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Drawing on evidence from ten towns (across England, Wales and Northern Ireland) participating in the High Street UK 2020 (HSUK2020) project, the purpose of this paper is to reveal how local stakeholders involved in place management respond to high street decline through a strategy of repositioning.

This paper identifies the challenges faced by the towns considering repositioning, and highlights examples of good practice of relevance to the practitioners. First, it outlines the perspectives on repositioning from the academic research and theory, before drawing on evidence from across ten UK towns that participated in the HSUK2020 project, to reveal how repositioning involves more than just taking a snapshot profile of a place.

The research revealed major challenges faced by local stakeholders in clearly identifying and communicating their market position, in particular, the maintenance of up-to-date information on catchments was lacking at all the locations. Despite having local knowledge and some data, stakeholders still did not possess a clear (or shared) understanding of the identity or function of their towns. This evidence reflects the complexity of analysing and understanding repositioning and developing coherent strategies.

Knowledge exchange between stakeholders involved in place management can help inform the identification of new strategic objectives, appropriate interventions and project planning and delivery. Where resources are limited, particularly in smaller towns and settlements, the research demonstrates the significance of collecting and sharing data and analysis with other stakeholders, because this can generate positive outcomes for all.

By offering empirical evidence based on the experience of local practitioners, this paper provides valuable insight into how town centre stakeholders collect, interpret and analyse data, revealing the challenges, opportunities and practicalities involved in developing and implementing repositioning strategies.

The purpose of this paper is to figure out in which way a hinterland-based inland depot model can help a shipping company in solving the empty container problem at a regional level. The repositioning of empty containers is a very expensive operation that does not generate profits. Consequently, it is very important to provide an efficient empty container management.

In this paper, the empty container problem is discussed at a regional repositioning level. For solving this problem, a mixed-integer linear optimization model is developed and validated by using the German hinterland as a case.

The findings show that the hinterland-based solution is able to reduce the total system costs by 40 per cent. In addition, total of truck kilometres could be reduced by more than 30 per cent too.

This research is based on German data only.

This paper closes the gap in empty container repositioning research by looking at the hinterland dimension from a single shipping company point of view.

This paper examines the possible cooperation options in terms of empty container repositioning across alliances for shipping lines based in the Greater China Region (China, Taiwan and Hong Kong SAR), after the three global shipping alliances reformed in April 2017.

This paper offers a comprehensive review to the latest shipping alliances and introduces a new cooperative dimension among shipping lines based in the Greater China Region which are member of different shipping alliances.

Cooperation among shipping lines in the Greater China Region in terms of empty container handling is possible in terms of resource sharing among shipping lines across alliances that fosters mega shipping line formation in the future.

Shipping lines should review their current empty container repositioning strategies and explore cooperation among non-alliance members having headquarters in proximity for quick responsiveness in empty container repositioning plan and execution.

This is a research directly analyzing the empty repositioning plan of the major shipping lines and their major service routes, fleet and containers.

This teaching case aims to encourage reflection on the formulation of the strategic repositioning of an automotive dealership.

Built on the teaching case method, it portrays the situation of the Premium Motors automotive dealership in the face of a strategic repositioning. Management and the board discuss ways to minimize the impact of the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic on sales figures. The situation presents the possibility of entering a new product segment.

How to make consumers correctly understand the new positioning? The case is structured to enable reflection and teaching of marketing strategies, with each student having the possibility of putting themselves in the role of company managers. The environment and trajectory are also portrayed, broadening the perception of the studied company and providing devices for solving the emerging problems of the case.

The case becomes a tool to promote knowledge, from the implementation to the management of strategic repositioning. Thus, the teaching notes offer directions on how professors can use the teaching case with their undergraduate and graduate students in disciplines related to strategy and marketing.

The purpose of this paper is to document the results and the impact of the ESRC-funded High Street UK 2020 (HSUK2020), a project designed to take the existing academic knowledge relating to retail and high street change directly to UK High Streets, to improve local decision-making and, ultimately, their vitality and viability.

Through a systematic literature review, and by following the tenets of engaged scholarship, the authors identified 201 factors that influence the vitality and viability of town centres. Through the consensus-building Delphi technique, a panel of 20 retail experts identified the top 25 priorities for action.

Taking a place management approach led to the development of a more strategic framework for regeneration, which consisted of repositioning, reinventing, rebranding and restructuring strategies (4R’s of regeneration). Collaboration with the project towns resulted in identification of the strategy area that would add the most value, and the impact of the 4R’s and the top 25 priorities is demonstrated via numerous town examples.

Knowledge exchange projects, such as High Street UK2020, have an important contribution to make, not by developing even more theory that is unlikely to get utilised, instead their contribution is to bring existing theory into practical use.

This paper aims to conduct a review on cruise shipping and the cruise shipping industry. The current trends are analyzed for the industry, showing that this industry is still young and has great potential to boom. Meanwhile, the Asia market is the fastest growth region among the global, to which increasing cruise ships are repositioned by major cruise lines. However, for such a promising industry, the literature review on some state-of-the-art research works suggests that the research works that have been conducted for the cruise shipping are quite limited, and the majority of the works belongs to empirical and descriptive studies, which does not provide optimization-based quantitative analysis on some operation planning problems.

This paper conducts a review on cruise shipping and the cruise shipping industry.

In reality, there are some important operation planning problems faced by cruise lines or cruise ships, and four of them are addressed in this paper in response to the fast growing trend. The addressed operation planning problems are cruise fleet management, cruise ship deployment, cruise itinerary design and cruise service planning.

The importance and the attention for the research on the problems are also elaborated in the paper.

Recent studies on commuter parking in an age of fully autonomous vehicles (FAVs) suggest, that the number of parking spaces close to the workplace demanded by commuters will decline because of the capability of FAVs to return home, to seek out (free) parking elsewhere or just cruise. This would be good news because, as of today, parking is one of the largest consumers of urban land and is associated with substantial costs to society. None of the studies, however, is concerned with the special case of employer-provided parking, although workplace parking is a widespread phenomenon and, in many instances, the dominant form of commuter parking. The purpose of this paper is to analyze whether commuter parking will decline with the advent of self-driving cars when parking is provided by the employer.

This study looks at commuter parking from the perspective of both the employer and the employee because in the case of employer-provided parking, the firm’s decision to offer a parking space and the incentive of employees to accept that offer are closely interrelated because of the fringe benefit character of workplace parking. This study develops an economic equilibrium model that explicitly maps the employer–employee relationship, considering the treatment of parking provision and parking policy in the income tax code and accounting for adverse effects from commuting, parking and public transit. This study determines the market level of employer-provided parking in the absence and presence of FAVs and identifies the factors that drive the difference. This study then approximates the magnitude of each factor, relying on recent (first) empirical evidence on the impacts of FAVs.

This paper’s analysis suggests that as long as distortive (tax) policy favors employer-provided parking, FAVs are no guarantee to end up with less commuter parking.

This study’s findings imply that in a world of self-driving cars, policy intervention related to work commuting (e.g. fringe benefit taxation or transport pricing) might be even more warranted than today.

Neo-liberal “reform” has in many countries shifted services across the boundary between the public and private sector. This policy re-opens the question of what structural and managerial differences, if any, differences of ownership make to healthcare providers. The purpose of this paper is to examine the connections between ownership, organisational structure and managerial regime within an elaboration of Donabedian’s reasoning about organisational structures. Using new data from England, it considers: how do the internal managerial regimes of differently owned healthcare providers differ, or not? In what respects did any such differences arise from differences in ownership or for other reasons?

An observational systematic qualitative comparison of differently owned providers was the strongest feasible research design. The authors systematically compared a maximum variety (by ownership) sample of community health services; out-of-hours primary care; and hospital planned orthopaedics and ophthalmology providers (n=12 cases). The framework of comparison was the ownership theory mentioned above.

The connection between ownership (on the one hand) and organisation structures and managerial regimes (on the other) differed at different organisational levels. Top-level governance structures diverged by organisational ownership and objectives among the case-study organisations. All the case-study organisations irrespective of ownership had hierarchical, bureaucratic structures and managerial regimes for coordinating everyday service production, but to differing extents. In doctor-owned organisations, the doctors’, but not other occupations’, work was controlled and coordinated in a more-or-less democratic, self-governing ways.

This study was empirically limited to just one sector in one country, although within that sector the case-study organisations were typical of their kinds. It focussed on formal structures, omitting to varying extents other technologies of power and the differences in care processes and patient experiences within differently owned organisations.

Type of ownership does appear, overall, to make a difference to at least some important aspects of an organisation’s governance structures and managerial regime. For the broader field of health organisational research, these findings highlight the importance of the owners’ agency in explaining organisational change. The findings also call into question the practice of copying managerial techniques (and “fads”) across the public–private boundary.

Ownership does make important differences to healthcare providers’ top-level governance structures and accountabilities and to work coordination activity, but with different patterns at different organisational levels. These findings have implications for understanding the legitimacy, governance and accountability of healthcare organisations, the distribution and use power within them, and system-wide policy interventions, for instance to improve care coordination and for the correspondingly required foci of healthcare organisational research.