This article presents a theoretical and empirical analysis of the recursive relationship between leadership practices and contexts to help explain the dynamics of change in a Swiss healthcare organization. Central to the paper’s argument is the assumption that leadership is not only a contextually influenced, but also a context-producing practice. We develop this argument theoretically by building on the sociology of knowledge and practice theory. Empirically, we draw on three episodes of a longitudinal case study that shows the unfolding of leadership and traces the consequences of the leader’s micro-actions for the context and overall change success. We discuss our insights and outline their implications for understanding and doing leadership in healthcare organizations.

In this paper, we assess the impact of a fare-free public transport policy for overnight guests on travel mode choice to a Swiss tourism destination. The policy directly targets domestic transport to and from a destination, the substantial contributor to the CO${}_2$ emissions of overnight trips. Based on a survey sample, we identify the effect with the help of the random element that the information on the offer from a hotelier to the guest varies in day-to-day business. We estimate a shift from private cars to public transport due to the policy of, on average, 14.8 and 11.6 percentage points, depending on the application of propensity score matching and causal forest. This knowledge is relevant for policy-makers to design future public transport policies for tourists. Overall, our paper exemplifies how such an effect of natural experiments in the transport and tourism industry can be properly identified.

During recent decades, behavioural pricing research has accumulated to represent an expansive subset of pricing research addressing how humans perceive, process, and evaluate price information. However, the insights and managerial implications of behavioural pricing research are still fragmented and hardly prepared for specific fields of application. This article provides an integrative review of the effects of behavioural pricing in the tourism field. Taking an application-oriented perspective, we propose a framework for describing how price perceptions may be influenced by (1) the presentation of prices, (2) the presentation of the choice set, (3) the communication accompanying the price, and (4) the design of payment parameters. We use this framework to structure and synthesize the empirical evidence on the effects of behavioural pricing in the tourism context. Our search for papers considering behavioural pricing effects that included either or both the terms tourism and travel in both the tourism and marketing literature identified 100 articles from the period between 1995 and 2022. The findings should provide a more comprehensive understanding of how behavioural pricing can be applied in tourism practice. Besides managerial implications, we discuss unresolved issues and offer an agenda for further empirical research on behavioural pricing in the tourism context.

This study aims to explore how customer segments are characterised by leisure and mobility orientations. By means of a survey, Swiss rail customers’ socioeconomic and trip profiles as well as attitudes towards taking the rail in their leisure time were collected. Respondents were free to take part in the survey by telephone or online, resulting in 1235 full interviews. A principal component analysis followed by segmentation through cluster analysis was conducted to derive their socio-economic and trip profiles and collect data on their attitudes towards using rail in their leisure time. Five railway customer segments were established, each demonstrating typical leisure orientations and specific attitudes towards the use of rail in leisure time and on tourist trips. This paper contributes to understanding the salient preferences of each segment and provides transport companies with clear indications for developing market-oriented offerings.

This study examines the effects of on-demand mobility services on sustainability in terms of emissions and traffic volume. According to our simulations, implementing on-demand mobility services is recommendable only as a supplement to public transport in both urban and rural regions since there are positive effects in terms of CO₂ emissions. However, in urban areas, there is a negative impact on the traffic volume in terms of additional vehicle kilometres since the bundled public transport demand is replaced by less bundled on-demand vehicles. In rural areas, the increase in vehicle kilometres plays less of a role due to generally low demand. The negative effects per vehicle kilometre are slightly higher in rural areas due to higher empty kilometres and lower bundling rates, but the negative effects per km² in dense cities are much more serious. Authorities need to consider these effects according to the spatial context when implementing such services.