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Application of technology and meeting accessibility requirements of guests are two essential areas to consider and improve in order to facilitate, ameliorate and accelerate the management of hospitality services furnished by hotels. These two trends carry great importance for competitivity of hotels' services and sustainability of tourism industry. They are two distinguishing characteristics that build a positive perception of hotels' image among its rivals.

This chapter aims to reflect the current level of conformance of the hotels' services to the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) for tourism, specifically, SDG 11 related to accessibility and SDGs 9, 12 and 13 related to technology. A qualitative research is conducted to find out the commitment and awareness levels of the hotel staff at managerial positions to the accessibility and technology requirements in line with the mentioned SDGs. The representatives of city centre hotels of İzmir, Turkey with three, four and five stars and boutique hotels categories are chosen as the target population. The results obtained via content analysis signal that the extent of conformity of hotels to technology and accessibility requirements in line with the adoption of the related SDGs depend on the creation of practical solutions on the educational, legal and managerial perspectives. The chapter contributes to academic literature in tourism management and brings suggestions for tourism practitioners to adapt and improve their services to meet the standards and requirements of SDGs related to accessibility and adoption of technology in hospitality services.

Izmir, the third largest city of Turkey, is an important trade hub and port. Since its early years, the city has been the home of many civilisations, nations and cultures. The Romani people can be counted among these cultures. In the centre of Izmir city, there are around 500,000 Romani inhabitants. The increasing number of migrants to Izmir and the obligatory settlement options, usually in poorer neighbourhoods, aggravates the situation. Within this context, the focus of administrative authorities on poorer neighbourhoods with a significant Romani majority and its effects to and connections with the urban improvement programme must be re-evaluated considering the benefit of the city and social-institutional support, including non-governmental institutions, must be maintained.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the social status of migrants in a culturally liberal and historically cosmopolitan port city in Turkey.

A novel data set from the Izmir Labor Market Household Survey is used. Social status is measured by occupational status, wages, and education. In addition, parents’ education, as well as, duration of unemployment for migrants is analyzed. Occupational status and education analyzes are based on ordered probit models. The probability that an individual with given characteristics will have an uneducated parent is estimated with a probit model. Weibull duration model is employed for the unemployment duration.

Migrants in Izmir are likely to have occupations that claim a lower status. Migrants have higher wages so migrants are taking jobs of lower status but higher pay. The probability of exiting unemployment for migrants is higher, that is the duration of unemployment for migrants is shorter. Male have higher education levels and receive higher wages. Parents’ education for migrants is lower in general. Female migrants have lower education levels than natives, male or female, and do not receive higher wages than female natives in the labor market. The paper concludes that the social status of migrant women is definitely lower than natives, male or female, and male migrants. Evidence on the social status of migrant men also points to a disadvantage as even though the male migrant is more educated on average, he is likely to hold an occupation of lower status.

This paper employs a novel data set to investigate the social status of migrants vs natives. In addition, it undertakes a multi-dimensional econometric analyses of social status. Unemployment has not been included in econometric analysis of social status before.

This study aims to understand the characteristics and formation of artists’ production sensibilities and relations with other actors within an emerging hybrid art market structure.

To unravel senses and map out relationships and structures in the context of this study, qualitative methods, including in-depth interviews and analysis of secondary data sources, were applied.

The authors describe three art production sensibilities and market-based relationship logics rooted in the artist and the artwork’s diverse role in the market.

The findings suggest that artistic sensibilities motivate managers working in the hybrid art market to develop a more nuanced positioning of artists and their creative outputs to improve harmony and collaboration.

This study demonstrates that the hybrid structure of art markets allows for the harmonious separation and collaboration of non-market (artistic) and market logics. This study uncovers how artists combine their non-market creative position with market needs in the process of marketization and hybridization.

A threatened sense of safety in public spaces is a problem for liveable communities. For better public policies, this study investigates multi-dimensional and multi-scalar aspects of gendered perceived safety and strategies by women and men in daily public spaces.

A face-to-face survey with 40 men and 50 women in a public space (Izmir, Turkey) is deployed. Descriptive statistics and regression analysis compare participants' perceptions of and strategies for safety across the city, neighbourhood and the study site.

Their experienced-based familiarities in public places increase women's perceived safety. As safety strategies, different place-based and gendered-preconditions appear for women and men going “outside” especially “alone” (i.e. unaccompanied). Reaffirming female vulnerability in public places, gendered preconditions include individuals' attributes. Of place-based preconditions, crowd and police are significant mechanisms for safety but emphasized differently by women and men. Housewives' female companionship in the study site develops a class- and gender-based claim for a safe place away from their underserved neighbourhood.

Gendered- and place preconditions for women's safety can inform design policies about surveillance and permeability of public spaces. Lack of data about class-based differences about perceived safety is a limitation.

Among a few, it takes perceived safety as performative acts with learned strategies across (rather than momentary perceptions in) socio-spatial spaces and provides a research framework that considers such acts with individual and spatial dimensions across multiple socio-spatial scales.

In his review of notable planning disasters, Hall proposes two ways for avoiding future disasters. In a turbulent age, the improvement of forecasting methods is quite problematic. Ranking near and distant futures requires images of alternative future developments. This paper investigates the use of scenarios constructed through interactive knowledge in order to evaluate near‐future policies and programmes. However, since scenarios normally have long‐time horizons, there is a tenuous link between the ideas and aspirations outlined in alternative scenarios and near‐future policies and programmes. This implies that such scenarios can in the first place be used to assess preferences in the near future in relation to distant ideas and aspirations expressed in them. They may also help structure the context and its underlying plural values, and enlarge the range of possible criteria for evaluation. In this sense, they require that evaluation remains open to the discovery of societal preferences, interests and desires. For this purpose uses the concept “exploratory evaluation”. The latter hopefully provides a useful instrument in evaluation. While the emphasis in this paper is on the methodological implications of using long‐term scenarios to evaluate current choices, it nevertheless indicates how scenarios might be used in evaluating policies for sustainable development in southern Mediterranean cities: Tunis, Izmir and Rabat‐Casablanca.

The legal and institutional infrastructure of organic agriculture in Turkey and the progress of the production and the marketing of organic agricultural products are analyzed. An overview of the field research carried out in Turkey, on both the production and consumption of organic products, is presented. The policies currently implemented for the improvement of the sector have been evaluated. Some strategic policy suggestions have been put forward.

The purpose of this paper is to figure out the impacts of soft innovation in the city hotels in general, whereas the focus is on figuring out if there exists a difference in vitality on the components of soft innovation among the hotel categories, as 4 stars, 5 stars and boutique hotels in Izmir, Turkey.

The first part is related to a detailed literature review on the soft innovation components as color, sound, light, scent and decoration. Literature review is followed by a qualitative research where expert information on the research topic is collected. Judgmental sampling is used to identify experts’ views where in-depth semi-structured interviews are conducted with 12 hotel managers in Izmir city. The soft innovation hotel application areas taken into consideration are: lobby and reception, rooms, restaurant, bar and ballroom areas, meeting and congress halls, SPA and pools, gardens and landscape and other exterior hotel architecture.

The findings of the research reveal the sample hotel managers’ views as all the soft innovation applications are important for all city hotels regardless of their category, meaning that soft innovation may lead to better marketing results. Thus, according to hotel managers, soft innovation offerings have a potential for better customer satisfaction as positive feedback. However, the vitality degree among components changes according to the hotel’s category. For boutique hotels the most important component is found to be the decoration of the hotel, whereas for 4 stars hotels it is light and for 5 stars hotels it is scent.

The results of this study give relatively limited information because only managers’ point of view are shown. In the research, customers’ perceptions on soft innovation based interviews with the top management of the hotels studied takes place, indicating which may not be the case to reflect the real perception of customers. Therefore, for further researches, it is recommended for the other researches to take into consideration of customers’ point of views as well. Also, time limitation, sample size and application of only qualitative research may be stated as the limitations for this study. Quantitative research applies to customers on the same topic and problem statement is recommended for further studies related to city hotels’ soft innovation applications.

Motivation of this study is to understand how soft innovation can change hotels’ atmosphere and make it more attractive from the managers’ perceptions. According to hotel managers’ views, soft innovation applications may lead to higher customer satisfaction, but the level of investment among the components may change according to the city hotel’s category. Research implications indicate that hotel managers may optimize the effectiveness of their soft innovation efforts by taking into consideration their hotel type, application areas and innovation category as decoration, color, scent, sound and light. According to hotel managers, decoration-related soft innovation is more important to boutique hotels, lighting-related soft innovation is an effective investment for 4 stars hotels and scent-related soft innovation is a suitable investment for 5 stars hotels.

The originality of the study lies in the analysis of the components of soft innovation as a means for effective city hotel marketing and innovative management applications. Though it is a very suitable industry for implementation, improvement and development, there are limited studies on soft innovation applications in the hotel industry.

In this paper, the authors examine the association between the amount of continuing professional education (CPE) hours per staff and audit quality in terms of discretionary accruals and audit opinion.

Several methodologies are adopted to test the hypotheses, including the ordinary least square (OLS) and logistic regression (Logistic). The authors also employ instrument variables regression with two least square (IVREG with 2SLS) and instrument variables probit model (IVProbit) to address the possible endogeneity and strengthen the validity of the main estimation results.

The main results show that there is a positive and significant relationship between CPE hours per staff and audit quality. As the authors grouped CPE into four areas (finance, auditing and accounting, tax, law and regulations and others) the results are more robust for the sub-sample “accounting and audit” and “others”. Moreover, the findings of this study suggest that CPE hours per staff do not affect audit quality significantly for Big4 audit firms compared to non-Big4 firms.

The sample size of the present study is quite small because the transparency reports of the audit firms in Turkey have been available since 2013 and the authors could not reach some auditor demographics at the individual level and some attributes at the audit firm level. Besides, some alternative audit quality measures, such as audit effort, audit fees are not employed because they are not disclosed.

This study contributes to the audit literature using Turkish audit firms. The authors believe that the setting of Turkey may yield interesting results because of the data it provides.

The purpose of this paper is to empirically analyze volatility properties of the house price returns of Turkey and Istanbul, Ankara and Izmir provinces over the period of July 2007-June 2014.

The paper uses conditional variance models, namely, ARCH, GARCH and E-GARCH. As the supportive approach for the discussions, we also use correlation analysis and qualitative inputs.

Empirical findings suggest several points. First, city/country-level house price return volatility series display volatility clustering pattern and therefore volatilities in house price returns are time varying. Second, it seems that there were high (excess) and stable volatility periods during observation term. Third, a significant economic event may change country/city-level volatilities. In this context, the biggest and relatively persistent shock was the lagged negative shocks of global financial crisis. More importantly, short-lived political/economic shocks have not significant impacts on house price return volatilities in Turkey, Istanbul, Ankara and Izmir. Fourth, however, house price return volatilities differ across geographic areas, volatility series may show some co-movement pattern. Fifth, volatility comparison across cities reveal that Izmir shows more excess volatility cases, Ankara recorded the highest volatility point and Istanbul and national series show lower and insignificant volatilities.

The study uses maximum available data and focuses on some house price return volatility patterns. The first implication of the findings is that micro/macro dimensions of house price return volatilities should be carefully analyzed to forecast upside/downside risks of house price returns. Second, defined volatility clustering pattern implies that rate of return of housing investment may show specific patterns in some periods and volatile periods may result in some large losses in the returns. Third, model results generally suggest that however data constraint is a major problem, market participants should analyze regional idiosyncrasies during their decision-making in housing portfolio management. Fourth, because house prices are not sensitive to relatively less structural shocks, housing may represent long-term investment instrument if it provides satisfactory hedging from inflation.

The evidences and implications would be useful for housing market participants aiming to manage/use externalities of housing price movements. From a practical contribution perspective, the study provides a tool that will allow measuring first time of the return volatility patterns of house prices in Turkey and her three biggest provinces. Local level analysis for Istanbul, Ankara and Izmir provinces, as the globally fastest growing cities, would be found specifically interesting by international researchers and practitioner.