Why Are Themed Brandstores So Powerful? Retail Brand Ideology at American Girl Place

Although there is growing interest in themed brandstores, we still know very little about the source of these retail environments’ power to affect consumers profoundly. Utilizing an ethnographic study of American Girl Place, a culturally rich and highly successful retail environment, we find that effective retailing in these contexts is an intensely ideological affair. In our participant-observation of, and on-site interviews with, consumers at American Girl Place we find that the ideology of the brand manifests powerfully through a variety of different and distinct areas within the store: the Museum, the Library, the Café, the Salon, the Theater, and the Photo Studio. Ideological expression is central to each of these places. Tracking the influence of brand ideology through consumers’ retail experiences, we theorize about the centrality of retail place in ideological branding. Although the confluence of ideology and retailing has been referenced in prior research, this paper focuses on and systematically develops the theoretical interconnection between the two. The physical immediacy of themed brandstore experience acts as a quilting point that links together related cultural concepts into a strong retail brand ideology. The implications of this theory draw our attention to ideological and morally-bound retail brand expressions, emphasize the importance of a variety of retail formats within a single store, and provide practical guidelines for retailers eager to build successful brands of their own.     

Disaggregating and reaggregating work: Workers,management and the struggle over creating coherency and purpose in a context of work degradation

The article argues that whilst there is a growing sense of degradation and worsening conditions (disaggregation) of work in the cleaning sector in general, there are some important contradictions which require complex organisational responses. In the main, there is a growing sense of isolation in this work, yet also a growing perception of autonomy and workers having to use discretion in new and challenging ways. This article focuses on these issues and management responses to reaggregate the nature of such work, creating new forms of identity and activities intended to enhance (or address) the levels of stability and sustainability at work as well as in operational processes. This management conundrum means that they need to deal with a range of job‐related, skill‐oriented worker learning and also representation issues. These responses bring to the fore the contested nature of such forms of work and how they are changing.     

Outsourcing with debt financing

This paper investigates the effect of capital structure on a firm’s choice between vertical integration and outsourcing. We model the production decision in a Principal-Agent framework and show that suppliers use debt as a strategic instrument to collect the surplus from outsourcing as their wealth constraint or limited liability ensures them more attractive compensation schemes. Investigating the buyer’s capital structure, we find that outsourcing with risky debt is more likely to occur for high values of the outsourcing surplus.     

Under What Conditions Is an Insurance Guaranty Fund Beneficial for Policyholders?

In this article, we derive conditions in an imperfect market setting, under which the introduction of a self‐supporting insurance guaranty fund improves the position of the policyholders. When a guaranty fund is advantageous given homogeneous firms in the market, all policyholders benefit from it to the same extent, if they have the same underlying risk preferences and are charged identical premiums. In a more realistic heterogeneous setting, the introduction of an insurance guaranty fund is in general no longer beneficial for all policyholders in the same manner. Hence, systematic wealth transfers take place between the policyholders of different insurance companies. As a possible solution, and in order to counteract this effect, we introduce a framework for utility‐based fund charges.     

The Internationalization of Spanish- and Portuguese-Speaking Banks

This article investigates which variables affect the location choice of banks from Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking countries in their process of internationalization. The article compares the differences in these variables for public and private banks. The sample consists of 141 banks operating in 58 countries. Results show that internationalization is undertaken by the largest banks, which preferably choose countries with similar language, close to the home country, and with the most opportunity for growth. Additionally, the effects of certain explanatory variables on the probability of expanding to a given country are different for public and private banks.     

The implications of job matching for retirement health insurance and leave benefits

This paper focuses on potential reasons for variations in benefit packages, in particular variations in the availability of retirement health insurance and leave. An important feature of our analysis is that we do not start with heterogeneity in workforces to explain fringe benefit differences across employers. It would be straightforward to say that differences across employers in fringe benefit packages simply represent differences in the preferences of their workforces. Rather, we focus on heterogeneity across employers as an important source of differences in fringe benefit packages. Preliminary evidence is found supportive of the predicted differences in the likelihood of such fringe benefits as retirement health insurance and leave based upon two variables–the extent of on-the-job training offered by the employer and the size of the employers. We also examine the implied links between these fringe benefits and such variables as average tenture and the proportion of the workforce that is female.     

Do tourists disperse weed seed? A global review of unintentional human-mediated terrestrial seed dispersal on clothing,vehicles and horses

Human-mediated seed dispersal is recognised as an important, but under-researched, issue. To assess the potential for tourists to act as unintentional seed dispersal agents, we reviewed published and unpublished data on seed dispersal via clothing, vehicles (cars) and in/on horses and donkeys, all of which can be used by tourists. Seeds from 754 species of terrestrial plants have been collected from these vectors, 15% of which are internationally recognised environmental weeds. Seeds were collected from personal clothing and equipment (228 species), the fur of donkeys and horses (42 species), horse dung (216 species) and vehicles (505 species). Most were herbs (429 species) or graminoids (237 species) and native to Europe. Annual Poa, White Clover, Kentucky Bluegrass and Yorkshire Fog were the most frequent species. There have been eight studies specifically on tourists, which identified 12 species on clothing, 26 on vehicles and 133 from horse dung. Methods that minimise the risk of tourists as human-mediated dispersal agents may therefore be appropriate for some tourism activities/destinations: suggestions are made. Further sampling using standardised experimental techniques is required to assess the relative risk associated with specific tourist activities and locations and determine which, and how much, seed is transported.     

The strategic strength of weak signal analysis

Foresight can be seen as a social cognition process involving a complex set of methods and interactive processes intended to assist policy in becoming more adaptive and forward-oriented in unpredictable environments. As a form of foresight raw material, “weak signals” can be thought of as gross, unstructured, fragmented, incomplete and inadvertent environmental data that may be refined into valuable information regarding context and further be articulated into strategically actionable knowledge. As advanced indicators that precede significant discrete one-off events and/or novel developments in the rate and direction of trends, their analysis has the potential to facilitate the real-time alignment between organisational decision-making and changing external circumstances. These predictors of future change pose fundamental problems of identification and interpretation and represent a challenge to established mental models. Thus, the practical significance of weak signals is that they can be transformed into meaningful insight for policy action. Such a value, however, does not materialise automatically. Realising this potential requires a degree of tolerance and fluidity of the collective cognitive frameworks by which weak signals can be apprehended, assessed and acted upon. This paper aims at covering the scope of perceptions and actions typically involved in the tracing and tracking of this shaping process.     

Urban Political Ecologies and Children's Geographies: Queering Urban Ecologies of Childhood

This article focuses on the material and discursive constructions of nature and children in the city. While dominant representations and idealizations of nature and childhood depend on the binary logic of the nature/culture and rural/urban divide, there is also a simplification and romanticization of nature in children's geographies and a lack of children and their spaces in urban political ecology. We argue that children and nature in cities need to be removed from a binary model of being and attended to in more nuanced ways in urban political ecology and children's geographies. In this regard, we suggest that both nature and children in cities need to be queered. We need to ask how the production of urban spaces (re)creates particular romantic and idealized relations with natures that reify the binaries between nature/culture, and male/female through a heteronormative framework. The purpose of this article is to bring the critical nature–society theories of urban political ecology into conversation with work in children's geographies that explores the ‘nature' of childhood, and in doing so queer the relationship between children and nature. Drawing on research on queer ecologies, and queered childhoods, we aim to provide a framework to rethink and queer both nature and children in cities.