<p>This study explored the role of idiosyncratic service experience by redefining the wow experience in the context of boutique hotels. Despite the expansion of the boutique hotel segment, which seeks to provide a unique and singular experience, in the lodging industry and the growing popularity of pursuing novel experiences among Millennial consumers, the role of idiosyncratic experience in consumer behavior has not been explored. This left the potential antecedents and consequents of idiosyncratic hotel stay experience—and its role in consumer’s decision-making process—unknown. In this study, a consumer’s perception of a hotel stay experience, which is unusual in an interesting and surprising way, is coined as the perceived quirky experience (PQE). Utilizing the Mehrabian-Russel model, the relationship among boutique hotel service quality aspects, motives and barriers, PQE, and behavior intentions were examined. The consumer decision-making process is expected to be influenced by the optimal stimulation level (OSL); thus, the group differences between stimulation avoiders and seekers were also explored. </p> <p>Methodologically, the current study also seeks to provide a novel approach to amalgamate qualitative and quantitative data. By integrating qualitative analysis of 175,407 TripAdvisor reviews and quantitative analysis of field data (n = 498), topic modeling using an unsupervised machine learning process was performed. Identified keywords were used for aspect-based sentiment analysis and to construct measurement items for the quantitative study stage. Statistical tests were performed using logistic regression and path analysis—and multi-group analysis. The results of this study suggested that boutique hotel-specific service quality aspects have a stronger effect on PQE, and this internal state leads to strong behavioral intentions regardless of temporal differences. The consumer’s stimulation-seeking tendency influenced multiple paths in the consumer’s decision-making process. </p> <p>This study is the first to explore the role of idiosyncratic service experience in the boutique hotel setting and makes theoretical contributions to understanding consumer behaviors involving the perception of uncommon and interesting experiences. The findings of this study provide practical contributions to boutique hotel developers regarding the relative importance of service quality aspects to create a unique and singular stay experience and also provide hotel and brand managers with insightful marketing implications.</p>

This dissertation examines emergent forms of digitally enabled boundary-spanning by considering the within- and cross-field interactions developed by LGBTQIA* organisations on social media. Within scholarship on collective actors characterised by strong collective identities, LGBTQIA* collective action fields have been conventionally found to be rather fragmented and polarised, as well as isolated from other fields. Nonetheless, recent studies have shown evidence of the emergence of cooperative and solidarity efforts by LGBTQIA* actors, suggesting that such LGBTQIA* organisations may actively engage in crossing categorical boundaries and overcoming differences in the attempt to achieve social change. Within this framework, information and communication technologies (ICTs) may provide LGBTQIA* communities with spaces to converge, share experiences, and articulate politicised identities also through the connection with other collective actors. Despite these findings, we currently lack a systematic understanding of the extent to which LGBTQIA* collective actors span field boundaries through the development of digitally enabled interactions, of how such ties evolve over time, and on the circumstances that may favour or inhibit their emergence and duration. Furthermore, the role of ICTs in supporting the emergence of boundary-spanning processes has so far been rather understudied. This dissertation addresses these concerns by conducting a mixed-method comparative research on LGBTQIA* actors based in Madrid and Milan. In particular, it focuses on different types of interactions (mentioning, sharing, and promoting collective action events) developed by such organisations on their Facebook public pages during the 2011-2020 decade. To examine the role of both cultural patterns (collective identities and framing strategies) and structural circumstances (political opportunities and threats), this study combines network and text data, analysed through social network and frame analysis. The findings provided by this research show that Spanish and Italian LGBTQIA* organisations increasingly crossed categorical boundaries through social media between 2011 and 2020, thus suggesting that ICTs do play a role in sustaining boundary-spanning processes. Moreover, they find that collective framing and networking are inextricably entangled, and hence contribute to shedding light on both symbolic and behavioural dimensions of digitally enabled boundary-spanning. To conclude, they show that actors embedded in different socio-political contexts engage in networking and framing, thus emphasising the role of contextual opportunities and threats in moderating the nexus between ICTs and boundary-spanning, as well as between framing and networking. This dissertation contributes to both social movement literature and gender studies. On the one hand, by shedding light on emergent forms of boundary-spanning processes enabled by ICTs, it not only contributes to examining the role of ICTs in empowering marginalised communities, but also further elaborates the entanglement between digital, hybrid, and on-the-ground collective actions. On the other hand, by systematically investigating an emerging phenomenon over time and across contexts, it contributes to generating knowledge on the circumstances encouraging collective actors to overcome differences and cooperate. Understanding this is of utmost importance, since cooperative relations provide collective actors with additional and diverse resources and experiences, as well as political legitimation, to resist processes of democratic erosion and achieve social change.

The design of a country’s tax system is important because of the critical role played by taxation in financing public spending towards economic and social development. In this regard, there is need to enhance the understanding of whether current tax systems in the SADC provide sufficient tax revenue to meet public spending needs. This study provides empirical evidence on the outcomes of existing tax systems in the SADC with the aim of offering a basis for normative evaluation of the regions’ tax policies. Literature posits that there are numerous economic and institutional factors that limit the amount of taxes that a country can actually raise. Against this background, the substantive aim of this study was to assess the determinants of tax capacity and tax effort in the SADC in view of providing a pragmatic approach to tax policy design. The methodology of this study involved the use of both quantitative and qualitative analysis (mixed methods approach) where the latter was used to augment the findings of the former. The first phase involved the use of a multi-step procedure to estimate determinants of tax capacity and tax effort using stochastic tax function and unbalanced panel data for 13 SADC countries. The study disentangled the error term to estimates the random-effects separately from tax effort in order to capture the time- invariant country-specific effects. Further, tax effort was classified persistent (long-run) and transient (short-run). The study was able to estimate the determinants of tax effort and to rank each member state according to its tax effort. The second phase involves a narrative analysis of tax legislation in the SADC over the period 2002-2016. The study used budget statements and Acts of parliament as the major sources of information to identify significant changes in tax legislation over this period. The findings of the quantitative analysis indicate that financial deepening, economic development and trade openness influence tax capacity, while corruption and inflation influence tax effort. In addition, the findings show that the region has low persistent tax effort than transient tax effort, implying that improving tax administration has superseded tax policy reforms. This result is augmented by the narrative record which seemingly shows that tax legislation efforts were largely successful in tax administration but rather limited in view of tax policy. In this regard, the study recommends that tax policy design should be informed by the conditions of a country and policy considerations relating to peculiar circumstances to obtain robust tax policies. / Economics / D. Com. (Economics)

From January 2016 until August 2021, at least 436 women or girls have been deliberately murdered in Spain by men. Non-intimate femicide (and, particularly, murder committed by complete strangers to the victim, to which this study refers as “stranger femicide”) has historically been, and still is, the most covered type of femicide in the media. This is also the case in the Spanish press, and more specifically, El País, the most read media outlet in the country. This thesis examines how El País framed Diana Quer’s case, the most high-profile, intensively covered femicide case in Spain in the past 5 years. It will also examine which ethical problems the reporting presented. From a feminist perspective and through a mixed-method approach of content analysis and frame analysis, this study examines 86 articles corresponding to the two informative peaks of Diana Quer’s case coverage. The periods go from August to October 2016, the first two months of her disappearance, and from December 2017 to January 2018, the 15 days following her killer’s arrest and crime confession. The findings reveal that the coverage in El País constructed a victimization iconography with DQ’s case that engendered cautionary tales and failed to address femicide as a social issue. The reporting also presented a series of critical ethical problems calling for a reformation of femicide reporting guidelines.