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The retail investment landscape in the UK has drastically changed. Understanding owners’ responses to this structural change is critical to gain insight into protecting investment performance. This paper identifies and evaluates the tactics and strategies being adopted.

This paper employs a mixed methods research approach, using data collected from semi-structured interviews with professionals involved in the retail investment process. This is supplemented by secondary market data analysis.

The paper assesses the practical responses made by retail property owners/managers, structured around emerging sub-themes. Actions include mitigating short-term risks through greater use of temporary tenants/licensees and independent retailers, preparing generic “white box” retail space to capture remaining tenant demand, exploiting the tenant mix to provide “the retail experience,” and applying new technologies and processes in a sector where systematic risk remains high. A new framework for retail asset management has been developed.

This study contributes to the retail asset management literature and understanding of the way the contemporary retail landscape is shaping investment management behaviour.

The developed framework provides guidance to real estate managers developing a retail real estate management strategy and will help them recognise tactics to better support the evolving retailing market.

The new framework adds new insights to understanding the process for managing retail assets and the actions necessary for asset managers to address economic/functional obsolescence and sustain asset investment values.

The importance of real estate’s sustainability rating has increased significantly. Studies undertaken in 2007 and 2016 show that, at acquisition, the rating rose from 7th to 3rd most important attribute. This shift in priorities parallels the RICS embracing the 10 principles of the UN Global Compact (RICS, 2015). However, while sustainability value premia appear common in some international markets, the picture is mixed and drivers and mechanisms lack empirical investigation. The literature reveals potential barriers to investors fulfilling both sustainability and financial objectives. The purpose of this study is explore these potential barriers.

Focus groups with real estate fund managers, sustainability managers and acquisitions surveyors are undertaken to explore the adoption and implementation of environmental sustainability policies. This reveals a series of barriers to implementation and these are then explored in greater depth through a series of interviews with fund managers. This layered, qualitative approach is designed to provide detailed knowledge of practical and conceptual sustainability issues within the UK real estate market.

Key drivers underpinning the adoption of sustainability policies are revealed and barriers to implementation are found to relate to data on investment performance, valuation methodologies and prohibitive capex. Further, the heterogeneous, opaque and slow-moving nature of the market is prohibitive and intervention is encouraged to overcome the lack of financial viability that hinders improvements.

Research is dominated by highly aggregated quantitative data on sustainability within commercial real estate markets. The qualitative approach used here adds new insights and value to the understanding of the embeddedness of sustainability in real estate investment decision-making.

The purpose of this paper is to test the hypothesis that investment decision making in the UK direct property market does not conform to the assumption of economic rationality underpinning portfolio theory.

The developing behavioural real estate paradigm is used to challenge the idea that investor “man” is able to perform with economic rationality, specifically with reference to the analysis of the spatial dispersion of the entire UK “investible stock” and “investible locations” against observed spatial patterns of institutional investment. Location quotients are derived, combining different data sets.

Considerably greater variation in institutional property holdings is found across the UK than would be expected given the economic and stock characteristics of local areas. This appears to provide evidence of irrationality (in the strict traditional economic sense) in the behaviour of institutional investors, with possible herding underpinning levels of investment that cannot be explained otherwise.

Over time a lack of distinction has developed between the cause and effect of comparatively low levels of development and institutional property investment across the regions. A critical examination of decision making and behaviour in practice could break this cycle, and could in turn promote regional economic growth.

The entire “population” of observations is used to demonstrate the relationships between economic theory and investor performance exploring, for the first time, stock and local area characteristics.

The workplace offers an ideal setting for facilitating physical activity and reducing sedentary behaviours. Understanding employees’ current health behaviours is required to inform appropriate, tailored, health promotion interventions. The purpose of this paper is to compare the physical activity and sedentary behaviours over 12 months of employees within and across five UK organisations. The paper also explores the association of these health behaviours with objective and self-reported health outcomes; and investigates the association between physical activity and sedentary behaviours.

Self-reported physical activity and sedentary behaviours were recorded at four time points (baseline, three, six, 12 months). BMI, per cent body fat, waist circumference, blood pressure and resting heart rate were collected in health checks (baseline, 12 months). Well-being and health were collected via questionnaire.

Low physical activity and high sedentariness were evident. Sitting levels varied by occupational role and organisation. More activity was associated with improved health outcomes; no association was evident for sedentary behaviour. No direct effects of occupational role or organisation on health outcomes emerged after accounting for physical activity/sedentary behaviours. Physical activity and sedentary levels were weakly associated.

The low activity levels are of particular concern as linked to health outcomes for this sample. The weak association between behaviours suggests worksite interventions should target both behaviours.

This study provides insight into both the physical activity and sedentary behaviours of employees of large UK employers across different occupational sectors over 12 months; importantly it is informed by the most recent guidance for these health behaviours.

This chapter describes an alternative model to out-of-the-classroom learning which has been highly successful in assisting students in New Zealand to make the transition to either the workplace, or to higher qualifications.

The final paper within the New Zealand Diploma in Business is ‘Applied Management’ in which students work in groups to design and implement a semester-long research inquiry with a host organisation. The authors discuss the challenges and strategies associated with delivering this paper and reference three current studies which relate to this student cohort: the first about students’ perceptions of cooperative learning in groups, and the alternate selection and assessment techniques the university has been trialling; the second about a Māori mentoring pilot pairing students with mentors in the workplace; and third, examining students’ experiences and expectations of the Diploma as a pathway into degree study.

Our story offers an example of how a focus on quality and accountability to local business stakeholders has created a successful co-curricular learning environment, and suggests the value of combining the three strands of research, teamwork and co-curricular projects.

While the context is of a small, regional institute, many of the elements of good practice will be transferable to other higher education providers.

When Eugene O'Neill died, theatre critic Brooks Atkinson said of him, “A giant writer has dropped off the earth….He shook up the drama as well as audiences and helped to transform the theatre into an art seriously related to life.” (New York Times, 30 December 1953).

The article aims to explore hybrid consumption behaviour as an emergent consumption pattern that may make conventional consumer stereotypes outdated.

The study is an exploratory study in urban environments using qualitative, semi-structured and semi-structured interviews.

It is found that a continuum of hybrid consumption types exists, which includes both omnivorous and polarised behaviour. Hybrid consumers opt for both premium and budget alternatives but ignore midrange alternatives. Both trading-up and trading-down categories and situations are identified. While in previous studies trading up and trading down have been considered product category specific, the results of this study imply that hybrid consumption transcends product category boundaries. Four key themes characterizing hybrid consumption are identified.

The study is explorative. However, as the phenomenon of hybrid consumption behaviour is insufficiently studied in previous research, the article reveals underpinning drivers of such behaviour and suggests directions of further research into the phenomenon.

There are many practical implications of the study. As hybrid consumers do not fall into distinct and stable categories, traditional marketing and segmentation strategies may need to be rethought. Consumers cannot be categorised in such a straightforward manner as conventional segmentation practices suggest.

The authors are not aware of hybrid consumption having been studied and categorised in this way before in academic research. New approaches to studying consumer behaviour, segmentation and marketing are implied.

The following is an annotated list of materials that discuss the ways in which librarians can provide library users with orientation to facilities and services, and instruct them in library information and computer skills. This is RSR's 11th annual review of this literature, and covers publications from 1984. A few items from 1983 have been included because of their significance, and because they were not available for review last year. Several items were not annotated because the compiler was unable to secure them.

This is the age of research. What was once a highly selective privilege in just a few professions that could be counted on one's fingers has since the last war become a feature of every conceivable branch of science and trade, to which millions in money are devoted. The connection often seems remote, if not a little spurious. Perhaps it may be due to the enormous emphasis on the teaching of science and technology in recent years, but we see what Sir William Dale calls “these turnspits of modern science” ready to undertake, and various official bodies to finance by grants, research into almost anything. The amount spent, for example, on cancer research through the years and all over the world, which incidentally has produced very little in the way of real advancement towards a cure, must be phenomenal, but it is now probably dwarfed by the colossal sums available for trade and market research. We even see research by opposing groups, one endeavouring to prove, the other to refute some particular hypothesis. Much of it appears to lack realism or to be of any great practical value and at too high a theoretical level, including masses of statistics, without which the younger generation of scientists appears to think research valueless, if not impossible.