Beyond the Urban–Suburban Divide: Urbanization and the Production of the Urban in Zurich North

Starting from current debates on ‘global suburbanism' and ‘postsuburbia', this article explores the changes that the former ‘urban periphery' of Zurich North has experienced in the last three decades. It mobilizes Henri Lefebvre's triadic concept of conceived, perceived and lived space in aid of an analysis of the profound urban transformations that can be observed. The construction of a new tramline serves as a guideline for an analysis of the implementation of new governance arrangements strengthening cross‐border cooperation between individual municipalities and new strategies of cooptation and expertise. This resulted in the production of new urban structures which led to a more densely woven and connected urban fabric primarily providing spaces for the headquarter economy and middle‐class housing. Concomitantly, great efforts have been made to create new public spaces, an urban image and even an urban atmosphere. These have proved at least partially successful, thus promoting a symbolic redefinition of the former urban periphery as a distinctively ‘urban' space. Conventional definitions and concepts no longer suffice to adequately understand such novel urban forms, leading to the conclusion that division into an ‘urban' and a ‘suburban' world is no longer a useful tool for urban analysis.     

Kapitalbeteiligung im 21. Jahrhundert: Antwort auf Thomas Piketty

This white paper discusses an aspect that seems to be missing in the debate about Piketty’s “Capital in the 21st Century”: to build the bridge between capital and labour and to spread capital investment over a wide base. Based on historical data, it shows that capital participation could be a realistic option for Germany and for all of Europe. It would therefore be an alternative to the redistribution of wealth suggested by Thomas Piketty, and it would fit very well into the current debate about additional improvements to the private pension system in Germany. Calculations prove that if European employees had contributed small amounts of money to saving plans, they could own approximately 50% of the European stock market. Employees could become capital owners. Labour income could be–at least partly–replaced by capital income.     

Time heals many wounds – explaining the immediate and delayed effects of message sidedness

This study investigates the immediate and delayed effects of advertising messages including both positive and negative information. A two-sided message has a negative effect on message attitudes due to two mediating variables with trade-off effects: valence and balance. These two variables are also responsible for the alignment of the effect of sidedness on message attitudes and purchase intentions over time: the negative effects of two-sided messages are neutralized over time because negative information is reevaluated, improving the valence of the message. The results explain the negative effects of message sidedness that have been found in prior research and they show that a two-sided message in advertising is not necessarily inferior to a one-sided message despite unfavorable short-term effects.     

Response style corrected market segmentation for ordinal data

Survey data collected for market segmentation studies is typically ordinal in nature. As such, it is susceptible to response styles. Ignoring response styles can lead to market segments which do not differ in beliefs, but merely in how segment members use survey answer options and which possibly occur in addition to the belief segments. We propose a finite mixture model which simultaneously segments and corrects for response styles, permits heterogeneity in both beliefs and response styles, accommodates a range of different response styles, does not impose a certain relationship between the response style and belief segments, and is suitable for ordinal data. The performance of the model is tested using both artificial and empirical survey data.     

Effects of service orientation on job embeddedness in hotel industry

This research aims to develop and analyze a model that depicts work engagement (WE) as a mediator of the relationship between job embeddedness and service orientation. Specifically, the model examines external environmental factors (EEFs) as moderator of the effects of service orientation and job embeddedness in the hospitality industry. All data used for this study were gathered in Iran from hotels frontline employees with a two-weeks’ time lag. These relationships mentioned above were analyzed using AMOS 22.0. It was discovered in the results that WE was indeed a partial mediator and that EEFs indeed moderated the effects of service orientation on job embeddedness with adequate empirical support. The implications of the findings for the managers, the study limitations, and future research recommendations were also discussed.