Connecting for competitiveness: future transport in UK city regions

Britain's major cities have fallen behind the best practice in transport of European and north American cities, and need to address this to compete in global markets. A number of potential mechanisms are available to UK cities, but only if central government is willing to transfer (limited) financial powers to the city regions.     

Predator Empire: The Geopolitics of US Drone Warfare

This paper critically assesses the CIA's drone programme and proposes that the use of unmanned aerial vehicles is driving an increasingly “dronified” US national security strategy. The paper suggests that large-scale ground wars are being eclipsed by fleets of weaponised drones capable of targeted killings across the planet. Evidence for this shift is found in key security documents that mobilise an amorphous conflict against vaguely defined al-Qa'ida “affiliates”. This process is legitimised through the White House's presentation of drone warfare as a bureaucratic conflict managed by a “disposition matrix”. These official narratives are challenged by the voices of people living in the tribal areas of Pakistan. What I term the Predator Empire names the biopolitical power that digitises, catalogues, and eliminates threatening “patterns of life” across a widening battlespace. This permanent war is enabled by a topological spatial power that folds the distant environments of the affiliate into the surveillance machinery of the Homeland.     

The role of entrepreneurial capital in building service reputation

This paper uses theories of capital to discuss the impact of non-financial capital on small service firm reputation and performance. As the success of service firms is predicated on the ability to develop relationships and build reputation with key stakeholders, theories of capital provide a relevant conceptual framework for exploring the use of non-financial capital in building such relationships. Drawing on findings from a qualitative study, this paper discusses the economic, human, social, and symbolic capital of a matched-pairs sample of male and female entrepreneurs in the business services sector. The results highlight a relationship between symbolic capital and service reputation. Specifically, the interplay between economic, human, and social capital generates the symbolic capital relevant for service reputation and firm performance.     

Marketing Jihad: the rhetoric of recruitment

ABSTRACT

The key question from a marketing perspective is why has Islamic State (IS) been so successful and how did it displace Al Qaeda (AQ) as the most prominent brand of global jihad from 2014 to 2016? The political and military elements have been examined but comparatively little attention has been paid to the ability of IS to commandeer the AQ narrative by appropriating and extending key themes and using them via social media to market itself as a choice for disaffected youth. It is suggested that IS has done this by making skilful use of rhetoric to position its brand and facilitate recruitment. To illustrate this, eight major themes of jihadi social media communications are identified and then analysed. Then a comparison is made between the way that AQ has used these themes in the online journal Inspire and the way that IS has used them in their online journals, Dabiq and Rumiyah.     

Defying contextual embeddedness: evidence from displaced women entrepreneurs in Jordan

ABSTRACT

Although entrepreneurial practices and processes are evolving and changing globally, models of entrepreneurship remain masculinized, embedded in advanced economies and associated with notions of individual agency, heroism and control. Rarely is defiance considered. In this paper, we explore the defiance practices of displaced women operating in the Jordanian patriarchal economy and society and consider how this enabled their nurturing of entrepreneurship. Indeed, we argue that socially excluded women actually defy their contextual embeddedness through their entrepreneurial activities. In so doing, we respond to calls for research that explores the contextual embeddedness of women’s entrepreneurship, and contribute to shifting the focus towards the more silent feminine end of the entrepreneurial process. We consider the defiance of invisible displaced women entrepreneurs operating in the under-researched context of Jordan. Longitudinal, ethnographic investigation revealed the creation of a secret production network led by, and for, displaced women. This paper focuses on the five founders of this network, which they established to mobilize and manage the production of traditional crafts and, by so doing, to defy the stifling limitations imposed by their restrictive contractors, community and family members.     

Aspects of service-dominant logic and its implications for tourism management: Examples from the hotel industry

This paper introduces the concept of service-dominant logic as a research paradigm in marketing management. It does so in the context of tourism management’s need to engage with wider debates within the mainstream management literature. Moreover it demonstrates the importance of service-dominant logic in uncovering the role played by co-production and co-creation in the tourism industry. These ideas are developed in detail through a case study of the UK hotel industry that draws on new empirical research undertaken by the authors.     

Future visioning of local climate change: A framework for community engagement and planning with scenarios and visualisation

There is an urgent need for meaningful information and effective public processes at the local level to build awareness, capacity, and agency on climate change, and support planning and decision-making. This paper describes a conceptual framework to meet these requirements by generating alternative, coherent, holistic climate change scenarios and visualizations at the local scale, in collaboration with local stakeholders and scientists. The framework provides a template for a process to integrate emission scenarios with both mitigation and adaptation strategies, and to link local manifestations of impacts and responses with global climate change scenarios. The article outlines the empirical application of this framework in the Local Climate Change Visioning Project in British Columbia, Canada. The project collaboratively localized, spatialized, and visualized possible climate change effects and community responses in the community's ‘backyards’. The article concludes with lessons learned and suggested principles for future visioning efforts to engage communities in possible policy and behavioural choices.     

Credit ratings and disclosure channels

We study the relation between analysts’ ratings of firms’ credit worthiness and ratings of the quality of firms’ (1) annual report disclosures, (2) quarterly and other disclosures, and (3) manager-analyst communications. We find that credit ratings are better for firms with higher rated annual report disclosures. We also find that marked increases in analyst ratings of annual report quality are accompanied by improvements in credit ratings. We find no relation between credit ratings and analysts’ ratings of either quarterly report disclosures or management-analyst communications. Overall, the results suggest that a commitment to better annual report disclosure is related to a lower cost of credit capital.