Role conflict and changing heritage practice: ancestral tourism in Scotland

ABSTRACT

Developing mutually beneficial outcomes in service encounters can be challenging due to resource asymmetry within co-created experiences. Such encounters can result in role conflict for service providers. Limited attention has been paid to the effect on service providers of highly collaborative exchanges which require specific customisation. An example of this is ancestral tourism, a dimension of heritage consumption, in which visitors actively participate in the co-creation of experience at museums, archives and related heritage sites. These institutions, previously seen as repositories of historical information, now act as conduits for visitors to investigate their ancestral past. The purpose of this study is to explore the relationship between changing professional discourse in the cultural heritage sector, specifically ancestral tourism, and role conflict amongst staff. Through interviews conducted with professionals, the extent and outcomes of role conflict in complex and collaborative exchanges are explored.     

A Bayesian interpretation of the Federal Reserve's dual mandate and the Taylor Rule

When the Federal Reserve was established by the US Congress in 1913, its charter mandated that the new central bank “promote an elastic currency” and the institution was given extraordinary powers to serve as a lender of last resort to the banking system. Congress was reacting to the cycle of financial panics that had beset the country since the Civil War and had worsened with the Panic of 1907. Congress sought to find a remedy to prevent runs on banks turning into full-fledged financial crises. The term “elastic” in the opening words of the charter was intended to underscore the need for a robust banking system that could withstand shocks and not collapse upon itself. There was no mention whatsoever of a dual mandate of promoting price stability and encouraging full employment.With prodding from the US Congress, the Federal Reserve became highly involved in the management of the economy of the United States after WWII, focusing on inflation and full employment objectives. In 1993 Professor John Taylor set forth an elegant and simple framework (aka, the Taylor Rule) for analyzing the interest rate policy of the Federal Reserve in terms of its dual mandate.This paper examines Federal Reserve behavior from the mid-1950s to 2011 through the lens of the Taylor Rule. Our contribution is to use a dynamic linear model with Bayesian inference to update the evolution through time of the key parameters surrounding the inflation and full employment mandates, using only the information available to the Federal Reserve at each point in time. Our findings provide a more nuanced quantitative view than is previously available in the literature of how the Federal Reserve shifted its management of its dual mandate over time and in response to different economic challenges. Moreover, our research leads to serious questions of how Federal Reserve decision making may change in the future, following the financial panic of 2008, pointing toward numerous avenues for new research.     

Tourists and researcher identities: critical considerations of collisions,collaborations and confluences in Svalbard

ABSTRACT

Svalbard is an “edge-of-the-world” hot spot for environmental change, political discourse, tourism and scientific research in the Anthropocene. Drawing on ethnographic and qualitative research, I use this context to critically explore the identity-categories of “researcher” and “tourist”. Through the lens of political ecology, I draw out the uneven power relations of knowledge production that are attached to these labels and their consequences for ongoing efforts for managing sustainable tourism. By considering the experiences of tourists, researchers and “scientific tourists”, both practically and from an embodied experiential perspective, I challenge the distinctions typically made between these roles. I bring to light several common aspects, goals and experiences these practices share. In doing so, I aim to disrupt the existing hierarchies of knowledge that champion an impersonal, rational scientific approach and call for a more varied array of knowledge and practices to be taken into account when considering the future ecologies of Svalbard and the broader Arctic region.     

Team Decision Making in Virtual and Face-to-Face Environments

We conducted a laboratory study on 65 teams performing a decision-making task. The two experimental manipulations involved the use of different communication media and decision frames. The decision frame manipulation involved informing the team to choose the demonstrably correct solution versus the solution that seemed most likely. These factors interacted to reveal novel insights about their multiplicative effects on decision processes and team psychological states. Further, main effects of the communication medium were found for team psychological states and decision behavior. Results suggest that virtual teams were at a disadvantage when the task was framed as having a demonstrably correct solution. Conversely, face-to-face teams were more effective, particularly when told that the task had a demonstrably correct solution. Face-to-face teams were more effective on all decision behaviors. Media synchronicity theory serves as a unifying framework to contextualize this research in the literature.     

Attributes influencing clothing store choice for an emerging market’s Generation Y Twixter customers

The aim of this paper was to determine the key attributes influencing a sub-segment of Generation Y, the Twixters’ choice of clothing retailers in South Africa, an emerging market. Generation Y has been identified as an important segment particularly for apparel and the Twixter sub-group comprises a third of the segment. Using a positioning theory lens, retailers need to understand the attributes a target market finds important as stores are positioned in consumers’ minds on those attributes. The study therefore sought to determine what these Twixters consider to be important attributes in their clothing store selection. The study comprised two stages; a qualitative stage based on focus group discussion data in which the attributes were determined, discussed and defined, and a quantitative stage, which involved a survey administered to 368 Twixter respondents which determined the relative importance of the attributes to Twixters in their clothing store selection. The results reveal that these Twixters appreciate the price–quality relationship and prefer clothing stores which provide high quality, unique and fashionable merchandise that meets their value for money requirements. The results of the study, although not generalisable, provide noteworthy insight for clothing store and apparel marketers targeting these Generation Y customers.     

When less is more: the impact of macro and micro social media influencers’ disclosure

ABSTRACT

There are growing discussions of social media influencers and their effectiveness in endorsing products. Further, recent policy regulations are requiring social media influencers to disclose sponsored content when using a form of native advertising. This research examined the effect of macro-influencers (high likes) and micro-influencers (low likes) and their disclosure of native advertising sponsorship on consumer evaluations of products. Results from a 2 × 2 experiment first show that consumers exposed to the micro-influencer condition report higher levels of product knowledge, and consumers exposed to the disclosure condition reported the products endorsed by social media influencers to be more attractive. The results also show that when exposed to micro-influencers who disclose, consumers have higher levels of purchase intentions than when exposed to macro-influencers who do not disclose, as well as higher purchase intentions than for posts where sponsorship is not disclosed by influencers. The important findings of this research for theory, practice and policy are discussed.     

Producing industrial pigs in southwestern China: The rise of contract farming as a coevolutionary process

The literature on contract farming (CF) has to date focused on how outside capital uses CF to vertically integrate non-capitalist producers into agro-industrial value chains. We argue that in places where multiple dynamics of capitalist growth co-exist, CF relationships can also emerge between different types of capitalist producers that are already in capitalist production using other organizational forms. In this situation, the well-studied drivers that fuel the spread of CF become less consequential; the emergence of CF is instead more contingent on the complex interactions between producers and the specific conditions and events in the local environment. We conceptualize the emergence of this type of CF as a coevolutionary process and develop an analytical toolkit from this perspective to study the rise of CF in industrial pig farming in a Chinese county. Our analysis traces the evolution of agro-industrialization over a decade (2006–2016) and shows the emergence of CF as a coevolutionary outcome shaped by the unique biography of the contract producers, the “historical accident” of a market downturn, and the reciprocal responses between contract producers and agribusinesses.