Barriers to 'US style' lean retailing: the case of Wal-Mart's failure in Germany

Wal-Mart's exit from the German market in 2006 after 10 yearsof attempting to achieve sustainable competitive advantage contributesan interesting case to the small but expanding literature on‘failure’ in international investment. The workon the disinvest decision in all its forms has been criticalto a re-conceptualization of the international investment processas dynamic rather than static, linear and inexorable. An importantsegment of the work on investment and disinvestment as dynamicprocesses focuses on the environment in which investment anddisinvestment decisions evolve. While the environment of thehost country market has begun to be examined, the market environmentof the country in which the retail transnational corporation(TNC) originates also affects the international disinvestmentprocess. To explore this ‘home country effect’,I examine the resources Wal-Mart brought into the German marketand their ability to use those resources in the German context.Wal-Mart's resources were shaped by the market governance regimein which the firm evolved, and not insignificantly, over whichit had and has influence. Within this theoretical frame, Wal-Mart'sreliance on the resources of network dominance and autonomousaction that made for its success in the USA contributed to unsuccessfulstrategies in the German retailing market.     

Domestic challenges and international leadership: a case study of women in Australian international affairs

Women in international affairs play powerful and influential roles in shaping laws and policies, negotiating on subjects of war, peace and security, and representing national interest. In Australia, women outnumber men at all levels of public service to executive level one. Yet, women remain under-represented in more senior ranks and appear to experience significant challenges gaining leadership in agencies involved in diplomacy and security. What are the gendered institutions at play in Australian international affairs? Using a comparative case study approach, this paper explores the experiences of senior executive level women leaders across the Australian Federal Government in four case agencies—the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT), Defence, Department of Home Affairs (DHA), and the Australian Federal Police (AFP). Women’s gendered challenges in international leadership are not surprising within a diplomatic history that has often restricted women’s roles based off the ‘appropriateness’ of sending women as envoys to nations of varying safety and respect for their status. What is surprising is that women report greater sexism, discrimination and harassment from within their own agencies, not from countries in which they are hosted. This has important ramifications globally on gaining and retaining women in international affairs leadership.     

Postcolonial cultural governance: a study of heritage management in post-1997 Hong Kong

This paper seeks to unpack the politics of heritage preservation in post-1997 Hong Kong. Referring to international frameworks on heritage preservation, it seeks to position Hong Kong’s cultural resource management on par with international discourses for the advancement of heritage governance. Debates surrounding heritage are indeed a part of the wider picture of Hong Kong’s cultural and identity politics and the Hong Kong-China relationship. By examining various contested cases of heritage conservation, and by linking those debates back to the government’s responses within the context of cultural governance, we suggest that heritage management has become a hot stove for cultural politics in post-colonial Hong Kong with deep repercussions in the political, social and economic spheres. The paper examines the rising social debates concerning the removal and conservation of built heritage, and the various government attempts to address these debates. It argues that the current heritage governance mechanism has failed to meet social needs and provide an articulated heritage policy. We propose that a coherent organisational structure is required to better accommodate diverse and contradictory views and discourses surrounding heritage and cultural governance and to tackle the various cultural challenges in postcolonial Hong Kong.     

Geographies of tourism development and planning

ABSTRACT

Development and planning have long been a focus of tourism geographers. Although the ideas of development and planning are complex and challenging to define and study, there is a strong agreement on the academic and societal relevance of their research in tourism geographies: tourism is a growth industry which requires holistic and future-oriented planning measures that minimize the negative externalities of tourism and guide the industry's growth towards a development path. A brief overview of early phases and current directions of development and planning approaches in geographical tourism research shows how traditional approaches are still relevant. There is, however, a need to recognize distinct contextual and historical dimensions around the geographies of tourism development and planning in versatile research contexts. These historic and contextual elements influence the present and future characteristics and power relations of tourism in place and can help us to understand how tourism works with localities and localities with tourism.     

Privatising the suburbs: examining the trends and implications of 20 years of private residential development in Sydney,Australia

Master planned estates have been the subject of considerable academic interest since the publication of Blakely and Snyder's ( 1997 ) typology. The growing provision of private assets, facilities, and infrastructure in such estates has been documented and discussed. However, the extent of this form of residential estate in Australia has yet to be systematically documented. This paper seeks to contribute to knowledge in this field by reference to findings from an investigation in Sydney, Australia, using data from 300 private residential estates constructed under the New South Wales Community Land Development Act, 1989 (community title) over a 20‐year period. The aim is to understand the broad trends emerging in relation to the nature and extent of these types of developments and to consider some of their potential implications. This research suggests that there has been a quiet revolution in residential development and postulates that the extent of privatisation of essential neighbourhood infrastructure has been considerable. The study finds that master planned residential estate development has proliferated, particularly in the outer suburbs and in areas of relative disadvantage, and resulted in enclaves of comparative affluence disconnected from surrounding areas. In addition, the restrictive covenants usually applied in these estates are often designed to prevent change, including future densification or environmental adaptation. To this extent, the privatised nature of these estates puts them beyond the reach of broader urban planning goals.     

Class Monopoly Rent and the Redevelopment of Portland's Pearl District

This study examines the role of class monopoly rent in shaping the spatial form and pattern of urban redevelopment processes in the contemporary neoliberal city. Since an initial flourishing literature during the 1970s and 1980s, urban land rent theory has fallen from the analytic radar of critical urban studies since the early 1990s, with the influence of class monopoly rent often considered an aberration of how capitalist real estate markets normally operate, if not rejected. Consequently, class monopoly rent has never been systematically elaborated. Based on an empirical analysis of Portland's Pearl District, this study suggests that the influence of class monopoly rent in contemporary processes of urban redevelopment is far more pervasive than often recognised, representing a “standard institutional practice” that is endemic (rather than aberrational) to the working of neoliberal urban governing regimes, and embeds in the social and physical landscape in a multiplicity of ways.     

Balancing Costs and Benefits of Collaboration in an Ecology of Games

The growth of collaborative approaches to governance has resulted in increasingly complex policy and management landscapes, where actors are presented with ever‐increasing numbers of decision‐making venues they can participate in and actors they can collaborate with. Given that actors face constraints on their capacity to manage actor and venue relationships in such polycentric governance systems, we assume the marginal benefit of yet another relationship should begin to diminish at some level of engagement. Furthermore, we hypothesize that such capacity limitations are not static, but decrease as actors learn, develop skills, and formulate strategies for how to navigate complex polycentric systems more effectively. Drawing on the Ecology of Games framework, this article investigates two Swedish collaborative governance initiatives where a multitude of actors came together to address a range of different, but interrelated, policy issues and management tasks. The empirical findings suggest that actors’ capacities to successfully navigate polycentric governance arrangements increase as they gain experience and develop their networking skills. Our findings imply there is a need to balance increased complexity in polycentric systems with increased capacity, otherwise the overall effect of an ever‐increasing number of venues and actors could be collaborative fatigue and decreased abilities to address diverse governance challenges.     

Participation and Political Influence in Complex Governance Systems

Public policy generally emerges from interactions among actors embedded within complex governance systems, composed of multiple actors and forums (issue‐based arenas where stakeholders repeatedly interact to resolve collective action problems). Such systems allow actors multiple forums wherein they can influence policy decisions. But actors do not value the decisions made in each forum equally, and it remains unclear how actors allocate resources across forums. This article links actor strategy to their influence within the forums the actors identify as most important (their primary forum). There is theoretical ambiguity about how actors invest their limited resources across the forums that affect their interests to maximize primary forum influence. Do they concentrate all their effort within the primary forum or participate more broadly? To answer this question, we offer two competing theories. First, broad participation may allow actors to develop political capital necessary to influence other actors and thus influence primary forum policies. The second approach notes the opportunity costs of broad participation—actors have fewer resources to invest in their primary forum. An analysis of stakeholder participation in the Sacramento–San Joaquin River Delta and Tampa Bay Watershed governance systems demonstrates that broader participation is associated with greater primary forum influence.     

Beyond the blind spot of knowledge-based territorial development: the mission of Metropolitan Food Clusters

The rise of knowledge-based territorial development has been fuelled primarily by aspirations of competitiveness and wealth creation. Another upcoming ambition is that of sustainability, not only as an accompanying goal but as a core mission driving territorial initiatives such as clusters development. This paper explores mission-driven territorial development along theoretical and empirical lines. The paper starts by discussing a basic heuristic model intersecting the three concepts of ‘mission’, ‘knowledge’ (distinguishing ‘substantive’ and ‘significant’ knowledge) and ‘governance’. This leads to an analytical framework for territorial development focusing on (1) mission formulation, (2) production and exchange of knowledge in supportive milieus, (3) embedding of substantive knowledge, (4) anchoring of significant knowledge, and (5) feeding of significant knowledge into the (re) design of institutions and strategies of policy design and implementation. This framework is applied to three cases of ‘Metropolitan Food Clusters’ to illustrate and test the framework. The paper shows how especially the continuous anchoring of significant knowledge poses major challenges to knowledge-based territorial development and should be a central issue in future research and policy.     

Investigating the partnership approach in the EU Urban Agenda from the perspective of soft planning

At the European level, several strategic documents concerned with spatial and urban development have been published during the last decades. While these documents are essential to communicate European ideas and objectives, they are often regarded least influential in practice due to their abstract nature, legally non-binding status and lack of allocated resources. Though these limitations apply to the EU Urban Agenda, this recently published policy paper introduces partnerships as a new implementation tool. The partnerships can be regarded as innovative in two respects: On the one hand, they involve new actors, most importantly cities, in European policy debates. On the other hand, they ensure the anchorage of the Urban Agenda with a broad range of actors at various spatial scales without challenging its legally non-binding status. The Urban Agenda can thus be understood as another example of the move towards soft European spatial planning and urban development. This article investigates the notion of partnership as a soft planning and governance tool within the Urban Agenda. Moreover, based on expert interviews, it presents early opinions and expectations of actors involved in the development of the Urban Agenda and the partnerships on affordable housing.