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Dividend The official online magazine of the Carson College of Business

College

U.S. News & World Report has ranked Washington State University’s Global Campus in the top five percent of best online bachelor’s programs in the nation. WSU Global Campus placed #15 in a field of 311 colleges and universities offering online degrees. The publication also ranked WSU’s the online graduate engineering program #28 — a nine-place improvement from last year. Other U.S. News & World Report 2017 rankings recognizing Carson College programs include:

  • #15 Best Undergraduate International Business Programs
  • #15 Best Online MBA Programs for Veterans
  • #27 Best Online MBA Programs

Students

The Department of Accounting and Beta Alpha Psi sponsored the annual Meet the Firms event at the WSU Pullman campus. Meet the Firms is a career fair for accounting students. Beta Alpha Psi, a student accounting fraternity, helps organize this event. The career fair features public accounting and information firms, private industry companies, and governmental agencies that recruit accounting, finance, and information systems majors. Company representatives attending Meet the Firms include professionals at all levels of accounting and information systems, from recent hires to partners and principals. HR recruiters often accompany them as well. This year, Meet the Firms was a success. At the September 9 event, approximately 90 accounting students and 54 professionals from 17 different businesses attended, including local, regional and national firms. The Department of Accounting received excellent feedback from the professionals on the quality of Carson College accounting students.

Hospitality business management students Isaiah Mueller, a senior from Tucson, and Ariel Fountain, a senior from Bainbridge Island, were selected to attend the eighth annual Young Hotelier’s Summit (YHS) held at Ecole hôtelière de Lausanne (EHL) in Switzerland. YHS is an independent event organized by a selected team of students from EHL. It takes place over three days and welcomes delegates from 40 leading hospitality institutions, along with some of the most influential operators in hospitality. The communicative platform empowers international professionals and students to share ideas and knowledge, accelerating progression in the hotel industry. Through keynote speeches, workshops, and the YHS Challenge, all participants are integrated to have a positive and meaningful experience. “I am beyond grateful for the opportunity to attend the summit,” said Mueller. “It will allow me the chance to gain an even better understanding of the traditional hospitality business model and its current trends and how to adapt to the changing consumer.”

From right: Quan Vu, Caity Scott, Samantha Renault, Teresa Lane, Melissa Schuetze, Salvador Esparza, Shannon Quayle, Chelsea Long, Kin Long Yuen, Professor Mark Beattie.
WSU North Puget Sound at Everett students in the Hospitality Business Management 494: Service Operations Management class received first-hand advice on brand management from the team at Edelman, a global communications marketing firm in Seattle. Special thanks goes to Edward R. Murrow College of Communication alumna, Teresa Lane, for hosting the field trip.

Alumni

Larry Culver (’64 Hotel & Restaurant Administration), retired hotel developer and manager, was honored Feb. 25 with the Washington State University Alumni Association Alumni Achievement Award in recognition of his career as an innovative leader in the hospitality industry and his service to WSU. He has been a member of the WSU Foundation’s Board of Governors/Directors, Board of Trustees, National Campaign Cabinet and many committees. He has served on boards for the Carson College of Business, School of Hospitality Business Management, and WSU Golf Course. He helped connect WSU and the J. Willard and Alice S. Marriott Foundation, which provided $1.5 million to renovate the Marriott Hospitality Teaching Kitchen and dining room in the Carson College. Culver also received the Foundation’s Outstanding Volunteer Service Award in 1999 and the Weldon B. “Hoot” Gibson Distinguished Volunteer Award in 2013.
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Rick Ellingson

Lynn Carmichael
The Marriott Hospitality Teaching Kitchen benefited from the generous donations of Rick Ellingson (’75 Marketing), owner, principal and vice president of Bargreen Ellingson Inc., and Lynn Carmichael (’73 Computer Science), general manager at Hobart Sales and Service, and his daughter Katrina Barone (’06 Business Administration). Ellingson donated a commercial ice machine, and Carmichael donated an electric stainless steel Vulcan jacketed steam kettle.

“We are so thankful for these generous donations to the hospitality teaching kitchen from Mr. Ellingson and the Carmichaels,” says Brittley Barrett, a hospitality major. The new equipment helps create the best possible learning environment for dozens of student employees and hundreds of students from Chef Jamie’s cooking class to explore their skills and pursue their passions for cooking and the hospitality industry.”

Veronica Cothard, culinary student, prepares broth in the steam kettle.
Student sous chef Brittley Barrett at the ice machine.
Minae Lee (’15 Accounting) was featured in “Never Lose Hope on Your Journey,” an article by Jocelyn Nystrom in the WashingtonCPA magazine, Winter 2017 issue. The article describes her journey to CPA licensure and the value of her undergraduate experience at the WSU Carson College of Business. Lee received one of 46 Washington CPA Foundation scholarships for the 2016 academic year. She is currently earning a master of science in taxation degree, studying for her CPA exam, and working as a full-time tax associate at Deloitte. Article reprinted from The WashingtonCPA magazine, Winter 2017 issue, with permission of the Washington Society of CPAs.

Faculty/Staff

Sara Ackerson, Carson Center for Student Success academic and student success advisor, co-presented “The Transfer Advising Continuum: Pre Advising to Successful Student,” a pre-conference workshop at the National Institute for the Study of Transfer Students in Atlanta, Georgia, along with Susan Poch and Waylon Safranski of the WSU Transfer Clearinghouse.
Paul Carlisle (’06 Business Administration, 07’ MBA) earned the Sam Vulpentest Entrepreneurial Leadership Award, which was given by the Richland Rotary for facilitating and accelerating entrepreneurship in the community. Carlisle is the founder and president of elevate, a technology solutions provider in Richland, Washington. He is also an adjunct professor for the Carson College of Business at WSU Tri-Cities where he teaches entrepreneurial management, in addition to serving on the WSU Tri-Cities Carson College of Business Advisory Board and on the regional affairs committee for the Tri-City Regional Chamber of Commerce. Carlisle started elevate while completing his master’s in business administration at WSU Tri-Cities and used his courses to solidify and refine his business plan and structure. The company has since grown to contract with approximately 50 organizations throughout the mid-Columbia region.
Robert Crossler, assistant professor of management, information systems, and entrepreneurship, was a panelist at the 50th Hawaii International Conference on Systems and Services in January. The discussion topic “not quite dead yet: password authentication revisited,” centered around individuals’ responsibility to select and use strong passwords, which can be simplified with password management software. The panelists also discussed two-factor authentication, a process that utilizes a person’s password plus another form of verifcation, such as a text code, to identify the user. The panelists agreed that many websites are still not offering it as an option for securing accounts, nor requiring strong passwords, and individuals need to continue to be diligent in doing this themselves.

“When Do Customers Offer Firms a ‘Second Chance’ Following a Double Deviation? The Impact of Inferred Firm Motives on Customer Revenge and Reconciliation” by Carson College professors Jeff Joireman (marketing) and Tom Tripp (MISE) was recognized as one of the top five most highly cited papers published in the Journal of Retailing. Berna Devezer, assistant professor of marketing, University of Idaho, and Yany Grégoire, associate professor of Marketing, HEC Montréal, were coauthors. Their research develops and tests a theory explaining how customers respond to failed service recoveries.

“Developing Ethical Confidence: The Impact of Action-Oriented Ethics Instruction in an Accounting Curriculum” coauthored by Jane Cote, associate professor of accounting and academic director of the Carson College of Business at WSU Vancouver, Claire Latham, associate professor of accounting at WSU Vancouver, and Anne Christensen, professor of accounting at Montana State University, was accepted for publication in the Journal of Business Ethics. The study examines the impact of two types of ethics instruction, specifically exploring the effect of repeated practice on development of voice efficacy.
Kunter Gunasti, assistant professor of marketing, and coauthor Hans Baumgartner, marketing professor, Pennsylvania State University, published “The Asymmetric Effects of Positive or Negative Experiences with an Extension on Attitudes Toward Low- vs. High-Equity Parent Brands: A Microtheoretical Notion,” in Customer Needs and Solutions. The paper examines how consumer experiences with new product extensions affect their attitudes toward the parent brand in the long run. Gunasti and coauthor Berna Devezer, assistant professor of marketing, University of Idaho, also published “How Competitor Brands Affect Within-Brand Choice” in Marketing Letters 27: 715. The paper demonstrate that consumers’ focal choices among different models of a brand can be affected by exposure to a competitor brand name when the models form an incidental numerical trend e.g., a Mercedes C330 vs. C340.
Dogan Gursoy, Taco Bell Distinguished Professor of Hospitality, was the first place winner of the Turkish Tourism Investor Association’s Barlast Kuntay Tourism Research Competition. The title of his paper was “Medical Tourism Growth Opportunities in Turkey: Market Analysis and Growth Strategies with Akin Aksu and M. Gamze Aksu.” He delivered an invited presentation “The Other Side of the Picture in Sustainable Tourism Development: Service Quality, Tourist Satisfaction and Destination Loyalty,” at the Dongbei University of Finance and Economics in Dalian, China, and received a grant from the Research Grants Council of Hong Kong to support his research topic: “Recurring Major Sport Events. Residents’ Perceptions of the Social Impacts of the Standard Charter Hong Kong Marathon.” He also published a new book: Sotiriadis, M. & Gursoy, D. (2016). “The Handbook of Managing and Marketing Tourism Experiences.” Bingley, UK: Emerald Group Publishing Limited.
“When Customers Anticipate Liquidation Sales: Managing Operations under Financial Distress,” by Michelle Wu, assistant professor of finance, was accepted by Manufacturing and Service Operations Management – an “A” journal. Coauthors include John R. Birge, University of Chicago – Booth School of Business; Rodney P. Parker, Indiana University Bloomington; and S. Alex Yang, London Business School. The paper identifies customers’ strategic waiting behavior as a source of a firm’s cost of financial distress and suggests customers’ anticipation of bankruptcy can be self-fulling. Wu was also invited by Massachusetts Institute of Technology as a visiting scholar for the period of May 16, 2017–April 30, 2018. She will be hosted by Professor Munther Dahleh, director of the Institute for Data, Systems, and Society.
Tom Tripp, associate dean for academic programs, received his 25-year longevity award from WSU.

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