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The purpose of this paper is to introduce the special issue on race and place.

The approach used by the authors is to combine an overview of sociological debates on place within a framework that makes the case for a relational approach to race, space and place.

The overview provides an account of place in sociology, of the relationality of race and place, and the making of race and place in sociological work.

The Introduction sets the papers in context, providing a short account of each of them; it also aims to present an argument for attention to race and place in sociology in a setting characterized by racism and reaction.

In this chapter, we examine the impact of pay-for-performance incentives on learning-by-doing. We exploit personnel data on fruit pickers paid under two distinct compensation contracts: a standard piece rate plan and one with an extra one-time bonus tied to output. Under the latter, we observe bunching of performance just above the bonus threshold, suggesting workers distort their behavior in response to the discrete bonus. Such bunching behavior increases as workers gain experience. At the same time, the bonus contract induces considerable learning-by-doing for workers throughout the productivity distribution who presumably hope to one day hit the target, and these improvements significantly outweigh the losses to the firm from the bunching. In contrast, under the standard piece rate contract, we find minimal evidence of bunching and only small performance improvements at the bottom of the productivity distribution. Our results suggest that contract design can help foster learning on the job, underscoring the importance of dynamic considerations in principle-agent models.

By drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted amongst waste-pickers and recycling traders in the waste paper, plastic and scrap metal sectors, and engaging with literature from economic anthropology and history, as well as archival sources, this paper documents changing perceptions of just price, morality and fairness in the Turkish recycling market. The paper suggests that multiple markets imply multiple prices, which are contingent and contested. When dealing with price mechanisms largely outside their control, actors tend to associate a fair price with the going market price, rather than factors such as state regulation. Approaches to morality and assessments of fairness become more ambiguous when prices are mediated by actors’ own practices. These range from gift relations to paternalism, envy and deception.

In Metro Vancouver, Vaisakhi celebrations are organized by local Sikh gurdwaras to mark the Punjabi harvest season and the anniversary of the Sikh Khalsa, which was formed in 1699. The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate how Vaisakhi celebrations have become mechanisms for state institutions to refigure and extend their racial authority over Sikh places and populations through their coordinated appearances at these public events. These appearances are analyzed to reveal how contemporary racial states are characterized by complex conditions of visibility and public identification that obscure and foreclose the racial conditions of their authority.

The data analyzed for this paper were generated through observational fieldwork at Vaisakhi celebrations and extensive archival and media research on the changing racial governance of Sikh and South Asian populations.

The results show that, in Metro Vancouver, racial modes of governance have created “post-racial” relations between the state’s public visages of diversity and accessibility and its expanded legal regulation of the social and political places of local Sikh populations.

The concept of political appearances is developed to explain how contemporary racial states reproduce and augment their authority through discursive practices of public engagement with minority populations as well as the specific aesthetic conditions of these engagements. The paper also offers important cautions against state practices that expand the presence of law enforcement within marginalized communities by showing how this enhanced visibility can engender forms of racialization.

This paper analyzes how different dynamics of changes in piece-rate incentives affect individuals' exerted effort.

The authors constructed an across-subjects three-period laboratory setting where, for each period, they exogenously manipulate the amount of piece-rate incentive paid for correct answer. The same experimental conditions were separately applied to two different laboratory tasks, one boring and the other entertaining.

It was found that performance contingent incentives affect participants' effort provision, while the effect is task dependent and it is much stronger for the boring task. Moreover, a unique increase in the amount of piece rate between periods leads to an increase in performance only for the boring task. A decrease in piece rate incentive between periods negatively affects subjects' performance on both tasks, but only provided that the decrease follows a previous increase.

The paper is the first to study the effect of a sequence of changes in the amount of piece rate incentives on individual effort provided. Our main result highlights the relevance of the order in which the sequence of changes in piece-rate incentive occurs. Results could be useful for the designing of performance rewards in organizations.

This research aims to explore the potential of big data technology for sustainable management and investigate its impact on tourism. Its goal is to obtain meaningful results related to sustainable tourism to understand better how big data technology plays a role in decision-making by looking at it through the lens of various studies.

A systematic review, which is a qualitative method, was used in this study. The analysis was conducted using secondary data from the Web of Science Core Collections databases.

Big data technology has many economic benefits for businesses, but it also has managerial benefits such as forecasting, decision-making and tracking human and machine behaviour. Furthermore, big data technology offers sustainability benefits such as resource efficiency, preventive quality systems, carbon reduction and environmentally friendly production.

Big data's capabilities enable businesses to make more informed business decisions, improve overall business performance and contribute to achieving various SDGs. Big data, which aids in developing smart and sustainable tourism in the tourism sector, assists tourism managers in making economically, socially and environmentally sound decisions.

This paper investigates rose and rose oil production in the province of Isparta, Turkey, with reference to the discourses on and procedures of price formation. Farmers have been engaging in rose cultivation for over a century and rose oil production is considered to be a traditional industry. The market actors for rose oil are global cosmetic and local processing firms and almost all rose oil from Isparta is exported. Prices and production have been steadily increasing since 2010. Although prices are seen as good, there are concerns about overproduction and fierce competition between the rose oil firms to buy the harvest, hence pushing up rose prices and, leading to a crash in rose oil prices on the world market. Through careful observation of payment and price formation procedures, the paper raises issues concerning the moral economy of price formation. Findings are provisional and the research is on-going, but the discourse on just prices clearly suggests that value judgments are embedded in and implicitly critical of capitalist markets.

The purpose of this paper was to investigate the physiological cost of concrete construction activities.

Five concrete construction workers were recruited. The workers’ three-week heart rate (HR) data were collected in summer and autumn. In this paper, several HR indexes were used to investigate the physiological cost of work in concrete construction trades, including average working HR, relative HR and ratio of working HR to resting HR.

This paper measures how absolute and relative HRs vary throughout a workday and how working HR compares to resting HR for individual workers.

Field observations are usually extremely difficult as researchers need to overcome a number of barriers, including employers’ resistance to perceived additional liabilities, employees’ fear that their level of activity will be reported to managers and many other practical and technical difficulties. As these challenges increase exponentially with the number of employers, subjects and sites, this study was limited to a small number of subjects all working for the same employer on the same jobsite. Still, challenges are often unpredictable and lessons learned from this study are expected to guide both our and other researchers’ continuation of this work.

The time effect on the physiological cost of work has not been considered in previous studies. Thus, this study is noteworthy owing to the depth of the data collected rather than the breadth of the data.

This paper attempts to trace and describe the role played by the government sector – the state – in promoting economic growth in Western societies since the Renaissance. One important conclusion is that the antagonism between state and market, which has characterised the twentieth century, is a relatively new phenomenon. Since the Renaissance one very important task of the state has been to create well‐functioning markets by providing a legal framework, standards, credit, physical infrastructure and – if necessary – to function temporarily as an entrepreneur of last resort. Early economists were acutely aware that national markets did not occur spontaneously, and they used “modern” ideas like synergies, increasing returns, and innovation theory when arguing for the right kind of government policy. In fact, mercantilist economics saw it as a main task to extend the synergetic economic effects observed within cities to the territory of a nation‐state. The paper argues that the classical Anglo‐Saxon tradition in economics – fundamentally focused on barter and distribution, rather than on production and knowledge – systematically fails to grasp these wider issues in economic development, and it brings in and discusses the role played by the state in alternative traditions of non‐equilibrium economics.