The increasingly multifaceted nature of event impacts makes them even more attractive as a potential solution to a range of urban and regional problems. As a result, competition to stage major cultural and sporting events is intensifying, and the cost of bidding is also rising. Given that such bidding processes only produce one winner, this means that a growing number of disappointed cities have to justify the costs of bidding for major events. In this context, we analyse the bidding process for the European Capital of Culture in the Netherlands (2018) and its impacts on local social structures. In particular the article focuses on the less tangible, non-economic effects of bidding for events, establishing a framework based on network formation, public support for the bidding process and social cohesion. The conclusions point to the key role of sociality and networking for events, which should therefore be developed throughout the bidding process for successful impacts, whether the event is won or not.
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The ambition to host mega sports events is (or can be) perfectly justifiable with various arguments. The most persistently used argument is the supposed financial or direct economic gain for the host economy, of which the compelling body of evidence is discouraging. This implies that the justification for hosting should come from a different, broader economic angle. This paper provides a critical discussion of the myriad of economic and frequently intangible effects that could be put forward in the public debate preceding the submission of a bid. Paradoxically, most of these effects are not, or infrequently employed in public debates.
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This report summarizes the work done by Thematic Working Group 4 (TWG4) on “Procurement and Tendering” for e-bus deployment. It further analyses the various Good Practices collected by project partners with a reference to the above aspects. This report takes the policy learning one step further and sheds light on regional similarities and differences in practices that have been found functional and worth spreading.
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This report investigates prior experiences and impacts of the European Capital of Culture (ECoC) with the aim of informing preparation plans for Leeuwarden and Fryslân to organize the event in 2018. The longterm benefits that the ECoC tend to be both tangible through improvements in facilities, and intangible as self-confidence and pride increase as the result of celebrating the destination, its culture and history.
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Background: Revealing tacit knowledge often is seen as very valuable for organizations, although it is usually challenging to enunciate and share this type of knowledge. Methods: This study uses a participatory design and the application of a board gaming simulation as instruments to extract tacit knowledge. To illustrate this application, the gaming simulation is played with entrepreneurs from horticulture. Horticulture represents a complex social system where tacit knowledge plays a major role in the trade process. A participatory design process is used to explore whether the design and play of gaming simulations enable participants to explicate their tacit knowledge. Participants’ participation in designing the gaming simulation explicated that reconstructing reality was a prerequisite for their commitment. Results: The results from playing simulation sessions show that participants were able to: (1) narrow down the anecdotic behaviour to a few factors; (2) to structure these factors; (3) explore how these factors relate to trade barriers and (4) to explain which tactics are applied to foster trade. Conclusion: The educational value of this study is that it helped entrepreneurs in understanding complex real-life situations.
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Competitive advantage is probably the most popular business concept today (Mooney, 2007). This article aims to investigate critically the discourse on competitive advantage, as expressed by business literature, by locating its meanings in the public higher education sector. This research reveals that people working within the HEIs have given broader and more diversified meanings to this concept, which are partly due to the message received from external environment, and partly because of the influence of professional settings in which they function. By studying these diversified meanings, 13 elements are identified in constructing the competitive advantages of higher education institutions. Furthermore, the importance of each element is rated and ranked which enables us to assess the quantitative significance. The clarification of this container concept “competitive advantage” leads to the conclusion that the business way of defining of competitive advantage should be critically reviewed and verified in the context of public higher education sector, because the competition in the public education market is different from the normal market competition defined by the business literature.
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This study explores how non-executive directors are challenged by management while they seek to improve the effectiveness of supervisory boards in the Netherlands. A combination of semi-structured interviews and a questionnaire among non-executive directors indicates that supervisory board members mainly experience boardroom challenges in three core areas: the ability of non-executive directors to ask management critical questions, information asymmetries between the management and supervisory boards and the management of the relationship between individual executive and non-executive directors. The qualitative in-depth analysis reveals the complexity of the main contributing factors to problems in the boardroom as well as the range of process and social interventions non-executive directors use to address boardroom issues. The findings highlight the need to better understand boardroom processes and the need of non-executive directors to carefully manage relationships in and around the boardroom.
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Sport kan net als kunst, muziek en kleding ook worden gezien als een maatschappelijk verschijnsel dat inzicht geeft in de hedendaagse cultuur. Verborgen competitie belicht juist deze kant van de sport. Hierbij staan eenvoudige vragen centraal die velen interesseren, maar waaraan nog maar weinigen aandacht hebben besteed. Waarom behoort American football tot de populairste sporten van de Verenigde Staten, is China een tafeltennisbolwerk, Nederland een schaatsland en Nieuw-Zeeland een rugbynatie? Waarom wordt voetbal wereldwijd massaal beoefend en kent korfbal alleen in ons land een grote populariteit? Maarten van Bottenburg beschrijft de verspreiding en popularisering van ongeveer dertig sporten over de hele wereld in de afgelopen honderd jaar en biedt de lezer daarmee een mondiaal sportpanorama. Door het lezen van Verborgen competitie krijgt u meer inzicht in de mondialisering van de hedendaagse cultuur en in de wijze waarop mensen zich door hun sportvoorkeuren aan anderen binden of zich van hen onderscheiden.
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In this policy evaluation report, the results of the first 2 years of the Interreg funded ABCitiEs project are presented. In total 16 entrepreneurship collectives have been studied in 5 partner regions, i.e. Athens, Vilnius, Varazdin-Cakovec, Manchester and Amsterdam. The report contains an analysis of the cases and gives an overview of the most important opportunities and challenges faced by these cases. On the basis of these result, 4 policy directions have been selected in which improvement are considered most successful, i.e. access to funding, intermediaries, monitoring and experimental learning environments. Also, the report presents the action plans that have been formulated on the basis of these policy directions for the cities involved in this project. In the last 2 years of the project, project partners will implement these action plans in their respective cities.
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Objectives: Aiming to reduce distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks by alerting the consciences of Internet users, this paper evaluates the effectiveness of four warning banners displayed as online ads (deterrent—control, social, informative, and reorienting) and the contents of their two linked landing pages. Methods: We implement a 4 x 2 quasi-experimental design on a self-selected sample of Internet users to measure the engagement generated by the ads and the pages. Engagement is measured on the ads as the ratio of clicks to impressions, and on the pages as percentage of page scrolled, average session duration, video interaction rate, and URLs click rate. Results: Social ads generate significantly more engagement than the rest with low to medium effect sizes. Data reveal no differences in engagement between both landing page designs. Conclusions: Social messages may be a better alternative for engaging with potential cyber offenders than the traditional deterrent messages. Correspondence: Netherlands Institute for the Study of Crime and Law Enforcement (NSCR), De Boelelaan 1077, 1081 HV, Amsterdam, The Netherlands. Email: AMoneva@nscr.n This is a post-peer-review, pre-copyedit version of an article published in Journal of Experimental Criminology. The final authenticated version is available online at: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11292-022-09504-2
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