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The purpose of this paper is to present a new and comprehensive business strategy matrix which can be used to create competitive advantage for the value chain of every business unit of any firm.

This paper reviews the key findings of several well-known papers within the value chain literature and then adds several new conceptual insights to step by step create a logically developed, business strategy matrix featuring four strategy choices.

This paper presents the four business strategy choices of competitive value chains, based on the business strategies of innovative quality, lean cost, agile delivery and attentive service.

A future research implication of this paper is to empirically test the financial benefits for producers of custom products, of applying agile delivery as a key business strategy.

This paper provides the senior management of each business unit of any firm, with a clear guide to defining an optimal business strategy.

This paper is intended to advance the practice of business strategy by senior management, to enhance customer value across all business units.

This paper expands upon existing business strategy models by providing a comprehensive business strategy matrix, which can be applied to all possible business units. It does this by building upon current best practice to demonstrate that next to innovative quality, lean cost and attentive service strategies, an agile delivery strategy is required in the case of custom products.

This study aims to add to the existing body of knowledge the link between market structures, strategy and innovation by applying the diagnostic test of the integrated model of innovation, and also present the results of an empirical study applied to tourism in a small open economy. The study uses an archetype and the market outcome resulting from the innovation strategies pursued to compare similarities and differences according to a firms’ geographical location to identify innovative patterns in tourism firms.

The study applies a multivariate analysis using a data set consisting of survey responses from 158 Portuguese firms.

The findings indicate links between service, market structures and innovation strategies considering geographical agglomeration of firms in a small economy, and also different innovation trajectories and positions in the model.

The results of this study are generalizable to a dynamic industry context of tourism firms operating in a small open economy, such as Portugal.

The results suggest that managers need to attend to intangible resources, such as marketing and human resources and their links with innovation and performance, particularly in the case of service firms.

The paper highlights the role of intangible resources, especially marketing and human resources, in tourism firms. Geographical location also influences the firm’s strategy and results.

Complex projects require careful management. They may expose stakeholders to greater risks and place additional demands upon resources. In the initial stages of project development, however, little may be known about the nature and magnitude of such complexity. This paper aims to ensure that this gap is at least subjectively assessed and addressed.

Research, using focus group workshops with a convenience sample of construction professionals, was carried out to test the validity of a Project Early Stage Complexity Assessment Tool (PESCAT). The PESCAT concept brings together selected complexity theories and uses subjectively based measures for assessment.

The findings confirm that an early-stage project complexity assessment tool is practicable and can contribute to project management practice in the construction industry. It should be applied by individual project stakeholders using small teams of experienced staff. PESCAT explores project complexity through “filter” sets of perspective factors which should be customised to reflect the stakeholder’s role and processes in a project.

In the initial complexity assessment model, resolution space and uncertainty were tested as project complexity parameters. However, in subsequent versions of the tool, four measures (differentiation and differentiation uncertainty; interdependency and interdependency uncertainty) are used in an innovative way that focuses users’ attention more clearly and points to a more targeted approach for addressing project complexity. The value of our model lies in its practical application and the project management benefits it can deliver.

A functionalist framework is used to synthesize well‐known ideas about societal integration and, conversely, disintegration. If the underlying Darwinian metaphor in functional analysis is retained, and supplemented by dialectical metaphors, then functional theorizing can insightfully address the forces of societal disintegration. The emerging theory revolves around, on the structural side, the dynamics of segmentation, differentiation, interdependence and exchange, structural overlap, structural embeddedness, mobility, segregation, and domination whereas on the cultural side, the theory emphasizes the dynamics inhering in systems of evaluational, regulatory, and legitimating symbols as well as generalized symbolic media.

In this paper, we examine the social stratification in the favelas, urban slums, both in general and how it correlates with technology. The analysis is based on Weberian stratification theory, since it provides for a broad understanding of the different factors that make up the digital inequalities.

Based on a 10-month critical ethnographic research dealing with LAN houses and state supported telecenters in the favelas of Vitória, Brazil, we analyze how the use of technology by residents of such marginalized areas expands our understanding of Weber’s axes of stratification, namely class, status and political power. The data was drawn from user observations, Facebook interactions, and 76 semi-structured interviews.

The drug cartel members belonged to the higher class of favela residents due to their access to material resources and ability to afford smartphones and data plans. However, in terms of status groups, they did not represent the pinnacle of the community. Where status was concerned, the highest stratum of the community was composed of the “Facebook’s celebrities,” the few teenagers who knew how to produce content online, such as images and videos. An additional axis of social differentiation, related to political power, was observed during the 2013 protests in Brazil. Favela residents arrived late to the event and found themselves “fighting” for demands stipulated previously by the organizers who belonged to upper classes.

We highlight what access to ICTs can, and cannot, accomplish in a “highly disorganized,” conflict-ridden, and institution-poor environment. With that we hope to encourage academics and practitioners to do a better job in developing appropriate policies and technologies.

Contemporary governmentality combines biopolitical and necropolitical logics to establish social, political and physical borders that classify and stratify populations using symbolic and material marks as, for example, nationality, gender, ethnicity, race, sexuality, social class and/or disability. The social sciences have been prolific in the analysis of alterities and, in turn, implicated in the epistemologies and knowledge practices that underpin and sustain the multiplication of frontiers that define essential differences between populations. The purpose of this paper is to develop a strategy that analyze and subvert the logic of bordering inherent in the bio/necropolitical gaze. In different ways, this paper examines operations of delimitation and differentiation that contribute to monolithic definitions of subject and subjectivity.

The authors question border construction processes in terms of their static, homogenizing and exclusionary effects.

Instead of hierarchical stratification of populations, the papers in this special issue explore the possibilities of relationship and the conditions of such relationships. Who do we relate to? On which terms and conditions? With what purpose? In which ethical and political manner?

A critical understanding of the asymmetry in research practices makes visible how the researcher is legitimized to produce a representation of those researched, an interpretation of their words and actions without feedback or contribution to the specific context where the research has been carried out. Deconstructive and relational perspectives are put forward as critical strands that can set the basis of different approaches to research and social practice.

A method is given for the design of a two‐dimensional wind tunnel contraction for incompressible inviscid flow. The contraction is considered to join parallel channels of different width and is of finite length. The contraction boundary consists of two curved portions fairing smoothly into the channel walls at the upstream and downstream ends and a straight portion in between joining the other ends of Ihc curved portions. The shape of the boundary is determined by specifying: (i) constant velocities along the curved portions and (ii) the angle of inclination of the straight portion to the tunnel axis. The solution to the problem is obtained by working in the hodograph plane. For this purpose the contraction is considered to be made up of two distinct parts, upstream and downstream, and the solution is worked out for each separately. Results are given in tabular form for differing values of the above parameters (i) and (ii). It is hoped that the results will be found useful in the design of most low‐speed tunnels and particularly those with large contraction ratios. The results given here have been used in the design of a smoke tunnel (contraction ratio 15 to 1), a model of which has been built and tested with satisfactory results.

In this chapter, I focus on stigmatization exercised and experienced by local residents, comparing two socially-diverse areas in very different contexts: the Cabrini Green-Near North area in Chicago and the La Loma-La Florida area in Santiago de Chile.

Data for this study were drawn from 1 year of qualitative research, using interviews with residents and institutional actors, field notes from observation sessions of several inter-group spaces, and “spatial inventories” in which I located the traces of the symbolic presence of each group.

Despite contextual differences of type of social differentiation, type of social mix, type of housing tenure for the poor, and public visibility, I argue that there are important common problems: first, symbolic differences are stressed by identity changes; second, distrust against “the other” is spatially crystallized in any type and scale of social housing; third, stigmatization changes in form and scale; and fourth, there are persisting prejudiced depictions and patterns of avoidance.

Socially-mixed neighborhoods, as areas where at least two different social groups live in proximity, offer an interesting context for observing territorial stigmatization. They are strange creatures of urban development, due to the powerful symbolism of desegregation in contexts of growing inequalities.

The chapter contributes to a cross-national perspective with a comparison of global-north and global-south cities. And it also springs from a study of socially-mixed areas, in which the debate on concentrated/deconcentrated poverty is central, and in which the problem of “clearing places” appears in both material (e.g., displacement) and symbolic (e.g., stigmatization) terms.

Urban typogenetics investigates the use of machine intelligence for the evaluation of performance measures as a decision support system (DSS) with a focus on urban aesthetics evaluation. This framework allows designers to address performance measures, urban measures and aesthetic criteria in an adaptive, interactive generative design approach. The purpose of this paper is to provide an understanding of the structure and the nature of the framework and the application of human-in-the-loop design systems to urban design.

Significant literature reviewed lead to the identification of an application potential in the decision-making process. This potential is situated around the use of AI for the evaluation of subjective performance criteria in a DSS. Recognising that the key decisions about urban aesthetics are based on the individual evaluation of the designer, an HITL approach for computational design software to support creative decisions is presented in this paper.

Urban typogenetics for interactive generative urban design allows the exploration of complex design spaces by using a human-in-the-loop design system in the context of urban aesthetics. Hybrid aesthetic evaluation allows the designer to analyse morphological features and urban aesthetics during exploratory search and reveal hidden aspects of the urban context by visualisation of the results of the aesthetic evaluation. Integrating performance measures and urban aesthetics in urban typogenetics addresses major criteria of urban design at the beginning of the creative process.

The use of a broad interactive approach to typogenetic design in an application to urban scenarios is a novel conceptual approach to the design of urban configurations. The suggested adaptive mechanism would allow the user of a typogenetic tool to subjectively evaluate solutions by sight and reason about aesthetic, social and cultural implication of the reviewed design solutions.

This paper aims to formulate assumptions on home sharing users’ sensitivity toward sustainability in mountain areas and define the sustainability indicators that may be used to search for home-based accommodation in mountain areas.

The paper is based on a literature review of key terms: mountain tourism, peer-to-peer accommodation and sustainability indicators.

Tourists in mountain areas are more likely to be sensitive toward sustainability than in urban areas, so they are likely to expect home sharing websites to provide sustainability criteria for selecting their accommodation.

Home sharing platforms should offer to mountain tourists the possibility to search for and assess home-based accommodation using sustainability criteria.

Most studies on peer-to-peer accommodation were designed in urban areas. The authors state that in mountain areas, tourists are more sensitive toward sustainability and would therefore be more inclined to consider sustainability in their search for a home-based accommodation.