Capturing the Commercial World of Children: The Feasibility of Wearable Cameras to Assess Marketing Exposure

There is widespread concern about the implications of increased targeting of marketing to children. However, despite the ubiquitous presence of marketing in children's environments, children's actual exposure to the full range of marketing across all media and in multiple settings remains unknown. This article reports on an innovative method of analysis, using data from wearable automated cameras, to objectively document children's marketing exposure across and within settings. Results show children were exposed to an average of 638 marketing encounters per day. The most common form of marketing exposure was to brand labeling, and marketing for food and beverages the dominant product category. This article provides an objective observation of the commercial world of children in a wide range of settings, presenting unique insights and a new analysis method for documenting children's environmental advertising exposure to inform policy decisions about the ethics and practices of marketing to children.     

A process for evaluating retail store efficiency: a restricted DEA approach

A managerial process is developed for assessing the efficiency of 552 individual stores for a multi-store, multi-market retailer employing Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA). Incorporating assurance regions into a DEA model allowed for a more complete specification of inputs and outcomes than usually found in DEA applications. This procedure permitted the researchers to capture top management's strategic thinking. Practical usefulness of the process' results is illustrated with respect to two management issues: evaluating store managers and identifying critical success factors (CSFs).     

‘A holiday is a holiday’: practicing sustainability,home and away

‘Behaviour change’ is one of the major concerns for academics and practitioners concerned with tackling climate change. Research amongst tourism geographers has conventionally focussed on the various choices that individuals can make, both before and during their holidays, to reduce environmental footprints, specifically through the use of sustainability criteria. However, whilst there is a developing understanding of the motivations for sustainable tourism practices, there is less appreciation of the relationship tourist practices have to everyday environmental activities in and around the home. This latter issue has been researched extensively by social psychologists and environmental sociologists. Accordingly, the paper will draw upon these two existing bodies of research to argue that a holistic understanding of ‘sustainable lifestyles’ is needed if effective behavioural change strategies for climate change are to be developed, revealing the complexities of contemporary environmental practices. Using data from a recent British Academy research project, the paper will explore the changing nature of sustainable lifestyles and will demonstrate the relationships between home- and tourism-based environmental practices. The paper will argue that whilst individuals are relatively comfortable with participating in a range of environmental behaviours in and around the home, the transference of these practices to tourism contexts can be problematic. This is particularly the case for high-consumption activities such as low-cost air travel. The paper concludes by arguing that both academics and policy makers need to re-frame their notions of ‘sustainable lifestyles’, transcending a series of practices and contexts.     

How Serious are the Problems of Japan’s Banks?

One of the three main planks of Japan’s new leader’s election platform was reform of the banking sector, including rapid disposal of bad debts and improved disclosure. In this article, Alistair Barr assesses the scale of Japan’s banking problems and their implications for the Japanese economy. He argues that these problems are a major obstacle to sustained growth. However, in the short run improved disclosure, adequate bad debt provisioning and the rapid disposal of bad debts could have very serious negative impact on the economy.     

ITQ’s in Chile: Measuring the Economic Benefits of Reform

In 2001 an individual (operationally transferable) quota system was introduced for all the most important industrial fisheries in Chile. This system was put in place after years of declining stocks and over investment. In this paper we describe this reform and estimate related allocative efficiency benefits for the most important industrial fishery in the country, the southern pelagic fishery. Benefits were estimated using a bioeconomic model estimated using data for the 1985–2004 period. The estimated model was then used to generate simulated scenarios of the evolution of this fishery in a 20 year horizon with and without the ITQ system in place. The benefits of the reform can then be estimated by comparing the fishery’s costs in the scenarios with and without ITQs. This approach allows benefits to be estimated using more realistic counterfactual scenarios than just comparing the fishery before and after the reform. Estimated discounted net benefits reach US $166 million in the period 2001–2020. Fleet size fell from 149 active boats in 2000 to 57 in 2004 as a direct consequence of the reform. Among the interesting features of the Chilean experience is the way the political economy of the reform was facilitated by the prior introduction of de facto individual quotas within the framework of fishery experimental activities. When the authorities closed the southern pelagic fishery because of biological problems between 1997 and 2000, they organized ‘experimental’ fishing expeditions in which participant boats were given the right to fish a certain amount of resources per expedition. This pseudo quota system allowed fishermen to experience directly the benefits of individual quotas and that was instrumental to the political agreement leading to the reform. It is important to note that the Chilean southern industrial pelagic fishery has average catches of over 1.4 million tons a year, making it one of the largest fisheries in the world to be regulated by individual quotas.     

The Ethical Issues Confronting Managers in the Sport Industry

The sport industry is an extremely diverse industry, including segments such as professional sport, intercollegiate athletics, health and fitness, recreational sport and facility management. The industry is currently experiencing rapid growth and development, and as it grows, sport managers in the different segments encounter ethical issues which are often unique to each segment. This article examines the professional sport, intercollegiate athletics, health and fitness, recreational sport and facility management segments of the sport industry and discusses the various ethical issues facing managers in each of these segments.     

Green consumption or sustainable lifestyles? Identifying the sustainable consumer

This paper examines green consumption in the context of an increasing focus on sustainable lifestyles. The authors argue that green buying must be seen in the context of wider debates surrounding the development of sustainable ways of living that incorporate other environmental actions in an holistic conceptualisation of sustainable lifestyles. This framework is operationalised in a study of environmental action in and around the home, in which 1600 households in Devon were asked questions concerning their everyday environmental actions. These results were manipulated so as to investigate how the different behaviours related to each other and also whether different groups of individuals could be identified, conforming to different lifestyles. The results suggest that conventional forms of green consumption can indeed be related to other forms of environmental action and that at least four different types of environmentalist can be identified. The implications of these results for policy makers are discussed at the end of the paper.