Abstracts and Keywords.

The article presents several abstracts related to marketing. The academic marketing literature reflects remarkably little effort to conceptualize total quality orientation, which is key to understanding customer satisfaction. Most researchers have studied economic performance linked to market orientation, while a lesser interest has been shown in validating this construct's measure. After presenting a theoretical model of market orientation, it is applied to investigate the usefulness of this construct in insurance companies of two European countries. Though academic research into the marketing/ entrepreneurship interface is of only relatively recent origin, it would seem that the basic principles of marketing appear to be equally valuable to both large and small firms. Marketing-manufacturing interface is becoming an increasingly important research area, as the firms unable to reduce interdepartmental conflict find their global competitiveness compromised. In recent years there has been a growing interest in Asian business practices, in particular the use of social networks in China for business purposes.