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1 – 10 of 57The purpose of this paper is to investigate specific marketing mix activities and influencing factors in hotels coping with falling room demand derived from drug cartel-related…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to investigate specific marketing mix activities and influencing factors in hotels coping with falling room demand derived from drug cartel-related risk and insecurity.
Design/methodology/approach
A case study research was carried out using semistructured interviews with key informants (hotel managers) in two neighboring destinations at the US–Mexico border, an area where criminal organizations' drug trafficking-related violence has impacted the hospitality industry.
Findings
The research identifies factors that are internal (market segment diversification, type of ownership, magnitude of investments) and external (tourism promotion organizations, media coverage, tourist flow volume) to the firms as they affect their marketing mix implementation.
Research limitations/implications
The research developed a framework to better understand the use of marketing mix practices and influencing factors in criminal insecurity contexts, which could be further studied in other risk and conflict scenarios.
Practical implications
The pricing and communication tactics are employed more intensively, while product-service and distribution channel actions are used to a lesser extent. Greater emphasis should be placed on product-service, distribution and market segment diversification.
Social implications
Considering the positive impacts that tourism and hospitality businesses have on local communities, it is recommended that the hotel sector works together with government and industry associations to improve the safety and security at tourism destinations.
Originality/value
The research extends the extant knowledge in hospitality crisis management by investigating the full marketing mix tactics in hotels at destinations stricken by cartel-related organized crime, an understudied context in the literature.
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There has been almost no scholarly work on the challenges of money laundering in sovereign states that use the US dollar as their currency of choice. This study aims to break the…
Abstract
Purpose
There has been almost no scholarly work on the challenges of money laundering in sovereign states that use the US dollar as their currency of choice. This study aims to break the silence by highlighting how money laundering thrives in these situations mainly due to lack of or weak regulation of the US dollar by both the adopting states and the USA.
Design/methodology/approach
The research depended on various secondary data sources. It is an adapted academic version of a shorter piece for a professional magazine for professionals in the Anti-Money Laundering (AML) Field.
Findings
Preliminary findings show that due to the lack of regulation of the US dollar in dollarized economies, unscrupulous politicians, organized criminal gangs and multinational corporations among others can use a variation of the Black Market Peso Exchange (BMPE) to counteract money laundering controls and launder ill-gotten gains from crimes such as corruption, transnational crimes and tax evasion. Furthermore, ordinary citizens, migrant workers and small businesses avoiding stringent exchange rates are also using the black market, posing a further challenge to the law enforcement authorities.
Practical implications
The practical implications of this paper relate to how the mutations of money laundering techniques, as they are adopted by criminals, to operate in different conditions are making it difficult not only to dictate but also to address using traditional AML techniques.
Social implications
BMPE has far reaching social consequences. Hence, this study is significant to instigate a search for solutions and for further detailed studies into the money laundering techniques in countries that do not have a sovereign currency.
Originality/value
To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first paper to discuss the unique challenges faced by countries that have adopted the US dollar for domestic use. The paper also shows how dollarization is a modest reminder that money laundering technique such as the BMPE can evolve to counter the legislative and regulatory environment of the various jurisdictions in which they are laundered.
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This paper aims to historicise the contemporary chlorophyll trend through the first academic study of its early marketing in Sweden (1950–1953). Using multimodal critical…
Abstract
Purpose
This paper aims to historicise the contemporary chlorophyll trend through the first academic study of its early marketing in Sweden (1950–1953). Using multimodal critical discourse analysis, it demonstrates how brands used advertisements to convince female consumers of chlorophyll’s necessity to fulfil certain aspirational goals.
Design/methodology/approach
In all, 150 advertisements for chlorophyll products were collected from the Swedish Historical Newspaper Archive, as well as 600 additional advertisements for the three most popular products (toothpaste/mouthwash, sanitary towels and soap) from 1940 to 1950 and from 1954 to 1964. Then, multimodal critical discourse analysis was used to investigate how the products were marketed before, during and after the chlorophyll trend, identifying the general themes and linguistic/semiotic structures of the advertisements.
Findings
This paper shows how the commercial use of chlorophyll offered a lucrative opportunity for marketers, acting as a “tabula rasa” on which they could use discourses of science, nature, idealised femininity and luxury to draw connections with health, modernity and beauty, despite the product having no real purpose or value.
Originality/value
Viewing this fad from a historical perspective emphasises how brands, marketers and influencers continue to capitalise on the anxieties of female consumers with promises around beauty, hygiene and health. It, thus, offers us critical distance to reflect on contemporary claims about chlorophyll’s health benefits to make informed choices.
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The relationships between tourist resorts and transnational crime are rarely analyzed systematically. This paper begins to fill this gap by examining how organized crime groups…
Abstract
Purpose
The relationships between tourist resorts and transnational crime are rarely analyzed systematically. This paper begins to fill this gap by examining how organized crime groups and individuals linked to them can take advantage of tourist resorts to commit crimes.
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This paper aims to draw attention to a broad range of experimental institutional initiatives which operate in the absence of a global antitrust regime. The purpose of this paper…
Abstract
Purpose
This paper aims to draw attention to a broad range of experimental institutional initiatives which operate in the absence of a global antitrust regime. The purpose of this paper is to offer food for thought to scholars in other fields of international trade law facing challenges from divergent national regimes.
Design/methodology/approach
Taking inspiration from political science literature on institutions, this paper crafts a broad analytical lens which captures various organisational forms (including networks), codes (including soft law) and culture (including epistemic communities). The strength and shortcomings of traditional “bricks and mortar” institutions such as the European Union (EU) and General Agreement Tariffs and Trade/World Trade Organisation are first examined. Then, the innovative global network of International Competition Network (ICN) is analysed.
Findings
It highlights the value of the global antitrust epistemic community in providing a conducive environment for extensive recourse to “soft law”. Examples from the EU and the ICN include measures which find expression in enforcement tools and networks. These initiatives can be seen as experimental responses to the challenges of divergent national antitrust regimes.
Research limitations/implications
It is desktop research rather than empirical field work.
Practical implications
To raise awareness outside the antitrust scholarly community of the variety of experimental institutional initiatives which have evolved, often on a soft law basis, in response to the challenges experienced by national enforcement agencies and businesses operating in the absence of a global antitrust regime.
Originality/value
It offers some personal reflections on the ICN from the author’s experience as a non-governmental advisor. It draws attention to the ICN’s underappreciated range of educational materials which are freely available on its website to everyone. It submits that the ICN template offers interesting ideas for other fields of international trade law where a global regime is unrealisable. The ICN is a voluntary virtual network of agencies collaborating to agree ways to reduce clashes among national regimes. Its goal of voluntary convergence is portrayed as standardisation rather than as absolute congruence. Even if standardisation of norms/processes is too ambitious a goal in other fields of international trade law, the ICN model still offers inspiration as an epistemic community within an inclusive and dynamic forum for encouraging debate and creating a culture of learning opportunities where familiarity and trust is fostered.
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Elin Åström Rudberg and Orsi Husz
The purpose of this paper is to investigate an unexplored part of advertising history; namely, the education of a large, mundane, nonelite group of advertising professionals…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to investigate an unexplored part of advertising history; namely, the education of a large, mundane, nonelite group of advertising professionals, so-called advertising technicians and the knowledge they acquired. Examining correspondence courses in the technology of advertising, we focus particularly on the production of technified knowledge and mass personas.
Design/methodology/approach
The study is based on a qualitative analysis of course material from Sweden’s two largest correspondence schools in the 1930s and 1940s. Two theoretical concepts guide the analysis: the concept of market devices and the notion of personas, both of which we use to show how the courses crafted a particular kind of advertising professional as well as knowledge.
Findings
The study shows that courses created a template-based persona of the advertising technician, who possessed what we call bounded originality characterized by diligence, modesty and rule-governed creative imagination. Similarly, the courses created a body of knowledge that was controllable and highly practice-oriented. The advertising technician was expected to embody and internalize the advertising knowledge, thus, becoming an extension of this knowledge on the market.
Originality/value
By directing the searchlight at the cadre of ordinary, middle-class advertising professionals instead of the high-profile “advertising creatives” and innovators, the paper brings to the foreground the nonelite level of the advertising industry. These practitioners went to work in the business world to produce the everyday advertising that was not necessarily groundbreaking but was needed in a growing mass-consumption society.
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The purpose of this paper is to offer a critical examination of industrial relations in Denmark.
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to offer a critical examination of industrial relations in Denmark.
Design/methodology/approach
The approach is based upon available data and a mixture of Marxist theory and systems theory. The theoretical position is discussed in relation to the academic discourses on the main characteristics of Danish industrial relations and provides a review of the foundation and historical development of the Danish system.
Findings
From this basis, it is analysed how the stagnation or decline has taken place in recent years regarding representation of workers’ interest as well as the ability of the Danish system to maintain its key importance when challenged by decentralisation, decreasing union affiliation rates, cuts in unemployment insurance and social dumping due to labour migration.
Originality/value
It is an original paper which offers a critical analysis of the institutional decline and increasing inequality that are the result of the liberalist political-economic hegemony.
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Camilo Arciniegas Pradilla, Jose Bento da Silva and Juliane Reinecke
Wicked problems are causally complex, lack definite solutions, and re-emerge in different guises. This paper discusses how new ways of organizing emerge to tackle changing…
Abstract
Wicked problems are causally complex, lack definite solutions, and re-emerge in different guises. This paper discusses how new ways of organizing emerge to tackle changing manifestations of wicked problems. Focusing on the wicked problem of poverty, we conducted a longitudinal study of Fe y Alegria (FyA), one of the world’s largest non-governmental organization, which provides education for the poor across 21 countries in Latin America and Africa. Drawing on archival and ethnographic data, we trace the historical narratives of how FyA defined poverty as a problem and developed new ways of organizing, from its foundation by a Jesuit priest in 1955 to its current networked structure. Our findings reveal the ongoing cycle of interpretive problem definition and organizing solutions for wicked problems. First, since there is no “true” formulation of a wicked problem, actors construct narrative explanations based on their understanding of the problem. Second, organizational solutions to a wicked problem are thus reflections of these narrative constructions. Third, emerging and changing narratives about what the problem is inspire new organizational responses. Our findings provide insights into the dynamic relationship between organizing for wicked problems, narratives, and the changing manifestations of wicked problems and grand challenges more broadly.
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This paper aims to challenge the assumption that brands of everyday products have only used lifestyle marketing in the past 30 years by conducting the first case study of the…
Abstract
Purpose
This paper aims to challenge the assumption that brands of everyday products have only used lifestyle marketing in the past 30 years by conducting the first case study of the marketing practices of the Swedish toothpaste brand Stomatol (1910–1940). Through visual social semiotic analysis, it explores how the brand was a pioneer in lifestyle marketing, using discourses of modernity, beauty and the Swedish “way of life” to sell its toothpaste.
Design/methodology/approach
Two hundred Stomatol advertisements were collected from the Swedish Historical Newspaper Archive and analysed using visual social semiotics. The analysis considers how the idea of a cultural Swedishness centred around modernity and beauty developed between 1910 and 1940, and how both linguistic and semiotic resources were used to make these claims seem credible.
Findings
At a time when its main adversaries were capitalising upon science in their advertisements to construct authority and credibility, Stomatol instead targeted lifestyle. Modernity, beauty and the Swedish “way of life” were central themes of their marketing campaigns, yet the way these themes were articulated varied between 1910 and 1940 in accordance with changing popular discourse. This made Stomatol more competitive than other toothpaste brands because it was able to sell an experience rather than a product, turning it into Sweden’s most popular toothpaste.
Originality/value
This paper demonstrates the importance of case studies to challenge the assumption that toothpaste brands have only used lifestyle marketing in the past 30 years (a claim based on Anglocentrism). It also showcases the need to further investigate non-Anglo countries when conducting research into lifestyle marketing to build a more nuanced perspective on its origins and the supposed novelty of (largely) US practices. Thus, Stomatol makes an important case for Sweden as a trailblazer in lifestyle marketing.
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Göran Finnveden, Eva Friman, Anna Mogren, Henrietta Palmer, Per Sund, Göran Carstedt, Sofia Lundberg, Barbro Robertsson, Håkan Rodhe and Linn Svärd
Since 2006, higher education institutions (HEIs) in Sweden, should according to the Higher Education Act, promote sustainable development (SD). In 2016, the Swedish Government…
Abstract
Purpose
Since 2006, higher education institutions (HEIs) in Sweden, should according to the Higher Education Act, promote sustainable development (SD). In 2016, the Swedish Government asked the Swedish higher education authority to evaluate how this study is proceeding. The authority chose to focus on education. This paper aims to produce a report on this evaluation.
Design/methodology/approach
All 47 HEIs in Sweden were asked to write a self-evaluation report based on certain evaluation criteria. A panel was appointed consisting of academics and representatives for students and working life. The panel wrote an evaluation of each HEI, a report on general findings and recommendations, and gave an overall judgement of each HEI in two classes as follows: the HEI has well-developed processes for integration of SD in education or the HEI needs to develop their processes.
Findings
Overall, a mixed picture developed. Most HEIs could give examples of programmes or courses where SD was integrated. However, less than half of the HEIs had overarching goals for integration of SD in education or had a systematic follow-up of these goals. Even fewer worked specifically with pedagogy and didactics, teaching and learning methods and environments, sustainability competences or other characters of education for SD. Overall, only 12 out of 47 got a higher judgement.
Originality/value
This is a unique study in which all HEIs in a country are evaluated. This provides unique possibilities for identifying success factors and barriers. The importance of the leadership of the HEIs became clear.
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