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Using service-based logic as its theoretical lens, this study aims to approach residents’ place satisfaction in a novel way. The purpose is to explore residents’ perception of the place in which they live and to shed new light on their place satisfaction.

The paper is based on explorative qualitative focus group research. Data were collected in two typical municipalities in southern Sweden. The sampling procedure was purposive, resulting in six focus groups, consisting of a total of 33 residents. The empirical material was transcribed and analyzed using a structured content analysis inspired by grounded theory.

A model for understanding residents’ perceptions of what constitutes a good place to live is introduced. The model shows that many value propositions are produced in the provider sphere, independent of the user, for example by the municipality or the business sector. Other value propositions are co-created in a joint sphere, meaning that the user is actively involved in the production of these value propositions. The resident then uses different value propositions to create value-in-use in the resident sphere, independent of the provider, and to co-create value-in-use in the joint sphere.

The study creates a bridge between the stream of research on place satisfaction and studies that take stakeholders and co-creation into consideration; it shifts from the prevalent provider perspective on place branding and static place attributes to a focus on the relationship between users and providers.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the association between local entrepreneurs’ perception of the city’s decline and their place attachment (measured in terms of commitment to the declining city and sense of how the declining city compares to other cities).

The authors surveyed entrepreneurs in a relatively small sample (N = 105) from a declining city of about 78,000 residents in the USA.

The authors found significant inverse correlations and found that, after controlling for length of residency, the entrepreneur’s perception of the city’s decline predicted lower place attachment. The authors also tested a moderation hypothesis and observed that, whereas professional-service entrepreneurs with both stronger and weaker perceptions of the city’s decline showed similar place attachment, non-professional entrepreneurs showed significantly more variation, displaying both the highest place attachment when weak in perceptions of the city’s decline and the lowest place attachment when strong in perceptions of the city’s decline.

The authors discuss implications for place attachment, place image and place branding research, as well as for the study of place context’s effects on entrepreneurship.

Results hold implications for place branding’s participative development and for reasons to expect some difficulty in place branding when the context is a declining city.

Relative to prior research in place management, the research features a neglected segment of the city’s population, business owners, to study place attachment. Relative to prior entrepreneurship research, the authors advance the study of context’s effects on entrepreneurship by extending it to the place context of declining cities, which are not usually featured in entrepreneurship studies.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the role of the municipality in the place marketing context and to describe how municipalities work on making their place good to live in. The study rests on abductive reasoning whereby service-based logic forms the study and offers a theoretical framework for how to approach the phenomena.

A qualitative study in the form of 20 semi-structured interviews with leading elected officials and civil servants is used to let us understand how two typical municipalities in southern Sweden work on making their municipality a good place for their residents to live in. Content analysis is used to analyze the data.

The study reveals how municipalities work on creating opportunities for interactions between themselves and their residents, as well as offers insight into what value propositions the municipalities believe they offer their residents. The current study shows that the geographical location and the natural environment, basic and essential services, accommodations, urban quality, recreation and leisure and ambience constitute important dimensions in the place offering.

Service-based logic is used as a backdrop to facilitate the analysis in this study, which emphasizes value propositions offered by the municipality and interactions between the municipality and its residents, which increase our understanding of how municipalities work on making their place good to live in. The service-based logic help shed new light on the place marketing context and allows us to understand the context in a new way.

This paper addresses the issue of granularity. The authors argue that in routine dynamics research granularity can be usefully defined by the number of actors, the variety of places/contexts, and the amount of time it takes to successfully accomplish an action. This is an important but often overlooked aspect of studying routines. It is important because different granularities imply different challenges and opportunities for performing and patterning. The authors propose a framework to distinguish between fine-, medium-, and coarse-grained actions, illustrate how different granularities have been used in existing routine dynamics studies, and discuss the implications for understanding routine dynamics. The authors conclude that granularity is a key construct that needs to be taken seriously and suggest a four-step procedure to help researchers establish and report on the granularity of actions in their research process.

With the trend of adaptive reuse of old buildings and the continuous development of the sports industry in China, transforming stadiums that are no longer suitable has become a pressing issue. Based on this, the basic problems of adaptive transformation of urban stadium were discussed, and the motivation and principles of stadium reconstruction were analyzed. From the sense of place context, the openness of the interface and the integrity and diversity of the environment space, the reconstruction of the exterior space of the stadium was planned. In the reconstruction of the interior space of the stadium, the use of the interior space of the stadium and the needs that should be satisfied were mainly planned. Taking Yubei stadium in Chongqing as an example, the analysis was carried out. The planning structure, functional requirements, transportation, environment, spatial integrity and diversity were studied, and the current development trend of the stadium was reflected from the planning of interior and exterior space of gymnasium. In conclusion, this study provides a theoretical basis for the adaptive transformation of the stadium, and it is of great significance.

Art is a complex, multiform, fluid human activity that is subjugated to time-space-place contexts and dependent upon social representation and values. But what is it for? This introduction to the book Art in Diverse Social settings begins with a general characterization of Art as universal language. Unlike verbal language, art is primarily processed in the sensorial and emotional fields and only later rationally; unlike science, it does not aim at explaining or predicting the laws of the world's phenomena, instead it communicates by showing (in essence, it has an expressive meaning). In today's world, art became an accessible good and a valuable human creation because of this reappraisal of artistic practices; art is today expressive in domains such as politics, citizenship, economy, ethics, sustainability or public affairs.

The introduction to this edited book explains why it is focused on the role of art in today's diverse society. Art is part of the worldviews and mindsets from which it results and as a complex and ambiguous product of culture and perception, it must be understood from multiple perspectives. As such, this book includes in the first part seminal chapters with a theoretical scope, which highlight conceptual, contextual and cultural issues of contemporary art. The chapters in the second and third parts of the book are exemplary case studies, describing concrete intervention projects, which use some form of art or composed artistic expression as a medium for communication and intervention in the contexts of social and professional organizations, public spaces or the community. A summary of each chapter is provided and linked to the main goal of the book.

This study seeks to assess the psychometric properties of SERVQUAL, a prevalent instrument for measuring service quality within the “place” context of a shopping mall. Since, appearing in the management and marketing literature, this instrument has proved popular amongst researchers and practitioners. However, evidence supporting or refuting the tenets of the “gap” model and the dimensionality of the questionnaire is equivocal.

Modified versions of the questionnaire were used as a basis for interviewing customers of three retail clusters in the region of far North Queensland (n=782).

Analysis of data failed to support the generic five‐factor structure of service quality amongst these retail outlets. Service quality was perceived to be context‐specific and less multi‐dimensional than contended by the original SERVQUAL authors. Furthermore, little support was found for the concurrent validity of the instrument. Moreover, notions of service quality may have been confused due to the separate perspectives of three retail clusters within the overall context of a shopping mall. The multi‐dimensional nature of intangible service quality and dynamic expectations of customers and clients therefore presents significant challenges for place managers.

A practical decision was made to maximize the generalizability of the research by aggregating individual retail outlets into three overall clusters. Some measure of internal validity may therefore have been sacrificed.

It is recommended that future research begins with 360‐degree qualitative analyses of contexts from which new constructs and instruments may be developed.

The retail industry in far North Queensland is a previously under researched area in terms of the SERVQUAL instrument. The new factor structures found for clusters should improve service‐quality management and impact on tourism‐related business in the region.

Inquiry-based approaches can potentially enrich sustainability learning in any educational context, more so in open and distance learning (ODL – perceived as theoretically inclined) and in regions of educational need (such as the Global South, of which Africa forms part). The purpose of this paper is to map the benefits and challenges of using inquiry-based learning (IBL), with reference to ODL and the value added by IBL in terms of education for sustainability (EfS) in Africa.

Evidence-based reflection is used to provide a narrative assessment of the experience gained with IBL in two undergraduate sustainability-focussed modules in the Department of Geography at the University of South Africa (Unisa), an ODL provider in Africa and the Global South.

Consideration of enabling and limiting factors indicates that although constraints are experienced, adoption of IBL approaches holds potential as pedagogic for EfS in Africa, due to grounding of learning in theory and applied to local places/contexts. This indicates a role for IBL to change perceptions regarding the lack of practical utility of ODL.

Implementing place-based and contextual IBL is innovative in ODL. It adds value to learning experiences and supports transformative learning, both important components of EfS and addressing a need in the African context. Practitioners will find the experience gained with implementation of IBL, coupled with possibilities associated with information and communication technologies, of value.

If regionalism is defined as designing responsibly in reaction to a local context, then critical regionalism can be defined as doing so without denying the universally enlightening content of the modernist project. Armed with this definition, this article attempts to analyze two houses by architect Han Tümertekin that are set in a rural context in a very small Aegean village in Turkey. The aim of the paper is to explore the extent to which these two buildings embrace the tenets of critical regionalism and to understand the local relevance as well as international esteem of the buildings.