Customers Value Seeking Practices in Public Sector Health and Fitness Clubs

This thesis is concerned with how customers seek value in public health and fitness clubs. Although the study of value takes many discursive avenues, value as practices are investigated in the present research. To establish the value seeking practices of public health and fitness club customers, data was collected via an ethnographic study. This involved the researcher attempting to view the practices of the public health and fitness club customers through their lens. Therefore, the researcher immersed himself in the study context for a period of five months as a participant observer. In addition, twenty in depth interviews with public health and fitness club customers where conducted. This combination of methods provided rich and detailed data for analysis. The data was viewed from an interpretive perspective and was subsequently coded using open, axial, and selective coding principles. The findings led to the identification of three key themes: practices concerning customers joining and committing to the health club, practices relating to the facilitation of customers performances within the health club, and the customers own visible performance practices. Within each broad theme, many sub-practices are identified and explained. The empirical data suggests that customers seek particular practices that give them value however these do not always match the provider’s requirements. It is further suggested that disjuncture’s between the customers and the providers practice could be viewed as the customer proposing practice for service development. Overall, the thesis extends existing research by providing new insights into customer’s value seeking practices in public sector health and fitness clubs and proposes a new model of value practice as a means of service development

Ukraine's Many Faces: Land, People, and Culture Revisited

Russia's large-scale invasion on the 24th of February 2022 once again made Ukraine the focus of world media. Behind those headlines remain the complex developments in Ukraine's history, national identity, culture and society. Addressing readers from diverse backgrounds, this volume approaches the history of Ukraine and its people through primary sources, from the early modern period to the present. Each document is followed by an essay written by an expert on the period, and a conversational piece touching on the ongoing Russian aggression against Ukraine. In this ground-breaking collection, Ukraine's history is sensitively accounted for by scholars inviting the readers to revisit the country's history and culture

Bargaining away the tax base: the north-south politics of tax treaty diffusion

Developing countries have signed over a thousand tax treaties, at a cost of millions of pounds a year, based on a myth. The predominant legal rationale for so-called ‘double taxation’ treaties is outdated, while the evidence that they attract investment into developing countries is inconclusive. Although the financial gains from tax treaties are split between the treasuries of capital exporting countries and their multinational companies, most of the costs are incurred by the fiscs of capital importing countries. Rational actor models alone cannot explain the diffusion of tax treaties to the global South. The missing piece of the picture is ideas. As developing countries have formed their identities as fiscal states, a century-old narrative describing the deleterious effects of double taxation resulting from international fiscal anarchy has shaped different actors’ preferences. From the perspective of those focused on investment promotion, tax treaties are part of what a state does when it wants to compete for investment, regardless of the evidence about their actual effects. Meanwhile, officials developing the tax system have looked to the OECD as the source of sophisticated technical knowledge, and learned to regard tax treaties as the way to ensure ‘acceptable standards’ for taxing multinational companies. This thesis uses interviews with treaty negotiators, observations of international meetings, and archival research, including case studies from the UK, Zambia, Vietnam and Cambodia selected through a mixed methods strategy. It identifies three diffusion mechanisms: competition by developed countries for outward investment opportunities, ‘boundedly rational’ competition by developing countries for inward investment, and efforts by tax specialists to disseminate fiscal standards. It also highlights two scope conditions. First, competition for inward investment can be blocked if political actors are concerned about raising corporate tax revenue. Second, where the preferences of specialists and nonspecialists in a country do not align, control over veto points is a prerequisite to diffusion