Focuses on the issue of country of origin stereotyping by consumers in the New Zealand automobile market. The approach uses 275 mail questionnaires (with 150 of these being returned) containing bi‐polar adjectives to assess the current attitude of new car purchasers towards automobiles made in four different countries (France, Italy, Germany and Japan). These four countries were chosen on the basis of their brand and model representation in the New Zealand market. The results of the study indicate that there is a significant level of stereotyping in the New Zealand automobile market, with “made in Germany” emerging as a favourite place of origin among consumers. Also, the recent purchase of a brand of automobile from a particular country of origin tends to positively bias the individual′s perception of automobiles from that country. The perception of automobiles from the four tested countries differed among various demographic groups classified by age, income, occupation and sex.

An enrollment crisis continues to plague the Information Systems (IS) discipline. Although recent studies have begun to offer several potentially profitable strategies to reverse plummeting student enrollments, little evidence has been put forth to document comprehensive intervention initiatives aimed at attracting students in higher education institutions. To this end, this study describes a 12-step program targeted at the introductory IS course at one such institution. Developed based on empirical evidence from the literature, discussions with our IS colleagues, and best practices at other institutions, the 12-step program covers all aspects of the course including faculty assignment, tenor and approaches used in class, and innovative ways to tell the IS story. As a result of implementing the program, enrollments in core upper-division IS courses at the institution doubled. This paper presents a powerful, integrated program that is replicable and can be used by other IS departments to address the enrollment crisis at their institutions.

The objective of this paper is to use a well-established theory of new product diffusion and show how it can be applied to cyber communities to forecast how many people will join the community, and how long it will take to attain peak membership. We use three online communities to illustrate the application of the theory, and show how the theory can be used to measure community size and time to peak membership for these communities. We show that the model can be used to delineate the two different types of influence (internal and external) that impact joining the communities. The paper is appropriate for researchers wishing to better understand the mechanics underlying online community growth, and for administrators of such communities who want to forecast the important aspects of size and peak adoption time.

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