Andy van den Dobbelsteen, Siebe Broersma, Michiel Fremouw, Tess Blom, Jelle Sturkenboom and Craig Martin
City-zen is an EU-funded interdisciplinary project that aims to develop and demonstrate energy-efficient cities and to build methods and tools for cities, industries and citizens…
Abstract
Purpose
City-zen is an EU-funded interdisciplinary project that aims to develop and demonstrate energy-efficient cities and to build methods and tools for cities, industries and citizens to achieve ambitious sustainability targets. As part of the project, an Urban Energy Transition Methodology is developed, elaborated and used to create Roadmaps, which indicate the interventions needed to get from the current situation to the desired sustainable future state of a city. For one of the partner cities, Amsterdam, such a Roadmap was developed. The paper aims to discuss these issues.
Design/methodology/approach
This paper discusses the approach and methodology behind the City-zen Urban Energy Transition Methodology, with its six steps from the initial energy analysis to the roadmap towards a desired future state. The paper will illustrate this by results from the Amsterdam Roadmap study, in numbers and figures.
Findings
The Roadmap study of Amsterdam revealed that the city can become energy neutral in its heat demand, but not in the production of sufficient electricity from renewables.
Research limitations/implications
Although as yet only applied to the City of Amsterdam, the methodology behind the roadmap can be applied by cities across the world.
Practical implications
An enormous effort is required in order to transform, renovate and adapt parts of the city. It was calculated, for instance, how many energy renovation projects, district heating pipes and photovoltaic panels will be annually needed in order to timely become carbon neutral, energy neutral and “fossil free”.
Social implications
The technical-spatial content of the Roadmap was presented to stakeholders of the Dutch capital city, such as politicians, energy companies, commercial enterprises, and not least citizens themselves. Although informed by scientific work, the Roadmap appealed too many, demonstrated by the extensive media coverage.
Originality/value
The City-zen Methodology builds upon earlier urban energy approaches such as REAP (Tillie et al., 2009), LES (Dobbelsteen et al., 2011) and Energy Potential Mapping (Broersma et al., 2013), but creates a stepped approach that has not been presented and applied to a city as a whole yet. As far as the authors know, so far, an energy transition roadmap has never been developed for an entire city.
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The 2015 Modern Slavery Act focusses attention forms of modern slavery (human trafficking and forced labour), within the UK. The contemporaneous 2014 Care Act, identifies modern…
Abstract
Purpose
The 2015 Modern Slavery Act focusses attention forms of modern slavery (human trafficking and forced labour), within the UK. The contemporaneous 2014 Care Act, identifies modern slavery as a new form of risk within adult social care, listing forms of abuse and vulnerability. However, it does not consider whether those providing care may themselves be vulnerable to forms of modern slavery. The paper aims to discuss these issues.
Design/methodology/approach
The authors describe the history of the development of modern slavery legislation in the UK, outline key provisions of the Care Act, illustrated with real-life cases. The analysis suggests that adult social care – characterised by informality, fragmentation and vulnerability – is one where instances of modern slavery may be more common than considered to date.
Findings
The data collected, though relatively modest, suggests that a thorough investigation should be undertaken into the possibility of modern slavery taking place within the realm of adult social care.
Research limitations/implications
Data have been collected through a snowball process, rolling out a survey to relevant groups of individual and organisations. A more rigorous investigation is required to examine the extent of modern slavery within adult social care.
Practical implications
The training of those responsible for the regulation/management of adult social care needs to ensure that they are fully equipped to understand the nature of modern slavery and how to identify its symptoms and victims.
Social implications
There is also a need for heightened awareness of those close to people being cared for that they may also identify the symptoms of modern slavery.
Originality/value
This area has not been explored to date.
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Chloe Preece, Finola Kerrigan and Daragh O’Reilly
This paper aims to contribute to the literature on value creation by examining value within the visual arts market and arguing for a broader, socio-culturally informed view of…
Abstract
Purpose
This paper aims to contribute to the literature on value creation by examining value within the visual arts market and arguing for a broader, socio-culturally informed view of value creation.
Design/methodology/approach
The authors develop an original conceptual framework to model the value co-creation process through which art is legitimised. An illustrative case study of artist Damien Hirst demonstrates the application of this framework.
Findings
The findings illustrate how value is co-constructed in the visual arts market, demonstrating a need to understand social relationships as value is dispersed, situational and in-flux.
Research limitations/implications
The authors problematise the view that value emerges as a result of operant resources “producing effects” through working on operand resources. Rather, adopting the socio-cultural approach, the authors demonstrate how value emerges and is co-constructed, negotiated and circulated. The authors establish the need to reconceptualise value as created collaboratively with other actors within industry sectors. The locus of control is, therefore, dispersed. Moreover, power dynamics at play mean that “consumers” are not homogenous; some are more important than others in the valuation process.
Practical implications
This more distributed notion of value blurs boundaries between product and service, producer and consumer, offering a more unified perspective on value co-creation, which can be used in strategic decision-making.
Originality/value
This paper illustrates that value co-creation must be understood in relation to understanding patterns of hierarchy that influence this process.
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Craig A. Martin and Alan J. Bush
Attempts to determine which individual, or group of individuals, has the strongest influence on adolescent consumer purchase intentions and purchase behavior. By introducing the…
Abstract
Attempts to determine which individual, or group of individuals, has the strongest influence on adolescent consumer purchase intentions and purchase behavior. By introducing the concepts of direct (fathers and mothers) and vicarious (favorite entertainers and favorite athletes) role models into the consumer behavior literature, the study allows greater understanding of the socialization patterns of young adult consumers. Results from this study provide significant contributions for marketing and advertising managers seeking to improve their understanding of the ever‐growing adolescent consumer market.
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Jessica Chelekis and Bernardo Figueiredo
We introduce critical regionalities and the archipelago metaphor as an analytic lens for interrogating and redrawing regional borders while preserving the benefits of a regional…
Abstract
Purpose
We introduce critical regionalities and the archipelago metaphor as an analytic lens for interrogating and redrawing regional borders while preserving the benefits of a regional approach.
Methodology/approach
Using secondary data from Latin America, we interrogate the mode by which regions are adopted in marketing and consumer research, raising a discussion of the analytical scales and boundaries of regional cultures, considering regional interdependencies and their common sociohistorical backgrounds.
Findings
We use the critical regionalities approach to examine the rise of gated-communities in Latin America and demonstrate how a regional approach can reveal connections between meso-level sociohistorical processes and cultural values.
Research implications
The critical regionalities approach transforms assumptions of national or global scales into tools of inquiry: both the nation and the globe become possible scales to contrast with regional archipelagos and enhance researchers’ reflexivity of the how’s and why’s of consumer phenomena.
Social implications
The method prompts cultural researchers to adopt scales of analysis that more closely reflect the social phenomena being studied, which is especially useful for understanding emerging markets and marginalized areas. We also emphasize the importance of attending to consumer cultural phenomena and processes in non-Western contexts.
Originality/value
The paper offers a solution for the conundrum of how to write about regions without essentializing them. Marketers and policy makers can use the concept of cultural archipelagos to define new segments and understand new markets, without the need to conform to preestablished geographic or political borders.
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Craig A. Martin and Alan J. Bush
Recent research investigating customer‐oriented selling has indicated that greater attention needs to be focused on organizational or personal antecedents influencing…
Abstract
Recent research investigating customer‐oriented selling has indicated that greater attention needs to be focused on organizational or personal antecedents influencing customer‐oriented selling behaviors. Similar to most other departments, a selling department’s environment would include its goals, objectives, and culture, as well as the behaviors, beliefs, and attitudes of top and middle management. Through its corporate culture and environment, the organization’s expectations and requirements are transmitted to its employees, who then implement the organization’s policies and carry out organizational strategies. Therefore, it is apparent that both individual internal environment perceptions and managerial leadership styles could possibly have a significant impact on the level of customer‐oriented selling behavior exhibited by salespeople. Three organizational or personal variables likely related to customer‐oriented selling are examined in the present study. The variables include sales manager leadership style, psychological climate, and empowerment. Each of the variables, and an explanation of its expected relationship with customer‐oriented selling, is explored. Implications for managers from these potential relationships are also provided.
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Yan Quan Liu, Craig Martin, Eileen Roehl, Zhixian Yi and Sheila Ward
The purpose of this paper is to explore the impact of public digital services on urban/suburban residents, to uncover the current usage of public digital services and levels of…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to explore the impact of public digital services on urban/suburban residents, to uncover the current usage of public digital services and levels of satisfaction with the digital resources/content in urban digital libraries (networked computers with specific information infrastructure designed free for public use).
Design/methodology/approach
A qualitative approach is used as a main stream in the research framework as the method of inquiry. Qualitative one‐to‐one interviews include surveying users who use public library websites, observing the users, consulting librarians about the users, and interviewing the users.
Findings
Provides demographic patterns of the patrons' interaction with the digital services public libraries provide, and the satisfaction and compliances the residents have regarding information access through the digital technology in urban/suburban Connecticut.
Practical implications
Because of the small number of participants, this study has limitations in being generalized to an understanding of overall patterns of urban residents using digital resources in public settings in the USA or elsewhere, however, it could be a good pilot study for a nation‐wide survey with the methods tested.
Originality/value
This study helps fulfill the scant empirical attention given to the impact access to public digital information or use of digital library services on the urban/suburban residents, offers new data that help public library administrators enhance the impact, efficiency and value of the public digital library services to improve the digital learning environments for life‐long education at all levels in a broad community of urban/suburban users.
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Craig A. Martin and L.W. Turley
Although malls have been a topic of interest to marketing researchers for at least 35 years, the attraction between malls and Generation Y consumers has received little interest…
Abstract
Although malls have been a topic of interest to marketing researchers for at least 35 years, the attraction between malls and Generation Y consumers has received little interest from marketing academics. This study focuses on the attitudes that the older segment of Generation Y consumers (19‐25) have toward a mall, and on their consumption motivation. Key findings include that Generation Y consumers are more likely to be objectively rather than socially motivated to consume. The findings also suggest that objective motivations to consume predict an individual consumer's perception of a shopping mall's ambience, layout, and his or her involvement in the shopping process. Social motivations to consume predict perceptions of a mall's ambience, design, variety, and excitement, as well as the consumer's desire to stay and intent to return to the mall. Managerial implications include using objective information, such as price‐oriented promotions, when trying to attract older Generation Y consumers.
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Although a significant number of employment fields and categories have followed the trend of increasing the number of minority employees in their profession, professional selling…
Abstract
Purpose
Although a significant number of employment fields and categories have followed the trend of increasing the number of minority employees in their profession, professional selling remains a profession dominated by the presence of Caucasian males. Racial minorities and their performance in a professional selling environment have yet to be examined in depth. Understanding why there are so few African‐Americans in professional selling is important. However, analyzing and comprehending what these salespeople accomplish once they obtain professional sales positions should also be of considerable interest, which this paper seeks to examine.
Design/methodology/approach
Utilizing a sample of 294 African‐American and Caucasian salespeople, the present manuscript empirically examines a variety of important work‐related perceptions and behaviors, and the performance levels of separate races of salespeople, to determine whether differences exist based on the race of the salesperson.
Findings
Results indicate that African‐American and Caucasian salespeople do not exhibit significant differences in terms of their psychological climate perceptions, customer relationship effort, and overall performance. Additionally, the results indicate that racial similarity between the sales manager and the sales representative significantly influences the aforementioned perceptions and performance of salespeople.
Originality/value
Managerial implications suggest that managerial‐level training should be utilized to create sales atmospheres that create equal opportunities for all salespeople. Sales executives will also be able to utilize the results from the present study as evidence that separate races of salespeople appear to be equally qualified to perform the job.