Heritage

This article examines the concepts, definitions, policies, and practices of heritage in a contemporary context. Within recent years, there have been significant shifts in our understandings and applications of heritage concepts and policies in the modern world. ‘Heritage’ emerged as a buzz word in international policy arenas in the 1980s and early 1990s, and has since weathered the vagaries of turbulent definitional and governance–nomenclature storms, as traditional debates about ‘what it is and what it is not’ reverberate around academia and state agencies alike. Policy and funding structures for heritage are determined by the classifications used to define them in various countries. Typically, reference is made to ‘built heritage’, ‘natural heritage’, and ‘intangible heritage’, loosely reflecting buildings, landscapes, and culture. Aspects of heritage are used by the cultural and tourism industries to add economic value, through heritage tourism sites, museums, and other activities. The cultural tourism product is often anchored around notions of heritage, and in postmodern, post-tourist societies, boundaries between culture, (travel) space, and identities are increasingly blurred. Issues of authenticity become important in the representation of heritage, and questions are asked about the validity of nostalgia versus realism. The role of heritage is examined in the context of identity formulation at individual and nation-state levels, and the political aspects of this are also discussed. Finally, heritage conservation is assessed through an examination of UNESCO’s World Heritage Site listing and protection strategy. In a changing world, new constructs of heritage, identity, authenticity, and representation will continue to emerge as meanings are constantly renegotiated over time and space.

Lost in Translation, book review of Urban Landscape Perspectives

In Sofia Coppola's 2003 film Lost in Translation, Bill Murray and Scarlett Johansson's characters find themselves culturally stranded and oddly mismatched as an improvised tourist couple in contemporary Tokyo. This is an urban landscape that they cannot comprehend but only temporarily experience, in a fragmented and surreptitious way that allows no possible understanding and categorizations, but offers physical inclusion, emotional participation and momentary embeddedness.

Financing of SME's: an asset side story

The main sources of financing for small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs) are equity (internally generated cash), trade credit paid on time, long and short term bank credits, delayed payment on trade credit and other debt. The marginal costs of each financing instrument are driven by asymmetric information (cost of gathering and analysing information) and transactions costs associated with non-payment (costs of collecting and selling collateral). According to the Pecking Order Theory, firms will choose the cheapest source in terms of cost. In the case of the static trade-off theory, firms choose finance so that the marginal costs across financing sources are all equal, thus an additional Euro of financing is obtained from all the sources whereas under the Pecking Order Theory the source is determined by how far down the Pecking Order the firm is presently located. In this paper, we argue that both of these theories miss the point that the marginal costs are dependent of the use of the funds, and the asset side of the balance sheet primarily determines the financing source for an additional Euro. An empirical analysis on a unique dataset of Portuguese SME's confirms that the composition of the asset side of the balance sheet has an impact of the type of financing used and the Pecking Order Theory and the traditional Static Trade-off theory are rejected.