Niche Theory Analysis of Sustainable Strategic Relationships among MICE Destinations: A Case of New Zealand

This study aimed to analyze the competitive relationship among meetings, incentive, convention and exhibition (MICE) destinations with reference to the notion of niche businesses in New Zealand; and to explore the existence of cooperative strategies between neighboring destinations. The data were collected from Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment Reports on the Convention Activity Survey (CAS) in New Zealand. The study contributes towards an innovative and better understanding of the dynamics of sustainable destination competitiveness. It broadens the scope of MICE industry research by exploring new insights on the notion of destination competition and makes a theoretical connection between niche theory and the importance of coopetition. By investigating the case of MICE destinations of four northern central islands in New Zealand, this study provides information on the strategic significance of niche marketing for global destinations preparing for entrance into this market.

Enabling Sustainable Organizational Change: A Case of Cognitive Diversity in the Automotive Industry

In diverse societies such as South Africa, organizations continue to face inclusion challenges when implementing change. This study proposes a different method and new dimension of diversity management within the cognitive diversity construct, namely human niche theory, to tackle the diversity dilemma of exclusivity. The research question asked whether human niche theory, as a defined concept within cognitive diversity, could be utilized by managers to enable inclusion and promote sustainable organizational change implementation. Conceptually, this paper relates human niche theory to seven themes in the change process, namely, communication, training, motivation, resources, control, monitoring, and feedback. An exploratory single case study in a multicultural South African automotive organization that implemented a company-wide technology change project was used as a unit of analysis. The single case study revealed a new understanding of change implementation processes using the human niche theoretical framework related to radical technological change implementation. Data collection included in-depth interviews, focus group sessions, solicited company data, field notes, and observations. Content and comparative data analysis were used to present findings. This research showed that managers’ awareness of human niche theory in terms of cognitive diversity could assist in managing diversity, enabling inclusion, and change effectiveness in the organization, while minimizing emotional exclusion.

Modeling and Empirical Analysis of Regional Tourism Competitiveness Based on Niche Theory

The fierce competition in tourism has brought a string of problems, such as the homogeneous development of regional tourism resources and the escalation of regional competition. One key issue in urban tourism today is how to identify competitors, recognize own advantageous resources, and clarify the direction of development. This paper evaluates the competitiveness of regional tourism in three steps: setting up an evaluation system, calculating niche and niche overlap, and conducting synthesis and cluster analysis. Firstly, a comprehensive evaluation system of urban tourism niche was established, which includes such four dimensions as tourism resources, tourism market, social economy, and eco-environment, and the weight of each index was calculated by entropy method. Next, regional niche and niche overlap were computed by niche theory. Taking the mean of niche overlap and that of composite niche as the references, the authors drew an overall distribution map of regional tourism niche. After that, a cluster analysis was carried out with the four-dimensional niche and composite niche of regional tourism. Finally, an empirical analysis was performed on the tourism competitiveness in ten prefectures of Shaanxi Province, using the data in 2010–2018. The results show that the prefectures differed greatly in tourism development and competed fiercely against each other.

The Scale, Logic and Structure of Intra-urban Place Communities Based on Place Niche Theory

Spatial agglomeration phenomena on the earth's surface permeate in various fields of the natural and human world, yet their researches in human society are relatively few with the focus mainly on the economic concept of "industrial clusters". Precise quantitative descriptions, in-depth logical analyses and overall systematic explanations are lacked in various intra-urban spatial agglomeration phenomena. Using over 10 million POIs in the mainland China, 18 grid network models of 9 grid scales based on two kinds of spatial relationships (co-location/adjacent) are constructed in this article. 23 typical place communities are extracted based on complex network analysis, and four types including 11 sub-categories of agglomeration patterns are summarized. Drawing on the concept of "ecological niche", we further propose the theory of "place niche" and analyze the logic and structure of intra-urban place communities within its framework. This study extends the spatial scales and dominating factors of the agglomeration phenomenon research.

Contribution of genome scale metabolic modeling to niche theory

Standard niche modeling is based on probabilistic inference from organismal occurrence data but does not benefit yet from genome-scale descriptions of these organisms. This study overcomes this shortcoming by proposing a new conceptual niche that encompasses the whole metabolic capabilities of an organism. The so-called metabolic niche resumes well-known traits such as nutrient needs and their dependencies for survival. Despite the computational challenge, its implementation allows the detection of traits and the formal comparison of niches of different organisms, emphasizing that the presence-absence of functional genes is not enough to approximate the phenotype. Further statistical exploration of an organism's niche sheds light on genes essential for the metabolic niche and their role in understanding various biological experiments, such as transcriptomics, paving the way for incorporating better the genome-scale description in ecological studies.