Search results

To introduce the special issue focusing on the QUIS 9 symposium.

A brief perspective of the best papers presented at the Quality in Services (QUIS9) symposium held at Karlstad university, Sweden in June 2004.

Outlines some of the highlights surrounding the conference.

Provides a brief report of the context of the conference.

Preferences of both Alzheimer patients and their spouse caregivers are related to a willingness-to-pay (WTP) measure which is used to test for the presence of mutual (rather than conventional unilateral) altruism.

Contingent valuation experiments were conducted in 2000–2002, involving 126 Alzheimer patients and their caregiving spouses living in the Zurich metropolitan area (Switzerland). WTP values for three hypothetical treatments of the demented patient were elicited. The treatment Stabilization prevents the worsening of the disease, bringing dementia to a standstill. Cure restores patient health to its original level. In No burden, dementia takes its normal course while caregiver’s burden is reduced to its level before the disease.

The three different types of therapies are reflected in different WTP values of both caregivers and patients, suggesting that moderate levels of Alzheimer’s disease still permit clear expression of preference. According to the WTP values found, patients do not rank Cure higher than No burden, implying that their preferences are entirely altruistic. Caregiving spouses rank Cure before Burden, reflecting less than perfect altruism which accounts for some 40 percent of their total WTP. Still, this constitutes evidence of mutual altruism.

The evidence suggests that WTP values reflect individuals’ preferences even in Alzheimer patients. The estimates suggest that an economically successful treatment should provide relief to caregivers, with its curative benefits being of secondary importance.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the importance of the entrepreneur’s quest for independence and control over the firm for governance and financing strategies with a special focus on family firms and how they differ from nonfamily firms.

The analysis is based on 1,000 telephone interviews with Swedish micro and small firms. The survey data are matched with firm-level data from the Bureau van Dijks database ORBIS.

The analysis shows that independence is a prime motive for enterprises, statistically significantly more so for family owners. Family owners are more prone to use either their own savings or loans from family and are more reluctant to resort to external equity capital. Our results indicate a potential “capital constraint paradox”; there might be an abundance of external capital while firm growth is simultaneously constrained by a lack of internal funds.

The main limitation is that the study is based on cross-section data. Future studies could thus be based on longitudinal data.

The authors argue that policy makers must recognize independence and control aversion as strong norms that guide entrepreneurial action and that micro- and small-firm growth would profit more from lower personal and corporate income taxes compared to policy schemes intended to increase the supply of external capital.

The paper offers new insights regarding the value of independence and how it affects strategic decisions within the firm.

The purpose of this paper is to advance the understanding of how Industry 4.0 related technologies affect the relocation of manufacturing abroad by small and medium-sized enterprises.

This paper contains an empirical analysis of how Industry 4.0 related technologies affect the cost-driven relocation of manufacturing abroad based on 191 comprehensive and full responses to a questionnaire survey distributed in 2018 among small- and medium-sized Danish manufacturers.

This paper builds upon data, which reveals that companies' pursuit of cost-focused competitive strategies is positively correlated with relocating manufacturing abroad. However, the data also shows that the more Industry 4.0-ready decision-makers are, the less cost-focused strategy drives manufacturing abroad. Furthermore, perceived barriers to Industry 4.0 related technologies promote the cost-driven relocation of manufacturing abroad whereas perceived drivers decrease this phenomenon.

This paper is based on the answers given by a single respondent from each company and only on Danish respondents.

The results indicate a need to invest resources to obtain a better knowledge of Industry 4.0 related technologies when used in processes involved in decisions about where to locate manufacturing.

This paper contains new, empirically founded information about how Industry 4.0 related technologies affect the cost-driven relocation of manufacturing abroad from the perspective of small- and medium-sized manufacturers.

The focus in this chapter is on male strategies of coping with unemployment and how these strategies are gendered due to local contextual factors, physical and natural as well as social and cultural. The results of the study show, in the case of men's relations to the labour market and the factors affecting such relations, how the Swedish welfare model and gender contracts work in a rural setting. The interrelation among labour market, household and family is formed according to the local gender contract and is supposed to develop within the frames of national policies, but it is also formed according to hegemonic gender regimes.

Presents an approach to improved performance and flexibility in industrial robotics by means of sensor integration and feedback control in task‐level programming and task execution. Also presents feasibility studies in support of the ideas. Discusses some solutions to the problem using six degrees of freedom force control together with the ABB S4CPlus system as an illustrative example. Consider various problems in the design of an open sensor interface for industrial robotics and discusses possible solutions. Finally, presents experimental results from industrial force controlled grinding.

Scenarios have become a vital methodological approach in business as well as in public policy. When scenarios are used to guide analysis and decision-making, the aim is typically robustness and in this context we argue that two main problems at scenario set level is conservatism, i.e. all scenarios are close to a perceived business-as-usual trajectory and lack of balance in the sense of arbitrarily mixing some conservative and some extreme scenarios. The purpose of this paper is to address these shortcomings by proposing a methodology for generating sets of scenarios which are in a mathematical sense maximally diverse.

In this paper, we develop a systematic methodology, Scenario Diversity Analysis (SDA), which addresses the problems of broad span vs conservatism and imbalance. From a given set of variables with associated states, SDA generates scenario sets where the scenarios are in a quantifiable sense maximally different and therefore best span the whole set of feasible scenarios.

The usefulness of the methodology is exemplified by applying it to sets of storylines of the emissions scenarios of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. This ex-post analysis shows that the storylines were not maximally diverse and given the challenges ahead with regard to emissions reduction and adaptation planning, we argue that it is important to strive for diversity when developing scenario sets for climate change research.

The proposed methodology adds significant novel features to the field of systematic scenario generation, especially with regard to scenario diversity. The methodology also enables the combination of systematics with the distinct future logics of good intuitive logics scenarios.

Purpose – This chapter examines how sentiment analysis and web-crawling technology can be used to conduct large-scale data analyses of extremist content online.

Methods/approach – The authors describe a customized web-crawler that was developed for the purpose of collecting, classifying, and interpreting extremist content online and on a large scale, followed by an overview of a relatively novel machine learning tool, sentiment analysis, which has sparked the interest of some researchers in the field of terrorism and extremism studies. The authors conclude with a discussion of what they believe is the future applicability of sentiment analysis within the online political violence research domain.

Findings – In order to gain a broader understanding of online extremism, or to improve the means by which researchers and practitioners “search for a needle in a haystack,” the authors recommend that social scientists continue to collaborate with computer scientists, combining sentiment analysis software with other classification tools and research methods, as well as validate sentiment analysis programs and adapt sentiment analysis software to new and evolving radical online spaces.

Originality/value – This chapter provides researchers and practitioners who are faced with new challenges in detecting extremist content online with insights regarding the applicability of a specific set of machine learning techniques and research methods to conduct large-scale data analyses in the field of terrorism and extremism studies.

This paper aims to formalize long-term trajectories of human civilization as a scientific and ethical field of study. The long-term trajectory of human civilization can be defined as the path that human civilization takes during the entire future time period in which human civilization could continue to exist.

This paper focuses on four types of trajectories: status quo trajectories, in which human civilization persists in a state broadly similar to its current state into the distant future; catastrophe trajectories, in which one or more events cause significant harm to human civilization; technological transformation trajectories, in which radical technological breakthroughs put human civilization on a fundamentally different course; and astronomical trajectories, in which human civilization expands beyond its home planet and into the accessible portions of the cosmos.

Status quo trajectories appear unlikely to persist into the distant future, especially in light of long-term astronomical processes. Several catastrophe, technological transformation and astronomical trajectories appear possible.

Some current actions may be able to affect the long-term trajectory. Whether these actions should be pursued depends on a mix of empirical and ethical factors. For some ethical frameworks, these actions may be especially important to pursue.