Climate change and visual imagery

Many actors—including scientists, journalists, artists, and campaigning organizations—create visualizations of climate change. In doing so, they evoke climate change in particular ways, and make the issue meaningful in everyday discourse. While a diversity of climate change imagery exists, particular types of climate imagery appear to have gained dominance, promoting particular ways of knowing about climate change (and marginalizing others). This imagery, and public engagement with this imagery, helps to shape the cultural politics of climate change in important ways. This article critically reviews the nascent research area of the visual representations of climate change, and public engagement with visual imagery. It synthesizes a diverse body of research to explore visual representations and engagement across the news media, NGO communications, advertising, and marketing, climate science, art, and virtual reality systems. The discussion brings together three themes which occur throughout the review: time, truth, and power. The article concludes by suggesting fruitful directions for future research in the visual communication of climate change.

Macroeconomic information, structural change, and the prediction of fiscal aggregates

Previous research on the prediction of fiscal aggregates has shown evidence that simple autoregressive models often provide better forecasts of fiscal variables than multivariate specifications. We argue that the multivariate models considered by previous studies are small-scale, probably burdened by overparameterization, and not robust to structural changes. Bayesian Vector Autoregressions (BVARs), on the other hand, allow the information contained in a large data set to be summarized efficiently, and can also allow for time variation in both the coefficients and the volatilities. In this paper we explore the performance of BVARs with constant and drifting coefficients for forecasting key fiscal variables such as government revenues, expenditures, and interest payments on the outstanding debt. We focus on both point and density forecasting, as assessments of a country’s fiscal stability and overall credit risk should typically be based on the specification of a whole probability distribution for the future state of the economy. Using data from the US and the largest European countries, we show that both the adoption of a large system and the introduction of time variation help in forecasting, with the former playing a relatively more important role in point forecasting, and the latter being more important for density forecasting.

International Sales of UK Television Content: Change and Continuity in ‘the space in between’ Production and Consumption

Focusing on the UK, this article addresses key issues facing the international distribution industry arising from over-the-top digital distribution and the fragmentation of audiences and revenues. Building on the identification of these issues, it investigates the extent to which UK distribution has altered over a ten-year period, pinpointing continuities in the destination and type of sales alongside changes in the role and structure of the industry as UK-based distributors adapt to a changing UK broadcasting landscape and global production environment. At one level increasing US ownership of UK-based distributors and the arrival of OTT players like Netflix, highlight the tensions between the national orientations of UK broadcasters and the global aspirations of independent producers and distributors. At another level VOD has boosted international sales of UK drama. Although the full impact of SVOD on content and rights has yet to materialise, significant changes in the industry predate the arrival of SVOD.

Best practice factory for freight transport in Europe: demonstrating how ‘good’ urban freight cases are improving business profit and public sectors benefits

The objective of this study is to better understand why selected urban freight solutions represent innovations that are technically feasible, economically profitable in different contexts, sustainable, transferable, and with tangible beneficial impacts. A total of 15 solutions are evaluated in the fields of Urban Consolidation Centre, clean and electric vehicles, IT solutions, use of urban waterways, and others. Three solutions are analysed more thoroughly, the Cityporto Padova, the Basel Exhibition Centre logistics support system, and the Berlin laboratory area test of the Bentobox. This paper ends with a transversal analysis of the solutions observed, and with methodological conclusions.

Best practice factory for freight transport in Europe: demonstrating how ‘good’ urban freight cases are improving business profit and public sectors benefits

The objective of this study is to better understand why selected urban freight solutions represent innovations that are technically feasible, economically profitable in different contexts, sustainable, transferable, and with tangible beneficial impacts. A total of 15 solutions are evaluated in the fields of Urban Consolidation Centre, clean and electric vehicles, IT solutions, use of urban waterways, and others. Three solutions are analysed more thoroughly, the Cityporto Padova, the Basel Exhibition Centre logistics support system, and the Berlin laboratory area test of the Bentobox. This paper ends with a transversal analysis of the solutions observed, and with methodological conclusions.

How Formal and Informal Institutions of Middle Eastern Countries Influence Managerial Discretion: An Empirical Investigation

Managerial discretion is the focal theme bridging the clash between two schools of thoughts; whether executives have greater influence on their firms’ outcomes or other factors restrain their actions (Hambrick & Finkelstein, 1987). It is argued that constraints come from inertial, normative and environmental forces (e.g. DiMaggio & Powell, 1983). Of these restraints is the institutional environment in which a firm is headquartered. Our paper falls within this research stream and provides an extension for Crossland and Hambrick (2007, 2011) work. We investigate the national level of discretion in new cross-cultural contexts, provide deeper understanding of its concept, and shed the light on undiscovered discretion’s antecedents and consequences. We adopt a quantitative approach in which questionnaires represent our data collection instrument. We anticipate that in high discretion countries firms tend to follow what Miles & Snow (1978) labeled ‘Prospector’ strategy as opposed to low discretion countries in which firms incline to implement a ‘Defender’ strategy.