Search results

In this paper, the authors present an empirical framework that incorporates different factors of the impact of COVID-19 on small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in La Rioja, Spain, in relation to the value chain, gender and family business and allows the evaluation of these impacts on the SMEs' outcomes.

The authors conduct exploratory research based on phone interviews with 329 business managers from SMEs in La Rioja (Spain), from June 1 to June 30 2021, using ordinary least squares linear regression and matching procedures to test the study hypotheses.

The results show that the impact of COVID-19 related to primary activities in adding value, such as inbound logistics, operations and marketing, have a positive influence on innovation outcomes in SMEs, as do female managers. Family SMEs present poorer innovation outcomes.

At the organizational level, this paper may be of interest to management, and at the national and regional levels to policymakers, since it could help to develop policies that support SMEs' sourcing, operations and marketing in order to prepare for potential value chain disruptions. Additionally, this research may help decision-makers to foster and promote innovation in SMEs as a way of ensuring their resilience.

In this paper, the authors provide novel evidence about the effect of COVID-19 in SMEs. Moreover, it has been shown that the COVID-19 pandemic has triggered the redefinition of supply chains at the organizational level.

This paper aims to review the history of Roldós y Compañía, one of the oldest advertising agencies in the world and the oldest currently operating. This research aims to highlight the importance of this agency and its founder, Rafael Roldós Viñolas – the first documented advertising agent in Spain to this day – in shaping the emerging Spanish advertising industry at the end of the 19th century.

The methodology used in this paper is based on a review of period and contemporary literature, as well as on newspaper sources and documents from the private archive of Roldós, S.A.

In its early years, the agency’s participation in two of the most significant events for the modernization of the city of Barcelona, the Universal Exhibition of 1888 and the International Exhibition of 1929; as well as the ideation and implementation of several urban projects with the aim of finding new formulas and advertising media are factors that make it one of the most important in the country. In 1929, the alliance Roldós-Tiroleses, S.A. de Publicidad, the first great merger of advertising agencies in Spain, which lasted three years, was led. The outbreak of the Civil War and the subsequent post-war period marked a few years of business irregularities and advertising silences that gave instability to its activity. During the last third of the 20th century, the agency was immersed in the generalized advertising euphoria around the world. With the arrival of North American agencies in Barcelona and the consequent business movements, Roldós, S.A. specializes in the processing of advertisements and media planning. The 21st century began with important changes in the media planning sector, and the agency was forced to restructure its services and organizational structure. In 2022, it celebrates 150 years of uninterrupted activity, recognized by the country’s business sector.

This research aims to internationalize the history of the Roldós y Compañía agency, so that it can be studied together with other names of Anglo-Saxon advertising pioneers who were contemporaries of Rafael Roldós.

Scientific research on the history of advertising agencies, especially in Spain, is scarce, so this paper aims to help fill this gap.

This paper aims to analyse residents’ perceptions of tourism growth in Porto prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, aiming to determine the most appropriate strategies to mitigate negative tourism impacts. Studies on resident perceptions of tourism impacts are still scarce, particularly the ones addressing the topic in the context of Portuguese urban tourism areas.

Data was collected through an online survey, focusing on three categories of impacts: (i) economic, (ii) sociocultural (iii) and spatial-environmental, and the respective mitigation strategies, analysed from the perspective of Porto’s residents. Descriptive and bivariate statistics – T-test and Eta correlation – were used to analyse the collected data.

Respondents who live in the city centre experience specific tourism impacts more negatively, when compared to those living outside the inner-city area. Furthermore, no strong correlation is found between the said impacts and the respective mitigation strategies. However, creating awareness among tourists about acceptable behaviour in shared spaces is the strategy that stands out, as it has a medium correlation with all three impact categories. Most impact-strategy associations are weak, meaning that the defined strategies are not the most case-appropriate, which is something that policymakers should address.

To the best of the author’s/authors’ knowledge, this is the first study to adopt this approach in tackling the negative impacts of rapid tourism growth in Porto.

This research proposes to organise and distil this massive amount of data, making it easier to understand. Using data mining, machine learning techniques and visual approaches, researchers and managers can extract valuable insights (on guests' preferences) and convert them into strategic thinking based on exploration and predictive analysis. Consequently, this research aims to assist hotel managers in making informed decisions, thus improving the overall guest experience and increasing competitiveness.

This research employs natural language processing techniques, data visualisation proposals and machine learning methodologies to analyse unstructured guest service experience content. In particular, this research (1) applies data mining to evaluate the role and significance of critical terms and semantic structures in hotel assessments; (2) identifies salient tokens to depict guests' narratives based on term frequency and the information quantity they convey; and (3) tackles the challenge of managing extensive document repositories through automated identification of latent topics in reviews by using machine learning methods for semantic grouping and pattern visualisation.

This study’s findings (1) aim to identify critical features and topics that guests highlight during their hotel stays, (2) visually explore the relationships between these features and differences among diverse types of travellers through online hotel reviews and (3) determine predictive power. Their implications are crucial for the hospitality domain, as they provide real-time insights into guests' perceptions and business performance and are essential for making informed decisions and staying competitive.

This research seeks to minimise the cognitive processing costs of the enormous amount of content published by the user through a better organisation of hotel service reviews and their visualisation. Likewise, this research aims to propose a methodology and method available to tourism organisations to obtain truly useable knowledge in the design of the hotel offer and its value propositions.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the unexplored part of the historical evolution of travel agencies in Spain, from the end of the 20th century to the 21st century. When examining promotion strategies, the study focuses on the change in marketing and public relations strategies based on the incorporation of information and communication technologies and, in particular, the use of the internet.

This study draws on a qualitative analysis of the different strategies used by traditional agencies and online agencies in Spain from the mid-19th century to the present. This analysis shows how traditional communication strategies survived at the beginning of the 21st century, together with other more innovative ones, while some disappeared, being eliminated by the new online travel agencies, which created a particular conception of marketing and communication. This paper is divided into the following parts: the introduction; the beginnings of travel agency promotion in the 20th century; the evolution of promotion in travel agencies since the late 20th century; communication innovation at the beginning of the 21st century; online travel agencies; and conclusions.

This study shows that although online agencies did not manage to position themselves with a large turnover, they generated advantages and sharpened their imagination to create a new, more economical advertising model, eliminating the costs of public relations and advertising campaigns. In addition, they allowed clients to have greater independence when making their reservations, while enabling them to monitor the tastes of potential and real clients and add blogs so that consumers could express their degree of satisfaction with the product or services provided by the agency.

The focus of attention is the travel agency sector in Spain and, more specifically, communication. Studies on travel agencies and their marketing have been very scarce and partial, impeding professionals in the tourism sector from having a broad vision to direct their promotional and public relations actions. The originality of this article lies in its making a comparison between two different visions of tourism marketing and, specifically, of travel agencies, that is, the traditional vision and the innovative one. It thus helps all professionals in the sector to value and improve their marketing and communication strategies.

This study aims to analyze the entrepreneurial intention (EI) of Colombian researchers using machine learning (ML) techniques, considering their academic activity, contexts and social norms (SN).

Unsupervised classification techniques were applied, including principal component analysis, hierarchical clustering with the Ward method and a logistic model to evaluate the classification. This was done to group researchers according to their characteristics and EI.

The methodology used allowed the identification of three groups of academics with distinct characteristics, of which two showed a high presence of EI. The results indicate that EI is influenced by the connection with the private sector (consulting, intellectual property and applied research) and by the lack of institutional support from universities. Regarding SN, only the preference for entrepreneurial activity over being an employee and the social appreciation of entrepreneurial dedication were identified as predictors of EI.

The use of ML techniques to study the EI of researchers is uncommon. This study highlights the ability of the methodology used to identify differences between two groups of academics with similar characteristics but different levels of EI. One group was identified that, despite rejecting values associated with entrepreneurs, has a high predisposition to develop a career as an entrepreneur. This provides valuable information for designing policies that promote EI among Colombian researchers.

The purpose of the article is to show the regime of truth in the institutional commissions that have the objective of restoring history by establishing a democratic, equitable, comprehensive, inclusive and fair criterion against the attempts of re-victimization and suppression of memory that Western political and cultural traditions have installed through their mechanisms of power.

Based on the analysis of the cases of Inés Fernández Ortega and Valentina Rosendo Cantú, they establish the material conditions from which prejudices and hegemonic stereotypes are intertwined to reproduce serious violations of human rights in democratic political and epistemic frameworks. The colonial function of the truth commissions in Mexico is analyzed, which are presented as mechanisms for social development, political and colonial reproduction of liberal democracy.

The qualitative results allow considering the way in which the different truth commissions in Mexico have been strongly linked to epistemic mechanisms in which truth and justice favor the reproduction of established relationships based on race, social class and gender. Especially in the so-called democratic transition, violence, truth and justice come together to highlight power relations in situations that have been disavowed by the intelligentsia.

The limitations of the research are found in the historical configuration of the truth commissions in Mexico. The data, references and assessments are crossed by the initial function of the truth commissions and the establishment of apparatuses and mechanisms based on transitional justice. Based on this, it can be considered a methodological oversight to shift the analysis of truth commissions toward a critical assessment of the truth as a regime of government and hegemonic and colonization criteria from two very specific cases.

The originality of the work is found in the critical discernment of truth as a political category and the coloniality of power.

This research aims at arriving at a broad scope of the lessons learnt after two years of the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic outbreak by analysing the catalyst and inhibiting factors within three aspects of the tourism sector: destination crisis management, tourist behaviour and tourism industry trends.

The methodology of this paper involves semi-structured interviews with high-ranking European travel agents as the agents represent the intermediates between the tourism offer and demand.

Data obtained from travel agents disclosed the factors that catalysed and inhibited the destination, the behaviour of tourists and the tourism industry trends. By contrasting data with previous literature, constructing an overview of the positive and negative outcomes of the pandemic in the tourism sector is possible.

Governments, destination marketing and management organisations and tourism and hospitality organisations could learn from the lessons of COVID-19 outbreak to cope better with future disruptive events affecting the tourism industry.

The paper is novel as it is the first overview that attempts to synthesise the lessons from the COVID-19 pandemic in the tourism sector by analysing tourism sector's three dimensions: the destination, the tourists and the industry.

This study aims to examine the asymmetric effects of average temperature (TP) and rainfall (RF) on the Moroccan food security, measured by the food production index (FPI), using annual data from 1961 to 2020.

The study uses the Climate Change and Food Security Framework (CCFS) developed by the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and employs the nonlinear auto-regressive distributed lag (NARDL) model and various econometric techniques to show the effects of climate variability in the short and long-term. It also examines if the impacts on Moroccan food security are asymmetric by analyzing the positive and negative partial sums of mean temperature and rainfall.

The study shows that RF has a long-term relationship with FPI, with increased RF leading to increased FPI and decreased RF leading to decreased FPI. FPI responds more strongly and persistently to a positive shock in RF than to an adverse shock. The study also identifies an asymmetric relationship between FPI and RF, with increased TP enhancing food output in the long run and a decrease reducing food production in the long run.

The current study could have some limitations. For instance, there are several other non-climate factors that might potentially impact food security. In particular, CO2 emissions which from the literature is a key variable that represent climate change impact on food security, was not included. The present research has not included those factors mainly because adding more variables to the model reduces the degree of freedom available to estimate the parameters, resulting in inaccurate results.

This paper contributes to the food security literature by utilizing the latest asymmetry methodology to decompose climate changes into their positive and negative trends and examining the contrasting impacts food production.

Cuenca, a World Heritage City, faces urban expansion as residents move to the outskirts, leaving the historic center abandoned and deteriorating. The challenge now is to relocate these spaces into sustainable and cohesive nodes. This research aims to identify cultural facility oversupply in the city center and understand the required usage for heritage buildings to promote a habitable, sustainable and cohesive historic center.

The study consisted of two phases. Firstly, a georeferenced spatial analysis and monthly usage frequency of each facility is proposed. Secondly, interviews explored the criteria for designating heritage buildings as cultural facilities. Additionally, a survey assessed urban habitability in three historic center parishes, measuring aspects like coverage, satisfaction and security from residents' perspectives.

The underutilization of cultural facilities demonstrates both inefficient heritage management and a lack of resident interest in cultural activities and neighborhood decision-making. Thus, ensuring collective ownership of heritage assets becomes crucial. Additionally, the municipality's approach to heritage must be reconsidered. While implementing a cultural program may seem faster and cheaper, the long-term cost-benefit of maintaining a cohesive historical center outweighs that of a dispersed city.

This paper calls for a fundamental reimagining of the concept of built heritage, emphasizing the need for a more inclusive and integrated approach that goes beyond museum and tourism-driven strategies. This perspective recognizes the importance of social, cultural and environmental sustainability in revitalizing the historic center, considering the broader context of the city and its diverse inhabitants.