Immigrants, Employment, and Labor Unions: Nashville—Prospects for Coalition

immigration, employment, labor unions, Nashville

The Careers Project: An Economic Analysis of Ten Industry Clusters in California

The Careers Project is a study of the preparation all students in public middle and high schools receive to explore career options and the relationship between that preparation and California\u27s state and regional economies. The California Research Bureau (CRB) undertook this research at the request of a bipartisan group of members of the California Legislature, with funding support from the James Irvine Foundation

The Careers Project: An Economic Analysis of Ten Industry Clusters in California

The Careers Project is a study of the preparation all students in public middle and high schools receive to explore career options and the relationship between that preparation and California\u27s state and regional economies. The California Research Bureau (CRB) undertook this research at the request of a bipartisan group of members of the California Legislature, with funding support from the James Irvine Foundation

Evaluating museum service quality: a scale validation and test

Museums are places which offer leisure, entertainment and tourism opportunities. Investigating the service quality dimensions in museums help researchers and managers to better understand visitors' satisfaction and therefore, enhance their experience. The purpose of this paper was to elucidate the perceived quality dimensions' of a local museum at Belo Horizonte, Minas Gerais, Brazil, proposing and validating a scale. The research methodology applied was quantitative and 617 visitors were surveyed. Data were compiled using Exploratory Factor Analysis to reveal the perceived quality dimensions. Results showed that there are at least four dimensions concerning the museum service quality, named: (1) quality of information, (2) customer service, (3) communication and (4) tangible aspects. The fourth dimension deserves greater attention by museums' managers, since it was the most salient one

Identify Key Business Strategies to Target the Mass Market in Macau

Statement of Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to examine Macau’s present gaming environment and identify factors that will contribute to the success of a mass gaming market in Macau. The study intends to provide economic justification and tourism policy considerations which support the growth of Macau’s mass gaming market by taking advantage of the booming Chinese economy and the fast growing popularity of gaming in China. In addition, this study will examine literature supporting Macau’s transformation from a simpler gamblers’ destination into a Las Vegas style international gaming, entertainment, and tourism destination, as well as arguments for sustaining steady gaming revenue growth while maintaining competitiveness to confront gaming proliferation in the Asia-Pacific region. Ultimately, the information summarized in this paper should provide the Macau SAR Government and the decision-makers of Macau’s tourism and gaming industry with important practical applications they need to formulate strategies for developing a diversified market, sustain gaming revenue growth, and develop as a world-class tourism destination

The Instruments of Place Branding: How is it Done?

Place branding is the idea of discovering or creating some uniqueness, which differentiates one place from others in order to gain a competitive brand value. This article is not about the concepts or justifications but about how it is actually done at the local level, especially as part of broader conventional place management policies. Three main local planning instruments are widely used throughout the world in various combination in diverse places, each of which is described and exemplified here. These are first, personality association, where places associate themselves with a named individual, from history, literature, the arts, politics, entertainment, sport or even mythology, in the hope that the necessarily unique qualities of the individual are transferred by association to the place. Secondly, the visual qualities of buildings and urban design is an instrument of place-branding available to local planners. This could include flagship building, signature urban design and even signature districts. Thirdly, event hallmarking is where places organise events, usually cultural or sporting, in order to obtain a wider recognition that they exist but also to establish specific brand associations. Lessons are drawn from practice about the importance of combining these instruments and integrating them into wider planning and management strategies

Theme parks, staycation practices, and COVID-19: opportunities and uncertainties

The effects of COVID-19 on the market transformation of the theme park industry has been significant in the short term because of travel restrictions. Challenges, impacts, responses, and strategies might vary from one region to another and even from one theme park to another. However, it can be assumed that domestic travel will continue to have an effect on the theme park industry during the months to come and likely beyond the pandemic. In this context, the “staycation” is becoming a booming trend in the leisure, entertainment, and tourism industry, creating new, current, and future unexpected economic winners and losers. Nevertheless, to what extent this reactive travel behavior under the pandemic will become permanent in the mid- and long-term is rather uncertain. In any case, the attraction of domestic visitors to theme parks as a staycation holidaying practice needs to be connected with the engagement of parks in the ongoing process of societal lifestyle changes shaping customers’ decision-making. Whether this strategy could be useful to a particular theme park remains relatively unknown. In any case, more research is needed on the long-term effects of the pandemic in the theme park industry considering the characteristics of specific theme parks and their locational, contextual, human agency, and path dependency issues

Challenges in the delivery of e-government through kiosks

Kiosks are increasingly being heralded as a technology through which governments, government departments and local authorities or municipalities can engage with citizens. In particular, they have attractions in their potential to bridge the digital divide. There is some evidence to suggest that the citizen uptake of kiosks and indeed other channels for e-government, such as web sites, is slow, although studies on the use of kiosks for health information provision offer some interesting perspectives on user behaviour with kiosk technology. This article argues that the delivery of e-government through kiosks presents a number of strategic challenges, which will need to be negotiated over the next few years in order that kiosk applications are successful in enhancing accessibility to and engagement with e-government. The article suggests that this involves consideration of: the applications to be delivered through a kiosk; one stop shop service and knowledge architectures; mechanisms for citizen identification; and, the integration of kiosks within the total interface between public bodies and their communities. The article concludes by outlining development and research agendas in each of these areas.</p

Tourism Space: An Attempt at a Fresh Look

In this article, the author is trying to answer the fundamental question: what is present-day tourism space like at a time of highly increasing flows of people or even a shift from the space of a ‘place’ to the space of a ‘flow’? The article puts special stress on how to define the current unique multi-functional space. The author attempts to define tourism space as a new entity, founded on poly-functionality (i.e. different functions and use of the same space both at the same time and in different seasons), multi-scale (overlapping of tourism spaces depending on the scale concerned), multi-layer, as well as the multi-motivation of its creators and users, or even multi-relativity

Towards a methodology for the development of integrated IT infrastructures

In this paper, the authors propose and validate a methodology for the development of integrated Information Technology (IT) infrastructures. The motivation for putting forward a new methodology is grounded on the limitations of the various software engineering methodologies (traditional) that exist today. Despite that the traditional methodologies result in the development of Information Systems (IS) from scratch, Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) builds integrated IT infrastructures using existing applications. This significant difference is associated with many issues needed to be realised and addressed like: (a) the changes that such an infrastructure brings to organisations, (b) the resistance to change and (c) the extension of IS lifecycle’s. The proposed methodology consist of eight stages and aims at supporting software engineers, organisations and researchers to build integrated IT infrastructures. As a result the methodology seeks to contribute to the body of knowledge