“I know half the money I spend on advertising is wasted,but I do not know which half (J. Wannamaker)”: Semiotic answers to perennial branding troubles

Marketing maverick J. Wannamaker's famous dictum has been hovering over marketing effectiveness ever since the late nineteenth century. Providing tentative answers to such a tantalizing question does not rest solely with the media-mix of a brand campaign. As argued in this paper, even more fundamentally than budget allocation lie issues about the semiotic structure of an intended brand positioning. By drawing on structuralist semiotics and particularly by focusing on the operations of structuration, homologation, isotopy, reduction, redundancy, recurrence, it will be demonstrated that what is dominantly conceived as “waste” does not concern merely media integration, but equally importantly message integration. Furthermore, communicative waste as aberrant positioning is not only the outcome of aberrant decoding, but also aberrant destructuration, both posing considerable threats to brand coherence and communicative consistency.     

Driving South: The globalization of auto consumption and its social organization of space

ABSTRACT

Don Mitchell is one of the most influential contemporary cultural geographers and has long been at the forefront of scholarship on intersections of capital, nature and labor. His work engages the geo-historical processes of landscape co-production and discusses how social, political and labor struggles that formed landscapes have been hidden or erased. Mitchell’s research and work are informed by an urgency to uncover the forces shaping the human–land dialectic. It is difficult not to sense profound urgency at the current political–ecological conjuncture, which is why we turned to Don Mitchell to reflect on his research, intellectual practice and the state of academia and activism today. The first section of the interview centers on Mitchell’s research and the tools and methods he employs in his work. In the second section of the interview, we discuss strategies and tactics in resistance struggles, campus activism and radical scholarship. Infused throughout the interview are the influences that have shaped Mitchell’s unique approach to teaching, research and a critical academic life. We conclude with a section on current academic practice.     

The challenges facing public housing authorities in a brave new world

Abstract

Public housing authorities (PHAs) are entering a brave new world. Major proposed changes to the public housing program will force PHAs to compete with private sector providers for tenants. To succeed, they will have to act more like entrepreneurial market participants: to change their management practices, the types of tenants they house, and the kinds of developments they operate, and to attract private capital for the development and operation of public‐private public housing ventures.

PHAs must confront the challenges of transformation while pursuing four mutually conflicting goals: housing the neediest, achieving diversity of tenantry, cross‐subsidizing by attracting unsubsidized tenants, and attracting private capital. Success, or even survival, may require sacrificing one or more of these goals. Whether PHAs can increase housing production to such an extent that they can provide sufficient housing for the neediest while fulfilling the other goals as well remains unclear.     

The impact of neighbors who use section 8 certificates on property values

Abstract

This article statistically examines the sale prices of single‐family homes surrounding Section 8 sites first occupied between 1991 and 1995 in Baltimore County. If only a few Section 8 sites were located within 500 feet, we found a strong positive impact on property values in higher‐valued, real‐appreciation, predominantly white census tracts. However, in low‐valued or moderately valued census tracts experiencing real declines in values since 1990, Section 8 sites and units located in high densities had a substantial adverse effect on prices within 2,000 feet, with the effect attenuated past 500 feet. Focus groups with homeowners revealed that the negative impact was based on the units’ imperfect correlation with badly managed and maintained properties.

We argue that policies should be devised to direct Section 8 households away from vulnerable neighborhoods, better regulate managers of Section 8 apartments, and more stringently screen and monitor Section 8 households.     

Alternative measures for the financial condition of the multifamily housing stock

Abstract

Indicators of the financial condition of the multifamily housing stock can potentially inform several policy issues, such as the loss of affordable rental units, multifamily developers’ access to capital, and the emerging secondary mortgage market for multifamily properties. Several rules of thumb exist for assessing financial condition. This article uses the Residential Finance Survey to investigate whether it matters, from a practical standpoint, which one is employed. Specifically, we ascertain how five measures—loan‐to‐value, debt coverage, rent‐to‐value, net operating income—to‐value, and vacancy loss ratios—relate to each other and rank properties.

We found that Pearsonian correlations among the measures varied dramatically. Factor analysis produced two factors, one corresponding to a rent‐flow measure and the other to a debt‐burden measure. Spearman rank‐order correlations revealed that with one exception, measures yielded noticeably dissimilar financial condition rankings. We conclude that single‐dimensional measures of financial condition should not be used in isolation.     

Overspending in Public Organizations: Does Strategic Management Matter?

ABSTRACT

In the wake of the financial crash, many governments across the globe are seeking to curb expenditure in public sector organizations. To assess the extent to which public organizations can make strategic choices that might result in lower expenditure, we explore the relationship between strategic management and overspending in English local governments. The effects of strategic stances and actions on overspending are tested using multivariate statistical techniques. The empirical results show that an innovative strategic stance results in overspending as does a commitment to the development of new services, while a reactive strategic stance and decentralized decision making are associated with lower levels of overspending. Our analysis provides support for arguments that public organizations can make strategic choices that result in tighter control of their budgets.     

A New Twist on an Old Approach: A Random-Interaction Approach for Estimating Rates of Inter-Group Interaction

There are numerous instances in which researchers wish to measure the rate of intra- or inter-group interactions (whether positive or negative). When computing such measures as rates there is great uncertainty regarding the appropriate denominator: we analytically illustrate how the choice of the denominator when calculating such rates is not trivial and that some existing strategies create a built-in relationship between the computed rate and the group composition within the entity. Another strand of prior work only focused on the relative occurrence of intra- versus inter-group events, which does not account for the important theoretical possibility that both types of events might increase in certain social contexts. Our approach provides an advance over these earlier strategies as it allows one to take into account the relative frequency of interaction between members of different groups, but then translates this into per capita rates. We also provide an empirical example using data on inter- and intra-group robbery and aggravated assault events for block groups in a section of the city of Los Angeles to illustrate how our procedure works and to illustrate how other approaches can lead to dramatically different conclusions.     

Spatializing the Social Networks of Gangs to Explore Patterns of Violence

The majority of spatial studies of crime employ an inductive approach in both the modeling and interpretation of the mechanisms of influence thought to be responsible for the patterning of crime in space and time. In such studies, the spatial weights matrix is specified without regard to the theorized mechanisms of influence between the units of analysis. Recently, a more deductive approach has begun to gain traction in which the theory of influence is used to model influence in geographic space. Using data from Los Angeles, we model the spatial distribution of gang violence by considering both the relative location of the gangs in space while simultaneously capturing their position within an enmity network of gang rivalries. We find that the spatial distribution of gang violence is more strongly associated with the socio-spatial dimensions of gang rivalries than it is with adjacency-based measures of spatial autocorrelation.