routine and ways of doing business. When this occurs, Malaysia hotel industry can never be improved, previously owned competitiveness can be competed away and GDP can be affected. 1.5 Research Objectives The general objective of this study is to identify the impact of each of the selected TQM factors towards the labor productivity. Next, it is then to be expressed in term of its level of correlation between each of the independent variables and the dependent one. Therefore, this result could be used by the Malaysia hoteliers in increasing their labor productivity as these findings will show which of the independent variables plays a more important role in achieving higher labor productivity in the Malaysia context. The following objectives are specifically derived from the problem statements: To identify the relationship between the chosen independent variables and dependent variable; To investigate the level of impact for each of the chosen TQM factors towards labor productivity; To determine whether high TQM commitment hotels will generally generate higher labor productivity than the low TQM commitment hotels; and To provide insights and recommendations for improvement to Malaysias hoteliers at the end of the research. 1.6 Scope of Study The scope of this study covers a discussion on TQM as well as the importance of productivity. As the scope of both TQM and productivity are broad, this study will primarily focus on the aspect of TQM factors and labor productivity. Besides, this study investigates the relationship between selected TQM factors and labor productivity. Theoretically, those selected TQM factors is to be said to have influences on the labor productivity. Therefore, this research is also carried out with the intention to identify the degree of impact of the selected TQM factors towards labor productivity, either a stronger or a weaker one. Moreover, this research is intended to provide useful and relevant findings for hoteliers in Malaysia, in order to achieve the ever higher labor productivity in Malaysia hotel industry. Therefore, it is targeted to hoteliers in Malaysia primarily located in Kuala Lumpur. Lastly, a questionnaire has been included in this study and carried out on hoteliers of Kuala Lumpur in order to measure the impact of TQM factors towards labor productivity. 1.7 Significance of Study The importance of this study is to explore the relationship between the selected TQM factors and labor productivity in the context of Malaysia hotel industry. Similar research studies have been done to prove the relationship between the TQM factors and productivity. However, most of it were not focusing on the hotel industry. Some of them might have focused in hotel industry, but the issue of applicability remains noticeable. For that reason, this study is focusing in the Malaysia hotel industry as an applicable guideline and reference for the Malaysia hoteliers. Besides that, this study will be able to contribute relevant information to the Tourism Malaysia Promotion Board (Malaysian Ministry of Culture, Arts and Tourism). In Section 1.3, it shows the importance of tourism is to the nation GDP. Furthermore, hotel industry is relatively important to the country as an accommodation means for tourists to visit Malaysia. In addition, through this study, government is now able to identify unsuitable approaches and strategies. Therefore, essential action such as coming out new incentives scheme can be taken to effectively replace the old ones. Thus, national resources can be distributed and used even more effective and efficient than ever. As to hoteliers, this study helps to lighten their worries when first implementing the TQM as they are now getting more supporting evidence from this study. According to Yesawich (1997), building customer loyalty is one of the biggest challenges for the hotel industry. Successfully implemented TQM contributes to customer satisfaction. From customer satisfaction, loyalty and profits are positively related. In other word, TQM can potentially overcome one of the biggest challenges in hotel industry. At the same time, organizations can enjoy the benefits from TQM such as creating competitive advantage, providing unique services and so forth. 1.8 Organization of Study The organization of this research study comprises of 5 chapters. This research study begins with Chapter 1 that covers the introduction for the chosen topic. It consists of the background of study and hotel industry in Malaysia. Next, problem statements, research objectives, scope of study and the significance of study are laid out in different section. Lastly, organization of study that shows the overall flow of this study ends the Chapter 1. Chapter 2 provides the literature review for the chosen topic. It includes all the related empirical studies that have been done by the previous researchers. Several of viewpoint, definition and argument have been included in this chapter as well. For instance, different point of views from different researchers for the same variable can be found here. Chapter 3 outlines the overall methodology being used in this research study. It shows the research framework together with the explanation and hypothesis of the framework. Besides, data collection method, sources of data, sampling method and sampling size will be discussed in separated section. Furthermore, there is the outline of the questionnaire development and scaling techniques before discussion of data analysis and measurement close the chapter. Chapter 4 discusses the findings and the results of this research study. Therefore, all related chart, graph, data will be included in this chapter. This chapter basically ends with the interpretation and discussion regarding all of the findings. Finally, conclusions and recommendations will be formed and given to readers. It concludes which TQM factors have a stronger effect and vice versa. Besides that, limitations of this study will also be included. The following figure shows the overall outline of this study. Figure 1.2: Flow Chart of Study CHAPTER 2 LITERATURE REVIEW 2.1 Overview This chapter develops and provides the foundation for this research study. Previous works done by other researchers that relate to labor productivity, total quality management, customer focus, human resource management, information analysis, leadership and strategic management are all presented in this chapter. Besides, in order to gain a better understanding of this research, viewpoints from different researchers are then compare and contrast in this chapter. 2.2 Labor Productivity In the 21st century, productivity growth plays an important role in GDP growth of any nation. According Chapman, Murray Mellor (1997), the use of sales per employee has been widely used to measure labor productivity for individual companies. Besides, Sauian (2002) says that in knowledge-based economy, competitive advantage can be maintained through â€Å"high productivity† and efficiency. In the other way round, labor productivity is an important element used to gauge competitiveness in producing goods and services (Sauian, 2002). Moreover, Hoffman Mehra (1998) argues that high productivity effects are impossible to sustain without a quality-based process-oriented environment which emanates from the support of employees, upper management, and the organization. Malaysia registered a productivity growth of 2.9 percent from RM 48,113 in year 2007 to RM 49,526 in year 2008. Furthermore, productivity contributed 62.2 percent while employment contributed 37.8 percent to the GDP growth of 5.98 percent. This growth surpassed several major countries of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). As shown in Figure 2.1, the Rep. of Korea recorded a productivity growth as much as 3.6 percent, the USA (2.1 percent), the Japan (0.8 percent), the Australia (0.4), the Germany (0.1 percent) and the rest had zero or negative growth (Malaysia Productivity Corporation [MPC], 2009). Figure 2.1: Productivity Growth of Malaysia and Selected OECD Countries, 2008 (Adapted From: MPC, Annual Productivity Report 2008) Thomas (1994) defined the simplest form of labor productivity (LP) as the hours of work divided by the units of work accomplished. In general, LP is a measure of output from a production as per unit of input. Therefore, it can be expressed as: LP From the above formula, LP consists of the total output and total input. It can be in terms of a particular production, a department, an organization or even a nation. In general, if we want to increase productivity, it is necessary to increase the systems output, if the input is to remain constant. Similarly, if the systems output is to maintain the status quo, then we need to utilize less input. From a different aspect, if both output and input are increased, then it is mathematically obvious that the rate of increase of output should be higher than the rate of increase of input, if productivity needs to be improved (Sauian, 2002). Therefore, in order to achieve higher LP, input and output should be manipulated in various ways. Schonewille (2001) said the effectiveness of training is lower compared to initial education when comes to contributing to labor productivity. Even thought training has smaller effects on labor productivity, still the estimated coefficient is positive (Schonewille, 2001). A number of researchers have proven the positive impact of quality on productivity, whereas both can influence positively profitability (Bylund Lapidoth, 1994). This relationship has been generally accepted within the manufacturing industry (Chase Aquilano, 1995). However in reality, LP is a much more complex phenomenon which largely depends on quite diverse factors such as workers competence, motivation, supervision and so forth. Also, management does affect LP (Enshassi, Mohamed, Mayer, Abed, 2007). Chapman and Al-Khawaldeh (2002) has investigated the relationship between TQM implementation and labor productivity in industrial companies in Jordan, as shown in Figure 2.2. The results of data analysis indicate that there is a positive relationship between TQM (and each TQM element) and labor productivity. Interestingly, it is found that companies with ISO 9000 certification has high positive slope whereas companies without ISO 9000 certification has low positive slope. 2.3 Total Quality Management (TQM) TQM emerged in the mid-1980s in response to Japans invasion of US markets with their high quality-low price automobiles and electronic products. Quality has been defined differently as conformance to requirement (Crosby, 1979), fitness for use (Juran, 1979), continual improvement (Deming, 1982) and as define by customers (Ford, 1990). Whereby, Spitzer (1993) called TQM â€Å"the only source of sustainable competitive advantage†. Also, TQM is continually satisfying agreed customer requirements at lowest cost through harnessing everyones commitment (Burton Franckeiss, 1994). In theory, TQM seems to assure performance improvement for any organization. But, in practice, TQM works for some organization and not for others (Terzioski, 2006). According to Chapman and Al-Khawaldeh (2002), TQM is a key strategy for maintaining competitive advantage and is a way of managing organizations to improve its overall effectiveness and performance towards achieving world-class status. During the last two decades or so, simple inspection activities have been replaced or supplemented by quality control, quality assurance has been developed and refined, and now most companies are working towards TQM (Dale Bunney, 1999). Dale (1999) indentifies four discrete stages: inspection, quality control, quality assurance and TQM, as shown in Figure 2.2. Figure 2.3: The four levels in the evolution of Total Quality Management (Sources: Adapted from Dale Bunney, Total Quality Management Blueprint, 1999) Inspection is defined as â€Å"activities such as measuring, examining, testing or gauging one or more characteristic of an entity and comparing the results with specified requirement in order to establish whether conformity is achieved for each characteristic† (BS EN ISO 8402, 1995). Quality control is defined as â€Å"operational techniques and activities that are used to fulfill requirements for quality† (BS EN ISO 8402, 1995). Quality assurance is defined as â€Å"all the planned and systematic activities implemented within the quality system and demonstrated as needed to provide adequate confidence that an entity will fulfill requirements for quality† (BS EN ISO 8402, 1995). TQM is the highest level which involves the application of quality management principles to all aspects of the business, including customers and suppliers. It is then defined as the management approach of an organization, centered on quality, based on the participation of all its members and aiming at long-term success through customer satisfaction, and benefits to all members of the organization and to society (BS EN ISO 8402, 1995). A number of research studies have been carried out to investigate the impact of TQM factors and implementation (Sila Ebrahimpour, 2005; Khan, 2003; Terzioski, 2006). Miller (1993) reported that success with TQM depends on the facilitating conditions. Leadership, human resource management and some other TQM factors are found to have positive impact on business results (Sila Ebrahimpour, 2005). Therefore, these findings can be reasonably useful in assisting managers so that they can allocate resources to improve their typical routines to obtain the best results. Next, five TQM factors have been selected as the independent variables for this study, namely (1) Customer Focus, (2) Human Resource Management (HRM), (3) Information and Analysis, (4) Leadership and (5) Strategic Planning. It is said that customer focus pays more attention on the customers whereas the rest of TQM factors have focused on the internal aspect of the organization. As for HRM, it focuses on the practices involved in carrying out the â€Å"people† of a management position. Information and analysis is said to be the information and communication technology used to further enhance labor productivity as automation has been widely used. Leadership is important as it creates synergy for achieving favorable business results whereas strategic planning is a set of process undertaken in order to develop a range of strategies that will contribute to achieve organization direction. Further elaboration and review for each variable will be discussed in different sub-section lat er. 2.3.1 Customer Focus According to Dean and Bowen (1994), customer focus is as important as many other TQM practices to organizational performance. Being customer-focused keeps us aware of quality, or rather it focuses our quality initiatives on what really matters to the customers (Cox, 1997). Also, Piercy (1995) says that TQM has too much focused on the internal aspect of the organization and much less attention on the customers. Customer satisfaction begins by discovering precisely what customers want and gearing every practice to their exact expectations (Kearney, 1994). Customer focus has changed mass production to mass customization. In addition, being far from depersonalizing the world, technology has the power to return us to being treated as individuals while getting all the benefits inherent in large-scale enterprise (Cox, 1997). Sousa (2003) pointed out the importance of customer focus lies in the fact that it is the starting point of any quality initiative. However, it has not received enough attention from quality management researchers (Cai, 2009). In the final decade of twentieth century, the term, customer-centered competition has been introduced. Customer-centered company is a company that focuses on customer developments in designing its marketing strategies and on delivering superior value to its target customers (Kotler Armstrong, 2008). It is common to hear the statement â€Å"customer is always right† in any organization. This could be the trend that organization is to focus on customer needs to be customer-led, to be market-oriented, to care for customers and so forth (Piercy, 1995). These are to make total customer satisfaction a strategic foundation for achieving competitive advantage (Kearney, 1994). Customer focus has been therefore defined as the degree to which firms continuously satisfy customer needs and expectations (Philips, Chang, Buzzell, 1983). The difference between customer focus and customer understanding is, according to Lagrosen (2001), mainly a matter of perspective. Customer focus means the activities of the companies are intended to benefit the customer but the customer is seen from the companies own perspective. Therefore, effects are usually being made to gain information about the customers needs and wants, although always in a set framework that originates in the companies view of the product and its features. Whereby, customer understanding needs perspective to be shifted. It means the company needs to gain entry to the customers own perspective and adopt the customers framework of viewing the product (Lagrosen, 2001). Cai (2009) found that organizational customer focus affects customer relationship practices, which subsequently influence production performance and customer satisfaction, and production performance and customer satisfaction lead to financial outcomes. Ooi, Bakar, Arumugam, Vellepan, and Loke (2007) says TQM practices such as teamwork, reward and recognition, customer focus and organizational trust are positively associated with job satisfaction within their organization. For instance, customer focus was found to have a direct influence on emplo Analysis of the Hotel Industry in Malaysia Analysis of the Hotel Industry in Malaysia CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION 1.1 Overview Basically, this chapter is an introduction of the research topic. In the Section 1.2, it briefly introduces the background of this study. Introduction of hotel industry in Malaysia is included in Section 1.3. Next, problem statements are explained in Section 1.4 while the research objectives are laid out in Section 1.5. Besides, Section 1.6 and Section 1.7 have included the scope of study and the significance of this study respectively. Lastly, Section 1.8 is about the explanation of the organization of this study with a flow chart attached depicting the tasks to be carried out. 1.2 Background of Study In todays increasingly competitive and complex business environment, being sustainable in the business arena is no longer the mission of any of the organization, but to grow. Competitive advantage gives organization to shield and isolate itself temporary from the intensive competitive environment. This advantage could be taken away when competitors improved their products or services that potentially make more appealing to customers. Therefore, organization requires a never-ending process of continuous improvement. The word kaizen has been used by Japanese for describing this ongoing process of unending improvement by setting and achieving of ever-higher goals that involves both managers and workers (Imai, 1996; Heizer Render, 2006). Over the years, organizations from every industry keep coming out new products, either with a different exterior or equipped with better and more advanced features. For example, todays mobile phones have almost the same function as a computer except with a smaller screen and size, auto industry comes out cars that strongly emphasize on performance, safety, comfortably, elegance and so forth. Same thing goes to services, organizations come out with services that are tailored to every customers. As a result, this provides what the customers are really wanted and undoubtedly, customer satisfaction increased. For instance, Tune Hotels has made all services as optional, from breakfast, air-conditioned room to water-heated bathroom (TuneHotels.com, 2009). All of these are normally being provided as a package in any other hotels. As a consequence, customers have the right to select which services they want and they are being charged according to what services they have selected. To sum it u p, organizations in 21st century are being very innovative in serving their customers. Instead of merely come out with novel products and services, organizations have to look into the quality issue of the products or services produced. Customers will never be satisfied if the products or services they received have no quality, regardless of how novel and unique it is. Here we need to look into quality issue. According to Blankenship and Petersen (1999), W. Edwards Deming is known most widely for his work in quality management. Demings 14 points help Japan in achieving very high levels of quality in products and turn out to be a great shock for the westerners because Japanese goods were perceived at low quality and cheapness before this. He used statistics to examine production processes for flaws and greatly influenced Japanese industry as it rebuilt in the years after World War II. Today, TQM is a popular topic for quality management. TQM is called total because it entire the whole organization, from the supplier to customer (Sharmma, 2008). In other words, TQM talks about the satisfaction of customer, supplier, and employee. Furthermore, quality assurance systems such as statistical process control, quality control and better conformance quality are lined to better business performance (Dick, 2000). Other than that, people in todays world are relatively concern with the quality of the products and services they purchase. With the advancement of Information Technology (IT), gathering information regarding quality for various products has no longer a time-consuming task. All of this information can be gathered with only a few clicks. For that reason, quality has become one of the considerations at customers pre-purchase stage. Since the quality has become more and more important nowadays, a non-govermental organization (NGO) named International Organization of Standardization (ISO) has published the ISO 9000 series of quality standards at year 1987 (Dick, 2000). The ISO 9000 series of international quality system standards provides a framework for a basic quality assurance system and a good starting point for achieving total quality (Evan Lindsay, 1999). Generally speaking, businesses can base the development of their products and services on reference documents which have broad market relevance. This, in turn, means that they are increasingly free to compete on many markets around the world. As on the customer side, the worldwide compatibility of technology which is achieved when products and services are based on International Standards brings them an increasingly wide choice of offers (ISO, 2009). By implementing TQM, both the organizations and customers can enjoy ever greater benefits. From the aspect of organizations, in reality, both the tangible and intangible ones are offered by TQM, such as cost savings for the employer and greater job satisfaction for the employee (Gunasekaram, Goyal, Martikainen, Yli-Olli, 1998). According to Shemwell, Tavas, Bilgin (2008), the key to sustainable competitive advantage lies in delivering high quality service that will in turn result in satisfied customers. In addition, Dick (2000) has proven that better quality does have a consistent positive relationship with improved business performance. Figure 1.1: Two Ways Quality Improves Profitability (Adapted From: Heizer and Render, Operations Management, 2006.) Also, Heizer and Render (2006) says profits can be increased by improved quality as the figure depicted above. Firstly, improved quality generally leads to both sales gains and reduced cost. This is because improved response, higher prices and improved reputation are all make sales gain happened. Moreover, reduction of cost happens when productivity increases, rework and scrap costs decreases and warranty costs decreases. Therefore, profits will be increased when expenditures (costs) have been lowered and revenue (sales) has been increased. 1.3 Hotel Industry in Malaysia As a sub-sector to services sector, tourism has an increase in foreign exchange earnings from RM17.3 billion in year 2000 to RM46.1 billion in 2007 (Bank Negara Malaysia [BNM], 2008). It shows that tourism had a growth in its revenue for 166% in a period of only 7 years. This is largely due to the effects of campaigns â€Å"Visit Malaysia Year† (Poon Low, 2005) and â€Å"Cuti-cuti Malaysia†. Up-to-date, tourism has recorded total receipts of RM49,561.2 million for the year 2008, an increment of RM3,491.2 million from year 2007 (Tourism Malaysia Corporate, 2009). Spillover effects have been generated by the increase in tourism activities into other sectors of the economy. In other words, the steadily growth of tourism industry has contributed to the growth of all related industries and businesses. These included hotel industry, retail businesses, restaurants and transportation (Bank Negara Malaysia [BNM], 2008). Hotel industry plays a very important role in complementing tourism as it provides accommodation to travelers and tourists. Nevertheless, hotel industry has been a major player in the growth of the Malaysian economy, which contributing approximately 50 percent of the nations real GDP (Awang, Ishak, Radzi, Taha, 2008). As today, there are approximately 105 hotels with different ratings and sizes in Kuala Lumpur alone (Malaysian Association of Hotels [MAH], 2009). This has shown that Kuala Lumpur has an incredibly high density of hotels. Here the problem arises, how is the hotel industry in Kuala Lumpur cope with the never ending increase of tourists and travelers? In this context, it seems not possible to provide more rooms by simply adding the number of hotels in Kuala Lumpur. This is because the land area of Kuala Lumpur has only 244km ², meaning that there will be 1 hotel in every 2.3km ². In this sense, hoteliers have to find other ways to increase their productivities. In recent years, governments from all over the world have been putting more and more emphasis in developing services industry in their countries. They are all now aware of the unique characteristic of services and its importance in supporting a countrys economic growth. Business services showed the strongest growth in terms of value added and economic productivity (Wirtz Ehret, 2009). Theoretically, any organization in developing countries must endeavor continuously to improve productivity in order to increase profitability (Oluleye Olajire, 2001). As a consequence to the Malaysia economy, a higher amount of GDP will be recorded, more and more employment will be provided and so on. Hence, these have made hotel industry as a key sub-sector to services industry and these social responsibilities should not be overlooked by hoteliers in Malaysia. 1.4 Problem Statements In general, Malaysian will have perception saying that things made by western countries and Japan have higher quality, things from China have no quality and so forth. This is partially true in reality, majority of the Malaysians opt to buy import goods where there is an option for them. Therefore, local made products are usually having less supports from Malaysian as it has been perceived to be low quality in terms of unreliable and unattractive (Damodaran, 2009). This shows that local made products have lesser competency even in local market. Consequently, government encourages both the manufacturer and services provider to look seriously in quality issue by giving several incentives (Malaysian Rubber Export Promotion Council [MREPC], 2009). However, the outcomes of it are not up to the expectation. This may due to the inadequate research carry out in Malaysia. Thus, organizations especially the small size ones will definitely lack of information when trying to implement quality man agement system. Kuala Lumpur is one of the major cities in Malaysia with an estimated of 1.6 million of population at the year 2005 (KL City Plan 2020, 2009) and it is to be said as the fastest growing region in Malaysia. This figure says that Kuala Lumpur is the most densely populated district in Malaysia. Moreover, Kuala Lumpur has a vast number of tourists and it increases over years. Just to name a few, its major tourist destinations include Dataran Merdeka (the Independence Square), House of Parliament, the Istana Budaya, the Istana Negara (National Palace), the Kuala Lumpur Tower, the Muzium Negara (National Museum), Petaling Street and etc (Tourism Malaysia, 2009). With the limited land that Kuala Lumpur has, it is almost impossible to build more hotels in order to cater the increasing number of tourist in the near future. Therefore, several actions have to be taken in order to best serve the tourists with the limited number of hotels in Kuala Lumpur. This is to ensure that the receipts from tourism will not be negatively affected while the hotel industry can continuously contribute significantly to GDP. As time goes by, Human Resource Management (HRM) has become a popular topic than ever before. Organizations have understood the importance of employees (human resources). At the same time, empirical research studies have been done by researchers to further understand and prove those theories related to motivate and compensate employees. Dessler (2005) says that employee satisfaction and performance are positively related. Therefore, hoteliers must understand the importance to maximize their employee satisfaction as this could lead to greater business performance. However, by solely compensating employees with both monetary and non-monetary rewards has its limitation. Performance will stop increasing when the problem arises are not come from employees but the management. For instance, it could be lacking a well-planned system in executing tasks, ineffective communications in organization and so forth. In other countries, TQM has been so popular for a period of time as it helps organiz ations to achieve even higher of performance. In other countries, plenty of research studies have been carried out to investigate which TQM factors are the most influential to the particular country. Unlike in Malaysia, the number of TQM study that can be applied is limited and lacking of guidelines for hoteliers is still a major problem. Someone could say that hoteliers can simply use the findings from other countries as a guideline for implementing the TQM. But, there is always a high possibility that those mentioned as important factors are not important in Malaysia, when compared to the original country that the research is carried out. In other words, it is imperative to understand the applicability of the findings from other countries. The applicability of some of the findings from research still remains questionable. For example, information and analysis, one of the TQM factors is said to be extremely important to developed and developing countries but it is not persuasive enough to apply on third world countries. This is because they probably lack of necessary infrastructure. Therefore, it can be said that Malaysias hoteliers are actually lack of a blueprint when initially applying TQM to their respective hotels. In other words, hoteliers may not known which factors of TQM can generally lead to better performa nce in the Malaysia. Furthermore, with the limited of number of such research available to Malaysia, it has nothing to show hoteliers how strong the impact of TQM factors is to labor productivity, thus lack of motivation to change their routine and ways of doing business. When this occurs, Malaysia hotel industry can never be improved, previously owned competitiveness can be competed away and GDP can be affected. 1.5 Research Objectives The general objective of this study is to identify the impact of each of the selected TQM factors towards the labor productivity. Next, it is then to be expressed in term of its level of correlation between each of the independent variables and the dependent one. Therefore, this result could be used by the Malaysia hoteliers in increasing their labor productivity as these findings will show which of the independent variables plays a more important role in achieving higher labor productivity in the Malaysia context. The following objectives are specifically derived from the problem statements: To identify the relationship between the chosen independent variables and dependent variable; To investigate the level of impact for each of the chosen TQM factors towards labor productivity; To determine whether high TQM commitment hotels will generally generate higher labor productivity than the low TQM commitment hotels; and To provide insights and recommendations for improvement to Malaysias hoteliers at the end of the research. 1.6 Scope of Study The scope of this study covers a discussion on TQM as well as the importance of productivity. As the scope of both TQM and productivity are broad, this study will primarily focus on the aspect of TQM factors and labor productivity. Besides, this study investigates the relationship between selected TQM factors and labor productivity. Theoretically, those selected TQM factors is to be said to have influences on the labor productivity. Therefore, this research is also carried out with the intention to identify the degree of impact of the selected TQM factors towards labor productivity, either a stronger or a weaker one. Moreover, this research is intended to provide useful and relevant findings for hoteliers in Malaysia, in order to achieve the ever higher labor productivity in Malaysia hotel industry. Therefore, it is targeted to hoteliers in Malaysia primarily located in Kuala Lumpur. Lastly, a questionnaire has been included in this study and carried out on hoteliers of Kuala Lumpur in order to measure the impact of TQM factors towards labor productivity. 1.7 Significance of Study The importance of this study is to explore the relationship between the selected TQM factors and labor productivity in the context of Malaysia hotel industry. Similar research studies have been done to prove the relationship between the TQM factors and productivity. However, most of it were not focusing on the hotel industry. Some of them might have focused in hotel industry, but the issue of applicability remains noticeable. For that reason, this study is focusing in the Malaysia hotel industry as an applicable guideline and reference for the Malaysia hoteliers. Besides that, this study will be able to contribute relevant information to the Tourism Malaysia Promotion Board (Malaysian Ministry of Culture, Arts and Tourism). In Section 1.3, it shows the importance of tourism is to the nation GDP. Furthermore, hotel industry is relatively important to the country as an accommodation means for tourists to visit Malaysia. In addition, through this study, government is now able to identify unsuitable approaches and strategies. Therefore, essential action such as coming out new incentives scheme can be taken to effectively replace the old ones. Thus, national resources can be distributed and used even more effective and efficient than ever. As to hoteliers, this study helps to lighten their worries when first implementing the TQM as they are now getting more supporting evidence from this study. According to Yesawich (1997), building customer loyalty is one of the biggest challenges for the hotel industry. Successfully implemented TQM contributes to customer satisfaction. From customer satisfaction, loyalty and profits are positively related. In other word, TQM can potentially overcome one of the biggest challenges in hotel industry. At the same time, organizations can enjoy the benefits from TQM such as creating competitive advantage, providing unique services and so forth. 1.8 Organization of Study The organization of this research study comprises of 5 chapters. This research study begins with Chapter 1 that covers the introduction for the chosen topic. It consists of the background of study and hotel industry in Malaysia. Next, problem statements, research objectives, scope of study and the significance of study are laid out in different section. Lastly, organization of study that shows the overall flow of this study ends the Chapter 1. Chapter 2 provides the literature review for the chosen topic. It includes all the related empirical studies that have been done by the previous researchers. Several of viewpoint, definition and argument have been included in this chapter as well. For instance, different point of views from different researchers for the same variable can be found here. Chapter 3 outlines the overall methodology being used in this research study. It shows the research framework together with the explanation and hypothesis of the framework. Besides, data collection method, sources of data, sampling method and sampling size will be discussed in separated section. Furthermore, there is the outline of the questionnaire development and scaling techniques before discussion of data analysis and measurement close the chapter. Chapter 4 discusses the findings and the results of this research study. Therefore, all related chart, graph, data will be included in this chapter. This chapter basically ends with the interpretation and discussion regarding all of the findings. Finally, conclusions and recommendations will be formed and given to readers. It concludes which TQM factors have a stronger effect and vice versa. Besides that, limitations of this study will also be included. The following figure shows the overall outline of this study. Figure 1.2: Flow Chart of Study CHAPTER 2 LITERATURE REVIEW 2.1 Overview This chapter develops and provides the foundation for this research study. Previous works done by other researchers that relate to labor productivity, total quality management, customer focus, human resource management, information analysis, leadership and strategic management are all presented in this chapter. Besides, in order to gain a better understanding of this research, viewpoints from different researchers are then compare and contrast in this chapter. 2.2 Labor Productivity In the 21st century, productivity growth plays an important role in GDP growth of any nation. According Chapman, Murray Mellor (1997), the use of sales per employee has been widely used to measure labor productivity for individual companies. Besides, Sauian (2002) says that in knowledge-based economy, competitive advantage can be maintained through â€Å"high productivity† and efficiency. In the other way round, labor productivity is an important element used to gauge competitiveness in producing goods and services (Sauian, 2002). Moreover, Hoffman Mehra (1998) argues that high productivity effects are impossible to sustain without a quality-based process-oriented environment which emanates from the support of employees, upper management, and the organization. Malaysia registered a productivity growth of 2.9 percent from RM 48,113 in year 2007 to RM 49,526 in year 2008. Furthermore, productivity contributed 62.2 percent while employment contributed 37.8 percent to the GDP growth of 5.98 percent. This growth surpassed several major countries of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). As shown in Figure 2.1, the Rep. of Korea recorded a productivity growth as much as 3.6 percent, the USA (2.1 percent), the Japan (0.8 percent), the Australia (0.4), the Germany (0.1 percent) and the rest had zero or negative growth (Malaysia Productivity Corporation [MPC], 2009). Figure 2.1: Productivity Growth of Malaysia and Selected OECD Countries, 2008 (Adapted From: MPC, Annual Productivity Report 2008) Thomas (1994) defined the simplest form of labor productivity (LP) as the hours of work divided by the units of work accomplished. In general, LP is a measure of output from a production as per unit of input. Therefore, it can be expressed as: LP From the above formula, LP consists of the total output and total input. It can be in terms of a particular production, a department, an organization or even a nation. In general, if we want to increase productivity, it is necessary to increase the systems output, if the input is to remain constant. Similarly, if the systems output is to maintain the status quo, then we need to utilize less input. From a different aspect, if both output and input are increased, then it is mathematically obvious that the rate of increase of output should be higher than the rate of increase of input, if productivity needs to be improved (Sauian, 2002). Therefore, in order to achieve higher LP, input and output should be manipulated in various ways. Schonewille (2001) said the effectiveness of training is lower compared to initial education when comes to contributing to labor productivity. Even thought training has smaller effects on labor productivity, still the estimated coefficient is positive (Schonewille, 2001). A number of researchers have proven the positive impact of quality on productivity, whereas both can influence positively profitability (Bylund Lapidoth, 1994). This relationship has been generally accepted within the manufacturing industry (Chase Aquilano, 1995). However in reality, LP is a much more complex phenomenon which largely depends on quite diverse factors such as workers competence, motivation, supervision and so forth. Also, management does affect LP (Enshassi, Mohamed, Mayer, Abed, 2007). Chapman and Al-Khawaldeh (2002) has investigated the relationship between TQM implementation and labor productivity in industrial companies in Jordan, as shown in Figure 2.2. The results of data analysis indicate that there is a positive relationship between TQM (and each TQM element) and labor productivity. Interestingly, it is found that companies with ISO 9000 certification has high positive slope whereas companies without ISO 9000 certification has low positive slope. 2.3 Total Quality Management (TQM) TQM emerged in the mid-1980s in response to Japans invasion of US markets with their high quality-low price automobiles and electronic products. Quality has been defined differently as conformance to requirement (Crosby, 1979), fitness for use (Juran, 1979), continual improvement (Deming, 1982) and as define by customers (Ford, 1990). Whereby, Spitzer (1993) called TQM â€Å"the only source of sustainable competitive advantage†. Also, TQM is continually satisfying agreed customer requirements at lowest cost through harnessing everyones commitment (Burton Franckeiss, 1994). In theory, TQM seems to assure performance improvement for any organization. But, in practice, TQM works for some organization and not for others (Terzioski, 2006). According to Chapman and Al-Khawaldeh (2002), TQM is a key strategy for maintaining competitive advantage and is a way of managing organizations to improve its overall effectiveness and performance towards achieving world-class status. During the last two decades or so, simple inspection activities have been replaced or supplemented by quality control, quality assurance has been developed and refined, and now most companies are working towards TQM (Dale Bunney, 1999). Dale (1999) indentifies four discrete stages: inspection, quality control, quality assurance and TQM, as shown in Figure 2.2. Figure 2.3: The four levels in the evolution of Total Quality Management (Sources: Adapted from Dale Bunney, Total Quality Management Blueprint, 1999) Inspection is defined as â€Å"activities such as measuring, examining, testing or gauging one or more characteristic of an entity and comparing the results with specified requirement in order to establish whether conformity is achieved for each characteristic† (BS EN ISO 8402, 1995). Quality control is defined as â€Å"operational techniques and activities that are used to fulfill requirements for quality† (BS EN ISO 8402, 1995). Quality assurance is defined as â€Å"all the planned and systematic activities implemented within the quality system and demonstrated as needed to provide adequate confidence that an entity will fulfill requirements for quality† (BS EN ISO 8402, 1995). TQM is the highest level which involves the application of quality management principles to all aspects of the business, including customers and suppliers. It is then defined as the management approach of an organization, centered on quality, based on the participation of all its members and aiming at long-term success through customer satisfaction, and benefits to all members of the organization and to society (BS EN ISO 8402, 1995). A number of research studies have been carried out to investigate the impact of TQM factors and implementation (Sila Ebrahimpour, 2005; Khan, 2003; Terzioski, 2006). Miller (1993) reported that success with TQM depends on the facilitating conditions. Leadership, human resource management and some other TQM factors are found to have positive impact on business results (Sila Ebrahimpour, 2005). Therefore, these findings can be reasonably useful in assisting managers so that they can allocate resources to improve their typical routines to obtain the best results. Next, five TQM factors have been selected as the independent variables for this study, namely (1) Customer Focus, (2) Human Resource Management (HRM), (3) Information and Analysis, (4) Leadership and (5) Strategic Planning. It is said that customer focus pays more attention on the customers whereas the rest of TQM factors have focused on the internal aspect of the organization. As for HRM, it focuses on the practices involved in carrying out the â€Å"people† of a management position. Information and analysis is said to be the information and communication technology used to further enhance labor productivity as automation has been widely used. Leadership is important as it creates synergy for achieving favorable business results whereas strategic planning is a set of process undertaken in order to develop a range of strategies that will contribute to achieve organization direction. Further elaboration and review for each variable will be discussed in different sub-section lat er. 2.3.1 Customer Focus According to Dean and Bowen (1994), customer focus is as important as many other TQM practices to organizational performance. Being customer-focused keeps us aware of quality, or rather it focuses our quality initiatives on what really matters to the customers (Cox, 1997). Also, Piercy (1995) says that TQM has too much focused on the internal aspect of the organization and much less attention on the customers. Customer satisfaction begins by discovering precisely what customers want and gearing every practice to their exact expectations (Kearney, 1994). Customer focus has changed mass production to mass customization. In addition, being far from depersonalizing the world, technology has the power to return us to being treated as individuals while getting all the benefits inherent in large-scale enterprise (Cox, 1997). Sousa (2003) pointed out the importance of customer focus lies in the fact that it is the starting point of any quality initiative. However, it has not received enough attention from quality management researchers (Cai, 2009). In the final decade of twentieth century, the term, customer-centered competition has been introduced. Customer-centered company is a company that focuses on customer developments in designing its marketing strategies and on delivering superior value to its target customers (Kotler Armstrong, 2008). It is common to hear the statement â€Å"customer is always right† in any organization. This could be the trend that organization is to focus on customer needs to be customer-led, to be market-oriented, to care for customers and so forth (Piercy, 1995). These are to make total customer satisfaction a strategic foundation for achieving competitive advantage (Kearney, 1994). Customer focus has been therefore defined as the degree to which firms continuously satisfy customer needs and expectations (Philips, Chang, Buzzell, 1983). The difference between customer focus and customer understanding is, according to Lagrosen (2001), mainly a matter of perspective. Customer focus means the activities of the companies are intended to benefit the customer but the customer is seen from the companies own perspective. Therefore, effects are usually being made to gain information about the customers needs and wants, although always in a set framework that originates in the companies view of the product and its features. Whereby, customer understanding needs perspective to be shifted. It means the company needs to gain entry to the customers own perspective and adopt the customers framework of viewing the product (Lagrosen, 2001). Cai (2009) found that organizational customer focus affects customer relationship practices, which subsequently influence production performance and customer satisfaction, and production performance and customer satisfaction lead to financial outcomes. Ooi, Bakar, Arumugam, Vellepan, and Loke (2007) says TQM practices such as teamwork, reward and recognition, customer focus and organizational trust are positively associated with job satisfaction within their organization. For instance, customer focus was found to have a direct influence on emplo

The Matthew Shepard Event Essay -- Gay Bashing Violence Law Papers

The Matthew Shepard Event The human body is an object in which one lives and the medium through which one experiences oneself and the world. The human body vests claims on ideology and space; and thus participates as the site on which conflicts about belief systems and territory contest violently. Gay bodies become entangled in violence when they enter into arenas that combat certain ideas. Gay bashing illustrates incidences all in which bodies experience physical injury. In modern U.S. communities various militant conservatives individually target homosexuals in "gay bashing." Though few conservative political groups explicitly avow targeting gays for physical violence, their members individually carry out anti-gay brutality. Mathew Shepard's brutal murder in 1998 illustrates a relatively recent incident in which the human body becomes politicized. What is the process by which the pain and death of Shepard's body transform the personal into the political? What does "gay bashing" mean to attackers, victims an d the state? The attackers' deliberate decision to raise Shepard's body stemmed from their intensions to make public what was private. To narrow the scope of analysis, I argue that by writing into law a "gay panic defense" statute the state establishes an anti-gay social atmosphere in which private citizens act as agents of the state to protect patriarchy by carrying out implicitly legalized physical violence against gays. The Gay Panic Defense uses the word panic to convey a sense of abruptness in the perpetrators' thought process during the moment they carry out the criminal behavior. The Oxford English Dictionary defines panic as "a sudden uncontrollable fear or anxiety." The word panic projects the illusion that t... ...ial meaning becomes embodied by meaning within context that ultimately has a stake in the body. Participating in the transformation of the private into the public, the human body is both an object in which one lives and a site of political articulation. Works Cited 1. Foucault, Michel. 1977. Discipline and punish. New York: Random house. 2. Friend, Richard A. 1993. "Choices, not closets: heterosexism and homophobia in schools." Beyond Silenced voices. Albany: State University of New York Press. 209-235. 3. Kaufman, Moises. 2001. The Laramie Project. New York: First Vintage Books. 4. Nardi, Peter, Bolton, Ralph. 1991. "Gay bashing: violence and aggression against gay men and lesbians." Social perspective in lesbian and gay studies. New York: Routledge. 412-433. 5. Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. 1985. Between Men. New York: Columbia University Press.