Purpose - The branding of places has gained popularity among city officials in recent years. Unfortunately, place marketers often disregard the complexity of place brands, as do their counterparts in ...the academic discussion: the focus repeatedly falls on the simple explorative description of certain city brands, rather than a proper conceptualization of a place brand that employs different measurement approaches for the different elements of the brand. Thus, this paper aims to identify those different elements and discuss measurement approaches that could prove useful in place branding. Design/methodology/approach - Following a review of the extant literature on the measurement of brand image in general and place branding in particular, the paper outlines distinct elements, categories and dimensions of a place brand, as well as a number of approaches from place brand image measurement, with example cases of each approach. Findings - Exploring a brand can be divided into three main approaches: in the form of free brand associations of target customers with qualitative methods, in the form of attributes with quantitative methods like standardized questionnaires and with mixed methods that combine qualitative research with quantitative methods. Originality/value - This paper presents an extensive review of current place brand measurement studies and provides a conceptual framework for the elements of a place brand. Through these means, the paper offers a valuable concept for place branding and furthers the discussion of appropriate measurement approaches in the realm of place branding.PUBLICATION ABSTRACT
•The Brexit is a political crisis that affects consumer decisions.•Research has focussed on economic effects, while missing social-psychological ones.•We explore how consumers’ decision change ...between a hard and soft Brexit scenario.•Trust in government is thereby lowering perceived uncertainty.•We found strong country differences for the effect of the Brexit scenarios.
For several years, the Brexit has been an ongoing political crisis with high uncertainty that nonetheless affects us in many ways. Until now, the academic debate has mainly emphasized the political, economic and legal consequences, while disregarding the social-psychological effects of the crisis. This article examined the relationships between trust in UK and EU government and perceived uncertainty, and how these relationships affected consumers’ choices (i.e., travelling decisions). We assessed these relationships in a two-country Brexit field experiment (UK and Germany; N = 1,228) confirming moderation by country differences, where trust in one’s own government has a weaker impact. In turn, the soft and hard Brexit scenarios moderated these country differences: for the British sample, the effect of trust in the EU government is stronger for a hard Brexit, while Germans showed a reversed and counterintuitive structure for trust in the UK government.
•MATTR and two versions of MTLD are highly stable indices for analyzing short texts.•TTR, Root TTR, and Log TTR were not stable for any text length in the analysis.•Essay prompt and proficiency level ...had a small but significant effect on scores.
Lexical diversity (LD) is an important feature of a second language (L2) writer’s lexical knowledge, and indices of LD have been widely used in the field of writing assessment (e.g., Cumming et al., 2006; Engber, 1995). Research with longer native speaker (L1) texts has indicated, however, that many commonly used LD indices are sensitive to text length and may conflate lexical breadth and fluency. Because of the importance of measuring LD in L2 writing assessment research, it is essential to know the degree to which particular LD indices are resistant to text length effects and the minimum text lengths at which these indices produce stable values. In this study, we investigate text length effects for nine indices of LD in a corpus of 4542 L2 argumentative essays. The results indicate that MATTR (Covington & McFall, 2010) and two versions of MTLD (McCarthy, 2005; McCarthy & Jarvis, 2010) are the most stable of the indices included in the study. MATTR performs particularly well, maintaining a high degree of stability across all text lengths. Comparisons based on essay prompt and proficiency level are also discussed.
Michael Schnegg's article makes an important, inspiring, and timely contribution to debates within phenomenological anthropology that have grown in recent years and are increasingly gaining attention ...within anthropology as a whole. Schnegg offers a substantial and solidly grounded overview of a set of key concepts in philosophical phenomenology - intentionality (Edmund Husserl), being-in-the-world (Martin Hei degger), embodiment (Maurice Merleau-Ponty), empathy (Edith Stein), responsivity (Bernhard Waldenfels) and atmosphere (Hermann Schmitz) - which, he argues, are useful in making better sense of specific experiences during fieldwork. Moreover, he also wants to use this phenomenological anthropology for the purpose of criticizing these socio-cultural contexts. Such a critical phenomenological anthropology may proceed, Schnegg argues, by analysing first-person experiences of suffering pointing towards structures of injustice and discrimination, as well as by using the emic concepts of our interlocutors to destabilize our own. T his thorough engagement with phenomenological concepts for potential ethno graphic usage is compelling and offers food for thought in many ways. At the same time, it also raises some questions.
Speeding up land reform through a constitutional amendment that would explicitly permit the expropriation of land without compensation has dominated legal and political-policy debates in South Africa ...in recent years. Taking this politically and emotionally charged issue as its starting point, this volume offers both expert commentary on this issue from a variety of disciplinary perspectives and also fresh ideas on how to advance the redistributive transformation that South Africa so urgently needs. It brings critically important debates around transformative property law, the need for diversified land justice and the possibilities of alternative forms of redistribution into productive conversation with each other. While grounded in the complex realities of South Africa's past and present, the volume speaks to concerns that resonate in many contexts in the Global South and beyond. It will appeal to scholars, students, policymakers and general readers concerned with both the theory and practice of redistributive justice. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.
With their specific layer features and properties, surface treatments such as thermochemical treatment (nitriding, boriding) and hard coating cover a broad field of application in the wear and ...corrosion protection of steels. Limitations exist, however, when applying these surface treatments to softer materials, such as cast irons and aluminum alloys in terms of both their treatability and load-bearing capacity.
This contribution deals with investigations into duplex surface treatments, where a pre- and post-electron beam (EB) surface treatment (e.g., hardening, remelting, alloying etc.) was combined with one of the above-mentioned treatments. Among other characteristics, the thermal EB surface treatments were characterized by high heating and cooling rates that facilitated the generation of a variety of non-equilibrium microstructures, which exhibited increased hardness and had minimal thermal effects on the surrounding base material. Furthermore, the layer thicknesses were one or two orders of magnitude higher than those generated by thermochemical treatment or hard coating.
Based on the comprehensive results and using cast irons and Al alloys as examples, the study demonstrates the extent to which duplex treatments can overcome the aforementioned limitations, and how the tribological and/or corrosive load behavior is affected. The property profiles achieved after duplex surface treatment were strongly dependent on the inherent microstructural and chemical processes. These complex processes were influenced by a range of factors, such as the thermal stability of the EB surface layer generated in the first process step, the respective temperature and time period of the secondary process, etc.
Hardness measurements, scratch tests, unlubricated pin-on-disc wear tests using different normal loads and potentiodynamic corrosion tests were realized to facilitate characterization of the different load behaviors of the single- and duplex-treated layers.
•Classification of combination treatments for cast irons and Al alloys•Combination treatments for overcoming microstructural limitations•Electron beam surface treatment to improve the load-bearing support of thin coatings•Thermal stability of the first process layer is essential.
Shortly after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Fukuyama (1992) famously framed the victory of liberalism and its universal acceptance as ‘the end of history’. To the extent that this sentiment has, ...of late, lost its grip on the popular imagination so that ‘the end of history’ has itself come to an end, we have been entering a postliberal world. This postliberal condition of Brexit, Trumpism and the expansion of right populisms throughout Euro-America and beyond has brought about a profound anthropological nervousness. How to explain this sense of disciplinary crisis? Why bother to proclaim that ‘how we respond to this challenge will define the future of our discipline’ (Bessire and Bond 2017: np)? In short: why do these postliberal projects seemingly go to the heart of the anthropological project itself?In a recent article, Mazzarella (2019) unearths some of the reasons for this deep postliberal provocation. In line with the diagnostic proposed here of anthropology as a discipline of postliberal critique, he argues that ‘anthropology itself, methodologically if not always ideologically, tends towards a populist stance habitually aligning with the common sense of the common people’ (2019: 46). What makes the current right-populist provocation so hard to swallow for anthropology is thus the fact that this provocation seems both in alignment with anthropology’s own postliberal critique and in conflict with anthropology’s own ‘vague, generic liberalism’ (2019: 48). Right populism so profoundly challenges anthropology because it seems to use many of anthropology’s own arguments; the postliberalisms of right populism and anthropology seemingly coalesce and are increasingly difficult to distinguish. Or, rather, anthropology might have, for too long, not invested enough energy and care in sufficiently distinguishing its own brand of postliberalism from potentially harmful other variants.That anthropology could afford to do so is arguably due to two common forms of de facto duplicity. First, preferably studying ‘good’ subaltern groupings (people who anthropologists ‘overtly liked and favoured politically’ (Don Kalb, this issue)), it has been relatively easy to advocate, and engage in, a morally and politically unproblematic collaborative anthropology of scholar–informant solidarity (see Lassiter 2005, but also Teitelbaum 2019), making it unnecessary to explicitly spell out, and defend, the values underpinning the postliberal project of both scholars and informants. Second, moral-political compartmentalisation might also have played some role: in extending the horizons of tolerance within research contexts sufficiently kept apart from those of the observing anthropologists, the latter might have been in the position to advocate an extensive tolerance for convictions and practices, the practical consequences of which they did not have to bear themselves.
The centrosome is the primary microtubule-organizing center (MTOC) of most animal cells; however, this organelle is absent during early mammalian development. Therefore, the mechanism by which the ...mammalian embryo organizes its microtubules (MTs) is unclear. We visualize MT bridges connecting pairs of cells and show that the cytokinetic bridge does not undergo stereotypical abscission after cell division. Instead, it serves as scaffold for the accumulation of the MT minus-end–stabilizing protein CAMSAP3 throughout interphase, thereby transforming this structure into a noncentrosomal MTOC. Transport of the cell adhesion molecule E-cadherin to the membrane is coordinated by this MTOC and is required to form the pluripotent inner mass. Our study reveals a noncentrosomal form of MT organization that directs intracellular transport and is essential for mammalian development.
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