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Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to report on the design and use of a questionnaire to measure student satisfaction at Liverpool John Moores University's Faculty of Business and Law. Design/methodology/approach: The paper utilised the concept of the service-product bundle to design the survey questionnaire and then used SPSS and Quadrant Analysis to analyse the results to determine which aspects of the University's services were most important and the degree to which they satisfied the students. Findings: The most important aspects were those associated with teaching and learning, while the least important were those associated with the physical facilities. Practical implications: The concept of the service-product bundle is a valid and reliable tool for the design of a satisfaction survey and segments a University's service offering in such a way as to allow management to target resources at those areas that are perceived to be low satisfaction and high importance. The questionnaire can be utilised in most education establishments. Originality/value: Utilising the concept service-product bundle places responsibility for questionnaire content and design firmly on the service provider rather than the user. (Contains 5 tables and 1 figure.)

To authenticate to the full-text of this article, please visit this link: http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-954X.2010.01919.x Byline: Barry Barnes (1) Author Affiliation: (1)formerly University of Exeter

The concept of agency in social theory is discussed, with a focus on the voluntaristic theory of action of Talcott Parsons and the theory of structuration of Anthony Giddens. Topics include Parsons's voluntarism, agency in Giddens, and accounts of action as caused or chosen in sociology.

Max Weber's description of how status groups monopolise goods and opportunities is now widely used by sociological theory to understand the economic and political relationships between groups. However, it is rarely recognised that a problem of collective action must be solved if a status group is to operate in this way, that it is individually irrational for members of the group to support its monopolistic activities even if they profit from them. Once the collective action problem is recognised, it is immediately apparent that Weber's own account of the definitive features of a status group identifies precisely the means by which the problem is solved. Weber on the operation of status groups and Weber on their nature may then be fused into a single coherent and comprehensive account, an account of profound and far-reaching theoretical interest., The work of Max Weber, and in particular his comments in Economy and Society (1968), are crucial to our current understanding of status groups. Weber analyses both the structure and [...]

A number of general issues in the social sciences are currently being addressed through consideration of the free-rider problem, also known as the problem of collective action. Many different ways of comparing and evaluating competing social theories can be co-ordinated as discussions of the problem. In attending to its relatively simple structure fundamental issues routinely arise, concerning the basis of social order, the nature of power, and the invariants of human nature itself, if such exist. In this paper I adopt a sociological perspective in defending the plausibility of one kind of solution to the problem, and then explore the general significance of that solution in a frankly speculative way.