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1 – 10 of 17Christoph Sommer and Ilse Helbrecht
The purpose of this paper is to clarify the administrative problematisations of conflict-prone urban tourism (e.g. noise) as political processes predetermining the future of city…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to clarify the administrative problematisations of conflict-prone urban tourism (e.g. noise) as political processes predetermining the future of city tourism. It is shaped by today’s administrative ways of knowing increasing visitor pressure as an issue for urban (tourism) development.
Design/methodology/approach
The problematisation of conflictive urban tourism in Berlin is used as case study and lens to analyse how administrative bodies see conflictive tourism like a tourist city. Drawing on Mariana Valverde’s idea of Seeing Like a City (2011), the paper demonstrates how disparate governmental bodies see and reduce the complexity of conflicts resulting from tourism in order to handle it. The authors use policy documents as the basis for the analysis.
Findings
The paper provides empirical insights about how political knowledge on urban tourism conflicts is produced in Berlin. The marginalisation of these conflicts on the federal state level seemingly aces out the calls for action on the borough level (Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg). According to these disparate modes of problematisation, older and younger governmental gazes on conflictive tourism and its future relevance interrelate in contingent combination.
Originality/value
This paper fills a gap in the existing urban tourism literature, by focussing on the definition of policy problems by governmental bodies as powerfully linked to the availability of solutions.
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Network analysis is a well consolidated research area in several disciplines. Within management and organizational studies, network scholars consolidated a set of research…
Abstract
Purpose
Network analysis is a well consolidated research area in several disciplines. Within management and organizational studies, network scholars consolidated a set of research practices that allowed ease of data collection, high inter case comparability, establishment of nomological laws and commitment to social capital motivation. This paper aims to elicit the criticism it has received and highlight the unsettled lacunae.
Design/methodology/approach
This paper sheds light on Network Analysis’s breakthroughs, while showing how its scholars innovated by responding to critics, and identifying outstanding debates.
Findings
The paper identifies and discusses three streams of criticism that are still outstanding: the role of human agency, the meaning of social ties and the treatment of temporality.
Originality/value
This paper brings to fore current debates within the Network Analysis community, highlighting areas where future studies might contribute.
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Susan Danissa Calderón Urbina, Antonios Stamatogiannakis and Dilney Goncalves
This study aims to introduce the duration of uniqueness, an important dimension of unique products. It studies how choices between products with long versus short duration of…
Abstract
Purpose
This study aims to introduce the duration of uniqueness, an important dimension of unique products. It studies how choices between products with long versus short duration of uniqueness are influenced by the interaction between pressure and consumers’ need for uniqueness (NFU).
Design/methodology/approach
This research uses a multi-method study approach. A pilot field-study tested the novelty and importance of the research by asking retail professionals to predict the choice of a hypothetical consumer. A retrospective study assessed the importance of duration of uniqueness in unique product choices, by asking consumers about a real and recent unique product purchase. Four additional experimental studies directly tested hypotheses by manipulating pressure and by measuring or manipulating uniqueness motivations.
Findings
The pilot field-study showed the novelty and relevance of this research for professionals. Study 1 revealed that, retrospectively, uniqueness duration was considered important for the choice of unique products, by high-NFU consumers under pressure. Studies 2 and 3 demonstrated that pressure increases the tendency of high-NFU, but not low-NFU, consumers to choose products with long over short uniqueness duration. Study 4 provided initial evidence for the process behind the effect. Study 5 showed that considerations of uniqueness duration when choosing mediated the effects.
Research limitations/implications
The results of the pilot field-study and retrospective study might be affected by recall bias or lay theories. The findings need to be replicated with other sources of pressure and uniqueness. This calls for further research.
Practical implications
Results are important for companies marketing unique products and they suggest that pressure-based marketing appeals can be used strategically to increase sales of products with long uniqueness duration but decrease sales of products with short uniqueness duration. Although the research provides these guidelines, managers should consider the ethical implications of pressure strategies.
Originality/value
This is the first attempt to empirically investigate the duration of uniqueness. Although extant research has examined choices between products with different degrees of uniqueness, this research studies choice of products with similar degrees of uniqueness, but different uniqueness duration. Thus, this research adds to the scarce literature studying the duration of symbolic benefits. Moreover, although pressure and NFU frequently co-exist in uniqueness consumption settings, this study is the first to study their joint effects.
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Response to suggestion that EU-wide cash payment limits would assist in the control of terrorism finance and money laundering.
Abstract
Purpose
Response to suggestion that EU-wide cash payment limits would assist in the control of terrorism finance and money laundering.
Design/methodology/approach
Desk review and interviews
Findings
The inception impact assessment (IIA) is ill-conceived, not grounded on firm empirical evidence and harmful to both crime control and the legitimate interests and rights of the EU citizens. The action under discussion is presented as a measure against terrorism finance, serious crime and tax evasion. The problem is that these criminal acts correspond to very different methods, volumes, perpetrators, causes and control challenges. Cash payment limitations (CPLs) are nowhere near a panacea that can address all of them and cannot make any of them go away magically. Even when each of these crime challenges are considered on their own, the empirical linkage of CPLs to effective controls is not there. The evidence from EU countries with CPLs in place shows higher levels of informal economy, corruption, tax evasion and terrorism risks than those without. There is substantial evidence of non-cash, very serious and organized crime, while the amounts needed and used by terrorists in Europe are usually very small in cash transactions, way below the thresholds under consideration. In fact, determined offenders will shift to other methods and become more sophisticated, posing new problems to controllers. Displacement and incentives for better-organized crime may well be the main products of such measures.
Originality/value
It counters the argument that the cash payment limits can help reduce serious crime, while pointing to several adverse consequences on legitimate interests and human rights.
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Magnus Söderlund and Eeva-Liisa Oikarinen
Firms have begun to introduce virtual agents (VAs) in service encounters, both in online and offline environments. Such VAs typically resemble human frontline employees in several…
Abstract
Purpose
Firms have begun to introduce virtual agents (VAs) in service encounters, both in online and offline environments. Such VAs typically resemble human frontline employees in several ways (e.g. the VAs may have a gender and a name), which indicates the presence of an assumption by VA designers – and by firms that employ them – that VA humanness is a positively charged characteristic. This study aims to address this assumption by examining antecedents to perceived humanness in terms of attribution of agency, emotionality and morality, and the impact of perceived humanness on customer satisfaction.
Design/methodology/approach
A questionnaire was distributed online to participants who had been interacting with existing VAs, and they were asked to focus on one of them for this study. The questionnaire comprised measures of antecedents to perceived humanness of VAs, perceived humanness per se and customer satisfaction. A structural equation modeling approach was used to assess associations between the variables.
Findings
Attributions of agency, emotionality and morality to VAs contributed positively to the perceived humanness of the VAs, and perceived humanness was positively associated with customer satisfaction.
Research limitations/implications
Additional humanness capabilities should be explored in further research.
Practical implications
Firms using VAs in service encounters should make attempts to maximize perceived VA humanness, and this study shows that it may be beneficial if such attempts comprise signals that VAs have agency, emotionality and morality.
Originality/value
By examining VAs in terms of a set of fundamental human capabilities, the present study contributes to existing research on human–VA service encounters, which to date has focused on more superficial VA characteristics (such as if the VA has a face and gender).
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Muhammad Sholihin, Nurus Shalihin and Apria Putra
The article examines Sheikh Ahmad Khatib Al-Minangkabauwi's initial concept of paper money, which in the early 20th century wrote Risala Raf'u Al-Iltibas.
Abstract
Purpose
The article examines Sheikh Ahmad Khatib Al-Minangkabauwi's initial concept of paper money, which in the early 20th century wrote Risala Raf'u Al-Iltibas.
Design/methodology/approach
This paper uses a qualitative approach based on the critical extraction analysis that can reveal a set of concepts related to the thoughts of Sheikh Ahmad Khatib Al-Minangkabauwi on paper money.
Findings
Through an attentive reading of Sheikh Ahmad Khatib Al-Minangkabawi, the authors can formulate several significant results: First, Ahmad Khatib Al-Minangkabawi applies two methods in studying critically on paper money, namely, the comparative law method and qiyas. Second, Ahmad Khatib believes that paper money has similarities with dinars and dirhams, namely its nominal value function. It is just that the existence of these values is different. Briefly, there are set law consequences for those who used paper money in economic activities, i.e. payment of zakāt on paper money applies when used as business capital.
Research limitations/implications
Sheikh Ahmad Khatib Al-Minangkabawi's work related to paper money is written heavily from the perspective of fiqh. Briefly, it is challenging to describe legal reasoning from work. As a result, articles are also thicker with fiqh analysis.
Practical implications
Sheikh Ahmad Khatib Al-Minangkabawi's view regarding paper money becomes the foundation for the theory of the value of money in Islam. However, it is rarely disclosed. In this regard, this paper can serve as the foundation of the value for money offered by scholars from Indonesia in the early 20th century.
Social implications
Money is not a commodity. Still, it must be positioned as capital to be productive. It finally becomes why trade is compelling and becomes the most practical reason for paying out zakāt.
Originality/value
It is not easy finding out articles that attempt to reveal the concept of classical ulemas or clerics from Indonesia relating to paper money. This article manages to identify that, and at the same time, becomes a novelty.
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Andreja Siliunas, Mario L. Small and Joseph Wallerstein
Today, low-income people seeking resources from the federal government must often work through non-profit organizations. The purpose of this paper is to examine the constraints…
Abstract
Purpose
Today, low-income people seeking resources from the federal government must often work through non-profit organizations. The purpose of this paper is to examine the constraints that the poor must face today to secure resources through non-profit organizations.
Design/methodology/approach
This is a conceptual paper. The authors review cases of non-profit organizations providing federally supported resources to the poor across multiple sectors.
Findings
The authors find that to accept government contracts serving the poor, nonprofit organizations must often engage in one or several practices: reject clients normally consistent with their mission, select clients based on likely outcomes, ignore problems in clients’ lives relevant to their predicament, or undermine client progress to manage funding requirements. To secure government-supported resources from nonprofits, the poor must often acquiesce to intrusions into one or more of the following: their privacy (disclosing sensitive information), their self-protection (renouncing legal rights), their identity (avowing a particular self-understanding) or their self-mastery (relinquishing authority over daily routines).
Originality/value
The authors show that the nonprofits’ dual role as brokers, both liaisons transferring resources and representatives of the state, can complicate their relation to their clients and the predicament of the poor themselves; the authors suggest that two larger trends, toward increasing administrative accountability and demonstrating deservingness, are having both intended and unintended consequences for the ability of low-income individuals to gain access to publicly funded resources.
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The purpose of this paper is to explore how the fragmentation of the fashion system can be conceptually explained by drawing on Peter Sloterdijk’s theory of spheres.
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to explore how the fragmentation of the fashion system can be conceptually explained by drawing on Peter Sloterdijk’s theory of spheres.
Design/methodology/approach
By conceptually discussing the changing nature of the fashion system and the institutional pressures exerted on fashion systems as a result of digital technology, the fundamental conceptual underpinnings of the theory of spheres are applied to these developments in order to explain the character of the contemporary organization of fashion.
Findings
Based on the conceptual analysis, this paper illustrates how a sphereological perspective to fashion provides a conceptual approach to explain the transformation and fragmentation of fashion systems.
Originality/value
This paper contributes to the field of fashion marketing and management by demonstrating how the concept of fashion spheres can explain social arrangements going beyond the boundaries of fashion systems and the associated implications that this brings to bear on the role of fashion.
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Zixin Tang, Andong Lu and Yue Yang
The purpose of this paper is to explore the possibility that design research involving a series of actions is an appropriate approach to memory place-making. It tries to explore…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to explore the possibility that design research involving a series of actions is an appropriate approach to memory place-making. It tries to explore how memory expressed in public space and how memory place becomes an agency system and re-organize fragments of memory in practice specifically.
Design/methodology/approach
Taking the memory project of Nanjing Yangtze River Bridge (NYRB) as an example of design research and re-establishing new cognitions of contemporary memory place-making through the elaboration and analysis of the design process of a series of teaching, exhibition and public participatory activities.
Findings
Design research is oriented towards multi-discipline campaigns of agency and actions and acts as thinking patterns and integration mechanisms, so that the memory place-making can be incorporated into the scope of planning and design. This paper suggests that contemporary memory place-making should pay more attention to the spiritual experience of individual participation and the identity relations behind these emotional memories. On one hand, social bonds are established between people and have involved more public participation. On the other hand, multiple resources are integrated through a series of practical activities and design research, and the memory place becomes a catalyst for individual memory, emotions and communication thus redefining memory place-making.
Social implications
NYRB is a controversial mid-20th century national monument. In the social context of contemporary China, design research has helped to redefine and shape this national icon into a contemporary memory place where people can share memories of the bridge.
Originality/value
It is project-based in the sense of adding the dimension of memory to the practice of place-making through design research.
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