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Between 1840s and 1940s, 27 occidental concessions have been created in several cities in China which represented difficult signs and memories for Chinese. Nowadays, these territories are experiencing a joint phenomenon of heritagization and tourismification which makes them experimental theaters for modern urban life and identity. Taking the former concessions of Tianjin as place study, the purpose of this study is to analyze the role of the heritage and tourism in the former concessions in city branding and more specifically the actors, approaches and products of this phenomenon.

This research draws on the comparison and analysis of two place studies in China. The authors base their analysis on semi-structured interviews in Chinese with previously identified stakeholders. In all, 20 individuals, including developers, public authority representatives, business owners, academics and conservation association members, were interviewed. This research was completed, updated and triangulated by content analysis of Web-based materials; official documents such as urban plans, guidelines and urban and tourism strategies collected during the fieldwork, as well as non-intrusive spatial observations of the concession and its various developments.

The results of this study show that the heritage in the former concessions has become an attractive tool for the city branding through tourism development, often led by the public actors with the participation of private entrepreneurs.

This study looks at the hybrid dimensions of the former concessions in China. It provides a better understanding of the co-action of heritage and tourism in the processes of territorial rehabilitation, which contributes to both the practitioners and researchers in this domain.

Presently, existing electric car sharing platforms are based on a centralized architecture which are faced with inadequate trust and pricing issues as these platforms requires an intermediary to maintain users’ data and handle transactions between participants. Therefore, this article aims to develop a decentralized peer-to-peer electric car sharing prototype framework that offers trustable and cost transparency.

This study employs a systematic review and data were collected from the literature and existing technical report documents after which content analysis is carried out to identify current problems and state-of-the-art electric car sharing. A use case scenario was then presented to preliminarily validate and show how the developed prototype framework addresses the trust-lessness in electric car sharing via distributed ledger technologies (DLTs).

Findings from this study present a use case scenario that depicts how businesses can design and implement a distributed peer-to-peer electric car sharing platforms based on IOTA technology, smart contracts and IOTA eWallet. Main findings from this study unlock the tremendous potential of DLT to foster sustainable road transportation. By employing a token-based approach this study enables electric car sharing that promotes sustainable road transportation.

Practically the developed decentralized prototype framework provides improved cost transparency and fairness guarantees as it is not based on a centralized price management system. The DLT based decentralized prototype framework aids to orchestrate the incentivize monetization and rewarding mechanisms among participants that share their electric cars enabling them to collaborate towards lessening CO₂ emissions.

The findings advocate that electric vehicle sharing has become an essential component of sustainable road transportation by increasing electric car utilization and decreasing the number of vehicles on the road.

The key novelty of the article is introducing a decentralized prototype framework to be employed to develop an electric car sharing solution without a central control or governance, which improves cost transparency. As compared to prior centralized platforms, the prototype framework employs IOTA technology smart contracts and IOTA eWallet to improve mobility related services.

While the causes of migration across a range of diverse societies have been studied in the extant literature, a systematic study encapsulating the extant literature pertaining to the push and pull factors for the phenomenon of migration has not been conducted so far. The purpose of this study is to present a gist of the push and pull factors that are responsible for migration patterns across different contexts.

Inferences from the literature review and documentary analysis show that, on the one hand, the push factors for migration entail the enforced reasons like natural causes, wars, health and the like; the pull factors are, by and large, the affirmative ones related to better job opportunities, anticipation of improved well-being, etc.

It may also be deduced that both the categories of migration causes are analyzed at the individual, group, societal as well as regional levels.

Hitherto, the migration research has focused on understanding the antecedents and consequences of migration in temporal–spatial context, but a syncretic understanding of the push and pull factors behind migration vis-à-vis smart cities is required. The present study seeks to fill this gap. Besides contributing toward the mainstream literature on migration in general, the present study also adds to the literature pertaining to the specific factors responsible for migration patterns.

The primacy of commerce in livelihood security cannot be overstated. However, in a rural context defined by involuntary socio-ecological displacement, commerce can assume a sociologically distinct character, with far-reaching implications. Based on first-hand encounters with victims of the devastating 2014 flood in Tokwe-Mukorsi, Zimbabwe, this paper analyses how the processes of “recreating” village markets in the resettlement site of Chingwizi impacted the victims’ experiences of resource provisioning and livelihood security.

Qualitative data were collected through 10 in-depth interviews, 10 key informant interviews and two focus group discussions, five years into the flood victims’ resettlement in Chingwizi. The data analysis focused on the dynamics around the recreation of village markets, and the consequences of this on the household economic standing of the resettled flood victims.

The paper reveals how the formation of village markets in Chingwizi was influenced not primarily by the ethno-commercial and ethno-economic impulses reminiscent of life in their ancestral home but mostly by new, disruptive dynamics and challenges unique to the resettlement site. The paper elucidates the constellation of factors that, together, exacerbated the flood victims’ overall socio-economic dislocation and disadvantage.

The study provides a systematic understanding of the dynamics of ethno-commerce, particularly on the evolution of village market activities and livelihoods, among Zimbabwe’s Chingwizi community over a period of five years into their resettlement. It brings to the fore, the often ignored, but significant nuances that 'village market' formation and livelihoods recreation takes in a resettlement context.

The peer review history for this article is available at: https://publons.com/publon/10.1108/IJSE-09-2023-0682

This paper aims to shed light on the spatial constraints of sex work in Greece. The objective is twofold: to illustrate the intertemporal stance of the Greek state to push sex work at the edge of both the city and the law produces sex workers as always already marginal subjects and to identify how a spatial-based understanding of sex work could help in acknowledging sex workers’ full community citizenship.

This article examines the legal geographies of sex work in modern and contemporary Greece. The author is a doctoral student in critical jurisprudence with a professional background in urban planning law, who also works voluntarily with Athens-based sex worker’s organizations. Law’s materialization within space (Bennet and Layard, 2015, p. 406), namely, the implication of law in the discursive and material production of place, is examined through archival research with primary and secondary sources, including legislations and LGBT publications such as Amfi and Kráximo from the 1980s and 1990s found in the Archives of Contemporary Social History (ASKI) in Athens. Additionally, as the author is currently conducting fieldwork with people who are working or have worked in the past in sex in Greece as a part of her PhD dissertation, the paper contains data provided by ten interlocutors to highlight their own personal experience. The researcher has used the critical oral history method, as it is committed to recording first-hand knowledge of experiences of marginalized community members who are often unheard or untold, with the additional goals of contextualizing these stories to reveal power differences and inequities (Lemley, 2017, Rickard, 2003).

The paper provides insight into how regulationism establishes the brothel – a metonymy of prostitution – as a heterotopia within the urban space. Contemporary approaches, such as LULUs and broken window policies, are used to indicate the historically marginal placement of sex work.

The interviews presented here were conducted in the summer of 2022, in the context of the author’s PhD research. Despite her six years of activist-level involvement with sex workers’ rights organizations, due to ethical constraints, only the findings of interviews conducted up to the writing of this paper are presented here, while details of private discussions with members of these organizations are omitted.

The paper examines a significant and timely matter of place making and spatial justice. Unlike earlier research on prostitution in Greece that focused on the brothel either as a heterotopia or as an undesirable land use, the novelty of this paper is that it highlights the intersections between policing, planning, public hygiene, anti-immigration policies around the regulation of the sex market. By critically discussing the implications of the de facto illegality of sex work in Greece, the study highlights the importance of including the voices of sex workers in decision-making and contributes to the debate around the decriminalization of sex work in Greece.

This paper aims to understand the main challenges connected with accountability issues across multiple layers of the metaverse, to identify whether and how any techwashing is taking place and to discuss implications for accounting research.

To develop the research, the authors refer to a critical dialogic accountability framework, operationalized in the current paper by leveraging the perspectives of accountability as virtues and as mechanisms (Bovens, 2010). The authors discuss who is accountable to whom, for what and in what manner in a relatively unregulated and unaccountable world, through the layers of virtual reality introduced by MacKenzie et al. (2013) and Llewellyn (2007). Methodologically, the study concentrates on 32 start-ups working in the metaverse selected from the Crunchbase database and relies on interviews, direct observation in the field and white paper reports analyzed by means of NVivo coding.

The findings show how metaverse creators deal with accountability as a virtue and accountability as a mechanism. Companies who operate metaverses primarily consider accountability in the virtual-physical domain, which focuses on developing the necessary internal and external architecture to enable a particular metaverse to function. Metaverse companies also emphasize the virtual-agential dimension that concentrates on onboarding, engaging with and incentivizing individuals in virtual worlds. There is an emphasis on outlining the virtues or standards that metaverse companies aspire to, but there is very little detail provided. Similarly, there are uneven and limited discussions of the mechanisms that can support accountability in most layers of a virtual world.

The analysis raises significant questions about the purpose, scope and use of metaverses, which are still a relatively unregulated and unaccountable world. The paper advances the idea that the current creators of metaverses are “techwashing” their projects, providing a utopian ideal of what their universes will look like but obfuscating the realities of their ventures in tech jargon that few people are likely to understand. Therefore, meaning and truth at all levels of the real and virtual worlds remain unaddressed, with implications to be explored in terms of legitimacy and trust of metaverses and the interests that shape them.

This paper is one of the first to address the issue of accountability in metaverses. It advances an analytical framework to guide future accounting and accountability research into virtual worlds.

Speckle noise removal in ultrasound images is one of the important tasks in biomedical-imaging applications. Many filtering -based despeckling methods are discussed in many existing works. Two-dimensional (2-D) transforms are also used enormously for the reduction of speckle noise in ultrasound medical images. In recent years, many soft computing-based intelligent techniques have been applied to noise removal and segmentation techniques. However, there is a requirement to improve the accuracy of despeckling using hybrid approaches.

The work focuses on double-bank anatomy with framelet transform combined with Gaussian filter (GF) and also consists of a fuzzy kind of clustering approach for despeckling ultrasound medical images. The presented transform efficiently rejects the speckle noise based on the gray scale relative thresholding where the directional filter group (DFB) preserves the edge information.

The proposed approach is evaluated by different performance indicators such as the mean square error (MSE), peak signal to noise ratio (PSNR) speckle suppression index (SSI), mean structural similarity and the edge preservation index (EPI) accordingly. It is found that the proposed methodology is superior in terms of all the above performance indicators.

Fuzzy kind clustering methods have been proved to be better than the conventional threshold methods for noise dismissal. The algorithm gives a reconcilable development as compared to other modern speckle reduction procedures, as it preserves the geometric features even after the noise dismissal.

The purpose here is to show how the “shadow” economy has grown in scale and impetus in recent years, though even before modern times it has been present (e.g. the City of London, Shaxson, 2011) since at least the middle ages. The reasons for this have become complicated, but we can identify some “deep structures” that are common. Firstly, “globalisation” made it easier for multinationals to escape national regulatory regimes. Secondly, one of the ways neoliberal trading regulations allowed such actors to augment their assets was by means of what they initially called “transfer-pricing” but which now is officially known as “profit shifting” through tax havens. Thirdly, the growth in international trade in legal and illegal ways caused money laundering – even by otherwise respectable banks – to grow across borders. Conversely, from the supply-side, tax haven status was increasingly accessed by jurisdictions that sought to achieve economic growth by supplying tax haven services, both Delaware and Ireland as exemplars of a “developmental” fiscal policy.

This paper adopts a “pattern recognition” design, an approach that is abductive, meaning interpretive, as shown in the observation that explanation can be valid or reliable without direct observation. This is shown in the indirect observation that “rain fell because the terrace has puddles” or “ancient glaciers once carved this valley”.

Reviewing the European Union’s (EU) list of non-co-operating jurisdictions in support of the OECD’s review of base erosion and profit-shifting activity, Collin concluded the EU’s listing “moved the needle” somewhat but was only a modest success. This is because of its reluctance to sanction its own members or large economies like the USA. Data on foreign direct investment and offshore banking assets suggest listed jurisdictions did not suffer notably from being named and shamed. In all cases studied, this contribution found legally damaging, fraudulent, conflict of interest and corrupt practice activities everywhere.

The originality is found in three spheres. Firstly, the pattern recognition method was vindicated in yielding hard to research results. Secondly, the “assemblage-thirdspace” theory was found advantageous in demonstrating the uneven geography of tax haven clusters and their common history in turbocharging economic development. Finally, the empirics showed the ruses executed by cluster members in tax havens to circumvent the law from global management consultancies to micro-firms consisting of tax lawyers and other experts interacting in knowledge supply chains of dubious morality.

The purpose of this study is to shed light on the twin transition in China in the organization of innovation processes in artificial intelligence (AI) and green technology (GT) development and to understand the role of foreign multinationals in Chinese innovation systems.

A qualitative research approach is used by interviewing executives from German multinationals with expertise in AI and GT development and organization of innovation processes in China. In total, 11 semi-structured interviews were conducted with companies, and the data were analysed with a thematic qualitative text analysis.

The findings show that AI applications for GT are primarily developed in cross-company projects that are led by local and regional authorities through the organization of industrial districts and clusters. German multinationals are either being integrated, remaining autonomous or being excluded from these twin transition innovation processes.

This paper aims to fill the gap in the literature by providing one of the first qualitative approach towards twin transition innovation processes in China and exploring the integration of multinational enterprises in cluster organizations. To the best of the author’s knowledge, this is one of the first twin transition studies from this perspective in emerging economies.

The World Bank-sponsored public financial management reforms attempt to instil fiscal discipline through techno-managerial packages. Taking Ghana's integrated financial management information system (IFMIS) as a case, this paper explores how and why local actors engaged in counter-conduct against these reforms.

Interviews, observations and documentary analyses on the operationalisation of IFMIS constitute this paper's empirical basis. Theoretically, the paper draws on Foucauldian notions of governmentality and counter-conduct.

Empirics demonstrate how and why politicians and bureaucrats enacted ways of escaping, evading and subverting IFMIS's disciplinary regime. Politicians found the new accounting regime too constraining to their electoral and patronage politics and, therefore, enacted counter-conduct around the notion of political exigencies, creating expansionary fiscal conditions which the World Bank tried to mitigate through IFMIS. Perceiving the new regime as subverting their bureaucratic identity and influence, bureaucrats counter-conducted reforms through questioning, critiquing and rhetorical venting. Notably, the patronage politics of appropriating wealth and power underpins both these political and bureaucratic counter-conducts.

This study contributes to the critical accounting understanding of global public financial management reform failures by offering new empirical and theoretical insights as to how and why politicians and bureaucrats who are supposed to own and implement them nullify the global governmentality intentions of fiscal disciplining through subdued forms of resistance.