Search results

This study proposes targeted modernization of the Department of Defense (DoD's) Joint Forces Ammunition Logistics information system by implementing the optimized innovative information technology open architecture design and integrating Radio Frequency Identification Device data technologies and real-time optimization and control mechanisms as the critical technology components of the solution. The innovative information technology, which pursues the focused logistics, will be deployed in 36 months at the estimated cost of $568 million in constant dollars. We estimate that the Systems, Applications, Products (SAP)-based enterprise integration solution that the Army currently pursues will cost another $1.5 billion through the year 2014; however, it is unlikely to deliver the intended technical capabilities.

This study investigates core framing techniques utilized by two anti-illegal immigration social movement organizations, the Minuteman Project, Inc. and the Minuteman Civil Defense Corps, both volunteer civil border patrol groups operating along the U.S.–Mexican border. Theoretically, this paper is informed by Robert Benford and David Snow's work on collective action framing. Using a case study approach, document analysis is employed to explore how four types of framing techniques (diagnostic framing, prognostic framing, motivational action framing, and credibility framing) are implemented by each group via information presented on their websites. The findings of this investigation suggest that these groups implement each of the four framing techniques in question, with the bulk of their focus resting in the diagnostic frame. Through the examination of these groups via the framing perspective, it is also found that the groups emphasize the importance of place, that is, the U.S.–Mexican border itself. The case analyses thus further framing theory by highlighting the roles that “geographic and place framing” also play. The Minuteman Project, Inc. and the Minuteman Civil Defense Corps are relatively new groups that have mobilized within the past few years. Sociologically, relatively few scholars have studied these particular groups within the larger anti-illegal immigration movement. This paper provides an in-depth analysis of how the groups utilize framing to construct their messages, missions, and goals to the public. Doing so contributes to an interesting and emerging type of civil border patrol movement and also adds to the body of work devoted to the importance of social movement framing.

In this chapter, I use the term “biopolitics” to mean evolutionarily informed political science. Politics has been characterized as “Who gets what, when, and how” (Lasswell, 1936), but rather than about material possessions, politics is understood to be about power, more specifically about collective power, especially differential group power competition, hierarchy and stratification in power distribution, and the universal struggle to enhance power, and to maintain or challenge/destroy this status quo. Politics “should be found in any system of nature in which conflicts of interest exist among cooperating organic units” (Johnson, 1995, p. 279). My main focus will be competitive intergroup relations in monkeys and apes, or as I (van der Dennen, 1995) called it “intergroup agonistic behavior” (IAB). I also briefly treat interindividual and intercoalitionary agonistic behavior when relevant.

International security is a constant threat to the pursuit of economic optimum. In the traditional economic analysis history, states are seen as agents in constant search for power, which leads to the emergence of conflicts of interests. The modern concept of security can be defined as the economic study of all the risks of short, medium and long term on the functioning of economic and social life. It can be divided into four sublevels: individual security, national security, international security and global security. The adoption of an enlarged approach to international security by integrating economic and environmental conditions highlights the expression of new collective priorities. Today, theories of security take into account the economic, human and social relationships, societal priorities and the balance of power in the international system. Human security implies a multi-disciplinary analysis, including human rights, state organisation, international relations and strategic studies. Security and sustainable development are deeply interconnected, which involves bearable production conditions for the environment in the long term, the end of extreme poverty, the creation of social stability and the rejection of discrimination.

Purpose – This chapter discusses the role that indices of corporate governance have had in comparative corporate governance research.

Design/Methodology/Approach – The authors begin with a short discussion of what corporate governance is and its main debates. Then, the authors review the main indices (which are also summarized in Table 1), highlighting their strengths and limitations as well as describing some of the findings that emanate from them. Then, the authors discuss the methodological and conceptual assumptions of corporate governance indices that may compromise their construct validity. The authors conclude with some encouraging suggestions for key methodological and research design issues to take into account in future comparative corporate governance.

Findings – Many methodological issues in the measuring and analysis of (comparative) corporate governance remain to be solved. First, although corporate governance practices have a direct effect on some of the firms’ strategic decisions, they may only have an indirect effect on firm performance. Second, it is possible that, after all, causality goes the other way around, i.e., the firm performance explains the adoption of certain governance practices. Third, there are also important challenges in measuring firm financial performance as well as measuring and comparing corporate governance effectiveness between firms from different governance settings.

Originality/Value – This is one of the first chapter to give an overview of the most current corporate governance indices, both academic and commercial, to discuss their underlying assumptions and limitations, and, finally, to provide specific directions for future research regarding comparative corporate governance.

For indigenous peoples around the world, schooling and education are fraught with extreme challenges within the current realities of globalization. Indigenous knowledge, perspectives, and pedagogy in Africa, Asia, and the Americas are rarely included in books and courses that deal with history and philosophy of education, and there is widespread belief that non-Western and indigenous educational traditions and realities are not comparable to Western educational traditions and have little to offer discussions about education (Reagan, 2005). That is, the larger discourse of educational thought and practice, as Timothy Reagan suggests in the quote preceding this introduction, has been extremely biased in its treatment of anything non-Western; instead simplistic misunderstandings and misrepresentations reify the larger effects of cultural and epistemological ethnocentrism, colonialism, and Western imperialism.

How do radical technological fields become naturalized and taken for granted? This is a fundamental question given both the positive and negative hype surrounding the emergence of many new technologies. In this chapter, we study the emergence of the US nanotechnology field, focusing on uncovering the mechanisms by which leaders of the National Nanotechnology Initiative managed hype and its concomitant legitimacy challenges which threatened the commercial viability of nanotechnology. Drawing on the cultural entrepreneurship literature at the interface of strategy and organization theory, we argue that the construction of a naturalizing frame – a frame that focuses attention and practice on mundane, “rationalized” activity – is key to legitimating a novel and uncertain technological field. Leveraging the insights from our case study, we further develop a staged process model of how a naturalizing frame may be constructed, thereby paving the way for a decrease in hype and the institutionalization of new technologies.