Services dominate the modern economy. This controversial and important book reviews research into the development and future of the service economy. Professor Illeris synthesises not only English language research on the nature and function of services, but also introduces the lesser--known but equally important work done on services by researchers in other languages which often reaches surprising and challenging conclusions. While the emphasis is on producer services in the western world, due consideration is also given to the role and significance of personal and household services which have been frequently ignored in the literature. The approach adopted is geographical and macro--economic and among the topics discussed are the nature and classification of service activities, the role and importance of services in the overall economy and the increasing importance of services in regional development and international trade. The overall theme of the book is how our society has been transformed into a service economy and what this implies for individuals, institutions and states as both producers and consumers of services. This is a key text for students and researchers of economics, economic geography, planning, regional science and applied social science as well as of interest to planners, consultants and managers in service industries and government.

This is a book for aspiring event managers, providing both a theoretical and a practical guide to selecting and working with venues as part of the event planning process. The book explores the different types of venues available to event managers, from unique venues such as historical buildings and theatres to sporting and academic venues, analysing the specific characteristics, benefits and drawbacks that distinguish them. It also illustrates how venues function and are managed, incorporating key aspects of venue management including staffing, marketing, legislation, production, scheduling and administration. Sustainability, ethics and technology are also integrated throughout, along with a vast range of industry examples of different venue types and events from around the world. Comprehensive and accessible, Working with Venues for Events offers students an essential understanding of how event managers can successfully negotiate, work with and plan for a successful event in a variety of venue settings. This is an invaluable resource for anyone with an interest in events management.

Given the historical and cultural richness of countries in the Middle East region, as well as the economic development many have exhibited in recent years, tourism planning and development gains much significance for both scholars and practitioners. Turbulence, conflicts and crises exhibited in the area add further dimensions that need to be incorporated in tourism strategies and planning, and taken into consideration by experts at an institutional, corporate and educational level. Furthermore, in order to effectively deal with aspects of sustainability, visions and strategies in the region need to build upon good practices. As a result, a greater understanding is required of the factors influencing decision-making on tourism matters as well as on the impacts and implications of sustainable tourism development. This book, written by an international team of experts, addresses the need to examine tourism development and planning in the Middle East from a sustainability perspective by embracing case studies and examples from the region. Through its collection of chapters, the book considers tourism planning and development from the economic, socio-cultural, environmental and regulatory perspectives of sustainability. Thus, the book advances understandings of the positive and negative impacts of tourism development as well as how turbulence, crisis, synergies and the top-down and bottom-up approaches to tourism development are connected to different problems and implications for local communities, the region and the relationship of the Middle East with the rest of the world. An essential resource for tourism practitioners, decision-makers in private and public organizations, government bodies, and consultants from not only the Middle East, but all those who want an encompassing view of global tourism.

Experience the joy-and profits-that come from managing your own bed and breakfast
Whether you already know the magic that comes with owning a B&B or you are at the planning stage, the fourth edition of Open Your Own Bed & Breakfast-now updated with everything you need to know about online marketing-guides you through this special world. Barbara Notarius, one of America's most widely recognized and respected B&B experts, shows you how to make your dream a reality. Some of the essential information provided in this book includes:
* Your responsibilities-and those of your guests
* Financial considerations
* Advertising, the Internet, and working with a reservation service
* Evaluating your home's assets and liabilities
* Conforming to the ADA
* Legal, tax, and insurance issues, including recent changes in the tax code
* Interviews with successful hosts
* Lists of B&B associations, guidebooks, and B&B reservation services

This new edition is an informative update of every aspect you need to know in order to run your B&B smoothly and successfully. Combining a meticulous business approach with a sincere appreciation for the pleasure that comes with running a B&B, Open Your Own Bed & Breakfast is an invaluable resource.

This book offers an overview of service design practices for healthcare and hospital management. It explores how these practices can help to generate innovations in healthcare and contribute to the improvement of patient-centered care. Respected experts, including scholars from various disciplines and practitioners from healthcare institutions, share essential insights into established research areas, fields of work and work structures, and discuss successful approaches, methods and tools. By illustrating innovative services, products, processes, systems, and technologies, as well as their application in practice, the authors highlight the role of participating stakeholders in service design projects and the added value that comes from sharing, communicating, networking and collaborating. This book is a must-read for scholars and practitioners in the hospital and healthcare sector. It will also appeal to anyone interested in organizational development, service business model innovation, customer involvement and perceptions, and service experience.

Tourism Fictions, Simulacra and Virtualities offers a new understanding of tourism's interaction with space, questioning the ways in which fictions, simulacra and virtualities express tourism in the built environment and vice versa. Since its beginnings, tourism has inspired themed built environments that have a constitutive, and sometimes problematic, relationship with the "real" world and its architectural references. This volume questions and rethinks the different environments constructed or adapted both for and by tourism exploring the relationship between the "real" and the "unreal" within the tourist bubble and the ways in which the real world inspires simulacra for tourism use. Adopting an interdisciplinary approach this book touches on a wide range of geographical areas, eras and subjects such as post-socialist tourism in Poland, the Hawaiian imaginary in Las Vegas, Rio de Janeiro's Little Africa, as well as multiple instances of virtual reality in tourism. This timely and innovative volume will be of great interest to upper level students, researchers and academics in tourism, architecture, cultural studies, geography and heritage studies.

Wirtschaftspolitische Lehrbuchdarstellung des Tourismus.

Each year, thirteen million anglers enjoy the sport of saltwater angling in the United States, generating an estimated $30 billion in sales and supporting nearly 350,000 jobs. Recreational saltwater fishing, however, can significantly impact species of concern-species overfished or experiencing overfishing. Traditional angling controls bag and size limits and restricted seasons have fallen short in controlling fishing impacts and reducing conflicts among fishing and non-fishing interests. Evolving Approaches to Managing Marine Recreational Fisheries offers ways of overcoming such problems while providing anglers and the recreational service industry greater regulatory flexibility to enjoy the fruits of sportfishing. It features fourteen internationally recognized fishery experts presenting the pros and cons of using individual fishing quotas (IFQs), game tags, and angler management organizations (AMOs) in managing marine recreational fisheries, presenting both theoretical and practical solutions to help move recreational fisheries management to a new and improved level."

This book comprehensively describes, explains, critiques and refines our current perspectives of event leveraging and, in so doing, provides an analytic account of the subject area as a whole, as it concerns the strategic pursuit of attaining and magnifying benefits that derive from events. Encompassing all events including sport, cultural and business, it also covers all kinds of benefits that can be leveraged and lead to sustainability through triple-bottom-line assessment. The book takes an interdisciplinary approach to cross boundaries and creates linkages among the parent disciplines (sport management; events, hospitality and tourism; leisure studies, parks and recreation) and general disciplines (management, marketing, sociology, anthropology, urban and regional planning). Written by an experienced author well-known in the field of event management and leveraging, this book: - Examines the art of event leveraging and contributes to the literature by refining pertinent theory. - Presents and explains theoretical models of event leveraging and emergent derivative frameworks. - Reveals major practices, issues and lessons from literature and case studies. - Integrates disciplinary applications of event leveraging to further refine the theoretical perspective through an interdisciplinary lens. - Develops a comprehensive outlook of event leveraging as a means to sustainability. Building a truly global and transdisciplinary framework, the author provides direction and possibilities that can lead to new forms of leveraging, making this an excellent resource for researchers, practitioners and students interested in event management and policy, sport management, recreation and leisure, and hospitality, tourism and festival management.

Few entrepreneurs can claim to have actually changed the way we live, but Ray Kroc is one of them. Hisrevolutions in food service automation, franchising, shared national training and advertising have earned him aplace beside the men who founded not merely businesses but entire new industries.But even more interesting than Ray Kroc the business legend is Ray Kroc the man. Not your typical self-madetycoon, Kroc was 52 when he met the McDonald brothers and opened his first franchise. Now meet Ray Kroc, theman behind the business legend, in his own words. Irrepressible enthusiast, perceptive people-watcher, and bornstoryteller, he will fascinate and inspire you. You'll never forget Ray Kroc.

If it can get dirty, chances are people will pay to have it cleaned. Houses, carpets, upholstery, windows . . . the list goes on and on. A vast majority of dual-income families use cleaning services, creating a huge market for cleaning service startups. Updated with the latest industry and market information, including the impact of technology and new specialty niches, this new edition provides eager entrepreneurs with all the information they need to become a squeaky-clean success. The experts at Entrepreneur Press share everything aspiring entrepreneurs need to know to start three of the most in-demand cleaning businesses: residential maid service, commercial janitorial service, and carpet/upholstery cleaning. Included here are current statistics and trend forecasts, the ins and outs of finding customers, new ideas for hiring and training employees, up-to-date legal, tax, and insurance requirements, tips on avoiding common pitfalls, and surefire tips for growing a business. Other support includes answers to frequently asked questions and access to an appendix of additional resources and checklists to guide readers through each step of the startup process.

On January 7, 1980, in the run-up to the publication of his landmark bestseller Thy Neighbor's Wife, Gay Talese received an anonymous handwritten letter from a man in Colorado. "Since learning of your long-awaited study of coast-to-coast sex in America," the letter began, "I feel I have important information that I could contribute to its contents or to contents of a future book." The man went on to tell Talese an astonishing secret: he had bought a motel outside Denver to satisfy his voyeuristic desires. Underneath the roof of his motel, the man had built an "observation platform," fitted with vents, through which he could watch his unwitting guests. Unsure what to make of this confession, Talese traveled to Colorado where he met the man--Gerald Foos--and verified his story in person. But because Foos insisted on remaining anonymous, preserving for himself the privacy he denied his guests, Talese filed his reporting away, assuming the story would remain untold. Over the ensuing years, Foos occasionally reached out to Talese to fill him in on the latest developments in his life. He also sent Talese hundreds of pages of notes on his guests and their habits, work that Foos believed made him a pioneering researcher into American society and sexuality. America in microcosm had passed through the Voyeur's motel, and he witnessed and recorded the harsh effects of the war in Vietnam, the upheaval in gender roles, the decline of segregation, and much more. But Foos continued to insist on anonymity. Now, after thirty-five years, he's ready to go public and Gay Talese can finally tell his story. The Voyeur's Motel is an extraordinary work of narrative journalism, at once a portrait of one complicated man, and an examination of secret lives and shifting mores in a culturally-evolving country.

CARlA BODO Board Member of the Cultural Information and Research Centres liaison in Europe (CIRCLE) and Director of the Observatory for the Performing Arts at the Department of the Performing Arts of the Italian Prime Minister's Office, Roma The relation between the public and the private sector in the field of culture, the central theme of this publication, was thoroughly debated during the 1997 CIRCLE Round Table in Amsterdam. It was not the first time CIRCLE addressed this issue. In 1988 CIRCLE'S Bureau was invited to participate in a seminar in Budapest on The State, the Market and Culture. I will never forget the emotional impact of Sacha Rubinstein's demonization of state sup port and his apotheosis of the role of the market in the cultural field in Russia. So, in ad vance of actual events, we suddenly had a premonition of what was going to happen, ofthe turmoil which was about to radically change the socio-political scene of Central and East ern Europe. Six years later, in 1994, we met again in Budapest for a Conference on The Distribu tion of Roles between Government and Arts Councils, Associations and Foundations."

Volume II of this series discusses the technology used to implement a big data analysis capability within a service-oriented organization. It discusses the technical architecture necessary to implement a big data analysis capability, some issues and challenges in big data analysis and utilization that an organization will face, and how to capture value from it. It will help readers understand what technology is required for a basic capability and what the expected benefits are from establishing a big data capability within their organization.

Volume I of this two-volume series focuses on the role of big data in service delivery systems. It discusses the definition and orientation to big data, applications of it in service delivery systems, how to obtain results that can affect/enhance service delivery, and how to build an effective big data organization. This volume will assist readers in fitting big data analysis into their service-based organizations. It will also help readers understand how to improve the use of big data to enhance their service-oriented organizations.

This book situates the 2020 Tokyo Olympics within the social, economic, and political challenges facing contemporary Japan. Using the 2020 Tokyo Olympics as a lens into the city and the country as a whole, the stellar line up of contributors offer hidden insights and new perspectives on the Games. These include city planning, cultural politics, financial issues, language use, security, education, volunteerism, and construction work. The chapters then go on to explore the many stakeholders, institutions, citizens, interest groups, and protest groups involved, and feature the struggle over Tokyo's extreme summer heat, food standards, the implementation of diversity around disabilities, sexual minorities, and technological innovations. Giving short glimpses into the new Olympic sports, this book also analyses the role of these sports in Japanese society. Japan Through the Lens of the Tokyo Olympics will be of huge interest to anyone attending the Olympic Games in Tokyo 2020. It will also be useful to students and scholars of the Olympics and the sociology of sport, as well as Japanese culture and society.

This book gives a detailed insight into the tour operator sector, particularly in Britain and Germany. Moreover, a theoretical framework ist developed, providing a useful methodology for the study of a sector or industry.

Das Lexikon vermittelt zuverlassig und aktuell Orientierung uber Erscheinungen und Vorgange im Bereich der Lebensversicherung, die in Zeiten der privaten Vorsorge fur alle Burger an Bedeutung gewonnen hat. Kriterium fur die Auswahl der Stichworte ist das aktuelle Standardwissen in der Versicherungswirtschaft. Uber wichtige Gebiete informieren Stichwortaufsatze, die von namhaften Experten verfasst worden sind."

The world arms market has been in continuous flux since the end of the Cold War. This volume provides a policy-relevant analysis of the complex web of contemporary economic trends, political developments and strategic considerations that are shaping the contours of the new post-Cold War world market for weaponry.

The economics of the service sector has recently attracted a large attention. At a macroeconomic level, the discussion has been focused on the issues concerning the relationship between the expansion of the service industry and the potential for a stable and sustained growth. Slow productivity growth, due to the largely non tradable nature of the output, lack of competition due either to regulations or to barriers to entry are among the "bads" sometimes associated with a "service led" growth. On the other hand new working places are created in the service industries at a rate much higher than in the industrial ones. Is a lower rate of technological change and the continuing of inflationary tensions the price to pay for a sustained expansion of employment in the service sector? These are in a nutshell the questions that led CElS (Centre for International Studies on Economic Growth - University of Rome "Tor Vergata") to organize the International Seminar on "The Service Sector: Productivity and Growth" held in Rome in May 1993, whose revised proceedings are published in this volume. The economists and academicians invited to the conference have faced the issues mentioned above from different perspectives, but they concentrated especially on the problems relative to growth and productivity.

Taking a new approach to a relatively underexplored area, this book examines the concept of authenticity and its relevance to marketing management. The author draws on several disciplines, including arts, philosophy, sociology and psychology, as well as focusing on important sub-fields within the field of marketing such as consumer behaviour and tourism. Presenting data from interviews with managers and consumers, and summarising and critiquing recent developments within the field, From Arts to Marketing is a timely and much-needed addition to literature and will be useful to those researching consumer behaviour, brand management and marketing more generally.

This book serves a unique purpose within the world of engineering. It covers the economics of modern manufacturing and focuses on examining the techniques and methods from a cost perspective. It can be used by both students and professionals alike. The book is useful to students in industrial engineering and mechanical engineering programs as a primary textbook for engineering economy, production costing, and related courses. It can also be used by MBA students specializing in production management and finance. Specific topics of coverage include the computation of direct and indirect cost for manufacturing operations, including a variety of overhead operations in such an environment. Costing of manufacturing methods such as casting, forging, turning, milling, and welding is addressed along with inventory analysis. The book also includes fundamental concepts such as cash flow analysis, present and future worth analysis, and rate of return analysis. Related topics such as equipment replacement, comparison of alternatives, depreciation, buy versus make decisions, interest factors, and equivalence are covered in detail as well. Key Features: Addresses the costing of manufacturing operations through a step-by-step problem solving approach. Includes traditional engineering topics such as cash flow analysis, present worth, future worth analysis, replacement analysis, equivalence, and depreciation are addressed in depth as well. Offers a variety of solved examples that can be used to develop a thorough understanding of the underlying concept. Provides a number of practice problems at the end of each chapter. Presents a large number of figures and tables in almost every chapter, to assist in visualizing the concept and apply it successfully. Production Economics: Evaluating Costs of Operations in Manufacturing and Service Industries focuses on rigorous problem solving. Each topic is presented succinctly along with numerous solved examples, along with a large number of end-of-chapter practice problems where applicable.

by RolfM. Jeker, Federal Office for Foreign Economic Affairs Services have only quite recently become an important issue in foreign economic policy and particularly in international trade negotiations. Trade policy was traditionally perceived to deal almost exclusively with exports and imports of goods. The increasing importance of services both nationally and internationally is, mainly, due to the gains in agricultural and industrial productiv ity (freeing resources for services activities), and the progress in communication technology, facilitating trade in invisibles. Notable examples of contractual and legal frameworks for services in international trade relations are the internal market program of the European Community extended by the Agreement on the European Economic Are. a (EEA) to EFTA countries, the multi lateral Uruguay-Round negotiations under the auspices of the GATT on a General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS), and the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) signed by the United States, Canada and Mexico. This trend is of particular significance to Switzerland, a country where services contribute about 65% to the value added of the economy, a share which will probably still increase somewhat. Ser vices also contribute to an important extent to the traditional surplus in the current account of the Swiss balance of payments. Switzerland clearly has comparative advantages in the field of ser vices, as is well demonstrated by its long and successful tradition in key services sectors like banking, insurance, tourism, consulting and engineering."

Many governments are pursuing with relentless vigor a neoconservative/transnational corporate program of globalization, privatization, deregulation, cutbacks to social programs, and downsizing of the public sector. Countries are forming into giant "free trade" blocs. Increasingly they lack the will and desire to resist encroachments of world "superculture". Furthermore, they encourage heightened commoditization of information and knowledge, for instance through provisions in bilateral and multilateral trade treaties. The analytical underpinning and ideological justification for this neoconservative/transnational corporate policy agenda is mainstream (neo-classical) economics.

Focusing on the centrality of information/communication to economic and ecological processes, "Communication and the Transformation of Economics" cuts at the philosophical/ideological root of this neoconservative policy agenda. Mainstream economics assumes a commodity status for information, even though information is indivisible, subjective, shared, and intangible. Information, in other words, is quite ill-suited to commodity treatment. Likewise, neoclassicism posits communication as comprising merely acts of commodity exchange, thereby ignoring gift relations; dialogic interactions; the cumulative, transformative properties of all informational interchange; and the social or community context within which communicative action takes place.

Continuing in the tradition of writers such as Russel Wallace, Thorstein Veblen, Karl Polyani, E. F. Schumacher, Kenneth E. Boulding, and Herman Daly, Robert Babe proposes infusing mainstream economics with realistic and expansive conceptions of information/communication in order to better comprehend twenty-first-century issues and progress toward a more sustainable, more just, and more democratic economic/communicatory order.