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The use of leasing as a means of obtaining business assets has grown spectacularly in recent years in the UK and other countries. This means that many managers have perceived, or been persuaded of, particular benefits which leasing confers. It is necessary, therefore, to understand the issues involved in leasing to appreciate why leasing has become so popular and to be able to evaluate leasing arrangements so that correct decisions can be made.

The paper has a twofold purpose: (1) to test the application of means-end theory to providers of hospitality goods and services, and (2) to explore this question in the context of winery tasting rooms when they had a unique opportunity to restructure their hospitality experience due to government restrictions in response to COVID.

A qualitative approach was adopted, and a convenience sample was used to conduct semi-structured laddering interviews. Forty interview transcripts were coded as means-end ladders, which were analyzed using a custom computer program to develop the implication matrix and the hierarchical value map.

This paper demonstrates that means-end is a useful approach to investigate the values and behaviors of the producer, specifically hospitality hosts. It finds that the principal goal of tasting rooms is to generate sales, and offering a compelling guest experience is the characteristic that contributes the most to achieving that goal. The staff and the atmosphere created for the guests are the two factors with the greatest influence on the guest experience.

This is the first paper to use means-end theory to study the hospitality host, or the producer of goods and services in general, and the first to study winery hospitality primarily through the lens of means-end theory. The study also helps fill a gap in research on tasting room sales focused on the winery’s goals.

Academic discussion of leasing has sought to provide possible explanations for its widespread use. Generally, taxation is regarded as the dominant factor in the decision to lease. Myers, Diil & Bautista, prominent in the area of lease evaluation, came to the conclusion that the tax benefit of leasing seemed to be

The institutional work literature has paid little attention to cognition and interests in the creation, maintenance, and disruption of institutions. The purpose of this paper is to explore the construct of interests as it relates to institutional work projects. The authors frame interests as recognitions situated within broader institutional meaning systems, with a specific focus on interest plurality.

The authors conducted an 18-month ethnography exploring institutional work projects within a rural chamber of commerce. The authors aimed to understand how projects contributed to community survival on a micro-level and institutional change on a macro-level. Rural chambers of commerce represent a unique example of emergent public-private partnerships, challenging traditional commercial logics of chambers of commerce. The research design included qualitative data collection, coding, and analysis of field notes, interviews, and archival sources.

Purposive action was grounded in the community inhabited by the rural chamber of commerce and not the institution itself. Recognized interests enabled nontraditional workers – public employees with newly founded and legitimate roles within the chamber – to pursue community-focussed projects. Change across the institution of chambers of commerce occurred because of the separated and aggregate projects spanning across rural communities.

Recognized interests are a social, plural, and malleable phenomenon supporting situated agency and the co-creation activities embodied in institutional work projects. The authors contribute to the institutional work literature by introducing the idea of interest plurality and illustrating how the work of rural chambers of commerce captures contemporary forms of community organizing.

From the proposals for a system of capitalising finance leases included in ED 18 in 1976 to the issue of SSAP 21 in 1984 has been a long haul. Much time has been given to a variety of technical problems, particularly the difficulties of defining a lessor's net cash investment in a lease. However the major delaying factor has undoubtedly been the debate over whether capitalisation of finance leases should be required. For the first time the Accounting Standards Committee (ASC) has explicitly laid out, and called for comment on, “economic consequence” issues. This article is concerned with exploring the nature of these issues and the way the ASC has responded to them.

Following six years consideration of the problem, and the production of at least two widely circulated early versions of the proposed exposure draft, the ASC formally published ED 29 in October 1981. ED 29 deals with accounting for leases, but excludes contentious lease contracts concerning rights to explore for or to exploit natural resources and similarly it does not cover licencing agreements for films, patents, copyrights etc. The exposure draft requires capitalisation of finance lease contracts in the accounts of lessees, is broadly consistent with the American, Canadian and International standards and compatible with, but more restrictive than, the Australian exposure draft (which permits, but does not require, capitalisation). In spite of the gestation period, the prior consultation with interested parties and the restricted coverage of the ED, its proposals are controversial and have provoked reaction from both lessors and lessees in the UK. Lease accounting, clearly, is not a simple matter. Indeed leasing arrangements raise many questions which encompass fundamental conceptual issues in accounting and finance. Any resolution of these issues, such as ED 29, in turn gives rise to problems of application.

It is apparent from the empirical studies in the UK and USA that incorrect approaches are frequently used to evaluate finance leases. Sykes (1975), Hull and Hubbard (1979) and Drury and Braund (1989) in the UK and Ferrara et. al., (1980) in the USA have expressed concern regarding the methods which companies use to evaluate finance leases. For example Sykes (1975) found that only 19% of UK companies used DCF methods to evaluate leases. Hull and Hubbard (1979) observed that many companies used the implied rate of interest quoted from the lessor's leasing tables and compared this with the borrowing rate. However, these tables did not include tax cash flows and were therefore only applicable to a permanent non‐taxpaying organisation. In the most recent study Drury and Braund (1989) found that 41% of the 300 firms responding to a questionnaire used the wrong discount rate to evaluate finance leases and a further 14% used non‐discounting methods. The objective of this article is to explain how the lease or purchase decision should be evaluated. It will be shown that leasing should be compared with borrowing and three different methods of correctly evaluating the lease or borrow decision will be presented and reconciled.

When financing capital investments, financial executives are often confronted with “lease or borrow” decisions. Leasing is financially justifiable when the non‐taxpaying lessee leases from a full taxpaying lessor. However, surveys have found that tax paying lessees do utilise the leasing market, suggesting that the tax factor is not the only consideration.

The purpose of this paper is to review empirical research on the determinants of leasing.

The paper reviews previous literature that has focused on studying the determinants of leasing decisions. It also discusses the determinants of the lease‐buy decision and the determinants of the choice between finance leases and operating leases.

Previous empirical studies show that there is no consensus as to whether debt and leases are complements or substitutes. However, there are some factors that affect the choice between leases and debt, such as size, taxes, nature of assets, financial constraints and management compensation. Leases tend to be more prevalent in some industries (such as air transport, retailing and services and utilities) than in others, and companies tend to lease assets that are less specific, of general usage and more liquid. Previous studies also show that higher leverage companies tend to use leases rather than other forms of financing.

The paper only addresses the determinants of leasing. Previous studies about leases address other areas such as the lease accounting standards and the economic consequences and valuation of leases, which are not discussed in this paper.

The paper presents an exhaustive review of previous literature on the determinants of leasing. Evidence from research on this topic is likely to be helpful in capital market investment decisions, accounting standard setting and decisions on corporate financial disclosure.

Even the most experienced and hardened negotiators tend to ‘lighten up’ when they step onto foreign soil. Current global conditions, however, allow for a systematic, diligent and professional approach to lease and purchase negotiations. This paper encourages corporate real estate professionals to do the right thing ‐ wherever they may be.