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The purpose of this paper is to test the popular perception that the storefront location choices of premium brands are positively related to adjacent rents. Focusing on the case of Starbucks, a popular international coffee chain, the authors examine the association between Starbucks locations and rents in Manhattan, New York.

The authors use a multi-year data set for average rent per square foot for office and multifamily residential properties within 1/10th of a mile of several hundred coffee shop locations in Manhattan, controlling for vacancy, job density, overall amenity density (WalkScore), coffee shop density, transit accessibility, neighborhood and the Starbucks brand. The authors take two different methodological approaches to isolate potential statistical evidence for an association between Starbucks locations and adjacent rents: the authors run a pooled-cross-sectional model and apply propensity-score matching.

The authors find a statistically significant positive relationship between the presence of Starbucks and average office rents when applying the authors’ pooled-cross-sectional model and applying propensity-score matching. This finding is consistent with several potential causal hypotheses: Starbucks may be attributed to higher rent office locations; the “Starbucks effect” may cause higher rents in adjacent locations; or there may be a mutual reinforcing of positive feedback between Starbucks locations and office rents. The authors find no strong association between Starbucks and residential rents (one model indicates an effect of 2.3 percent on residential rent at 10 percent level of significance), which challenges the direct linearity of the consumption theory of gentrification popularly called the “Starbucks effect.”

In the literature, the existence, causality and directionality of a relationship between Starbucks locations and neighborhood change have been largely unstudied. In this paper, the authors test the hypothesis that there is a positive correlation between Starbucks locations and rents.

THAT SUPERSONIC RIDE courtesy of British Airways I flew to Bahrain and back in Concorde G‐BOAC. This gave me the opportunity to see the very comprehensive engineering support provided by BA with Bill Jasper—who is one of those compulsive residents of the Gulf—and his staff. I nearly froze to death in his air‐conditioned stores and workshops but otherwise found the experience pleasant and instructive.

Given the heightened scrutiny of police by the media in the post-Ferguson era, the purpose of this paper is to test hypotheses derived from the cultivation theory regarding possible media-related effects on perceptions of police legitimacy.

A sample of 1,197 residents from a mid-size California city was surveyed. Regression analyses were conducted to examine the relative effects of media consumption and personal experience on perceptions of police legitimacy.

Partial support for the cultivation theory was found. Those who reported local TV as their most important news source saw police as more legitimate than those who reported the internet as most important. Consistent with past research, procedural justice was the strongest predictor of perceptions of police legitimacy for those recently stopped by the police. Awareness of negative media depictions of police, however, also had independent effects indicating that media consumption does impact perceptions of police legitimacy.

While a wealth of research on the relationship between procedural justice and perceptions of police legitimacy exists, no previous research has examined the role media consumption plays in shaping such perceptions.

The purpose of this paper is to propose a scalable quantitative approach to evaluate alignment within and between courses and programs in higher education for benchmarking purpose.

The revised Bloom’s taxonomy, which combines a cognitive process dimension and a knowledge dimension, is used as a basis for categorizing national standards, program and course learning outcomes (CLOs) and assessment methods. Alignments between programs and national standards, programs and courses and assessment tasks and courses are then measured using a series of Cohen’s κ statistics. Two undergraduate business programs offered at an Australian university were used as examples to demonstrate the proposed method as an alignment evaluation tool.

The findings reveal that the two sample programs are better aligned with national standards than with their respective constituent courses. The degree of alignment between CLOs and assessment methods varies from course to course within the programs. This might be related to the lack of clarity of some learning outcome statements and the complexity of certain assessment methods.

This study lends insight into the use of an alignment mapping for benchmarking academic programs in higher education. To serve mainly as an illustration of the proposed approach, the case study is limited to two undergraduate business programs offered at the same university.

Universities can use the proposed approach to benchmark their academic programs against the national standards and similar programs offered by other competing educational institutions. The alignment indices can also serve as yardsticks to continuously improve the consistencies within and among academic programs to ensure quality.

The proposed method offers a consistent basis to compare the degrees of alignment of different higher education programs with national standards and their respective constituent courses, hence enabling benchmarking for continuous improvement. It also reveals how the alignment between different parameters in teaching and learning can be improved, thereby facilitating incremental learning and enhancing student performance.

Purpose – Role-taking refusal was a foundational problem in Mead's work but was ignored by subsequent interactionists who focused on the benefits of role-taking – empathy and solidarity – but failed to examine how they are destroyed or crippled from emerging as inclusionary aspects of social consciousness. Role-taking refusal constitutes both the microfoundation of dehumanization in the case of the oppressor and, in the case of the oppressed, the microfoundation of resistance. Role-taking refusal is linked to Giddens's notion of the reflective project of the self, Omi and Winant's racial formation theory, Feagin's theory of systemic racism, and the perspective of Critical Race Theory.

Methodology – I shall portray role-taking refusal by using historical, theoretical, and empirical works, especially ethnographic studies.

Social implications – The oppressed know the image their oppressors have of them. Refusing to internalize this image is the first step – the microfoundation – of resistance. Role-taking refusal in the oppressed fosters critical consciousness, which, if solidarity with others is formed, can lead to collective action and, possibly, permanent institutional change.

Originality – “The superiority delusion” is the paradigmatic ideology of all oppressors, deployed to justify their power, privilege, and prestige. This delusion is maintained by the microfoundation of dehumanization, which is a systematic refusal to role-take from those over whom oppressors oppress. All other ideologies that justify oppression are derived from some form of “the superiority delusion,” identifying for the first time role-taking refusal as paradoxically both the original sin of social relations and the foundation of social resistance.

This study aims to assess the factors influencing the adoption of circular bioeconomy practices by crop farmers.

Data collected from 303 farmers in the region of Western Macedonia (WM) were used to identify the adoption factors of the circular bioeconomy. Principal component analysis (PCA) and exploratory factor analysis (EFA) techniques were applied through a custom-designed and specially structured questionnaire.

The results reveal four main motivations that lead farmers to adopt circular bioeconomy practices in their farming activities: interest in physical-economic resources and factors related to production and consumption; technology and renewable energy and the environment.

This study is based solely on farmers in WM. Furthermore, this study assumes that there will be a strategy to promote a circular bioeconomy under the auspices of the government.

Few studies have focused on the perspectives of crop farmers and what encourages them to adopt circular bioeconomy practices in their crops. Existing barriers are related to economic incentives and constraints. The more circular bioeconomy practices farmers adopt, the greater the positive impact on the environment and rural development, and the factors influencing the adoption of these practices are investigated here.

The purpose of this paper is to critically analyze the discourses on migrant acculturation and migrants’ mobile phone communication, in order to examine the inclusiveness of communication-acculturation research in the recent years.

The paper draws on from 102 qualitative interviews (48 Malayali, 26 Bangla, 17 Tamil and 11 Telugu) for a larger research project that investigated the role of mobile phones in migrant acculturation in Singapore. Respondents were selected using a combination of purposive and snowball sampling methods. The respondents had been in Singapore for varying amount of time: from one month to 19 years.

The analysis of the discourses on migrant acculturation and mobile phone communication revealed that labor migrants were excluded on the basis of their temporary status and apprehensions on work productivity. The mobile usage prohibitions that existed in work sites were hinged on similar discourses that stereotyped the labor migrants. The emancipatory metaphor that has been at the center of research on migrants’ mobile phone usage and acculturation needs to be replaced with a critical discourse perspective.

The data were originally collected for a research project that approached the phenomena of acculturation and mobile phone appropriation from a positivist perspective, whereas this paper analyzed the data to critically examine the discourses that supported the premise of the project itself. Due to this, the findings presented in this paper have limited scope for generalization.

The paper critiques the research trends in migrant acculturation and mobile phone communication and suggests a possible alternative that goes beyond the “transcendental teleology” that underpins discourse and practice.