Stakeholder Engagement And Communicaton In UK Town Partnerships: An Empirical Study

The crucial role of town partnerships in the management, marketing and regeneration of places, and in factors that affecting its performance (such as retailing, planning, infrastructure, housing) has been widely emphasized in the literature (De Magalhaes, 2012; Diamond, 2002; Hemphill et al., 2006; Warnaby et al., 2004; Whyatt, 2004). Successful partnerships often refrain from the managerial or top-down approach, and emphasize on building bridges between all local stakeholders in an attempt to enhance community engagement and participation (Head, 2007). The ideal concept of “partnership” is one of joined-up place governance by all place stakeholders (Friend, 2006), a view that is supported by the UK government, which calls for "community participation", "involving the community" and "holistic partnership" throughout the attempt to "economically transform areas and create sustainable places where people want to live and can work and businesses want to invest" (DCLG, 2009; pg.1; Greig et al., 2010). However, the creation of sustainable and successful partnerships is hampered by various parameters, such as the lack of stakeholder engagement and communication barriers between partnerships and local stakeholders (public, private, and voluntary). Whereas the future of towns is of relevance to a wide range of stakeholders (Nisco, Riviezzo, & Napolitano, 2008), only a small proportion of them seems to be interested in making a change and engages in collaborative town activities (Medway et al., 2000). Lack of collaboration and co-operation with stakeholders on a network level that stems from the inability to engage with them in the first place hinders the ability of partnerships to tackle complex and ill-defined problem solving in towns (e.g. the long-term decline of a town centre) (O’Higgins & Morgan, 2006). Barriers to communication are also prevalent between place stakeholders and partnerships, which leads to little involvement and no real empowerment of important stakeholders over town decisions (Davies, 2002). The paper aims to address the issue of communication and stakeholder engagement through an empirical examination of 10 town partnerships that participate in a High Street project. Data were collected from direct and indirect observations, as well as town documents. Initial findings suggest that the difficulty of engaging stakeholders stems from failure to find the right way to get everyone "up to speed" with what is going on in town. Town partnerships recognise that “communication is key” to the prosperity of partnerships and the town. The challenges and problems of communicating with stakeholders, as well as ideas and proposals of tackling these will be presented in a communication model, which will emphasise multiple patterns of communication in partnerships. The study aims to contribute to the understanding and successful implementation of communication practices between stakeholders, in order to enhance participation and engagement in town partnerships

What Does Place Marketing Mean in Practice? A Preliminary Content Analysis of North West England Place-Related Websites

Place marketing has been used widely as a strategy for improving the competitive image of a place. However, confusion over what place marketing is, difficulties of identifying which practices are part of a place marketing framework, and the unclear roles of stakeholders, are hindering the field's progress. Therefore, this exploratory study is concerned with identifying a range of place marketing practices, supported by the literature, that are implemented by place marketing actors. A preliminary content analysis of 49 web pages from place-related organisations in North West England was conducted, and Chi-Square tests for independence explored the relationships between practices and stakeholders. The results showed that top-down practices associated with planning, place promotions, image communication, and service offerings (retail, events) are more common than practices concerned with engaging a variety of stakeholders for the common good of a place. Chi-Square tests also showed disparities between place stakeholders, as visitors/tourists appear to have a larger effect in the implementation of place marketing practices than citizens and investors. Overall, the study contributes to a better understanding of how place marketing is implemented in practice. The results will be used for further exploration of the relationships between place marketing practices and place stakeholders

A Review Of Epistemological Issues And Philosophical Positons For The Development Of Theory In Place Marketng

The aim of this paper is to present a critical review of epistemologies within the place marketing and place branding fields and propose alternative philosophical positions that can contribute to theory development. The paper argues that the majority of place marketing and place branding literature (either explicitly or implicitly) embraces in either interpretivist or positivist philosophical stances, which have helped the field to progress in the past 20 years, but have evident drawbacks when applied as sole epistemologies. Alternative philosophical perspectives of doing research in the field of place marketing are presented, which stem from a mixed-paradigm, pragmatic approach to research, and blend pragmatism, realism and social constructionism in the context of places. Such views can delimit the concept of “place” from practical issues such as deprivation, crisis, and regeneration, as well as explore “marketing” as a social process, which can benefit communities within places. Overall, the paper suggests that philosophical and epistemological debates can clarify the field of place marketing and advance theory-making

Study of High-Transverse-Momentum Higgs Boson Production in Association with a Vector Boson in the qqbb Final State with the ATLAS Detector.

This Letter presents the first study of Higgs boson production in association with a vector boson (V=W or Z) in the fully hadronic qqbb final state using data recorded by the ATLAS detector at the LHC in proton-proton collisions at sqrt[s]=13  TeV and corresponding to an integrated luminosity of 137  fb^{-1}. The vector bosons and Higgs bosons are each reconstructed as large-radius jets and tagged using jet substructure techniques. Dedicated tagging algorithms exploiting b-tagging properties are used to identify jets consistent with Higgs bosons decaying into bb[over ¯]. Dominant backgrounds from multijet production are determined directly from the data, and a likelihood fit to the jet mass distribution of Higgs boson candidates is used to extract the number of signal events. The VH production cross section is measured inclusively and differentially in several ranges of Higgs boson transverse momentum: 250-450, 450-650, and greater than 650 GeV. The inclusive signal yield relative to the standard model expectation is observed to be μ=1.4_{-0.9}^{+1.0} and the corresponding cross section is 3.1±1.3(stat)_{-1.4}^{+1.8}(syst)  pb