PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to investigate the engagement of Australian consumers when buying and drinking Champagne.Design/methodology/approachThe paper identified seven variables a priori that were expected to influence consumers' decisions and then used exploratory interviews to investigate how Champagne consumers were influenced by these. The authors interviewed Champagne marketers, sellers, educators, connoisseurs and aspirational consumers. The interview protocol allowed respondents to identify other variables.FindingsThe paper identified two new variables that, inter alia, influence Australian consumers in their Champagne selection. These were the kudos that comes from the people they serve or give it to and their sentimentality about previous experiences of Champagne consumption. The two new variables are the focus of this paper.Research limitations/implicationsThe exploratory nature of this research means larger studies are needed to confirm the preliminary findings, particularly in other, non Anglo‐Saxon cultures.Practical implicationsChampagne houses could place greater emphasis on kudos and sentimentality in their marketing campaigns; additionally cultural issues could affect how the two factors operate in different markets.Originality/valueKudos and sentimentality have not been previously emphasised in the wine consumer behaviour literature.

A Survey of Home‐Based Workers in Japan: Emerging Health Issues: Wendy A. Spinks. Department of Management Science, Science University of Tokyo—Changes such as the greater diversification of work arrangements, either the result of or enabled by the rise of information communication technology, are testing many long‐standing practices and assumptions in the workplace. The emergence of the virtual organization and telework raises serious management questions including work organization, worker evaluation and knowledge management. These changes, however, also have a growing but little understood impact on health management. The aim of this paper is to explore attitudes to health management and the incidence of illness for home‐ based teleworkers. After a brief outline of major changes in organizational and management practices as well as research trends in the area of health and telework, it presents a set of field data on home‐based workers in Japan, and links the findings to a future research agenda. The survey data indicate that health management issues do exists for this group of workers and that a worrying proportion of respondents experienced health conditions detrimental to work performance that went untreated. Additionally, a somewhat cavalier attitude towards safe work practices indicated either low worker awareness of, or low priority for, minimizing health risks. This was often compounded by the lack of a traditional mitigating third party such as a regular employer. These findings suggest that conventional organizational criteria for sickness may be being replaced by more elastic concepts of health and sickness in the virtual workplace.

Environmental and qualify-of-life issues are taking on an increasing social and political significance the world over. Even in Japan, a country so often criticized for its economic-dominated outlook, talk is turning to these issues. Advances in telecommunications and a growing awareness of the need to change how we live and function in an increasingly threatened environment has brought telework to the forefront of the debate on the nature of work and how our cities function.After setting the broad Japanese social context, this paper will look at the progress of telework in Japan to date with especial emphasis on several current satellite and resort office pilots. It will summarize the findings and proposals of several available reports, and will also attempt to identify the overall outlook for telework in Japan.

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This paper analyzes a set of 9,035 salaryman senryū poems over an eighteen-year period (1990Ϫ2007) in order to track salaryman reactions to workplace transition from an organizational behavioralist perspective. Major findings include: (i) the number of submissions and votes for the major poetry competition, Salaryman Senryū, have been falling since 1994, suggesting a decline in shared salaryman mentality; (ii) there has been a shift in the relative importance of broad themes, so that the workplace as a category of senryū poems is of less centrality in 2007 than it was in 1990; (iii) within the workplace category, (negative) interpersonal relations, especially with supervisors, still dominate; and (iv) workstyle is also a strong subtheme, with workers showing more interest in work processes than actual work conditions. The analysis also shows that the years 1996 and 1997 are a watershed where poems shift from a more jocular to strident tone. The overall implication of the study is a potential breach of the social contract between Japanese employers and regular employees, which will require the assiduous application of supportive employment practices (SEP) in order to ensure a high level of employee performance and engagement.