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The purpose of this paper is twofold: to explore how commercial hospitality has contributed to the development of urban areas in relation to commerce, hospitality, religious and imperial patronage in early modern, Safavid Iran (c. seventeenth century). Second, to combine material culture research methods in an analytical framework for future use.

Data were collected during 27 site visits over three years to 14 caravanserai six bazaar complexes. A material culture methodology is proposed, designed and implemented, supplemented by analysis of textual sources.

The form and function of caravanserai at Zein‐i Edin broadly reflect the form and function of desert caravanserai common in much of the Islamic world. However, the complex within the Qaysariyya Bazaar in Isfahan reflects the convergence of specific dynastic, geopolitical and economic issues facing seventeenth century Safavid Iran shaping both urban form and commercial focus. These are consolidation of the Safavid dynasty, rivalry with the Ottoman Empire and the vital importance of trade with Mughal India.

The research is limited by its specific contextual scope but invites further investigation in analogous contexts across this milieu as well as further implementation of the material culture methods it adopts to both historical and contemporary commercial contexts.

The paper explores, for the first time the development of commercial hospitality in early modern Iran and invites further consideration of the development of capitalism outside of Eurocentric teleologies. Furthermore, it presents a new and explicit methodological framework for using material culture as a means of enquiry.

In the presented research, the authors have conducted the literature review and organised real interviews of fruit retailers (FRs) to construct the advanced hierarchical structural (AHS) chain of macro-micro parameters for measuring the performances of defined fruit supply bazaars (FSBs). Apart from this, the purpose of this paper is to develop the grey set-based scorecard model for solving the proposed AHS chain of macro-micro parameters.

The performance of FSBs is linked with the supply of fruits towards clients under a feasible rate, which circuitously depends upon the evaluation of the economic locality of FSBs. The authors developed an advanced hierarchical structure of macro-micro parameters via a literature survey and considered these parameters based on the sampling score of FRs corresponding to select feasible FSBs/alternatives. Furthermore, the authors developed a grey set-based scorecard model for undertaking the incomplete information of FRs against the hierarchical structure.

It is found that the work is well suited for FRs as they can measure the performances of defined FSBs in accordance with their own opinions under the proposed AHS of macro-micro parameters. Apart from this, the work is useful for benchmarking the vegetable supply bazaars (VSBs) on the replacement of AHS. The proposed hierarchical structure with a grey-based scorecard model is flexible in its nature and can undertake more than 1,000 macro-micro parameters and FRs to access potential decision.

The conducted research work has a precise value for evaluating the economic FSB locality. The overall performance scores of considered FSB localities are computed as (∂₁)=1.991, (∂₂)=2.567 and (∂₃)=2.855, where (∂₃) is found to be more significant than available FSBs. This work can be used for opting the economic locality of VSB too.

Core economy is defined as the economic activity, which is mostly underestimated as the non-market economy. As a result of certain concurrent studies, it is however estimated to be 25% of the economy of the USA with 1.91 trillion USD for the year 1998, which can’t be measured directly in spite of generating direct benefits. District bazaars and marketplaces and the street economy, an intersection point of the ones tired of suppression and tyranny of the Landowners and Sheikhdom, snowed under the sectarian conflicts, the ones feeling outcasted from the society, who would like to enjoy the benefits of modern life, the ones without the sufficient capital to establish a business or a regular business, the ones who would like to contribute to their families, the ones who are outside and excluded from the professional life; some of the ones are thugs and ramblers and lumpen, and the ones with no jobs and got nothing as defined as ‘Bosiacs’ by Maxim Gorki.

Child friendly space (CFS) has been introduced worldwide as an effective Child Protection response to the affected children in emergency to restore their life through psychosocial support programs. An effective physical environment is crucial to accommodate the psychosocial activities of a CFS. Several guidelines have stated minimum standards regarding design and implementation of a CFS. However, different case studies show that the physical set-up of CFS varies in different contexts. Therefore, there is a scope to analyze the physical environment of CFSs in the context of Rohingya camps based on those standards.

Very few guidelines have solely discussed the criteria of physical design and implementation of a CFS. First, the study develops an assessment tool by sorting out those standards from available sources. Secondly, the study follows multiple case study research approach to assess physical environment of four CFSs in Rohingya camps, Cox’s Bazar based on those standards using direct observation, photographic analysis and key informant interview as survey tools.

Major findings reveal that local factors such as topography, availability of land and density have great impact on physical environment on CFSs in Cox’s Bazar beyond the minimum standards, which indicates the importance of considering local factors while designing a CFS for a given context.

Solely demonstrates the need of considering the benchmarks as well as local factors, which will contribute to the knowledge of policymakers and implementers during designing and implementing a CFS for a specific context.

The paper seeks to capture the history of the evolution of modern‐format food and grocery retail in India. Its focus is on the time period from 1971 to 2001.

The research is primarily exploratory in nature. Primary research included depth interviews, focus groups and survey through questionnaire with organized retailers, unorganized retailers, consumers, fast‐moving consumer goods manufacturers, channel members and opinion‐leaders. Secondary research involved a review of the existing literature on Indian retail available at that time.

Emergence of modern retail in India is not just a result of increasing consumer buying power – manufacturers and unorganized retailers also have an important role to play in this process at the macro‐level. At the micro‐level, the trigger came from diverse angles like entrepreneurial desire to provide better service to consumers, social desire to provide relief to the masses in the form of lower prices, desire to capitalize on emerging business opportunities being provided by the changing business environment, etc.

Being an early work in this area, the research was exploratory in nature and tried to understand the role of different stakeholders in emergence of modern retail in India. It does not use any statistical technique to prove or disprove any hypothesis. It is focused on the food and grocery retail business.

The paper provides a historical perspective to academics as well as practitioners.

In “data collaboratives”, private and public organizations coordinate their activities to leverage data to address a societal challenge. This paper aims to focus on analyzing challenges and coordination mechanisms of data collaboratives.

This study uses coordination theory to identify and discuss the coordination problems and coordination mechanisms associated with data collaboratives. The authors also use a taxonomy of data collaborative forms from a previous empirical study to discuss how different forms of data collaboratives may require different coordination mechanisms.

The study analyzed data collaboratives from the perspective of organizational and task levels. At the organizational level, the authors argue that data collaboratives present an example of the bazaar form of coordination. At the task level, the authors identified five coordination problems and discussed potential coordination mechanisms to address them, such as coordination by negotiation, by third party, by standardization, to name a few.

This study is one of the first few to systematically analyze the phenomenon of “data collaboratives”.

This study can help practitioners better understand the coordination challenges they may face when initiating a data collaborative and to develop successful data collaboratives by using coordination mechanisms to mitigate these challenges.

Data collaboratives are a novel form of data-driven initiatives which have seen rapid experimentation lately. This study draws attention to this concept in the academic literature and highlights some of the complexities of organizing data collaboratives in practice.

This paper is one of the first attempts to explain the local dynamics of the 2010 ethnic riots in Kyrgyzstan. No scholarly work has attempted to systematically analyze the 2010 ethnic violence and its local dynamics on the neighborhood scale. The purpose of this paper is to shed light on this gap by analyzing neighborhoods’ responses to the emerging violence in the city of Osh. In order to do this, the author compares two typical neighborhoods in Osh, one violent and the other non-violent, with different spatial structures and built environments that demonstrate/represent similar dynamics of riots in many other neighborhoods.

The empirical findings of this paper are based on the ethnographic fieldwork the author carried out in 2010 and between 2012 and 2014. During nine months (in total) of the author’s ethnographic fieldwork, the author conducted around 60 semi-structured interviews in Osh city mainly with community leaders. In the author’s interview sampling, the author used two approaches: the snowball method and geographically/territorially representative sampling.

The author argues that among other factors, a particular type of public space provides favorable conditions for riot occurrence or non-occurrence. For example, in Osh, such places as areas around the central bazaar and densely populated multi-story building complexes were especially riot-prone. By contrast, residential areas with individual-unit houses and low residential mobility represented communally private spaces with more easy riot-control. In addition, some residential areas implemented strategies such as physical self-isolation to avoid violence. By restricting freedom of movement and erecting improvised barricades, the residents of such neighborhoods created a temporally new space with its own rules and interethnic cooperation.

This paper suggests new insights in the analysis of riots by connecting theoretical categories and concepts of space provided by scholars of contentious politics and applying them to the case of the 2010 ethnic riots in Osh city. By analyzing riot dynamics on the neighborhood scale, this research contributes to the understanding of the spatial dynamics of ethnic riots.

This chapter focuses on donkey traders and trading in Kashgar in Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, an area which has experienced unrest and also seen sporadic incidents of violence that reflect the social and political instability in China since the 1990s. The Uyghurs are a Turkic speaking Islamic people who are classified as one of the country's 56 ethnic groups. Since the establishment of the People's Republic of China in 1949, mass migration of Han Chinese to this remote Central Asian region has intensified relations between the indigenous Uyghurs and the migrant Han Chinese, with many socioeconomic and political consequences. Through an exploration of the Uyghurs' cultural and religious understanding of donkeys and the multidimensional transactions of donkeys in livestock markets between Han Chinese and Uyghurs, the chapter argues that the practices and meanings of culture are both accommodated and contested when economic and political realities are simultaneously in play. Examining the changing characteristics of the intermediaries at donkey markets also sheds light on the ways in which these actors are becoming agents who bridge peasant communities in remote parts of southern Xinjiang and national markets amidst otherwise unfavourable social and economic conditions.

Second Life, as a three-dimensional social medium, provides an unparalleled opportunity for people to interact with each other and their surroundings in unfamiliar and innovative ways. After a brief introduction to the discipline of Studies in Religion at the University of Queensland (UQ), this chapter will examine some of the key characteristics of MUVEs in general and of Second Life in particular, with a view to assessing its suitability as an environment for learning based on andragogical and constructivist methodologies. Further, it will explore the original conception and development of the UQ Religion Bazaar project within Second Life.

The UQ Religion Bazaar project was originally conceived in 2007 and developed through 2008. It consists of a Second Life island situated in the New Media Consortium educational precinct and boasts a number of religious builds including a church, a mosque, a synagogue, an ancient Greek temple, a Freemasons' lodge, a Zen Buddhist temple and a Hindu temple to Ganesha. The island was used in two large first-year classes and for supervising distance postgraduate research students.

This chapter focuses on brokerage in the prestige economy of the Gabor Roma ethnic subgroup in Romania. It argues that the necessity of the brokers’ employment as well as their economic importance comes from the significant uncertainty characterising the prestige-object transactions, that is, these brokers are occasional entrepreneurs specialised in risk management. The theoretical purpose of the chapter is to demonstrate that brokers and goods mediated by them can be associated with more than one socially constructed transactional identity (cultural, political, economic, etc.) at the same time. It also aims to highlight the shifting nature of these identities – they are not constant and context-free qualities, but highly context-sensitive social constructions that can appear in various combinations.