The Vortex of Rights: ‘Right to the City’ at a Crossroads

The right to the city concept has recently attracted a great deal of attention from radical theorists and grassroots activists of urban justice, who have embraced the notion as a means to analyze and challenge neoliberal urbanism. It has, moreover, drawn considerable attention from United Nations (UN) agencies, which have organized meetings and outlined policies to absorb the notion into their own political agendas. This wide‐ranging interest has created a conceptual vortex, pulling together discordant political projects behind the banner of the right to the city. This article analyzes such projects by reframing the right to the city concept to foreground its roots in Marxian labor theory of value. It argues that Lefebvre's formulation of the right to the city — based on the contradiction between use value and exchange value in capitalist urbanism — is invaluable for analyzing and delineating contradictory urban politics that are pulled into the vortex of the right to the city. Following Lefebvre's lead in such an analysis, however, reveals certain limitations of Lefebvre's own account. The article therefore concludes with a theoretical proposition that aims to open up space for further critical debate on the right to the city.     

Linking learning and effective process implementation to mass customization capability

This study investigates the role of learning and effective process implementation in the development of mass customization capability. Building upon the knowledge-based view of the firm, we argue that internal and external learning are two knowledge-generation routines that contribute to effective process implementation. Effective process implementation, in turn, is a knowledge-based manufacturing capability, which, as a function of internal and external learning, leads to mass customization capability. We employ structural equation modeling to empirically test the effects of learning on mass customization capability, mediated by effective process implementation, using survey data collected from 100 manufacturing plants in 3 industries and 6 countries. Our results provide empirical evidence supporting the proposed model of the effect of internal and external learning on mass customization capability, fully mediated by effective process implementation. This research is one of the first studies to integrate insights from the knowledge-based view of the firm and mass customization. It complements the OM view of mass customization, which to date has largely focused on the technical side, by demonstrating the role of managerial practices and learning in cultivating mass customization capability in a manufacturing environment.     

Product quality selection: Contractual agreements and supplier competition in an assemble-to-order environment

We consider a multi-supplier, single-manufacturer supply chain where each supplier sells a different component at varying quality levels. The manufacturer has to decide on which quality level to choose for each component, trading-off the total cost and total quality. Each supplier decides on a price per unit quality level for its component. We characterize the strategic interaction among the suppliers and analyze the inefficiencies. We find that the inefficiencies due to such quality competition can be quite significant. We then propose and analyze several mechanisms, such as quality-price schedules and revenue sharing, that restore efficiency.     

Employee service abandonment in offshore operations: A case study of a US multinational in India

Indian Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) exports industry has witnessed an exponential growth over the last few years. This has been accompanied by a shortage of talented skilled workers to serve the BPO sector. Attracting and retaining talented employees has become the chief challenge of HR departments in the BPO industry. This study examines the demographic antecedents of job abandonment among call centre employees in India using a large firm level data. The theoretical and practical implications of the findings are discussed.     

Time-varying linkages between tourism receipts and economic growth in South Africa

The causal link between tourism receipts and GDP has recently become a major focus in the tourism economics literature. Results obtained in recent studies about the causal link appear to be sensitive with respect to the countries analysed, sample period and methodology employed. Considering the sensitivity of the causal link, we use rolling window and time-varying coefficient estimation methods to analyse the parameter stability and Granger causality based on a vector error correction model (VECM). When applied to South Africa for the period 1960–2011, the findings are as follows: results from the full-sample VECM indicate that there is no Granger causality between tourism receipts and GDP, while the findings from the time-varying coefficients model based on the state-space representation show that tourism receipts have positive-predictive content for GDP for the entire period, with the exception of the period between 1985 and 1990. Full-sample time-varying causality tests show bidirectional strong causality between tourism receipts and GDP.     

Interactions between real economic and financial sides of the US economy in a regime-switching environment

This objective of this study is to examine the linkages between real (economic) and financial variables in the United States in a regime-switching environment that accounts explicitly for high volatility in the stock market and high stress in financial markets. Since the linearity test shows that the linear model should be rejected, we employ the Markov-switching VECM to examine the same objective using the Bayesian Markov-chain Monte Carlo method. The regime-dependent impulse response function (RDIRF) highlights the increasing importance of the financial sector of the economy during stress periods. The responses and their fluctuations are significantly greater in the high-volatility regime than in the low-volatility regime.     

Fixed price equilibria in an overlapping generations model with investment

We study fixed price temporary equilibria (with rationing) and sequences of temporary equilibria in a three commodities (goods, labor, bonds) overlapping generations model with endogenous investment. Young consumers, living two periods, work, consume, and buy bonds for financing next period's consumption. New firms, existing for two periods, make a production plan for the next period, taking into account expected rationing, assumed similar to present rationing. The plan determines the amount of goods to buy as capital, financed by bonds. Old firms produce, using labor and the previously bought capital. Different regimes exist and expectations can be self-fulfilling and self-destroying.We are grateful to the referees for helpful comments.     

Institutions for private sector development and pro‐poor growth: Evidence from Vietnam

Using the Vietnam Household Living Standards Survey 2008, we explore the differences in pro‐poor growth performance in provinces in Vietnam according to the quality of the provinces’ institutions that support private sector activity. We exploit the localized and varying effect of French colonial legacy across Vietnamese provinces to address the endogeneity of institutions. We find strong and robust evidence of a positive effect of good‐quality institutions that support private sector activity on pro‐poor growth and that enhanced working hours and hourly wage and extended income from non‐farm self‐employment play critical roles in this outcome.