Sport facility development: municipal capital and shutting out the private sector

Regime theory provides a framework for exploring changes in development patterns and internal dynamics of growth coalitions. Academic debates on sport and urban development have focused on large American and European markets, where such venues are increasingly led by urban regimes that aim to leverage public goals through private investment. Based on a detailed qualitative analysis of four projects in three major Israeli cities, this work examines a different typology of sport venue development – ‘public regime’, which operates in a small market context. The Israeli public regime neither allows the private sector to assume central roles in the design, development and operation of venues nor does it stimulate real estate development anchored by the venue. The assumption that professional sports is not a viable business in small markets is used to justify the public monopoly that regards the venues as public amenities, legitimizing the lack of strategic and business plans, producing benefits for the local political elite but doing little to stabilize professional sport and secure economic returns for the public. The more affluent city of Tel Aviv demonstrates a breakout from a pure public regime, where public control is retained but more business-oriented considerations are incorporated.     

The missing revolution: The totalitarian democracy in light of 1776

During much of his prolific career, the late historian Jacob Talmon was preoccupied with revolutionary movements, and was especially unsettled by, and attracted to, the force displayed by the French and Russian Revolutions. The young United States’ long and bloody war against the British Empire, followed by the creation of a republican novus ordo seclorum, supposedly fitted Talmon's revolutionary model and narrative. Hence, it is hard to account for the complete absence of the American Revolution from Talmon's extensive and celebrated trilogy.

This paper examines how Talmon understood revolutions and how the major historiographical schools interpreting the American Revolution could not accommodate, for different reasons, Talmon's paradigm of the nature and essence of revolutions. The paper further demonstrates how not only the failings of different historical interpretive schemes convinced Talmon to ignore the American Revolution. Rather, since the American Revolution could be conceived either as Lockean or Machiavellian, but in any event not as Rousseauian, Talmon overlooked its Atlantic nature; he chose to focus solely on messianic Europe. The paper will thus analyze the meaning and consequence of the fact that Talmon left the examination of the pursuit of happiness to Americanists, and chose to leave 1776 out of his corpus. Indeed, a missing revolution.     

Location Determinants of New Foreign-Owned Manufacturing Plants

In this paper we examine the county-level pattern of new foreign-owned manufacturing plants in the United States from 1989 through 1994. We construct a model to produce insights into the differences in the location of these plants among Bureau of Economic Analysis regions, as well as between rural and urban counties. Higher levels of economic size, educational attainment, the existing manufacturing base, and transportation infrastructure are found to be associated with larger numbers of new foreign-owned plants. Meanwhile, higher levels of taxes and labor-intensiveness are found to be associated with smaller numbers of new plants. Comparing regions, we find that the main advantages of the Southeast region stem from a relatively high manufacturing base and relatively low taxes. Comparing urban with rural counties, we find that urban counties possess more favorable average values for nearly all the explanatory variables.     

Decadent pioneers: Land,space and gender in Zionist revisionist thought

Soviet Russia in the 1920s was the scene of intensified Zionist activity, fed by an economic and existential crisis among large segments of the Jewish population and tolerated to a surprising degree by the Soviet authorities. The article explores these factors and the “Soviet context” of Zionism, and documents the powerful influences they exerted on the young membership of the Zionist organizations. The author's interest goes beyond articulated ideological positions to include learned habits of work, political and cultural practices, and perceptions of the social and the personal. She analyzes the transplantation of these elements of political culture into Palestine by the 3,000-odd young Zionist immigrants who arrived between 1924 and 1931, cautioning that ideas and practices were borrowed selectively and modified by the reality of the Jewish settlement in Palestine.     

Municipal Boundary Conflicts Between Jewish and Arab Local Authorities in Israel: Geography of Administration or Geopolitics?

Municipal boundaries shape the influence of local government on patterns of development and disparities. Based on a largely qualitative assessment of initiatives to change municipal boundaries of Arab localities in Israel between the 1960s and 2001, we aim to demonstrate the tension between geographical‐administrative considerations and political, particularly geopolitical, issues at two levels: Arab claims and central government decisions. We emphasize that municipal boundary conflicts provide broader insights on societal transformations and dilemmas, as well as influencing them. Growing activism of Arabs and trends of political decentralization led not only to class‐based demands, but also to ethno‐national‐based demands. In addition to development needs with an emphasis on equality, claims of Arab municipalities also reflect aspirations to reverse consequences of the 1948 war and to redefine the Jewish essence of the state. A major dilemma among Arabs is whether to emphasize geographic‐administrative justifications or to explicitly take the ethno‐national path. Among central government decision‐makers, an explicitly political discourse has apparently given way to a professional one, which faces dilemmas of incorporating unique political‐cultural attributes of Arabs in professional assessments, and balancing them with concerns of security and state identity. Whereas professional jargon is not value free and can mask political agendas, dialogues based on a professional jargon could lead to solutions in otherwise dead‐end political disputes, although such dialogues could gain momentum only if showing results.     

The arming of non-state actors in the Gaza Strip and Sinai Peninsula

Rebellious non-state actors of the Gaza Strip and the Sinai Peninsula have been arming themselves through smuggling networks operating in north-east Africa and the Middle East. They feature complex, dynamic, open systems which include many components of various organisational and national identities, and which are driven by various motives, united in order to accomplish the goal of arms smuggling. Previously, this system was dominated by the supply of Iranian large and high-quality weapon systems, mainly rockets, to the Palestinian Hamas, enabling them to build up military force that has sustained long-standing conflict against the stronger Israel. The Arab turmoil initiated dramatic changes in the arming system: Iran stopped, at least temporarily, the channelling of weapons to the Hamas due to its support of the Syrian opposition against the Assad regime. Egypt blocked many of Hamas's smuggling tunnels, intensifying Hamas's strategic isolation. Following the removal of Gaddafi and lack of government, Libya became a major arms source, serving mainly regional radical Islamic groups. Salafist jihadist groups in Sinai revolted against the Egyptian government, using huge local stockpiles of weapons and operational cooperation with Palestinian Islamists. This article argues that to survive, rebellious non-state actors must exploit arming opportunities in the physical, social and political environment, whereas securing shared borders is vital for defeating rebellious non-state actors. The arming of non-state actors should be analysed broadly, considering the needs of the civilian population among whom the militants are operating.     

Marketing Destinations with Prolonged Negative Images: Towards a Theoretical Model

Abstract

While there is a great deal of research on destination branding in general, the study of tourism marketing that deals specifically with destinations suffering from prolonged image problems is less well developed. We integrated theories from crisis communication, image restoration and destination marketing to examine media strategies used by such destinations to attract tourism, and then classified them. We utilized qualitative content analysis of tourism campaigns for destinations – primarily in problematic areas such as the Middle East, Africa, Eastern Europe – that appeared in international tourism magazines, destinations’ websites and video-sharing websites. We classified two approaches of media strategies: the ‘cosmetic approach’, relating to strategies that focus mainly on altering the destination's image and the ‘strategic approach’, relating to strategies that take comprehensive action, changing both the negative image and the problems causing it.     

Destination image repair while combatting crises: tourism marketing in Africa

ABSTRACT

The current study analyzes the media strategies used by Sub-Saharan African (SSA) countries to repair their destination image during and after crisis, and attract international tourism. There has been to date a dearth of academic studies that looked at the marketing and branding of destinations in SSA. The few studies that have appeared on this topic focused primarily on a single case study, rather than examining various models and theories that belong to the field of image repair. We, therefore, sought to analyze a variety of case studies to look for common strategies among SSA nations. The conceptual framework used in this research was the ‘multi-step model for altering place image.’ The study was based on qualitative content analyses of news reports, press interviews, campaigns and other marketing initiatives. These items were located in three sources between the years 2008 and 2015: official websites and social media pages of the national tourism boards of SSA countries, news, reports about African countries published in three main international media outlets and reports in a global tourism news website.The study's conclusions show that SSA marketers and policy-makers used three groups of strategies to promote their destinations during and after tourism crises: (1) source-focused strategies (media cooperation and media relations, physical/economic threats and media blockage, and internet use as an alternative source), (2) message-focused strategies (ignoring the crisis, negative image acknowledgement, scale of crisis reduction, counter-message delivery, association with well-known brands and celebrities, tackling the crisis and the spin of liabilities into assets), and (3) audience-focused strategies (patriotism and personal/national heritage, and target audience change). We discovered that despite the differences among the countries, marketers in this area have adopted similar strategies to combat crises in order to repair destination images.