The role of corporates in creating sustainable Olympic legacies

Abstract

The Olympic Games is a major stimulus for increased tourism. In recent years, there have been greater calls for this and other mega-events to leave sustainable positive legacies for the host city, partly to offset the massive cost of hosting. To date, little consideration has been afforded to the role corporates might play in contributing to event legacies. This gap is compounded by the lack of research examining stakeholder engagement in legacy planning more generally. This paper adopts Holmes, Hughes, Mair and Carlsen’s (2015) sustainable event legacy timeline to conceptualise how corporates through the corporate social responsibility (CSR) initiatives of sponsorship and employee volunteering can engage across the Olympic event planning cycle to generate volunteering legacies. Drawing upon a comparative study of the Sydney 2000 and London 2012 Olympic Games, tentative evidence of corporate engagement was noted but for the most part it was fragmented and CSR initiatives primarily focused on the immediate planning and delivery stages of the event cycle. The paper advances new knowledge of how volunteering legacies can be generated through the best practice engagement of corporates as key stakeholders involved in legacy planning and governance across the Olympic planning cycle.     

Resource Investments and Loyalty to Recreational Sport Tourism Event

ABSTRACT

Sport tourism events have a marketing possibility in the Japanese tourism industry. The ultramarathon is a very popular recreational sport event in the world. This type of sport tourism event has shared with completive and enjoyment factors in relation to participant's motivation. Loyalty is a very important factor with attendance to recreational sport events. Generally, as many researchers indicated, that participants' loyalty will lead to repeat attendance or purchase. However, there is no consensus as to how loyalty develops. In the files of recreational sport tourism event research, the process leading to participants' loyalty with a specific event is not evident.

The purpose of this article is to test a conceptual framework of the development of loyalty (Morais et al., 2004 Morais, D. B., Dorsch, M. J. and Backman, S. J. 2004. Can tourism providers buy their customers' loyalty? Examining the influence of customer-provider investments on loyalty. Journal of Travel Research, 42(3): 235–243. [Crossref] , [Google Scholar]) that is grounded in resource theory. According to the proposed model, when participants and organizers invest specific profiles of resources in each other, the participants tend to develop a bond with the customer and become dedicated to maintaining a stable relationship. The model is used to discuss the mixed results of current loyalty from recreational sport event tourists to organizers and to outline future research efforts.     

Assessing the Use of Internet Surveys in the Context of Advertisement Tracking Studies: A Case Study of Tourism Yukon's Winter Promotion Campaign

Abstract

As interest in the varying applications of Internet technology has expanded in recent years, so have discussions concerning the relative merits of this medium as a credible means for conducting market survey research. Proponents of this form of on-line surveying claim that as the Internet becomes more universally accepted as a means of communication, its utility for survey purposes will be largely related to its ability to conduct some forms of research faster, better, and more conclusively than other more traditional methods of interviewing. Other supporters highlight the approach's potential research advantages with respect to gaining access to especially difficult-to-find populations, its cost effectiveness from a data collection perspective, and its speed of interaction with respondent populations. Conversely, other researchers express more cautionary perspectives and emphasize that Internet survey methods tend to suffer many of the same shortcomings as those associated with more traditional survey methods: inappropriateness for communication with specific audiences, control over sample representativeness, “self-selection” biases and response turn-around time. As with other emerging market survey research tools, there is a need to systematically explore the strengths and weaknesses of these perspectives in the context of specific research situations. This research examines issues of sample representativeness, “self selection” or non-response bias, and appropriateness of the survey techniques in the context of advertising tracking research. It does this by comparing the socio-economic and behavioral traits of Internet and traditional (telephone and mail) survey respondents participating in a tourism advertisement tracking study in Canada.     

Destination Images Penetrated by Mega-events: A Behaviorist Study of the 2008 Beijing Olympics

While the penetration effect of mega-events on the hosts' destination images is important, its research has rather been insufficient. This study aims to fill the gap by initiating an in-depth investigation of this effect. Guided by behaviorism rather than introspectionism and psychometrics adopted by previous researchers, the study interviewed 66 tourists visiting Beijing city – the host of the 2008 Summer Olympics – before, during and after the event. The results showed that: (1) elements of the Olympics had penetrated into the core and semi-core of Beijing's destination image; (2) the penetration did vary according to different event elements and event stages; and (3) the penetration was jointly determined by the stimuli the tourists received during the surveys and their complex mental mechanisms (i.e. cognitive matching and attitudinal preference). This research has strengthened the evidence for the penetration effect, explained it systematically and expanded the methodological choices in studying similar topics.     

Abnormal returns before acquisition announcements: evidence from Europe

Acquisition announcements influence the stock price of target firms, providing an opportunity for insiders to obtain significant abnormal returns. We study the presence of positive abnormal returns before the announcement date, in target firms, quoted in Euronext markets (Belgium, France, The Netherlands and Portugal) from 2001 to 2007. We investigate whether the pre-announcement run-up of prices can be explained by rumours in the media and the percentage of capital previously owned by the bidding firm, among other factors. We examine cumulative abnormal returns in an event window of 60 days prior the acquisition announcement, with the event date adjusted for the previous disclosure of news about the acquisition, in the media. We compute a run-up index, and find that there are abnormal positive returns before the announcement date, confirming previous studies. We find that a significant part of the run-up is explained by: (i) market anticipation triggered by legitimate sources of information, namely, rumours in the media about the possibility of an acquisition bid and (ii) the percentage of capital previously owned in the target firm, by the bidding firm.     

The effects of multilateral trading systems on risk and return in equity markets

The event study methodology of Brown and Warner (1985) is adopted and augmented to evaluate the effect of the launch of multilateral trading systems on risk and return in equity markets. The methodology is supplemented with various techniques, such as the nonparametric ranking test and kernel regression, to find out if announcements about the introduction of Chi-X Australia generated abnormal returns (ARs). Asset pricing models are fitted with interaction variables, while GARCH, threshold ARCH (TARCH), exponential GARCH (EGARCH) and power-ARCH (PARCH) are used to determine changes in systematic risk. We find evidence in favour of Fisher’s separation theorem and detect a new market anomaly, which we call the ‘Fisher market anomaly’. Our results show that Chi-X system testings affect ARs. Consistent with the adaptive expectations theory, we confirm that the first announcement about the launch of Chi-X affected systematic risk the most. In addition, we identify industry and firm effects in risk analysis.     

Strategic adjustment between innovation and production: generation of integrated archetypes in Spanish service firms

This paper investigates empirically the strategic alignment between innovation and production strategies in a sample of service firms in Spain. It employs the integrated archetypes approach to analyse a dataset of unique, manually collected, firm responses. The results highlight differences in behaviour patterns underpinning both kinds of strategic decisions and, coherent with alignment theory, differential firm performance.     

Content analysis of open innovation communities using latent semantic indexing

The internationalisation of corporate research is an issue with a large impact on strategic decision-making within the research-intensive pharmaceutical industry. However, sector-wide comparative statistics on the whereabouts of corporate research activities and the geographic distribution of their research partners is scarce. This paper describes the international research profiles of Europe's top 10 largest multinational pharmaceutical companies based on publication counts and author address information drawn from the thousands of pharmaceutical research articles published in 2005–2006. The results provide relevant aggregate-level background intelligence for strategic analysis of the industry's internationalisation processes and research cooperation patterns. The overall statistics indicate that international research activity of European industry is significantly more oriented towards the US science base than vice versa. Company-level statistical data on the research cooperation involving each company's central research centres based in country of corporate headquarters, reveal quite distinctive geographical characteristics alongside differential preferences for in-house or external research partners.     

Decision-making in investment in overseas R&D

According to the literature, multinational firms are motivated to locate R&D activity overseas for mainly three reasons, namely: to adapt to local markets; access lower cost R&D capacity; or access unique research capability. Ireland at the beginning of the century appeared, from this finding, badly placed to attract R&D in foreign direct investment (FDI), as it had by global comparisons neither a large domestic market, a low cost economy nor a strong R&D profile. In spite of this, Ireland has succeeded in attracting significant investment in R&D projects. The cases of investment in Ireland analysed here reveal that the nature of the decision-making process itself has been a decisive factor in the outcome, and that less quantifiable factors such as cultural closeness, history, and personal relationships have played a stronger role in the outcome than would be expected from the literature.     

Do funding sources matter?: The impact of university-industry collaboration funding sources on innovation performance of universities

ABSTRACT

The nature of funding sources for university-industry collaboration (UIC) has gradually changed, which may motivate universities to pursue different goals. Therefore, a question arises concerning whether and how funding sources influence the innovation performance of universities. This study explicates this relationship by using organisational control theory. Results of structural equation modelling using partial least squares based on a sample of 146 Taiwanese universities revealed that both governmental and industrial funding facilitated UIC management mechanisms and regulation implementation, which subsequently influenced the innovation performance of universities. Moreover, governmental funding has a greater impact on implementing UIC regulations and industrial funding has a greater impact on building UIC management mechanisms. The results also revealed that only industrial funding exerts a positive influence on the innovation climate of a university. Policy implications are discussed at the end of this paper.